VOL. I.
 
 THE LIFE OF JOHN RUSKIN
 
 G. RichiiKjncl 
 
 The Author of "Modern Painters"
 
 THE LIFE OF 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 BY 
 
 E. T. COOK 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES— VOL. I 
 1819-1860 
 
 WITH PORTRAITS 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 GEORGE ALLEN & COMPANY, LTD. 
 
 44 & 45 RATHBONE PLACE, OXFORD STREET 
 1912 
 
 [All lights reserved]
 
 Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson £r* Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh
 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 The principal material on which this Biography is founded 
 consists of Raskin's diaries, note-books, and letters which 
 have been placed at my disposal by his executors. The 
 diaries, though some years and events are not included, are 
 a main authority for the Life. They are supplemented by a 
 large collection of letters to his parents, which are preserved 
 at Brantwood. During Ruskin's absences from home, he 
 wrote almost daily, and sometimes more than once a day, 
 to his father, or to his mother, or to both The letters to 
 his father (who died in 1864) are fuller than those to his 
 mother. After her death in 1871, their place is partly taken 
 by letters to Mrs. Arthur Severn, to whose friendly assistance 
 I am much indebted. Letters to many other correspondents 
 are also used in this Biography ; and I am especially grate- 
 ful to the family of the late Professor Norton, and to his 
 publishers, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, for their 
 kind and gracious permission to make large use of his letters. 
 Other important material for a Life of Ruskin is to be 
 found in his own books, and especially in Prceterita and Fors 
 Clavigera. Upon this material also I have been allowed 
 by his executors to draw unreservedly. Prceterita is only 
 a fragment of autobiography. It deals hardly at all with 
 Ruskin's later years; and, in the years with which it does 
 deal, it leaves many gaps. It is fullest in the record of his 
 childhood. My first two chapters might have been made 
 much longer, but that Prceterita covers the ground. Here 
 and there, both in those chapters and elsewhere, I have 
 quoted from it ; but as far as possible I have drawn upon 
 autobiographical passages scattered elsewhere in Ruskin's 
 writings. The " Autobiographical Notes," which are occa- 
 sionally quoted, are manuscript passages not included by
 
 vi PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 Ruskin in the published text of Prceterita, but intended 
 by him for the projected continuation of it or for its 
 subsidiary Dilecta. 
 
 Among hitherto published biographical studies of Ruskin, 
 the books which have most authority are Mr. W. G. Colling- 
 wood's Life and Work of Ruskin and Ruskin Relics. 
 Every student of Ruskin must feel himself to be under 
 a deep debt of gratitude to the author of those excellent 
 books. The literature of Ruskiniana is vast. My biblio- 
 graphy in the Library Edition of his Works enumerates more 
 than 1200 items under that head. I cannot honestly say 
 that I have read every one of those books, pamphlets, and 
 articles ; but I have probably read more of them than most 
 other persons have. In every case where I have used in- 
 formation or other material thus derived, I have intended 
 to express my obligation by reference. If I have anywhere 
 failed to do so, it is by inadvertence for which I here offer 
 apology. 
 
 The late Mr. George Allen gave me some personal re- 
 miniscences of his long connexion with Ruskin ; and these 
 have been supplemented, since Mr. Allen's death, by his 
 diary, extracts from which were made for me by his 
 daughter, Miss Grace Allen. 
 
 I have the pleasant duty of thanking my friend, Mr. 
 Alexander Wedderburn, for reading the proofs of this book, 
 for supplying me with several reminiscences of Ruskin, and 
 for making many valuable suggestions. 
 
 E. T. C. 
 September 1911.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Introtiuctonj 
 
 PAGK 
 
 Ruskin's view of biography. Scope of the present work. Char 
 
 acter of his life. His influence. Division into volumes . . xvii 
 
 Folume I.: I819-I86O 
 
 CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD 
 
 (1819-1832) 
 
 Pervicacity of character. — I. Meaning of the name " Ruskin." 
 Conjectural ancestry. Immediate descent. — II. Birth. In- 
 fluence of the character of his parents. His mother. His 
 aunts. The Heme Hill garden. Discipline and punishments. 
 The trials of Sunday. Bible lessons. Advantages and dis- 
 advantages of his up-bringing. His father. Influence of his 
 character. — III. Home lessons. Beresford Chapel. Classical 
 studies under Dr. Andrews. Mr. Rowbothara. — IV. Summer 
 tours with his parents. Early familiarity with beautiful 
 country and with fine pictures. Love of nature. Romantic 
 associations. First "Works," Early Poems. The Iteriad. 
 His industry. His father's encouragement. — V. Love of 
 drawing. Maps. Cruikshank. Early interest in geology and 
 mineralogy .......... 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. ENTRANCE INTO HIS KINGDOM 
 
 {1833-183G) 
 
 Decisive moments. — I. Gift of Rogers's Italy with Turner's 
 illustrations. Prout's Sketches in Flanders and Germany. 
 Foreign tour, 1833. Mode of travel. First sight of the Alps 
 and (of Italy. Chamouni. Copying in the Louvre. Literary 
 result of { the tour. First printed prose-piece. Loudon's 
 Magazines. Diary in prose and verse. — II. Foreign tour, 
 1835. Abbeville. The Jura. Scientific interests. Chronicles 
 of St. Bernard. Drawing-lessons. — III. Day-boy at Mr. Dale's 
 school, Camberwell. Essay on Works of Fiction. Reply to 
 Blackwood's Magazine in defence of Turner : prelude to Modern 
 Painters. Matriculation at Christ Church, Oxford ... 33
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER III. OXFORD 
 
 (1837-1840) 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Entrance into residence at Christ Church. — I. The gentlemen- 
 commoners. Ruskin and his parents. " Ragging " and a 
 College Wine. Companions. His rooms. — II. Reputation of 
 his drawings. Music lessons. Extraneous pursuits. " Smalls." 
 Classical studies. Little influenced by Oxford. — III. New- 
 digate Prize Poems. Introduction to Wordsworth. — IV. 
 Speeches at the Union. — V. Contemporaries, Tutors, and 
 Friends : Edward Clayton. Liddell. Walter Brown. Osborne 
 Gordon, Buckland. A meeting with Darwin. Charles 
 Newton. Henry Acland. — VI. Unused advantages. His 
 Oxford education criticised. Hard reading for the Final 
 Schools. Threatened with consumption. Oxford course 
 interrupted .......... 52 
 
 CHAPTER IV. THE POETRY OF ARCHITEC- 
 TURE— VO'EM.^—^l^^T LOVE 
 
 (1837-1840) 
 
 The Poetry of Architecture. — I. Significance of the title and nom 
 de plume. Prelude to his Architectural Works. Individua- 
 lity of style. Influence of Johnson. Other contributions, to 
 Loudon's Architectural Magazine. — II. Ruskin's false start as a 
 poet. Introduction to Pringle, editor of Friendship's Offering. 
 Introduction to Rogers. W. H. Harrison. Ruskin's repute 
 as an Album Poet. — III. First Love. Adele Domecq. Pieces 
 written for her : Leoni, Marcolini. Love poems. Herodotean 
 poems. — IV. Poetry and poetical prose. Ruskin's abandon- 
 ment of verse-writing. His letters on his Poems ... 83 
 
 CHAPTER V. THE CALL 
 
 (1840-1842) 
 
 First introduction to Turner (June 1840). — I. Ordered abroad 
 in search of health (Sept. 1840). Influence of David Roberts's 
 sketches. Impressions of France. " The Hills of Carrara." 
 First impressions of Florence and of Rome. Morbid taint. 
 Introduction at Rome to Joseph Severn and George Rich- 
 mond. Miss Tollemache. Concentration upon scenery. De- 
 scriptive passages in Ruskin's diary. Venice. Recovery of 
 health among the mountains. Good resolutions. — II. A cure 
 under Dr. Jephson at Leamington. What to do next ? Com- 
 peting calls of the Church and of Art. Reading for the 
 Final Schools at Oxford. Drawing-lessons from Harding.
 
 CONTENTS ix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Honorary Double Fourth (June 1842). — III. Turner's Swiss 
 drawings (1842). Revelation of Nature's "composition." 
 Foreign tour. Attacks in the press on Turner's pictures of 
 1842. A call to action. Modern Painters planned. Charaouni 107 
 
 CHAPTER VI. THE FIRST VOLUME OF 
 MODERN PAINTERS 
 
 (1843) 
 
 Sydney Smith's estimate of the book. Ruskin's preparation for 
 the work. " Having walked with nature." — I. Home surround- 
 ings. Denmark Hill. The Dulwich Gallery. Daily work on 
 the book. — II. Anonymous publication. The title. State of 
 public opinion in artistic matters at the time. A misin- 
 terpretation corrected. Turner and Claude. Descriptive 
 "phenomenology." Scientific basis of Ruskin's criticism.— 
 III. Reception of the book. Favourable press notices. 
 Opinions of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Sir Henry Taylor, Miss 
 Mitford, Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Charlotte Bronte, George 
 Eliot. Influence of the book on Liddell, Jowett, Thring, 
 Holman Hunt, Morris, and Burne-Jones. The modern painters 
 and the book. Turner's appreciation. — IV. Renewed attacks 
 on Turner. Criticisms of Blaclcioood and Athenceum on the 
 book. Ruskin's reply. Monckton Milnes and Rogers . . 131 
 
 CHAPTER VII. STUDIES FOR MODERN 
 PAINTERS 
 
 (1843-1S44) 
 
 I. Plans for the continuation of the book. Daily studies. 
 Experiments in Painted Glass. Scheme for the second 
 volume. — II. Foreign tour, 1844. Ferment of multifarious 
 interests. Chamouni. Busy days. The Simplon : meeting 
 with James Forbes. First sight of the Matterhorn. Studies 
 of pictures in the Louvre. From Rubens to Titian. A 
 " cyclone of new knowledge " 154 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. THE REVELATION OF 
 TINTORET 
 
 (1845) 
 
 I. Foreign tour, 1845. Travelling companions : " George " and 
 Couttet. Pcuskin's mode of travel. Anxiety of his jiarents. 
 Letters to them. — II. The I'apture of Italy. A day in 
 his life at Lucca. New lessons in architecture, painting, 
 sculpture. The tomb of Ilaria : turned " from landscape to
 
 X CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 life." — III. A day in his life at Pisa. Frescoes of the Oampo 
 Santo, "a veritable Palestine." "Restoration." — IV. Florence. 
 Enthusiastic study of the Primitives. Macugnaga. Study of 
 Shakespeare. " The Pass of Faido " : Turnerian Topography. 
 — V. With Harding to Venice. The Scuola di San Rocco. 
 The revelation of Tintoret. Ruskin's call to be Interpreter. — 
 VI. Emotional strain. An answer to prayer. Temper in which 
 he composed the second volume of Modern Painters . .169 
 
 CHAPTER IX. THE SECOND VOLUME OF 
 MODERN PAINTERS 
 
 (1845-1846) 
 
 Publication of the volume, April 1846. — I. Reception of it. Press 
 notices. Appreciation by Dr. John Brown. — II. Altered 
 style and tone. Influence of the book in turning attention 
 to the 'Primitives. The Arundel Society. Giotto and his 
 Works in Padua. Influence of the book in establishing the 
 fame of Tintoret. Chapters on the Imaginative Faculty. — 
 
 III. Ruskin's Theory of the Beautiful. Permanent value of 
 
 the volume .......... 190 
 
 CHAPTER X. MARRIAGE 
 
 (1846-1848) 
 
 Suspension of Modern Painters. — I. A new call : " restoration " and 
 mediaeval architecture. Foreign tour, 1846. Champagnole. 
 Architectural studies. — 11. Widening circle of acquaintance. 
 Miss Mitford. Ruskin's personal appearance : Richmond's 
 portrait. Social distractions. Lady Davy. Miss Charlotte 
 Lockhart. An article for the Quarterly. Visit to the Lakes. 
 The British Association at Oxford. Gladstone's candidature. 
 — III. Despondency. A "cure " at Leamington. Studies and 
 moods. Visit to Crossmount. Father and Son. Drawing. — 
 
 IV. "Letters to E. C. G." The King of the Golden River. 
 Verses " For a Birthday in May." Marriage to Miss Gray, 
 April 1848. Honeymoon : letter to Miss Mitford, public 
 anxieties. Salisbury. Illness 203 
 
 CHAPTER XI. THE SEVEN LAMPS OF 
 ARCHITECTURE 
 
 (1848-1849) 
 
 I. Tour in Normandy, Aug.-Oct. 1848. A day's work. Architec- 
 tural enthusiasm. Events in France. Interest in political 
 and religious questions.— II. Park Street, Grosvenor Square.
 
 CONTENTS xi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A visit to Ruskin. An evening with Jenny Lind. — III. The 
 Seven Lamps. Raskin's etchings in the first edition. Charac- 
 teristics of the book. Reception of it by the press. Whewell 
 and Willis. "A hymn to architectural loveliness." Architects 
 and the book. Its leading ideas. Style. Its influence. 
 "Restoration." Social and political ideas .... 224 
 
 CHAPTER XII. AMONG THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 (1849) 
 
 Studies for Modern Painters resumed. — I. Foreign tour, with his 
 parents. The Grande Chartreuse. Rousseau and Les Char- 
 mettes. — II. The narcissus fields of Vevay, The weariableness 
 of the imagination. The Valley of Cluses. The "Hotel of 
 Mont Blanc " at St. Martin. Chamouni. Mountain-studies. 
 — III. The Tour of Mont Blanc. Zermatt : studies of the 
 Matterhorn. Chamouni again : the Montanvert. A ghost 
 hunt. At home among the mountains ..... 243 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. VENETIAN WINTERS 
 
 (1849-1850, 1851-1852) 
 
 Impulse to write The Stones of Venice; significance of the title. — 
 I. Foreign tour, with his wife (Oct. 1849). Settled in Venice 
 (Nov. 1849-March 1850). Minute studies in Venetian archi- 
 tecture. Difficulties of research. Disillusionment. Letters to 
 Rogers and Norton : " Queen of Marble and of Mud." — II. 
 Foreign tour, with his wife (Aug. 1851). Travelling com- 
 panions. Settled again in Venice (Sept. 1851-June 1852). 
 Zest and enthusiasm in his work. Rawdon Brown. Society 
 at Venice. Marmont, Duke of Ragusa. The Archduke Albert. 
 The Emperor Francis Joseph. Marshal Radetsky. Lord 
 Dufferin. Dean Milman. A day in Ruskin's life. Religious 
 exercises and studies. Charities. — III. Social inequalities. 
 Letters to the Times on Politics. Suppressed by Ruskin's 
 father. — IV. Negotiations for the purchase of pictures by 
 Tintoret for the National Gallery. Departure from Venice. 
 The St. Gothard 265 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. CHAMPION OF THE PRE- 
 RAPHAELITES 
 
 (1851) 
 
 I. The London Season (18.50). Description of a crush. A Court. 
 — II. Ruskin's relation to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 
 Attacks on Millais and Holman Hunt (1851). Millais's
 
 xii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 request, through Coventry Patmore, for Ruskin's interven- 
 tion. His letters to the Times in defence of the P.R.B. 
 Acquaintance with Millais. Value of Ruskin's championship, 
 — III. Pamphlet on Pre-Eaphaelitism (1851). Ruskin and his 
 reviewers. Richmond's appreciation. The Farnley Turners. 
 — IV. Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (1851). Origin of 
 the pamphlet : an essay on Protestant Re-union. Replies 
 to the pamphlet. Correspondence with F. D. Maurice. — V. 
 Discursive industry. Vitality and zest ..... 281 
 
 CHAPTEK XV. THE STONES OF VENICE 
 (1852-1853) 
 
 I. Reception of the first volume (1851). Appreciation by Charlotte 
 Bronte; by Carlyle. Continuation of the book (1852); hard 
 work at Heme Hill (1852-53). — II. Reception of the later 
 volumes ; favourable press notices. Relation of the book to 
 Modern Painters. Leading ideas and influence of the book. 
 Architecture as an historical document. Appreciation of 
 Venetian architecture. Novelty of Ruskin's views. The 
 Byzantine revival. Venetian Gothic and the Gothic Revival. 
 The Westminster Play on Ruskin. — III. Social and political 
 influence of the book. The chapter on " The Nature of Gothic, 
 and herein of the True Functions of the Workman in Art." 
 Influence on William Morris. Reprint of the chapter for the 
 Working Men's College. — IV. Ruskin's monument at Venice . 295 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. WITH MILLAIS IN 
 GLENFINLAS 
 
 (1853) 
 
 Autumn holiday with his wife, — I. Ruskin's friendship with 
 Millais. Travelling companions. Visit to Wallington. 
 Ruskin's cottage at Brig o' Turk. Diversions. A visit from 
 Acland : his impressions of Ruskin and Millais. Portrait of 
 Ruskin by Millais. — II. Preparation of Lectures on Architecture 
 and Painting. Help from Millais. Delivery of the lectures 
 at Edinburgh (Nov. 1853). Impressions of Ruskinlas lecturer. 
 Letters about the lectures to his parents. Edinburgh Society. 
 J. S. Blackie. — III. A visit to the Duke of Hamilton. The 
 Hamilton MSS. Study of illuminated MSS. at the British 
 Museum. Qualms of conscience at the collection of MSS. 
 Purchase of " St. Louis's Psalter." How he treated his books. 
 — IV. Publication of the Edinburgh lectures (April 1854). 
 His marriage annulled (July 1854). Marriage of Millais to 
 Miss Gray (July 1855) 314
 
 CONTENTS xiii 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. MODERN PAINTERS CONTINUED 
 
 (1854-1856) 
 
 PAGK 
 
 I. After the separation. — II. Foreign tour, with his parents (May- 
 Sept. 1854). Calais. Amiens. Vevay. The Simmenthal. 
 Fribourg. Proposed History of Swiss Towns. Interlaken. 
 Lucerne. Chamouni. A call from God. Mountain Glory 
 and Mountain Gloom. France and England contrasted. 
 Paris. Multifarious interests. Summary of occupations, 
 1854-56. Publication of Modern Painters, vols. iii. and iv. 
 (1856). — III. Modern Painters really five books. The third 
 volume, an interlude. Appearance of contradictions. A 
 harmony of conclusions. — IV. The history of landscape. 
 Mountain Beauty in the fourth volume. Influence of the 
 book. Reception of the volumes by the press. Apprecia- 
 tion by Morris and Burne-Jones ; by George Eliot. — V. The 
 Harbours of England ......... 329 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. IN A LITERARY WORKSHOP 
 
 I. Buskin's account of his literary workmanship. — II. His style. 
 His models. Daily reading of Plato and the Bible. His 
 memory of the Bible. His reading. Allusions to passing 
 events. His three different ways of writing. Esoteric allu- 
 siveness. — III. His methods. Careful revision. Illustrative 
 passages. The search for the right word. Not a mere " word- 
 painter"; accurate expressions of natural phenomena. — IV. 
 His handwriting. Amanuenses. Final revision for him by 
 W. H. Harrison. Ruskin's "approximate grammar." His 
 study at Denmark Hill. — V. Illustrations in his books. His 
 industry in drawing-studies. Equipment as critic. Relations 
 with his engravers. Friendly dealings with his printers, proof- 
 readers, booksellers, etc. The human relationship . . .351 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. THE WORKING MEN'S COLLEGE 
 
 (1854-1858) 
 
 I. Chronological summary, 1856-60. — II. Desire for action and 
 personal service. — III. The Architectural Museum. His gifts, 
 lectures, classes, and prizes. The OjKtiing of the Crystal Palace 
 (1854) : a plea for the preservation of ancient monimionts, a 
 Society suggested. — IV. The Working Men's College. His 
 lectures. The Trade Union Congress suggested. His drawing- 
 class. Reminiscences by pupils. Object and scope of his
 
 xiv CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 teaching. Relations with his pupils. Arthur Burgess. William 
 Ward. George Allen. Correspondence with J. J. Laing. — V. 
 Drawing-lessons by letter. The Elements of Drawing (1857). 
 Characteristics of the book. Its style. Object and scope of 
 his system. The Liber Studiorum. The Elements of Perspective 
 (1859). — VI. Drawing pupils. Lady Waterford. Miss Rose 
 La Touche 373 
 
 CHAPTER XX. ART CENSOR 
 
 (1855-1859) 
 
 I. Academy Notes, 1855-59. Their purpose and scope. Recogni- 
 tion of rising talent. Friendship with Leighton. Encourage- 
 ment of Pre-Raphaelitism. Notices of Millais. Acquaintance 
 with Inchbold and Brett. — II. Authority exercised by the 
 Notes. Their technical criticisms. Objections by artists to 
 their frankness : " why doesn't he back his friends ? " — III. 
 Suspension of the Notes. Resumed, for one year only, in 1875. 397 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. TURNER'S EXECUTOR 
 
 (1851-1852, 1856-1858, 1861-1862, 1881) 
 
 I. Death of Turner (1851). Raskin's feelings. Speculations as to 
 the dispersal of his drawings. Turner's Will, Ruskin appointed 
 an executor. A description of Turner's house. Ruskin's 
 schemes for a Turner Gallery. The Will disputed : its terms. 
 Ruskin renounces executorship. The compromise (1856). — II. 
 Ruskin's work in arranging the drawings and sketches. His 
 ofter to the Trustees : letter to Lord Palmerston. Notes on 
 the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House (1856). Catalogue of 
 the Turner Sketches in the National Gallery (1857). Catalogue 
 of the Sketches and Drawings exhibited in Marlborough House 
 (1857-58). Sorting the sketches in the National Gallery. 
 Report to the Trustees (1858). Catalogue of the Drawings and 
 Sketches in the National Gallery (1881). National neglect of the 
 Turner Bequest : memorandum to Lord St. Leonards (1861) . 409 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. PUBLIC LECTURER— THE 
 OXFORD MUSEUM 
 
 (1856-1860) 
 
 Motives of his activity as Lecturer. — I. Popularity of his lectures. 
 — II. Lectures at Manchester on The Political Economy of Art. 
 Salient points in the book. George Eliot on it. Protest
 
 CONTENTS XV 
 
 PAGE 
 
 against laissez faire. Plea for Old Age Pensions : "soldiers of 
 the ploughshare as well as of the sword." — III. Lectures on 
 Art Education. Government " Schools of Design." Ruskin's 
 more excellent way. William Morris. Paper on the place of 
 Art in a University curriculum. — IV. Lectures on Nature 
 versus Conventionalism in art. The Two Paths. Main theme 
 of the book. Lectures at Manchester and Bradford (1859) : 
 their success.— V. The "Battle of the Styles" (1857-59). 
 Ruskin as inspirer of the Gothic hosts. The Oxford Museum. 
 Acceptance of a Gothic design. Benjamin Woodward. Ruskin's 
 co-operation in the Museum. His window. Experiment in 
 brick-laying. The paintings at the Oxford Union. The 
 Museum craftsmen. Description of the building. Ruskin's 
 plea for its enrichment. — Hon. Student of Christ Church . 428 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. HOME AND FRIENDS 
 
 I. Friendship with Coventry Patmore. Defence of The Angel in 
 the House. — II. Admiration for Mrs. Browning's poetry. Letters 
 to her and Robert Browning. Browning's defence of his 
 "obscurity." Aurora Leigh. The Italian question. Mrs. 
 Browning's death. — III. Tennyson and Ruskin. Idylls of the 
 King. — IV. Lowell and Charles Eliot Norton. Letters to 
 Norton. — V. Letter to Aclaud : Ruskin's defence of his 
 politics. — VI. Letters to Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle. — VII. 
 Various friends and correspondence. Art-lessons for the 
 Prince of Wales. — VIII. Ruskin's relations with his parents. 
 A visit to Denmark Hill. Medley of occupations : letter to 
 Mrs. Carlyle 455 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. RUSKIN AND ROSSETTI 
 
 A problem in friendship. — I. First acquaintance (1854). Ruskin's 
 desire to cultivate friendship with Rossetti. Correspondence. 
 Ruskin's help to Rossetti and Miss Siddal. His account of 
 his own disposition. — II. Affectionate friendship between 
 Ruskin and Rossetti. Miss Siddal's illness: Ruskin's help. 
 Intercourse between him and Rossetti. Mutual banter. 
 Ruskin assists publication of Rossetti's translations. Criticism 
 of Jenny. Literary discussions. — III. Rossetti's menage. His 
 marriage. A little rift within the lute. Death of Mrs. 
 Rossetti. Rossetti's morbid suspiciousness. Letter from 
 Ruskin breaking oft" personal intercourse. Occasional friendly 
 communications in later years. Ruskin's estimate of Ros- 
 setti 486 
 
 VOL. I. h
 
 xvi CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. THE END OF MODERN 
 PAINTERS 
 
 (1856-18G0) 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Studies of nature for the completion of Modern Painters : summer 
 tours. — I. 1856: Chamouni. Counting his days. — II. 1857: 
 Scotland. Studies of skies at Denmark Hill. Flowers. — 
 III. 1858 ; Rheinfelden. The Lake of Zug. Pastoral peace. 
 Bellinzona. Turin : a turning-point in his study of art. The 
 worldly power of the Venetians. Studies of Veronese's " Queen 
 of Sheba." A turning-point in his religious views. " Uncon- 
 verted " by a Waldensian preacher. The religion of humanity. 
 The Vigna della Regina. The enigma of art-history. Cloud- 
 studies. — IV. 1859 : Studies of Turner in Yorkshire (March). 
 Foreign tour (May-Oct.). German Picture Galleries. Modern 
 German art : letters to Olarkson Stanfield and Richmond. 
 Nuremberg. Chamouni. Writing the fifth volume of Modern 
 Painters. — V. The book finished under constraint from his 
 father. Characteristics of the fifth volume. Abandonment 
 of portions of the original design. Beauty of Vegetation. 
 Lecture on "Tree Twigs" (1861). Cloud Beauty: altered 
 tone of the volume. Mythological interest. Principles of 
 Composition. "Ideas of Relation." Style of the volume. — 
 VI. Reception of the volume. A chorus of praise. On the 
 threshold of a new era in his life 507 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS, ETC. 
 
 "The Author op Modern Painters" {From the portrait 
 
 by George Eiclwiond, K.A., 1842) .... Frontispiece 
 
 Ruskin's Father and Mother (From the piortraits by 
 
 James Northcote, R.A.) ...... To face 2^- 172 
 
 Facsimile of the MS. of the Opening Passage of 
 
 "The Stones of Venice" .... Between pp. 362, SdS
 
 ^ntrotiuctorj) 
 
 The life of Ruskin Avas, as he said of it, "persistently 
 literary." ^ The biography of him must be the account, 
 mainly, of a character, a temperament, an influence ; 
 and seldom, of events on the stage of public action. He 
 himself would have deemed this limitation not disad- 
 vantageous. " Lives in which the public are interested," 
 he wrote, " are scarcely ever worth writing. For the most 
 part compulsorily artificial, often affectedly so, — on the 
 whole, fortunate beyond ordinary rule, — and, so far as the 
 men are really greater than others, unintelligible to the 
 common reader, — the lives of statesmen, soldiers, authors, 
 artists, or any one habitually set in the sight of many, tell us 
 at last little more than what sort of people they dealt with, 
 and of pens they wrote with ; the personal life is inscrutably 
 broken up, — often contemptibly, and the external aspect of 
 it merely a husk, at the best," 2 A biographer of Ruskin 
 is free from some of these disabilities. 
 
 Ruskin's lite was not lived in the public eye, but he was 
 frankly communicative. In letters and diaries, as well as in 
 his fragment of autobiography and in many a page of his 
 other books, he left behind him much intimate material. If 
 there be anything unintelligible in his life, it is not for lack 
 of self-revelation. The lives worth writinsf, he thought, are 
 those about which truth can be told in the greatest of 
 sciences, that of Humanity ; and which reveal what is 
 " beautiful or woful " in an individual soul. 
 
 There is little temptation, again, to dwell too much in 
 any biography of Ruskin upon the people he dealt with or 
 the pens he wrote with. There is indeed a certain interest 
 
 ' Fors Clavigera, Letter 85. 2 Preface to The Story of J da, 1883. 
 
 xvii
 
 xviii INTRODUCTORY 
 
 in the case of a master in any of the arts in knowing 
 something of his methods, and I shall devote a chapter or 
 two to such topics. Yet among great writers Ruskin was one 
 of the least dependent upon particular methods, apparatus, 
 tricks, or surroundings. He wrote anywhere, anyhow, with 
 anything, and on everything. 
 
 Ruskin's dealings with persons were of comparatively 
 little moment. He had, indeed, many distinguished friends, 
 especially among artists and men of letters, and the story of 
 his friendships will be found, I hope, to be among the more 
 interesting threads in this biography ; but the interest 
 centres largely around Ruskin himself. He met also, and 
 had some personal acquaintance with, men of fame outside 
 his own immediate circle. We shall catch glimpses in this 
 book of Marshal Radetsky ; of Archdukes and Grand 
 Duchesses and British Royal Highnesses ; of Rubini and 
 Taglioni and Jenny Lind ; of Forbes and Buckland and 
 Darwin; of Manning, of Gladstone, and of Disraeli. And, 
 more summarily, it may here be recorded that Ruskin 
 " formed one of a Avorshipful concourse invited by the Bunsen 
 family to hear them talk Bunsenese " ; that he saw the 
 Bishop of Oxford (Wilberforce) " taught by Sir Robert 
 Inglis to drink sherry cobbler through a straw " ; that he 
 'heard Macaulay spout the first chapter of Isaiah without 
 understanding a syllable of it " ; ^ and that he was invited to 
 go down to Broadlands with Lord Palmerston, who received 
 him much as Lord Oldborough receives Mr. Temple in Miss 
 Edgeworth's Patronage, and, at dinner, cross-examined him 
 playfully upon the wildest of his political theories. But all 
 such'-'encounters were incidental and sionificant of little. 
 The success of Modern Painters gave the author entrance 
 to the polite circles of London ; but " at that time," he said, 
 " even more than now (1888) it was a mere torment and 
 horror to me to talk to big people whom I didn't care 
 about." And in the later period of his life he mixed 
 very little even in literary or artistic circles. "It seldom 
 chances," he said, " my work lying chiefly among stones, 
 clouds, and flowers, that I am brought into any freedom of 
 
 » Fnettrita, vol. iii. §§ 28, 29.
 
 INTRODUCTORY xix 
 
 intercourse with my fellow-creatures. "^ Still less did he 
 mix at any period in public affairs. He made a glory 
 in what I fear that some of my readers may consider his 
 shame ; namely, that he had never given, and never meant to 
 give, a parliamentary vote in his life.^ He " knew so little," 
 he said, " of public life and saw so little of the men who are 
 engaged in it," that he was "guilty of a misunderstanding 
 of Mr. Gladstone's character " ^ as "total" as — well, as that 
 of some who had not a like excuse. Ruskin's life, then, 
 was private and secluded. A biography of him must be the 
 story of a soul, or be of nothing worth. 
 
 The development of Ruskin's character and mind, the 
 nature of his temperament, and their encounter with the 
 world will, then, be one main theme of this biography. The 
 theme is ample ; for Ruskin's life, though in an external 
 sense empty of events, was in another sense as full as any of 
 which we have record. His life, like his style, is distin- 
 guished above all things by abounding vitality; for his 
 closing years are not rightly to be accounted part of his 
 "life," they were but a long-drawn-out stage of death. 
 In no author who has written so much as Ruskin can so 
 few words be found which are otiose, so few passages which 
 are spiritless; and, similarly, in his life, I doubt whether 
 from his first articulate years to his last there was an empty 
 or an idle moment in them. He Avas, indeed, a creature of 
 moods ; the same eager sensibility that gave him exaltation 
 brought in reaction an equal despondency. But he liked 
 and disliked, he hoped and despaired, ever with the same 
 consuming intensity. He could find occupation anywhere, 
 and beauty everywhere ; in the simplest and commonest 
 effects of nature, no less than in the most brilliant. Mrs. 
 Severn remembers walking with Ruskin, when she was a 
 young girl, and seeing him stoop low down and glance 
 sidewise at the sky. " Do you put your head down here," 
 he said, " and you will see what I see." So she bent down 
 also, and saw what he had seen — " the wondrous loveliness 
 
 » For.f Clavigern, Letter 7 (1871). 2 m^i^ Letter 29. 
 
 » Ibid., Letter 57. 
 VOL. I. . 6 2
 
 XX INTRODUCTORY 
 
 of a tree's buds against the sky." " I cannot explain to you," 
 he said in one of his later Oxford lectures, " what a deep 
 element of life, for me, is in the sight merely of pure sun- 
 shine on a bank of living grass. More than any pathetic 
 music,— yet I love music, — more than any artful colour — 
 and yet I love colour, — more than any other merely material 
 thing visible to these old eyes, in earth or sky." ^ When he 
 wrote of the world that " God had placed its real happiness 
 in the keeping of the little mosses of the wayside and of the 
 clouds of the firmament," ^ he was recording a fact of his own 
 experience of life. Every cause which he took up, every 
 interest which successively engaged him — painting, archi- 
 tecture, sculpture or missals, rocks, shells, flowers or birds, 
 mythology, music or economics — aroused the same en- 
 thusiasm, whether in admiration or in rebuke. He lived, 
 as he wrote, at white-heat. If, as Mr. Pater says, " to burn 
 always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this 
 ecstasy," be " success in life," then was Ruskin's life suc- 
 cessful above common measure. 
 
 But Ruskin lived not only for art's sake ; and our theme 
 is full of the tragi-comedy of human life ; abounding in 
 conflicts of duties, in tragic disappointments, in an almost 
 comic disproportion, sometimes, between means and ends. 
 We shall see Ruskin, endowed with exquisite sensibility, 
 and possessed by a love of beauty so passionate that he 
 burnt to make all the world participate in his vision. With 
 him this love of beauty was inextricably mixed with the 
 beauty of holiness. Two sides of his nature were at first 
 at strife. He found for himself a reconciliation ; and be- 
 lieved, in the first rush of his enthusiasm, that he had only 
 to write, in order to convert the world. The enthusiast 
 for beauty was cast into the midst of a material age. He 
 did not convert the world, and he turned to rail at it. 
 Instincts of compassion, at first dormant in his nature, 
 were awakened, and the same sensibility that opened the 
 
 ^ Art of England, § 11. 
 
 ^ See the passage cited in Vol. II. chap, xxxii.
 
 INTRODUCTORY xxi 
 
 beauty of the world to him impressed upon him with in- 
 tolerable force its load of misery. Ill equipped, and giving 
 only half his energies to the work, he sought to redeem the 
 misery, and his life seemed to him to end in failure. 
 
 The story of Ruskin's private fortunes, and of the 
 development of his character, have also their elements 
 of tragic circumstance. The earlier period of his life was 
 tied in a relation with his parents closer than falls to the 
 lot of most men. They had for him unbounded affection, 
 and he for them ungrudging deference ; but it was " an 
 exquisite piece of tragedy altogether," said Ruskin, of his 
 father's death — " the loss of a father who would have 
 sacrificed his life for his son, and yet forced his son to 
 sacrifice his life to him, and sacrifice it in vain." ^ "The 
 men capable," he said, " of the highest imaginative passion 
 are always tossed on fiery waves by it"-; his own experi- 
 ence in love shoAvs every element of the comic or tragic 
 irony of life — a grand passion in boyhood which left a 
 scar not the less wounding because it was partly ludicrous ; 
 a marriage in early manhood which was brief and unhappy ; 
 an abiding love in middle age which was denied its frui- 
 tion by the most cruel irony. Tragedy more exquisite, 
 as we shall see, than the other ! If life be the school of 
 character, Ruskin was well lessoned. We shall hear his 
 own account of the influences which moulded his character 
 favourably and unfavourably in early years ; and afterwards 
 the course of our story will show the many gifts, graces, and 
 virtues which illuminated his life. Yet Ruskin's character 
 was not one of those which seem raised above the level of 
 humanity, and from their very perfection leave us a little 
 cold. In something that I once wrote and showed to 
 Ruskin, I had chanced to cite these lines from " Mimnermus 
 in Church " : — 
 
 "You promise heavens free from strife, 
 Pure truth aud j)erfect change of Avill ; 
 
 1 Letter to Dr. Acland, March 9, 1864 : see Vol. II. p. 68. 
 
 2 PrcBterita, vol. i. § 255.
 
 xxii INTRODUCTORY 
 
 But sweet, sweet is this human life, 
 
 So sweet I fain would breathe it still. 
 Your chilly stars I can forgo : 
 
 This warm, kind world is all I know." 
 
 The lines were new to him, and he asked particulars about 
 the author of lonica. " I like this one verse," he said, 
 adding characteristically, " though I have never thought 
 of stars as chilly." He liked the verse, and it was in 
 harmony with his own feelings. With a mind of singular 
 richness and fulness, he combined a childlike character; 
 fresh, winning, playful, wistful ; but he had also something 
 of the impatience and the petulance of a child. These 
 developed under conditions of his education and circum- 
 stances into an intellectual pride, which was Ruskin's most 
 tragic fault. It is no discovery of his critics. He knew 
 it and confessed. He did, indeed, rebut the charge of 
 " arrogance," in so far as it referred to the bold utterance 
 of long considered and carefully formed opinions. But 
 he knew that one of his calamities was " a dangerous 
 and lonely pride." i And one cannot doubt that he was 
 right in ascribing to this sense of isolation a principal cause 
 of the failing of his mind. His successive mental illnesses 
 were, as we shall find, attended in some respects with every 
 circumstance of exquisite pain. His was no case of an 
 abrupt failure of all mental power and total eclipse. The 
 earlier brain storms passed, and in the intervals between 
 them his mental powers were hardly impaired. But as they 
 increased in frequency, he was for ever haunted with the 
 dread of recurrence. Under the ordeal, Ruskin's character 
 was perhaps perfected by suffering. It is certain that 
 Proiterita, which some account the most perfect in style of 
 his books, and which was written in intervals of illness, 
 is distinguished also by an unusual serenity of temper ; and 
 Fors Clavigera similarly closes upon a note of repentant 
 softness : — 
 
 " I thought myself speaking to a crowd which could only be 
 influenced by visible utility ; nor was I the least aware how many 
 
 1 Fors Clavigera, Letter 88 (March '1880).
 
 INTRODUCTORY xxiii 
 
 entirely good and holy persons were living in the faith and love of 
 God as vividly and practically now as ever in the early enthusiasm 
 of Christendom, until, chiefly in consequence of the great illnesses 
 which, for some time after 1878, forbade my accustomed literary 
 labour, I was brought into closer personal relations with the friends 
 in America, Scotland, Ireland, and Italy, to whom, if I am spared 
 to write any record of my life, it will be seen that I owe the best 
 hopes and highest thoughts which have supported and guided the 
 force of my matured mind. These have shown me, with lovely 
 initiation, in how many secret places the prayer was made which I 
 had foolishly listened for at the corners of the streets ; and on how 
 many hills which I had thought left desolate, the hosts of heaven 
 still moved in chariots of fire. . . . The story of Rosy Vale is not 
 ended ; — surely out of its silence the mountains and the hills shall 
 break forth into singing, and round it the desert rejoice, and blossom 
 as the rose." 
 
 But Ruskin's own days were not destined to close in the 
 calm of work done in happier temper. The clouds descended 
 on his mind asrain, and did not break. Prceterita was left 
 a fragment ; and just when he seemed to be coming out of 
 school and expecting to enter upon more serious business he 
 was dismissed by the Master he hoped to serve with a — 
 " That's all I want of you, Sir." ^ If it be the function of 
 biography to reveal what is beautiful and woful in individual 
 souls, a life of Ruskin should not lack material. 
 
 These volumes have, however, a further scope. They 
 must attempt to describe not only a life, but an influence. 
 His writings exercised an influence upon the thought of his 
 time, the very extent of which sometimes causes it to be 
 forgotten. He Avas a pioneer in many fields, and it is the 
 fate of successful pioneers, first to be scorned because their 
 words seem paradoxes, and then to be ignored because their 
 paradoxes have become commonplaces. To give any ade- 
 quate account of a great writer's work in the "world, it is 
 necessary to recall the conditions, the thoughts, the prejudices 
 which existed when he wrote. Again, though Ruskin's life 
 » St. Marl's Rest, § 208.
 
 xxiv INTRODUCTORY 
 
 was persistently literary, and though he mixed but little 
 in public affairs, yet his writings, his lectures, his schemes 
 were ever addressed to practical issues. And here, too, his 
 influence made itself felt through many channels and in 
 many different directions. It will be an object of these 
 volumes, then, while avoiding such disquisitions as would be 
 out of place in a biography, to give some historical account 
 of the fortunes of his books and of their influence in the 
 world of thought and of action. 
 
 The course of Ruskin's life and influence lends itself with 
 unusual appropriateness to the division of the biography 
 into volumes. The two volumes, covering respectively the 
 periods from birth to 1860 and from 1860 to the end, 
 correspond to two Books m his history. The year 1860 
 makes a dividing line ; before it, he was a writer upon art, 
 after it, a writer also upon economics. Of course men's lives 
 and thoughts are not built in absolutely water-tight com- 
 partments; and I have taken care to trace in the earlier 
 period the growth of the ideas and instincts which coloured 
 the later one. There was no dichotomy in Ruskin's mind 
 between them, but only a development from one to the 
 other. He had thought much and written something about 
 social and political conditions before 1860, and after 1860 
 he continued to be artist, art-teacher, art-critic. Still there 
 is a real line of demarcation which may be drawn in that 
 year. Before 1860, he was in his principal activities the 
 interpreter of a Beautiful World; after 1860, he was princi- 
 pally absorbed in a mission to reform the world. And the 
 nature of his reputation in the world corresponded with this 
 division of his interests. The first volume will show Ruskin 
 winning his way, against some prejudice at first, but with 
 steady advance in favour, to general acceptance. In the 
 second, we shall see him derided ; and if in the end by some 
 the more admired and respected, yet also the object of a 
 more doubtful and perplexed regard. The first Book is the 
 record of splendid and unbroken success ; the second, of 
 apparent failure. Failure, as some think, splendid also, and 
 destined to become success ; but still, so far as immediate
 
 INTRODUCTORY xxv 
 
 efifect was concerned, failure. In another respect the two 
 Books of Raskin's Hfe are contrasted. The interest of the 
 first Book is largely that of an orderly and, as it may 
 seem, inevitable development. The interest of the second 
 is different. In some autobiographical notes, left among 
 Ruskin's papers and not used in Prceterita, I find this 
 remark : " My old age is really youth." ^ He made the note 
 in connexion with his keener appreciation of certain aspects 
 of architecture ; but it is true in a wider sense. It was in 
 the later period of his life that Ruskin broke most away 
 from the conventions and restraints of thought which old 
 age deems sage and prudent, and turned to the fields of 
 more obstinate defiance and more daring experiment which 
 are sometimes supposed to belong only to youth. Yet, 
 throughout, as I hope to show in the course of these 
 volumes, there was a unity of increasing purpose in Ruskin's 
 life and work. "The multiplicity of subject," he said, "and 
 opposite directions of investigation, which have so often 
 been alleged against me, as if sources of weakness, are in 
 reality, as the multiplied buttresses of the apse of Amiens, 
 as secure in allied result as they are opposed in direction," 
 Ruskin's writings on art are the more worthy of regard 
 because he connected art with life. His writings on social 
 economy are the more broadly based because they take 
 account of the ministry of art. And throughout, beneath 
 all diversity of doctrines, enthusiasms, and works, he pursued 
 the same ideal, and inculcated the same devotion. " There 
 is no Wealth but Life— life, including all its powers of Love, 
 of Joy, and of Admiration." 
 
 * This aspect of Ruskin's life Chevrillon's Nouvelles £tiides An- 
 
 had suggested itself to one of the glm'ses, 1910. 
 
 French critics who, in recent years, ^Epilogue to Arroivs of the 
 
 have written with so much charm Chace, written at Amiens in 1880. 
 and insight upon him. See "La ' Unto this Last, ^77. See the 
 
 Jeunesse de Ruskin " in M. Andre quotation of the passage in Vol. II. 
 
 p. 134.
 
 Folume 31 
 
 (1819-1860) 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 CHILDHOOD 
 
 (1819-1832) 
 
 " So stubborn and chemically inalterable the laws of the 
 prescription were, that now, looking back from 1886 to that 
 brook shore of 1837, whence I could see the whole of my 
 youth, I find myself in nothing whatsoever changed. Some 
 of me is dead, more of me stronger. I have learned a few 
 things, forgotten many ; in the total of me, I am but the 
 same youth, disappointed and rheumatic." — Prceterita. 
 
 The first forty years of Ruskin's life, which are the sub- 
 ject of the present vokime, have the interest of unity of 
 purpose, showing the approval and the accomplishment in 
 middle age of what youth had planned. His methods and 
 opinions did indeed alter, as any wise man's must, with 
 altering conditions, with enlarged experience, with acquired 
 knowledge. A great man of action was once rallied by a 
 friend for changing his views " so hurriedly." " Yes," he 
 replied, " as hurriedly as I could, for I found I was wrong." 
 The man of letters who is the subject of this biography 
 was often taunted for the different views which he put 
 forward at different times upon the same questions. The 
 problems of life, of ethics, of criticism are mostly polygonal, 
 he replied, and " for myself, I am never satisfied that I 
 have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted 
 myself at least three times." ^ To be truly alive, a man 
 must be capable, he said elsewhere, of nourishment and 
 therefore of change ; but in the case of a consistent life 
 and a strong character, the change is " that of a tree, not 
 of a cloud." 2 
 
 ^ Cambridge Inaugural Address, § 13. 
 2 Preface to Modern Painters, vol. v. 
 VOL, I. A
 
 2 PERVICACITY OF CHARACTER 
 
 CHAP. Pervicacity of humour, of tastes, of character is one of 
 
 the most marked features in the life of Ruskin. For nearly 
 fifty years he was a writer of printed books, which became 
 in the end so numerous that he lost count of them ; at the 
 age of seven he was already busy with his " Works," and 
 a year later they were numerous enough already for him 
 to begin a classification of them under various heads. He 
 became a great master of English ; and though his more 
 juvenile pieces show few gifts of style other than that 
 of fluency, yet by the age of eighteen he was writing sen- 
 tences nearly as well put together as any he afterwards made. 
 Throughout his active life, he was a moralist in season 
 and, as many of his critics hold, out of season ; some have 
 regarded him as a Prophet, all perceive that he was a 
 sermonizer : the performance for which his mother used 
 to call as her baby-boy's great accomplishment was a sermon 
 which began with the words " People, be good." He was 
 to give men eyes to see the beauties of nature : his childish 
 rhymes invited " Papa " to observe " how pretty those icicles 
 are," and " the water-wheel that turns slowly round, Grind- 
 ing the corn that — requires to be ground " (his " Political 
 Economy of the future," as he afterwards noted), "and 
 quarries with their craggy stones" ("so foretelling Stones 
 of Venice")} "I was as fond of nature at five years old 
 as I am now," he wrote in 1853,^ " and had as good an ear 
 for the harmony of words." He became a famous inter- 
 preter of art and himself a draughtsman of exquisite, 
 though unfulfilled, skill : already at the age of nine he was 
 poring over engravings from Prout and Turner, and there 
 are drawings of his, done when he was sixteen, which are 
 of real artistic merit. In Ruskin, as in few men of his 
 generation, were united the Hebraistic and the Hellenistic 
 elements ; the clash between them, with their reconciliation, 
 is the secret of his work : the earliest of his mental struggles 
 raged around this self-same conflict. The chemical " pre- 
 scription" in Ruskin's nature must have been unusually 
 stubborn, the accidents of his youth unusually consonant, 
 
 1 The Queen of the Air, § 112. 
 
 2 III a letter to his college tutor, the Rev. W. L. Brown.
 
 THE NAME "RUSKIN" 8 
 
 to give to his life so much of this consistent unity. To CHAP, 
 trace the influences of the moulding years of his childhood •^• 
 is the obj ect of the present chapter. 
 
 The ancestry of John Ruskin, and the origin of his name, 
 have been the subject of much ingenious speculation and 
 some inconclusive research.^ He himself had little light 
 to throw upon the questions. With the meaning of his 
 name, he was content only to play. He did not care to 
 think that it was merely an abbreviation of " Rough Skin " 
 in the sense of "Pigskin"; but he took "some childish 
 pleasure " in its accidental resemblance to that of Giovanni 
 Rusconi, the Venetian architect who gave an opinion in 
 favour of sparing the old Ducal Palace after the fire of 
 1574.2 Ruskin would have been pleased with the etymo- 
 logy, communicated to me by Dr. Furnivall, which traces 
 the name back to an old English word denoting the winter- 
 fur of the squirrel. That " little dark-eyed miracle of the 
 forest, more like a sunbeam than a living creature," ^ was 
 one of Ruskin's favourite animals. Of the past history of 
 his family he was, he says, " stupidly and heartlessly care- 
 less as long as he could have learnt it ; not until after his 
 mother's death did he begin to desire to know Avhab he 
 could never more be told." In one place he speaks of 
 his English ancestors ; and the name has been traced back 
 to the fourteenth century, when a Ruskin was captain of 
 one of Edward IIl.'s ships. For the most part, however, 
 he thought and talked of himself as of Scottish descent. 
 He was interested in a genealogy which traced his forbears 
 back to the Rusgains (or bark-peeling family) of Muckairn, 
 on the shore of Loch Etive. This is highly conjectural ; 
 his paternal great-grandfather — John Ruskin the elder — 
 
 ' Those who are curious in such * The Stones of Venice, vol. ii. 
 
 matters may find tho subject fully ch. viii. § 28. 
 
 summarised and discussed in the ' Deucalion, vol. i. ch. xii. 
 
 Library Edition of Ruskin's Works, § 40. 
 vol. XXXV. pp. Iviii.-lxi., ti02-4, 607.
 
 4 SCOTTISH ANCESTRY 
 
 CHAP, whatever may have been his descent, was a Londoner ; his 
 -'■• grandfather was apprenticed in London, migrating some 
 years later to Edinburgh. This grandfather, John Thomas 
 Ruskin, is described as being of unstable disposition, " seldom 
 knowing his own mind for two hours together " ; and during 
 the latter years of his life, his conduct, or misconduct, of 
 his affairs, as well as the condition of his health and mind, 
 gave much anxiety to his family. He had been settled 
 at Bower's Well, Perth, and there he ended his life by his 
 own hand ; leaving to his son, John James Ruskin, this 
 painful memory and a load of debt. The character and 
 mental equipment of his son, John James Ruskin (the father 
 of our subject) were, as we shall see, very different from 
 that of John Thomas. 
 
 Whatever may have been the remote history of Raskin's 
 family, its immediate connexion was Scottish. His father 
 was born and bred in Edinburgh; many of his own very 
 earliest memories were connected either with it or with the 
 Grampians and the Tay ; the first patriotic delight he could 
 recollect distinctly was that of crossing the border, when 
 his Scottish nurse, Anne Strachan, always sung to him as 
 they approached the Tweed or Esk : — 
 
 " For Scotland, my darling, lies full in my view, 
 With lier barefooted lassies, and mountains so blue." 
 
 He used to speak of himself as " a son of the Manse," 
 too ; a son, however, only in the third generation, John 
 Thomas Ruskin, his grandfather, having married Catherine 
 Tweddale, who was a daughter of the Rev. James Tweddale, 
 minister of Glenluce, by his marriage with Catherine Adair. 
 It was through this Catherine Tweddale that he derived, he 
 used to say, such dim gleam of ancestral honour as he could 
 claim, her people being "right earth-born and yrj'yevei'i of 
 Galloway." But he was a son of the Manse in another 
 sense. In later years, when he was pronouncing sentence 
 of major commination against a perverse generation at 
 large and pleading, in particular, for a stricter exercise of 
 Ciiurch discipline in matters of conduct, he was fond of
 
 RUSKIN'S AUNTS 5 
 
 recalling the stern Presbyterian conscience with which CHAP. 
 a great-great-uncle, James Maitland of Sorbie, fearlessly ^• 
 exercised " the needful excommunicative power of all living 
 
 churches, Puritan or Papal." A certain Lady , living 
 
 in open quarrel with her son, desired to receive the Sac- 
 rament. Mr. Maitland resolutely interdicted her. Think- 
 ing to shame him into concession, she came forward and 
 knelt at the altar to receive it ; whereupon the un- 
 daunted pastor lifted her up bodily and conveyed her back 
 to her seat. 
 
 Apart from this Galloway ancestry, Ruskin belonged to 
 the commercial class. His grandfather, John Thomas, was 
 a merchant of some sort in Edinburgh ; his father, a wine- 
 merchant in London. His mother was the daughter of a 
 sailor in the herring business ; his maternal grandmother 
 was the landlady of the Old King's Head in Market Street, 
 Croydon, and " I wish she were alive again," he wrote from 
 Florence, " that I could paint her Simone Memmi's King's 
 Head for a sign " ; his mother's sister married a baker at 
 Croydon ; his father's sister, a tanner at Perth ; " and I don't 
 know much more about my family," he said, " except that 
 there used to be a greengrocer of the name in a small 
 shop near the Crystal Palace." He was but " a poor gipsy 
 Herald," he wrote, when challenging the Squires of England.^ 
 He was not a "gentleman," not being born in the caste; 
 but he had some pieces of gentlemen's education, and in 
 looking back upon his early days he " would not change," 
 he proudly wrote, " the dreams and tender realities of them 
 for anything I hear now remembered by lords or dames, of 
 their days of childhood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns 
 and lakes in park- walled forest." He also knew castle halls 
 and pleasaunces, as wo shall hear ; and attributed to his lot 
 one of the most fortunate influences in his education : an 
 instinct, namely, of uncovetous admiration, through which 
 he perceived that it was " probably much happier to live 
 in a small house, and have Warwick Castle to be astonished 
 at, than to live in Warwick Castle and have nothins: to be 
 
 ^ Fors Clavigera, Letter 45,
 
 6 BIRTH: HUNTER STREET 
 
 CHAP, astonished at; and that, at all events, it would not make 
 Brunswick Square in the least more pleasantly habitable, 
 to pull Warwick Castle down." 
 
 II 
 
 It was in 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, in Blooms- 
 bury, that Ruskin was born. The house, a small brick 
 edifice of the style common in that quarter of boarding- 
 houses, still stands, and has been marked by the Society 
 of Arts with a memorial tablet. Ruskin's father and mother 
 were first cousins, his maternal grandmother having been 
 a sister of the John Thomas Ruskin aforesaid. They had 
 married in 1818, and in the following year, on February 8, 
 their first and only child was born. Ruskin, who sometimes 
 played with the subject of astrology, noted that he was 
 born at "| past 7 a.m. (under Aquarius)"; John Varley, 
 who believed in everything (except religion) from astrology 
 to the reality of William Blake's ghost of a flea, once 
 met Ruskin in 1842 or '43, to whom he undertook, on 
 being given the place and hour of nativity, to prove the 
 truth of the science in ten minutes; "and in certainly 
 not more than ten minutes, occupied in drawing of its 
 sky, he fastened upon the three years of my past life 
 when I was 14, 18, and 21 as having been especially fatal 
 to me." They were the years in which he had first seen 
 the object of his early attachment, had fallen in love with 
 her, and had lost her by her marriage to another. He used 
 to trace the leaden influences on him of the planet Saturn, 
 to which in the older systems Aquarius was assigned as 
 the " house." Of less nebulous significance were the gifts 
 which Ruskin received from nature, the character of his 
 parents, and the influence of his home surroundings. 
 Biographers are too much in the habit, he says, of attri- 
 buting to accidents which introduce some new phase of 
 character all the circumstances of character which gave 
 the accidents importance ; and for his own part he re- 
 garded many elements in his character and powers, and 
 especially the art-gift, as innate. But innate qualities
 
 HOME INFLUENCES 7 
 
 may be favoured or checked, and must be directed, by €HAP. 
 circumstances, and they are thus mfiucnced from the ^' 
 earhest years. 
 
 The education of a child begins, said Ruskin, in infancy. 
 " At six months old it can answer smile by smile, and 
 impatience with impatience. It can observe, enjoy, and 
 suffer. Do you suppose it makes no difterence to it that 
 the order of the house is perfect and quiet, the faces of its 
 father and mother full of peace, their soft voices familiar 
 to its ear, and even those of strangers, loving ; or that it 
 is tossed from arm to arm, among hard, or reckless, or 
 vain-minded persons, in the gloom of a vicious household, 
 or the confusion of a gay one ? The moral disposition is, 
 I doubt not, greatly determined in those first speechless 
 years." ^ He wrote thus of the early years of Scott, but 
 he was thinking also of his own. The character of his 
 parents and the tenor of the daily round at home were 
 the formative forces in Ruskin's life. As a child and boy, 
 he Avas taught by his mother ; at school he was a " day boy," 
 and then only intermittently ; when he travelled, it was 
 with his parents ; and even when he went into residence 
 at Oxford, his mother accompanied him. 
 
 " I have seen my mother travel," says Ruskin, " from sun- 
 rise to sunset on a summer's day without once leaning back 
 in the carriage." ^ A friend who made her acquaintance 
 in later years, when she had hurt her leg and could only 
 walk with difficulty, noted it as characteristic of her nature 
 that she chose for support, rather than the arm of husband 
 or son, the back of a chair.^ She maintained this unbend- 
 ing^ attitude in the education of her son. An evangelical 
 Puritan of the straitest sect, she held strong views on the 
 sinfulness even of toys. A bunch of keys and a box of 
 bricks were the total equipment in this respect of Ruskin's 
 nursery. An aunt once brought him a Punch and a 
 Judy, radiant in scarlet and gold, from the Soho Bazaar. 
 His mother immediately put them away, and he never 
 saAv them asrain. There was a like restriction in dainties. 
 
 ^ Fors Clavigera, Letter .33. ^ G. B.-J. in Memorials of 
 
 * Ibid. Edward Burne-Jones, vol. i. p. 252.
 
 8 EARLY CHILDHOOD 
 
 CHAP, Many a child, even of a generation or two ago, can 
 remember the bhss of accompanying its mother to the 
 store-cupboard and being allowed to dip its tiny hand 
 into the jar of sugar or sultanas; and in the present genera- 
 tion every self-respecting child brings up its parents to the 
 plentiful supply of sweets. Ruskin's recollection in this 
 sort was of three raisins once counted out to him. Nor was 
 the paucity of toys counteracted by any abundance of play- 
 fellows. His father and mother kept themselves to them- 
 selves, as the saying is, and expected the child to do the like. 
 There were indeed some delicious days when, as soon as he 
 could run, he was taken down to see his Croydon aunt, and 
 left to play by " the springs of Wandel." And there were 
 weeks of yet greater delight, both in his earliest years and 
 in later childhood, spent in his Scottish aunt's garden sloping 
 to the Tay. The idea of distant hills was connected in the 
 child's mind with approach to the extreme felicities of life ; 
 so that when at the age of three and a half he was taken 
 to have his portrait painted by Northcote, and the old man 
 asked him what he would like to have put in the distance, 
 he replied, " Blue hills." At Croydon, and at Perth, alike, 
 there were many cousins; of his Perth cousin, Jessie, he 
 was specially fond, but she died early ; her elder sister, 
 Mary, was afterwards adopted by Ruskin's parents. The 
 Scottish aunt, like her of Croydon,^ was of Puritan temper ; 
 and the servant-of-all-work in the Perth house " might well 
 have been the prototype of the Mause of Old Mortality." 
 "I never can be thankful enough," he added, "for having 
 seen, in her, the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith 
 and force." The Springs of Wandel and the Banks of Tay 
 were, however, but occasional delights; for the most part 
 his first years were spent without companions, and with no 
 more alluring prospect than could be obtained by watching 
 
 ^ Ruskin's family connexions Bridget) married a Mr. Richardson 
 
 are complicated, and sometimes — in the former case, Mr. Peter 
 
 confused, by the fact that both Richardson, tanner, of Perth ; in 
 
 his father's sister (the Aunt Jessie the latter, Mr.Richardson of Market 
 
 or Janet of Fors and Frceterita) Street, Croydon, 
 and his mother's sister (Aunt
 
 HERNE HILL 9 
 
 tlie turncock at an opposite water-stand or by a sidelong CHAP. 
 glance at the trees of Brunswick Square. When the child I- 
 was about four, his father was able to leave Hunter Street 
 and to buy the lease of a house on Heme Hill (No. 28), 
 then embowered in leafy seclusion and commanding from 
 its garret windows a notable view, on one side, of the 
 Norwood hills, and, on the other, of the valley of the 
 Thames, The house, which still stands, was for more than 
 eighty years, though with some intermission, connected 
 with Ruskin or his memory. He lived there with his 
 parents for twenty years. It was then let to strangers for 
 a while ; but in 1872 Ruskin made over the lease to his 
 cousin, Mrs. Arthur Severn, and her husband. Durine- 
 their tenancy, which continued till 1907, Ruskin's old 
 nursery was for the remainder of his life kept as a bed- 
 room for him ; and it was in that room that he wrote in 
 18S5 the preface to the autobiographical memories of his 
 childhood. The house had front and back garden, and in 
 it the boy passed most of his days for some years : — 
 
 " The differences of primal importance which I observed between 
 the natui'e of this garden, and that of Eden, as I had imagined 
 it, were, that, in this one, all the fruit was forbidden. . . . The 
 unalloyed and long continuing pleasure given me by our fruit-tree 
 avenue was in its blossom, not in its bearing. ... So that very 
 early indeed in my thoughts of trees, I had got at the principle 
 given fifty years afterwards in Proserjnna, that the seeds and 
 fruits of them were for the sake of the flowers, not the flowers 
 for the fruit; . . . and for many and many a year to come, — 
 until indeed, the whole of life became autumn to me, — my chief 
 prayer for the kindness of heaven, in its flowerful seasons, was 
 that the frost might not touch the almond blossom." 
 
 In the matter of discipline, Ruskin's mother was a 
 Spencerian before Spencer. " Let your penalties," says that 
 mildly austere philosopher, " be like the penalties inflicted 
 by inanimate Nature — inevitable. The hot cinder burns a 
 child the first time he seizes it; it burns him the second 
 time ; it burns him every time ; and he very soon learns not
 
 10 HIS MOTHER^S DISCIPLINE 
 
 CHAP, to touch the hot cinder." That was Mrs. Riiskin's method 
 and the boy needed no second lesson. In a lecture given at 
 Woolwich, he recalled an incident of his early childhood 
 which his mother was fond of telling him. " One evening, 
 when I was yet in my nurse's arms, I wanted to touch the 
 tea-urn, which was boiling merrily. It was an early taste 
 for bronzes, I suppose ; but I was resolute about it. My 
 mother bade me keep my fingers back ; I insisted on putting 
 them forward. My nurse would have taken me away from 
 the urn, but my mother said — 'Let him touch it, Nurse.' 
 So I touched it, — and that was my first lesson in the meaning 
 of the word Liberty. It was the first piece of Liberty I got, 
 and the last which for some time I asked for." ^ There are 
 questions, he says, which are determined more easily in days 
 of innocence, than when approached with the prejudices and 
 puzzlements of later years. Is the Will Free, and what 
 is Human Responsibility ? Solvitur amhulando. He well 
 remembered settling these matters for himself, before he 
 was ten years old, on the nursery stairs : " I jumped up and 
 down an awkward turn of four steps, and considered whether 
 it was likely that God knew whether I should jump only 
 three, or the whole four at a time. Having settled it in 
 my mind that He knew quite well, though I didn't, which 
 I should do ; and also whether I should fall or not in the 
 course of the performance, — though I was altogether respon- 
 sible for taking care not to, — I never troubled my head more 
 on the matter from that day to this." This rough-and- 
 tumble method of approaching some abstract questions was 
 characteristic of Ruskin throughout life. Meanwhile, his 
 sense of responsibility had been strengthened by external 
 sanction ; for the child was " always summarily whipped if he 
 cried, did not do as he was bid, or tumbled on the stairs." 
 
 Sundays in the Evangelical household at Hunter Street 
 and Heme Hill were a sore trial to Ruskin. A lurid shade 
 was cast, he says, over the whole of Friday and Saturday 
 by the horrible sense that Sunday was coming. Croydon 
 afforded no escape, for his aunt, even more Evangelical 
 than his mother, carried her religion down to the glacial 
 
 * The Story of Arachne, § 3.
 
 THE TRIALS OF SUNDAY 11 
 
 circle of Holiness, by allowing only cold mutton for CHAP. 
 Sunday's dinner, " which as I much preferred it hot greatly •'■• 
 diminished the influence of the Pilgrims Progress." At 
 home, the thought of Yorkshire pudding to come at one 
 o'clock atforded some consolation ; and Good Friday was 
 also partly intermeddled with light and shade because there 
 were hot cross buns at breakfast, though church afterwards. 
 But the trial of having all his story-books taken away from 
 him on Sunday morning was severe, and the bottom of a 
 pew in church was a terribly dull place to keep quiet in. 
 Many persons who were brought up in similar surroundings 
 Avill share Ruskin's recollections of Sunday as the eclipse 
 of the week; but few perhaps have submitted so late in 
 life as he to the constraining force of early associations. 
 When he was living much abroad, he never thought of 
 travelling or climbing on Sunday. Writing to his father 
 from Venice in 1852, he apologised even for referring to 
 the progress of his work in a Sunday letter. It was not till 
 1858 that he made even a sketch on a Sunday. 
 
 So far the picture of Ruskin's childhood may seem a 
 gloomy one, and suggest that rigorous teachers shackled 
 his youth. The reality was far otherwise. There are many 
 lights to be added to the shades; his childhood was, in fact> 
 intensely happy ; its surroundings were favourable to the 
 moral disposition which he was to commend in his life's 
 work, and its discipline, so far from restraining his natural 
 instincts and gifts, gave them in many respects their most 
 fortunate direction. The orderly routine, the gentle affection, 
 the quiet of his home, taught him the perfect meaning 
 of Peace in thought, act, and word. Harmony and peace 
 met the sense like a breeze, and insensibly drew the soul 
 even in childhood into harmony with them. He had never 
 heard his father's or mother's voice raised in any ques- 
 tion with each other; never seen a moment's disorder in 
 any household matter ; never caught even one of those 
 vague hints which sometimes disturb childhood with uneasy 
 mystery, of vexatious trouble or baulked ambition. 
 
 Then, again, the monastic discipline of his mother
 
 12 FOUNDATION OF HIS TASTE 
 
 CHAP, developed in him an extreme perfection in palate and all 
 other bodily senses, and this was the foundation of his taste ; 
 the foundation, perhaps also, of his thought. " I believe," 
 he says, " that quiet, and the withdrawal of objects likely 
 to distract by amusing the child, so as to let it fix its 
 attention undisturbed on every least thing in its domain, 
 is essential to the formation of some of the best powers of 
 thought." If this be so, Ruskin's childhood was peculiarly 
 favourable to the gifts which he was afterwards to develop. 
 With few toys and no playfellows, the child's faculties 
 were concentrated from his earliest years on the observa- 
 tion of nature and inanimate things. He learnt, he says, to 
 pass his days contentedly in tracing the squares and com- 
 paring the colours of the nursery carpet, and examining 
 what patterns he could find in bed-covers, dresses, or wall- 
 papers. When the household moved from Bloorasbury 
 to Heme Hill, the garden took the place of the carpet. 
 What he said in one of his Oxford lectures of the world 
 of childhood was very true of his own : the child " sets all 
 the faculties of heart and imagination on little things, so 
 as to be able to make anything out of them he chooses. 
 Confined to a little garden, he does not imagine himself 
 somewhere else, but makes a great garden out of that." ^ 
 Ruskin attached something of the same value, in concen- 
 trating the attention, to the few and simple illustrations 
 in the books which formed his nursery library. It is " not 
 well," he says, " to make the imagination indolent, or take 
 its work out of its hands by supplying continual pictures 
 of what might be sufiiciently conceived without pictures." 
 He remembered poring during unaccountable hours over 
 an old edition of Robinson Ci^usoe with a few rude and 
 meagre vignettes entirely devoid of all attempt at imitative 
 resemblance. " I am quite sure," he says, " that being forced 
 to make all I could out of very little things, and to remain 
 long contented with them, not only in great part formed 
 the power of close analysis in my mind, and the habit of 
 steady contemplation ; but rendered the power of greater art 
 over me, when I first saw it, as intense as that of magic, 
 * Aratra Pentelici, § 77.
 
 BIBLE LESSONS 13 
 
 so that it appealed to me like a vision out of another CHAP, 
 world." ^ 
 
 The discipline of his mother in religious matters was yet 
 more important. Her creed was narrow, and the unquestion- 
 ing obedience with which he accepted it was to have a painful 
 reaction. With him it was afterwards to be " Protestantism 
 or nothing "2 — Protestantism in a very rigid form, and the 
 contest went for a time in favour of negation. But from his 
 mother's teaching he had, he says, perfect understanding of 
 the nature of Obedience and of Faith. And a knowledge, 
 moreover, such as few men have had, of the Bible. His 
 mother's daily readings with him " established his soul in 
 life " and were " the one essential part in all his education." 
 She began with the first chapter of Genesis, went straight 
 through to the last verse of the Apocalypse, and began again 
 at Genesis the next day. I have been told that on the night 
 before he was three years of age he repeated to his mother 
 the whole of the 119th Psalm. The child had also to learn 
 the whole of " the fine old Scottish paraphrases." To this 
 daily discipline he attributed the cultivation of his ear and 
 his sense of style. They read alternate verses, she " watch- 
 ing every intonation, allowing not so much as a syllable to 
 be missed or misplaced." All this was a study not only 
 in religion, and in Bible literature; but a discipline in 
 attention and in all literature. "The duty enforced upon 
 me in early youth of reading every word of the gospels 
 and prophecies as if written by the hand of God, gave me 
 the habit of awed attention which made many passages of 
 the profane writers, frivolous to an irreligious reader, deeply 
 grave to me." ^ 
 
 Such were Buskin's debts to his mother. Her upbring- 
 ing of him was in many ways fortunate, but there were 
 calamities also in it, as he came clearly enough to perceive. 
 He had, ho said, nothing to love and nothing to endure ; he 
 was taught no precision of manners, no bodily dexterity. 
 He did no wrong, and knew not the meaning of it, but his was 
 a fugitive and cloistered virtue. The bridle and blinkers were 
 
 * The Cestus of Aglaia, § 90. '^ Fors Clavigera, Letter 76. 
 
 * Bible of Amiens, cb. iii. § 52.
 
 14 CHARACTER OF HIS FATHER 
 
 CHAP, never so taken off as to allow him any independence of 
 action. His education was, he added, " at once too formal 
 and too luxurious " ; and in later years, " whenever I did 
 anything wrong, stupid, or hard-hearted, my mother always 
 said, ' It is because you were too much indulged.' " Again, 
 he had no companions in his childhood ; and " by the 
 time I was seven years old was already," he says, " getting 
 too independent, mentally, even of my father and mother ; 
 I having nobody else to be dependent upon, began to lead 
 a very small, perky, contented, conceited, Cock-Robinson- 
 Crusoe sort of life, in the central point which it appeared 
 to me (as it must naturally appear to geometrical animals), 
 that I occupied in the universe." 
 
 To his father Ruskin owed the cultivation of artistic 
 gifts. John James Ruskin, whom we shall come to know 
 and (I hope) to like well in the course of this biography, 
 was a man of rare character ; combining with great shrewd- 
 ness in business a genuine love of literature and art, and 
 a strong vein of romantic sentiment. He had learned Latin 
 thoroughly, says his son, " under the noble traditions of 
 Adam at the High School of Edinburgh, while by the then 
 living and universal influence of Sir Walter every scene of 
 his native city was exalted in his imagination by the purest 
 poetry and the proudest history that ever hallowed or 
 haunted the streets and rocks of a brightly inhabited 
 capital." The fact that Dr. Thomas Brown, the Professor 
 of Moral Philosophy, acted as his mentor in literary matters 
 shows the position which the elder Ruskin held in the 
 cultivated society of Edinburgh. He had devoted himself 
 early to business, first to assist in the maintenance of his 
 parents and afterwards to pay off his father's debts. His 
 engagement to his cousin, Margaret Cox, then living with 
 his mother, was protracted for nine years, in order that he 
 might discharge this obligation of family honour before 
 setting up house for himself He had first been a clerk in the 
 house of Mr. Moore, an army contractor, with whose daughter 
 he fell in love. She was a Roman Catholic, and her parents 
 forbade the idea of marriage. He then came to London, in 
 1810, as clerk in a wine merchant's office, and two years later
 
 INFLUENCE OF HIS FATHER'S TASTES 15 
 
 entered into partnership under the title of Ruskin, Telford, CHAP, 
 and Domecq — Mr, Domecq contributing the sherry from his •'■• 
 famous Macharnudo vineyards, Mr. Telford the capital, and 
 Ruskin the brains. The firm, established in Billiter Street, 
 was for many years the leading house in the sherry trade. 
 In 1818 John James Ruskin had been able to marry, and 
 in 1824, as already related, his household had been removed 
 to Heme Hill. He was engaged in the city every day, and 
 left the education of the son to the mother ; but in the early 
 mornings, and in the evenings, the boy owed a good deal to 
 his father's tastes. "We both of us," said Ruskin, "had 
 alike a subdued consciousness of being profane and rebel- 
 lious characters compared to my mother " ; and " though 
 my father went to church with a resigned countenance, I 
 knew very well that he liked going just as little as I did." 
 To his mother, then, Ruskin owed religious teaching and the 
 Bible ; to his father, romance and Scott, Shakespeare, Don 
 Quixote, Byron. The father had been a pupil in the landscape 
 class of Alexander Nasmyth at Edinburgh, and a drawing of 
 Conway Castle hung over his dressing-room table. The boy 
 was always allowed to watch his father shave ; and it was a 
 firm understanding that when the operation was finished 
 a story should be told about the pictured castle. In the 
 evenings the father would read aloud to his wife, while the 
 boy sat quiet ; and Ruskin could no more recollect the time 
 when he did not know the Waverley Novels than when he 
 did not know the Bible. His father's taste was as exact, too, 
 in art as in sherries ; and " he never allowed me for an instant 
 to look at a bad picture." At good pictures he had, as we 
 shall hear, many opportunities of looking, even from his 
 earliest childhood ; but something must be told first about 
 the boy's more formal education. 
 
 Ill 
 
 This was undertaken by his mother, who, up to his tenth 
 year, was his sole tutor. He had taught himself to read ; 
 by sentences, not syllables ; by the look of words in their 
 collective aspect, a study which he pursued by copying 
 printed type ; and so successful in his case was the method
 
 16 BERESFORD CHAPEL 
 
 CHAP, that, at five years old, he says, " I was already sendmg for my 
 ^' 'second volumes' to the circulating libraries." His mother, 
 who had " devoted him to God " from his birth, gave the 
 Bible lessons, already described ; taught him the Latin 
 grammar, and even mastered some rudiments of Hebrew, 
 in order to initiate him into the Word of God in that 
 tongue. His father agreed that the boy should be withdrawn 
 from the sherry trade, and bred for the Church ; and in later 
 years, when his son had gone his own way, he used to say 
 with tears in his eyes, " Yes, he would have been a Bishop." 
 For the better pursuit of the polite studies which were to lead 
 to the bench, a classical tutor was in due course called in, 
 and the choice was destined to have some influence upon 
 Ruskin's life. 
 
 He worshipped with his father and mother in Beresford 
 Chapel, Walworth, " the Londonian chapel in its perfect 
 type," as described in Prceterita, with " pulpit, sublimely 
 isolated, a stout, four-legged box of well-grained wainscot, 
 high as the level of front galleries, and decorated with a 
 cushion of crimson velvet, padded six inches thick, with gold 
 tassels at the corners ; which was a great resource to me 
 when I was tired of the sermon, because I liked watching 
 the rich colour of the folds and creases that came in it when 
 the clergyman thumped it." Twenty years later Burne- 
 Jones was taken by an evangelical aunt to the same place of 
 worship, and on reading the account of it " in that most 
 heavenly book called Prceterita " he recalled " the fat cushions 
 into which the preacher pressed his face when he prayed ... a 
 big fat cushion for the preacher, and a less fat one for the 
 curate, and a hard, dry, mean one for the clerk." " How 
 ineffably wonderful," wrote Ruskin in reply to his friend, 
 " that you and I both sate — and — behaved properly in Beres- 
 ford Chapel." 1 The minister of this chapel was the Rev. 
 Edward Andrews, an eloquent preacher and " a sort of Pope," 
 we are told,^ in the Congregational Church of the time. 
 
 ^ Memorials of Edward Bnrne- graded orders of cushion may- 
 Jones, vol. i. pp. 41-42, where be seen. 
 
 a dehcious drawing of the * Memoirs and Correspondence of 
 
 three-decker with its nicely Coventry Patmore, vo\. \. ■p. \2Q.
 
 LESSONS FROM DR. ANDREWS 17 
 
 Ruskin's father and mother had not presumed to seek the -CHAP, 
 
 great man's acquamtance ; but the child, and his cousin Mary, 
 " used to walk up and down in Walworth, merely in the 
 hope of seeing him pass on the other side of the way," and 
 one day he stopped and spoke to them. An acquaintance 
 followed, and Ruskin's father ens:ao:ed "the Doctor" to 
 initiate his son into the classical authors. Dr. Andrews was 
 the father of Coventry Patmore's first wife, the Angel in 
 the House, and it was through this connexion that Ruskin 
 in after years became introduced to the Pre-Raphaelite 
 set. A letter from the boy to Mrs. Monro, a neighbour in 
 Camberwell Grove, who with her daughter, Mrs. Richard 
 Gray, was allowed to pet him, describes the pleasures of 
 his first classical learning : — 
 
 " Well, papa, seeing how fond I was of the doctor, and knowing 
 him to be an excellent Latin scholar, got him for me as a tutor, 
 and every lesson I get I like him better and better, for he makes 
 me laugh * almost, if not quite ' — to use one of his own ex- 
 pressions — the whole time. He is so funny, comparing Neptune's 
 lifting up the wrecked ships of ^neas with his trident to my 
 lifting up a potato with a fork, or taking a piece of bread out of 
 a bowl of milk with a spoon ! And as he is always saying [things] 
 of that kind, or relating some droll anecdote, or explaining the 
 part of Virgil (the book which I am in) very nicely, I am always 
 delighted when Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are come." 
 
 This was in 1829 ; a year later. Dr. Andrews resigned 
 his charge, in a letter which may be quoted to show the 
 impression made by Ruskin upon his first tutor : — 
 
 " Walworth, May 22, 1830. — My dear Sir, — I am anxious 
 only that you should believe it was vitterly; impossible for me to 
 continue my attendances on your son : the regularity of my visits, 
 at first, demonstrated how honourably I would fulfil my engage- 
 ments, while dire necessity kept at a little distance from me. 
 But latterly, owing to a great increase of the church with other 
 ministerial calls, I could not be regular, neither indeed had occa- 
 sional and indefinite lessons been suflBcient, which they would 
 710^ have been, could I have continued them. I am gratified to 
 VOL. I. B 
 
 I.
 
 18 LATIN AND GREEK 
 
 CHAP, see that you repose confidence in my opinion : the tutor was what 
 I recommended : with reluctance but conscientiously. I say with 
 reluctance because it was painful to me to be separated from 
 Master Ruskin : a boy whose mind requires a peculiar manage- 
 ment, and who excited in me a higher degree of interest than I 
 ever felt for any other young gentleman with whose education 
 I was honoured." 
 
 Dr. Andrews went on to urge tlie importance of studying 
 closely the " Alphabetismus Anomalorum " in Greek grammar 
 and the " Elegantise " in Latin exercises. It is to be feared 
 that Ruskin did not then, or thereafter, devote himself greatly 
 to the grammatical anomalies ; but he owed to his first 
 tutor a love of Virgil as one of " the great masters of the 
 absolute use of language," ^ and an understanding, from the 
 Odes of Anacreon, " that the Greeks loved doves, swallows, 
 and roses just as well as I did." The tutor recommended by 
 Dr. Andrews was Mr. Rowbotham, an industrious and fairly 
 well informed compiler of school-books, who kept a "young 
 gentleman's Academy," near the Elephant and Castle, in the 
 Walworth Road. Under the tutorship of this worthy person, 
 twice a week in the evening, Ruskin added to his learning 
 the elements of French and of mathematics. 
 
 lY 
 
 Such were the lessons of the boy's school-hours ; a more 
 important part of his education was given by his holidays, 
 and especially by the summer tours with his parents. In 
 1825, when he was six, they went to Paris, Brussels, Ghent, 
 and Bruges. With this exception the tours, until the year 
 1833, were in Great Britain. His father was in the habit of 
 travelling once a year for orders, and on these journeys he 
 combined pleasure with business. He travelled to sell his 
 wines, but also to see pictures ; and in any country seat where 
 there was a Reynolds, or a Velazquez, or a Vandyck, or a 
 Rembrandt, " he would pay the surliest housekeeper into 
 patience until we had examined it to our heart's content." 
 
 1 Lectures on Art, § 70.
 
 SUMMER TOURS WITH HIS PARENTS 19 
 
 Also, he travelled leisurely — in a private carriage hired or CHAP. 
 
 borrowed for the expedition, and he made a point of including 
 in each summer's journey a visit to some region of romantic 
 scenery, such as Scotland (in 1824, 1826, 1827), Wales (1831), 
 the West of England (1828), Derbyshire (1829), and the English 
 Lakes (1824, 1826, 1830). These early tours had included 
 also most of the cathedrals and castles of England. From 
 the earliest days the young Ruskin had accompanied his 
 parents on their journeys, perched on the top of a box. His 
 art-gift, Ruskin said, " belonged to him by birth-right, and 
 came by Athena's will, from the air of English country 
 villages and Scottish hills." ^ But it was developed rightly 
 because, much as he loved art, he loved what she mirrors 
 better : — 
 
 " The beginning of all my own right art work in life depended 
 not on my love of art, but of mountains and sea. All boys with 
 any good in them are fond of boats, and of course I liked the 
 mountains best when they had lakes at the bottom ; and I used 
 to walk always in the middle of the loosest gravel I could find 
 ill the roads of the midland counties, that I might hear, as I 
 trod on it, something like the sound of the pebbles on sea- 
 beach. ... I would pass entire days in rambling on the Cumber- 
 land hill-sides, or staring at the lines of surf on a low sand ; and 
 when I was taken annually to the Water-colour Exhibition, I 
 used to get hold of a catalogue beforehand, mark all the Robsons, 
 which I knew would be of purple mountains, and all the Copley 
 Fieldings, which I knew would be of lakes or sea; and then go 
 deliberately round the room to these, for the sake, observe, not 
 of the pictures, in any wise, but only of the things painted." ^ 
 
 To this intensity of pleasure in nature, to his enthusi- 
 astic love of scenery, of which succeeding chapters will give 
 ample illustration, Ruskin attributed " the impulse to which 
 he owed the best force of his life and whatever of saying or 
 doing in it has been useful to others." ^ And with this love 
 of nature went " an hereditary love of antiquity as natural to 
 
 ^ The Queen of the Air, § 112. '-The Eagles Nest, § 41. 
 
 3 llie Art of England, § 159. 
 
 I.
 
 20 ROMANTIC ASSOCIATIONS 
 
 CHAP, me as a little jackdaw's taste for steeples." ^ "In the more 
 romantic expeditions," Ruskin said in one of his latest lectures, 
 " aided and inspired by Scott, and never weary of re-reading 
 the stories of The Monastery, The Abbot, and The Antiquary, 
 I took an interest more deep than that of an ordinary child ; 
 and received impressions which guided and solemnized the 
 whole subsequent tenor of my life." ^ In this way he had seen 
 before he was twelve all the high-roads, and most of the cross- 
 roads of England and Wales, and the greater part of lowland 
 Scotland ; every castle in Scotland, England, and Wales, from 
 Stirling to Dover, and every abbey from Dunkeld to St. Fride- 
 swide. " Seen " them, he says ; meaning a very different thing 
 from what is called seeing or doing a place in days of hustle, 
 bustle, railways, bicycles, and motor-cars. On the long and 
 leisurely summer journeys, his father or mother or nurse 
 Anne used to take the boy in the quiet afternoons to play 
 or look, as long as he chose, wherever he chose — which was 
 always by a river-side, or under a castle walL or in an abbey 
 cloister. As, a little later, he was to shiver pensively with 
 Augustines at St. Bernard, so in early years he had mourned 
 through many a day-dream at Melrose and Bolton. 
 
 He was encouraged by his father to write records of these 
 travels, and already he had amused himself by authorship. 
 What he described as his " earliest dated efforts indicating 
 incipient action of brain molecules " belong to the year 1826, 
 and are contained in a little note-book still preserved at 
 Brantwood. It includes the following "work " : — " Harry and 
 Lucy " Concluded, 'printed and coTnposed by a little boy and 
 also drawn. The title-page and a page or two of the text 
 are given in Prccterita ; I reproduce here the " copper-plate," 
 purporting to represent " Harry's new road," as the author's 
 first attempt at mountain-drawing. " Your new chapter," 
 wrote Miss Jean Ingelow when she read this part of Prce- 
 terita, " appears to introduce one at a bound to genius of a rare 
 kind which I have often longed to see described. It belongs 
 to the senses as well as to the reason. What child of seven 
 ever saw how a road went winding up and round a cliff 
 before ? The upper curve where the road goes behind the 
 ^ Notes on Prout and Hunt, § 22. ^ Mendinc/ the Sieve, § 1.
 
 FIRST "WORKS 21 
 
 cliff, you could hardly make more correctly now. Surely CHAP. 
 this is a gift of the eye." The other pieces in this, the first ■^• 
 of Ruskin's "Works," are in verse; his juvenilia in this 
 medium have interest for their precocity and evidence of 
 early tastes. It is curious that one of the pieces is in praise 
 of " The Steam-Engine." This may be read by the curious 
 in the Library Edition ; it is characteristic of the author, if 
 in nothing else, in going off at frequent tangents. Another 
 of the first pieces, on " The Rainbow," is characteristic, as 
 Ruskin slyly observed in Prceterita, in its " didactic character 
 
 with observations on the ignorant and unreflective character 
 of certain people " : — 
 
 *' But those that do not know about that light, 
 Eeflect not on it; and in all that light, 
 Kot one of all the colours do they know," 
 
 Another of the poems, addressed to " Ragland {sic) Castle," 
 shows already a certain interest in " Gothic arches, falling 
 towers." In 1827 Ruskin spent several months in Scot- 
 land with his aunt, and one of the things which he 
 remembered most vividly in after years was going through 
 Glenfarg, near Kinross, when the rocks were hung with 
 icicles. The occasion is commemorated in the lines (" Papa, 
 how pretty those icicles are ") already referred to ; but a 
 piece of the previous year is worth citing in full ; it shows 
 a power of consecutive thought which is of remarkable 
 precocity in a child not yet eight, and is a prelude to that
 
 22 EARLIEST POEMS 
 
 CHAP, moralisation of landscape which was to be a principal 
 characteristic of Ruskin's mature work : — 
 
 " Glen of Glenfarg, thy beauteous rill, 
 
 Streaming through thy mountains high, 
 Onward pressing, onward still, 
 Hardly seeing the blue sky. 
 
 Mountain streams, press on your way 
 
 And run into the stream below : 
 Never stop like idle clay, — 
 
 Hear the sheep, and cattle low. 
 
 Stones that in the streams do lie, 
 
 Bear the rushing torrent still : 
 — Thou shalt never, never die, 
 
 — Submit unto the Almighty's will. 
 
 Cows that lie upon the grass. 
 
 Rise and graze upon the hills ; 
 Never be a heavy mass. 
 
 Like a stone that's in the rills. 
 
 Sheep that eat upon the hills. 
 Rise, and play, and jump about ; 
 
 Drink out of the running rills, 
 And always on the grass be out. 
 
 Cottages upon the plain. 
 
 Placed so near the floury mills ; 
 Cottager, look on Charles's Wain, 
 
 Right above the grassy hills. 
 
 The pole-star guides thee on the way, 
 When in dark nights thou art lost ; 
 
 Therefore look up at the starry day. 
 Look at the stars about thee tost."
 
 HIS FIRST PRINTED PIECE 23 
 
 Not less remarkable, in another way, is a set of blank verses CHAP. 
 on " Time," in which, with a droll mixture of metaphysics ^• 
 and toyshop recollections, he wonders whether Father Time 
 be a figure, a quality, or a sense. A boy who could amuse 
 himself with such speculations at the age of seven was likely 
 to develop remarkable powers of analysis. His longest poeti- 
 cal exercise in 1827 Avas a versification, some 400 lines long, of 
 Scott's Monastery. In 1828 {cet. 9) Ruskin composed some 
 lines "On Skiddaw and Derwent Water" which, two years 
 later, were published in a magazine.^ As this is the author's 
 earliest printed piece, I give some extracts : — 
 
 " Skiddaw ! upon thy cliflFs the sun shines bright; 
 Yet only for a moment : then gives place 
 Unto a playful cloud, which on thy brow 
 Sports wantonly, soon melting into air ; 
 But shadowing first thy side of broken green, 
 And making more intense the sun's return. 
 Then, in the morning, on thy head those clouds 
 Rest, as upon a couch, and give fair scope 
 To fancy's play ; and airy fortresses, 
 Towers, banners, spears and battlements appear 
 Chasing the others off ; and in their turn 
 Are vanquished too, dissolving like the mould 
 That's trampled by the foot of urchin boy ; 
 And, rolling down, though once so firmly bound 
 By roots tenacious, while the upward spoiler 
 Climbs on to invade the hidden eagle's nest. 
 Skiddaw ! majestic. Giant Nature's work. 
 Lower than Alps or Andes. . . . 
 
 The touch of man 
 Raised pigmy mountains, but gigantic tombs. 
 The touch of Nature raised the mountain's brow, 
 But made no tombs at all, save where the snow — 
 The fleecy locks of winter fall around, 
 A mausoleum for the careless swain." 
 
 ^ The Spiritual Times : a Monthly original MS. with that printed 
 Magazine, February 1830. The in the magazine, 
 version here given combines the
 
 24 "THE SITE OF BABYLON" 
 
 CHAP. There is thought in the closing lines, and the opening 
 -'■• ones show a minute watching of the clouds which was char- 
 acteristic of Ruskin throughout life. " We might pick out 
 of the Excursion" says Mr. Frederic Harrison, "many a 
 duller passage than this " ; and so we might from the Night 
 Thoughts many a less felicitous passage than Ruskin's lines 
 " On Happiness," which belong to this same year 1828. 
 But in actual precocity of achievement there is, I think, no 
 piece among his juvenilia more remarkable than " The Site 
 of Babylon." The first stanza, here quoted, might almost 
 pass for one out of Rossetti's Burden of Nineveh — a poem, 
 by the way, which Ruskin in after years greatly admired : — 
 
 " The desert stretched its ocean sweep, 
 All vast and boundless as the deep 
 
 In mighty solitude ; 
 Night, like a Hon o'er his prey, 
 Above the vast, the desert way, 
 
 In silence stern did brood. 
 I stood beside one tree that flung 
 A gloomy shadow, where it hung ; 
 And not a column, — not a stone — 
 Marked out the site of Babylon." 
 
 Ruskin was eleven when he wrote these lines. In 1830 
 the summer tour with his parents was to the Lake District, 
 and this was recorded in a long rhyming poem of more than 
 2000 lines called the Iteriad. Its poetical merit is small, 
 but it shows the author's fluency, facility, and accuracy of 
 observation ; and is further interesting as containing a lively 
 description of scenes and modes of travel which have now 
 passed away, and as recording early impressions of places 
 with which Ruskin was in one way or another to become 
 associated. " The more one reads the boy's poem," says one 
 than whom few have known the Lake Country better, " the 
 more one is struck with the way in which that little lad of 
 eleven saw and noted what was really best worth seeing 
 in the district." ^ The view of Windermere from Low- wood,, 
 as which there is not, says Professor Wilson, such another 
 
 • ■ ^ Buskin and the English Lakes, by the Rev. H. D. Rawnsley.
 
 THE ITERIAD 25 
 
 prospect in England ; the streamlets on the flanks of Hel- CHAP. 
 vellyu like " threads of pure silver which hung from the 
 sky " ; the stream that crosses the road near Low-wood, by 
 which Wordsworth and his sister rejoiced ; the heathy swells 
 which Matthew Arnold afterwards immortalised : these and 
 many another characteristic piece of lakeland are noted, if 
 without any poetic felicity, yet with accuracy of observation. 
 He went to CrostliAvaite Church in the hope of seeing 
 Southey, and was not disappointed : — 
 
 " His eyes were as black as a coal, but in turning 
 They flashed, — ay, as much as that coal does in burning ! 
 His nose in the midst took a small outward bend, 
 Bather hooked like an eagle's, and sharp at the end ; 
 But his dark lightning-eye made him seem half-inspired, 
 Or like his own Thalaba, vengefully fired." ^ 
 
 The description is observant and agrees with the portraits. 
 Friar's Crag he had seen before, and it had made a profound 
 impression upon him. " The first thing which I remember, 
 as an event in life, was being taken by my nurse to the 
 brow of Friar's Crag on Derwent Water ; the intense joy, 
 mingled with awe, that I had in looking through the 
 hollows in the mossy roots, over the crag, into the dark 
 lake, has associated itself more or less with all twining 
 roots of trees ever since." ^ The Iteriad notes the net- 
 like weaving of "the roots of the fir, of the elm, and 
 the oak." Ruskin in after life once described the spot as 
 " one of the three most beautiful scenes in Europe," and 
 it is here that his admirers in the Lake Country have placed 
 a memorial of him. The Ascent of Skiddaw is told with 
 all the air of excitement and adventure which belongs to 
 such enterprises in the Alps. A guide-book of the time 
 mentions among the paraphernalia for an attempt on this 
 hardly virgin peak " the brandy which with a few biscuits 
 
 ' On the following Sunday they asleep the greatest part of the 
 
 saw Wordsworth at Rydal Chapel. time. This gentleman possesses 
 
 " Rather disappointed in this a long face and a large nose." 
 gentleman's appearance," says the * Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. 
 
 prose diary kept by Ruskin and xvii. § 13. 
 his cousin Mary ; " he appeared
 
 I. 
 
 26 THE PUPPET SHOW 
 
 CHAP, or sandwiches a provident guide will not fail to recommend," 
 and Ruskin duly chronicles — 
 
 " Cakes, sandwiches, ham, were by no means unhandy. 
 And amongst other things we forgot not some brandy." 
 
 In coming down from Kirkstone, our poet digresses into 
 a discussion, which he was presently to resume in prose, 
 upon the influence of Lake architecture upon scenery, 
 and avers that he would like a house " snugly embayed 
 by the side of the Lake " — a wish that was to be realised 
 forty years afterwards on the shore of Coniston Water. 
 
 Many of Ruskin's early " Works " were, like his later, 
 illustrated by the author. This is the case with a manu- 
 script volume, now at Brantwood, which is entitled 
 
 The Puppet Shoio ; or, Amusing Characters for Children. 
 
 With coloured plates by John Ruskin. 1829. 
 
 The writing is in " print " hand throughout. There is an 
 introduction, and twenty-nine characters are then brought 
 forward in succession. It is not without curious interest 
 that the first of them is " George of England," whose " power 
 will serve to save." It was under the banner of St. George 
 that Ruskin was to set himself, forty years later, to his 
 scheme of political salvation. Among so much that is serious 
 and (in intention, if not in execution) old in Ruskin's 
 juvenilia, it is refreshing to find occasional evidence that 
 the boy was a boy after all. In the invocation to the Sun, 
 the bathos — " At the hot noon Oft have I worked to make 
 my garden nice " — reminds us that he played in the garden ; 
 and there is a rhyming letter of 1831 which records a visit 
 to the pantomime, and gloats over a supper of " puff-tarts, 
 ham, and oyster patties." 
 
 There is biographical interest of another kind in these 
 juvenile verses, and in the letters of the same period. The 
 world in which he lived and moved and had his being 
 was from his earliest years the world of art and literature. 
 On his tenth birthday he received some presents which 
 he specially valued : — 
 
 " There never were gifts (he writes to his father, Feb. 21, 1829) 
 more useful to me than — shall I enumerate them ? — my pens, my
 
 HIS INDUSTRY 27 
 
 instruments, my box, my pencils, my portfolios, my paints, my CHAP. 
 atlas and my paper." ^• 
 
 His literary and artistic efforts were discursive, but his 
 industry was prodigious. He was never happier — then or 
 in after life — than when he had a dozen books on hand 
 at once: — 
 
 "I do believe (he writes to his father on May 10, 1829) that 
 the last year of my life was the happiest ; and shall I tell you 
 why? Because I have had more to do than I could do without 
 cramming and ramming, and wishing days were longer and sheets 
 of paper broader. . . . I do think, indeed am sm'e, that in common 
 things it is having too much to do which constitutes happiness, 
 and too little, unhappiness." 
 
 "I find time now (he writes three yeai's later, Feb. 20, 1832) 
 still more scarce than ever; for what with Livy and Lucian, 
 Homer, French, drawings, arithmetic, globe woik and mineralogical 
 dictionary, I positively am all flurry and hurry." 
 
 So, then, we must picture the young Ruskin as an author 
 in his childhood ; busy with his works, as he has described, 
 in a httle recess in the parlour at Heme Hill, with a table 
 in front of it, wholly sacred to him ; seated, in the admiring 
 company of his parents, as an idol in a niche. Among 
 those privileged to see the idol at home was James Hogg, 
 the Ettrick Shepherd, and a letter to him from the elder 
 Ruskin shows the father's fond pride : — 
 
 "Herne Hill, Jan. 22, 1834. — My dear Sir, — It is long 
 since I was favoured by our friend Mr. Elder with a sight of part 
 of a letter of January, 1833, in which you very kindly enquire 
 after my son and myself, and if I had not deemed it intrusive, I 
 should sooner have thanked you. I cannot say what has now 
 led me to do what I have so long deferred, unless it may be 
 sundry hints from our wife, and niece, and son, who all indulge 
 in periodical remembrances of the delight your only too short 
 visit offered them. Touching my son, there are many to whom 
 I would never name him or his pursuits ; but to men of talent 
 and of heart I find I can say many things that I dare not tell 
 the world at large. It cannot comprehend ; it has not patience,
 
 28 HIS FATHER'S ENCOURAGEMENT 
 
 CHAP, nor feeling, nor delicacy. It shall not be entrusted with my 
 weaknesses, because I am not yet willing to be laughed out of 
 them. To you I will venture to say that the youth you were 
 kind enough to notice, gives promise of very considerable talent. 
 His faculty of composition is unbounded ; without, however, any 
 very strong indication of originality. He writes verse and prose 
 perpetually, check him as we will. . . . That I may not select, I 
 send his last eighty or a hundred lines, produced in one hour, 
 while he waited for me in the city. Do not suppose we are foster- 
 ing a poetical plant or genius, to say we keep a poet. It is im- 
 possible for any parents to make less of a gift than we do 
 of this. ..." 
 
 Qui s excuse, s'accuse; but the accusation is venial. The 
 fostering of the child's precious talent was an amiable weak- 
 ness ; but Ruskin's father certainly indulged it, and it made 
 a pleasant link in the relations between father and son. 
 Ruskin in after life often alluded to his foible for discursive 
 industry. The same ironical note is struck in his early 
 letters. He warns his father in absence (March 6, 1830) 
 that he will know to his cost on his return how busy his 
 son has been. " I am already," he writes, " in the fourth 
 hundred of the second book, cantering away to Borrowdale 
 and Bowderstone and Buttermere." So again, a year later 
 (Feb. 28, 1831), he writes: "You will be smothered under 
 a mountain of words. . . . You will groan under the weight 
 of lines, the sea of rhymes, which I shall load you with 
 on your return." To Ruskin's father the load was all a 
 pleasure. The boy always composed a Rhyming Letter to 
 his father for New Year's Da}^ (generally enclosing some 
 other pieces from the author's stock in hand), and another 
 for his Birthday. Often, too, when the father was absent 
 on business, the son sent similar letters in rhyme. Some- 
 times there is a note of strain in the boy's effusions; but 
 more often the rhyming letters pour themselves out with the 
 unrestraint of comradeship. The trivialities of home and 
 the pranks of the schoolroom are told with much spirit, 
 and often with humorous insight into character. Nor is 
 the boy ever a^fraid of speaking his deeper thoughts and
 
 FATHER AND SON 29 
 
 fancies into his father's ear. At other times he hits off the CHAP. 
 foibles of both his parents, or chaffs the wine-merchant ■'■• 
 freely about his business. There is a characteristic touch 
 in this connexion in one of the letters to W. H. Harrison 
 from Ruskin's father (Jan. 30, 1837): "His treatment of 
 the City altogether shocks my feelings. He knows the 
 shape of every needle round Mont Blanc, and could not 
 tell you now where Threadneedle Street is." The elder 
 Ruskin was a keen man of business, but his heart was not 
 " always in his office," and often in the rhyming letters 
 we seem, as it were, to catch father and son in the act 
 of devising confidential schemes for sentimental tours. The 
 father was in the habit of sending round to his friends any 
 of the effusions which struck him as peculiarly clever. " We 
 think him clever," he writes in reply to a friend's admira- 
 tion, "and his masters pronounce his talents great for 
 his age. ... If the Almighty preserves the Boy to me, 
 I am richly blessed." The father used also to carry about 
 with him favourite poems by his son, and his old friend 
 W. H. Harrison, wanting to make an acceptable pre- 
 sent, had proofs of Ruskin's contributions to Friendship s 
 Offering bound up. The volume accompanied the father 
 on his tours. He eagerly collected, too, any favourable 
 notices in the press of his son's verses. When a hostile 
 criticism appeared, the father was convinced that there 
 were " conspiracies " afoot and " unrelenting foes " abroad. 
 Every scrap of the juvenilia was treasured ; and in after 
 years when Ruskin had fulfilled, though in a different sort, 
 the promise of his boyhood, the father turned back to the 
 manuscript volumes and therein entered this note: "He 
 has been compared with Goethe, Coleridge, J. Taylor, Burke, 
 Juvenal." Ruskin remembered his father's rushing up to 
 the drawing-room at Heme Hill with wet and fiashin"' 
 eyes with the proof of the first piece of his son's prose 
 ever set in type. The mother questioned eagerly the cause 
 of his excitement. " It's — it's — only print," said he.^ His 
 mother, not less sympathetic at heart, had more of the 
 parental prudence. It is she who utters the notes of 
 
 1 Deucalion, vol. i. ch. xiv.
 
 30 LOVE OF DRAWING 
 
 CHAP, warning. " If you think of writing John," she said to her 
 husband, "would you impress on him the propriety of not 
 beginning too eagerly and becoming careless towards the 
 end of his works, as he calls them ? " And " Mama is con- 
 tinually saying," wrote the boy himself, " that I shall weary 
 out my brain," 
 
 V 
 
 He was saved from mental over-pressure, and the con- 
 templative side of his training was corrected, by two other 
 formative influences in his early education and character 
 which have yet to be noticed. One was the love of draw- 
 ing ; the other, the love of natural science. He had some 
 faint recollection of drawing out of his head, at the age of 
 four, certain towers and castles "as false as Claude's"; but 
 his first discipline in art began a few years later when he 
 made careful copies of the maps in some old quarto Atlas. 
 These, he says, were a great delight ; " the colouring round 
 the edges being a reward for all the tediousness of the 
 printed names; the painting, an excellent discipline of 
 hand and eye ; and the lines drawn for the mountains and 
 sea, a most wholesome imitation of steady engraver's work." 
 As a drawing-master in later years he placed map-making 
 among the elementary exercises — laying special stress on 
 the lettering — " you will draw palaces and towers in truer 
 stability after drawing the letters uprightly," and emphasis- 
 ing the advantage therein of " teaching geography, geology, 
 drawing, and colouring all at once." ^ This was a cardinal 
 principle in Ruskin's theory of art as an element in general 
 education. He did not beheve in nonsense lines ; every 
 exercise which he arranged, either at the Working Men's 
 College or in his Drawing School at Oxford, had the 
 secondary object of fixing in the student's mind some 
 piece of accurate knowledge. He had instinctively fixed 
 on this principle in the earliest exercises by which he 
 trained his own hand and eye ; and in an education which 
 in many ways lacked precision and drill, his constant 
 ^ The Laics of Fesole, ch. ix. § 20.
 
 HIS FIRST DRAWING-MASTER 31 
 
 practice with pen and pencil must have been of great value. CHAP. 
 Examples of his maps, done when he was eight, nine, and ten, 
 have been shown in various exhibitions ; and to the same 
 date belong the copies in pen and ink from Cruikshank's 
 vignettes to Grimm's German stories. Here, again, Ruskin, 
 in later years, urged his pupils to adopt his own early 
 models. Nothing in modern line work, he said, approaches 
 Cruikshank's in pure straightforward unaffected rightness 
 of method. The study certainly encouraged in Ruskin an 
 extraordinary gift for drawing delicately with the pen 
 pomt ; his copies from Grimm " show curious accuracy of 
 eye and self-confidence, not having the slightest fear of 
 being unable to carry out my full complement of subjects 
 without making a mess." This practice was not encou- 
 raged by Mr. Runciman, Ruskin's earliest drawing-master, 
 who, however, grounded his pupil thoroughly in perspec- 
 tive, and founded the habit of looking for the essen- 
 tial points in the things drawn so as to abstract them 
 decisively. Some of Ruskin's early drawings from scenery 
 or buildings show real feeling; and his constant practice 
 influenced his view of nature. He loved nature with a 
 rapture which was increased by many associations of ideas. 
 But he was never a mere sentimentalist or a romanticist. 
 He had reverence and sensitiveness; but "I never," he says, 
 " should have written sonnets to the celandine, because it is 
 of a coarse yellow and imperfect form ; and did not weary 
 myself in wishing that a daisy could see the beauty of its 
 shadow, but in trying to draw the shadow rightly, myself." 
 
 A similar influence came from his early interest in 
 natural science. In reviewing the work of his life, he claimed 
 for himself a " balanced unison of artistic sensibility with 
 scientific faculty which enabled me at once to love Giotto 
 and learn from Galileo," ^ The alliteration corresponds 
 with the actual course of his interests. The unison was 
 described in other language by his father. " His geology," 
 he wrote to Dr. John Simon, " is perhaps now (1858) the bes.t 
 part of my son's art, for it enables him to place before us 
 rocks and mountains as they are in nature, in place of the 
 ^ Fors Clavigera, Letter 67.
 
 32 GEOLOGY AND MINERALOGY 
 
 CHAP, very bad likenesses of these objects presented to us in most 
 of the old paintings or modern drawings." And again : 
 " From boyhood my son has been an artist, but he has been 
 a geologist from infancy." Geology and mineralogy, not 
 painting and literature, were his earliest love. No acquisi- 
 tion of later years — not his most radiant Turner or choicest 
 missal— gave him pleasure so keen as he felt in his first box 
 of minerals, and no subsequent possession, he tells us, had so 
 much influence on his after life. " In the glittering white 
 broken spar, speckled with galena, by which the walks of the 
 hotel garden at Matlock were m ade bright, and in the shops 
 of the pretty village, and in many a happy walk among its 
 cliffs," the child pursued his " mineralogical studies on fluor, 
 calcite, and the ores of lead with indescribable rapture." 
 His father's wine-business took him often to Bristol also, 
 and words cannot tell the joy which a collection of Bristol 
 diamonds gave to the child. In journeys to the Lake District, 
 " the little yellow bit of copper ore from Coniston and the 
 garnets from Borrowdale were the beginning of science to me 
 which never could have been otherwise acquired." ^ The 
 ambition of his boyhood was to connect with his name, not 
 a system of art-criticism, but a system of mineralogy. The 
 dream of his early manhood was that he should become, 
 not a master of English, but President of the Geological 
 Society. As a boy he spent many a day in the British 
 Museum, comparing the minerals there with the descrip- 
 tions of them in Jameson's book. Before he was in his 
 teens, he had begun to compile a Mineralogical Dictionary, 
 and for a present on his fifteenth birthday he chose the 
 Voyages dans les Alpes by Saussure, his master in geo- 
 logy. The first of his prose pieces to appear in print 
 was a scientific note ; the earliest of his collections was 
 of minerals. The study which he took up in the latest 
 of his unclouded years was that of crystallography ; and 
 among his last interests was the cataloguing of specimens 
 of silica. So true is it that at the end he was " but the same 
 youth " ; that his life was one " of gradual progress in the 
 things which he began in childish choice." ^ 
 
 1 Deucalion, Appendix to vol. i. " The Eagle's Nest, § 83.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 ENTRANCE INTO HIS KINGDOM 
 
 (1833-1836) 
 
 " Not what I Have, but what I Do, is my Kingdom. To each is 
 given a certain inward Talent, a certain outward Environment 
 of Fortune ; to each, by wisest combination of these two, a 
 certain maximum of Capability." — Carlyle {Sartor Resartus). 
 
 In the lives of men who make a mark in the world, there is 
 often some incident of moment to which they look back 
 as decisive. It may come early or late ; amidst the ruins 
 of the Capitol, or on the road to Damascus. "Yet," as 
 Ruskin says, "men are made what they finally become only 
 by the external accidents which are in harmony with their 
 inner nature." ^ It was to a present received on his thirteenth 
 birthday that he looked back as determining the main tenor 
 of his life ; and it was the publication of a volume of 
 lithographs in the following year that was the means of 
 opening his kingdom to him. 
 
 On February 8, 1832, his father's partner, Mr. Henry 
 Telford, gave the boy a copy of Rogers's Italy, with Turner's 
 vignettes. Ruskin had at this time never heard of Turner 
 "except in the well-remembered saying of Mr. Runciman's 
 that the world had lately been much dazzled and led away 
 by some splendid ideas thrown out by Turner." Ruskin 
 was both dazzled and led. He fastened on the vignettes at 
 once, took them for his only masters, and set himself to 
 imitate the engravings as far as he possibly could by fine 
 
 ^ Notes on Protit and Hunt. 
 VOL. I. 33 Q
 
 34 FOREIGN TOUR: 1833 
 
 CHAP, pen shading. His work in life as the interpreter of Turner 
 was decided for him. 
 
 In 1833 he had an opportunity of trying to imitate them 
 in a new field. In the spring of that year the elder Ruskin 
 had brought home from the city a copy of Front's Sketches 
 in Flanders and Germany. Father and son looked with 
 delight at the wonderful places, and Mrs. Ruskin asked, 
 Why should they not go and see some of them in reality ? 
 Switzerland was included in the plans, and that very 
 evening the boy was busy with the geography of Mont 
 Blanc. They went by Calais and the Rhine to Strassburg, 
 and thence to Schaffhausen and the Gates of the Hills — 
 " opening for me," he says, " a new life — to cease no more 
 except at the Gates of the Hills whence one returns not." 
 "It is not possible to imagine," he adds, of his first sight 
 of the Alps, " in any time of the world, a more blessed 
 entrance into life, for a child of such temperament as 
 mine. ... I went down that evening from the garden- 
 terrace of Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed in all of it 
 that was to be sacred and useful." His work in life as the 
 interpreter of Nature was decided for him. 
 
 The tour in which Ruskin thus entered into his mountain 
 kingdom was the first of many Swiss and Italian journeys 
 which he made with his parents, and he has given several 
 descriptions of their mode of travel — the more interesting 
 for its contrast with present-day conditions. The beginning 
 of delight, he says, was in choosing the carriage, and in 
 arranging cunningly what was to be virtually the travellers' 
 home for many weeks. There was a front seat outside ; 
 four seats inside ; and a dickey behind for nurse Anne and 
 the courier. Then came the rapture of starting; the first 
 trot through Camberwell — " the sense of pity for all the 
 inhabitants of Peckham who weren't going, like the pity of 
 lovers on their wedding-day for everybody who is not being 
 married ; the change of horses at Dartford, feeling that the 
 last link with Camberwell was broken, that we were already 
 in a new and miraculous world, in which one crowded day 
 of glorious life was worth a year of vulgar days." And then 
 the channel-crossing in the little paddle-steamers of earlier
 
 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CALAIS 35 
 
 times, their bits of sail worn and patched like those of an CHAP. 
 old fishing-boat ; and " the immeasurable delight of being ^• 
 able to loiter and swing about just over the bowsprit and 
 watch the plunge of the bows, if there was the least swell 
 or broken sea to lift them, with the hope of Calais at 
 breakfast, and the horses' heads set straight for Mont 
 Blanc to-morrow." Then the first sight of the old belfry — 
 "the epitome, in some sort, of all that makes the continent 
 of Europe interesting, as opposed to new countries." No 
 passage of Modern Painters is better knoAvn than that in 
 which Ruskin describes " the strange pleasures and thoughts 
 that come about me at the sight of that old tower." The 
 richness of association and the literary skill to fit them to 
 beautiful words were gifts of later years ; but already, at 
 this first sight of Calais in 1833, the boy had seized the idea 
 of the place as an epitome, a vestibule. Here is his entry 
 in the prose diary which he kept of the tour : — 
 
 " How much has been said of Calais. Every one who has ever 
 set his foot on the French shore, from poor Yorick to the veriest 
 scribbler ever blotted paper, has written half a volume upon 
 Calais. And no marvel. Calais — the busy — the bustling, the 
 — I had almost said the beautiful, for beautiful it was to me, 
 and I believe to every one who enters it as a vestibule — an 
 introduction to France, and to the French. See Calais, and you 
 can see no more, though you should perambulate France from 
 the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. It is a little France, a 
 miniature picture, but not the less a resemblance. Stand on 
 the pier and look round you. The sky is a French sky, it is a 
 very turquoise, the sea is a French sea in everything but its 
 want of motion, the air is French air, none of your English 
 boisterous sea puffs that blow the dust in your eyes when you 
 wish to be particularly clear-sighted. Xo, it is a mere breath, 
 you can't call it a breeze, yet bearing a delicious, a balmy coolness, 
 and a little, a very little smell of the sea." 
 
 The start from Calais was made with four stout French 
 horses, driven by a postilion. Travellers of birth or conse- 
 quence had also their avant-courier to gallop in advance, 
 and order the horses at each post-house. " My father,"
 
 J36 POSTING IN THE OLD DAYS 
 
 CHAP, says Ruskin, "would have considered it an insolent and 
 revolutionary trespass on the privileges of the nobility 
 to have travelled in such state " ; but he liked a good 
 dinner and the best rooms at the best hotels. They started 
 early, often at six, never later than eight, and travelled 
 slowly, doing not more than fifty miles a day, and arriving 
 at their destination for dinner at four o'clock. After dinner 
 the boy had two hours of delicious exploring by himself; 
 ordered in punctually at seven to tea ; and finishing his 
 sketches till bed-time at half-past nine. Three or four days 
 would thus be spent between Calais and Paris, and between 
 Paris and Geneva eight, nine, or ten. Words failed even 
 Ruskin to describe the joy of these enchanted journeys — 
 the afternoon walk among the rocks of Fontainebleau ; the 
 wonder of the cathedral aisles of Sens ; the geological rambles 
 on the oolite limestones of Mont Bard. The fourth day saw 
 them at Dijon, where it was generally arranged that Sunday 
 should be spent. Then on Monday came " the drive of 
 drives, through the village of Genlis, the fortress of Auxonne, 
 and up the hill to the vine-surrounded town of Dole ; whence, 
 behold at last the limitless ranges of Jura, south and north, 
 beyond the woody plain. Then at Poligny the same after- 
 noon we gathered the first milkwort for that year ; and on 
 Tuesday at St. Laurent the wild lily of the valley, and on 
 Wednesday at Morez gentians. And on Thursday one saw from 
 the gained height of Jura the great Alps unfold themselves 
 in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and cloud." ^ 
 
 Such was the old road of most of Ruskin's Continental 
 travels with his parents ; but on this first tour in 1833 their 
 route lay from Calais to Cologne and thence up the Rhine. 
 Besides the first sight of the Alps from Schaffhausen, he had 
 on this tour his first sight also of Italy — entering it by the 
 grandest pass, through the Via Mala, and spending rapturous 
 hours on the Lake of Como, seen through Turner's eyes 
 from memories of the vignettes in Rogers's Italy. From 
 Milan they journeyed by Genoa, Turin, and the Great St. 
 Bernard to Vevay, Interlaken, and finally Chamouni. A 
 piece of his first description of the valley where so many 
 ^ Proserpina, vol. ii. ch. iv.
 
 CHAMOUNI— PARIS 37 
 
 of the most fruitful months of his life were to be passed CHAP. 
 must be given : — ■^^• 
 
 "There is not another scene like Cliamouni throughout all 
 Switzerland. In no other spot that I have seen is the rich 
 luxuriance of the cultivated valley, the flashing splendour of the 
 eternal snow, the impending magnificence of the bare, spiry crag, 
 and the strange, cold rigidity of the surgy glaciers so dreadfully 
 and beautifully combined. There is silence unbroken, no thunder 
 of the avalanche comes crashing from the recesses of the hills, 
 there is no voice from the chasmy glacier, no murmur from the 
 thousand mountain streams, you are in solitude, a strange un- 
 earthly solitude, but you feel as if the air were full of spirits ." 
 
 They returned home by Paris, where Ruskin first saw the 
 daughter of his father's partner, Mr. Domecq. An eventful 
 meeting, as we shall hear presently. Another scene in Paris 
 is interesting. Raskin was bent upon making a copy of the 
 small Rembrandt in the Louvre, of the Supper at Emmaus. 
 He Avas too young to obtain a permit in the ordinary 
 way ; but a good-natured custode, seeing the woebegone dis- 
 appointment of the young enthusiast, advised a personal 
 application to the Board. In such broken French as he 
 could muster, the boy appealed to this superior authority, 
 obtained special leave, and made his outline of the picture. 
 
 " I had certainly more passionate happiness," said Ruskin 
 in recalling his early travels, "of a quality utterly indescrib- 
 able to people who never felt the like, and more, in solid 
 quantity, in those three months than most people have in 
 all their lives," The pleasure of the Continental tours, alike 
 for father and for son, was heightened by contrast with their 
 home lives. " My father," he says, " had known the pinch 
 of poverty and borne the stress of steady toil ; to find him- 
 self living with unstinted power in a palace at Genoa, or 
 floating with absolutely nothing to do or be anxious about 
 down the Grand Canal at Venice, was an extremely marvellous 
 and romantic fact to him, giving a root of inner life to what- 
 ever was marvellous and romantic in the scenes themselves." 
 And to the boy, though he could always make himself happy 
 anywhere in a quiet way, " the boaut}^ of the mountains had
 
 38 FIRST PRINTED ESSAY 
 
 CHAP, an additional charm of chanoce and adventure which a 
 
 TT 
 
 country-bred child would not have felt." ^ The tour of 1833 
 excited all his faculties to their utmost strain. It was the 
 occasion of his first printed prose piece, and of an ambitious 
 attempt both in verse and in drawing. 
 
 The printing of the prose piece — the appearance of 
 which brought tears of joy to his father's eyes — was due to 
 acquaintance with John Claudius Loudon, editor of The 
 Magazine of Natural History. Loudon was himself a man 
 of singular enterprise and originality. He had made some 
 reputation as a landscape-gardener and had established a 
 successful model farm, when he threw up his professional 
 engagements in order to enlarge his agricultural experience 
 by travel on the Continent. He returned to find his invest- 
 ments gone, and set to work with great energy to retrieve 
 his fortunes by the publication of magazines and encyclo- 
 pasdias. There was a time when he had no less than five 
 monthly magazines running at once. Loudon was to publish 
 many of Ruskin's early essays, including those on the Poetry 
 of Architecture. In connexion with that remarkable work, 
 and with some of Ruskin's early poems, he wrote to the 
 author's father the following letter (Nov. 30, 1837):— 
 
 " My wife and myself unite in thanking you for your kindly 
 sending Friendshiiy's Offering, 1838, and I beg you will also thank 
 your son. Both my wife and myself had recognised ' Christ 
 Church, Oxford ' in the Athenceum long before we received your 
 letter. It and the other poems are exquisitely beautiful ; but 
 not less so in my opinion is an article by your son on the Poetry 
 of Architecture in the December number of the Architectural 
 Magazine, of which number I send you a copy. Your son is 
 certainly the greatest natural genius that ever it has been my 
 fortune to become acquainted with ; and I cannot but feel proud 
 to think that, at some future period when both you and I are 
 under the turf, it will be stated in the literary history of your 
 son's life that the first article of his which was published was 
 in Loudon^ s Magazine of Natural History J' 
 
 As in duty bound I fulfil the old man's prophecy. 
 ^ Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvii. § 15.
 
 DIARY OF THE TOUR 39 
 
 The subject of the first article by Ruskin which appeared CHAP. 
 iu London s Magazine (September 1834, the author being 
 then fifteen) is of interest as linking one of his latest passages 
 with his earliest. Almost the last elaborate piece of writing 
 which came from his pen was a description of the Rhone 
 at Geneva; the piece which Loudon first printed was "On 
 the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine," and also 
 of the Rhone at Geneva. The boy asked questions rather 
 than answered them,^ but the note shows closeness of ob- 
 servation ; and the same may be said of a second piece, 
 suggested by the tour of 1833, which Loudon published in 
 the following December, "Facts and Considerations on the 
 Strata of Mont Blanc." 
 
 These pieces were a by-product of the tour. The winter 
 of 1833 and what time he could steal from school-tasks in 
 1834 were mainly spent by our young author in composing, 
 writing fair, and drawing vignettes for the decoration, in 
 imitation of Rogers's Italy, of a poetical account of the 
 tour. The verses themselves were in imitation of Scott, 
 Portions of them, afterwards printed in Friendships Offer- 
 ing, are quite as good as the tamer passages in their model. 
 Here, for instance, are some lines on St. Goar : — 
 
 "Bosomed deep among the hills, 
 Here old Rhine his current stills, 
 Loitering the banks between, 
 As if, enamoured of the scene, 
 He had forgot his onward way 
 For a live-long summer day. . . . 
 — No marvel that the spell-bound Rhine, 
 Like giant overcome with wine, 
 Should here relax his angry frown. 
 And, soothed to slumber, lay him down 
 Amid the vine-clad banks, that lave 
 Their tresses in his placid wave." 
 
 The verses were accompanied by a diary in prose, from 
 which some extracts have already been given. The diary 
 
 * Any reader who is interested in the note suppUed to Raskin's 
 in the subject will find answers article in the Lib. Ed., vol. i. p. 193.
 
 40 SCENERY OF THE MEUSE 
 
 CHAP, is of real interest. The characteristics of many a place that 
 
 II 
 
 he Avas to love throughout life, of scenes that he was to 
 analyse and describe, are seized upon from the first. His 
 natural affinity with Turner also appears in many a recog- 
 nition of particular beauties. This point is very noticeable 
 in what the young Ruskin noted of the scenery of the 
 Mouse : — 
 
 " How lightly the waves of the broad Meuse crisped with the 
 first breath of the morning, as we swept over the long bridge 
 that crosses the river from Namur, and looked back on the rich 
 dome of its small but beautiful cathedral, as it began to smile 
 to the first glance of the joyous sun, that was drinking up the 
 delicate mists which clung to the hills, and rested on the valley, 
 in which the fair city reposed so peacefully — and then we dashed 
 along the valley of the Meuse. . . . 
 
 " If you wish to see rock scenery in perfection, go to the Meuse, 
 for never were rocks more beautifully disposed, more richly and 
 delicately wooded, or more finely contrasted with the amazing 
 richness of the surrounding scenery." 
 
 This, as we may now all know, but as could not then be 
 known, was also Turner's opinion of the scenery of the 
 Meuse. He had travelled in its valley in 1825, and he 
 revisited the place in the year following Ruskin's tour. 
 He brought back with him multitudes of those beautiful 
 sketches, with effects just such as Ruskin described, which 
 may now be seen among the collection of the National 
 Gallery. 
 
 II 
 
 In 1835, Ruskin, with his parents and cousin Mary, 
 went for a yet longer tour on the Continent, notable 
 for his first visit to Venice. The route on this occa- 
 sion was through France to Geneva and Chamouni. They 
 then visited the Great St. Bernard and the Swiss Ober- 
 land ; went on to Innsbruck ; crossed the Stelvio to 
 Venice ; and returned home by Salzburg, Carlsruhe, Strass- 
 burg, and Paris. Of his impressions during the earlier 
 part of this tour, Ruskin has given memorials in a chapter
 
 FOREIGN TOUR: 1835 41 
 
 of Frwterita ("The Col do la Faucille"). It was on this CHAP. 
 occasion that he entered into another portion of his king- ^* 
 dom. " My most intense happinesses have of course been," 
 he says, " among mountains. But for cheerful, unalloyed, 
 unwearying pleasure, the getting in sight of Abbeville on 
 a fine summer afternoon, jumping out in the courtyard of 
 the Hotel de I'Europe, and rushing down to see St, Wulfran 
 again before the sun was oif the towers, are things to cherish 
 the past for, — to the end." For Abbeville and for Rouen, 
 "I was ready," he adds, "on that 5th of June, and felt that 
 here was entrance for me into immediately healthy labour 
 and joy." Afterwards they went to Dijon, and thence drove 
 by Champagnole through the Jura over the Col de la 
 Faucille. The famous view of the Alps was seen with 
 perfect clearness; but what was new and most arresting 
 was the scenery of the Jura : — 
 
 " All Switzerland was there in hope and sensation, and what 
 was less than Switzerland was in some sort better, in its meek 
 simplicity and healthy purity. . , . The Jura cottage has no dainti- 
 ness of gu'den nor waalbh of farm about it, — is indeed litblemore 
 than a delicately-built chalet, yet trim and domestic, mildly in- 
 telligent of things other than pastoral, watch-making and the like, 
 though set in the midst of the meadows, the gentian at its door, 
 the lily of the valley wild in the copses hard by. 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 
 insisting on this as if it were general to human nature thus to 
 admire through sympathy. . . . But the feeling which gave me so 
 much happiness, 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, it 
 is written : " Not till we can think that here and there one 
 is thinking of us, and is loving us, does this waste earth 
 become a peopled garden." " My training," continues Ruskin, 
 
 " produced in me the precisely opposite sentiment. My times 
 of happiness had always been when nobody was thinking of
 
 II. 
 
 42 LOVE OF NATURE 
 
 CHAP, me ; and the main discomfort and drawback to all proceedings 
 and designs, the attention and interference of the public — re- 
 presented by my mother and the gardener. The garden was no 
 waste place to me, because I did not suppose myself an object of 
 interest either to the ants or the butterflies ; and the only qualifi- 
 cation 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. . . . The living inhabitation of the world — the grazing 
 and nesting in it, — the spiritual power of the air, the rocks, the 
 watei-s, 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." 
 
 Of the greater part of this tour, Ruskin wrote a full prose 
 diary at the time. This is almost entirely concerned with 
 geological and other scientific observations. Among his 
 paraphernalia was a "cyanometer" by which to measure the 
 blue of the sky; and observations, such as "Cyan. 14," 
 " Cyan. 10," are frequent in the diary. It is illustrated also 
 with sketches very neatly executed in pen and ink to record 
 geological features of the scenery. Picturesque descriptions 
 are few. The literary and artistic output inspired by this tour 
 of 1835 was prodigious. It was scientific, literary, artistic ; 
 in prose and in verse. From the diary, papers were written 
 for Loudon's Magazine of Natural History. Ruskin in- 
 tended to describe the events and sentiments of the journey 
 in a poetic diary " in the style of Don Juan artfully com- 
 bined with that of Ghilde Harold. Two cantos of this work 
 were indeed finished — carrying me across France to Cha- 
 mouni — where I broke down, findinsf that I had exhausted 
 on the Jura all the descriptive terms at my disposal, and 
 that none were left for the Alps." There is not much of 
 Bon Juan in these fluently imitative verses, but there 
 are some Byronic rhymes — such as " wind they go " and 
 '' indigo," and "Tom BGcketis"and "antiquities." Ruskin 
 wrote also rhyming letters to school-friends, Richard Fall
 
 CHRONICLES OF ST. BERNARD 43 
 
 and Sir Willoughby Jones ; a few lines of one of them give CHAP. 
 a good picture of the author on his travels : — 
 
 "Then through the whole of Switzerland as merrily went we, 
 I took my pencil in my hand, my Horace on my knee, 
 And now I sketched a mountain scene, or anything that did 
 
 me please, 
 And then I puzzled out a sentence of the cramp Thucydides." 
 
 A further series of pieces suggested by the tour centre 
 round the Great St. Bernard, and show how deeply the 
 Monastery and the Pass had moved him. And, indeed, 
 there are few scenes which, in the days at least before 
 carriage roads, were more calculated to excite feeling and 
 thought than the lonely Hospice on that historic Pass, 
 crowned by the snows of Mont Velan, one of the ruling peaks 
 in the mountain kingdom of which Raskin claimed posses- 
 sion by the law of love. In his case, the verse of Rogers and 
 the vignettes of Turner must have heightened the interest. 
 He appears to have planned out Chronicles of St. Bernard 
 on an elaborate scale ; it was characteristic of him that they 
 went no further than an "introduction" and an unfinished 
 tale. In the introduction, there is a description of the 
 morning mass, which may be quoted as one of the "purple 
 patches " among his juvenilia : — 
 
 " I have heard the sacred music of the miss roll and reverberate 
 among the immeasurable twilight of the vast cathedral aisle, and 
 the cadences of the chaunted Te Deum passing over the heads of 
 thousands bowed at once. I have held my breath when, in the 
 hush of a yet more sacred silence, the secret prayers of the 
 population of a city rose up in their multitude, till every breath 
 of the incensed air became holy, and the dim light around was 
 full of supplication ; but more sublime than the sacred tones that 
 shake the dusky aisles with their tread, more holy than the hush 
 of the bended multitude, were those few voices, whose praise rose 
 up so strangely amid the stillness of the terrible solitude, and 
 passed away and away, till the dead air that sleeps for ever 
 and for ever, voicelessly, like a lifeless spirit upon the lonely 
 mountains, was wakened from its cold silence, and that solitary
 
 44 THE ASCENT OF THE ST. BERNARD 
 
 CHAP, voice of praise was breathed up into the still blue of the heaven 
 rising from the high Alps as from one vast altar to the ear of the 
 Most High, sounding along the vacancy of the illimitable wilder- 
 ness where God was, and God only." 
 
 The piece is, however, written for the most part in a 
 lighter vein. From this point of view, it is not so successful 
 as a dramatic sketch in verse — The Ascent of the St. Ber- 
 nard. This is one of the brightest descriptions of Swiss 
 travel to be found in literature of that sort. It brings before 
 the reader with great vividness the interests and demeanour 
 of Ruskin at this time, and reveals the character of his 
 parents with frank simplicity. The cousin, the courier, and 
 the nurse — all of them known to readers of Prceterita — are 
 also sharply sketched. The piece as a whole shows a quiet 
 humour and a power of characterisation somewhat remark- 
 able in a boy of sixteen. A few lines will show the sort of 
 thing : — 
 
 Master R. {looking out of the windoiv). 
 
 The shadows on the mountain flanks 
 
 Are grey with morning haziness. 
 Mr. R. (imjjatiently). 
 
 What can keep the char-a-bancs ? 
 
 Hang the fellow's laziness ! 
 Miss R. {spendatively). 
 
 They say it's cold, and wet enough to soak one ; 
 
 I wonder if I'll need to put my cloak on. 
 Mrs. R. {peaceably). 
 
 We'll see, my dear, in time ; you'd better take it. 
 Master R. {still looking out of the window). 
 
 With many a range of mountain white 
 
 The Valais meets the morn. 
 
 The Drance is deep, the Drance is bright; 
 
 With thousand foam-globes driving white 
 
 Fast and well his billows roll — 
 Salvador {heloio the window). 
 
 Sind sie schnell ! ja, das geht wohl. 
 It is interesting that at this period Ruskin should have 
 found verse a better medium than prose for playful essays of
 
 DRAWING LESSONS: COPLEY FIELDING 45 
 
 this kind. The fragment, Velasquez, a Novice, •which the CHAP. 
 author embodied in his Chronicles of St. Bernard, is inter- ^^• 
 esting as his only attempt to write a novel. The attempt 
 does not belie his self-criticism that he could not write a 
 story.^ 
 
 " Sketches innumerable I have," wrote Ruskin to his 
 school-friend, Richard Fall, " which you must not yawn over, 
 poetry interminable I have which you must not sleep over." 
 Over the prose and poetry which the tour of IS 35 inspired 
 it is permissible to yawn or sleep ; but the pencil drawings 
 which he brought back with him are admirable. They were 
 found really interesting, he says, even to artists ; and it 
 was decided to promote him from the teaching of Mr. 
 Runciman to a course of lessons in water-colour from Copley 
 Fielding. He made some progress, but presently returned, 
 yet for a few years, to the pencil outline. He had also 
 taken some lessons in oils, and afterwards occasionally used 
 that medium ; but a rhyming letter to his father shows 
 that he did not take kindly to it : — 
 
 " I cannot bear to paint in oil, 
 C. Fielding's tints alone for me ! 
 The other costs nfie double toil, 
 And wants some fifty coats to be 
 Splashed on each spot successively. 
 Faugh, wie es stincld 1 " 
 
 III 
 
 The more formal part of Rusk n's education during these 
 years was in the hands of the Rev. Thomas Dale, an Evan- 
 gelical of some distinction in the Church as successively 
 Vicar of St. Pancras, Canon of St. Paul's, and Dean of 
 Rochester. In 1833 he was incumbent of St. Matthew's 
 Chapel, Denmark Hill, and kept a private school in Grove 
 Lane, Camberwell. This was within walking distance of 
 Heme Hill, and to it Ruskin was sent after the summer 
 tour of 1833. He was only a day-boy and mixed but little 
 in the life of the school. He walked down with his father 
 * See Praterita, vol. ii. § 64.
 
 46 MR. DALE'S SCHOOL 
 
 CHAP, after breakfast, carrying his blue bag of books, came home 
 to half-past-one dinner, and prepared his lessons in the 
 evening for next day. He was too much of an innocent 
 to be bullied ; and chaff had no effect on him, " the fountain 
 of pure conceit in my own heart sustaining me," he says, 
 "serenely against all depreciation whether by master or 
 companion." Among his schoolfellows he had Edmund 
 Oldfield, afterwards of the British Museum, and the sons 
 of Colonel Matson, of Woolwich. They sometimes invited 
 Ruskin to their home, and in the Colonel " I saw," he says, 
 "such calm type of truth, gentleness, and simplicity as I 
 have myself found in soldiers and sailors only, and so 
 admirable to me that I have never been able since those 
 Woolwich times to gather myself up against the national 
 guilt of war, seeing that such men were made by the dis- 
 cipline of it." Against his master, Ruskin was set, as 
 it chanced, from the first. The Latin Grammar out of 
 which his mother had taught him was that of Alexander 
 Adam. "On the first day," says Ruskin, "when I went 
 to take my seat in Mr. Dale's schoolroom, I carried my 
 old grammar to him, in a modest pride, expecting some 
 encouragement and honour for the accuracy with which I 
 could repeat, on demand, some hundred and sixty close- 
 printed pages of it. But Mr. Dale threw it back to me 
 with a fierce bang upon his desk, saying (with accent and 
 look of seven-times-heated scorn), ' That's a Scotch thing.' " ^ 
 The master spoke perhaps in play ; but the effect of his 
 words was as of double-edged blasphemy to a pupil who 
 was the son of an Edinburgh High School Boy, and of a 
 mother who had laboured in the book with him since he 
 could read; "and in that one action he rejected himself 
 from being my master, and I thenceforward learned all 
 he told me only because I had to do it." The regular 
 tuition under Mr. Dale was broken off by a serious attack 
 of pleurisy which Ruskin had in the spring of 1835, and the 
 long Continental tour, already described, followed ; but in 
 183G his further education was again entrusted to Mr. Dale, 
 who was now Vicar of St. Bride's, Fleet Street, and Professor 
 1 Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 95.
 
 ESSAY ON FICTION: 1836 47 
 
 of English literature at King's College. To his lectures CHAP. 
 at the College, and to private classes conducted by him, ^^• 
 Ruskin was sent. The lectures were on early English 
 literature. " His quotation of ' Knut the king came sailing 
 by' stayed with me," says Ruskin, "and I think that was 
 about all I learnt during the summer." 
 
 " My severest and chiefly antagonist master," Ruskin 
 calls Mr. Dale. The antagonism comes out in an essay 
 by the pupil which was found in the tutor's desk. In 
 1836 Dale had issued an edition, with a commendatory 
 preface, of The Student's Guide by the Rev. John Todd, 
 an American divine. The work, which passed through 
 many editions, both in that country and in this, affords 
 amusing illustration of the kind of literary guidance then 
 current in some Evangelical circles. " Beware of Bad Books,'' 
 says the Rev. John Todd, and, among them, of Byron, 
 Bulwer, and Scott. He admits that he had read Byron ; 
 it was his duty so to do, in order to sound " the rocks and 
 quicksands" in the sea of literature which virtuous youth 
 must avoid ; his consolation was in the thought " that what 
 is putrid must soon pass away" and that the works of Byron 
 '' will quickly pass from notice and be exiled from the 
 libraries of all virtuous men." As for Bulwer and Scott, 
 whom the reverend gentleman classed with Hume and Paine, 
 he solemnly declares to us " that the only good which he 
 is conscious of ever having received from them, is a deep 
 impression that men who possess talents of such compass 
 and power, and so perverted in their application, must meet 
 the day of judgment under a responsibility which would be 
 cheaply removed by the price of a world." Such was the 
 guidance to English literature commended by Ruskin's 
 tutor. Now, Ruskin believed himself to be quite as good 
 an Evangelical as Dale ; but at this time he was very fond 
 of Bulwer's novels, and from his earliest years he had been 
 brought up on Scott and Byron. Dale's commendation of the 
 Rev. Mr. Todd was flat " blasphemy " again, and Ruskin was 
 given a delicious opportunity of saying what he thought of 
 it. Dale had set as a theme for an essay " Does the Perusal 
 of Wt)rks of Fiction act favourably or unfavourably on the
 
 48 "REPLY TO BLACKWOOD''; 1836 
 
 CHAP. Moral Character ? " Ruskin seized the occasion to write 
 a glowing panegyric upon Bulwer, a reasoned account of 
 the Great Magician's moral teaching, and an impassioned 
 defence of Byron against the criticisms of certain " crawling 
 things." He enjoys himself in this essay hugely, not least, 
 we may imagine, when with withering scorn he likens certain 
 opponents of his views to " old maids of jaundiced eye and 
 acidulated lip," and dismisses as " philosophers falsely so- 
 named " those grave and reverend teachers " who assert that 
 whatever is amusing must be criminal." The original MS. 
 of this crude but vigorously written essay may be seen in the 
 British Museum. 
 
 Of the same date is another, and a more remarkable, essay. 
 Ruskin was now seventeen, and his first defence of Turner — 
 the germ of his principal book — belongs to this year (1836). 
 It also was inspired by indignant protest. In 1836 Turner 
 exhibited at the Royal Academy the pictures in which his 
 later manner was first displayed with his utmost skill and 
 enthusiasm. They were attacked in Blackwood's Magazine 
 in an article, as Ruskin in later years described it, " of 
 sufiiciently telling ribaldry, expressing with some force, 
 and extreme discourtesy, the feelings of the pupils of Sir 
 George Beaumont at the appearance of these unaccredited 
 views of nature." Of the "Juliet and her Nurse," Maga 
 said that it represented "neither sunlight, moonlight, nor 
 starlight, nor firelight " ; and that the scene (laid by some 
 freak of Turner in Venice, instead of Verona) was " thrown 
 higgledy-piggledy together, streaked blue and pink, and 
 thrown into a flour tub." Of " Rome from Mount Aventine," 
 the critic said that it was " a most unpleasant mixture, 
 wherein white gamboge and raw sienna are, with childish 
 execution, daubed together " ; but it was of the " Mercury 
 and Argus," the best picture of the three and one of Turner's 
 masterpieces, that Blackivood was most contemptuous : — 
 
 " We think the * Hanging Committee ' should be suspended 
 from their oiEce for admitting his ' Mercury and Argus.' It is 
 perfectly childish. All blood and chalk. There was not the least 
 occasion for a Mercury to put out Argus's eyes ; the horrid glare 
 would have made him shut the whole hundred, and have made
 
 PRELUDE TO MODERN PAINTERS 49 
 
 Meicury stone blind. Tuiner reminds us of the man who sold his CHAP. 
 shadow, and that he might not appear singular, will not let any- ^^• 
 thing in the world have a shadow to show for love or money. . . . 
 He has robbed the sun of his birthright to cast shadows. When- 
 ever Nature shall dispense with them too, and shall make trees 
 like brooms, and this green earth to alternate between brim- 
 stone and white, set off with brightest blues that no longer shall 
 keep their distance ; when cows shall be made of white paper, 
 and milk-white figures represent pastoral, and when human eyes 
 shall be happily gifted with a kaleidoscopic power to patternize 
 all confusion, and shall become ophthalmia proof, then will Turner 
 be a greater painter than ever the world yet saw, or than ever the 
 world, constituted as it is at present, wishes to see." 
 
 This ribald attack " raised me," says Riiskin, " to the height of 
 ' black anger ' in which I have remained nearly ever since " ; 
 and the boy sat down to write a reply. His father thought it 
 right to ask Turner's leave for the publication of the paper, 
 and a fair copy, in the author's best hand, was sent to Queen 
 Anne Street. Turner's reply was characteristic : — 
 
 *' 47, Queen Ann {sic) Street West, October Qth, 1836. — My dear 
 Sir, — I beg to thank you for your zeal, kindness, and the trouble 
 you have taken in my behalf, in regard of the criticism of Black- 
 wood's Magazine for October, respecting my works ; but I never move 
 in these matters, they are of no import save mischief and the meal 
 tub, which Maga fears for by my having invaded the flour tub. 
 
 *' P.S. — If you wish to have the manuscript back, have the 
 goodness to let me know. If not, with your sanction, I will send 
 it on to the possessor of the picture of Juliet." 
 
 The possessor of the picture (now in Lord Strathcona's collec- 
 tion) was Mr. Munro of Novar, into whose hands this inter- 
 esting piece thus came. What subsequently became of it I 
 do not know ; and at the time of writing Prceterita Ruskin 
 could find no fragment of it. At a later date a copy (not in 
 Ruskin's hand) was found in an old note-book at Brantwood, 
 and the text has been printed in the Library Edition. It is 
 a most characteristic production. Alike in substance and 
 in style, it may be described as a prelude to Modern 
 Painters. Blackivood had criticised Turner's pictures as 
 
 VOL. I. D
 
 50 FIRST DEFENCE OF TURNER 
 
 CHAP, beincf "out of nature"; Ruskin maintained, on the other 
 
 TT 
 
 hand, that they were true to the vital facts of nature, 
 while giving at the same time "the consecration and the 
 poet's dream." And something of "the scarlet and the 
 gold " of the painter's fancy passed into the young critic's 
 defence. The style was hereafter to be more fully informed, 
 and more deeply suffused with passion ; to be chastened also 
 and matured ; but the essential Ruskin is already here : — 
 
 " The critic affirms that he has deprived the sun of his birth- 
 right to cast shadows. Now the manner in which Turner makes 
 his visible sunbeams walk over his foregrounds towards the 
 spectator, is one of his most pecuHar beauties ; and in this very 
 picture of ' Mercury and Argus ' it is inimitably fine, — and is 
 produced by the exquisite perspective of his shadows, and the 
 singular lurid tints of his reflected lights. The connoisseur 
 remarks, a few pages further on, that ' even composition is often 
 made out by light, shade, and colour.' Will he inform us what 
 else it could be made out by ? " 
 
 " Turner's imagination is Shakespearian in its mightiness. Had 
 the scene of ' Juliet and her Nurse ' risen up before the mind of a 
 poet, and been described in ' words that burn,' it had been the 
 admiration of the world : but, placed before us on the canvass, it 
 becomes — what critics of the brush and pallet may show their 
 wit upon at the expense of their judgement ; and what real artists 
 and men of feeling and taste must admire, but dare not attempt 
 to imitate. Many-coloured mists are floating above the distant 
 city, but such mists as you might imagine to be aetherial spirits, 
 souls of the mighty dead breathed out of the tombs of Italy into 
 the blue of her bright heaven, and wandering in vague and 
 infinite glory around the earth that they have loved. Instinct 
 with the beauty of uncertain light, they move and mingle among 
 the pale stars, and rise up into the brightness of the illimitable 
 heaven, whose soft, sad blue eye gazes down into the deep 
 waters of the sea for ever, — that sea whose motionless and silent 
 transparency is beaming with phosphor light, that emanates out 
 of its sapphire serenity like bright dreams breathed into the spirit 
 of a deep sleep. And the spires of the glorious city rise indistinctly 
 bright into those living mists, like pyramids of pale fire from some
 
 MATRICULATION 51 
 
 vast altar ; and amidst the glory of the dream, there is as it were CHAP. 
 the voice of a multitude entering by the eye, — arising from the * 
 
 stillness of the city like the summer wind passing over the leaves 
 of the forest, when a murmur is heaid amidst their multitude." 
 
 The whole piece shows how effectively Ruskin had already 
 occupied much of the ground on which his defence of 
 Turner was to bo based. It cannot, however, be considered 
 other than fortunate that Turner discouraged his young 
 champion from entering the fray. The years which intervened 
 before the germ of Modern Painters bore fruit were full of 
 various instruction, equipping Ruskin the better for his task. 
 
 The essay is dated October 1st, 1836. Three Aveeks 
 later he went up to matriculate at Oxford. His name 
 had been put down at Christ • Church some time before, 
 and his father now consulted the College authorities whether 
 a person in his position might without impropriety enter his 
 son as a gentleman-commoner. The old Dean (Gaisford) 
 said that there was no objection, if the fees were paid ; 
 the college-tutor hinted that there might be some advan- 
 tage in escaping the entrance examination which ordinary 
 commoners had to undergo ; and the point was clenched 
 by the fact that gentlemen-commoners wore velvet caps 
 and flowing silk gowns. In January 1837 Ruskin drove 
 down to Oxford with his mother, and entered into residence. 
 
 He was now a University " man " ; but his childhood 
 had been ceaselessly fenced, and even now the bridle and 
 the blinkers were not to be taken off. His affections had 
 been dormant for lack of opportunity, but he yearned for 
 romance. "While I have indeed," he said in 1875, "the 
 sincerest admiration for the characters of Phocion, Cin- 
 cinnatus, and Caractacus, and am minded, so far as I may, 
 to follow the example of those worthy personages, my ow^n 
 private little fancy is still, as it alw^ays was, to find Prince 
 Ahmed's arrow and marry the Fairy Paribanou." ^ The 
 Fairy Paribanou was presently to appear upon the scene ; 
 but as equipment for winning her, the limitations of his 
 childhood had given him nothing better than " a curious 
 combination of Mr. Traddles, JMr. Toots, and Mr. Winkle." 
 ^ FoTS Clavigera, Letter 54.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 OXFORD 
 
 (1837-1840) 
 
 " Oxford taught me as much Greek and Latin as she could ; 
 and though I think she might have told me that fritillaries 
 grew in Iffley meadow, it was better that she left me to find 
 them out for myself, than that she should have told me, as 
 nowadays she would, that the painting on them was only to 
 amuse the midges. For the rest, the whole time I was 
 there, my mind was simply in the state of a squash before 
 'tis a peascod." — Pneterita. 
 
 A SONG that was popular in my school-days described the 
 advent at Oxford of " a freshman so modest : The figure 
 he cut was the oddest. All Puritan stocking and starch." 
 Ruskin must have cut some such figure when he went up to 
 the University in his mother's care, and seated himself — a 
 wine-merchant's son, an innocent, a milksop, with no public 
 school behind him — at the table of the gentlemen-commoners 
 in Christ Church Hall. 
 
 The group of young men among whom he found himself 
 included a few of studious tastes, some of intellectual ability, 
 and many of high spirits. Among them were Francis 
 Charteris, now Lord Wemyss ; Lord March, afterwards sixth 
 Duke of Richmond ; Lord Desart, Lord Carew, Lord Emlyn, 
 Lord Kildare ; Stephen Fox Strangways, afterwards Lord 
 Stavordale ; Sir Matthew Tierne}^ presently of the Coldstream 
 Guards ; and Robert Grimston, famous as cricketer, boxer, 
 steeplechaser. Ruskin regarded his companions primarily, 
 he tells us, from an jEsthetic point of view. The " delicate 
 beauty " of Charteris raised him at once to the position of 
 
 52
 
 AMONG THE GENTLEMEN-COMMONERS 53 
 
 an idol; "the grandest type of European Circassian race CHAP. 
 hitherto visible to me." Lord Desart, too, interested him 
 greatly as " a young man of superb personal beauty and 
 noble gifts of mind." But however «3sthetically admirable 
 to him, the youths into whose society Ruskin was suddenly 
 thrown out of the cloistered seclusion of his suburban home 
 must have been poles asunder from him. The position 
 might have seemed hopeless. Yet somehow he made his 
 way among them ; establishing even a place, of a sort, in their 
 regard. The truth is, as an old Student of the House has 
 said, that Christ Church, therein resembling other colleges 
 that might be named, "is very like the House of Commons 
 in temper ; a man, however plain of origin, however humble 
 in position, is tolerated and listened to with respect, if he is 
 sincere, honest, and 'knows his subject.' "^ And so they came 
 to tolerate him, though not without some preliminary testing 
 of his quality. In one respect their treatment of him is wholly 
 to their credit. Ruskin was probably the only gentleman- 
 commoner who was ever attended by his mother throughout 
 his Oxford career, and whose father came down to join the 
 domestic circle at the end of every week. They had the 
 good sense, it is true, to appear little in public with him, 
 but their presence was well known. Once he was seen with 
 them in the shop of Mr. Ryman, the print-seller, and shame- 
 facedly he was ill at ease. Many years afterwards, bethink- 
 ing him perhaps of Johnson at Uttoxeter, he did public 
 penance by exhibiting himself in one of his books, bare- 
 souled in that act of recreance.^ Yet "none of the men," 
 he tells us, " through my whole college career, ever said one 
 word in depreciation of vintner papa and his old-fashioned 
 wife, or in sarcasm at my habitually spending my evenings 
 with my mother." On the other hand, when he had been 
 seen acting as cicerone to a lady-visitor, and mentioned 
 superfluously at dinner that she was the Countess Diane de 
 Maison, they had no mercy on him for a month afterwards. 
 
 " I was received," he says, " as a good-humoured and 
 inoftensive little cur, contemptuously, yet kindly, among the 
 
 ^ Raskin at Oxford and Other Studia, by Dean Kitchin. 
 ^ Fors Clavigera, Letter 63.
 
 54 AN OFFENDING ESSAY 
 
 CHAP, dogs of race at the gentlemen-commoners' table." He scored 
 III- a good mark in their esteem by happening one day, in 
 complete innocence and good faith, but to the exquisite joy 
 of his companions, to ask a question which the College 
 lecturer appeared to be unable to answer. The moment 
 they got into the quad, he was admiringly congratulated on 
 the consummate manner in which he had " floored the 
 tutor." Another exploit was less successful. It was an 
 institution of the House that every week the undergraduates 
 should write an essay, and the essay pronounced the best 
 be read in hall on Saturday afternoon to the enforced 
 audience of the other undergraduates. The usual practice 
 with regard to these weekly exercises has been recorded 
 by Dean Kitchin. " Randall, the great hosier of the High, 
 or ' Cicero ' Cook, the learned scout of Christ Church, used 
 to undertake, for a consideration, to compose the views of 
 the haughty undergraduate. The rest usually aimed at 
 filling their regulation three pages with few words, long 
 and well spread out." Imagine, then, the enormity of the 
 offence committed by Ruskin, a gentleman-commoner, first 
 in composing an elaborate discourse and next in reciting 
 every word of it, though the exercise occupied a full 
 quarter of an hour ! No wonder that words flew about as 
 soon as the assembly was dismissed — words " varied in 
 expression through every form and manner of English 
 language, from the Olympian sarcasm of Charteris to the 
 level-delivered volley of Grimston " ! Yet Grimston came to 
 tolerate the greenhorn in time, and even " condescended to 
 take me with him one day to a tavern across Magdalen 
 Bridge to hear him elucidate from the landlord some points 
 of the horses entered for the Derby — an object only to be 
 accomplished by sitting with indifference on a corner of the 
 kitchen table, and carrying on a dialogue with careful pauses, 
 and more by winks than words." 
 
 Ruskin was tolerated, then, it seems, even among the 
 young " bloods." Mr. Aubrey de Vere, on the publication 
 of the first volume of Modern Painters, wrote : " I am told 
 that the author's name is Ruskin, and that he was con- 
 sidered at College as an odd sort of man who would never do
 
 « RAGGING " 55 
 
 anything." Dean Liddell's description of Ruskin (in a letter CHAP. 
 written in 1837) is somewhat different: "I am going to ■'-'•■'•• 
 drink tea with Adolphus Liddell to-night, and see the 
 drawings of a very wonderful gentleman-commoner here 
 who draws wonderfully. He is a very strange fellow, always 
 dressing in a greatcoat with a brown velvet collar, and a 
 large neck-cloth tied over his mouth, ^ and living quite in 
 his own way among the odd set of hunting and sporting 
 men that gentlemen-commoners usually are. Ruskin tells 
 them that they like their own way of living and he likes 
 his ; and so they go on, and I am glad to say they do not 
 bully him, as I should have been afraid they would." ^ He 
 did not, however, escape some " ragging." Osborne Gordon 
 told Holman Hunt that " Ruskin had been made the subject 
 of a great deal of horse-play on account of his avoidance 
 of sports." ^ It has been reported that Acland's attention 
 was first directed to Ruskin by seeing him being ridden 
 round Tom Quad by some of the rowdier gentlemen- 
 commoners, and that he interfered to protect the victim. 
 Another version represents that Acland's indignation was 
 aroused by an attempt to make the boyish-looking freshman 
 tipsy at a wine party.* A third story describes how some 
 noisy spirits invaded Ruskin's rooms one night, breaking 
 down his oak and rushing into his bedroom. Ruskin 
 received them in his dressing-gown. " Gentlemen," he said, 
 with a sweet smile, " I am sorry I cannot now entertain 
 you as I should wish ; but my father, who is engaged in the 
 sherry trade, has put it into my power to invite you all 
 
 * These were fashions to which Lytton's ' Pelham ' rather than the 
 
 Ruskin remained constant. On homespun-suited seer of Coniston. 
 
 State occasions, however, he in- ' Did you ever wear a coat like 
 
 dulgedj asayoungman,in "awhite that?' I asked. 'I'm not so 
 
 satin waistcoat with gold sprigs, sure that I didn't^' said he" {Life 
 
 and a high dress-coat with bright and Work of John liushin, 1900, 
 
 buttons. Picture, then," says Mr. p. 68). 
 
 CoUingwood, " the young Ruskin '^ Henry George Liddell, by the 
 
 in those dressy days. A portrait Rev. H. L. Thompson, p. 215 n. 
 was once sent to Brantwood of a ' Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre- 
 
 dandy in a green coat of wonderful Kaphaelite Brotherhood, vol. i. p. 323. 
 cut, supposed to represent him in * Memoir of Sir Henry Acland, 
 
 his youth, but suggesting Lord by J. B. Atlay, p. 41.
 
 56 A COLLEGE "WINE" 
 
 CHAP, to wine to-morrow evening. Will you come ? " The rioters 
 • withdrew with " Three cheers for Ruskin ! " i Thus early 
 did he illustrate a power which he had throughout life of 
 disarming any opponents with whom he came in personal 
 contact. Of an earlier " wine " Ruskin himself gave a 
 description in a lecture to the Woolwich cadets in 1869 : — 
 
 " Thirty years ago, I, a most inexperienced freshman, went to 
 my first college supper. . . . There (for this beginning of college 
 education was compulsory), I choosing ladlefuls of punch instead 
 of claret, because I was then able, unperceived, to pour them into 
 my waistcoat instead of down my throat, stood it out to the end, 
 and helped to carry four of my fellow students, one of them the 
 son of the head of a college, head foremost, down stairs and home." ^ 
 
 These revels, of which he added perhaps too sanguinely 
 that " such things are no more," made a lasting impression 
 on him and served more than once to point a moral in his 
 economic writings.^ It is not so certain, by the way, that 
 the liquor went only to the waistcoat, for elsewhere, in re- 
 calling the same occasion, he says that he walked across 
 Peckwater to his own rooms, deliberating as he went whether 
 there was any immediately practicable trigonometric method 
 of determining whether he was walking straight. 
 
 ^ Obituary notice of Ruskin in of food left on our supper tables 
 the Times, Jan. 22, 1900. industriously thrown into the 
 2 Grown of Wild Olive, § 148. street — and the floor industriously 
 ^ For instance: a Professor of Hooded with wine- — while pale 
 Economics had defined " spend- mothers and sisters at home were 
 ing" as ''direct employment in providing for these operations by 
 an industrial operation." " It is divers others — dimly feeling, they, 
 a pretty phrase," replied Ruskin, in spite of political economy, that 
 " and one which also suits your tliere was a difference between 
 University audience — doubtless "spending" and "laying by." 
 many an undergraduate would be They ought to have felt, you will 
 glad to have every piece of docu- say, comforted, because in the end 
 mentary currency he had left be- — "all reached the hands of pro- 
 hind him docketed on its appearance ducers." I am not sure that the 
 at home — * To directly employed College scouts, who with applause 
 in industrial operations, so much.' received the ruin, could produce 
 But then there are so many indus- much in the morning except broken 
 trial operations ! In old Oxford glass " (Library Ed., vol. xvii. p. 
 days I have seen every fragment 4L>5).
 
 COLLEGE COMPANIONS 57 
 
 Ruskin's mother, from her lodgings in the Hiy^h Street, CHAP, 
 kept such watch and ward as she might, and her letters to ^^^' 
 her husband give us a few glimpses of undergraduate life. 
 She was insistent upon her son keeping early hours, but 
 reckoned without his friends. "It docs little good sporting 
 his oak," she reports in an account of an evening when Lord 
 Desart and Bob Grimston climbed in through his window ; 
 '' they say midshipmen and Oxonians have more lives than a 
 cat, and they have need of them if they run such risks." 
 What would she have said if she had lived to see a certain 
 " Climbers' Guide to " — I forget what College at which Uni- 
 versity ? In another letter she refers to the incident of the 
 offending essay. A bonfire was lighted in Peckwater, it 
 seems ; presumably to make short work of Ruskin's long- 
 winded production ; but he judiciously escaped to bed, and 
 on this occasion was not molested otherwise than by word 
 of mouth. That Ruskin was capable of holding his own 
 and making his way is clear from the fact of his election, in 
 his second term, to the exclusive Christ Church Society. 
 " Simeon, Acland, and Mr. Denison proposed him," his 
 mother reports ; " Lord Carew and Broadhurst supported." 
 A letter from Raskin to his father gives a spirited account 
 of the racing set and of his own more sedate diversions : — 
 
 " I suppose Mamma had told you about the laces. I should 
 have liked to have seen Desait in his jockey cap and jacket. 
 There was very high betting — one man lost .£1500. All the 
 Dons of the University were assembled at the Dean's house — 
 the result of their lucubrations is unknown, but the riders are 
 afraid of Collections. When they were returning, the proctors, 
 particularly Hussey, were excessively active endeavouring to catch 
 them, dashing at the horses' heads, and endeavouring to seize 
 the bridles ; but they whipped their horses by at full speed ; one 
 fellow knocked off Ilussey's cap and drove neatly over it. He 
 only succeeded in catching two men in a gig, whose horse Avas 
 tired and could not be got into speed. 
 
 " 1 had a chess party last night, had invited [Adolphus] Liddell 
 — and before he came, in came Goring, by chance, with the same 
 intention. He is an agreeable, gentlemanly man, and a fine
 
 58 RUSKIN'S ROOMS 
 
 CHAP, player. Our game lasted an hour and a half, and he beat me ; 
 but I don't think he'll do it again. During the game Carew 
 came in, and then Tierney. Liddell appeared at last ; he is also 
 a good player, and it was a drawn game. Liddell was soliloquis- 
 ing to this effect upon the figure he should cut at collections : 
 ' I've had three lectures a week from Mr. Brown, and have 
 attended five in the term ; I've had ditto from Mr. Kynaston, 
 and have attended two in the term ; and three a week fx'om Mr. 
 Hill, and I've attended three ; and I'll be dashed if I don't come 
 off as well as the whole set of you.' . , . 
 
 " I hope I shall have more interesting information for you when 
 you come up on Saturday — Friday I hope it will be, if the judges 
 will evacuate our rooms. It is nearly nine o'clock." 
 
 The rooms here referred to, which were used as the 
 Judges' Lodgings at assize time, were occupied by Ruskin's 
 mother throughout his three years of residence (1837-39). 
 Tlie house (90 High Street), containing some good sixteenth- 
 century wood- work, was formerly in possession of Christ 
 Church, but is now occupied by University College. A 
 sketch by Ruskin is extant ; it must have been made on the 
 floor, and magnifies the height, but is otherwise true to the 
 panelled and ceiled sitting-room as it still exists. Ruskin's 
 own rooms were in Peckwater quadrangle, looking over the 
 gravelled square to the Palladian Library. Of the particular 
 staircase I have been unable to trace record or tradition. 
 "I was vexed a little," he says, in recording his first im- 
 pressions at Oxford, "because I was not in an oriel window 
 looking out on a Gothic chapel " ; but for the moment " felt 
 that, though dull, it was all very grand ; and that the 
 architecture, though Renaissance, was bold, learned, well- 
 proportioned, and variously didactic." Later on he was 
 promoted to Tom Quad (first floor left, No. 4), and for his last 
 term (of regular residence) he was in lodgings in St. Aldate's. 
 He ran what accounts with the tradesmen he liked, and 
 his mother paid the bills weekly without demur. His father, 
 well disposed to be extravagant in anything that concerned 
 his son's state or comfort, boggled only at his taste for 
 minerals, and a piece of Cornish chalcedony bought for lis.
 
 REPUTATION OF HIS DRAWINGS 59 
 
 caused a domestic jar. On Ruskiii's twenty-first birthday, CHAP. 
 his father presented him with a Turner drawing (Winchclsea), ^^^• 
 and with a sum in the stocks bringing in £200 a year. 
 
 II 
 
 Raskin made his way at Christ Church, says Dean 
 Kitchin in the passage above quoted, as a man " who knew 
 his subject." The subject was drawing; and his mother 
 sent word to her husband of the way in which their son's 
 fame in this sort became noised abroad : — 
 
 " Mr. LiJdell and Mr. Gaisford (junior) turned up. John 
 was glad he had wine to offer, but they would not take any ; 
 they had come to see sketches. John says Mr. Liddell looked at 
 them with the eye of a judge and the delight of an artist, and 
 swore they were the best sketches he had ever seen. John 
 accused him of quizzing, but he answei'ed that he really thought 
 them excellent." 
 
 To like effect Dean Kitchin gives a letter from one of 
 Raskin's contemporaries at Christ Church, Mr. W. Hughes 
 Hughes : " I myself, on June 2, 1838, coming home from a 
 late (or early) party, found Ruskin sitting near the central 
 basin in Tom Quad ; and looking over his shoulder, was 
 charmed at the sight of his beautiful water-colour sketch, 
 in what was then called Front's style, of the Tower. From 
 that time I always felt great respect for Ruskin, having 
 found that he had some talent." 
 
 Even the Dean sent for the gentleman-commoner's 
 portfolio and signified his approval. Ruskin drew much at 
 Oxford ; and Blenheim, with its tine collection of pictures 
 then undispersed, was within distance ~of a walk or drive. 
 " I oro over to Blenheim as often as I can," he wrote to a 
 friend, " where there is a most pure and instructive Raft'aelle 
 of his early time — painted at Perugia — I don't think there is 
 such another in England." This is the " Ansidei Madonna,'' 
 and Ruskin's admiration of it lasted to the end. A few years 
 after the picture had been bought for the nation, I was talk- 
 ing to him in Trafalgar Square. " The new Raphael," he
 
 60 EXTRANEOUS PURSUITS 
 
 CHAP, said, " is lovely — quite the loveliest Raphael in the world ; 
 ' the 'San Sisto' is dark and brown beside it." Ruskin also 
 gave some time at Oxford to music. For some years his 
 parents had taken him every season to the opera, and he had 
 heard Grisi and Malibran with delight. There was a Musical 
 Society at Christ Church, under instruction of the cathedral 
 organist, William Marshall, by whose encouragement Ruskin 
 was brought to the point of learning to sing a Florentine 
 canz^aet and to play the ac3ompanim3nts to Bellini's " A te, 
 o cara" and other songs of similarly tender purport. He 
 never learnt to read with ease, but he took music lessons at 
 intervals throughout his life and was fond, in his later years, 
 of putting favourite verses to tunes. There were other sub- 
 jects and studies which occupied much of his time, thought, 
 and emotions daring these years at Oxford (1837-39). His 
 companions went their ways, and he went his. He was 
 a lover, pouring out the sorrows of his heart in verse ; a 
 poet, cjntributing piec3s in other kinds to Annuals and 
 Miscellanies; a writer on the Fine Arts, discussing divers 
 questions with an air already of authority and decision 
 in Magazines and Proceedings. Of these extra-academic 
 activities, account is given in the next chapter. The most 
 important of them were his contributions, on the Theory of 
 Perspective and the Poetry of Architecture, to Loudon's 
 Architectiiral Magazine. A curious glimpse of Ruskin's 
 anonymous repute on this account is given us in the memoirs 
 of Thomas Sopwith, a mining engineer of celebrity in his 
 day, a geologist, and an amateur artist. He was staying 
 with Dr. Buckland at Christ Church, and Ruskin was invited 
 to dinner to meet him. Sopwith describes a long conversa- 
 tion with Ruskin, in Avhich the latter disclosed himself as 
 the author of the essays. "It was truly delightful," writes 
 Sopwith, " to become acquainted with the ingenious author 
 of those very able papers, and still more so to find that we 
 exactly coincided in opinion." A day or two later, Dr. 
 Buckland again had young Ruskin to meet his guest, who 
 records in his diary the pleasure he had in looking at 
 the gentleman-commoner's " four large folio volumes " of 
 drawings. " Those who delight in seeing correct and vivid
 
 READING AND "SMALLS" 61 
 
 portraits of distant scenery, in beholding splendid archi- CHAP. 
 tectural combinations, and in admiring the highest efforts of ■'■■'^^• 
 art, will readily appreciate my enjoyment in looking over 
 these beautiful volumes." 
 
 Ruskin was thus, it seems, one of the "show" young 
 men at Christ Church ; but his artistic and literary pre- 
 occupations did not advance him in the formal studies of 
 the University. He worked, however, for six hours a day, 
 and the routine was this : — 
 
 ♦'I never missed chapel; and in winter got an hour's reading 
 before it. Breakfast at nine, — half-an-hour allowed for it to a 
 second, for Captain Marryat with my roll and butter. College 
 lectures till one. Lunch, with a little talk to anybody who cared 
 to come in, or share their own commons with me. At two, 
 Buckland or other professor's lecture. Walk till five, hall dinner, 
 wine either given or accepted, and quiet chat over it with the 
 reading men, or a frolic with those of my own table ; but I 
 always got round to the High Street to my mother's tea at 
 seven, and amused myself till Tom rang in, and I got with a 
 run to Canterbury gate, and settled to a steady bit of final 
 reading till ten." 
 
 In his second year (March 1838) came the ordeal of 
 " Smalls," when Robert Lowe was one of the examiners. 
 Ruskin described the scene in a lively letter to his father : — 
 
 " Nice thing to get over ; quite a joke, as everybody says 
 when they've got through with the feathers on. It's a kind of 
 emancipation from freshness — a thing unpleasant in an egg, 
 but dignified in an Oxonian — very. Lowe very kind ; Kynaston 
 ditto — nice fellows — urbane. How they do frighten people ! 
 There was one man all but crying with meie fear. Kj'naston 
 had to coax him like a child. Poor fellow ! he had some reason 
 to be afraid ; did his logic shockingly. People always take up 
 logic because they fancy it doesn't require a good memory, and 
 there is nothing half so productive" of pluck ; they never know 
 it. I was very cool when I got into it ; found the degree of 
 excitement agreeable ; nibbled the end of my pen, and grinned 
 at Kynaston over the table as if / had been going to pluck Jiwi. 
 They always smile when they mean pluik."
 
 62 CLASSICAL STUDIES 
 
 CHAP. In his Autobiography, he gives the result and a further 
 reminiscence : — 
 
 " The diagrams 'of Euclid being given me, as was customary 
 with the Euclid examination paper, I handed the book back to 
 the examiner, saying scornfully, ' I don't want any figures, Sir.' 
 ' You had better take them,' replied he, mildly ; which I did, 
 as he bid me ; but I could then, and can still, dictate blindfold 
 the demonsti-ation of any problem, with any letters, at any of 
 its points. I just scraped through, and no more, with my Latin 
 writing, came creditably off with what else had to be done, and 
 my tutor was satisfied with me, — not enough recognizing that 
 the 'little go' had asked, and got out of me, pretty nearly all 
 I had in me, or was ever likely to have in that kind." 
 
 His Latin, he says, was the worst in the University, and 
 to the end of his Oxford career he never could get into his 
 head where the Pelasgi lived or where the Heraclidse re- 
 turned from ; though, to be sure, these items of information 
 are in some dispute to this day. Plato he loved from the 
 first line he. read ; but Aristotle was less sympathetic. His 
 copies of the Ethics and the Rhetoric are preserved in the 
 library of the British Museum ; both volumes appear to 
 have been used less for grammatical or philosophical notes 
 than as affordmg convenient spaces for architectural draw- 
 ings. That he knew his Ethics well, is obvious from his 
 writings ; his " detestation " of the Rhetoric as a school-book 
 (recorded on the fly-leaf of the Museum copy) appears from 
 a well-known passage in Modern Painters. Tacitus, he says, 
 was too hard, for him; Terence he found "dull and stupid 
 beyond patience " ; and Lucretius he detested with " a bitterly 
 wholesome detestation," never repented of. " It seems to me, 
 looking back," he wrote in some autobiographical notes, " as 
 if I never knew or read any Latin at all, except — of all 
 books in the world — Juvenal, the worst and ugliest that 
 could have been put into my hands, — but which I did master, 
 and which founded sternly my first notions of national fault 
 and dishonour in Rome, and, so far as she has followed fall- 
 ing Rome, in England." Among the Greek classics, he 
 declares that he never c6uld construe a line of Homer
 
 HERODOTUS AND THUCYDIDES 63 
 
 (though Pope's Homer he knew by heart) ; Sophocles he CHAP. 
 found "dismal, and in subject disgusting"; but Euripides ^■'■•'■• 
 he tasted with pleasure. The poet, however, who most 
 attracted him at Oxford was Aristophanes, who remained 
 a favourite with him always. " I owe more of the general 
 tone and form of my political thoughts to Aristophanes," 
 he said, " than to any other writer, living or dead." Other 
 favourite poets were Hesiod and Pindar, but the study 
 of them was only taken up in later years. At Oxford 
 " Herodotean history got well settled down into me " ; it 
 inspired many of his better poems, and served to illustrate 
 many a passage in his books. But probably the best 
 discipline which he owed to the University was a knowledge 
 of '' every syllable of Thucydides." The " intricate strength," 
 " the scorn of construction with which he knotted his mean- 
 ing into a rhythmic strength that writhed and wrought 
 every way at once," interested Ruskin intensely in Thucydides 
 as a Avriter; "while his subject, the central tragedy of all the 
 world, the suicide of Greece, was felt by me with a sympathy 
 in which the best powers of my heart and brain were brought 
 up to their fullest, for my years." Ruskin rated his classical 
 attainments low, and an exact scholar he never became ; 
 yet the vitality and freshness of his classical allusions are 
 remarkable, and few English writers have cited, to such 
 happy purpose, so many Greek and Latin authors.^ Some 
 of his biographers, noticing this fact, have suggested that 
 his account of neglected opportunities for classical study at 
 Oxford should be taken with copious grains of salt. But 
 the note-books, diaries, and letters to which I have had 
 
 * "We are continually struck," imitable passages of Homer, Hesiod, 
 
 says Mr. Frederic Harrison, "in JEschylus, Pindar, Aristophanes, 
 
 the Oxford lectures with the range Aristotle, Xenophon, Lucian ; or 
 
 of reading, the subtle comments, again of Virgil, Horace, and 
 
 and the force of sympathy with Catullus" {John Ruskin, 1902, p. 
 
 which he had reached the inmost 136). A list of classical writers 
 
 soul of so many classical writers, touched by Ruskin would in- 
 
 both prose and verse, Roman as elude also Anacreon, Callimachus, 
 
 well as Greek. Nor has any Pro- Claudian, Euripides, Herodotus, 
 
 fessor of Greek, of Poetry, or of Juvenal, Livy, Lucretius, Sopho- 
 
 Philosophy, touched with a wand cles, Tacitus, and Tliucydides. 
 of such magic power so many in-
 
 64 LITTLE INFLUENCED BY OXFORD 
 
 CHAP, access do not support the suggestion. Most University men 
 of a studious turn spend long hours at school and college 
 in grounding themselves, or being grounded, in the classics ; 
 they fill note-books or interleaved texts with collations, 
 references, annotations ; and alas'j they forget the classics 
 in after life. Ruskin inverted the process. His work in 
 studying the classics was voluminous, but it belongs to later 
 years. At Oxford his study of them was unwilling and 
 little given to the niceties. 
 
 The fact is that the University, to which he became 
 deeply attached and to whose service he was to devote a 
 large portion of his best work and energy, played a small 
 and an indecisive part in his own education. The " Graduate 
 of Oxford," as he was to call himself on the title-page of his 
 most famous book, owed to her no revelation, no first 
 awakening. To some of her sons, it is the ineffable charm 
 of Oxford that first gives the call to the pursuit of beauty. 
 But other gardens spread to the moonlight had spoken to 
 Ruskin already ; the enchantments of the Middle Age had 
 whispered their message to him from many another city 
 of ancient towers. The University makes an epoch in the 
 lives of others because there the boy becomes the man ; 
 but Ruskin was already little of the boy, and at the Univer- 
 sity he remained under the parental restraints of home. 
 With others, as many biographies tell us, it is at Oxford or 
 Cambridge that " aspiring talent first enters on its inherit- 
 ance," ^ that young men destined to fill a great place in 
 the world are inspired by congenial studies or honourable 
 emulation to show what is in them and to find their true 
 bent. But to Ruskin the studies of the place were not 
 congenial ; he worked, but it was work against the grain ; 
 there was nothing in such discipline as he underwent to 
 correct what was defective in his previous education or to 
 develop what was native in his genius ; and such emulation 
 as touched him with the spur encouraged him only in a 
 false literary start. 
 
 * Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. i. p. 48.
 
 NEWDIGATE PRIZE POEMS 65 
 
 III 
 
 A pursuit recognised as proper to the University, to CHAP. 
 which Ruskin devoted much labour and upon which he 
 wasted much time, was the competition for the Ncwdigate 
 Prize. He had gone up to the University with the reputa- 
 tion at home of a poet, and his father looked to him to 
 carry off the prize. His Newdigate poems are three in 
 number, for he competed twice unsuccessfully — in 1837 with 
 "The Gipsies," in 1838 with "The Exile of St. Helena"— 
 before being successful in 1839 with " Salsette and Ele- 
 phanta." "Prize poems," said Tennyson, " are not, properly 
 speaking, 'Poems' at all." They are built much on the 
 same pattern, and Ruskin was not altogether well equipped 
 for the rules of the competition. He meant to succeed, but 
 he scorned the wisdom of the wary in such matters. Among 
 the hints given him by his tutor, on going up to Oxford, 
 was some good advice to competitors for the Newdigate : — 
 
 " Then he gave me (wrote Ruskin to his father on Dec. 24, 
 1836) some directions for gaining Oxford poetical prizes, which 
 were very excellent directions for writing bad poetry. One was 
 to imitate Pope. Now, when I write poetry I like to imitate 
 nobody. However, one piece of counsel was excellent, viz. to 
 write two poems — one in my own style, the other polished and 
 spoiled up to their standard, so that if I failed to carry all before 
 me with my own, I might be able to fall back upon the other." 
 
 If Ruskin did not literally carry out this latter counsel, yet 
 a reader, if he cares to compare the several pieces (printed 
 among the Works), wdll observe that in " Salsette and Ele- 
 phanta" he polished in the orthodox fashion, whereas in 
 "The Gipsies" he went his own way. In the case of "The 
 Gipsies," Ruskin had a formidable competitor in Arthur 
 Penrhyn Stanley, Avhom, however, he ran close for the prize. 
 An eminent writer has said that "those who care to see 
 how a clever man may beat a man of genius may compare 
 Dean Stanley's 'Gipsies' Avith Ruskin's." ^ Stanley's poem 
 
 ' Frederic Harrison's Jolm IxusJdn, p. 35. 
 VOL. I. E
 
 66 UNSUCCESSFUL ATTEMPTS 
 
 CHAP, was imdoiibtedlv better calculated than Riiskin's to hit the 
 III ' . 
 
 taste of the exammers, especially when Keble, as Professor 
 
 of Poetry, was chief among them. But it seems unnecessary, 
 in order to account for Ruskin's failure, to disparage Stanley's 
 poem, which is among the best of its kind, and contains two 
 or three lines that deserve to live. His "Gipsies" may or 
 may not be the better poem ; it is certainly not the better 
 " prize poem." Ruskin's father, whose intense admiration 
 for his son's talents never conquered his own shrewd common 
 sense, put both the philosophy of prize poems and the be- 
 setting sin of Ruskin's verses in an admirable letter to 
 W. R Harrison (April 7, 1837) :— 
 
 " My son left for Oxford this morning, and had not time to 
 reply to your kind notes. Some corrections he must and others 
 he will, I doubt not, adopt. The truth is, that verses taken at 
 random from his poetic heap are just about as fit for the public 
 eye as a block of marble just starting into form would be for 
 the model room of Somerset House. ... I cannot get him to 
 correct or revise anything ; and if he ever aspires to contend for 
 a Poetry Prize at Oxford, he must fail, for this reason, that there 
 it is not the poem having the greatest number of beauties, but 
 that which betrays fewest faults, that carries the day." 
 
 In the following year Ruskin, as a letter to his father shows, 
 took much pains in polishing : — 
 
 " I must give an immense time every day to the Newdigate, 
 which I must have, if study will get it. I have much to revise. 
 You find many faults, but there are hundreds which have escaped 
 your notice, and many lines must go out altogether which you 
 and I should wish to stay in. The thing must be remodelled, 
 and I must finish it while it has a freshness on it, otherwise it 
 will not be written well. The old lines are hackneyed in my 
 ears, even as a very soft Orleans plum, which your Jewess has 
 wiped and re-wiped with the corner of her apron, till its polish 
 is perfect, and its temperature elevated." 
 
 The poem, however, as finally sent in, was not among 
 Ruskin's happier pieces ; he was very properly beaten, as 
 he said, by an old schoolfellow at Mr. Dale's, J. H. Dart,
 
 SUCCESS: "SALSETTE AND ELEPHANTA " 67 
 
 who afterwards obtained distinction as a conveyancer and CHAP 
 wrote a passable translation of the Iliad. At the third try 
 Ruskin was successful. His " Salsette and Elephanta"^ 
 is less interesting than his " Gipsies," but it is far more 
 smooth and polished. It " betrays the fewest faults." Its 
 rhetoric is in the approved style. " You know the kind 
 of thing," said Lord Goschen in describing his own can- 
 didature for the Newdigate prize — " rhetoric in rhyme, 
 grand, heroic, antithetical, alliterative." The subject on 
 that occasion was Belshazzar's Feast : — 
 
 " Ho ! bring the cups, the golden goblets bring ; 
 A godlike chalice, for a godlike king ! 
 Bring forth the cups ! 'Twould be a draught divine — 
 In Hebrew vessels, Babylonian wine." 
 
 There are passages in Ruskin's prize poem Avhich recall Lord 
 Goschen's skit : — 
 
 " Revered as monarchs, or as gods adored, 
 Alternately they rear the sceptre and the sword . . . 
 And cast, in death-heaps, by the purple flood. 
 Her strength of Babylonian multitude." 
 
 The argument of the poem conforms closely, too, to the then 
 accepted models, which were parodied by Goldwin Smith in 
 the following programme suggested to a competitor whose 
 subject was "The Stuarts": "The Stuarts will never be 
 restored — The Jews will — Salem ! " Stanle3^'s " Gipsies " had 
 concluded with the restoration of all Wanderers to the fold 
 of the Church ; and Ruskin's " Salsette and Elephant a," 
 after duly chronicling divers superstitions, shows us heathen 
 India deserting " the darkened path her fathers trod," and 
 seeking redemption in Christianity. The exotic scenery of 
 the poem has been known to perplex some readers. " Majestic 
 
 ^ Cases are known, I believe, in through 'The Revolt of Islam'" 
 
 which readers have gone through without ever discovering "who 
 
 the poem without deriving any revolted against whom, or what." 
 
 clear idea of who or what were It may be well, therefore, to say at 
 
 Salsette and Elephanta ; therein once that Salsette and Elephanta 
 
 not being worse at fault perhaps are islands lying off Bombay, with 
 
 than Ruskin himself, who once remains of cave temples sacred to 
 
 confessed that he had " waded Hindu divinities. •
 
 68 COMPLIMENTS FROM THE CENSOR 
 
 CHAP. Dharavee," " Canarah's hill," and the " peepul's purple shade " 
 carry with them suggestions of Bon Gaultier's " Kaftan and 
 Kalpac have gone to their rest," and of Edward Lear's 
 " purple nullahs " and " silvery Goreewallahs." But for this 
 the subject was responsible. The piece, however, is not 
 without " beauties " of its own, and the real Ruskin flashes 
 out in occasional passages, as in the lines : — 
 
 " Yes ! he shall fall, though once his throne was set 
 Where the high heaven and crested mountains met ; 
 Though distant shone with many an azure gem 
 The glacier glory of his diadem." 
 
 Ruskin's success with " Salsette and Elephanta " won him 
 favour in the eyes of the College and University authorities. 
 Keble, discharging the usual office of the Professor of Poetry 
 on these occasions, "asked me to cut out all my best bits." 
 Dean Gaisford was gracious, and coached the prizeman for 
 his recitation in the theatre (June 12, 1839). The Censor, 
 in his speech at the end of term, made very complimentary 
 allusions to the honour which a gentleman-commoner had 
 done to the House. The following letter gives a lively 
 account of the speech : — 
 
 {To his Father.) — " I am in a great hurry, going to Athlone's, 
 but I thought the Censor's speech particularly eloquent last night, 
 and my mother can't remember the substance thereof. After a 
 few remarks on the Class List, he began to speak of a certain 
 insignis juvenis — ex superiori ordine — of the upper rank of his 
 college — uniting an intense degree of intellect and morality, who 
 having acquired extensive knowledge of men and manners and 
 natural phenomena during protracted travel — uniting refined taste 
 with extensive knowledge of polite literature — suvimo something 
 or other — and then maxima facundid atque lepore, etc. — had been 
 successful ill certamine p)oeHco — victoriam vieritam, etc. — to the 
 great joy of his college friends and tutors. Then he proceeded 
 to compare this Juvenis to Alexander the Great and Pompey, 
 though I couldn't catch the points of resemblance, and wound 
 up by returning thanks to him in the name of his college, and 
 saying they^ expected higher honour from him yet. All this in
 
 NOTICED BY WORDSWORTH 69 
 
 Latin, and a great deal more which I could not hear. I want CHAP, 
 a brown, rough, bright-eyed brute of a new dog." 
 
 The recitation of the Prize Poem at Commemoration was 
 a jjreat event in the domestic circle. His mother was too 
 nervous to be present ; but without need, for Ruskin went 
 through the ordeal very well, to his father's infinite delight. 
 The recitation was of accidental interest as bringing the 
 young author to the notice of a master in literature, in 
 whose spirit of " walking with nature " Ruskin was to under- 
 take his principal work. " There were 2000 ladies and 
 gentlemen to hear it," records Ruskin's father proudly in a 
 letter to W. H. Harrison ; " he was not at all nervous, and it 
 went all very well off. The notice taken of him is quite 
 extraordinary." It must be doubted, however, whether the 
 Newdigate Prize Poem was so much the attraction as the 
 conferment of an honorary degree upon the Lake Poet. 
 Wordsworth's reception on the occasion by the under- 
 graduates Avas most enthusiastic. He in his turn took kindly 
 notice of the young prize poet. " We were asked," continues 
 Ruskin's father, " to meet Wordsworth yesterday, and getting 
 next to him, I had a delightful hour." Ruskin's Newdic^ate 
 was almost worth winning, for the sake of this link in the 
 personal history of English literature ; but in after life he 
 looked back with bitterness on the long hours spent upon 
 the competition. The recitation, he said in conversation 
 in 1881, quite turned his head ; and in some unused notes 
 for his Autobiography he describes the prize as having been 
 won at last "to my father's tearful joy, and my own entirely 
 ridiculous and ineffable conceit and puffing up. We went 
 on our summer travels that year to Cornwall, where I 
 expected the miners to regard me with admiration as the 
 winner of the Newdigate — where, however, I still had the 
 grace and sense to spend all the time I could get, after my 
 miserable forenoon's task of Lucretius was done, in starino' at 
 the sea. I cannot understand how schoolmasters of sense 
 allow their boys even to try for prizes." Many passages 
 in his books, in which he inveighed against the evils of 
 the competitive element in education, were heightened in 
 emphasis by bitter recollections of his own experience.
 
 70 SPEECHES AT THE UNION 
 
 IV 
 
 CHAP. Ruskin spoke occasionally at the Union, and served for 
 
 III- a term upon tlie Committee of that Society. The Presi- 
 dent under whom he served was Lake, afterwards Dean of 
 Durham, who never forgot two very brilliant speeches he 
 heard there at different times. One was by Lord Robert 
 Cecil, afterwards Marquis of Salisbury and Prime Minister ; 
 the other, " striking and very poetical," was by Ruskin. 
 "I forget the subject," added the Dean, "but remember a 
 specially vivid description of the scenery of the Alps." ^ The 
 subject of the motion which Ruskin proposed in this speech, 
 as in many a book of later years, was "That intellectual 
 education as distinguished from moral discipline is detri- 
 mental to the interests of the lower order of a nation." The 
 connexion with the scenery of the Alps is not obvious, 
 but Ruskin may have kept no closer to his text in Union 
 speeches than afterwards in Professorial lectures. Another 
 motion which he supported was " That the reading of good 
 and well-written Novels is neither prejudicial to the moral 
 nor to the intellectual character." For that debate he must 
 have been well prepared by the essay of which we have 
 already heard. Ruskin throughout his life was fond of the 
 theatre, and it is interesting to find him moving on another 
 occasion " That Theatrical Representations are upon the 
 whole highly beneficial to the character of a nation." Of 
 his reply at the end of the debate there is amusing mention 
 in the life of F. W. Robertson. The future minister of 
 Trinity Chapel, Brighton, spoke against the theatre, and was 
 so much obsessed with the responsibility of the occasion 
 that, before rising, he asked the friend who was sitting at 
 his side to pray for him. The prayer did not avail to save 
 him from a reply which convulsed the room with laughter. 
 Ruskin's speech, as the friend records, was "very ingenious 
 and somewhat sarcastic. With considerable circumlocution 
 and innuendo he was describing a certain personage to 
 whose influence he probably thought Robertson had, in his 
 
 ^ Memorials of Dean Lake, 1901, p. 33.
 
 OXFORD CONTEMPORARIES 71 
 
 observations, given too much consideration, when Robertson CHAP, 
 said in my ear, ' Why, the man is describing the Devil ! ' " ^ ^^^• 
 One other speech at the Union remains to be recorded • 
 it is the only one of the four in which Ruskin took a side 
 which was afterwards not to be his. It had been moved 
 " That the present facilities of acquiring knowledge through 
 the medium of the Press are on the whole productive of 
 more harm than benefit," and Ruskin spoke against the 
 motion ; in favour of a Press which he afterwards compen- 
 diously condemned as so many "square leagues of dirtily- 
 printed falsehood."^ But, as for personal reasons I am glad 
 to remember, he made exceptions. 
 
 V 
 
 Neither in Christ Church, nor in the wider circle to 
 which membership of the Union might have admitted him, 
 did Ruskin make many fast friendships. With the Oriel 
 set, then the most influential in the University, he did not 
 come in contact. Froude was his contemporary at Oxford, 
 and in after life they became close friends, but they did not 
 meet in their undergraduate days. Of the Oxford Move- 
 ment, at its height towards the end of Ruskin's time there 
 . . . . . . ' 
 
 little mention is to be found in his letters, writings, or papers. 
 
 Two of the greatest masters of modern Enq:lish were at the 
 University at the same time ; but their orbits did not cross- 
 Who can say what might have happened if Ruskin had 
 fallen under Newman's spell ? But the younger man had 
 a stubborn tenacity of Evangelical breeding in him. His 
 mother, however, was not without her anxieties, for was not 
 Pusey installed in a chair of authority within her son's 
 college ? — 
 
 " I am sorry, very sorry," she wrote to him, when he was stay- 
 ing at Oxford in 1843, " that such cliflferences should have arisen 
 anywhere, but more especially that they should have ai'isen in 
 Oxford. What arc the real doctrines of Puseyism? Why do 
 they not state them fairly and in such plain terms as may 
 
 ^ Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, by Stopford Brooke, p. 18. 
 ' Fors Clavigera, Letter 67.
 
 72 LETTERS TO A COLLEGE FRIEND 
 
 CHAP, enable people of ordinary understandings to know what they 
 do think the truth ? Any time I have heard Mr. Newman preach, 
 he seemed to me like Oliver Cromwell to talk that he might 
 not be understood. . . . Surely our Saviour's consecration must 
 have effected a change in the Elements if an ordinary minister 
 can ; but these are things too much for me. I thank God I have 
 His word to go to ; and I beseech you to take nothing for granted 
 that you hear from these people, but think and search for yourself. 
 As I have said, I have little fear of you, but I shall be glad when 
 you get from among them." 
 
 This was an attitude of suspicion towards his Oxford 
 associates, as towards Carlyle and others at a later time, 
 which she steadily maintained, and it caused some necessary 
 alienation of sympathy and economy of confidence between 
 mother and son. Such an attitude, and Raskin's dutiful 
 habit of spending some part of every evening in his mother's 
 lodgings, may well have tended to limit the range of his 
 acquaintance. But there were other reasons. For one 
 thing, he was, as we have seen, centred and absorbed in his 
 own pursuits ; for another, he had, at this period at any rate 
 and in relation to his own sex, little genius for friendship in 
 the romantic sort. Of some of his Christ Church contem- 
 poraries he saw something during vacations, and for a time 
 his father took rooms for him in St. James's Street, that his 
 friends of quality might not be at the pains of coming out to 
 Heme Hill to see him. References to Christ Church acquaint- 
 ances occur in a scries of his Letters to a College Friend. 
 Edward Clayton, to Avhom they are addressed, was his senior 
 at Christ Church by two years, and was ordained in 1841- 
 In writing to him, Ruskin adopts the familiar style common 
 among college friends, and condescends to the occasional use 
 of slang. Many of the letters seem, however, to have been 
 written with care, and there is much vivacity and fanc}'' in 
 them. Of the following Reflections on a Penny, it has been 
 well said that there is "at least a dash of Charles Lamb 
 init":— 
 
 {To Edward Clayton.) July 4, 1840. — " Sir, — It is altogether 
 impossible that 3'ou can have any moral perception of the value
 
 THE LIFE-HISTORY OF A PENNY 73 
 
 of coins in general, and pence in particular — that you can have CHAP. 
 formed any distinct ideas of the functions of pence — of their ^^^' 
 design — and influence on society. You never can have weighed 
 one in your hand — suspended it between your forefinger and 
 thumb — felt that it was an ounce of copper — remembered that 
 it was four farthings — or computed that eleven encores would 
 make it a shilling ! a Scotch pound ! a piece of silver ! a bob ! 
 Have you ever reflected that, in order to your possession of it, 
 currents of silent lightning have been rushing through the 
 inmost mass of the globe since the foundation of its hills was 
 laid — that chasms have been cloven upwards through its adamant, 
 with the restless electric fire gleaming along their crystalline 
 sides, folded in purple clouds of metallic vapour — that to obtain 
 it for you the sepulchral labour of a thousand arms has penetrated 
 the recesses of the earth, dashed the river from its path, hurled 
 the rock from its seat, sought a way beneath the waves of the 
 deep, heavy sea ! For you, night and day, have heaved the dark 
 limbs of the colossal engine — its deep, fierce breath has risen in 
 hot pants to heaven — the crimson furnace has illumined midnight, 
 shaken its fiery hair like meteors among the stars — for you — for 
 you, to abuse and waste the result of their ceaseless labour ! . . . 
 
 " I have been hard at work with Cocks,^ getting him to believe 
 in Turner : he is coming steadily round ; clever fellow ! will soon 
 be all right. He is going up the Nile this winter, to learn to eat 
 raw meat; he'll save in cooks when he comes back, provided they 
 don't cook him. I have seen Newton in tov/n, who is busy giving 
 long names to brass farthings, and putting them in the British 
 Museum. Acland, 1 had a day's sketching with, at Oxford, and 
 was introduced to A^hlonQ's, fourteen dogs:- he is beginning to 
 think of parting with some. Nothing new at Oxford, except a 
 Christ Church man's making the Proctor feel the value of jj^ewce 
 by taking him 480 half-pence by way of a sovereign fine, and 
 remarking to him, as he let go the handkerchief which contained 
 them, that he'd no doubt he would find them all right, if he'd 
 pick them up. This was done once before, Vjut, by all accounts, 
 not so effectively." 
 
 ^ Charles Somers Cocks, after- Ginkel, Earl of Athlone, an under- 
 wards third Earl Somers. graduate at Christ Church at this 
 
 * George Henry Godart de time ; he died in 1843.
 
 74 COLLEGE TUTORS 
 
 CHAP. It was, however, among the " last year " undergraduates 
 
 • and the College authorities that Ruskin found his more 
 valuable friends and acquaintances. Some of the great 
 personages of the place disappointed him ^sthetically, and 
 either took no notice of him or were personally repellent. 
 The Dean (Gaisford) was " a rotundly progressive terror, 
 or sternly enthroned and niched Anathema." Pusey, who 
 never spoke to him, was " 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." Liddell, 
 on the other hand, who succeeded to the Deanery in 1855, 
 impressed Ruskin at once as " one of the rarest types of 
 nobly presenced Englishmen." " He was always right and 
 serviceable," Ruskin adds in some autobiographical notes, 
 " in what notice he luok of me, though he took little, and 
 his haughty and reserved manner hindered me from asking 
 for more." To his advice, however, Ruskin owed a debt at 
 this time which was acknowledged in one of his last lectures 
 at Oxford.^ The Library of Christ Church contains a few 
 good Italian pictures and a valuable collection of drawings. 
 Liddell introduced Ruskin to them, and in the later period 
 of his undergraduate days he spent many hours studying 
 and drawing among them. The description of Liddell in 
 Proiterita is well known, and is not very sympathetic. With 
 him and his family, in later years, Ruskin was, however, in 
 relations of cordial friendship, and there are letters which 
 show that he and the Dean were on more affectionate terms 
 in earlier times than the references in Prceterita suggest. 
 Ruskin's own College Tutor was the Rev. Walter Brown, 
 afterwards Vicar of Wendlebury, who "became," says the 
 pupil, "somewhat loved by me, and with gentleness encou- 
 raged me into some small acquaintance with Greek verbs." 
 " He was the only one of my old masters," wrote Ruskin in a 
 letter of condolence on his death (1862), " from whom I could 
 or would receive guidance." The guidance, if received, was 
 accompanied with much objection and criticism on Ruskin's 
 side, as appears in many letters which passed between them 
 on principles of criticism, theories of education, and the 
 1 A Lecture on " Patience " (1884), § 6.
 
 OSBORNE GORDON— BUCKLAND 75 
 
 foundations of morality and religion. Ruskin perhaps owed CHAP, 
 more to his private tutor, Osborne Gordon, who, if less given 
 to discussion of the immensities, was ever at hand with a 
 shrewd word in season. Ruskin's father Avas deeply sen- 
 sible of Gordon's services to his son, and in recognition of 
 them gave £5000 for the augmentation of poor Christ 
 Church livings. Ruskin's own tribute may be read in the 
 inscription which he composed for a memorial window in 
 Easthampstead Church : — 
 
 This "Window and Mosaic Pavement are dedicate 
 
 To God's praise, in loving Memory of His 
 
 Servant, Osborne Gordon, B.D., 
 
 Student and Censor of Christ Church, Oxford, 
 
 Rector of this Parish from 1860 to 1883. 
 
 An Englishman of the olden time, 
 
 Humane without weakness, Learned without ostentation, 
 
 Witty without malice, Wise without pride. 
 
 Honest of heart. Lofty of thought ; 
 
 Dear to his fellow men, and dutiful to his God. 
 
 When his friends shall also be departed, 
 
 And can no more cherish his memory, 
 
 Be it revered by the stranger. 
 
 Another of the College authorities to whom Ruskin owed 
 much was Dr. Buckland, afterwards Dean of Westminster, 
 then a Canon of Christ Church and Reader in Geology in the 
 University. He was one of the " characters " of the place i 
 his table, for one thing, was like no one else's, before or since. 
 He used to say that he had eaten his way straight through 
 the animal creation, and that the worst thing was a mole ; 
 though he told Lady Lyndhurst afterwards that there was 
 one thing even worse than a mole, and that was a blue-bottle 
 fly. Augustus Hare, whose amusing tales themselves call 
 for a somewhat robust digestion, had a story of a dish yet 
 more strange and rare. The heart of a French king pre- 
 served in a silver casket at Nuneham was produced for his 
 inspection. Whilst looking at it he exclaimed, " I have 
 eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of 
 a king," and before any one could hinder him he had gobbled
 
 76 A MEETING WITH DARWIN 
 
 CHAP, it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever ! Ruskin 
 always regretted a day of unlucky engagement on which he 
 missed a delicate toast of mice; and remembered, with 
 delight, being waited upon one hot summer morning by 
 two graceful and polite little Carolina lizards, who kept off 
 the flies. He recalled this occasion in the Catalogue of his 
 collections at Oxford in a note to his copy of Carpaccio's 
 signature held by a lizard. " The student will be surprised 
 at first," he says, " by the placing of this example in the group 
 of domestic animals. If he will recollect Juvenal's measure 
 of contented possession — TJnius sese dominum fecisse lacertw 
 — he may feel that the lizard is indeed the best of all in- 
 troductions to the races of living creatures meant for our 
 companions." He had another story of Buckland sending a 
 young lady to a ball with a live snake for her bracelet, and 
 he stayed there ! "Yes," added Ruskin, in telling the story 
 to a young lady, " and well he might in such an honourable 
 place ; any snake might be proud of so delightful a position." 
 At Buckland's table Ruskin met the leading scientific men 
 of the day ; among others, the one who was to become the 
 greatest of them all : — 
 
 (To his Father.) " Oxford, April 22, 1837. . . . Buckland intio- 
 duced me to Lord Cole, and said that as we were both geologists 
 he did not hesitate to leave us together, while he did what he 
 certainly very much required — brushed up a little. Lord Cole 
 and I were talking about some fossils newly arrived from India. 
 He remarked that his friend Dr. B.'s room was cleaner and 
 in better order than he remembered ever to have seen it. There 
 was not a chair to sit upon, all covered with dust, broken alabaster 
 candlesticks, withered flowerdeaves, frogs cut out of serpentine, 
 broken models; of fallen temples, torn papers, old manuscripts, 
 stuffed reptiles, deal boxes, brown pa.per, wool, tow and cotton, 
 and a considerable variety of other ai-ticles. . . . While we were 
 sitting over our wine after dinner, in came Dr. Daubeny, one of 
 the most celebrated geologists of the day, — a curious little animal, 
 looking through his spectacles with an air very disiingud — and 
 Mr. Darwin, whom I had heard read a paper at the Geological 
 Society. He and I got together, and talked all the evening."
 
 CHARLES NEWTON 77 
 
 Ruskin used to prepare diagrams for the lectures given CHAP, 
 by Buckland as Reader in Geology. " My picture of the ^^^• 
 CTranite veins in Trewavas Head, with a cutter weathering 
 the point in a squall, in the style of Copley Fielding, still, 
 I believe, forms part of the resources of the geological 
 department." Buckland's geology was in many respects as 
 old-fashioned as this curious relic ; but Ruskin always re- 
 membered with gratitude his introduction, through Buck- 
 land's advice, to James Forbes's papers on glacier motion, 
 afterwards expanded in Travels through the Alps of Savoy. 
 
 An interesting friendship which Ruskin made among the 
 older men was with Charles Newton. He was three years 
 Ruskin's senior, and was already giving evidence of his 
 bent, in the scientific study of architecture and archaeology. 
 Ruskin owed to him one lesson, he says, which he never 
 forgot. It came about in the usual way, which was a 
 request to Ruskin for a drawing. Newton wanted one of 
 a Norman door on which he was going to read a paper to 
 the Architectural Society : — 
 
 " When I got to work on it, he had to point out to me that 
 my black dots and Proutesque breaks were no manner of use 
 to him, and that I must be content to draw steady lines in their 
 exact place and proportion. I fulfilled his directions with more 
 difficulty than I had expected — and produced the first architectural 
 drawing of any value I ever made in my life. If only I had 
 gone on so! but the accuracy was irksome to me; — the result I 
 thought cold and commonplace. I went back to my dots and 
 hreaks for three years more. Yet the lesson stayed with me." 
 
 The two men had many tastes in common ; they travelled 
 together in Switzerland and Italy, as we shall hear ; and 
 "there were possibilities," Ruskin says, "of some heroic 
 attachment between us, in the manner of Theseus and 
 Pirithous." " Newton is indeed a noble fellow," wrote Ruskin 
 in 1830 ; " I learn more from him than from any other of my 
 acquaintance old and young, besides getting prime jokes into 
 the bargain." But when Ruskin dilated upon the beauty of 
 the snows of Chamouni, Newton fixed his eyes upon the 
 moraines and was of opinion that " more housemaids were
 
 78 HENRY ACLAND 
 
 CHAP, wanted in that establishment." The note of Phihstinism 
 was assumed, no doubt, to tease his friend ; but there was 
 some fundamental difference between the two men. Ruskin 
 was in his early years absorbed in landscape, Italian art, 
 Gothic architecture, and was destined to develop Radical 
 tendencies which Newton had early detected when he said 
 of his friend that there was " the making of a Robespierre in 
 him." Newton was absorbed in classical art and archeeo- 
 logy ; was Attic and diplomatic. On one occasion he invited 
 Ruskin to go Avith him to Greece, but this invitation was not 
 accepted. The Goth and the Greek went their several ways, 
 and a friendship which at one time was close and affectionate 
 was partly buried beneath the marbles of Halicarnassus. Yet 
 as late as 1869 Ruskin refers to Newton as " a sure and 
 unweariedly kind guide, always near me since we were at 
 College together." ^ The nearness came to have a domestic 
 tie, for Newton married Mr. Arthur Severn's eldest sister; 
 and one may trace to the friendship with Newton the lively 
 interest which Ruskin took in archaeological excavation in 
 classical lands, and the financial aids which he rendered 
 to it.2 
 
 But the closest, the dearest, and the most enduring of 
 Ruskin's Oxford friendships — a friendship which never 
 changed, but by deepening, throughout life — was with Henry 
 Acland. He was Ruskin's senior by four years in age, by 
 two in College standing, and the older man assumed from 
 the first an attitude of protective friendship towards the 
 younger. Ruskin has drawn in Prceterita a charming pic- 
 ture of Acland "in the playful and proud heroism of his 
 youth," and has described how he "gave me the good of 
 seeing a noble young English life in its purity, sagacity, 
 honour, reckless daring, and happy piety ; its English pride 
 shining prettily through all, like a girl's in her beauty." 
 Ruskin admired, without having it in him to imitate, the 
 example. " I had been too often adjured and commanded," 
 he says, " to take care of myself, ever to think of following 
 
 ^ Preface to T/(e Queen of the excavations in Rhodes, and the 
 jlir. works of art discovered were pre- 
 
 * He defrayed the cost of various sented by him to the Museum.
 
 UNUSED ADVANTAGES 79 
 
 him over slippery Aveirs, or accompanying him in pilot boats CHAP, 
 through white-topped shoal water; but both in art and ^^■'■• 
 science, he could pull me on, being years ahead of me, yet 
 glad of my sympathy, for, till I came, he was literally alone 
 in the University in caring for either." The protective friend- 
 ship, on the one side, the affectionate sympathy, on the 
 other, endured throughout life. Acland, in looking back 
 over more than fifty years of " a friendship without a jar," 
 said that Ruskin had been one of the joys of his life and of 
 his home ; ^ and Ruskin, in one of his later Oxford lectures, 
 said of the friendship begun in undergraduate days that 
 " if it alone were all I owed to Oxford, the most gracious 
 kindness of the Alma Mater would in that gift have been 
 fulfilled to me." ^ 
 
 VI 
 
 " And is there to be no more Oxford ? " asked Froude, 
 after reading the account of Ruskin's undergraduate days 
 in Prwterita — an account which, with inimitable irony and 
 humour, describes " Christ Church Choir," but which — so 
 Froude, of Oriel, complained — did not give an exhaustive 
 view either of the studies or manners of the University 
 in their day. "No, dear friend," replied Ruskin; "I have 
 no space to describe the advantages I never used, nor does 
 my own failure give me right to blame, even were there 
 any use in blaming, a system now passed away." He was not 
 always so reticent ; a letter written many years earlier to his 
 Oxford tutor grives account of w^hat he did not learn at the 
 University, and what he should have been taught : — 
 
 (To the Rev. W. L. Brown.) "Edinburgh, Sth November, 
 1853. . . . The very few who have perfectly rational parents, and 
 perfectly well educated minds, may turn our university system to 
 good advantage, but they would do the same with anything. I 
 will tell you frankly what I feel respecting myself. ... I went 
 on till I was to go to College, educating myself in mineralogy, 
 
 ' Letter from Acland, read at the opening of the Ruskin Museum 
 at Meersbrook Park (Igdrasil, May 1890). 
 * Readings in " Modern Painters," § 64.
 
 80 OXFORD EDUCATION CRITICISED 
 
 CHAP, drawing, and the power of stringing words together, which I called 
 poetry. My intense vanity prevented my receiving any educa- 
 tion in literature, except what I picked up myself. . . . On the 
 whole, I am conscious of no result from the University in this 
 respect, except the dead waste of three or four months in writing 
 poems for the Xewdigate, a prize which I would unhesitatingly do 
 away with. . . . 
 
 " I ought never to have been allowed — but stop : I will tell 
 you exactly what ought to have been done with me — had the 
 University been working on a healthy system. 
 
 " I should have been first asked what I liked and had been 
 in the habit of studying. I should have answered — Mineralogy, 
 natural history, drawing, poetry, and mathematics : that I rather 
 liked Greek. 
 
 " ' Good,' you should have answered. ' Show me your poetry ; 
 write me a prose essay on any subject that at present interests 
 you. Go to Dr. Buckland and ascertain how much time he can 
 spare you, and to Dr. Daubeny and Mr. Hill. Let them examine 
 you first closely, and ascertain where you ought to begin.' 
 
 " When I gave you my poetry and essay, you would have 
 seen in a moment that the poetry was uninventive and value- 
 less, but that the prose writing had some thought in it, and 
 that the talent of putting words together was worth cultivatinsr. 
 You should then have consulted with Buckland, Daubeny, and 
 Hill, and on their report, have addressed me next day as follows : — 
 
 " ' Sir, you will not, of course, expect that our estimate of your 
 powers and of what is best to be done for you .should altogelTier 
 agree with yours — but if we are wrong, you will have plenty 
 of time to show us that we are so, in your after life ; meantime, 
 we hope for your diligence in following out the plan of study 
 we shall adopt for you. We think that your prose writing is 
 good. You will furnish us with a short essay every week, on 
 which we will make such remaiks as we think proper. We do 
 not expect you to fulloic our advice, unless you see the justice of it. 
 Every writer, however young, must form his own style by his own 
 judgment. 
 
 " ' We do not think it advisable at present to cultivate your 
 taste for poetry, and we beg of you to give us your word of
 
 WHAT IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 81 
 
 honoui* that you will not occupy your time in writing so much CHAP. 
 as a single verse while you are at the University. This is the 
 only thing in which we wish to put constraint upon you. 
 
 " (You would not have hurt my vanity very dreadfully by 
 this, and have saved me much loss of time.) 
 
 '"We Avill give you every advantage in our power in the 
 study of mineralogy, botany, and astronomy, but as we find you 
 are unacquainted at present with the first laws of chemistry, 
 you must begin with these. 
 
 '* ' You will find it not irksome to give an hour a day to the 
 study of Latin grammar — an hour to Greek : and an hour — or 
 as much more as you like — to Mathematics. 
 
 " ' In all your studies, we have only one request to make you, 
 and that we expect you scrupulously to comply with : That you 
 work with patience as well as diligence, and take care to secure 
 every step you take : we do not care how much or how little 
 you do — but let what you do, he done for ever.' . . . 
 
 " With another boy, of course, another kind of treatment would 
 have been required. You will say, * But this would have needed 
 totally different machinery.' Yes, verily, and totally difTerent 
 machinery I trust we shall soon have. They have too long 
 forgotten at Oxford the exclamation of the old cavalier — ' By 
 G — , sir, men cannot be stuffed as they stuff turkies ' — when 
 his friend sent to him in his prison to ask what he could do 
 for him before his execution." 
 
 This is all very well ; and in these days, of wider choice 
 of studies and of " soft options" (as admirers of the ancien 
 regime arc wont to call them), it is possible that Rnskin 
 misfht have fared better at Oxford. But on the other 
 hand he might not. He would have been wayward and 
 discursive, I think, whatever the University system of 
 the time might have been. At the end, however, as the 
 hour of the final schools drew near, he made a desperate 
 effort to qualify himself for the brilliant degree upon which 
 his father counted as the first stage on his son's career 
 towards a Bishopric. In the Long Vacation of 1839, Osborne 
 Gordon came to read with Ruskin at Herno Hill. He gave 
 one initial piece of good advice which his pupil throughout 
 
 VOL. 1. F
 
 82 SUDDEN ILLNESS 
 
 CHAP, life consistently disobeyed : " When you have got too much 
 ^^^- to do, don't do it." After Christmas came the last push, 
 with pi-ivate coaching again from Gordon, and Ruskin read, 
 with little intermission, from six in the morning to twelve 
 at night. One evening at the beginning of the summer 
 terra he was surprised by a short tickling cough, followed 
 by a curious taste in the mouth which he presently perceived 
 to be blood. The drop was not his death-warrant, but it 
 was a death-blow to hopes of academical distinction. Some 
 of the doctors took a very serious view ; his mother, who 
 had kept terms in Oxford in order to be at hand in case 
 of accident or sudden illness, Avas more hopeful; but on 
 the immediate policy for the crisis there could be no 
 division of opinion. Further reading was imperatively for- 
 bidden. The Dean gave permission to put off degree-taking ; 
 Ruskin went down from Oxford with his parents in search 
 of health. He was to return two years later; and, a year 
 later again, was to come before the world as "A Graduate 
 of Oxford " ; but it was among other scenes and in other 
 studies, among the hills and clouds, the trees and mosses, 
 that he really graduated.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTUBE—VOEMS— 
 FIRST LOVE 
 
 (1837-1840) 
 
 " I spent the sunny hours of many a glorious morning, — when 
 I ought to have been hammering on the hilltops or ploughing 
 in the fields, — in trying which of two fine words would fit 
 best at the end of a stanza, and how the stanza might best 
 be twisted so as to get them both in — sustaining my stomach 
 for this work at the same time by dwelling on my own dis- 
 appointed love and on any picturesque horrors or sorrows I 
 could find in Herodotus." — Autobiographical Notes. 
 
 Nothing illustrates more clearly the strength of Ruskin's 
 native bent, and the early development of his powers, than 
 the papers on " The Poetry of Architecture," which appeared 
 in Loudon's Architectural Magazine during 1837 and 1838; 
 that is, Avhen he was eighteen and nineteen. In 1837 the 
 summer tour wdth his parents was to Yorkshire, the Lakes, 
 and Derbyshire. They drove down by the North Road as 
 usual, and on the fourth day arrived at Catterick Bridge, 
 on the Swale, below Richmond. By the clear-pebbled 
 stream, Ruskin felt for the last time, he says, " the pure 
 childish love of nature which Wordsworth so idly takes 
 for an intimation of immortality," They went on to the 
 Lake country ; familiar ground, but since he had last visited 
 it he had seen Italy. The contrast between the cottages 
 of Westmoreland and those of the Southern Alps struck 
 him at once, and the idea of the architectural papers 
 took shape. Some were written in 1837; others, in the 
 following year when the tour was to Scotland, and again 
 the Lakes and Derbyshire. The first notes were written 
 on his knee as they trotted along; they were worked up 
 at Oxford, and many of them were dated at " Christ Church." 
 
 S3
 
 84 THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTURE 
 
 CHAP. How significant is the full title of these papers ! — 
 
 Introduction to the Poetry of Architecture ; or, Tlie Archi- 
 tecture of the Nations of Europe considered in its Associa- 
 tion ivith Natural Scenery and National Character, by 
 Kataphusin, 
 
 "I could not have put," he says, "in fewer or more in- 
 clusive words the definition of what half my future life was 
 to be spent in discoursing of ; while the nom-de-plume I 
 chose, According to Nature, was equally expressive of the 
 temper in which I was to discourse alike on that and every 
 other subject." His works on architecture were the first 
 treatises in English to teach the significance of buildings as 
 records of the life and faith of nations. Herein they had a 
 truly scientific basis, and opened up new paths of specula- 
 tion, study, and research. In these early essays, the thesis 
 is illustrated from a narrow range of instances and in a 
 restricted field, for the wide prospectus of the title shrank 
 in the actual text to an analysis of cottages and villas in 
 England and the Alpine regions, with an excursus in which 
 the writer characteristically found sermons in Chimneys ; 
 but the root-idea is firmly there : in every chapter the char- 
 acteristics of the building are brought into relation with the 
 national character of the builders. The papers show, more- 
 over, that Ruskin had already seized some of the architec- 
 tural principles which he was to develop ten years later in 
 The Seven Lamps. Here, for instance, is a passage (notable 
 also for its command of expression) in which he states his 
 characteristic theory of ornament : — 
 
 " When Nature determines on decorating a piece of project- 
 ing rock, she begins with the bold projecting surface, to which the 
 eye is naturally drawn by its form, and (observe how closely she 
 works by the principles which were before investigated) she 
 finishes this with lichens and mingled colours, to a degree of 
 delicacy, which makes us feel that we never can look close 
 enough ; but she puts in not a single mass of form to attract the
 
 PRELUDE TO THE SEVEN LAMPS 85 
 
 eye, more than the grand outline renders necessary. But, where CHAP. 
 the rock joins the ground, where the shadow falls, and the eye 
 is not attracted, she puts in bold forms of ornament, large leaves 
 and grass, bunches of moss and heather, strong in their projec- 
 tion, and deep in their colour. Therefore, the architect must 
 act on precisely the same principle : his outward surfaces he may 
 leave the wind and weather to finish in their own way ; but he 
 cannot allow Nature to put grass and weeds into the shadows ; 
 ergo, he must do it himself ; and, whenever the eye loses itself 
 in shade, wherever there is a dark and sharp corner, there, if he 
 can, he should introduce a wreath of flower-work." 
 
 And here, again, is a passage in whicli the boy of nineteen 
 lays down a law with regard to ornamental design and 
 natural forms which he was to teach in lectures, treatises, 
 examples, and practice throughout his working life : — 
 
 " Of the ornament itself, it is to be observed that it is not 
 to be what is properly called architectural decoration (that which 
 is ' decorous,' becoming, or suitable to), namely, the combination 
 of minor forms, which repeat the lines, and partake of the essence 
 of the grand design, and carry out its meaning and life into its 
 every member ; but it is to be true sculpture ; the presenting of 
 a pure ideality of form to the eye, which may give perfect con- 
 ception, without the assistance of colour : it is to be the stone 
 image of vegetation, not botanically accurate, indeed, but suffi- 
 ciently near to permit us to be sure of the intended flower or leaf." 
 
 As the "Reply to Blackwood," written in 1836, was the 
 prelude to Modern Painters, so the " Poetry of Architec- 
 ture " was the prelude to Seven Lamps, Stones of Venice, 
 and The Tivo Paths} 
 
 The individuality of style in these papers is no less 
 marked. The sentences are put together in his character- 
 istic manner, with the form and the rhythm which were 
 his own. The juvenilia of many eminent men, if brought 
 together, may often be mistaken, the one for the other's ; 
 
 1 Any reader who cares to pur- Library Edition a Ifiri^e collection 
 sue this subject will find in the of parallel passages. 
 Notes, and by the Index, to the
 
 86 INDIVIDUALITY OF STYLE 
 
 CHAP, but who could doubt that a passage such as this was 
 -^^ • Kuskin's ?— 
 
 " But, if one principal character of the Italian landscape is 
 melancholy, another is elevation. . . . Tall mulberry trees, with 
 festoons of the luxuriant vine, purple with ponderous clusters, 
 trailed and trellised between and over them, shade the wide fields 
 of stately Indian corn ; luxuriance of lofty vegetation (catalpa, 
 and aloe, and olive) ranging itself in lines of massy light along 
 the wan champaign, guides the eye away to the unfailing wall 
 of mountain. Alp or Apennine ; no cold long range of shivery 
 grey, but dazzling light of snow, or undulating breadth of blue, 
 fainter and darker, in infinite variety ; peak, precipice, and 
 promontory passing away into the wooded hills, each with its 
 tower or white village sloping into the plain ; castellated battle- 
 ments cresting their undulations ; some wide majestic river 
 gliding along the champaign, the bridge on its breast and the 
 city on its shore ; the whole canopied with cloudless azure, 
 basking in mistless sunshine, breathing the silence of odori- 
 ferous air." 
 
 This might easily be taken for a passage from Modern 
 Painters ; and another of Ruskin's characteristic notes, the 
 satiric, is no less clearly struck : — 
 
 " All unity of feeling (which is the first principle of good taste) 
 is neglected; we see nothing but incongruous combination; we 
 have pinnacles without height, windows without light, columns 
 with nothing to sustain, and buttresses with nothing to support. 
 We have parish paupers smoking their pipes and drinking their 
 beer under Gothic arches and sculptured niches ; and qviiet old 
 English gentlemen reclining on crocodile stools and peeping out 
 of the windows of Swiss chalets." 
 
 Very nearly the whole of Ruskin (in his Modern Painters 
 period) is in these early essays — in embryo, in miniature. 
 
 The essays show, as Ruskin said in his autobio- 
 graphical notes, that he had already quite definitely taken 
 his own manner of writing : " a carelessly connected throwing 
 out of thoughts as they came into my head, modulating 
 the sentence in any time or rhythm that suited them, and
 
 INFLUENCE OF JOHNSON 87 
 
 only, when I began to lose breath, finishing it off with a CHAP. 
 neatly tied knot or melodious flourish." This is true, but ^^• 
 there are passages also in thoni which suggest a model : — 
 
 " It will be seen hereafter, when we leave the lowly valley for 
 the torn ravine, and the grassy knoll for the ribbed precipice, 
 that, if the Continental architects cannot adorn the pasture with 
 the humble roof, they can crest the crag with eternal battlements ; 
 if they cannot minister to a landscape's peace, they can add to its 
 terror," etc. 
 
 In passages such as this we are reminded of the calcu- 
 lated periods of Johnson. And this infiuence was at the 
 time strong upon Ruskin. The books which his father took 
 as companions of travel were foiir little volumes of Johnson ; 
 " and accordingly," says Ruskin, " in spare hours and on 
 wet days, the turns and returns of re-iterated Rambler and 
 iterated Idler fastened themselves in my ears and mind." 
 And fastened themselves, he added, to his lasting advantage. 
 " 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. 
 No other writer could have secured me, as he did, against 
 all chance of being misled by my own sanguine and meta- 
 physical temperament," 
 
 The papers on " The Poetry of Architecture," which were 
 illustrated by rough woodcuts after drawings by Ruskin, 
 attracted considerable attention. We have heard how Mr. 
 Sopwith, the engineer, considered himself highly privileged 
 in making the author's acquaintance at Oxford ; and the 
 Times, in reviewing a file of Loudon's serials, singled out 
 the articles as " the most remarkable in the Magazine." 
 " Kataphusin has the mind of a poet as well as the eye and 
 hand of an artist, and has produced a series of highly 
 poetical essays " (Feb. 2, 1839). This I beheve to be the'first 
 notice of any prose piece by Ruskin that appeared in the 
 press. Loudon, whose appreciation of the papers has been 
 recorded above, invited Ruskin to write on other subjects ; 
 and indeed it seems that no discussion started in the 
 Magazine was considered complete without a contribution
 
 88 AN IMPRESSIONIST PRINCIPLE 
 
 CHAP, from Kataphusin. This was a view of sucli cases whicli at 
 no time of liis life was Ruskin disinclined to take. The 
 same Architectural Magazine contains in its issues for 1838 
 a long series of papers by him on " The Convergence of 
 Perpendiculars." These are interesting as showing his in- 
 terest in geometrical problems and his skill in controversy. 
 They fill a place, too, among his juvenilia as foreshadowing 
 another work of his later life — TJte Elements of Perspective 
 (1859). But indeed, as some one has said, there are few 
 artistic or artistic-scientific problems that Ruskin has not 
 somewhere or other handled. And to this same early period 
 belongs an ingenious essay — to be found, of all places in the 
 world, in a book on Landscape Gardening ^ — upon " The Proper 
 Shapes of Pictures and Engravings." Incidentally Ruskin 
 asserts a principle which has been much emphasised by 
 modern art-critics : — 
 
 " When an artist is composing his picture, he supposes the 
 distribution of sight, which may be called, for convenience, the 
 attention of the eye, to be perfect ; and considers only that 
 indistinct and undetailed proportion of forms and colours, which 
 is best obtained from the finished drawing by half closing, and 
 thus thi'owing a dimness over the eye. But, in finishing, he works 
 on quite a different principle. One locality is selected by him, 
 as chiefly woithy of the eye's attention ; to that locality he 
 directs it almost exclusively, supposing only such partial dis- 
 tribution of sight over the I'est of the drawing, as may obtain a 
 vague idea of the tones and forms which set off and relieve the 
 leading feature. Accordingly, as he recedes from this locality, 
 his tones become fainter, his drawing more undecided, his lights 
 less defined, in order that the spectator may not find any point 
 disputing for authority with the leading idea." 
 
 This is by no means the only passage in Ruskin's writings 
 wherein he anticipated the theory of impressionism. An- 
 other essay, printed during his undergraduate days, is 
 entitled Whether Works of Art may, with iiropriety, he com- 
 
 1 The. Landscape Gardening and J. C. Loudon, 1840. Ruskin's 
 Lands''ape Architecture of the late contribution is dated " Oxford, 
 Humphry h'epton, a now edition by February 1830.''
 
 A FALSE LITERARY START 89 
 
 bined luith the Sublimity of Mature; and what would be the CHAP. 
 most appropriate situation for the Proposed Monument to 
 the MeTnory of Sir Walter Scott, in Edinburgh? This 
 question was exciting much controversy in the press; 
 something that " Kataphusin " had said in The Poetry of 
 Architecture was cited as supporting somebody's proposal, 
 and a deliverance was sought from the great man himself. 
 Ruskin sat down in his rooms at Christ Church, and 
 despatched an elaborate essay forthwith ; diverting himself, 
 gladly enough, we need not doubt, from his Aristotle, but 
 dividing this subject also into categories and deducing 
 conclusions " from demonstrable principles." The demon- 
 stration did not convince the Committee, for Ruskin 
 proposed a colossal statue on Salisbury Crags, whereas the 
 Scott monument ultimately took the form of what he 
 afterwards called " a small vulgar Gothic steeple " ^ in 
 Princes Street. 
 
 II 
 
 These prose pieces are remarkable for their command 
 of the medium which Ruskin was ultimately to adopt. 
 But they were little more than bye-work. It was into 
 verse, apart from and beyond the Newdigate competitions, 
 that he threw the greater part of his literary activity at 
 Oxford. He continued so to do for some years ; and even 
 after he had published the first volume of Modern Painters, 
 he still devoted serious thought to poetical composition. 
 Before he achieved ti-ue fame as a writer of prose, he 
 had made a false start as a poet. He described in later 
 years how some of his pieces " made my unwise friends 
 radiantly happy in the thought that I should certainly be 
 a poet, and as exquisitely miserable at the first praises of 
 then clear-dawning Tennyson." - The judicious reader, who 
 neither allows himself to read into Ruskin's verse a glamour 
 from his prose, nor to be blinded by the greater merits of 
 the prose to any merits in the verse, will probably sympathise 
 
 ' Fors Clavigera, Letter 31. 
 
 " Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. v. (udded in 1877) § 2.
 
 90 INTRODUCTION TO ROGERS 
 
 CHAP, a little with the hopes, while entirely applauding his 
 • ultimate choice. His real strength lay in other directions ; 
 but if at all times he missed being a poet, he sometimes 
 missed it only by a hair's breadth. Yet in verse it is just 
 the hair's breadth that makes all the difference. No one 
 ever marked out the dividing line more trenchantly than 
 Ruskin himself. In all the arts, he said, the difference 
 between the "all but" finest and "finest" is infinite;^ and 
 " with second-rate poetry in quality no one ought to be 
 allowed to trouble mankind." 2 Ruskin came to regard his 
 own poetic career, most clearly and decisively, as a false 
 start ; ?but it is among the curiosities of literary history 
 thatfhe took so long to discover the fact. 
 
 " My son," wrote his father to W. H. Harrison from 
 Venice (May 25, 1846), " has not written a line of poetry, . . . 
 he only 'regrets ever having written any. He thinks all his 
 own poetry very worthless, and considers it unfortunate that 
 he prematurely worked any small mine of poetry he might 
 possess. He seems to think the mine is exhausted, and 
 neither gold nor silver given to the world." Ruskin was 
 drawn into working the mine by his own precocious facility, 
 by the chances of literary introduction, by the encourage- 
 ment of his father, by a certain success in hitting the taste 
 of the time, and by the inspiration of first love. His pre- 
 cocious facility and his father's encouragement of it have 
 been described in an earlier chapter. The chance which 
 opened the way into print for his youthful verses came 
 about in this way : — Through a cousin, who was a clerk in 
 the house of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., he was introduced 
 to Thomas Pringle, the Scottish poet, at that time editor of 
 Friendsliiii s Offering, a fashionable Annual published by 
 the firm. Pringle was struck by the young Ruskin's gifts, 
 and printed some of his pieces in the Annual for 1835, 
 issued in the preceding autumn. Pringle did the boy a 
 further favour and, "as a sacred Eleusinian initiation and 
 Delphic pilgrimage," took him one day to see the poet 
 Rogers. The initiate, admitted to the Presence, betrayed 
 
 1 Cestus of Afjlaia, § 28. 
 
 ^ Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xii. § 6 n.
 
 AN ALBUM POET 91 
 
 inopportune zeal for Turner and the Old Masters. He CHAP. 
 congratulated the great man with enthusiasm on the beauty ^V. 
 of the engravings by which the Italy was illustrated ; and 
 when Pringle abruptly diverted the conversation, the boy 
 allowed his eyes to wander frankly to the Titians on the 
 crimson-silken walls. He was soon to know better, and 
 his letters to the poet, of a few years later, show him an 
 adept in the art of pleasant flattery. Pringle was succeeded 
 in the editorship of Friendsldps Offering by William Henry 
 Harrison. Of this worthy man, Ruskin wrote a memoir 
 entitled " My First Editor." He was a clerk in an Insurance 
 Office, and a city friend of Ruskin's father. Though not 
 an author himself, except in a very mild way, Harrison 
 lived near the rose. As editor of Friendship s Offering and 
 Registrar of the Royal Literary Fund he came across many 
 distinguished men in whose reflected radiance he sunned 
 himself with modest joy. He was a great admirer of 
 Ruskin's talent, and during the years of his editorship of 
 the annual (1837-41) had a first call on all the young 
 man's poems. Ruskin's connexion with Friendshij)' s Offer- 
 ing continued after Harrison ceased to edit it ; and his 
 contributions were also sought for in other publications of 
 the kind — such as The Amaranth, edited by T. K. Hervey, 
 and The Keepsake and The Booh of Beauty, both edited by 
 Lady Blessington. Indeed, no miscellany for the boudoir 
 was considered complete without a copy of verses from 
 "J. R." of "Christ Church, Oxford"; and the reviewers 
 seldom failed to pick out his contributions for quotation 
 and praise. It is a curiosity of criticism that papers which 
 ignored or derided Modern Painters were enthusiastic 
 over Ruskin's early poems. The Times had no notice 
 of the prose masterpiece, but found "real merit" in the 
 Album verses. The Athenceum, which fell savagely upon 
 Modern Painters, saw in the verses coinage "from the 
 true mint." The Literary Gazette discovered in Ruskin the 
 poet " all the force and spirit of a Byron " ; and another 
 literary journal of the day, the Torch, welcomed in him 
 "a new fountain for the old poetic waters." The young 
 Ruskin was, in short, one of the popular Album Poets of
 
 92 FIRST LOVE 
 
 CHAP, his time. Ruskin's father in a letter to Harrison (1839) 
 mentioned another " symptom of popularity " : " His lines 
 'Remembrance' from Friendships Offering, 1837-8, I see 
 in a cheap almanack this year, and his mother was surprised 
 by the same in a Magazin des Modes taken up at a milliner's." 
 Some lines from this piece may be given as a sample of the 
 kind of thing which won for Ruskin his first reputation : — 
 
 " I ought to be joyful ; the jest and the song 
 And the light tones of music resound through the throng ; 
 But its cadence falls dully and dead on my ear, 
 And the laughter I mimic is quenched in a tear. 
 
 For here ai-e no longer, to bid me rejoice, 
 The light of thy smile, or the tone of thy voice, 
 And, gay though the crowd that's around me may be, 
 I am alone, Adele, parted from thee." 
 
 Ruskin altered the eighth line to " I am alone, when 
 I'm parted from thee," and made it a further condition of 
 publication that the piece should not be signed or dated. 
 " The gravity of the University would be shocked," he said. 
 The gentleii] en-commoners, if any of them had chanced to 
 light on the Offering, would certainly have wanted to know, 
 who is She ? 
 
 Ill 
 
 By far the greater part of Ruskin's poems written 
 during his Oxford days were inspired directly or indirectly 
 by " Adele," one of the daughters of his father's partner, 
 M. Domecq. It was at Paris in 1833 that Ruskin first saw 
 the five daughters of his father's Spanish partner, then living 
 in the Champs Elysees. The eldest, Diana, was on the eve 
 of her marriage to one of Napoleon's officers, Count Maison. 
 The four others, much younger, were home for the holidays, 
 and the vision of them — for they were the first well-bred 
 and well-dressed girls ho had ever spoken to — sealed itself 
 in him. Three years later, Mr. Domecq came with the 
 four unmarried girls on a visit to Heme Hill : " a most 
 curious galaxy, or southern cross, of unconceived stars, 
 floating on a sudden into my obscure firmament of London
 
 COURTSHIP BY TRAGEDY 93 
 
 I suburb." Adele Clothilde, the eldest of the four, was a CHAP. 
 ! graceful blonde of fifteen. Four days, at the most, it took 
 to reduce him to ashes, but " the Mercredi des ccndres lasted 
 four years." Ituskin describes his courtship with ruthless 
 raillery. His method was not at all that of forgoing his 
 proper dowry, in order once and for one only to find his 
 love a sutlicicnt language ; on the contrary, he made dis- 
 play of his talents in their habitual fields. Accordingly, 
 i having " on any blessed occasion of tete-a-tete endeavoured 
 ■ to entertain his Spanish-born, Paris-bred, and Catholic- 
 hearted mistress with his own views upon the subjects of 
 I the Spanish Armada, the Battle of Waterloo, and the 
 i doctrine of transubstantiation," he proceeded to write a 
 i story of a bold and desperate lover, the " Bandit Leoni " and 
 I the Maiden Giuletta. This was printed in Friendship's 
 \ Offering, and Adele " laughed over it in rippling ecstasies 
 tof derision." He next sat down under the mulberry tree 
 in the back garden "in a state of majestic imbecility to 
 ^ write a tragedy on a Venetian subject in Avhich the sorrows 
 ; of his soul were to be enshrined in immortal verse." This 
 j piece entitled Marcolini was deemed by Ruslcin the best 
 \ of his despairing poems ; it shows greater power than many 
 , of the others, and power in a different direction. It cannot 
 be said, indeed, to disclose any skill in dramatic construc- 
 : tion; but the characters are well distinguished, and they 
 '. display themselves in animated and appropriate dialogue. 
 I There are passages also which show that Ruskin could catch 
 I Shakespeare's style as cleverly as in other pieces he caught 
 Scott's and Byron's and Shelley's. His prose was always 
 original; his verse, always reminiscent. But the tragedy 
 was given up, " because, when I had described a gondola, a 
 bravo, the heroine Bianca, and moonlight on the Grand 
 Canal, I found I had not much more to say." In 1838 
 Ruskin was thrown into the company of another young lady, 
 Miss Charlotte Withers, " not pretty, but quite pleasant to 
 see, especially if her eyes were looking your way, and her 
 mind with them." Perhaps he was not averse from showing 
 to his lad3'-love in imagination that she was not the only 
 girl in the world ; and Charlotte was more sympathetic.
 
 94 COURTSHIP BY ESSAY 
 
 CHAP. Ruskin's metliod had not been wholly unsuccessful in this 
 
 TV 
 
 case, and she carried off, with confidential pride, an Essay 
 which he wrote for her, by way of sequel to a discussion 
 between them, " On the Relative Dignity of the Studies of 
 Painting and Music and the Advantages to be Derived 
 from their Pursuit." This piece is of no interest in the 
 development of Ruskin's mind. He was arguing for victory ; 
 Miss Withers had taken the side of music ; and Ruskin was 
 determined to let the painters have the best of it. In the 
 serious thought which he devoted throughout life to the 
 subject of music, he insisted always on its intellectual 
 appeal; in this youthful essay he marks it down for ear- 
 tickling sensualism. Miss Withers stayed at Heme Hill 
 a few days only, was not invited again, and shortly after- 
 wards was married by her parents to a well-to-do Newcastle 
 trader. In the autumn of the same year Mr. Domecq 
 brought his daughters again to England, to finish their 
 schooling at a convent near Chelmsford. Ruskin's mother 
 took him down with her on a visit, when the young ladies 
 were allowed to chat with him in the parlour, and it was 
 arranged that they should spend their holidays at Heme 
 Hill. The mother must have dismissed the idea of her 
 Puritan-bred son actually marrying a Spanish Catholic as 
 unthinkable; the fathers on each side would have seen 
 conveniences in such a finale, and Ruskin's father had indul- 
 gent memories of his own youth. To the young lover there 
 was solace in the thought " that she was really in England, 
 really over there, and that she was shut up in a convent 
 and couldn't be seen by anybody, or spoken to, but by 
 nuns; and that perhaps she wouldn't quite like it, and 
 would like to come to Heme Hill again, and bear with me 
 a little." She came and stayed some weeks ; he was as 
 devoted, but she as lightly laughing, as before. The fidelity 
 of Mr. Traddles with the conversational abilities of Mr. Toots 
 were no recommendation, even though supplemented by 
 poetical offerings, in the eyes of the sparkling Adele. She 
 returned to Paris, and a year later negotiations were entered 
 upon for her marriage to Baron Duquesne, a rich and hand- 
 some Frenchman.
 
 VERSES TO ADi:LE 95 
 
 The less satisfied the lover was with himself in real life, CHAP. 
 the more he sought to invest his feelings with worthy utter- ^^• 
 ance in verse. The whole story of his love may thus be 
 traced in the Poems; in the passionate yearning of the 
 earlier lines, and, when the final disappointment came, in 
 the bitterness of memory and its pang. After the first visit 
 of Adele and her sisters to Heme Hill, Ruskin celebrates her 
 "glory" and her "grace," and lingers over her "last smile." 
 She departs; he sends her "Good-night" across the sea. 
 Her name is named in company ; he falters for a moment, 
 but, in lines of real dignity and compression, nerves himself 
 to be firm. Among many Verses to Adele in absence, during 
 1837 and 1838, are "The Mirror," "Nature Untenanted," 
 and " Remembrance." In 1838 Adele and her sisters spent 
 the Christmas holidays at Heme Hill ; the song, " Though 
 thou hast not a feeling for one Who is torn by too many 
 for thee," sufficiently tells the story. Other pieces of the 
 same date and motive are " Memory," " The Name," and 
 " Fragment from a Meteorological Journal." The fact of 
 Adele's betrothal was for a time kept from Ruskin's know- 
 ledge by his parents, who feared that the disappointment 
 would interfere with his studies at Oxford. The verses, " To 
 Adele," written in the first half of 1839, are not yet without 
 all hope. At about this time Ruskin's parents, distressed 
 at his discomfortable state of mind about Adele, threw him 
 into the society of a daughter of a City merchant, Mr. 
 Wardell. But Miss V^ardell's charms did not appeal to him, 
 and she died soon afterwards. Meanwhile, at Christmas 
 1839, Adele and her sisters were again at Heme Hill. It 
 is not clear whether Ruskin at this time kncAv the truth or 
 not. The negotiations for the marriage continued, and it 
 took place in March 1840. The long poem, "Farewell," is 
 dated as if on the eve of their last meeting and parting. 
 This piece was, as we learn from the correspondence 
 between Ruskin's father and W. H. Harrison, a particular 
 " pet " with its author. He took unusual pains with it, 
 polishing it and polishing again. 
 
 Another serieslof Ruskin's Poems — the pieces on themes 
 taken from Herodotus— were in some cases written as a relief
 
 96 HERODOTEAN POEMS 
 
 CHAP, from the sorrows of unrequited love, but partly also in 
 ^^- connexion with his studies at Oxford. " I wrote ' The Tears 
 of Psammenitus,' " he told a College friend, " and five or six 
 other pieces, as ilkistrations of Herodotus, partly because 
 I thought there was a great deal of the picturesque lying 
 neglected in this historian, and partly to fix the history in 
 my mind while I read it." " The Scythian Grave," " The 
 Scythian Banquet Song,"" The Scythian Guest," " Aristodemus 
 at Platcea," "The Last Song of Arion," and "The Recreant" 
 were all thus founded on Herodotus. Schlegel, before 
 Rusldn's time, in his "Arion," and MatthcAv Arnold, after him, 
 in " Mycerinus," went to the same source. Ruskin's pieces 
 are spirited, but imitative. His father complained that they 
 savoured too strongly of " the shambles" ; and in most of them 
 there is a note of gruesome realism in marked contrast to 
 Ruskin's habitual theory and practice in art. The morbid 
 strain in them came from the depth of his wounded passion. 
 In his diary at Naples (March 12, 1841), in a reference to 
 Adele's marriage, he recalls ''• that evening in Christ Church 
 when I first knew of it, and went staggering along down the 
 dark passage through the howling wind to Child's room, and 
 sat there with him working through interminable problems." 
 In the composition of the Herodotean poems, Rnskin found 
 a further distraction. His friend, Clayton, had been critical 
 of " Psammenitus," and he replied that " the thing was written 
 in two hours as a relief from strong and painful excitement." 
 This was the news of Adele's marriage, and the emotional 
 strain doubtless was a cause contributory to his breakdown 
 at Oxford. 
 
 IV 
 
 The poems of Nature, which Ruskin continued to write 
 occasionally until 1845, were more in his proper vein. Close 
 observation may be discerned in his earliest verses, and 
 a greater intensity of feeling gives to the later pieces a 
 corresponding intensity of expression. The " unrestrained 
 facility," noted by Ruskin's father as his son's besetting sin 
 in versification, often gives place in the later pieces to
 
 POETRY AND POETICAL PROSE 97 
 
 concentration. Yet even so there is more of rhetorical CHAP. 
 effort than of natural magic ; as in the opening lines of " The ^^* 
 Alps seen from Marengo (1844) " : — 
 
 " The glory of a cloud — without its wane ; 
 
 The stillness of the eaith — but not its gloom ; 
 The loveliness of life — without its pain ; 
 
 The peace — but not the hunger — of the tomb ! " 
 
 An eminent critic, in discussing the " truth and beauty " of 
 an Alpine description in Modern Pdinters, has only one 
 objection to suggest : " that Mr. Ruskin is there trying to 
 make prose do more than it can perfectly do ; that what he 
 is there attempting ho will never, except in poetry, be able 
 to accomplish to his own entire satisfaction." ^ The actual 
 process of Ruskin's experiments was the reverse. He sought 
 to accomplish in prose what he found that he could not to 
 his satisfaction express in verse. " I perceived finally," he 
 wrote of his travels -in 1845, "that I could express nothing 
 I had to say, rightly, in that manner ; and the peace of mind 
 which returns to me as the principal character of this 
 journey was perhaps, in part, the result of this extremely 
 wholesome conclusion." 
 
 Why was Ruskin not a poet ? Many pages have been 
 written by ingenious pens on the question in a more general 
 form — on the incompatibility between poetry and prose- 
 poetry — and I have read disquisitions also on the particular 
 case of Ruskin ; but I have never felt that these discussions 
 carry us very far. " No writer of florid prose," says Landor, 
 " ever was more than a secondary poet." Plato had failed in 
 poetry, before he turned to imaginative prose ; and Carlyle's 
 verse was always wooden. "Poetry," continues Landor, "in 
 her high estate is delighted with exuberant abundance, but 
 imposes on her worshipper a severity of selection." And 
 certainly Ruskin's mind was often too discursive to take 
 kindly to the restraints of poetic form. Yet he was a writer 
 of stately as well as of florid prose ; and some writers of 
 stately prose have been among the greatest of poets. Ruskin 
 had to the full the poet's vision and the poet's sensibility ; 
 
 ' Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism. 
 VOL. 1. G
 
 98 ABANDONMENT OF VERSE-WRITING 
 
 CHAP, he had, too, facility, and a fine sense of rhythmic cadence. 
 But the poet's gift of constructive imagination, and the magic 
 of concentrated expression, were denied to him. It has been 
 suggested that the analytical turn of his mind, and the 
 sub-humorous strain of irony in his thought, were incon- 
 sistent with poetical expression ; but Byron was analytical 
 and ironic. It has been said, again, that he had no ex- 
 perience of life when he wrote his verses ; but this explana- 
 tion is not wholly adequate, for Ruskin's experience of love 
 had been real and deep enough. Such discussions seem only 
 to bring us back to what is written in the Book : " there are 
 diversities of gifts," and " the wind bloweth where it listeth." 
 
 The extinction of the poetic impulse in Ruskin, and his 
 recognition that his true medium was prose, were a grievous 
 disappointment to his father. On the tour of 1845 he had 
 sent home some pieces. His father's verdict was severe 
 (June 26) :— 
 
 " I am, to speak truth, disappointed in the hist lines sent 
 home, and you see by enclosed Haiiison is of same opinion. 
 The Scythian Banquet Song, which you think little of, was the 
 greatest of all your poetical productions. All the Herodotean 
 pieces show real power, and have a spice of the devil in them. 
 I mean nothing irreverent, but the fervour and fury and passion 
 of true poetry. . . . Your poetry at present has got among your 
 prose, and it may be well to leave it there till the important book 
 be done, which I am certain will overflow with poetry." 
 
 Ruskin replied from Parma (July 1 0) : — 
 
 " I am not surprised at the lines being so far inferior, but I 
 do not think I have lost power. I have only lost the exciting 
 circumstances. The life I lead is far too comfortable and regular, 
 too luxurious, too hardening. I see nothing of human life, but 
 waiters, doganiers, and beggars. I get into no scrapes, sufifer 
 no inconveniences, and am subject to no species of excitement 
 except that arising from art, which I conceive to be too abstract 
 in its nature to become productive of poetry, unless combined 
 with experience of living passion. I don't see how it is possible 
 for a person who gets up at four, goes to bed at ten, eats ices 
 when he is hot, beef when he is hungi-y, gets rid of all claims
 
 THE POET AND HIS EDITOR 99 
 
 of charity by giving money which he hasn't earned, and of those CHAP, 
 of compassion by treating all distress more as picturesque than 
 as real — I don't see how it is at all possible for such a person 
 to write good poetry. . . . Nevertheless I believe my mind has 
 made great progress in many points since that poetical time. I 
 perhaps could not — but I certainly would not, now write such 
 things. I might write more tamely, but I think I should write 
 better sense, and possibly if I were again under such morbid 
 excitement, I might write as strongly, but with more manly 
 meaning. I believe, however, the time for it has past." 
 
 There was excellent sense in this reply ; and I have some- 
 times thought that the best things about Ruskin's poems 
 are the letters which he wrote concerning them. The 
 young Ruskin ought from his upbringing to have been an 
 insufferable prig, but he was blessed with a saving sense of 
 humour. His letters about his poems, whether of expostula- 
 tion with editors who cut them down, or of apology to friends 
 who cut them up, or of deprecation to a fond father who 
 doted on them, are all alike remarkable for fun and sense. 
 He had sent to Harrison some verses entitled '' The Mirror," 
 beginning : — 
 
 " It saw, it knew thy loveliness, 
 
 Thy burning lip, and glancing eye, 
 Each lightning look, each silken tress 
 
 Thy marble forehead braided by. 
 Like an embodied music, twined 
 About a brightly breathing mind." 
 
 We proceed with " breathing " and " glowing " and " faces " 
 and " graces," and conclude with : — 
 
 " My thoughts are with that beauty blest, 
 A breathing, burning, living vision," 
 
 and so forth, and so forth. The editor, in submitting the 
 proof, thought that there was too much burning and suggested 
 emendations. The poet thus replied : — 
 
 {To W. H. Harkison.) " Oxford, April 8, 1837. . . . Burn- 
 iiuj lip. You put my ' bui-nings ' in such formidable juxtaposition
 
 100 THE CHOICE OF EPITHETS 
 
 CHAP, that I begin to think there is some probability of my setting the 
 ^^ • Thames on fire, although I am afi^aid the more general opinion 
 would be that there was ' burning instead of beauty.' I am afraid, 
 however, that in this first instance we must blaze away. Rosy 
 and ruby are somewhat the worse for the wear ; they are besides 
 weak, and only simply colour, withovit expression. The idea that 
 I wish to convey by 'burning' is that of a lip which when it 
 opens is like the opening of a crimson cloud when the west is 
 most glorious, with the smiles and the expression flashing about 
 it, and from it, like the sheet lightning when it gleams fastest 
 and brightest, kindling its accents into a quivering music. . . . 
 Kindling is the only word which could be substituted, and that 
 is a spindle-shanked sort of a word, which I do not think you 
 will consider preferable to the oiiginal epithet, that is, if we can 
 get rid of our inferior conflagration in the last stanza. . . . 
 
 "And now for some ' visionary lines ' — suppose, in the second 
 of the last verse we were to knock down the fire and breath with 
 an ' everlasting ' by way of a ' temporary ' relief, or, let me see 
 what epithets can we apply to visions in general : there are sweet 
 visions, like a baby's anticipation of sugared bread and butter, 
 or a school-boy's estimation of the probable magnitude of future 
 plum-cakes ; there are misty visions, like those of the same young 
 gentleman, after receiving a disagreeable piece of persuasion, in 
 his dexter or sinister optic. There are perpetual visions, like 
 a curate's of a mitre ; angelically rare visions, like a young, 
 and golden visions like an old, lawyer's of a litigious client ; 
 mysterious visions, like a pig's of the mind ; awful visions, like 
 the first glance of a poet's manuscript — but none of these epithets 
 will apply to this sort of vision. . . ." 
 
 Against a plea for the restoration of pages and pages of the 
 "Bandit's" passion, the editor had been adamant; on the 
 epithets in the shorter piece, he was more yielding. " The 
 Mirror " was left to breathe and burn — to the heart's 
 content of the poet, and to the further ripphng merri- 
 ment, it is to be feared, of his lady-love. But even with 
 reo-ard to the pieces which enshrined his most passionate 
 feelings, the poet was able to perceive the humorous side 
 of thino-s. The "Farewell," mentioned above (p. 95), is a
 
 THE POET AND HIS FRIENDS 101 
 
 long poem, and Ruskin wrote to the editor (March 22, CHAP. 
 May 9, 18-40) :— I^- 
 
 " I rather think, on looking over the long dream-poem, that 
 we must cut it into two, for in the first or second stanza I inform 
 the young lady that on the whole it is my opinion she had much 
 better ' Let silence guard, with calm control, The grief my words 
 were weak to tell,' and hers ' unable to console ' ; after which 
 expression of opinion, I proceed to indulge her with a treatise 
 on oneirology some 250 heroics long." 
 
 " I can't tell what to call the long thing. If it is to be a 
 Farewell, it is a deuced lucky thing there's no omnibus waiting." 
 
 Ruskin was doubtless chary of showing his poems to his 
 Christ Church companions. Bob Grimston, for instance, 
 would not have had much sympathetic indulgence for 
 despairing Bandits, breathing Mirrors, or agonised Farewells. 
 Even Acland found the recitation of them a little tedious. 
 And in later years Ruskin had no weakness whatever for 
 his poems, and would admit no indulgence to be shown 
 to them by others.^ In 1861 Mrs. Penny, a popular 
 writer of the day, and a daughter of Ruskin's College 
 tutor, Mr. Brown, had quoted in her novel The Romance 
 of a Dull Life, as very beautiful, Ruskin's lines on " The 
 Hills of Carrara." They are among his better pieces, and 
 have found their way into some anthologies ; but here is 
 Ruskin's criticism, illustrated by references to poems which 
 every reader will recognise, such as Shelley's translation of 
 the Hymn to Mercury, Hood's Death Bed, and Malherbe's 
 Consolation a M. du Perier : — 
 
 {To his Father.) "Lucerne, 2nd Nov. 1861. — I shall have 
 pleasure in seeing the ' Romance of a dull life ' — but not if there 
 are more of my verses in it. These are melodious enough — but 
 alas, they are but nonsense, written in the loosest and most 
 
 ^ Collectors who possess the 1849, may question this statement, 
 
 reprint of Leoni, purporting to But these reprints and " prefaces " 
 
 have a preface by Ruskin dated were not Ruskin's, but literary 
 
 1868, or the reprint of IVic Snjthiun " fakes " : see Library Edition, 
 
 Guest, similarly prefaced and dated vol. i. p. 288, vol. ii. p. 102 n.
 
 102 A POEM ANALYSED 
 
 CHAP, inaccurate English. A sound and close criticism ol' them would 
 be as follows. 
 
 1. 'The couchant strength, etc., Of thoughts they keep, and throbs 
 they feel.' 
 
 " If a throb is felt, its strength cannot be ' couchant ' ; if unfelt, 
 it cannot be a ' throb.' By ' thoughts they keep,' does the 
 writer mean ' thoughts they keep thinking ' ? or ' thoughts they 
 keep to themselves ' ? In either case, the completed phrase is as 
 ungraceful as the contracted one is obscure. 
 
 2. ' May need an answering music,' etc. 
 
 " It is difficult to see how anything can be answered, when 
 nothing has been said. 
 
 3. ' Music to unseal.' 
 
 " ' Couchant strength ' is not usually ' unsealed.' You do not 
 * unseal a lion.' In the use of objects which can be unsealed, 
 such as documents or old wine, music is not the instrument likely 
 to be employed. 
 
 4. ' What waves may stir the silent sea.' 
 
 " Waves do not stir the sea. They are a result of the sea's 
 being stirred. 
 
 5. ' Beneath the low appeal ... Of winds unfelt,' etc. 
 
 "This would have been rather a pretty image if, in the course 
 of the preceding five lines, the writer had not forgotten what he 
 was talking about. The rise of waves in consequence of the action 
 of wind at a distance might prettily illustrate the existence of 
 emotion for which there was no visible cause, but it cannot illus- 
 trate the Absence of emotion for which a cause is presumed to 
 exist. 
 
 6. ' Within the winding shell ... of those that touch it well.' 
 
 "Shells used for musical purposes were of two kinds. Spiral 
 shells were not ' touched,' but blown like trumpets, and made 
 loud and disagreeable noises, for the tones of which, indeed, no 
 one could be answerable but the performer. The shells which 
 (or, more accurately, the strings of which) were ' touched ' to pro- 
 duce sound, were originally tortoise sliells, and had no ' windings.'
 
 TESTS OF GOOD POETRY 103 
 
 The writer's fancy appears to be as much at fault as his informa- CHAP. 
 
 tion, for we are much mistaken if the whole passage is not merely 
 a blundering reminiscence of two others, one of which he has not 
 understood, and the other he has never appreciated — namely, 
 Shelley's beautiful ' Up from beneath his hand a tumult went ' 
 of Mercury playing the first tortoise-shell lyre ; and Woi-dsworth's 
 exquisitely accurate — 
 
 ' Applying to his ear, 
 The Convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell.' 
 
 I should not at the time have liked this criticism to appear in the 
 Times, but it would have done me ' yeoman's service ' if it had. 
 
 " You may nearly always know in a moment whether poetry is 
 good and true, by writing it in prose form. If it then reads like 
 strong and sensible or tender and finished prose, and is perfectly 
 simple, it is good : — 
 
 You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet ; where is the Pyrrhic phalanx 
 gone ? of two such lessons, why forgot the nobler and the manlier 
 one? 
 
 But, when the dawn came, dim, and sad, and chill with early 
 showers, her quiet eyelids closed. She had another morn than ours. 
 
 Mais elle etait du monde, oil les plus belles choses Ont le pire 
 destin ; Et, rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses, L'espace d'un 
 matin. 
 
 " In some cases reversion is admissible — or even desirable — but 
 it is always a fault if it will not read as a vigorous prose form also. 
 Intense simplicity is the first characteristic of the greatest poetry. 
 I wish I could let you hear the melodious simplicity of the Greek 
 epitaph on the Slave, Zosima : — 
 
 ' Zosima, while she lived, was a slave in her body only. 
 Now, she has gained freedom for that, also,' 
 
 Or this, on Epictetus : — 
 
 ' I was Epictetus, a slave, and a cripple, 
 Penniless, and Beloved of the Gods. ' " 
 
 Mr. Harrison, who treasured his publication of Ruskin's 
 poems as the eagle's feather of his editorship, wrote piously 
 
 IV.
 
 104 SELF-CRITICISM 
 
 CHAP, to ask what was " the classical source of insph-ation " for a 
 " passage in " The Last Song of Arion " : — 
 
 " Farewell ! but do not grieve : thy pain 
 Would seek me where I sleep ; 
 Thy tears would pierce, like rushing rain, 
 The stillness of the deep." 
 
 Ruskin replied with this piece of general criticism : — 
 
 (To W. H. Harrison.) "Denmark Hill, Monday. — I was 
 quite horror-struck when, on reading over the note you so kindly 
 left m^ I discovered that it referred not to ' Orion,' the Epic [by 
 Home], as I thought, but to a piece of nonsense of which I was 
 not vain when I wrote it, and am now most heartily ashamed. 
 
 " I recollect showing it in a beseeching way to Henry Acland, 
 who, after reading it i)atiently (all honour to his friendship ! ) 
 all through, said, with a quiet, annihilating smile, * My dear R., 
 mightn't Arion have done something more than lament over his 
 country and his mistress ? ' The fact is, that every thnvght in it — 
 and it hasn't many— is so irretrievably well known and well used, 
 that I am as much surprised at any trouble being taken about 
 their genealogy, as if I had been asked for a list of all the snufiE- 
 stained fingers which a dirty Scotch one-pound note — coming to 
 pieces in mine from sheer age — might possibly have mouldered 
 through. Nevertheless, I can very honestly say, respecting these 
 same dirty notes, that I found them in my own purse without 
 knowing how they came there ; and I believe their very common- 
 placeness arises from their being the genuine and natural ex- 
 pressions of true passion at any age of the world, rather than 
 from their being borrowed by one writer from another. . . . 
 
 " I was about to say, that when I spoke of the feeling in 
 question being common to all ages of the world, it was not among 
 all nations that I suppose it to have been so, but only among those 
 with whom some traditions of the Patriarchal or Mosaic dis- 
 pensations had distinctly remained, or in modern times among 
 Christians. Almost all true gliost feeling is, I believe. Christian ; 
 but the most pure and beautiful expression of this particular one 
 that I recollect is in the Border ballad — 
 
 ' . . . . The Bairnies grat ; 
 The Mither, though under the mools, heard thatj
 
 COLLECTED "POEMS OF J. R." : 1850 105 
 " I conceive that nothing can beat the purity and precision CHAP. 
 
 and intensity of this poetic diction. The bringing the unimportant 
 word to the end of the line when you are compelled to lay the 
 right emphasis upon it by the rhyme; the straightforward un- 
 adorned simplicity of it; the quiet order of the natural words — 
 how superior to my turgid piece of cold, degrading, and unnatural 
 simile : ' Thy tears would pierce like rushing rain ' — as if rain 
 ever did pierce to a dead man's ear, or as if tears were no more 
 to be counted of than protoxide of hydrogen, or as if a dying man 
 would have thought of the tears being like anything but them- 
 selves, or as if a loving man would ever have compaied his 
 mistress's tears to a thunder-shower. . . ." 
 
 The two old friends— Ruskin's father and W. H. Harrison 
 — mincjled their reo^rets and contrived their consolations when 
 the poet abandoned the role. " I wish," wrote the father to 
 Harrison (July 16, 1845), " that his mother may not be right 
 after all, and our son prove but a poet in prose." The 
 mother was right, and Ruskin's choice was final. The father 
 determined to console himself by raising a memorial to his 
 hopes. " I want," he wrote to Harrison (March 8, 1847), 
 " to get the best of all he has ever penned selected and 
 printed in a good type, but not published ; in fact, to be 
 merely called ' Poems, etc., printed but not published by J. R. 
 They are worth collecting for a family Record, and the 
 expense would not be great, if I could get his own consent ; 
 but I believe I should have both him and his mama aofainst the 
 project." Ruskin had not the heart to exercise an absolute 
 veto, and three years later the project was carried out by his 
 father and Harrison. The privately-printed volume is in its 
 genuinely original form the rarest of Ruskiniana. Only 
 tifty copies were printed, and of these several were subse- 
 quently destroyed by Ruskin. The volume was, however, 
 reprinted some years later in America, where it had a con- 
 siderable sale; the reprint included, in addition to Ruskin's 
 own work, one spurious piece. Ruskin regretted the English 
 collection, and was much vexed when he heard of his 
 father giving copies away. "I am seriously annoyed," he 
 wrote to Dr. John Brown (Lucerne, Dec. 3, 1861), "by my 
 
 IV.
 
 106 REWARD OF HIS EARLY WRITINGS 
 
 CHAP, father's sending you those effete and vile verses of mine, 
 in which the good which they do by humiliation is neutral- 
 ised by the uuhealthiness of the discouragement and disgust 
 which seize me whenever I see or hear of them." 
 
 Ruskin, then, repented of his false start whole-heartedly. 
 " I wasted several good years of my life," he said, " in verse- 
 writing when I had nothing to say." ^ Yet it was not all 
 waste, either. " Though I shall always think," he wrote 
 elsewhere, " these early years might have been better spent, 
 they had their reward. As soon as I had anything really to 
 say, I was able sufficiently to say it." ^ The studies which 
 gave him something to say, and the impulse which came 
 upon him to say it, will be told in the next chapter. 
 
 1 My First Editor, § 7. 
 
 ^ Roadside Songs of Tuscany, Lib. Ed., xxxii. p. 98.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE CALL 
 
 (1840-1842) 
 
 "Thy lot or portion in life," said the Caliph Ali, "is seeking 
 after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it." — 
 Emerson. 
 
 The illness which ended Raskin's course at Oxford was 
 destined to set him in the path which led to Modern Painters. 
 He knew it not at the time ; he was still to be dragged about 
 in search of health, and to drift for a while somewhat aim- 
 lessly, as it seemed, on the current of circumstance from 
 day to day; he appeared to himself, on looking back, to 
 have been, for a year or two yet, " simply a little floppy and 
 soppy tadpole, — little more than a stomach with a tail to 
 it, flattening and wriggling itself up the crystal ripples and 
 in the pure sands of the spring-head of youth." " But there 
 Avere always good eyes in me," he adds ; and to those who 
 keep their eyes and their hearts open, the Call comes in due 
 season. An incident which occurred shortly after Ruskin 
 went down from Oxford was prophetic. On June 22, 1840, 
 he dined with Mr. Griffith, the picture-dealer, at Norwood, 
 and there for the first time met the man whom he was 
 afterwards to call his Earthly Master. He records the 
 occasion in his diary : — 
 
 " Introduced to-day to the man who beyond all doubt is the 
 greatest of the age ; greatest in every faculty of the imagination, 
 in every branch of scenic knowledge ; at once the painter and 
 poet of the day, J. M. W. Turner. Everybody had described 
 him to me as coarse, boorish, unintellectual, vulgar. This I 
 knew to be impossible. I found in him a somewhat eccentric, 
 keen - mannered, matter - of - fact, English - minded — gentleman : 
 
 107
 
 108 FIRST INTRODUCTION TO TURNER 
 
 CHAP, 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 
 manifestation, or intention of display, but flashing out occasionally 
 in a word or a look." ^ 
 
 Though Turner spoke kindly to Ruskin, he took no particular 
 notice of him on this occasion; but personal knowledge of 
 the man was now added to admiration of the artist. 
 
 Released from the pressure of work for the Schools, Ruskin 
 set himself to drawing and to quiet reading ; but presently 
 the bad symptoms returned, and the doctors ordered him 
 abroad to winter in Italy. His father left the office-desk, 
 and the party— father, mother, Ruskin, and Cousin Mary — 
 set out for a journey of ten months on the Continent. The 
 travel in beautiful country gave healthy stimulus to his 
 artistic faculties. He took counsel before starting with his 
 painter-friends, and received the usual conflict of advice. 
 " Harding said to me yesterday," he wrote to Acland, " ' Never 
 use a lead pencil, or a brush, when you are sketching from 
 nature ; do everything in chalk. I never made twenty 
 coloured sketches in my life.' Do Wint said to me, 'Never 
 take anything up but your brush and moist colours.' Roberts 
 advised pencil — and Turner everything, and I shall take 
 his advice, for your material should vary with your subject." 
 
 ^ Accordint^ to Dean Kitchin over Ruskin's shoulder, and said, 
 
 (who had the story from Bisliop ' The young man draws very nicely.' 
 
 Creighton), Ruskin had previously That was the first meeting of the 
 
 met Turner at Oxford. The "story two" {tit. George, vol. iv., 1901, 
 
 was told me," wrote Creighton, p. 29). Mr. Holman Hunt tells the 
 
 " by old Ryman the printseller. same story, adding that " thus 
 
 He told me that Ruskin as an began the personal friendship be- 
 
 undergraduate would sometimes tween the two " {Pre-Raphaelitism 
 
 draw in his parlour from the prints. and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 
 
 One day, while he was so engaged, 1905, vol. i. p. 323). One would 
 
 Turner came into the shop on busi- like to accept the tale ; but it seems 
 
 ness. Ryman told him there was incredible that Kuskiu should not 
 
 a young man drawing, and took have remembered and recorded the 
 
 him into the parlour. He looked incident, if it had really happened.
 
 ORDERED ABROAD: 1840-41 109 
 
 But the principal influence was that of David Roberts, whose CHAP. 
 sketches in Egypt and the Holy Land had been exhibited ^' 
 in the spring of this year. They " taught me," says Ruskin, 
 " of absolute good, the use of the fine point instead of the 
 blunt one ; attention and indefatigable correctness of detail ; 
 and the simplest means of expressing ordinary light and 
 shade on grey ground, flat wash for the full shadows, and 
 the heightening of the gradated lights by warm white." His 
 pencil was very busy throughout the tour. " I have got a 
 decent number of sketches," he wrote to a College friend, 
 " forty-seven large size, and thirty-four small." Many of 
 these have been exhibited; and the best of them show 
 remarkable decision and delicacy in pencil-touch. One of 
 them, of the Piazza S. Maria del Pianto, at Rome was 
 lithographed a year or two later in The Amateurs Portfolio 
 of Sketches, a collection issued by the firm of Colnaghi, In 
 another (now at Oxford), of the Casa Contarini Fasan at 
 Venice, Ruskin took some pride because " Prout was so 
 pleased with it that he borrowed it, and made from it 
 the upright drawing of the palace with the rich balconies 
 which now represent his work very widely as a chromo- 
 lithotint." 
 
 Of the first part of the tour, account was dutifully 
 rendered to his old tutor : — 
 
 {To the Rev. Thomas Dale.) "Rome, Dec. 31, 1840. ... We 
 sauntered leisurely enough through France, taking some six weeks 
 from Calais to Nice, and passing over most of the characteristic 
 portions of French landscape. ... The ignorance of the lower 
 classes seems about equal everywhere ; but in the north it is 
 active, energetic, feeling and enthusiastic, in the south dull, 
 degraded and slothful. La Vierge Noire, the presiding Deity of 
 Chartres Cathedral, is a little black lady about three feet high. 
 The devotion of the whole city to her is quite inexpressible; they 
 are perpetually changing her petticoats, making her presents of 
 pink pincushions, silk reticules, and tallow ' dips ' by the 
 hundredweight, with occasional silver or plated hearts in cases 
 of especial ingratiation. . . . The worshippers stagger dreamily 
 into the church, generally lame or weak with some chronic disease,
 
 110 LE PUY— CARRARA 
 
 CHAP, mutter their prayers in the mere fulfilment of peremptory habit, 
 kneel, seemingly without a desire, and rise, seemingly without 
 a hope. . . ." 
 
 — and so forth, with other remarks on benighted lands, 
 pleasing to the ear of Mr. Dale, and in accord with Ruskin's 
 own feelings at the time. Yet his heart was open to more 
 catholic impressions. He and his father visited the convent 
 of St. Michael, on the summit of the isolated peak of lava 
 at Le Puy. The cheerful simplicity, the happy sincerity, of 
 the Sister with whom they discoursed on the dividing points 
 of doctrine between Catholics and Protestants stayed in 
 his memory and bore fruit in time. Carrara greatly im- 
 pressed him, as appears from a letter to a friend : — 
 
 {To the Rev. E. Clayton.) — " Imagine a range of noble moun- 
 tains from 5000 to 7000 feet high, terminating in jagged and 
 inaccessible peaks, on whose bases, fourteen miles off, you can just 
 discern two little white chips, as if a cannon ball had grazed the 
 hills. These, as you get nearer, increase in apparent size till, 
 after a walk over an old Roman road paved with marble, you 
 arrive at the lowest, which you find to be a group of seven or eight 
 quarries, each the size of the great one on Headingdon, and the 
 last deep and large, in rocks of lump-sugar — exquisite, snow-white, 
 stainless marble — out of whose dead mass life is leaping day by 
 day into every palace of Europe." 
 
 The same thought is expressed in the verses, " The Hills 
 of Carrara," which Ruskin wrote at this time. We have 
 heard his ruthless criticism of certain lines in the poem, 
 but some others are worth citing : — 
 
 " Far in the depths of voiceless skies. 
 
 Where calm and cold the stais are strewed, 
 The peaks of pale Carrara rise. 
 
 Nor sound of storm, nor whirlwind rude. 
 Can break their marble solitude. . . . 
 
 But far beneath, in folded sleep, 
 
 Faint forms of heavenly life are laid. 
 
 With pale brows and soft eyes, that keep 
 Sweet peace of unawakened shade ;
 
 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF FLORENCE 111 
 
 Whose wreathed limbs, in robes of rock arrayed, CHAP. 
 
 Fall like white waves on human thought, *• 
 
 In fitful dreams displayed ; 
 Deep through their secret homes of slumber sought, 
 They rise immortal, children of the day, 
 Gleaming with godlike foims on earth, and her decay." 
 
 Had Ruskin read Michael Angelo's sonnet about the sculp- 
 tor giving life to the soul imprisoned in the marble? Per- 
 haps not yet, though he refers to it in the second volume 
 of Modern Painters. 
 
 From Carrara on to Pisa, Florence, Rome, and Naples. 
 The solemnity and purity of the architecture of Pisa im- 
 pressed him deeply ; but the first sight of Florence and 
 of Rome — an experience which makes an epoch in the lives 
 of many men — left Ruskin cold. His impressions, as he 
 Avrote them down at the time in his diary and in letters 
 to friends, were at any rate his own ; and some of them — 
 such as his opinion of St. Peter's— remained Avith him always ; 
 of others, and especially of his want of feeling for Florence, 
 he became, as he records in his autobiography, heartily 
 ashamed. Italian art, except only that of Michael Angelo, 
 was as yet a sealed book; and at Rome historical associa- 
 tions and archaeology made no appeal. " I was not quite 
 sure," he says, "whether Trajan lived before Christ or after, 
 and would have thanked, with a sense of relieved satisfaction, 
 anybody who might have told me that Marcus Antoninus 
 was a Roman philosopher contemporary with Socrates'" 
 His interest was that of the sketcher, not of the student. 
 The limitations of his outlook, and his varying moods, appear 
 successively in notes of travel : — 
 
 "Florence, Novemlev \Wi, 1840. — I have just been walking, 
 or sauntering, in the square of the statues, the air perfectly 
 balmy ; and I shall not soon forget, I hope, the impression left 
 by this square as it opened from the river, with the enormous 
 mass of tower above, — or of the Duomo itself. . . . Not that it is 
 good as architecture even in its own barbarous style. I cannot tell 
 what to think of it ; but the wealth of exterior marble is quite
 
 112 FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ROME 
 
 CHAP, overwhelming, and the notion of magnificent figures in marble and 
 bronze about the great square, thrilling, 
 
 '■^ Nov. l^th. — I cannot make up my mind about this place, 
 though my present feelings are of grievous disappointment.'' 
 
 {To the Rev. E. Clayton.) " Rome, Dec. 3, 1840. — I have not 
 made up my mind about St. Peter's : there is certainly a great 
 deal too much light in it, which destroys size ; it is kept a little 
 too clean, and the light colours of its invaluable marbles tell 
 gaudily, and the roof is ugly, mei-ely a great basket of golden 
 wickerwork ; but if you go into its details, and examine its 
 colossal pieces of sculpture which gleam through every shadow, 
 the thorough get tip of the whole, the going the whole hog, the 
 inimitable, the unimaginable art displayed in every corner and 
 hole, the concentration of human intellect and of the rarest and 
 most beautiful materials that God has given for it to work with, 
 unite to raise such feelings as we can have only once or twice 
 in our lives." 
 
 {To the Rev. T. Dale.) " Rome, Dec. 31, 1840. ... St. Peter's 
 I expected to be disappointed in. I was disgusted. ... In the city, 
 if you take a carriage and drive to express points of lionisa- 
 tion, I believe that most people of good taste would expect little 
 and find less. The Capitol is a melancholy rubbishy square 
 of average Palladian — modern ; the Forum, a good group of 
 smashed columns, just what, if it were got up, as it very easily 
 might be, at Virginia Water, we should call a piece of humbug — 
 the kind of thing that one is sick to death of in ' compositions ' ; 
 the Coliseum I have always considered a public nuisance, like Jim 
 Crow ; and the rest of the ruins are mere mountains of shattered, 
 shapeless brick, covering miles of ground with a Babylon-like 
 weight of red tiles. But if, instead of driving, with excited 
 expectation, to particular points, you saunter leisurely up one 
 street and down another, yielding to every impulse, peeping into 
 every corner, and keeping your observation active, the impression 
 is exceedingly changed. There is not a fragment, a stone, or 
 a chimney, ancient or modern, that is not in itself a study, not 
 an inch of ground that can be passed over without its claim of 
 admiration and offer of instruction, and you return home in 
 hopeless conviction that were you to substitute years for the
 
 ILL HEALTH 113 
 
 days of your appointed stay, they would not be enough for the CHAP. 
 estimation or examination of Rome. Yet the impression of this 
 perpetual beauty is more painful than pleasing, for there is a 
 strange horror lying over the whole city, which I can neither 
 describe nor account for ; it is a shadow of death, possessing and 
 penetrating all things. The sunlight is lurid and ghastly, though 
 so intense that neither the eye nor the body can bear it long; the 
 shadows are cold and sepulchral ; you feel like an artist in a 
 fever, haunted by every dream of beauty that his imagination ever 
 dwelt upon, but all mixed with the fever fear, I am certain 
 this is not imagination, for I am not iven to such nonsense, and, 
 eveia in illness, never remember feeling anything approaching 
 to the horror with which some objects here can affect me. It is 
 all like a vast churchyard, with a diseased and dying population 
 living in the shade of its tombstones." 
 
 {To W. H. Harrison.) " Naples, Jan. 30, 1841. ... I am 
 most thoroughly in my element here, having every possible source 
 of enjoyment — Apennines round a horizon of 150 miles, sheeted 
 with snow ; sea, such as you never saw — nor I neither till I got 
 here — blue and clear, as any sapphire ; fortresses and rocks more 
 than I can sketch — and a population whose every motion is a 
 study — and a Volcano. What more can one have on earth ? " 
 
 A perusal of the diary shows that Ruskin was at this 
 time suffering from much morbid languor. He was in 
 ill-health, he was still nursing unavailing memories of 
 Adele, and smarting from the disappointment of a 
 broken career at Oxford.^ References to his cough, to 
 trouble with his eyes, to wasted years at the University, 
 are frequent also in his letters of the time. At Rome, 
 at Christmas-time, he had an attack of fever; at Albano, 
 on the way back from Naples, the consumptive symptoms 
 returned, but passed away with the coming of the spring. 
 The morbid taint is apparent in his letters from Rome. 
 The weeks which he spent there gave him, however, many 
 excellent sketching-subjects, and other things more valuable. 
 
 ^ For instance : on occasion the merry guides " little thought 
 
 of lunch among the cindeis of of the dark ashes my spirit was 
 
 Monte Somma he remarks that lying in." 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 114 JOSEPH SEVERN AND GEORGE RICHMOND 
 
 CHAP. Acland had provided him with introductions to Joseph 
 Severn — the friend of all English visitors to Rome at 
 that time — and to George Richmond, then painting with 
 his elder brother, Tom, in a Roman studio. " What a 
 poetical countenance ! ' exclaimed " Keats's Severn," on 
 first catching sight of Ruskin on the stairs. With Severn, 
 Ruskin was in after years to be connected closely ; and 
 these days at Rome began a friendship with Richmond 
 which lasted throughout life. It was during this Roman 
 winter, too, that Ruskin saw, at many a musical service, 
 " above the bowed heads of the Italian crowd, for an instant 
 or two before she also stooped — or sometimes eminent in 
 her grace above a stunted group of them, — a fair English 
 girl, who was not only the admitted queen of beauty in 
 the English circle, of that winter in Rome, but was so, 
 in the kind of beauty which I had only hitherto dreamed 
 of as possible, but never yet seen living — statuesque severity 
 with womanly sweetness joined." Many years were to pass 
 before Ruskin saw his Egeria again; she was Miss ToUe- 
 mache, afterwards Mrs. Cowper-Temple, the ^/Xt; to whom 
 later editions of Sesame and Lilies are dedicated — a great 
 and beautiful influence on his later life. 
 
 In company with Severn and the Richmonds Ruskin 
 saw the galleries of Rome, and spent long evenings in 
 the talk of the studios. The young man was as full of 
 enthusiasm as any of them could be for Michael Angelo, 
 but " fired up under their feet in little splutters and spit- 
 fires of the most appalling heresies," speaking disrespectfully 
 of Raphael and Domenichino — much to his father's alarm. 
 " I'd give something now," wrote Ruskin to Richmond 
 in 1886, " to have heard something of Papa's consultations 
 with you about his Prodigal Son." But Ruskin went his 
 own way — leaving classical art on the other side, and con- 
 centrating his mind on what he found of picturesque in 
 Roman by-streets, and on the study of hills and clouds. 
 His mission in life, he used to say, was to teach people 
 to see, to be an interpreter of nature. How closely he 
 himself saw, how conscientiously he noted, is shown by 
 his diary; and the very refusal of his mind to receive
 
 TURNERTAN EFFECTS 115 
 
 strong impressions at this time from historical monuments CHAP, 
 or architecture or mediseval painting served to mark out ^• 
 the course which was leading to the first volume of Modern 
 Painters. " When every moment,"' he wrote to Harrison 
 from Naples, " offers some fresh change in cloud, or wave, 
 or hill, I should think it rank heresy to waste one moment's 
 thought on anything but observation." The entries in the 
 diary are often like those brilliant impressions by Turner 
 which may be seen in the water-colour rooms of the 
 National Gallery. We may see them now, but Ruskin 
 had not seen them. Many of them are of much the same 
 date as Ruskin's tour ; the artist was noting effects with 
 his brush ; his interpreter, Avith the pen. The coincidence 
 is not the least interesting of the events which link two 
 great names together. Here, for instance, is the entry made 
 at Sestri (Nov. 4, 1840) :— 
 
 "The clouds were rising gradually from the Apennines, frag- 
 ments entangled here and there in the ravines catching the level 
 sunlight like so many tongues of fire ; the dark blue outline of 
 the hills clear as crystal against a pale distant purity of green 
 sky, the sun touching here and there upon their turfy precipices, 
 and the white, square villages along the gulph gleaming like 
 silver to the north-west ; — a mass of higher mountain, plunging 
 down into broad valleys dark with olive, their summits at first 
 grey with rain, then deep blue with flying showers — the sun 
 suddenly catching the near woods at their base, already coloured 
 exquisitely by the autumn, with such a burst of robing, penetrat- 
 ing glow as Turner only could even imagine, set off by the grey 
 storm behind." 
 
 And here is a note made at Naples (Jan. 17, 1841): — 
 
 "There was an effect on St. Elmo I would have given any- 
 thing to keep — its beautiful outline was dark against streaks of 
 blue sky and white cloud — horizontal, — and yet its mass was 
 touched with sun in places, so as to give it colour and solidity ; 
 clouds like smoke, hovering on the hill below and enclosing the 
 .sky-opening, and the square masses of the city in shade, one or 
 two houses only coming out in fragments of sunlight ; the smoke
 
 116 DESCRIPTIVE PASSAGES IN THE DIARY 
 
 CHAP, from the palace-manufactory close to me rose in an oblique 
 column, terminating the group with a lovely line of blue mist. 
 It was a Turner." 
 
 The diary was written for no eyes but his own — " neither 
 to please papa," he says, " nor to be printed, with corrections, 
 by Mr. Harrison." The editor of Friendship's Offering, scent- 
 ing "good copy" in the impressions of his young genius 
 among romantic scenery, wrote to know what he was writ- 
 ing, and seems to have reminded him that Byron was said 
 to have composed on the Lake of Geneva. The bait was 
 artful, but Ruskin was not to be caught. " I have written 
 absolutely nothing," he replied, " and don't feel inclined." 
 The notes in his diary were for his own satisfaction, to 
 keep memory of things seen ; and one or two further extracts 
 are here given to show (as Ruskin himself claimed for them) 
 " the constant watchfulness upon which the statements in 
 Modern Painters were afterwards founded." The first of 
 the folloAving entries is the note of the ravine under Ariccia, 
 the subject of one of the oftenest quoted passages in Modern 
 Painters ; the remarks appended to the second entry were 
 added by Ruskin when he was going through the diary for 
 his autobiography : — 
 
 " Albano, Jan. 6. — Just beyond, descended into a hollow with 
 another village on the hill opposite, a most elegant and finished 
 group of church towers and roof, infinitely varied outline against 
 sky, descending by delicious colour and delicate upright leafless 
 sprigs of tree, into a dark rich toned depth of ravine, out of 
 which rose, nearer, and clear against its shade, a grey wall of 
 rock — an absolute miracle for blending of bright lichenous colour ; 
 our descending road bordered by bright yellow stumpy trees, 
 leaning over it in heavy masses (with thick trunks covered with 
 ivy and feathery leafage), giving a symmetry to the foreground ; 
 their trunks rising, from bold fragments of projecting tiers loaded 
 with vegetation of the richest possible tone, the whole thing for 
 about three minutes of rapidly changing composition absolutely 
 unparalleled in my experience, especially for its total independ- 
 ence of all atmospheric effect, being \inder a grey and unltroken
 
 IN WHAT SENSE A « WORD- PA INTER" 117 
 
 sky with raiii as bright as a first-iato Turuer. I got quite sick CHAP, 
 with delight." ^• 
 
 " Naples, Jan. 9. — Dressed yesterday at Mola by a window 
 commanding a misty sunrise over the sea — a grove of oranges 
 slo[)ing down to the beach, flushed with its light ; Gaeta opposite, 
 glittering along its promontory. Ran out to terrace at side of 
 the house, a leaden bit of roof, with pots of orange and Indian 
 tig. Tliere was a range of Skiddaw-like mountains rising from 
 the shore, the ravines just like those of Saddleback, or the west 
 side of Skiddaw ; the higher parts bright with fresh-fallen snow ; 
 the highest, misty with a touch of soft white, swift ^ cloud. . . . 
 The sun kept with us as we drove through the village ; — confined 
 streets, but bright and varied, down to the shore, and then under 
 the slopes of the snowy precipice, now thoroughly dazzling with 
 the risen sun, and between hedges of tall myrtle, into the plain 
 of Garigliano. A lieavy i-ain-cloud raced- us the ten miles, and 
 stooped over us, stealing the blue sky inch by inch, till it had 
 left only a strip of amber-blue^ behind the Apennines, the near 
 hills thrown into deep dark purple shade, the snow behind them, 
 first blazing — the only strong light in the picture — then in shade, 
 dark against the pure sky ; the grey above, warm and lurid — a 
 little washed with rain in parts ; below, a copse of willow coming 
 against the dark purples, nearly pure Indian yellow, a little 
 touched with red. . . ." 
 
 Has the reader noted the phrase cited above — "the 
 statements in Modern Painters'' ? Nothing angered Ruskin 
 more in later years than to hear himself praised as a 
 "word-painter," It seemed to imply, for one thing, that 
 people read his books more for the sound than for the 
 sense of them ; which is the last thing desired by a man 
 with a practical mission. We shall hear of this matter 
 again; but there were other reasons. He objected to be 
 
 * " Note the instant (marking chase, by rain-cloud is opposed, in 
 
 the imce of the cloud,— the work my last lectures on sky, to the 
 
 of ' Coeli Enarrant ' having been guthering of rain-cloud all through 
 
 begun practically years before this. the air, under the influence of 
 
 See below also of the rain-cloud." plague wind." [/f?-] 
 [J. R. in Prceterita.] ^ " Palest transparent blue 
 
 2 (( 
 
 This distinct approach, or passing into gold." [/t7.]
 
 118 THE ENCHANTMENT OF VENICE 
 
 CHAP, called '' word-painter " because what he claimed for his 
 descriptions was scientific exactness. Hence his use of the 
 word "statements" above; just as, in describing the "Snow- 
 storm," he emphasised the significance of the fact that 
 Turner, in an explanatory note in the catalogue, called 
 himself not " the artist " but " the author." Ruskin, like 
 Turner, " felt bound to record what he saw." And these 
 diaries illustrate another point. The richness, the glow of 
 colour, even the music of Ruskin's earlier books, were not 
 all artifice, and not at all affectation. They were the 
 natural vehicle of his thought. 
 
 All traces of languor disappeared as Ruskin drew near, 
 in May, to Venice. He had as yet seen her only once, and 
 that six years before when he was still a child. The later 
 descriptions in The Stones of Venice were to be mingled 
 with a note from passing bells. Something, too, was lost 
 from the romance of the approach when, as in the days 
 of Ruskin's later visits, the city in the sea was connected 
 by the railroad-causeway with the land. But now in 1841 
 all was the rapture as of an enchanted world — the start 
 from the gate of Padua in the morning ; the first sight of 
 Venice as the boat shot into the open lagoon from the canal 
 of Mestre ; the gliding past the belfry of St. George of the 
 Sea-weed or the shrine of the Madonna dell' Acqua ; the 
 coming of the gondola-beak "inside the door at Danieli's, 
 when the tide was up, and then, all along the canal sides, 
 actual marble walls rising out of the salt sea, with hosts 
 of little brown crabs on them, and Titians inside." And the 
 bliss, too, of the days spent in sketching, when St. Mark's 
 and the Ducal Palace were as yet unrestored ! Ruskin 
 recalled some of the rapture in a letter written, forty 
 years on, to his Venetian friend, Count Zorzi : — 
 
 "Of all the happy and ardent days which, in my earlier life, 
 it was granted me to spend in this Holy Land of Italy, none 
 were so precious as those which I used to pass in the bright 
 recess of your Piazzetta, by the pillars of Acre ; looking some- 
 times to the glimmering mosaics in the vaults of the Church ; 
 sometimes to the Square, thinking of its immortal memories ; 
 sometimes to the Palace and the Sea. No such scene existed
 
 HEALTH RECOVERED 119 
 
 elsewhere in Europe, — in the world ; so bright, so magically CHAP, 
 visionary, — a temple radiant as the flowers of nature, venerable * • 
 
 and enduring as her rocks, arched above the rugged pillars which 
 then stood simply on the marble pavement, where the triumphant 
 Venetian conqueior had set them." 
 
 " I have found nothing in all Italy comparable to Venice," 
 he wrote at the time to his friend Clayton ; " it is insulted by 
 a comparison with any other city of earth or water " ; and 
 in his diary (May 8) : " Thank God I am here ; this and 
 Chamouni are my two homes of earth." Of days spent on 
 the lagoon, there is a recollection in verse in the lines, 
 "La Madonna dell' Acqua," included by Grant Duff in his 
 " Victorian Anthology " : — 
 
 *' Around her shrine no earthly blossoms blow, 
 No footsteps fret the pathway to and fro ; 
 No sign nor record of departed pi-ayer, 
 Print of the stone, nor echo of the air ; 
 Worn by the lip, nor wearied by the knee, — 
 Only a deeper silence of the sea. ..." 
 
 But his days at Venice were mostly spent in sketching 
 and in watching, and there are many entries m the diary, 
 such as this (the italics and the exclamation marks were 
 added when he was reading over the notes in after years) : — 
 
 {May 12.) " When I left the square — before the sunset — at 
 it rather — there was a light such as Turner in his maddest moments 
 never came up to ! ! It turned the masts of the frigate into 
 absolute pointed fire, and the woods of the Botanic Gardens 
 took it in the same say — not as if it were light on them, but in 
 them ; it was impossible to believe it was not autumn ; and the 
 brick buildings far over the lagoon blazing in fine crimson. When 
 it left the earth and got into the sky it turned it as usual into 
 the purple grey with red touches ; but one effect new to me 
 was a stray i-ay which caught vertically on a misty rain-filled 
 cloud, and tiu-ned it into a perpendicular pillar of crimson haze 
 like the column that led the Israelites." 
 
 It was an attack on some of Turner's "mad" visions of 
 Venice that was presently to rouse Ruskin to action ; and
 
 120 GOOD RESOLUTIONS 
 
 CHAP, llie studies of light wliicli lie was now making wei'e to be 
 ^- greatly useful to him. 
 
 From Venice, Ruskin travelled by Milan and Turin to 
 Susa, and over the Pass of Mont Cenis. The air of the 
 Campagna and the artificial excitement of new scenes and 
 interests, had probably been just what his physical state did 
 not require ; but the Alpine cure for cases such as his had 
 not then been discovered. Among the mountains he re- 
 covered at once health and spirits. His first morning 
 among the hills after the long months in Italy, he accounted 
 a turning-point in his life : — 
 
 " I woke from a sound tired sleep in a little one-Avindowed 
 room at Lans-le-bouig, at six of the summer morning, June 2nd 
 1841 ; the red aiguilles on the north relieved against pure blue — 
 the great pyramid of snow down the valley in one sheet of eastern 
 light. I dressed in three minutes, ran down the village street, 
 across the stream, and climbed the grassy slope oxi the south 
 side of the valley, up to the first pines. I had found my life 
 again ; — all the best of it. What good of religion, love, admiration 
 or hope, had ever been taught me, or felt by my best nature, 
 rekindled at once ; and my line of work, both by my own will 
 and the aid granted to it by fate in the future, determined for 
 me. I went down thankfully to my father and mother, and told 
 them I was sure I should get well." 
 
 Ruskin might have said very literally with the Psalmist : 
 " I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my 
 help." The return of buoyancy led to good resolutions at 
 Geneva a few days later : — 
 
 " J%me 6. — Pouring rain all day, and slow extempore sermon 
 from a weak-voiced young man in a white arched small chapel, 
 with a braying organ and doggerel hymns. Several times, about 
 the same hour on Sunday mornings, a fit of self-reproach has 
 come upon me for my idling at present, and I have formed 
 resolutions to be always trying to get knowledge of some kind 
 or other, or bodily strength, or some real, available, continuing 
 good, lather than the mere amusement of the time. It came on
 
 WHAT TO DO NEXT? 121 
 
 me to-day vtry strongly, and I would give anything and every- CHAP. 
 thing to keep myself in the temper, for I always slip out of it ''^• 
 
 next day." 
 
 II 
 
 Ruskin returned *to England from his long tour in search 
 of health at the end ot" June, and after some weeks at home 
 was sent to complete his cure under Dr. Jephson at Leam- 
 ington. There Ruskin settled down to various studies — 
 reading the Foissons Foasilea of Agassiz, trying to paint 
 vignettes in imitation of Turner, writing bits of his own 
 King of tke Golden River. Occupations desultory enough, 
 but not without an incidental value, he came to think. For 
 at Leamington he learnt at least, he tells us, that it " avails 
 nothing to call by their right names every scale stuck in the 
 mud of the universe," and that he could not compose a 
 picture, or write a story. Another salutary discovery is 
 recorded in the gloss upon the last of the three following 
 entries in his diary, made before he went to Leamington : — 
 
 '^^ July Qth, 'il. — Dined with Turnei-, Jones, and Nesfield at 
 Griffith's yesterday. Turner there is no mistaking for a moment 
 — his keen eye and dry sentences can be the signs only of high 
 intellect. Jones a fine, grey, quiet, Spectator-like 'gentleman.' 
 
 " July 9ih.- — Croly, Stewart (John Stewart, a somewhat con- 
 ceited old Scotch friend), Campbell (I forget who), and Harrison 
 at dinner. Stewart, speaking of Lord Melbourne, said he was a 
 man who always said what he thought. ' Well, what is it ? ' asked 
 Croly. 
 
 ''July 12.— Want to finish B. C." ("Broken Chain") "this 
 week if I can." (A blessed entry — it was the last poetry I ever 
 wrote, under the impression of having any poetical power.) 
 
 What, then, to do next ? The two sides of his nature and of 
 his training seemed to point in diti'erent directions. He was 
 not as yet minded definitely to renounce the Church as 
 a profession, but he was counting with wistful regret the 
 sacrifice of other interests which its adoption would involve 
 — interests towards which also he felt a moral call. His 
 friend Clayton, with whom he had been used to exchange
 
 122 COMPETING CALLS 
 
 CHAP, views on artistic and literary subjects, had by this time taken 
 Holy Orders ; and Ruskin wrote to him : " I am studying 
 with Harding for foliage and he gives me a great deal to do ; 
 but I suppose I can be of no further use to you, you have 
 cut all these things. Must I, when I follow you ? " He laid 
 his perplexities before his old school-master : — 
 
 {To Canon Dale.) " Leamington, Seiyt. 22. — My dear Sir, — I 
 have just received your most kind letter, and sit down instantly 
 to reply, with sincere thanks for your permission to write to 
 you at length. Scripture, of course, must be the ultimate appeal, 
 but what I have to say at present is, I think, founded on no 
 solitary passages, but on the broadest and first doctrines of our 
 religion. . . . Nero's choice of time and opportunity for the pursuit 
 of his musical studies has been much execrated, but is guiltless in 
 comparison to the conduct of the man who occupies himself for 
 a single hour with any earthly pursuit of whatever importance, 
 believing, as he must, if he believe the Bible, that souls, which 
 human exertion might save, are meanwhile dropping minute by 
 minute into hell. This being fully granted, the questions come, 
 ' What means are there by which the salvation of souls can 
 be attained ? ' and ' How are we to choose among them ? ' For 
 instance, does the pursuit of any art or science, for the mere 
 sake of the resultant beauty or knowledge, tend to forward this 
 end ? That such pursuits are beneficial and ennobling to our 
 nature is self-evident, but have we leisure for them in our perilous 
 circumstances? Is it a time to be spelling of letters, or touching 
 of strings, counting stars or crystallising dewdrops, while the 
 earth is failing under our feet, and our fellows are departing 
 every instant into eternal pain ? Or, on the other hand, is not 
 the character and kind of intellect which is likely to be drawn 
 into these occupations, employed in the fullest measure and to 
 the best advantage in them? Would not great part of it be 
 useless and inactive if otherwise directed ? Do not the results 
 of its labour remain, exercising an influence, if not directly 
 spiritual, yet ennobling and purifying, on all humanity, to all 
 time? Was not the energy of Galileo, Newton, Davy, Michael 
 Angelo, Raphael, Handel, employed more eflFectively to the glory 
 of God in the results and lessons it has left, than if it had been
 
 J. D. HARDING 123 
 
 occupied all their lifetime in direct priestly exertion, for which, CHAP, 
 in all probability, it was less adapted and in which it would have ^• 
 been comparatively less effectual ? 
 
 "Yet if the Libours of men like these, who spread the very 
 foundations of human knowledge to twice their compass, may 
 be considered as tending to the great end of salvation, can the 
 same be said of those who follow their footsteps with the average 
 intellect of humanity ? 
 
 " Is an individual, then, who has the power of choice, in 
 any degree to yield to his predilections in so important a matter ? 
 I myself have little pleasure in the idea of entering the Church, 
 and have been attached to the pursuits of art and science, not 
 by a flying fancy, but as long as I can remember, with settled 
 and steady desire. How far am I justified in following them up? " 
 
 What answer was sent by Canon Dale to assist his pupil in 
 resolving the doubt between these conflicting calls, I do 
 not know ; but Ruskin's own answer to it is written large 
 in his life and work. He made the critic's chair a pulpit. 
 
 Meanwhile there was one duty of the moment to be dis- 
 charged, whichever path was afterwards to be chosen. He 
 had still to take his degree at Oxford: in the autumn he 
 settled quietly at home, and Osborne Gordon came to read 
 with him. The lessons from Harding which went on con- 
 currently had an important influence. On the technical 
 side, Ruskin learnt much from his drawing-master's know- 
 ledge and faithful study of tree form ; their discussions. must 
 have helped the pupil also towards making his final choice, 
 and Harding's influence may be traced in some of Ruskin's 
 critical views. For Harding was a man of deeply religious 
 temperament, and he was also a violent hater of the old 
 Dutch school of bituminous landscape and tavern scenes. 
 Harding's authority may well have lent some emphasis to 
 the terms in which, a year later, Ruskin was to inveigh 
 against " the various Van somethings and Back somethings, 
 more especially and malignantly those who have libelled the 
 sea." The interruption in his academical studies caused 
 Ruskin to give up the idea of reading for " Honours " ; and 
 even so, ho was not sure of passing. " I can't write Latin," he
 
 124 FINAL SCHOOLS AT OXFORD 
 
 CHAP, said Lo Clayton, " I am nervous." But the examiners for- 
 • gave his shaky Latinity because the divinity, philosophy, 
 and mathematics were all above the average. " Ruskin is 
 a wonderful example," says one who speaks from long and 
 intimate experience of Oxford examinations, " of the en- 
 noblement of Pass work by a strong and ready intelligence. 
 In my time I have known three men on whom the old Pass 
 education really had excellent effects : Lord Salisbury, Lord 
 DufFerin, and Ruskin. They all brought to it a generosity 
 of mind and breadth of experience which raised them above 
 the work they had to do. Ruskin at the end showed so 
 much work and brilliancy in his final examination, that he 
 was placed in the Class List on his Pass work; his name 
 appears as a Double Fourth Class-man, that is, an Honorary 
 Class-man in both Classics and Mathematics. It was a 
 very rare distinction." ^ The elaboration of classes and 
 categories in the first volume of Modern Painters, the search 
 for philosophic first principles, the references to Aristotle 
 and Locke, show the infiuence of his Oxford studies. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Ruskin took his degree in the summer-term of 1842, and 
 once more the question came, What to do next ? " There 
 I was," he says, " at threc-and-twenty, with such and such 
 powers, . . . such and such likings, hitherto indulged rather 
 against conscience ; and a dim sense of duty to myself, my 
 parents, and a daily more vague shadow of Eternal Law." 
 He was under no constraint to earn his own living or make 
 his own way. His mother still clung to her hopes of the 
 Church ; his father, " utterly indulgent," was ready to let 
 him do anything— convinced that in one way or another, as 
 Bishop, or as a poet, or as an artist, he would win distinction 
 in the world. Ruskin decided, as the easiest and pleasantest 
 thing to do for the moment, that they should all set out 
 for Chamouni once more. The destinies were shaping a 
 course for him ; but his own immediate impulse, in planning 
 
 ' Doan Kitcliin, Ruskin in Oxford and (Jther Studies, p. 30.
 
 TURNER^S SWISS DRAWINGS: 1842 125 
 
 this tour of 1842, was geological. " I spent a week," he says, CHAP, 
 "in Somerset House drawing a geological map of the route ^• 
 on a large scale from the maps of the Geological Society," 
 and he had long desired an opportunity of examining accu- 
 rately the rocks of Mont Blanc. Other influences, however, 
 had been at work which were to give special importance 
 to the tour. 
 
 In the spring of 1842 he had been one of the few con- 
 noisseurs privileged to see a set of sketches, from which 
 Turner proposed to make finished drawings under quite 
 other conditions than those which he had previously accepted 
 or insisted upon. The sketches, being a few of an almost 
 infinite number made by the artist in his later Continental 
 wanderings, may now for the most part be seen in the 
 National Gallery. They belong to the group which Ruskin 
 afterwards called " delight drawings " — drawings, that is, 
 made not for exhibition or even for sale, but for the artist's 
 own pleasure and delight. None ot Turner's drawings are 
 now more admired, and the history of some of them illus- 
 trates in a striking way the change which has taken place 
 in the public estimate of the monetary value of the artist's 
 genius — a change due, in what measure, who shall say, to 
 Ruskin's influence ? In 1842, then. Turner selected fifteen 
 sketches from his rolls ; from ten of these he proposed to 
 make finished drawings, and he offered the choice to his 
 public. Of these ten, he made anticipatorily four, as signs, 
 as it were, of his re-opened shop, and he placed them to- 
 gether with the fifteen sketches in the hands of Griffith, the 
 dealer, to get what orders he could. Turner had expected 
 to clear 1000 guineas by the work; but Griffith reported 
 that he could not get more than 80 guineas for a drawing, 
 and there was the commission to come out of that. So 
 Turner agreed to sell sixteen if orders could be got. But 
 purchasers were backward ; only nine could be placed ; 
 Turner consented with a growl, and threw in a tenth drawing 
 for the dealer's commission. One of the four anticipatory 
 drawings was the " Splilgen," specially liked by Turner him- 
 self. Ruskin saw it in an instant to be "the noblest Alpine 
 drawing Turner had ever made till then " ; but his father
 
 126 NATURE'S "COMPOSITION" 
 
 CHAP, Avas travelling for orders at the time, the son did not press 
 the point in his absence, and by the time he returned, the 
 Spliigen had been bought by Munro of Novar. Three 
 others of these delight-drawings Ruskin was allowed by his 
 father to buy; and one of them, Lucerne Town, Ruskin sold 
 many years later for £1000, " I wished," he explains, " to 
 get dead Turner for one drawing his own original price for 
 the whole ten." The missing of the Spltigen long rankled, 
 and was a thorn in the sides of father and son all their lives. 
 It was one of the little tragedies in their relations, which will 
 meet us in a more poignant form presently, that the son 
 never fully explained his feelings till it was too late, and 
 that the father, though "utterly indulgent" in the main, 
 often thwarted his son's purposes. The Turner drawings of 
 1842, now so highly valued, hung fire, it will be seen, at 
 the time. They were " not in his usual style," the con- 
 noisseurs complained. They were not ; but Ruskin felt 
 that the new style was even better than the old. In these 
 drawings he saw examples, in Turner's highest power, of a 
 landscape-art which owes nothing to traditional rules of 
 composition, but attains, after long study of nature, to 
 impressions of her inmost truth and spirit. 
 
 His outlook upon art and nature was deepened from 
 another side by a " discovery " which he made at this time from 
 his own experience. Hitherto he had sought, in sketching, 
 for effects and views of specially romantic character ; he had 
 looked at nature, also, through the eyes of Prout or Turner, 
 and had tried to compose in their way. But one day, in 
 the spring of 1842, he noticed, on the road to Norwood, " a 
 bit of ivy round a thorn stem, which seemed, even to my 
 critical judgment, not ill ' composed.' " ^ The lesson thus 
 learnt — the lesson of thinking nothing common or unclean, 
 and of seeking beauty through truth — was reinforced later 
 in the year in the forest of Fontainebleau, when he found 
 himself " lying on the bank of a cart-road in the sand, with 
 no prospect whatever but a small aspen tree against the blue 
 
 ^ I have been unable to discover It may possibly have been the 
 whether this study, of so much orif^inal of a plate inserted in the 
 interest in Ruskin'slife,still exists. Library Edition, vol. iii. p. 338,
 
 ATTACKS ON Tl RNER : 1842 127 
 
 sky. Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it ; and as CHAP. 
 I drew, the languor passed away : the beautiful lines in- ^'^• 
 sisted on being traced. . . . With wonder increasing every 
 instant, I saw that they ' c omposed ' themselves by finer 
 laws than any known of men. . . . ' He hath made every- 
 thing beautiful in his time,' became for me thenceforward 
 the interpretation of the bond between the human mind and 
 all visible things ; and I returned along the wood-road feeling 
 that it had led me far." It was to lead him to Modern 
 Painters. The impression made upon him at the time by 
 his new interest in simple studies from nature appears in 
 a letter of this date to Clayton : — 
 
 " Time was (when T began drawing) that I used to think a 
 picturesque or beautiful tree was hardly to be met witli once a 
 month ; I cared for nothing but oaks a thousand years old, split 
 by lightning or shattered by wind, or made up for my worship's 
 edification in some particular and distinguished way. Noiv, there 
 is not a twig in the closest-clipt hedge that grows, that I cannot 
 admire, and wonder at, and take pleasure in, and learn from, I 
 think one tree very nearly as good as another, and all a thousand 
 times more beautiful than I once did my picked ones, but I admire 
 those more than I could then, tenfold." 
 
 Ruskin's arms were now ready ; only the call to battle 
 remained to come. At Geneva, in the same church as in 
 the preceding year (p. 120), the same fit of self-reproach, the 
 same resolve to be up and doing, came upon him. It was, as 
 he noted in his diary a few months later, " the origin of 
 Turner work." The immediate impulse was the same as in 
 the case of the Essay of 1836 ; for at Geneva a review of the 
 Royal Academy's Exhibition of 1842, ridiculing Turner's 
 pictures of the year, reached him. He had seen the pictures 
 before leaving England, and had admired them no less than 
 the delight-drawings. The review was probably that in the 
 Literdry Ga-efte or the Athenceum, both of Avhich papers 
 W. H. Harrison was in the habit of sending to Ruskiu 
 or his father. Some extracts are worth,;giving as show- 
 insf the kind of criticism airainst which the first volume
 
 128 MODERN PAINTERS PLANNED 
 
 CHAP, of Modern Painters was directed. The Literary Gazette 
 wrote: — 
 
 " No. 52, ' The Dogano ' {sic), and 73, ' Campo Santo,' have a 
 gorgeous ensemhie, and produced by wonderful art, but they mean 
 nothing. They are produced as if by throwing handfuls of white, 
 and blue, and red, at the canvas, letting what chanced to stick, 
 stick ; and then shadowing in some forms to make the appearance 
 of a picture. And yet there is a fine harmony in the highest 
 range of colour to please the sense of vision ; we admire, and we 
 lament to see such genius so employed. But ' Farther on you 
 may fare worse.' No. 182 is a Snow-storm of most unintelligible 
 character — the snow-stoim of a confused dream, with a steamboat 
 making signals,' and (apparently, like the painter who was in 
 it) 'going by the head' \_sic ; the word was of course lead]. 
 Neither by land or water was such a scene ever witnessed. No. 
 338, ' Burial at Sea ' : though there is a striking effect, still the 
 whole is so idealised and removed from truth, that instead of the 
 feeling it ought to effect, it only excites ridicule. And No. 353 
 caps all before for absurdity, without even any of the redeem- 
 ing qualities in the rest. It represents Buonaparte, — facetiously 
 described as 'the exile and the rock-limpet,' standing on the 
 seashore at St. Helena. . . . The whole thing is so truly ludicrous, 
 that the risum teneatis even of the Amiei is absolutely impossible." 
 
 The Athenceum was more ribald. Only by contemplation of 
 Creswick's delicious landscape, it seems, could the spectator 
 be prepared for the painful effect of Turner : — 
 
 " This gentleman has on former occasions chosen to paint with 
 cream, or chocolate, yolk of egg, or currant jelly, — here he uses his 
 whole array of kitchen stufi'. . . . We cannot fancy the state of 
 eye, which will permit any one cognizant of Art to treat these 
 rhapsodies as Lord Byron treated ' Christabel ' ; neither can we 
 believe in any future revolution, which shall bring the world 
 round to the opinion of the worshipper, if worshipper such 
 frenzies still possess." 
 
 With such criticisms ringing in his ears as a call to 
 action, Ruskin went on to Chamouni, hoping to say what 
 was burninsf in his heart and mind within the limits of a
 
 THE BEAUTY OF CHAMOUNI 129 
 
 pamphlet. But at Chamouni he became engrossed "with CHAP, 
 snow and granite." And the more he considered, the ^• 
 larger grew the enterprise. The scheme for a pamphlet 
 became one for a treatise. The defence of Turner was, 
 therefore, postponed for autumn work at home. 
 
 Of the tour of 1842, and of the studies at Chamouni 
 immediately preparatory to the first volume of Modern 
 Painters, no diary is now extant ; perhaps little or none was 
 written. His " feelings and discoveries " of this year were, 
 he says, " too many and too bewildering to be written " ; but 
 letters to his friends tell us something of the rapture : — 
 
 (Tothe'R^y. W. L. Brown.) "Chamouni, Aug. 1842. — Chamouni 
 is such a place ! There is no sky like its sky. . . . There is no air 
 like its air. Coming down from Chamouni into the lower workl 
 is like coming out of open morning air into an ale-house parlour 
 where people have been sleeping and smoking with the door shut 
 all night ; and for its earth, there is not a stick nor a stone in 
 the valley that is not toned with the majestic spirit ; there is 
 nothing pretty there, it is all beautiful to its lowest and lightest 
 details, bursting forth below and above with such an inconceivable 
 mixture of love and power — of grace with glory — its dews seem 
 to ennoble, and its storms to bless ; and with all the constant 
 sensations of majesty from which you never can escape, there 
 is such infinite variety of manifestation, such eternal mingling 
 of every source of awe, that it never oppresses, though it educates 
 you. Kor can you ever forget for an instant either the gentle- 
 ness or the omnipotence of the ruling Spirit. Though the whole 
 air around you may be undulating with thunder, the rock under 
 which you are sheltered is lighted with stars of strange, pure, 
 unearthly flowers, as if every fissure had had an angel working 
 there all spring ; and if the sky be cloudless, and you bury 
 your head in a bank of gentians, and forget for an instant that 
 there is anything round you but gentleness and delight, you 
 are roused by the hollow crash of the advancing glacier, or the 
 long echoing fall of some bounding rock, or the deep prolonged 
 thrilling murmur of a far-off avalanche, which would be sounds 
 of Death if they were not in Regions of Death." 
 
 {To W. II. Hakuison.) "Chamouni, June 20. — If I have not 
 VOL. 1. I
 
 130 MODERN PAINTERS BEGUN 
 
 CHAP, followed everij suggestion you have made, it is only because I 
 am so occupied in the morning — and so tired at night — with 
 snow and granite, that I cannot bring my mind into a state 
 capable of taking careful cognizance of anything of the kind. 
 I cannot even try the melody of a verse, for the Arve rushes 
 furiously under my window — mixing in my ear with even imagi- 
 nary sound, and every moment of time is so valuable — between 
 mineralogy and drawing — and getting ideas ; — for not an hour, 
 from dawn to moonrise, on any day since I have been in sight 
 of Mont Blanc, has passed without its own peculiar — unreportable 
 — evanescent phenomena, that I can hardly prevail upon myself 
 to snatch a moment for work on verses which I feel persuaded 
 I shall in a year or two almost entirely re-write, as none of 
 them are what I wish, or what I can make them in time." 
 
 The letter to Harrison may have accompanied the " Walk 
 in Chamouni " which appears among Ruskin's poems, and of 
 which a line or two may be given : — 
 
 " That thrill of gushing wind and glittering rain 
 Onward amid the woodland hollows went ; 
 And bade by turns the drooping boughs complain 
 O'er the brown earth, that drank in lightless stain 
 The beauty of their burning ornament." 
 
 Creditable lines, enough ; but the real Ruskin appears not 
 in them, but rather in the prose of the letter to Brown. 
 It was in Modern Painters, not in any re- writing of the 
 verses, that Ruskin was to show what he could make of 
 the impressions received at Chamouni. There during the 
 summer months he studied the "Aiguilles and their Friends." 
 On days of blue unclouded weather, he climbed the hills 
 and explored the glaciers with his Savoy guide ; or pondered 
 among the gentians and the Alpine roses; or sketched in 
 the Happy Valley. On days of rain, he would sort or 
 sketch his minerals and flowers, or make studies of tree- 
 structure. From Chamouni he travelled home by the 
 Rhine and Flanders, and set himself down in his little study 
 at Heme Hill to write in the full enthusiasm of youth the 
 first volume of Modern Painters.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FIRST VOLUME OF MODERN PAINTERS 
 
 (1843) 
 
 " Vou will not be uninterested to hear that Mr. Sydney Smith 
 (no mean authority in such cases) spoke in the highest terms of 
 your son's work, on a public occasion, and in presence of several 
 distinguished literary characters. He said it was a work of 
 transcendent talent, presented the most original views, and 
 the most elegant and powerful language, and would work a 
 complete revolution in the world of taste. He did not know, 
 when he said this, how much I was interested in the author." — 
 Ca-Non Dai.k to Ruskin's father. 
 
 The first volunio of the famous book, of which Sydney- 
 Smith thus spoke to Ruskin's tutor, and which was to take 
 the hterary world by storm, was an octavo in 4r)0 pages, 
 and was written, so far as the actual composition was con- 
 cerned, in eight months. But, as my earlier chapters have 
 shown, Ruskin had, in another sense, been Avriting the book 
 for many years, and had been educating himself for it, in 
 literature, in art, and in nature, from his earliest youth. 
 His reading, if discursive, had been deep. He was saved, 
 alike by his own temperament and by broken health, from 
 the dangers of cram. He read to learn, rather than to pass 
 examinations. He had practised himself in the art of writing 
 for years. From his youth, too, as he stated in the preface 
 of his book, he had been " devoted to the laborious study of 
 practical art." His descriptions and analyses of Turner's 
 art were founded on long practice in copying the master's 
 drawings, and in making studies from his pictures. We 
 have followed the author, too, in the travels to which he 
 referred when he added that his criticisms of the old schools 
 of landscape-painting were "founded on familiar acquaint- 
 ance with every important work of art, from Antwerp to 
 
 131
 
 132 "HAVING WALKED WITH NATURE" 
 
 CHAP. Naples." It was, however, his long apprenticeship to Nature 
 ^^- that enabled this young man to write with so much assur- 
 ance. " I should not have spoken so audaciously," he said 
 at the time to Liddell, " had I not been able to trace, in my 
 education, some grounds for supposing that I might in deed 
 and in truth judge more justly of Turner than others can. 
 I mean, my having been taken to mountain scenery when a 
 mere child, and allowed, at a time when boys are usually 
 learning their grammar, to ramble on the shores of Como 
 and Lucerne ; and my having since, regardless of all that 
 usually occupies the energies of the traveller, — art, antiquities, 
 or people, — devoted myself to pure, wild, solitary, natural 
 scenery ; with a most unfortunate effect, of course, as far as 
 sfeneral or human knowledge is concerned, but with most 
 beneficial effect on that peculiar sensibility to the beautiful 
 in all things that God has made, which it is my present aim 
 to render more universal." The same justification for his 
 confidence is expressed in the passage from Wordsworth's 
 Excursion, which Ruskin placed on the title-page of every 
 volume, in every edition, of Modern Painters : — 
 
 " Accuse me not 
 Of arrogance, .... 
 
 If, having walked with Nature, 
 And offered, far as frailty would allow, 
 My heart a daily sacrifice to Truth, 
 I now affirm of Nature and of Truth, 
 Whom I have served, that their Divinity 
 Revolts, offended at the ways of men, 
 Philosophers, who, though the human soul 
 Be of a thousand faculties composed, 
 And twice ten thousand interests, do yet prize 
 This soul, and the transcendent universe. 
 No more than as a mirror that reflects 
 To proud Self-love her own intelligence." 
 
 "He has just gone," wrote his father on one occasion, 
 "from a hurried dinner to the sunset which he visits as 
 regularly as a soldier does his evening parade." He was 
 young in years; but already he had long "walked with
 
 HOME SURROUNDINGS 133 
 
 Nature," and offered his heart "a daily sacrifice to Truth." CHAP. 
 He sat down to his task, then, not only with the fire of a • 
 
 pamphleteer, eager to do battle for Turner, but with the zeal 
 also of a prophet, bent upon explaining the works of God 
 to man. 
 
 His home surroundings were favourable to his work. 
 A London suburb is a humdrum place, certainly, after 
 Chamouni ; yet nowhere, as Mr. Pater says, " are things more 
 apt to respond to the brighter weather, nowhere is there so 
 much difference between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the 
 clouds roll together more grandly." And Heme Hill was 
 in those days at the edge of the open country. Modern 
 Painters could never have been written, Ruskin used to say 
 in later years, except in the purer air of fifty years since. 
 In October 1842 the Ruskin household Avas moved to the 
 larger house and grounds on Denmark Hill (No. 51). Here 
 Ruskin's study, on the first floor, looked on to " the lawn and 
 further field " ; while the window of his bedroom above, 
 looking straight south-east, " gave command of the morning 
 clouds, inestimable for its aid in all healthy thought." In 
 Croxted Lane, then a green by-road passing through hedge- 
 rows, "my mother and I," says Ruskin, 'used to gather 
 the first buds of the hawthorn ; and there, in after years, 
 I used to walk in the summer shadows, as in a place 
 wilder and sweeter than our garden, to think over any 
 passage I wanted to make better than usual in Modern 
 Painters." And, for his special art work, Ruskin was other- 
 wise well placed. He had Dulwich Gallery close by, for 
 examples of the ancients ; and for Turner, he had not only 
 the run of the master's own gallery in Queen Anne Street ; 
 but, nearer home, the collection of Mr. Bicknell at Heme 
 Hill freely open to him, and the yet richer one of Mr. Windus 
 within an easy journey at Tottenham. At Norwood, too, 
 within a walk of Denmark Hill, was Mr. Griffith, the picture- 
 dealer, who had first introduced Ruskin to Turner, and in 
 whose house pictures and drawings by the artist were always 
 to be seen. Entries selected from the diary for 1843 afford
 
 134 ACQUAINTANCE WITH TURNER 
 
 CHAP, a glimpse of the author at work, showhig his diverse interests 
 and enthusiasms, and recording the progress of his com- 
 position : — 
 
 '■'■Jan. 19. — Yesterday with Richard [Fall] to Geological. . . . 
 To-day pleasant lesson from Harding, and got some valuable notes 
 at Royal Academy; but late to-night, and must be up to organize 
 in the morning. 
 
 " Jan. 24. — I am getting quite dissipated — out at Drury Lane 
 last night. Macready in Macheth, wretched beyond all I had con- 
 ceived possible ; quite tired and bored, but [Osborne] Gordon 
 liked it. . . . 
 
 ^' Jan. 25. . . . Walked down to Zoological Gardens, and had 
 a pleasant saunter with Gordon. Many new animals ; I think I 
 shall manage to go there oftener. Curious essay of Newman's 
 I read some pages of — about the ecclesiastical miracles : full of 
 intellect, but doubtful in tendency. I fear insidious, yet I like it. 
 
 " Jan. 26. — Pleasant evening with Gordon and his sister and 
 Richard, but little done. Sauntered with him into Dulwich 
 Gallery, and wrote a little, and drew badly. The days get long 
 apace, however, and my work is beginning to assume form. 
 
 ^^ Jan. 27. — Gordon left us to-day, and I miss him very much 
 — kind fellow, and clever as kind. Took him into town, and 
 called on Turner ; found him in, and in excellent humour, and 
 will come to me on my birthday. 
 
 " Feb. 8. — The happiest birthday evening save one I ever 
 spent in my life. Turner happy and kind ; all else fitting 
 and delightful. . . ." 
 
 Turner, it will be seen, was already on terms of friendship 
 in Ruskin's home ; and these dinner parties on his birthday 
 introduced him to many other artists of the day. " If," 
 he says, " the painters cared to say anything of pictures, 
 they knew they would bo understood ; if they chose rather 
 to talk of sherry, my father could, and would with delight, 
 toll them more about it than any other person knew in either 
 England or Spain." 
 
 " 7''e^. 9. — I wish my work went as tlie days do; I am ter- 
 ribly behind. All day long in town to-day, and bothered in the
 
 DAILY WORK ON MODERN PAINTERS 135 
 
 JSTat. Gall. — quite certain of the villainousness of the pictures, but CHAP. 
 
 VI 
 
 difficult to prove. 
 
 "Feb. 10. . . . Nothing done beyond a single chapter to-day. 
 
 "Feb. 21. — It is strange — I work and work and cannot get 
 on ; had to rewrite a whole chapter to-day. But I had a lovely 
 walk — mild sun and baking wind — and I got to the snowdrifts 
 where they still lay deep and pure, and glowed in the sun as 
 if they had been on the Alps ; and the dogs went half out of 
 their wits with delight, rolling and kicking in it, and throwing 
 it over each other. What a lovely thing a bit of a fine, sharp, 
 crystallized snow is, held up against the blue sky, catching the 
 sun ! Talk of diamonds ! 
 
 " Feb. 24. . . . Called at Turner's . . . insisted on my taking 
 a glass of wine, but I wouldn't ; excessively good-natured to-day. 
 Heaven grant he may not be mortally offended with the work ! " 
 
 Then the diary breaks ofi', as the work for the press became 
 more instant : — 
 
 "May 1. — Couldn't write while I had this work for Turner 
 to do ; had not the slightest notion what labour it was. I was 
 at it all April from 6 morning till 10 night, and late to-night 
 too — but shall keep on, I hope." 
 
 II 
 
 The first volume of Modern Painters was published in 
 the first week of May 18-i3. Ruskin was then just twenty- 
 four years of age. The author's youth was the reason of his 
 concealing his personality under the description "A Gradu- 
 ate of Oxford" — "sure," he says, "of the truth of what I 
 wrote, but fearing that I might not obtain fair hearing, if 
 the reader knew my youth." This was a counsel of prudence 
 — as also the adoption of a nom de phcme for The Poetry 
 of Architecture — which Ruskm owed to his father. The 
 concealment was at first well sustained ; even college tutors 
 and friends were unaware of the author's identity. Like 
 the author of Waverley, he practised some little mystifica- 
 tion upon them. George Richmond, Raskin notes in his 
 diary (May 15), " Seems to have no idea at present it can be
 
 136 xVNONYMOUS PUBLICATION— TITLE 
 
 CHAP, mine." In writing to Prout, Kuskin kept up for a while a 
 • veil of anonymity ; and, in putting it aside, explained the 
 reason for the disguise. 
 
 '■'■ Feh. 9, 1844. ... I am tired of keeping up forms with you; 
 in fact there are many who must know me and my doings with 
 whom I do, so long as it is possible, in order that they may be able 
 to deny knowledge of the matter when questioned, and it is very 
 important that the book should not be generally known to be 
 written by a young man. I must entreat the favour of your keep- 
 ing the secret. You may perhaps imagine it is pretty generally 
 known — not so. You see the Atlientjeum regrets that my age is 
 not as green as my judgment. I know its editor and several 
 others are quite on a wrong scent ; so pray be cautious. Don't 
 tell even best friends. I wouldn't you if I could help it, but I 
 cannot receive your advice and ask for it comfortably in a third 
 name. Every new clue must take away from my power of doing 
 good." 
 
 There is one thing harder, it has been said, than to write 
 a good book, and that is to find a good title for it. The 
 history of Ruskin's most famous book is a case in point. His 
 own idea was to call the book Turner and the Ancients. To 
 this, however, the publishers objected, and to them the title 
 Modern Painters was due. Ruskin, however, was not en- 
 tirely deprived of his Turner and the Ancients, for, in the 
 original edition, the title-page was well filled as follows : — 
 Modern Painters : Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape 
 Painting to all the Ancient Masters proved, by Examples of 
 the True, the Beautiful and the Intellectual, from tJie Works 
 of Modern Artists, especially from tliose of J. M. W. Turner, 
 Esq., R.A. The long title was a fairly accurate description 
 of the argument of the book, but it was very cumbersome. 
 In later editions Ruskin called it Modern Painters simply, 
 and he must have become pleased with the title, since for 
 many years he used to describe himself as " The author of 
 Modern Painters." But the title is in some sort a misnomer 
 after all. The book does, it is true, assert the superiority in 
 the art of landscape-painting of one modern painter (Turner) 
 to all the ancient masters, and it asserts the superiority of a
 
 THE PUBLISHERS 137 
 
 group of modern painters to a group of older painters, but CHAP. 
 it does not assert the inferiority of all the ancient masters. ^^" 
 On the contrary, in the very forefront of the book (the pre- 
 face to the 2nd edition), as in many a page of later volumes, 
 the practice of the more ancient painters (of Italy) is 
 appealed to as against that of the less ancient (the Dutch 
 and the French). I have sometimes seen all this cited 
 as an instance of Ruskin's "inconsistency." It is nothing 
 but an instance of the difficulty of finding an entirely satis- 
 factory short title. In "Modern" Painters he compared, as 
 he has elsewhere explained, "the work of living artists with 
 that of so-called ' old ' masters of landscape who flourished 
 for the most part in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
 turies." Why he selected these latter for comparison, we 
 shall hear presently. I must first complete the story of the 
 publication of the book. 
 
 Modern Painters is one of the many great books which 
 a publisher refused. Ruskin's father, who until his death 
 in 1864 acted as his son's literary agent, had in the first 
 instance offered the book to John Murray, without, however, 
 showing him the MS. "He said," wrote J. J. Ruskin to 
 W. H.Harrison, "the public cared little about Turner, but 
 strongly urged my son's writing on the German School, 
 which the public were calling for works on." Murray asked, 
 however, for sight of a sheet. " I thought," continues J. J. 
 Ruskin, " if I sent a sheet, and the work Avas refused, I 
 should be offering my old friend P. Stewart a rejected book. 
 I therefore declined submitting any sheet, and carried the 
 work at once to Smith & Co." Stewart was a partner in the 
 firm, and Mr. Smith (the elder) magnanimously offered 
 Ruskin's father to induce Murray to take the book. This 
 offer was not accepted, and Smith, Elder & Co. then 
 accepted the proposal to publish the book with alacrity, and 
 thus began Ruskin's close personal connexion with the firm, 
 and more especially with Mr. Smith (the younger), on whose 
 shoulders the whole responsibilities of the business presently 
 devolved. The firm had already had dealings with Ruskin 
 through Friendship's Offering, and George Smith was at this 
 time a neighbour on Denmark Hill. "I should like much
 
 158 STATE OF PUBLIC TASTE 
 
 CHAP, again," wrote Riiskin many years later, when he had trans- 
 ferred his books elsewdiere, "to be on terms with my old 
 publisher, and hear him telling me nice stories over our 
 walnuts, after dividing his year's spoil with me in Christmas 
 charity." 
 
 Murray's reason for declining Modern Painters is of 
 interest as showing the current taste of the time, and the 
 opposing forces which the book had to combat. The public 
 then "cared little for Turner." It has sometimes been sup- 
 posed that Ruskin introduced Turner to the English public. 
 It is true that the two names will ever be associated, owing 
 to the conjunction whereby the original genius of the artist 
 found in his own day the genius of a critic, no less original, to 
 understand and to interpret him. But Turner had become a 
 Royal Academician nearly twenty years before Ruskin was 
 born. He was famous and wealthy long before Ruskin's book 
 appeared. Ruskin did not discover Turner in the sense that 
 he discovered Carpaccio a.nd re-discovered Tintoret ; but he 
 did for him a service even more conspicuous. He rescued 
 him not from obscurity, but from misunderstanding. He 
 w^as not the first to praise Turner, but he intervened in order 
 that he should be praised rightly. It was, as we have seen, 
 the change to Turner's later manner, and the contemptuous 
 misunderstanding of this change on the part of the critics, 
 that called Ruskin into the fray. " I like his later pictures, 
 up to the year 1845, the best," he explained when re-affirm- 
 ing his faith in Turner a few years later; "and believe 
 that those persons who only like his early pictures, do not, 
 in fact, like him at all. They do not like that which is essen- 
 tially his. . . . His entire power is best represented by . . . 
 pictures . . . painted exactly at the time when the public and 
 the press were together loudest in abuse of him." ^ What 
 Ruskin did in the first volume of Modern Painters was to stem 
 the tide of war, and in doing so he laid the foundations not 
 only of a better appreciation of a great master, and of broader 
 views of the art of painting, but also generally of saner and 
 more scientific criticism. " Turner's impressions displease 
 us," said the critics of the day ; " we have never seen such 
 ^ Sto)ics of Venice, vol. i. (IS31), appendix xi.
 
 ROBERTSON ON RUSKtN 139 
 
 things; they do not conform to existing rules and traditional CHAP, 
 conventions." Raskin's was the more modern attitude. He 
 discarded authoritj' and looked to principle. "What does 
 the artist mean ? " he asked ; " what laws docs he exemplify ? 
 what is he driving at ? " The essential merit, the originality, 
 the permanent value of Ruskin's book lay not in its rhap- 
 sodies, but in its reasoning. It was a work not primarily of 
 sentiment, but rather of scientitic criticism. As such it 
 requires close attention, to be understood aright, for it deals 
 with difhcult problems and draws many subtle distinctions. 
 It found such a reader in Robertson of Brighton, who wrote 
 thus of the book : — 
 
 "I rejoice that you have taken up Ruskin ; only let me ask 
 you to read it very slowly, to resolve not to finish more than a few 
 pages each day. One or two of the smaller chapters are quite 
 enough — a long chapter is enough for two days, except where it is 
 chiefly made up of illustration from pictures ; those can only be 
 read with minute attention when you have the print or picture 
 to which he refers you ; and those which you can so see, in the 
 National Gallery, Dulwich, etc., you should study, with the book, 
 one or two at a time. The book is worth reading in this way : 
 study it — think over each chapter, and examine yoxu'self mentally, 
 with shut e3es, upon its principles, putting down briefly on paper 
 the heads, and getting up each day the principles you gained the 
 day before. This is not the way to read many books, but it is the 
 way to read much ; and one read in this way, carefully, would do 
 more good, and remain longer fructifying, than twenty ski med. 
 Do not read it, however, with slavish acquiescence ; with deference, 
 for it deserves it, but not more. And when you have got its 
 principles woven into the memory, hereafter, by comparison 
 and consideration, you will be able to correct and modify for 
 yourself." ^ 
 
 Not every reader takes this trouble. Ruskin's art-teaching 
 is often judged by a single quotation from his first volume — 
 and that a quotation w^hich is incomplete. It is supposed 
 that his whole philosophy of art is summed up in the 
 injunction to painters "to go to Nature in all singleness 
 
 ^ Stopford Brooke, Life and Letters of F. IF. Robertson, p. 305.
 
 140 TRUTH AND "IMPRESSIONISM" 
 
 CHAP, of heart, . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorn- 
 ing nothing." But the injunction is addressed to "young 
 artists," and the passage continues : — 
 
 " Then, when their memories are stored, and their imaginations 
 are fed, and their hands firm, let them take up the scarlet and 
 gold, give the reins to their fancy, and show us what their heads 
 are made of. We will follow them wherever they choose to lead ; 
 we will check at nothing ; they are then our masters, and are 
 fit to be so. They have placed themselves above our criticism, 
 and we will listen to their words in all faith and humility ; but 
 not unless they themselves have before bowed, in the same 
 submission, to a higher Authority and Master. " 
 
 Ruskin, it will be seen, did not deny or disparage the 
 value of selective imagination in landscape-painting. What 
 he maintained was that imaginative treatment should be 
 founded on study of nature. Want of truth to nature was 
 what Turner had been accused of; and the truth of Turner 
 was therefore the point which Ruskin laboured in his 
 defence. Truth, that is, of form ; not necessarily of topo- 
 graphy. A painter may or may not be justified in moving 
 a tree from this place to that ; he cannot be justified in 
 making an oak move like " india-rubber," ^ Ruskin, whilst 
 on the one side a preacher of fidelity to nature, was, on 
 the other, a pioneer in what is valuable in the gospel of 
 " impressionism." 
 
 Murray's remarks to Ruskin's father suggest another 
 set of considerations which must be remembered if the 
 book is to be understood aright. While the current criti- 
 cism of the day ridiculed Turner's later manner, " the 
 public called for works of the German School." At that 
 time the scheme for painting the walls of the new Houses 
 of Parliament was on foot ; it was to the German painter 
 Cornelius that the British Government first applied. Among 
 British artists, Maclise was the great man of the day. 
 A leading art-critic proclaimed that Lee was a greater 
 
 ^ For a typical instance of tion, I may refer to the Fortnightly 
 the misunderstanding of Ruskin's Review, March and April 1900. 
 meaning, and for a fuller correc-
 
 ANCIENT AND "MODERN" PAINTERS 141 
 
 painter than Gainsborough. The Italians, and especially CHAP. 
 the early Italians, were little known. Those, it must be ^• 
 remembered, were days before photography had familiarised 
 the eyes of the general public Avith Italian masterpieces. 
 " There was no discrimination then," says Holman Hunt, 
 " with artists, more than with the public, that Guido, 
 Parmigiano, and Le Brun, Murillo, Sassoferrato, and such 
 crew, were birds of a different feather to their great idols, 
 so that the name of the princely Urbinite was made to 
 cover all conventional art." In the work of discrimination 
 Ruskin was a pioneer, and in considering the warmth of 
 his invectives it is necessary to remember the contrary 
 opinions which he was assailing. In the field of landscape, 
 the Dutch and the French masters of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury were the accepted models. It was by their standard 
 that Turner was found wanting ; to clear the ground for 
 Turner, he sought to demolish the others. This led him, 
 no doubt, into some exaggeration of blame and into excess 
 of emphasis. He has been accused — to take an instance 
 typical of many others -of unfairness toAvards Claude, and 
 it may be that he strained some points unduly against 
 that master. But any one who will take the trouble to 
 read all Ruskin's references will see that he was by no 
 means blind to Claude's merits. It appears, too, from the 
 following letter, that Claude was taken as whipping-boy, 
 and made to receive some blows vicariously : — 
 
 {To Samuel Prout.) "Dec. 7, 1843. . . . Your kind interest 
 and gentle expression of regret with respect to the work of 
 my Oxford friend have so mvich touched him that he begs me, 
 so far as may be in my power, to justify him to you. He is 
 very inconsiderate in what he writes, but I don't think it is from 
 want of feeling ; it appears to me to be lather from having 
 too much, and from having been put in a rage by people's 
 admiring the old masters who actually do not see the very 
 qualities which constitute their excellence, while their habit of 
 looking at them exclusively prevents them from forming any 
 idea of that of others. My friend has been much cramped in 
 his work by the fear of injuring living painters. I know that
 
 142 CLAUDE AND TURNER 
 
 CHAP, the really sore point with him is not that Claude should be put 
 ^^- above Turner, but that Stanfield and Cresim'ck should. But de- 
 liberately to sit down in order to prove the superiority of a man 
 who has made his £100,000, over those who are struggling up 
 the hill, however he might wish to do so, would have been, I 
 think, an ungenerous step. Had Turner been poor and despised, 
 I feel sure that my friend would have left the old masters alone, 
 whatever he may think of them, and endeavoured only to show 
 Turner's superiority to living men. . . . Kot that you are to 
 suppose for a moment that my friend has said what he does not 
 think. He does think Turner as superior to the old masters as 
 he has said, but he certainly would not have said this so boldly, 
 until he had gained more experience, or perhaps until he was 
 generally acknowledged to be a first-rate judge of the old masters 
 themselves. But no other way was open to him ; and he pre- 
 ferred plunging into the forefront of the battle at once, to the 
 safer line of argument which might have done heavy injury to 
 industrious, earnest, and deserving men. . . . You ought to con- 
 sider further, what most of the critics of the work seem altogether 
 to have overlooked, that it is only the heginning of a treatise, 
 that the author hints that he has respect for the feeling of the 
 old masters, but has strictly confined himself in the present 
 volume to matters of fad. Not one question of art, pioperly 
 so called, of beauty, composition, meaning, expression, selection, 
 is touched on in the whole volume. How can you possibly tell 
 what the author may think, or say, of Claude when he comes to 
 these questions? Does his language respecting Giotto, Perugino, 
 or Raflfaelle, look like that of a man who has no peiception of 
 Ideal qualities? . . ." 
 
 As a matter of fact, Ruskin did full justice to Claude's 
 amenity and pensive grace ; to the beauty of his skies 
 and the skill and charn: of his aerial effects. Ruskin's main 
 work in relation to accepted masters was, however — and 
 necessarily from his point of vicAv — destructive. At the 
 time when he began to write Modern Painters, Claude 
 was accounted the prince of all landscape painters and 
 the model of all excellence. Ruskin, in vindicating the 
 greater sweep and depth of Turner's genius, fastened with
 
 DESCRIPTIVE "PHENOMENOLOGY" 143 
 
 the emphasis of an advocate upon the weak points in CHAP. 
 
 Claude's artistic and intellectual armoury. By so doing ^^' 
 
 he cleared the ground for a truer appreciation of Claude, 
 
 as well as of Turner. " I remember upon one occasion," 
 
 says George Richmond's son, Sir William, " when a tirade 
 
 of Claude was pouring out of Ruskin's mouth like a cataract, 
 
 in order that he might put Turner upon a yet higher 
 
 pedestal, that my father turned sharply to him and said, 
 
 ' Ruskin, when your criticism is constructive you talk like 
 
 an angel, when it is destructive you declaim like a demon.' " 
 
 It is probably a true criticism that Ruskin's judgnjents 
 
 upon painters will stand more in what he praised than 
 
 in what he blamed ; but in reading those judgments it is 
 
 necessary to remember the conditions and circumstances 
 
 of their delivery. 
 
 The attack on popular reputations, the vindication of 
 Turner — " the most triumphant vindication of the kind ever 
 published," says Leslie Stephen ^ — and the establishment of 
 sound principles in criticism, were not the only new things 
 in Ruskin's book. In bringing works of landscape art to 
 the test of nature, he was led into many a golden page 
 of descriptive writing. " His descriptions of nature in re- 
 ference to art," wrote Sara Coleridge in recommending 
 to a friend " a thick volume by a graduate of Oxford," 
 " are delightful ; clouds, rocks, earth, water, foliage, he ex- 
 amines and describes in a manner which shows him to be 
 full of knowledge and that fineness of observation which 
 genius produces." German critics of Ruskin, applying 
 an uncouth term from philosophy, say that he was the 
 great English master of "phenomenology," He recorded, 
 analysed, and compared the appearances of nature, not 
 merely in gloAving language, but with scientific precision.^ 
 Such studies in connexion with art had, when Ruskin began 
 
 1 " John Ruskin," in the Na- own pursuit of the subject, though 
 
 tional Review, April 1900. followed alonga somewhat different 
 
 ^ For instance : Sir Montagu line, has yet only served to in- 
 
 PoUock in a scientific study of re- crease his admiration of the great 
 
 flexions {Li(jht and Water, 1903) has teacher's marvellous insight and 
 
 occasion to quote Ruskin freely, power of observation." 
 and says : " The present writer's
 
 144 RECEPTION OF THE BOOK 
 
 CHAP, to write, a note of originality. A century earlier Richardson, 
 in describing Clarissa's " fine taste for the pencil," had given 
 as an instance of the powers of his prodigy that " she (un- 
 taught) observed when but a child that the Sun, Moon, 
 and stars never appeared at once, and were therefore never 
 to be in one piece." A generation later, Barry, the painter, 
 had explained in a letter to Burke, describing the passage 
 of the Mont Cenis, that they saw the moon five times as 
 big as usual from being so much nearer to it. " But where 
 is your brown tree ? " was Sir George Beaumont's ques- 
 tion to Constable. Sir George looked at pictures through 
 eyes attuned only to the tone of certain ancient masters. 
 Ruskin gave his readers eyes for the phenomena of nature 
 themselves, and taught them to consider pictures by the 
 light of natural truth. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Such are the leading notes by which the first volume 
 of Modern Painters made its appeal. Unlike some other 
 famous books, it found its mark quickly. It was " the work 
 of a poet as well as of a painter " ; the author showed " great 
 brilliancy of illustration, a thorough analytical mind, a minute 
 observance of nature " ; it was "no common mind that could 
 soar above the mists and delusions of traditionary pre- 
 judice"; the volume was "a work calculated more than 
 any other performance in the language to make men 
 inquire into the nature of these sensations of the sub- 
 lime, the touching, and the delightful, and to lead them 
 from doubt into knowledge, without feeling the length of 
 a way so scattered over with the flowers of an eloquent, 
 forcible, and imaginative style." ^ Such reviews accurately 
 retiected, as we now know from many Memoirs, the impres- 
 sion made by the book upon the best minds of the time. 
 Among the first to read it was Wordsworth, who regarded 
 Ruskin as " a brilliant writer," and placed the volume in his 
 lending library at Rydal Mount. A copy of the volume lay 
 on Rogers's library table. Tennyson saw it there and was 
 
 ^ A further collection of the may be found in the Library Edi- 
 contemporary reviews of the book tion, vol. i. pp. xxxv.-vii.
 
 SOME OF ITS READERS 145 
 
 instantly attracted by it. "Another book I long very much CHAP, 
 to see," he wrote to Moxon the publisher, " is that on the 
 superiority of the modern painters to the old ones, and the 
 greatness of Turner as an artist, by an Oxford under- 
 graduate, I think. I do not much wish to buy it, it may 
 be dear ; perhaps you could borrow it for me out of the 
 London Library or from Rogers." Sir Henry Taylor, author 
 of Philip van Artevdde, was another early reader of the 
 book, and he passed on its praises to Mr. Aubrey de Vere, 
 begging him to read " a book which seems to me to be 
 far more deeply founded in its criticism of art than any 
 other that I have met with, . . . written with great power 
 and eloquence, and a spirit of the most diligent investiga- 
 tion." Miss Mitford, who afterwards became a dear friend 
 of the author, was another early admirer of Modern 
 Painters. She sent word of it to the Brownings in Italy. 
 They were already engaged upon the book, deeply interested, 
 but sometimes acutely disagreeing with its judgments : — 
 
 " The letter (wrote Mrs. Browning) in which you mentioned 
 your Oxford student caught us in the midst of his work upon 
 art. Yery vivid, very graphic, full of sensibility, but inconse- 
 quent in some of the reasoning, it seemed to me, and rather 
 flashy than full in the metaphysics. Robert, who knows a good 
 deal about art, to which knowledge I of course have no pretence, 
 could agree with him only by snatches, and we, both of us, 
 standing before a very expressive picture of Domenichino's (the 
 ' David ' — at Fane), wondered how he could blaspheme so against 
 a great artist. Still, he is no ordinary man, and for a critic 
 to be so much of a poet is a great thing. Also, we have by 
 no means, \ .should imagine, seen the utmost of his stature." 
 
 "Hitherto," wrote Miss Bronte, "I have only had instinct 
 to guide me in judging of art ; I feel now as if I had been 
 walking blindfold — this book seems to give me eyes. I do 
 wish I had pictures within reach by which to test the new 
 sense. Who can read these glowing descriptions of Turner's 
 works without longing to see them ? . . . I like this author's 
 style much ; there is both energy and beauty in it. I like 
 biraself, too, because he is such a hearty admirer. He does 
 VOL. I. K
 
 146 THE BOOK AS "A REVELATION" 
 
 CHAP, not give himself half-measure of praise or vituperation. He 
 eulogizes, he reverences with his whole soul." "Ruskin 
 seems to me," she wrote at a later time, "one of the few 
 genuine writers, as distinguished from book-makers of the 
 age. His earnestness even amuses me in certain passages ; 
 for I cannot help laughing to think how utilitarians will 
 fume and fret over his deep, serious (and as they will think), 
 fanatical reverence for Art. That pure and severe mind 
 you ascribed to him speaks in every line. He writes like a 
 consecrated Priest of the Abstract and Ideal." ^ It was as 
 a prophet that George Eliot came to regard the author of 
 Modern Painters. " I venerate him," she wrote, " as one of 
 the great teachers of the day. The grand doctrines of truth 
 and sincerity in art, and the nobleness and solemnity of our 
 human life, which he teaches v\^ith the inspiration of a 
 Hebrew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a 
 promising way." ^ Among the young minds whom the appear- 
 ance of Modern Painters greatly stirred were many who 
 were destined to have influence in their turn on the minds 
 of others. Liddell, afterwards Dean of Christ Church, wrote 
 to Ruskin in 1879: — 
 
 " Thkty-six years ago I was at Birmingham, examining the 
 boys in the great school there. In a bookseller's window I saw 
 Modern Painters, tnj a Graduate of Oxford. I knew nothing of 
 the book, or by whom it was written. But I bought it, and read 
 it eagerly. It was like a revelation to me, as it has been to 
 many since. I have it by me — my children have read it ; and 
 I think with a pleasure, a somewhat melancholy pleasure, on those 
 long past days." 
 
 Jowett, afterwards Master of Balliol, " read it all through," 
 as he wrote to a friend (Dec. 1844), "with the greatest 
 delight ; the minute observation and power of description 
 it shows are truly admirable. Since I read it, I fancy 
 I have a keener perception of the symmetry of natural 
 scenery; the book is written by Ruskin, a child of genius 
 
 1 The Life of Charlotte Bronte, ^ George Eliot's Life, by J. W. 
 
 by Mrs. Gaskell, pocket ed., 1889, Cross, 1885, ii. 7. 
 p. 368 ; cf pp. 345 and 383.
 
 INFLUENCE ON HUNT AND MORRIS 147 
 
 certainly." Edward Thring, afterwards headmaster of Upping- CHAP, 
 ham, owed to Riiskin and Modem Painters " more of thought 
 and fruitful power than to any other book or any other 
 Uving man." 
 
 The fructifying effect which the first vokime of Modern 
 Painters exercised on the minds of general readers, it 
 exercised also on many a young artist.^ The great books, 
 some one has said, are those which come home with a 
 personal appeal, making the reader feel that they were 
 written expressly for him. Such was the effect which 
 Ruskin's book produced upon Holm an Hunt in his early 
 days. A fellow-student, he said, " one Telfer — with whom, 
 wherever he wanders, be everlasting peace ! — spoke to me of 
 Modern Painters; and wlien he recognised my eagerness 
 to learn of its teachings all he could tell me, he gained 
 permission from Cardinal Wiseman,- to whom it belonged, 
 to lend it to me for twenty-four hours. To get through the 
 book I sat up most of the night, and I had to return it ere I 
 made acquaintance with a quota of the good there was in it- 
 But of all its readers none could have felt more strongly 
 than myself that it was written expressly for him. When it 
 had gone, the echo of its words stayed with me, and they 
 gained a further value and meaning whenever my more 
 solemn feelings were touched." It is a thing to cherish in 
 the literary and artistic history of the Victorian era, this 
 picture of the great Pre-Raphaelite painter burning the mid- 
 night oil over a borrowed copy of Modern Painters. But 
 most of all I like to think of the days at Oxford, as they 
 have been described by a Victorian poet, when William 
 Morris and Burne-Jones and others of their set got at 
 Ruskin's book and Morris would give out favourite passages 
 from the first volume as they have never been given before 
 or since. " He had a mighty singing voice and chanted 
 rather than read those weltering oceans of eloquence. The 
 description of the Slave Ship, or of Turner's skies, with the 
 burden 'Has Claude given this?' were declaimed by him 
 
 ' For Leighton in this con- may be found in the Cardinal's 
 nexion, see below, p. 398. Points of Contact between Science 
 
 " Many references to Ruskin ami Art.
 
 148 TURNER'S APPRECIATION 
 
 CHAP, in a manner that made them seem as if they had been 
 written for no end but that he should hurl them in thunder 
 on the head of the base criminal who had never seen what 
 Turner saw in the sky." ^ From Holman Hunt to Morris 
 and Burne-Jones : thus did the echoes roll from soul to soul. 
 But " we have got past Ruskin and Morris." So Professor 
 Sieper of Munich was told the other day at Cambridge. ^ 
 Beautiful souls ! and a fortunate age ! if in its onward rush 
 it can afford to discard men of such strength and originality 
 of mind. 
 
 The first reception of Ruskin's book in the circle of 
 painters in which he and his father moved was somewhat 
 reserved. "The total group of Modern Painters were," he 
 says, " more startled than flattered by my schismatic praise ; 
 the modest ones, such as Fielding, Prout, and Stanfield, 
 felt that it was more than they deserved, — and, moreover, 
 a little beside the mark and out of their way ; the conceited 
 ones, such as Harding and De Wint, were angry at the 
 position given to Turner ; and I am not sure that any of 
 them were ready even to endorse George Richmond's con- 
 soling assurance to my father, that I should know better in 
 time." Among the artists who wrote to Ruskin's father 
 about the book was Samuel Prout. In a letter given in 
 Prceterita, he is "pleased to find that he has come off 
 beautifully " ; and although, to Ruskin himself, Prout' seems 
 to have shown some chagrin at first, he afterwards accepted 
 the criticisms of his young friend with gracious modesty. 
 " Would I could exchange twenty old years for twenty new 
 ones," he wrote, "and, with the eyes you have opened, I 
 would be a real ' architectural draughtsman ' without resign- 
 ing my enthusiasm for the picturesque. Your criticism is 
 like the knife of a skilful surgeon, so that, as I am in safe 
 hands, you may cut away without hearing a moan." But 
 what concerned Raskin most was the attitude of Turner 
 towards his champion. The old painter may have read the 
 book at once, for Ruskin notes in his diary on May 15 (1843) : 
 " Called on Turner to-day, who was particularly gracious ; 
 
 ^ Canon Dixon in Mackail's Life " A Brief Sketch of the Morris 
 
 of William Morris, vol. i. p. 47. Movement, 1911, p. 61.
 
 RENEWED ATTACKS ON TURNER 149 
 
 I think he must have read my book, and have been pleased CHAP. 
 with it, by his tone." But it was not until the following year 
 that Turner said anything. Ruskin's note of the occasion 
 gives a characteristic glimpse of the painter : — 
 
 " October 20, '44. — I ought to note my being at Windus's on 
 Thursday, to dine with Turner and Griffith alone, and Txirner's 
 thanking me for my book for the first time. We drove home 
 together, reached his house about one in the morning. Boy-like, 
 he said he would give sixpence to find the Harley Street gates 
 shut; but on our reaching his door, vowed he'd be damned if we 
 shouldn't come in and have some sherry. We were compelled 
 to obey, and so drank healths again, exactly as the clock struck 
 one, by the light of a single tallow candle in the under room — the 
 wine, by-the-bye, first-rate." 
 
 It was not in Turner's nature to say much ; it is charac- 
 teristic again of him that among the things he said on this 
 or some other occasion were, as Ruskin recalled in one of 
 his Oxford lectures, that his champion " didn't know how 
 difficult it is," and had been too hard on his fellow-artists. 
 
 Meanwhile the champion had to renew the fight. In the 
 Academy of 1843, which opened at the time that the book 
 appeared, Turner exhibited pictures which Ruskin con- 
 sidered among his finest works — especially the " Sun of 
 Venice going to Sea " and the " St. Benedetto looking to 
 Fusina," both now in the National Gallery. The press was 
 again bitterly hostile. Ruskin notes in his diary : — 
 
 "May 10 [1843]. — Yesterday at Academy . . . Turner greater 
 than he has been these five years." 
 
 ^^ May 13. — Nothing but ignorant, unmeasured, vapid abuse 
 of Turner in the periodicals. I believe it is spite, for I cannot 
 conceive ignorance so total in any number of men capable of 
 writing two words of English." 
 
 Attacks on Turner now became combined with attacks 
 on the prophet. The general reception of Modern Painters
 
 150 THE AUTHOR AND HIS CRITICS 
 
 ^^^P- was, as we have seen, favourable ; but the old guard of 
 conventional art, the fierce opponents of Turner's later style, 
 led by the Athenoium and Blackwood's Magazine, were not 
 driven by Ruskin's charge into surrender. The Athenwum's 
 reviewer likened Turner's champion to " a whirling Dervish 
 who at the end of his well-sustained reel falls with a higher 
 jump and a shriller shriek into a fit." " What more light- 
 headed rhodomontade," he asked, was ever " scrawled except 
 upon the walls, or halloed except through the wards, of 
 Bedlam ? " It was admitted, however, that the author 
 wrote " eloquent skimble-skamble " better than some other 
 professors of the art. Blackwood was equally facetious- 
 suggesting also a lunatic asylum as the author's pro- 
 venance, and ridiculing his language as " very readily learned 
 in the Fudge School." 
 
 Ruskin, as he read such attacks, was eager for the fray 
 His father, on the other hand, was distressed by them, and, 
 like a cautious and prudent man of business, was doubtful of 
 the expediency of controversy. At an early period he tried 
 to screen his son from the sight of adverse criticisms; now, 
 the parts were reversed. " We had seen the Athenoium 
 before," writes Ruskin to W. H. Harrison, " I do not 
 forward it to my father, simply because the later he is in 
 seeing it, the less time he will have to fret himself about 
 what is to come next week. In fact, if by any means he 
 could be got to overlook these things, it would be all the 
 better, for they worry him abominably, and then he worries 
 "inc. Do not send anything of the kind in future unless he 
 fishes it out for himself. I believe you know pretty well 
 how much / care for such matters." He cared for them 
 only as blows to be returned. " BlcLcktuood sends back its 
 petty thunders," wrote his father to W. H. Harrison (Dec. 
 12, 1843); "I regret to see that in a letter to Rippingille 
 he has given Blackwood another thrust. He believes the 
 critic of paintings and writer of the article on Modern 
 Painters to be a Rev. Eagles, or some such name, near 
 Bristol." ^ "I am only desirous," writes Ruskin's father 
 
 ^ The Rev. John Eagles, author Italy, trying to form his style 
 and artist, who had studied in on Gaspard Poussin and Salvator
 
 MONCKTON MILNES 151 
 
 again (Jan. 2, 1844), " of keeping my son out of broils or CHAP. 
 braAvls or personalities. He can write on Principles and 
 Theories without meddling with any one — no man becomes 
 distinguished by making enemies, though he may by beating 
 them when made to his hand. I wish him to be playful, not 
 spiteful, towards all opponents." In a reply, Ruskin gave 
 his critics his tit-for-tat. He was at work upon it during 
 the winter of 1843-44. " Put my rod nicely in pickle for 
 Blackwood," he writes in his diary on Dec. 29 ; adding on 
 Jan. 20, " Wish I could get my preface done ; cannot write 
 contemptuously enough, and time flies." The preface, with 
 a vigorous reply to his critics, appeared in the second edition 
 which was issued in March 1844, ten months after the first 
 publication of the book. 
 
 The authorship was by this time an open secret, and 
 Ruskin was taken up as a literary lion of the season : — 
 
 {To his Father.) " Denmark Hill, A23ril 28, 1844.— 1 have not 
 time for a letter, as I have been in town till now, and want to get 
 a little work done — but I may just tell you what 1 have been 
 about. At Sir Robert Inglis's there were: 1st, Mr. Rogers; 2ndj 
 Lord Northampton; 3rd, Lord Arvmdel; 4tb, Lord Mahon ; 5th, 
 R. M. Milnes ; 6th, 7tb, and 8th, two gentlemen whose names I 
 could not catch and a lady; and 9th, Sir J. Franklin, the North 
 Sea man. Monckton Milnes sat next me, and talked away most 
 pleasantly, asking me to come and see him ; of course I gave him 
 my own card, and as I was writing the address on it, Rogers called 
 to Milnes over the table. Sh R. said to Milnes, ' Mr. Rogers is 
 speaking to you,' and Rogers said in his dry voice, ' Ask him for 
 — an-other.' Milnes gave him the one I had written, and 1 
 replaced it. Afterwards in the passage, Rogers came up to me 
 and took my arm most kindly. ' I don't consider that you and I 
 
 Rosa ; ho was a contributor to should be a second review, con- 
 
 Blackwood's Magazine from 1831 to ceived in a dilferent style from that 
 
 1855. That lluskin's conjecture of Eagles, and that Ruskin himself 
 
 was correct appears from Mrs. should bo asked to contribute, 
 
 Oliphaut's Memoirs of the Black- as he "had hoard he would be a 
 
 woods. She gives a curious letter great acquisition to the maga- 
 
 (no date) from Richard to John zine" {William, Blaclnvood and his 
 
 Blackwood, suggesting that there Sons, 1897, ii. 403).
 
 152 SAMUEL ROGERS 
 
 CHAP, have met to-day ' — (he had been on the other side and near the 
 ^^' other end of the table) — ' will you come and breakfast with me — 
 Tuesday at 10?' Of course I expressed my gratitude, and then 
 Lord Northampton came up and asked me to come to his soiree 
 this evening, saying he would send me cards for the other nights. 
 I said I could go, though I don't like soirees, but I thought you 
 would have been vexed if I had refused." 
 
 {To Samuel Rogers.) " Denmakk Hill, May. — I cannot tell you 
 how much pleasure you gave yesterday ; yet, to such extravagance 
 men's thoughts can reach, I do not think I can be quite happy 
 unless you permit me to express my sense of your kindness to you 
 here under my father's roof. Alas ! we have not even the upland 
 jawn, far less the cliff with foliage hung, or wizard stream ; but 
 we have the spring around us, we have a field all over daisies, and 
 chestnuts all over spires of white, and a sky all over blue. Will 
 you not come some afternoon, and stay and dine with us ? I do 
 think it would give you pleasure to see how happy my father would 
 be, and to feel, for I am sure you would feel, how truly and en- 
 tirely we both honour you with the best part of our hearts, such as 
 it is. And for the rest, I am not afraid, even after so late a visit 
 to St. James's Place, to show you one or two of our Turners, and I 
 have some daguerreotypes of your dear Florence which have in 
 them all but the cicadas among the olive leaves — yes, and some of 
 the deep sea too, in the broad, the narrow streets, which are as 
 much verity as the verity of it is a dream. Will you not come? 
 I have no further plea, though I feel sadly inclined to vain re- 
 petition. Do come, and I will thank you better than I can beg 
 of you." 
 
 The reader who knows his Rogers will have marked not 
 only familiar lines from the Italy, but references to "An 
 Epistle to a Friend." The "pleasure given yesterday" 
 was at the Private View of the Academy, when Rogers 
 made^the tour of the pictures with him : — 
 
 "May 2, 1844. — A memorable day ; my first private view of the 
 Royal Academy. I stayed to the very last, and shall scarcely 
 forget the dream-like sensation of finding myself with Rogers the 
 poet — not a soul beside ourselves in the great rooms of the 
 Academy."
 
 FURTHER STUDIES 153 
 
 Neither praise nor blame diverted Ruskin from the path CHAP. 
 he had marked out for himself. He fought his hostile ^■'■• 
 critics with a will, and he accepted his recognition gladly. 
 He was conscious of his gifts, but also of his limitations. 
 He was confident because he felt that he had the root of 
 the matter in him but he knew that he was a learner still. 
 The completion of the first portion of his essay was a spur 
 to new studies. They Avere to lead him into further 
 paths, and to open longer vistas than as yet were within 
 his ken.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 STUDIES FOR MODERN PAINTERS 
 (1843-1844) 
 
 "Nulla dies sine linea." 
 
 Fortune, or Destiny— tic inscrutable power which Ruskin 
 named, in the title of one of his later books, " Fors Clavi- 
 gera " — had a large part in the ordering of his works. He 
 learnt as he went on his way; and new experiences, new 
 knowledge, new enthusiasms continually modified his plans. 
 The second volume of Modern Painters was not intended, 
 he says, to be in the least like what it ultimately became. 
 Possibly it was intended to complete the book. Certainly 
 he supposed that two or three years would suffice to that 
 end ; it was not, however, to be attained till seventeen years 
 had passed. He had discussed in the first volume "ideas 
 of truth " in relation to art ; he had next to discuss " ideas 
 of beauty" — to discover, that is, a philosophy of the beau- 
 tiful, a task which in all ages has been found no less difficult 
 than absorbing. 
 
 The intricacy of the questions which presented them- 
 selves, and the inrush of new knowledge, had a sobering 
 effect on Ruskin as he set himself to the second portion of 
 his essay. He was determined to persevere with his self- 
 appointed mission ; but he was resolved, in the continuation 
 of the book, to adopt a less militant tone. The following 
 letters show these two resolves respectively : — 
 
 (7b <7ie Rev. Osborne Gordon.) " March \0t/i,\84:i. . . . You 
 ask me if the cultivation of taste be the proper ' ergon ' of a man's 
 
 154
 
 PLANS FOR THE FUTURE 155 
 
 life. . . . Your expression — cultivation of taste — is too vague in CHAP. 
 
 r . VII 
 
 two ways ; — it does not note the differences between cultivation 
 of one's own taste — and of other people's ; — and it leaves open to 
 various interpretations that most vague of all words — taste — 
 which means, in some people's mouths, the faculty of knowing a 
 Claude from a copy, and, in others, the passionate love of all 
 the works of God. Now observe — I am not engaged in selfish 
 cultivation of critical acumen, but in ardent endeavour to spread 
 the love and knowledge of art among all classes ; — and secondly, 
 that the love and knowledge I would communicate are not of 
 technicalities and fancies of men, but of the universal system 
 of nature — as interpreted and rendered stable by art; — and, 
 thiidly, observe that all that I hope to be able to do will be 
 accomplished, if my health holds, in two or three years at the 
 vei'y utmost ; and then consider whether the years from four 
 to seven and twenty could be, on the whole, much better em- 
 ployed — or are, on the whole, much better employed by most 
 men — -than in showing the functions, power, and value of an 
 art little understood ; in exhibiting the perfection, desirableness, 
 and instructiveness of all features, small or gieat, of external 
 nature, and directing the public to expect and the artist to in- 
 tend — an earnest and elevating moral influence in all that they 
 admire and achieve. 
 
 " . . . ' Soit,' perhaps you will say, ' I give you till twenty- 
 seven to do that, and what will you do next ? ' Heaven knows ! 
 Something assuredly, but I must know my feelings at twenty- 
 seven, before I can tell what. I cannot prepare for it at present, 
 and therefore I need not know what it is to be. I shouldn't be 
 surprised to find myself taking lay orders and going to preach, 
 for a time at least, in Florence or Rome. One thing I shan't 
 do, and that is preach or live in London. But I wish you 
 would, when you have leisure, give me your opinion as to what 
 would be my duty, and in doing so, keep in mind these following 
 characteristics of ray mind : — 
 
 " First, its two great prevalent tendencies are to mystery in 
 what it contemplates and analysis in what it studies. It is exter- 
 nally occupied in watching vapours and splitting straws (Query, an 
 unfavourable tendency in a seimon).
 
 156 LEARNING IN ORDER TO TEACH 
 
 CHAP. "Secondly, it has a rooted horror of neat windows and clean 
 
 walls (Query, a dangerous disposition in a village). 
 
 " Thirdly, it is slightly heretical as to the possibility of anybody's 
 being damned (Q. an immoral state of feeling in a clergyman). 
 
 " Fourthly, it has an inveterate hatred of people who turn 
 up the white of their eyes (Q. an uncharitable state of feeling 
 towards a piovis congregation). 
 
 " Fifthly, it likes not the company of clowns — except in a pan- 
 tomime (Q. an improper state of feeling towards country squires). 
 
 " Sixthly and seventhly, it likes solitude better than company, 
 and stones better than sermons. . . ." 
 
 {To the Rev. H. G. Liddell.) ''October 12, 1844.— I was on 
 the vei^y point of writing to beg for your opinion and assistance 
 on some matters of art, when your invaluable letter arrived. I 
 cannot tell you how glad and grateful it makes me ; glad for 
 its encouragement, and grateful for its advice. For indeed it lis 
 not self-confidence, but only eagerness and strong feeling which 
 have given so overbearing a tone to much of what I have 
 written. ... I wish there was something in your letter which 
 I could obey without assenting to, that I might prove to you 
 my governability. But alas ! there is nothing of all the little 
 that you say in stricture which I do not feel, and which I 
 have not felt for some time back. In fact, on looking over 
 the book the other day, after keeping my mind off the subject 
 entirely for two or three months, I think I could almost have 
 anticipated your every feeling ; and I determined on the instant 
 to take in future a totally different tone. ... I am going to 
 try for better things ; for a serious, quiet, earnest, and simple 
 manner, like the execution I want in art. Forgive me for talk- 
 ing of myself and my intentions thus, but your advice will be so 
 valuable to me that I know you will be glad to give it ; especially as 
 the matter I have in hand now relates not more to Turner than 
 to that pure old art which I have at last learnt (thanks to you, 
 Acland, and Richmond) to love. . . . So I am working at home 
 from Fra Angelico, and at the British Museum from the Elgins. 
 I don't think with my heart full of Angelico, and my eyes of 
 Titian, that I shall fall into the pamphleteer style again. ... I 
 shall be, as you will easily conceive, no little time in getting
 
 DAILY STUDIES 157 
 
 my materials together. In fact, I have to learn half of what CHAP. 
 I am to teach." ^11- 
 
 As soon, then, as the first volume of Modern Painters 
 was off his hands, Ruskin set to work to learn. The days 
 which he marked as bad in his diary were those on which 
 he had learnt nothing. In 1843 he did not go abroad ; he 
 kept the siiiiimer term at Oxford ; his pursuits at home are 
 described in a letter to a friend : — 
 
 (To the Rev. E. Clayton.) '^ June 17. — Now, while the 
 Academy is open and I am at home, I have to go into town evei'y 
 day to study Turner ; this knocks oflf much of the forenoon. Then 
 I have to write down what I have learned from him. Then I like 
 every fine day to get a little bit of close, hard study from nature ; 
 if not out of doors, I bring in a leaf or plant for foreground 
 and draw that. This necessarily leads me to the ascertaining of 
 botanical names and a little microscopic botany. Then I don't 
 like to pass a day without adding to my knowledge of historical 
 painting, especially of the early school of Italy : this commonly 
 involves a little bit of work from Raflfaelle, and some historical 
 reading, which brings me into the wilderness of the early Italian 
 Republics, and involves me also in ecclesiastical questions, re- 
 quiring reading of the Fathers (which, however, I have not 
 entered on yet, but am about to do so) and investigation of the 
 religious tenets and feelings of all the branches of the Early 
 Church. Then a little anatomy is indispensable, and much study 
 of technical matters — management of colours, composition, etc. 
 With all this, which would keep my head a great deal too much 
 upon art, I must have a corrective. This comes in the shape of 
 geology, which necessarily leads me into chemistry, and this latter 
 is not a thing to read a bit of now and then, but requires hard 
 reading and much learning by rote ; and organic chemistry has 
 made such advances of late that it has become intensely interest- 
 ing, and draws me on more than it ought. With chemisti*y and 
 mineralogy, which, though they go together, are totally distinct 
 in the characters (of substances) considered, I am compelled to 
 look at comparative anatomy, especially of fishes, in order to have 
 some acquaintance with the fossil characters of rocks. Then I do 
 not like to give up my Greek altogether, or I should entu'ely
 
 158 WORK FOR MODERN PAINTERS 
 
 CHAP, forget it. I, therefore, think myself very wrong if I do not read 
 a little bit of Plato very accurately every day ; and reading Plato 
 necessarily involves some thought of something more than lan- 
 guage. Finally, as in pursuit of the ancient school of religious 
 painting, I must necessarily go to Italy, it is absolutely necessary 
 that I should know Italian well; so that I have to read a little 
 Tasso every day, which I do with difficulty, never having looked 
 at the langviage till a month or two back ; and I cannot suffer 
 myself entirely to forget my French." 
 
 He was often, too, at the British Museum, sometimes in 
 the company of his Christ Church friends, Liddell and 
 Newton, studying the marbles, the drawings, the missals. 
 He was learning more than he was writing. The winter 
 (1843-44) passed without seeing the second volume far 
 advanced. His activities, interests and moods, during the 
 first period of work for it, are shown in the following notes 
 from his diary : — 
 
 ^^ Nov. 20, 1843. — Have done Plato — some Pliny — written a 
 good bit . . . and a little bit of Rio ^ — tolerable day's work — some 
 Italian besides — a walk — and investigation of foliage of Scotch fir. 
 
 " Nov. 23. — An unprofitable day. I fear I have spoiled my 
 etching plate and didn't wi-ite much ; pleasant saunter in Dul- 
 wich Gallery — read a little Italian — finished first vol. Waagen. 
 Made another study for my vignette; didn't like it; general 
 discouragement, except in seeing of what shabby stuff ciitics are 
 made. Impressed with the rapidity of an artist's hand in making 
 a sketch from Rubens to-day. 
 
 '■'■Nov. 25. — A capital day; wrote a first-rate chapter, getting 
 me out of many difficulties ; succeeded with my vignette and got 
 an encouraging letter from Armytage,- — besides some Italian, 
 Greek, and a little chemistjy, and a game of chess. 
 
 " Z)ec. 9. — Rather pleasant evening; but nothing learned. 
 
 " Dec, 28. — Drew a little, but unsatisfactory ; wrote notes — and 
 idled. One thing only I have learned, that the common fungus 
 which grows on wet wood is most beavitiful and delicate in its 
 sponge-like structure of interior. I must microscope it to-morrow. 
 
 1 See below, p. 168. 
 
 ^ The engraver of many plates in Modern Painters.
 
 GLASS-PAINTINCx 159 
 
 ''Jan. 3, 1844.— Thou "ht a little over the book, but wi-ote CHAP. 
 
 . . VII 
 
 nothing. I get less and less productive, I think, every day. 
 
 " Jan. 4. — A bad day. Went over to Cousen ; ^ found him 
 infernally dear ; put me out. Came back ; my father says 1 must 
 keep to same size as the other volume — floorer No. 2. My mother 
 asked me if I were not getting diffuse — floorer No. 3. . . . 
 
 ''Jan. 10. — Harrison at dinner; young Smith in the even- 
 ing.- Settled not to bring out the work in numbers, and so 
 shall take my leisure. . . . 
 
 "Jan. 14. — Yesterday a very valuable day; good hard work 
 over painted glass in British Museum. Delicious hour in Turner's 
 gallery. . . . 
 
 " Feb. 25. — Sunday — a good day because wet. I wish Sunday 
 were always wet, otherwise I lose the day. Read some of Spenser 
 in the morning and learned it ; then some of Hooker ; did a good 
 deal of divinity. 
 
 "Fkb. 26.— At Ward's, the glass painter's, with Oldfield : 
 my head is quite full of broken bits of colour — madonnas — and 
 crucifixions mixed up with oolitic fossils and shadowy images of 
 the Lorenzo in different lights brooding over all." 
 
 The last entry introduces an artistic diversion which 
 occupied much of Ruskin's time and thoughts at this period. 
 Edmund Oldfield had been a fellow-pupil with Ruskin at Mr. 
 Dale's, and he was now a neighbour on Denmark Hill. The 
 artistic tastes of the two young men were known in the parish, 
 and they were commissioned to prepare designs for a window 
 in the new church — St. Giles', Caniberwell — which had just 
 been erected in the Early Decorated style by Gilbert Scott. 
 " They seem to desire," writes Ruskin in his diary (May 3), 
 " to put in my design for the window; hope they will like it, 
 if they do, but it will make me very anxious." In the tirst 
 instance designs for the window-head only were to be 
 submitted. These were prepared by Ruskin and approved 
 by the Committee ; but a fresh design by Oldfield was 
 
 ^ The engraver of some of the Murray Smith, was at this time 
 
 plates in Modern Paintem. enterint); upon control of the firm 
 
 ^ For Harrison, see above, p. 91. of Smith, Elder & Co. 
 "Young Smith," the late George
 
 160 SCHEME FOR HIS SECOND VOLUME 
 
 CHAP, substituted for the central light, Ruskin perceiving, as he 
 ^^^- explains in Prceterita, that his own " figures adapted from 
 Michael Angelo"were "not exactly adapted to thirteenth- 
 century practice." The window-head was liked, and it was 
 decided to fill the five vertical lights in the same manner. 
 The designing of these, however, Ruskin left to Oldfield, who 
 attained " a delicate brilliancy purer than anything I had 
 before seen in modern glass." But Ruskin, on his travels 
 in the ensuing months, made a close study of the glass in 
 French cathedrals, and sent to Oldfield, in illustrated letters, 
 a constant stream of designs, suggestions, and criticisms. 
 The window is that of the East-end. An interesting essay 
 might be put together from scattered passages in Ruskin's 
 works upon the principles and technique of Painted Glass. 
 Like nearly all of his writings on artistic subjects, these were 
 founded on much study and some practice. 
 
 It will be seen from the diaries, quoted above, that "the 
 plans for the second volume of Modern Painters were at 
 present undecided. He had intended, it seems, to bring out 
 the continuation of his essay in " parts," instead of volumes 
 — a manner of publication, agreeable to his discursive mind, 
 which he adopted, all too frequently, in later years. He 
 intended, also, to illustrate the second volume, and was 
 busily engaged in negotiations with engravers. Ultimately 
 the illustrations were deferred till the third volume, but in 
 anticipation of it the size of the page in the second volume 
 was enlarged. The intention was to confine the essay to 
 the subject of landscape. The central idea of the volume, 
 however — namely, its theory of beauty in relation to the 
 " theoretic " faculty — was with Ruskin from the first, and 
 there was a moment when he experienced what is often an 
 author's worst apprehension — the fear of being forestalled. 
 On November 30 (1843) he says in his diary : " In the 
 Artist and Amateur I see a series of essays on beauty 
 commenced which seem as if they would anticipate me 
 altogether." The second essay snfiicod, however, to dispel the 
 fear. " Find Rippingille all wrong," he writes on December 
 30, " in his essay oa beauty : shall have the field open."
 
 FOREIGN TOUR: 1844 161 
 
 II 
 
 In May^l844 Riiskin set out with his parents, yet again CHAP, 
 for Chamouni. The ferment of multifarious interests work- ^^^• 
 ing in his mind — painted glass, madonnas, geology, and 
 shadowy images of Michael Angelo brooding over all — con- 
 tinued during this tour, and it was as yet by no means 
 certain into what form the fermentation would resolve itself. 
 First they went, that Ruskin might study painted glass, 
 to Rouen, Chartres, Auxerre ; then to Dijon and on to 
 Geneva and Chamouni, where Joseph Couttet, "the Captain 
 of Mont Blanc," was engaged as guide. The letters and 
 diary show Ruskin's occupations : — 
 
 {To Edmund Oldfield.) " Rouen, 18/7i May. — I found no glass 
 at Abbeville — at Eu, the pet church of Louis Philippe has some 
 modern glass, of the worst kind. . , . No glass at Dieppe. But 
 when I got into the Cathedral here this evening, I was grievously 
 vexed with all that I had done, and rendered almost hopeless 
 by the dazzling beauty of form of the windows of the choir. . . . 
 I set myself to consider the difference between the ancient and 
 modern work, which I find chiefly to consist in these points (the 
 design, size, etc., being in all points the same). First, the modex^n 
 glass admits much more light, producing a glaring and painful 
 impression on the eye, so that I could not look at it long — the 
 old glass soothed, attracted, and comforted the eye, not dazzling it, 
 but admitting of long contemplation without the least pain. On 
 closer examination, I found that the icTiites of the modern glass 
 were very bright, looking like the ground glass of a lamp, and 
 were all inclined to pink in their hue ; while the whites of the old 
 glass were dead, and wanting in transparency, looking like the 
 ground of a picture {i.e. like real colour, instead of mere ground 
 glass), and that they were all inclined to green in their hue. Note 
 this, please, especially. Again, I found that all the blues of the 
 old glass had a grey or black quality of colour, black stains occurring 
 upon them, so as to make them in places almost opaque, vei-y pure 
 indeed in places, but always tending to grey ; whereas the modern 
 blues were much more transparent — like the blues of a druggist's 
 bottles — and instead of tending to grey, tended to purple. 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 162 ANCIENT AND MODERN GLASS 
 
 CHAP. " Again, the yellows of the old glass were always pale, pass- 
 
 ing into grey — sometimes stained with black, the yellows of the 
 modern glass invariahly oraiuje in a very high degree. Again, the 
 reds of the old glass were pure crimson in their general tone, and 
 occasionally so dark as to pass into black, while the reds of the 
 modern glass were invariably a tone more inclined to scarlet, and 
 more pale. Now I want you to go to Ward,^ and insist especially 
 on this want of transjjareiwy in the old glass, which it appears to 
 me is a very, verij important point. I find universally that the 
 eye rests on it as on a quiet picture, while with the modern it is 
 tormented by violence of transmitted light. . . , 
 
 " Lastly, I find the iron bars twice as thick in the old glass as 
 in the modern, and running through eveiy bit of the window. If 
 ever Ward gives you a bit of whole glass, four inches over, make 
 him smash it, and stick it together again. I think the pvitty, or 
 the rust of the iron, gives quality to the edges of the glass." 
 
 {To the same.) " Chartres, May 23. — On going again to the 
 cathedral this morning, I was yet more struck with the palpitation 
 of the ground colour. It is to the modern glass what the varying 
 complexion of life is to i-ouge. . . . The finest windows in colour 
 are three of the twelfth centm-y, in perfect preservation, and their 
 colour is perfectly unique. I never saw anything approaching it, 
 not for depth, but for refinement and purity ; and it is their blue 
 which the Labrador felspar resembles. This blue is so luminous 
 that the ruby reds of the window come upon it as distinct shades, 
 looking as if it had been spotted with rich blood." 
 
 {Diary.) "Geneva, il/ay 3 L — We arrived here yesterday. . . . 
 The day before I should remember, for the walk I had at St. 
 Laurent ; above all, for the phenomenon at sunset which I had 
 never seen till then — of the sun's image reflected from a bank of 
 clouds above the hoiizon, for at least a quarter of an hour after he 
 had set. It had all the brilliancy of a reflection in water, and if I 
 had not seen the sun set, I should have taken it for the sun itself. 
 A point of greatest intensity was on the edge of the cloud, but it 
 shot up a stream of splendid light far towards the zenith, as well 
 s downwards towards the sun." 
 
 {To Edmund Oldfield.) " Geneva, June 3. — I send you at last 
 
 * Of Messrs. Ward & Nixon, Frith Street, Soho.
 
 CHAMOUNI 163 
 
 two rude designs, one for the angel in the circle, the other for the CHAP. 
 side ; both rudely drawn, because to try and get a little purer red, ^^• 
 I used this white paper, which takes colour badly : my drawing- 
 paper is all grey. I was obliged to alter my plan in the side piece. 
 I tried the tigers, but it made the angel at the top look like Mr. 
 Wombwell, and the angel at the bottom like Mr. Van Amberg ; 
 so I put in a row of gates, which you will please to take for the 
 celestial city, and a bit of unintelligible figure from St. Radegonde 
 [at Poictiers] to fill up, which looks something between a monk and 
 an angel, and may be typical of general felicity. The chaining of 
 the dragon I suppose people will understand. You perceive he holds 
 with his tail tight round an apple-tree. If Mr. Ward could make 
 him look a little less like a gamecock, it would be desirable." 
 
 {Diary.) " Chamouni, June 16. — The hills are as clear as 
 crystal ; more lovely, I think, every day, and I don't know how 
 to leave ofif looking at them." 
 
 {Diary.) " June 23. — 9 o'clock, morning. There is a strange 
 effect on Mont Blanc. The Pavilion hills are green and clear, 
 with the pearly clearness that foretells rain ; the sky above is 
 fretted with spray of white compact textured cloud which looks 
 like flakes of dead aiborescent silver. Over the snow, this is 
 concentrated into a cumulus of the Turner charactei', not heaped, 
 but laid sloping on the mountain, silver white at its edge, pale 
 grey in interior. ..." 
 
 {Diary.) '^2Sfh June, half-past fen. — I never was dazzled by 
 moonlight until now ; but as it rose from behind the Mont Blanc 
 du Tacul, the full moon almost blinded me : it burst forth into 
 the sky like a vast star. For an hour before, the aiguilles had 
 appeared as dark masses against a sky looking as transparent 
 as clear sea, edged at their summits with fleeces of cloud breaking 
 into glorious spray and foam of white fire. A meteor fell over 
 the Dome as the moon rose ; now it is so intensely bright that 
 I cannot see the Mont Blanc underneath it ; the form is lost 
 in its light." 
 
 Many an hour was spent in thus watching skies ; and on 
 this tour Ruskin made also several drawings in colour of 
 considerable beauty. 
 
 From Chamouni, Ruskin returned to Geneva, and thence
 
 164 MEETING WITH JAMES FORBES 
 
 CHAP, by Sion and Brieg across the Simplon to Baveno and back. 
 ^^^' Here is a time-table which shows the busy eagerness of his 
 days, the fulness of his vitality : — June 15, 6 a.m. Baveno, 
 called on Signor Zanetti and inspected his collection of 
 pictures on the Isola dei Pescatori ; walked up most of the 
 defile of Gondo ; on reaching the Simplon village, dashed 
 off to catch the sunset from the Col (five miles up hill 
 against time) ; 8 p.m., " sitting on the highest col of the 
 Simplon, watching the light die on the Breithorn, nothing 
 round me but rock and lichen, except one purple flower" 
 (linaria alpina, outlined) ; five miles walk back to the inn, 
 'star after star coming out above my head, the white 
 hills gleaming among them, the gulph of pines, with the 
 torrent, black and awful below " ; long entry of the day in 
 diary before bed. The next day was one, as he noted 
 (July 16), " to be most grateful for and to remember long." 
 He recalled it, in writing a chapter of Deucalion in the 
 same room, thirty-two years later : — 
 
 " My father and mother and I were sitting at one end of the 
 long table in the evening ; and at the other end of it, a quiet, 
 somewhat severe-looking, and pale, English (as we supposed) 
 traveller, with his wife ; she, and my mother, working ; her husband 
 carefully completing some mountain outlines in his sketch-book. 
 Whether some harmony of Scottish accent strvick my! father's 
 ear, or the pride he took in his son's accomplishments prevailed 
 over his own shyness, I think we first ventured word'' across the 
 table, with view of informing the grave draughtsman that ive 
 also could draw. Whereupon my own sketch-book was brought 
 out, the pale traveller politely permissive. My good father 
 and mother had stopped at the Simplon inn for me because I 
 wanted to climb the high point immediately west of the Col, 
 thinking thence to get a perspective of the chain joining the 
 Fletschorn to the Monte Rosa. I had brought down with me 
 careful studies ... of great value to myself, as having won 
 for me that evening the sympathy and help of James Forbes. 
 For his eye grew keen, and his face attentive, as he examined 
 the drawings ; and he turned instantly to me as to a recog- 
 nised fellow-workman, — though yet young, no less faithful than
 
 VII. 
 
 FIRST SIGHT OF THE MATTERHORN 165 
 
 himself. . . . He told me as much as I was able to learn, at that CHAP. 
 time, of the structures of the chain, and some pleasant general 
 talk followed ; but 1 knew nothing of glaciers then, and he had 
 his evening's work to finish. And I never saw him again." ^ 
 
 But neither ever forgot the other. Twenty, and agam 
 thirty, years later Ruskin was to defend Professor Forbes 
 with something of the same zeal that he threw into his 
 defence of Turner : — 
 
 (J. D. Forbes to Ruskin.) "St. Andrews, Dec. 2, 1864. . . . 
 Having almost retired from the din of controversy, it is a pleasur- 
 able surprise to me to find now and then some old friend who has 
 not forgotten me, and who has still spirit and fidelity enough to 
 break a lance in my favour. For about three years I have felt 
 disheartened and hopeless as to stemming the popular tide of pre- 
 possessions against my ' Theory of Glaciers,' or, I should rather say, 
 against me personally as its author. The article in the Quarterly 
 seemed to me to complete the triumph of Tyndall within the 
 limits of his influence. Its dulness and stupid reiteration of ex- 
 ploded statements seemed to me to give the best promise of its 
 speedy oblivion. Adv^ancing years and a permanently depressed 
 state of health have taken the edge off the bitterness which 
 the injustice I have experienced caused rne during many years. 
 Hut, as I said, the old fire revives within me when I see any one 
 willing and com-ageous, like you, to remember an old friend, and to 
 show that you do so." 
 
 From the Simplon, Ruskin and his parents wont by 
 Bricg and Visp to Zorinatt, where Osborne Gordon was 
 awaiting them. Zermatt Avas no haunt of tourists in those 
 days, and the commissariat of the little mn, first opened by 
 Dr. Lauber in 1839, was unprepared for its visitors. Ruskin 
 met Gordon as the Matterhorn came in sight. " Yes," said 
 he, " the Matterhorn is all very tine ; but do you know there's 
 nothing to eat?" "Nonsense," replied Ruskin, "we can 
 eat anything here." They could sop the black bread in milk, 
 he added. But when supper-time came, it had to be ad- 
 mitted that " one might almost as hopelessly have sopped 
 
 ^ The "Forbes" mentioned below, p. 211, was Edward, not James.
 
 166 RUBENS AND THE VENETIANS 
 
 CHAP, the Matterliorn as the loaf." A day or two sufficed ; and 
 
 VTT 
 
 Ruskin with his parents descended the valley, his mother, 
 now sixty-three, " walking the ten miles from St. Nicholas 
 to Visp as lightly as a girl." Thence they returned to 
 Brieg, in order that Ruskin might ascend to a point near 
 the Bel Alp, then unknown to English travellers, to draw 
 the panorama which may now be seen in his Museum at 
 Sheffield ; and afterwards he explored the gorge of the 
 Aletsch torrent — "making some notes of it used in Modern 
 Painters, many and many a day of foot and hand labour 
 having been needed to build that book." 
 
 Labour of another kind was needed in picture-galleries, 
 and on his way home Ruskin stayed some days at Paris 
 to study in the Louvre. He came to the pictures there 
 with new eyes. Hitherto Rubens had remained his type of 
 colour-power, and Titian had been beyond him. He owed to 
 a remark of George Richmond, at one of Rogers's breakfast 
 parties, a year or two before this date, his initiation into the 
 principles of Venetian colour. On Rogers's walls hung the 
 original sketch by Rubens for the picture of " The Horrors 
 of War" (in the Pitti Palace), and beneath it a study by 
 Paolo Veronese for " Mary Magdalene anointing the feet 
 of the Saviour " : — 
 
 " As I was getting talkative over the wild Rubens sketch, 
 Richmond said, pointing to the Veronese, ' Why are you not look- 
 in» at this, — so much greater in manner ? ' ' Greater, — how % ' I 
 asked, in surprise ; 'it seems to me quite tame beside the Rubens.' 
 ' That may be,' said Richmond, ' but the Veronese is true, the 
 other violently conventional.' ' In what way true ? ' I asked, 
 still not understanding. ' Well,' said Richmond, ' compare the 
 pure shadows on the flesh, in Veronese, and its clear edge, with 
 Rubens's ochre and vermilion, and outline of asphalt.' No more 
 was needed. From that moment, I saw what was meant by 
 Venetian colour." 
 
 In the diary written at Paris in 1844 Ruskin's enthusiasm 
 is all for the Venetians. Technical descriptions of pictures 
 are dreary at the best ; but a note or two in this sort must 
 be quoted now, and perhaps here and there on later pages,
 
 STUDIES IN THE LOUVRE 16T 
 
 in order to show the careful study on which his judgments CHAP. 
 were founded : — 
 
 *' Paris, Aur/. 14. — A singular instance of refinement] in Titian 
 [No. 1590 : ' Alphon.so di Ferrara and Laura di Dianti '], a mirror 
 held to the back of a lady dressing her hair. The mirror is 
 nearly black and invisible, only one square bright light upon 
 it, but on looking close, the light is found to be truly the image 
 of the window given by vertical strokes chiefly, and to be 
 interrupted by a curve below ; that of the woman's head re- 
 flected. On looking close, the whole figure is seen in the shade 
 of the mirror ; the half light on the back, the dark dress, the 
 clasp or knot on the shoulder, and a reflected light on the edge 
 of this shoulder all clear and sharp, no slurring. The face and 
 head-dress of Flora are also reflected in front of the armour of 
 the man. 
 
 "Paris, Awj. 17. — I was a long while yesterday studying the 
 execution of the two large Paul Verone.ses, and noting the dif- 
 ference between their manly, fearless, fresco-like attainment of 
 vast effect, in spite of details, and Landseer's, or any other of 
 our best manipulators' paltry dwelling upon them. I have had 
 a change wrought in me, and a strong one, by this visit to 
 the Louvre, and know not how far it may go, chiefly in my 
 full understanding of Titian, John Bellini, and Perugino, and 
 being able to abandon everything for them ; or rather, being 
 unahle to look at anything else. 
 
 "The fine.st Titian in the Gallery [No. 1584 : 'The Entomb- 
 ment'], glowing, simple, broad and grand. It is to be opposed 
 to 'The Flagellation' [No. 1583], in which the shades are 
 brown instead of grey, the outlines strong brown lines, the 
 draperies broken up by folds, the light very round and vivid, 
 and foiled by deep shades ; the flesh forms the highest lights, 
 and the draperies are subdued. In ' The Entombment ' every 
 one of these conditions is reversed. Even the palest flesh is 
 solemn, and dark, in juxtaposition with bright golden white 
 drapery. All the masses broad and flat, the shades grey, the 
 outlines chaste and severe. May be taken as an example of the 
 highest dignity of impression, wrought out by mere grandeur of 
 colour and composition.
 
 168 «A CYCLONE OF NEW KNOWLEDGE" 
 
 CHAP. '^ Ang. ISfh. — To-moirow we leave. I have been watching 
 
 the twilight on the Tuileries, which was very grand and cleai-; 
 and planning works. I shall try to paint a Madonna some day, 
 I believe." 
 
 During the winter of 1844-45 (for which there are no 
 diaries) the book seems to have made little progress ; he 
 felt, he sa3^s, "in a cyclone of new knowledge." He was 
 enlarging the range of his studies in art and nature, and 
 feeling his way to laws common to all manifestations of the 
 beautiful. In the first draft of the second volume there are 
 unfinished chapters in which lines of beauty are illustrated 
 alternately from mountain forms and from the human figure. 
 But for the present his hardest work was in manual practice 
 in the principles of light and shade. He took up Turner's 
 Liber Studiorwin, practised its methods, " and by the 
 spring-time in 1845 was able to study from nature accurately 
 in full chiaroscuro, with a good frank power over the sepia 
 tinting." During the same winter (1844-45) Ruskin was 
 again reading Rio's Poetry of CJtristian Art. His interest 
 in this book, quickened by his studies in the Louvre, deter- 
 mined him to revisit Italy and study the early Christian 
 painters before proceeding any further with his essay. The 
 tour of 1845 was the decisive factor in making the second 
 volume what it is, and was a turning-point in his career. 
 As such it must be reserved for a separate chapter.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE REVELATION OF TINTORET 
 
 (1845) 
 
 " True taste is for ever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, 
 laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished." — 
 Modern Painters, vol. ii. 
 
 I 
 
 RusKiN left home on April 2, 1845, and was on the Continent, 
 among the Alps and in Italy, for seven months. It was the 
 first tour he had ever undertaken without his father and 
 mother, and great was their anxiety on his behalf. He took 
 with him as travelling servant the young brother of his 
 mother's maid, John Hobbes, called " George" in the Ruskin 
 household where both master and son were named John. 
 He seems to have been a youth of cheerful spirit and humour, 
 and remained in Ruskin's service till 1854. His quaint 
 remarks, and the chatF of him by Couttet the guide, supply 
 the element of light comedy in the tour. While his master 
 was sketching near Albertville, in Savoy, George was sent 
 to sec the town. Not much of a town, he reported ; he had 
 met " just six living creatures — two dosfs, three children, 
 and a man out of his mind." Florence pleased him no 
 better; he did not appreciate the heat and compulsorily 
 light diet, '"Oh, sir,' he said," writes Ruskin, '"think of 
 them at home walking in the acacia walk and eating as 
 many strawberries as they like, and having all the blinds 
 down in the library, and here we are, without a breath of air 
 and mustn't eat anything.' ' Among the Alps, George became 
 a mighty walker. But, said Couttet, " afin que George aille 
 bien, il faut lui donner a manger souvent, et beaucoup a la 
 fois." On one occasion Ruskin pointed out first an actual
 
 170 FOREIGN TOUR: 1845 
 
 CHAP, scene, and then Turner's vision of it. " George didn't re- 
 ^ cognize it at first, and on my [showing him how it had been 
 
 adapted — ' Well, he is a cunning old gentleman, to be sure ; 
 just like Mrs. Todgers, dodging among the tender pieces with 
 a fork.' " George's criticism of Turner's composition has often 
 been made in more pretentious language. But George knew 
 how to humour his master. It is a quaint glimpse that we 
 get of the party at Padua, where, when Ruskin was feeling 
 UQwell, George was sent out to buy some scrap of a picture to 
 hang in the bedroom ; " and he brought me a seven-inch 
 square bit of fifteenth century tempera, a nameless saint 
 with a scarlet cloak and an embossed nimbus, who much 
 comforted me." Ruskin on his part held himself responsible 
 for George's religious welfare, and let us hope that George 
 appreciated the attentions. " I read my chapter with him," 
 says Ruskin, " morning and evening ; and if there were no 
 English Church on Sundays, the Morning Service, Litany 
 and all." 
 
 But the commander-in-chief of the expedition was 
 Joseph Couttet, in whose prudence, resourcefulness, and in- 
 tegrity Ruskin's parents had full confidence. It was amply 
 deserved, and Ruskin cherished to the last the warmest 
 affection for this guide, philosopher, and friend — a practical 
 physician also. The letters home during this tour show how 
 carefully Couttet guided, guarded, and physicked his charge. 
 Nothing escaped him ; he held an umbrella over Ruskin 
 while the latter sketched ; he was even at hand to see that 
 Ruskin always took " a squeeze of lemon in his water." The 
 peasant's time must have hung heavily during the long 
 sojourn at Florence, but he " solaced himself by making a 
 careful collection of all the Florentine wild flowers " in 
 order, as we learn from one of the letters, that Ruskin might 
 compare them with the flowers in Florentine pictures. It 
 must have been with considerable relief that Couttet saw 
 his young employer turn to the mountains. At Macug- 
 naga he was in his element — " cooking the dinner, going 
 out to gather strawberries for tea, mulling wine in the even- 
 ing, and encouraging everybody all day like Mark Tapley." 
 Couttet was an untaught philosopher. " He could only read
 
 JOSEPH COUTTET 171 
 
 with diflSculty and write scarcely intelligibly, and by great CHAP 
 effort. But he was, without exception, one of the happiest 
 persons, and, on the whole, one of the best, I have 
 ever known : and after lunch, when he had had his half 
 bottle of Savoy wine, he would generally, as we walked up 
 some quiet valley in the afternoon light, give me a little 
 lecture on philosophy; and after I had fatigued and pro- 
 voked him with less cheerful views of the world than his 
 own, he would fall back to my servant behind me and 
 console himself with a shrug of the shoulders, and a 
 whispered ' Le pauvre enfant, il ne sait pas vivre ! '" ^ He 
 had read clearly enough one aspect of Ruskin's eager tem- 
 perament. Among the minerals in the Natural History 
 Museum at South Kensington, some beautiful pink crystals 
 of fiuor may be seen. They are inscribed "The Couttet 
 Rose-Fluors," and were presented by Ruskin " In Honour of 
 his Friend, Joseph Couttet, by whom they were found." ^ 
 
 Ruskin, then, was well attended, and he had not the 
 least intention of encountering any perils or privations. He 
 was a luxurious traveller, and fond of his creature comforts. 
 He somewhere professes his sympathy with and propounds 
 his resemblance to St. Jerome; but " there was," he is quick 
 to add, " this terrible difference between us, that while he 
 left, for his studies in the desert, Roman luxury far away, 
 / always carried it with me, as well as my books, and my 
 chosen kind of desert was — the Hotel de Bellevue at Thun, 
 or the Cascade at the Giessbach " — " with comfortable rooms 
 always ordered," as he says elsewhere, " and a three-course 
 dinner ready by four o'clock." ^ The books were numerous, 
 for he did much serious reading during his travels abroad, 
 and the heaviest box in the boot was full of dictionaries. 
 
 ^ Fors Clavigera, Letter 4. Society should ever make the 
 
 * " I think," wrote Ruskin to expedition, they should try the 
 
 the Keeper of the Minerals (Jan. Aiguille d'Argentiere ; for it was 
 
 8, 1888), "the entire Geological there (as Couttet darkly hinted 
 
 Society should meet at Chamouni to Mr. Allen) that he found the 
 
 this year, and resolve never to treasure. 
 
 return, — till they had found the ' Library Edition, vol. xxxiii. 
 
 Home of Rose-Fluor." If the p. 109 n. ; and Pmicritn, vol. ii. § 74.
 
 172 TRAVELLING EXPENSES 
 
 CHAP, Among his constant travelling-companions were little Tes- 
 ■ taments ; and another was a pocket Horace : this may 
 be seen in the Raskin Museum at Coniston. He used to 
 take Turner drawings and other examples with him also ; 
 contriving arrangements of leather frames for them. He 
 had his special travelling carriage, too, made with any 
 quantity of front and side pockets ; and hung low, with a 
 hxed side-step, for better convenience in getting off or on 
 with the horses at the trot. His father, though grudging 
 no reasonable expense, liked to see the accounts, and during 
 the earlier part of this tour Ruskin's letters contain some- 
 thing about hotel and posting charges,^ but after a time he 
 could be bothered in this way no longer. "I began," he 
 wrote home, " most economically and arithmetically, and 
 went on to Nice counting sous, but at Nice I found myself 
 short by six five-franc pieces, and after puzzling over the 
 matter for two hours I had to give it up, which disgusted 
 me with my accounts, and when I got into pauls and batz 
 and all sorts of rubbishy incalculables, I gave it up in despair, 
 and threw.it all into Couttet's hands." 
 
 But neither Couttet's care nor Ruskin's own unadven- 
 turous habits could allay the anxiety of the fond parents 
 at Denmark Hill, as is indicated clearly enough by pas- 
 sages in the son's letters home. "I am very cautious 
 about ladders," he writes from Florence, " and always try 
 their steps thoroughly, and hold well with hands." So 
 again: "I will take great care of boats at Baveno, merely 
 usinsf them on calm afternoons for exercise " ; and, on his 
 way to Venice, " You needn't be afraid of railroads ; I shan't 
 trouble their dirty ironwork." Turner had foreseen the old 
 
 ^ The details are sadly tantalis- spaciously lodged, he paid 17 
 
 ing to tourists with small purses francs, but he dined out. At 
 
 in these latter days. At Lucca Florence, where he had lodg- 
 
 (whereRuskin had two large rooms, ings, he managed for 8 francs a 
 
 besides accommodation for George day ; " but I am very expensive," 
 
 and Couttet), he paid for " every he adds, " in sight-seeing." At 
 
 conceivable luxury and conveni- Airolo, the three fared sumptuously 
 
 ence," 111 francs per day (includ- for 7 francs. Couttet considered 
 
 ing board for the whole party). himself well paid with 4 francs 
 
 At Pisa, where he was yet more a day.
 
 
 O -^
 
 ANXIETY OF HIS PARENTS 173 
 
 people's anxiety and tried to dissuade Ruskin from going: CHAP. 
 " Why ivill you go to Switzerland — there'll be such a fidge VIII. 
 about you, when you're gone." Ruskin believed " Turner 
 made up his mind that I was heartless and selfish." It 
 seems possible that Turner's love of mystification may have 
 had something to do with his advice ; for he knew that one 
 of Ruskin's motives was to hunt up the artist's sketching- 
 ground. There were, however, some political disturbances 
 at that time in Switzerland, and just a bare possibility of 
 danuer. But Ruskin had his work to do ; nor in the doinsf 
 of it did he ever lose loving thought of his parents. A letter 
 written four months later, Avhen the return of the prodigal 
 was being eagerly awaited, illustrates the relation between 
 the son and his parents : — 
 
 " Baveno, SmuJay, 24th Aug. — My dearest Mother, — As I 
 received on the 22nd a letter of my father's dated 13th August, 
 I trust that this will either arrive on or before the second of 
 September, in time to assure you of my most affectionate remem- 
 brance of you, and my hope that I shall not be away from you 
 on any more birthdays. I am already in a hurry to get home, 
 even from this delicious place, and I only go to Venice because I 
 must see the pictures there before I write ; or else I should run 
 direct and directly for Denmark Hill, and be with you, instead 
 of this letter. I think there is such a change come over me lately 
 that there will be no more disagreements between us as to where 
 we shall go to or what we shall do, for my childishnesses are — I am 
 (in one respect) sorry to say, — nearly gone, and now, wherever I 
 am — in church, palace, street or garden — there is always much 
 that I can study and enjoy ; and although I am just as self-willed 
 as ever, yet my tastes are so much more yours and my father's 
 that nothing can come wrong to me, and if even you were to 
 desire a sojourn at Wiesbaden or Baden-Baden, I believe I should 
 find enough to employ myself withal ; and I think in other places 
 you will find me a little more of the cicerone than I used to be, 
 and perhaps something of the guide Avhere I was formerly only an 
 encumbrance. I am looking forward with infinite delight to the 
 prospect of showing my father all my new loves, making him 
 decipher the sweet writing of Simon IMemmi in the Canipo Santo,
 
 174 A LITTLE DINNER AT CHAMPAGNOLE 
 
 CHAP, and leading him into the dark corners of the cloisters of St. Mark, 
 • where my favourite Fra Angelicos look down from the -walls like 
 visions, and into the treasuries of the old sacristies, lighted with 
 the glass that glows ' with blood of queens and kings ' ; and I 
 think I shall have something for you too, when I show you the 
 children of Mino da Fiesole — such sweet, living, laughing, holy 
 creatures, that I am afraid you will wish they were yours instead 
 of me. . . . And so I have only to pray you to take care of your 
 sight, and to make yourself comfortable in the idea of my being 
 soon home again — only four weeks more, you know, after you 
 receive this ; and I assure you it will not be longer than I can 
 help ; not even Venice will keep me longer than is absolutely 
 necessary ; and then I hope I shall write a very nice book, and 
 one that I needn't be ashamed of. I have done some good to art 
 already, and I hope to do a great deal more . . . and so, my dearest 
 mother, with every prayer for your long preservation to me, — 
 Believe me ever, your most affectionate son." 
 
 On this tour of 1845 Riiskin wrote almost daily to his 
 father or mother, or to both. He kept no other diary of 
 travel, though he filled voluminous note-books with descrip- 
 tions of pictures and other works of art. From these note- 
 books he contributed a series of comments on various works 
 of art to the third edition (1847) of Murray's Handbook for 
 Travellers in North Italy} He went first by Beauvais, 
 Paris, Sens, and Dijon to Champagnole, where he had 
 stayed many a time already with his parents : — 
 
 ^^ April 10. — . . . There was such alacrity on the part of the 
 landlady, and such inquiries after Monsieur and Madame, as made 
 me feel quite at home. At six o'clock they brought me a couple 
 of trout fried, just out of the river, of the richest flavour, followed 
 by a roasted woodcock on delicate toast, and a small perfectly 
 compounded omelette soufflee. To encourage the house, as well as 
 to make that which was already near perfection absolutely perfect, 
 I looked over the carte des vins, and finding half bottles of sillery 
 mousseux at .3 frs., I ordered one, and it turning out very pure 
 
 ' These notes, which had hither- are collected in tlie Library Edi- 
 to escaped the attention of Rus- tion of his Works : see vol. xxxviii. 
 kin's editors and bibliographers, p. 32G.
 
 THE RAPTURE OF ITALY 175 
 
 and ill fine condition, rendered, as I conceived, the whole thing CHAP. 
 worthy of Horace or Mr. Rogers. Meanwhile the sun was sinking 
 gradually, and I was warned of something equally perfect in that 
 direction and way by seeing niy champagne suddenly become rose. 
 And a beautiful sunset it was : glowing over the pine woods, and 
 far up into the sky, long after the sun went down. And as I came 
 back to my souffl(^e and sillery, I felt sad at thinking how few 
 were capable of having such enjoyment, and very doubtful whether 
 it were at all proper in me to have it all to myself." 
 
 At Geneva, Couttet was in waiting : and the}^ travelled 
 leisurely through Lower Savoy and Provence to Frejus. 
 Thence they drove along the two Rivieras. A fine draw- 
 ing of stone pine, made at Sestri, may be seen at Oxford. 
 Leaving the coast at Massa, they passed through the 
 southern valleys of the Carrara hills to Lucca. "I settled 
 myself there," Ruskin says, "for ten days — as 1 supposed. 
 It turned out forty years." 
 
 II 
 
 His first impressions of Lucca were almost overwhelm- 
 ing :— 
 
 " What in the wide world I am to do (he writes, May 4) in or 
 out of this blessed Italy I cannot tell. I have discovered enough 
 in an hour's ramble after mass to keep me at work for a twelve- 
 month. Such a church ! So old, 680 probably, Lombard, all 
 glorious dark arches and columns, covered with holy frescoes and 
 gemmed gold pictures on blue grounds. I don't know when I shall 
 get away, and all the church fronts charged with heavenly sculjiture, 
 and inlaid with whole histories in marble." 
 
 "The full happiness of that time to me," said Ruskin 
 in his retrospect of this tour, " cannot be explained except 
 to consistently hard workers ; and of those, to the few who 
 can keep their peace and health. For the world appeared 
 to me now exactly right. Hills as high as they should be, 
 rivers as Avide, pictures as pretty, and masters and men as 
 wise — as pretty and wise could be." The happiness, the
 
 176 A DAY IN HIS LIFE AT LUCCA 
 
 CHAP, wonder, the enchantment, shimmer in the letters of this 
 ^"I- time:- 
 
 " Lucca, Tuesday evening {Mmj 6]. — My dearest Father, — 
 Though it is getting late and I have a great deal to write before 
 going to bed, I must give you an account of the way I spend my 
 day here. In the first place, I find it is of no use getting up much 
 before 6, for I only tire myself before the day is over. So at six 
 precisely I am up, and my breakfast — in the shape of coffee, eggs, 
 and a volume of Sismondi — is on the table by 7 to the minute. 
 By 8 I am ready to go out with a chapter of history read. I go 
 to the old Lombard church of which I told you, for the people 
 hardly frequent this (owing to its age and gloom, I suppose), and 
 therefore I can draw there without disturbing any one even during 
 the mass hours. There I draw among the frescoes and mosaics 
 (and with a noble picture of Francia over one altar) until 12 o'clock. 
 Precisely at 12 I am ready to begin my perambulation (with the 
 strong light for the pictures) among the other churches, for the 
 masses are then over, and I can get at everything. I usually go 
 first to San Romano, the church of the Dominican monks, where 
 are the two great Fra Bartolommeos. The monks are most kind 
 in every way, and pleased at my giving so much time to study 
 their pictures. They take all their candlesticks off their altar 
 and bring me steps to get close to the picture with, and leave me 
 with it as long as I like. And such a heavenly picture as one of 
 them is ! Mary Magdalene and St. Catherine of Siena, both kneel- 
 ing, the pure pale clear sky far away behind, and the auburn hair 
 of the Magdalene, hardly undulating but falling straight beside the 
 pale, pure cheek (as in the Middle Ages), and then across the sky 
 in golden lines like light. Well, from San Romano, I go to the 
 Duomo, where there is a most delicious old Sacristan, with the 
 enthusiasm of Jonathan Oldbuck, and his knowledge to boot, and 
 perfectly enraptured to get anybody to listen to him while he 
 reads or repeats (for he knows them all by heart) the quaint 
 inscriptions graven everywhere in Latin (dark, obsolete-lettered 
 Latin) and interprets the emblems on the carved walls. After 
 two hours' work of this kind, and writing — as I go — all I can 
 learn about the history of the churches, and all my picture criticism, 
 I go home to dine — dinner being ready at two exactly. At three
 
 NEW LESSONS IN ARCHITECTURE 177 
 
 I am again ready to set to work, and then I sit in the open, warm, CHAP. 
 afternoon air, drawing the rich ornaments on the fa9ade of St. 
 Michele. . . . After working at this till ^ past five or so, I give up 
 for the day, and walk for exercise round the ramparts. There, as you 
 know, I have the Pisan mountains, the noble peaks of Carrara, and 
 the Apennines towards Parma, all burning in the sunset, or purple 
 and dark against it. . . . Finally, when the rose tints leave the 
 clouds, I go and spend a quarter of an hour beside the tomb 
 of Ilaria di Caretto ... by Jacopo da Querela. It is in the 
 Cathedral, ... It is impossible to tell you the perfect sweetness 
 of the lips and closed eyes, nor the solemnity of the seal of death 
 which is set upon the whole figure. The sculpture — as art — is in 
 every way perfect : truth itself, but truth selected with inconceiv- 
 able refinement of feeling. . . , With this I end my day, and return 
 home, as the lamps begin to burn in the Madonna shrines, to read 
 Dante and to write to you. . . ." 
 
 Lucca Avas a revelation to him, it will have been noticed 
 alike in architecture, in painting, and in sculpture. Hitherto 
 all architecture except fairy-finished Milan had depended 
 with him for its delight on being partly in decay ; his 
 admiration had been sentimental ; he had looked for signs 
 of age in mouldering of the traceries and in deepening 
 interstices of the stones ; but here in Lucca he found 
 himself suddenly "in the presence of twelfth-century 
 buildings, originally set in such balance of masonry that 
 they could all stand without mortar ; and in material so 
 incorruptible, that after six hundred years of sunshine 
 and rain, a lancet could not be put between their joints." 
 And again, as he writes elsewhere,^ "the inlaying of San 
 Michele, as opposed to Gothic pierced lace-work, (which 
 was all I cared for in Gothic at that time,) and the pure 
 and severe arcades of finely proportioned columns at San 
 Frediano, doing stern duty under vertical walls, as opposed 
 to Gothic shafts with no end, and buttresses with no 
 bearing, struck me dumb with admiration and amazement ; 
 and then and there on the instant, I began, in the nave 
 
 1 Epilogue to Modern Painters, vol. i. (ed. 1883). 
 VOL. I. M
 
 178 THE TOMB OF ILARIA 
 
 CHAP, of San Frediano ^ the course of architectural study which 
 VTTT . 
 
 reduced under accurate law the vague enthusiasm of my 
 childish taste." Thus began at Lucca Ruskin's first serious 
 study of architecture. The picture by Fra Bartolommeo, 
 described in the letter to his father, was, he explains, " the 
 first example of accomplished sacred art I had seen, since 
 my initiation, by the later Turner drawings, into the truths 
 of deep colour and tone. It is a picture of no original 
 power (none of Fra Bartolommeo's are), but it sums the 
 principles of great Italian religious art in its finest period, 
 — serenely luminous sky, — full light on the faces ; local 
 colour the domina,nt power over a chiaroscuro more per- 
 fect because subordinate ; absolute serenity of emotion 
 and gesture; and rigid symmetry in composition. These 
 technical principles, never to be forgotten (and leaving 
 very few to be added), that single picture taught me in 
 the course of a day's work upon it ; and remains accord- 
 ingly, without being the subject of special admiration, 
 extremely dear to me." The lessons received at the tomb 
 of Ilaria were yet deeper and covered a wider ground. This 
 recumbent statue, described many times in his books, 
 became and ever remained his ideal of Christian sculpture. 
 He saw in it the harmony of those laws of beauty which he 
 had learnt to trace in other fields. " The accurate study of 
 tree branches, growing leaves, and foreground herbage, had 
 more and more taught me the difference between violent 
 and graceful lines ; the beauty of Clotilda and Cecile, 
 essentially French-Gothic, and the living Egeria of Araceli,^ 
 had fixed in my mind and heart, not as an art-ideal, but as 
 a sacred reality, the purest standards of breathing woman- 
 hood ; and here suddenly, in the sleeping Ilaria, was the 
 perfectness of these, expressed with harmonies of line which 
 I saw in an instant were under the same laws as the river 
 wave, and the aspen branch, and the stars' rising and setting ; 
 
 ^ I have seen a drawing by - Clotilde (Adele) and Cecile, 
 
 Ruskin of this church made at dant^ditersofMr.Domecq; "Egeria," 
 
 the time, which is thus of special Miss Tollemache, " of Araceli"be- 
 
 interest. Drawings of S. Michele, cause he had seen her in that church 
 
 also made in 1845, are at Oxford, at Kome,
 
 A DAY IN HIS LIFE AT PISA 179 
 
 but treated with a modesty and severity which read the CHAP, 
 laws of nature by the light of virtue." Beside the lady ^ ^^^• 
 Ilaria sleeping on her tomb he partly then felt, partly 
 vowed, that his life " must no more be spent only in the 
 study of rocks and clouds." ^ The revelation of Lucca 
 turned him, as he says in yet another place, " from the 
 study of landscape to that of life." - 
 
 III 
 
 The lessons were to be enforced yet further at Pisa, 
 where the Campo Santo became to him " a veritable Pales- 
 tine." In its frescoes he found a graphic Bible spread 
 out before him, containing in its painted legends a complete 
 code of Christian teaching. Everything at Pisa delighted 
 him — the Cathedral, the little church of La Spina, the 
 sunsets on the Carrara mountains. His manner of life was 
 as strenuous as at Lucca : — 
 
 " Breakfast at 7, to work at 8, work till one ; or on Thursdays 
 and Saturdays till 12, when I go to call on the Professor Eossini 
 and see more pictures. Dine at 2 ; to work again at 3, always 
 in Campo Santo ; stop at 5, walk about town, or as yesterday up 
 on the roof of La Spina, to get the details. Then up Tower to see 
 sunset on Carrara mountains, home at ^ past 7 or 8 ; tea and 
 write till 9^, or longer, if I am not sleepy; bed at 10." 
 
 He worked with eager determination, for the frescoes were 
 peeling and dropping almost before his eyes, and beside each 
 perishing outline he saw 
 
 " One wishful each scrap should clutch the brick. 
 Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster, 
 — A lion who dies of an ass's kick, 
 
 The wronged great soul of an ancient master." 
 
 The vandals were soundly rated by Ruskin also, in letters to 
 
 ' Epilo<,'ue to Modern raintns, The other quotations in the fore- 
 vol. ii. going pages are from PrceUrita. 
 
 '^ Fors Claviyera, Letter 45.
 
 180 FRESCOES OF THE CAMPO SANTO 
 
 CHAP, his father which presage many a thunderous objurgation in 
 ^^^- his books :— 
 
 {May 13.) " While for want of glass and a good roof these monu- 
 ments are rotting every day, the wretches have put scaffolding up 
 round the Baptistery, and are putting modern work of the coarsest 
 kind instead of the fine old decayed marble. I do believe that I 
 shall live to see the ruin of everything good and great in the world, 
 and have nothing left to hope for but the fires of judgment to shrivel 
 up the cursed idiocy of mankind. . . . Why wasn't I born fifty years 
 ago 1 I should have saved much and seen more, and left the world 
 something like faithful reports of the things that have been. . . . God 
 preserve us, and give us leave to paint pictures and build churches 
 in heaven that shan't need repairs." 
 
 {May \i.) "Two thousand pounds would put glass round the 
 whole of the Campo Santo, and preserve all that remains of the 
 frescoes, and our Government give 2500 for a rascally Guido not 
 worth sixpence. Seriously I am going to write to George Eichmond 
 and Sir K. Inglis, and anyone else I can think of, and see if I can't 
 get a subscription set on foot. Two thousand pounds only, to save 
 Giotto, Simon Memmi, Andrea Orcagna, Antonio Veneziano, and 
 Benozzo Gozzoli ! and thei'e will not be a fragment left in thirty 
 years more, unless it be done." 
 
 {May 25.) "I saw some of the improvements going on in the 
 Campo Santo yesterday. They were going to put up a monument 
 to some apothecary, and so three workmen came and knocked a 
 great hole in the wall ; of course every blow of the hammer causing 
 the fresco plaster, already loose, to detach itself more and more from 
 the wall, and tearing down at the same time half of what remained 
 of a head of Antonio Veneziano. Then they put up a slab with the 
 apothecary's name upon it, and saying that it was a great pity he 
 was dead (/ think it's a pity that anybody here is left alive), and 
 then they knocked down some more fresco to put up his bust. This 
 they put up so as to conceal all that they had left of the Antonio 
 head ; and then they filled up the whole with Avet plaster, and plas- 
 tered away half a yard more of the old fresco decorated border on 
 each side, to make the wall flat, and so they left it to damp all 
 the painting above and prepare it for tumbling otf next time. But
 
 THEIR INFLUENCE ON PRE-RAPHAELITES 181 
 
 they won't let me take tracings, not they ! I shall certainly get into CHAP. 
 tlie habit of swearing in Italy." VIII. 
 
 There was somethiDg to be done at once, and that was to 
 make record of the frescoes. Ruskin cajoled the Abbe 
 Rossini into letting him put up a scaffold level with the 
 frescoes, and from this point of vantage he made a series 
 of outline studies from Benozzo Gozzoli. Some of them 
 may be seen in his drawing-school at Oxford. In 1848, in 
 a studio in Gower Street, three young painters were dis- 
 cussing the past, the present, and the future of art. They 
 happened to open a book of old engravings. They were 
 entranced by what they found therein, and then and 
 there Holraan Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti established the 
 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.^ The engravings (Lasinio's, 
 I suppose) were of the same frescoes in the Campo Santo 
 of Pisa that, three years before, had opened " a veritable 
 Palestine " to Ruskin. 
 
 IV 
 
 When his portfolio was well filled at Pisa, he moved on 
 to Florence, where his " new discoveries," he says, became 
 ■' yet more absorbing." His eyes were opened, and there 
 was no disappointment no\v, as four years before. He had 
 lodgings in the Cathedral square, with Giotto's Tower and 
 Brunelleschi's dome always before him. The new enthusiasm 
 is expressed in a letter to his father, written a day or two 
 after his arrival : — 
 
 " Florence, Jtine 4. ... I went yesterday to Santa Maria 
 Novella, and was very much taken aback. There is the Madonna 
 of Cimabue, which all Florence followed with trumpets to the church ; 
 there is the great chapel painted by Orcagna, with the Last Judg- 
 ment, at least 500 figures; there is the larger chapel with 14 vast 
 and untouched frescoes, besides the roof, of Domenico Ghirlandajo; 
 there is the tomb of Filippo Strozzi ; there is the great crucifixion of 
 Giotto; there, finally, are three perfectly preserved works of Fra 
 
 * See Holman Hunt's "Pre-Raphaelite Brotlierhood " in the Con- 
 temporarxj lievieiv, April 1886.
 
 182 STUDY OF THE PRIMITIVES AT FEORENCE 
 
 CHAP. Angelico, the centre one of which is as near heaven as human hand or 
 ^^^^' mind will ever or can ever go. Talk of chiaroscuro and colour ; give 
 me those burnished angel wings of which every plume is wrought out 
 in beaten gold, in zones of crimson and silver colour alternately, 
 which play and flash like, and with far more rainbow hue about them 
 than, the breasts of the Valparaiso birds, which, however, will give 
 you some idea of the effect and power of light in them. And then 
 the faces, without one shadow of earth or mortality about them, all 
 glorified. . . ." 
 
 He studied principally the primitives, without, however, 
 neglecting the later painters. His admiration of Michael 
 Angelo knew as yet no abatement, though already he had 
 begun to trace in the work of the crowning masters what 
 he afterwards described as the writmg on the wall. " Raphael 
 and Michael Angelo," he says in the same letter, " were 
 great fellows, but from all I can see they have been the 
 ruin of art." 
 
 Ruskin's studies at Florence may be traced in nearly 
 every chapter of the later volumes of Modern Painters. 
 His note-books show that he did not spare himself. He was 
 sometimes at work by five o'clock in the morning. The 
 galleries, the churches and convents, the private palaces, 
 were all laboriously explored ; and those were the days when 
 many works of art, now gathered together in galleries and 
 museums, were still preserved — or more truthfully, neglected 
 — in their several shrines. His main work, for two months, 
 was in the Ghirlandajo chapel of S. Maria Novella, in the 
 Brancacci chapel on Masaccio and Lippi, and in St. Mark's 
 Convent on Angelico. It was at this time, too, that his 
 study of Giotto began. Botticelli was as yet sealed to him. 
 He wrote elaborate descriptions, largely technical, of the 
 pictures, and he made studies from them. He drew a good 
 deal also out of doors ; a water-colour sketch of San Miniato, 
 then encircled by a wilderness of wild rose, which has been 
 exhibited and reproduced, is especially charming. Other 
 favourite spots, for study or exercise, were the Spezeria of 
 S. Maria Novella ; and the hill of Fiesole, where he made 
 hay Avith the monks in their convent garden.
 
 MACUGNAGA 183 
 
 But at length it was time to move. The summer-heats CHAP. 
 of Italy were not so healthful, Couttet urged, as the breeze ^■^•'••'■" 
 over Alpine rose ; Ruskin himself was tired out, and had 
 much within him that needed quiet thinking on. So they 
 trotted over the Apennines, stayed for a few days at Parma, 
 caught gleams of Monte Rosa from Piacenza and Pavia, and 
 sought mountain-solitude beneath her snows at Macugnaga. 
 Of this now favourite resort, and of the valley of approach 
 to it, Ruskin held heretical views. The Val Anzasca, says 
 Murray, " combines all that is most lovely in Italian with 
 all that is most grand in Swiss scenery." The Val Anzasca, 
 says Ruskin, "is merely a deep furrow through continuous 
 masses of shaly rock, blistered by the sun and rough with 
 juniper, with scattered chestnut-trees and pastures below. 
 There are no precipices, no defiles, no distinct summits on 
 either flank ; while the Monte Rosa, occasionally seen at 
 the extremity of the valley, is a mere white heap, with no 
 more form in it than a haycock after a thunder- shower." 
 Macugnaga pletised him no better. " I did not then, nor 
 do I yet, understand why the village should have a name 
 at all, more than any other group of half-a-dozen chalets 
 in a sheltered dip of moorlands." The inn in those days 
 was tiny and primitive, and perhaps even Couttet's minis- 
 trations did not make up for the flesh-pots of Florence. 
 A letter from Ruskin to a friend gives a description of 
 the " deal cabin " : — 
 
 {To the Rev. E. Clayton.) " Macugnaga, Arig. 3. . . . Up 
 liere among the hills — living in a deal cabin, in which I can't stretch 
 without taking the skin off my knuckles, with not a soul whom I can 
 speak to except the cows and the goats and a black puppy, and some 
 sociable moths who come in the evening to put my candle out — I begin 
 to feel more like St. Paul or St. Anthony than myself. I don't mean 
 our St. Paul, but their St. Paul here — the first hermit, who had the 
 two lions to dig his grave, the two pious lions that wouldn't go away 
 afterwards till they had got St. Anthony's blessing." 
 
 Ruskin found that he Avas not born for solitude like Dr. 
 Zimmermann or St. Paul the Anchorite. He could not
 
 184^ TURNERIAN TOPOGRAPHY 
 
 ^^j^^' have stayed out his appointed time at Macugnaga, he says, 
 if it had not been for a pocket vohime of Shakespeare which 
 he set himself for the first time to read with serious study. 
 The plays had been familiar to him from childhood ; but 
 "the attentive reading meant the discovery of a more 
 perfect truth, or a deeper passion, in the words that had 
 before rung in my ears with too little questioned melody." 
 Ruskin's studies of Shakespeare, scattered through his 
 published works, and in references more numerous than 
 those to any other author except Dante, are well worth 
 collecting. To the attentive reading now commenced at 
 Macugnaga he attributed " the courses of study which led him 
 into fruitful thought out of the till then passive sensation 
 of merely artistic or naturalist thought." 
 
 It was artistic and naturalist studies, however, to which 
 he next turned. One of the objects which he had proposed 
 to himself on this tour was to find and study the sites and 
 scenes of some of Turner's " delight-drawings," and more 
 especially of that of the " Pass of Faido " (partly engraved 
 as "The Gate of the Hills" in the frontispiece to the third 
 volume of Modern Painters). From Macugnaga, then, he 
 made his way to the Italian side of the St. Gothard, where 
 he found the object of his search, as reported in a letter 
 to his father: — 
 
 "Faido, Friday, August 15. — I have found his subject or the 
 materials of it here ; and I shall devote to-morrow to examining 
 them, and seeing how he has put them together. The' stones, road, 
 and bridge are all true ; but the mountains, compared with Turner's 
 colossal conception, look pigmy and poor. Nevertheless, Turner has 
 given their actual, not their apparent size. ... I have got two 
 sketches to-day (Saturday) of Mr. Turner's subject, and a specimen of 
 the stones of the torrent — gneiss coloured by iron ochre proceeding 
 from decomposing garnets. The road on the left is the old one, which 
 has been carried away in the pass, and that on the right is the new 
 one, which crosses the stream by the shabby temporary bridge. It 
 has been carried away twice, so that there are the remains of two 
 roads and two bridges, and three new bridges of wood, which 
 Turner has cut out, keeping the one he wanted. The gallery on
 
 AT VENICE WITH J. D. HARDING 185 
 
 the left is nearly destroyed — it protected the road from a cataract CHAP. 
 which has now taken another line, and has left the worn channel Vlil, 
 you see." 
 
 The studies here recorded, with others of later years, went 
 to building up Ruskin's well-known chapter on "Tur- 
 nerian Topography." ^ The " specimen of the stones of the 
 torrent " was a cherished possession. He used to show it, 
 side by side with Turner's drawings, to his class at Oxford, 
 as often also to visitors at Denmark Hill and Brantwood. 
 
 V 
 
 The travels were now extended, and in a direction which 
 was to enlarge once more the revelations of this year, by a 
 letter from Harding asking if Rusk in would join him on 
 an autumn sketching-tour. Ruskin went down to meet him 
 at Baveno, and thence they drove, stopping to sketch as 
 they went, by Como, Bergamo, Desenzano, and Verona, to 
 Venice. The travelling companions, though diverse in 
 styles, were sympathetic in tastes. " We could always sit 
 down to work," says Ruskin, " within a dozen yards of each 
 other, both pleased. I did not mind his laughing at me 
 for poring into the foreground weeds, which he thought 
 sufficiently expressed by a zigzag, and heartily admired in 
 him the brilliancy of easy skill, which secured, and with 
 emphasis, in an hour or two, the etfect of scenes I could 
 never have attempted." It is worth noting, however, that 
 some of Ruskin's drawings of this year show a new breadth 
 and selection. There is a " View from Vogogna," for instance, 
 in which " a vista of ranges of mountains and distant lake is 
 treated with all the stylo of the modern ' secession ' in its 
 decorative use of natural material and omission of the in- 
 essential." - At Venice, Harding and Ruskin were at first 
 preoccupied with sketching. They were moored every morn- 
 ing at six o'clock among the boats in the fruit-market ; in the 
 
 ' See, further, on this subject, tion at Manchester, 1904, No. 3.36. 
 below, p. 367. The drawing is Plate fi in vol. 
 
 ' Catalogue of the Raskin Exhibi- xxxvi. of the Library Edition.
 
 186 THE SCUOLA DI SAN ROCCO 
 
 CHAP, afternoons ihey lashed the irondoki to the stern of a tishinsr- 
 VITT • • • • • • 
 
 • boat, " sailing, as the wind served, within or outside the Lido, 
 and sketchinu" the boat and her sails in their varied action — 
 or Venice, as she shone far away beyond her islands." On 
 the sunset-walks in the evening, they were often accompanied 
 by two other English visitors, staying also at Danieli's — 
 Boxall, afterwards Royal Academician and Director of the 
 National Gallery, and Mrs. Jameson, working at Venice on 
 her Sacred and Legendary Art. The three artists never had 
 the same reasons, but they liked the same pictures — much 
 to Mrs. Jameson's peace of mind, says Ruskin, in his kindly, 
 though pungent, notice of that estimable compiler. 
 
 Harding for the most part left Ruskin to do picture- 
 seeing by himself; but one day, after they had been in 
 Venice for a fortnight, they went together and knocked at 
 the door of the Scuola di San Rocco, to see the then little- 
 known and uncared-for Tintorets within. The visit was a 
 turning-point in the work of Ruskin's life : — 
 
 "But for that porter's opening, I should (so far as one can ever 
 know what they should) have written, The Stones of Ghmnouni, 
 instead of The Stones of Venice; and the Laws of Fesole, in the 
 full code of ; them, before beginning to teach in Oxford : and I 
 should have brought out in full distinctness and use what faculty 
 I had of drawing the human face and form with true expression 
 of their higher beauty. But Tintoret swept me away at once into 
 the ' mare maggiore ' ^ of the schools of painting which crowned the 
 power and perished in the fall of Venice ; so forcing me into the 
 study of the history of Venice herself ; and through that into what 
 else I have traced or told of the laws of national strength and virtue." 
 
 He came away from the Scuola di San Rocco feeling, as 
 he says elsewhere, that he "had seen that day the Art 
 of Man in its full majesty for the first time; and that 
 there was also a strange and precious gift in myself enabling 
 me to recognize it, and therein ennobling, not crushing me." ^ 
 
 • Tintoret's saying, as recorded by Ridolfi : " E faticoso lo studio 
 dulla pittura, e sernpre si fa il mare maggiore." 
 " Epilogue to Mudern Painters, vol. ii.
 
 THE REVELATION OF TINTORET 187 
 
 His function was henceforth, he felt, to be that of the CHAP 
 Interpreter in the Pilgriins Progress. 
 
 The revelation of Tintoret is described in letters to his 
 father : — 
 
 "Venice, Sept. 23. — I have been quite overwhebned to-day by 
 a man whom I never dreamed of — Tintoret. I ahvays thought 
 him a good and clever and forciljle painter ; but I had not the 
 smallest notion of his enormous powers. Harding has been as 
 much taken aback as I have — but he says he is ' crumbled up,' 
 while I feel encouraged and excited by the good art. ... It is 
 marvellous lucky I came here, or I might have disgraced myself 
 for ever by speaking slightly of Tintoret. I look upon Tintoret 
 now, though as a less perfect painter, yet as a far greater man than 
 Titian ipse. . . . 
 
 " Sejjt. 24. — I have had a draught of pictures to-day enough 
 to drown me. I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before 
 any human intellect as I was to-day — 'before Tintoret. Just be 
 so good as to take my list of painters and put him in the school 
 of Art at the top — top — top of everything, with a great big black 
 line underneath him to stop him off from everybody ; and put 
 him in the school of Intellect, next after Michael Angelo. He 
 took it so entirely out of nie to-day that I could do nothing at 
 last but lie on a bench and laugh. Harding said that if he had 
 been a figure-painter, he never could have touched a brush again, 
 and that he felt more like a flogged schoolboy than a man, and 
 no wonder. Tintoret don't seem able to stretch himself till you 
 give him a canvas forty feet square, and then — he lashes out 
 like a leviathan, and heaven and earth come together. M. Angelo 
 himself cannot hurl figures into space as he does, nor did M. 
 Angelo ever paint space which would not look like a nutshell beside 
 Tintoret's. Just imagine the audacity of the fellow — in his Massacre 
 of the Innocents one of the mothers has hurled herself off a terrace 
 to avoid the executioner and is falling head foremost and backwards 
 — holding up the child still. 
 
 "And such a Resurrection as there is ! — the rocks of the sepulchre 
 cracked all to pieces and roaring down upon you, while the Christ 
 soars forth into a torrent of angels, Avhirled up into heaven till 
 you are lost ten times over. And then to see his touch of quiet
 
 188 AN ATTACK OF FEVER 
 
 CHAP, thought in his awful Crucifixion. There is an ass in the distance, 
 feeding on the remains of pahn leaves. If that isn't a master's 
 stroke, I know not what is. As for painting, I think I didn't know 
 what it meant till to-day ; the fellow outlines you your figure with 
 ten strokes, and covers it with as mauy more. I don't believe it 
 took him ten minutes to invent and paint a whole length. Away 
 he goes, heaping host on host, multitudes that no man can number 
 — never pausin , never repeating himself. Clouds and whirlwinds 
 and fire and infinity of earth and sea, all alike to him. . . ." 
 
 The rush and enthusiasm of Ruskin's new discoveries are 
 even more striking in these first impressions, than in 
 the more dehberate descriptions, based upon them, in his 
 books. One sees how true of his own case is what he 
 says in the passage from which I have quoted at the head 
 of this chapter : " true taste is for ever growing, learn- 
 ing, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth 
 because it is astonished, lamenting over itself, and testing 
 itself by the way that it fits things." 
 
 Harding presently returned home, while Ruskin remained 
 to continue his learning, reading, worshipping. He was 
 engaged, among other studies from Tintoret, in making 
 the pen-and-sepia drawing of a portion of the Crucifixion 
 in S. Rocco of which he afterwards placed photographs 
 on sale. The incessant work and emotional strain began 
 to tell. "You will not feel it at present," Couttet had 
 said to him, "but you will feel it afterwards." At Padua, 
 and again on the homeward journey from Geneva to 
 Paris, a fit of nervous depression, accompanied by some 
 fever and tingling in the throat, overtook him ; a letter 
 from home, announcing the -death of his eldest Croydon 
 cousin, a strong and dutiful youth, struck him, he says, 
 with awe, and " wonder what my own selfish life was to 
 come to or end in." He fell into " the temper and more 
 or less tacit offering of very real prayer"; and "on the 
 third day what people who are in the habit of praying
 
 AN ANSWER TO PRAYER 189 
 
 know as the consciousness of answer came to me, and a CHAP 
 certainty that the illness, which had all this while increased 
 if anything, wonld be taken away." This certainty of mind, 
 this happy sense of direct relation with Heaven, passed away ; 
 Ruskin was not to regain any large part of it till after 
 many spiritual wanderings. "I had scarcely reached home 
 in safety," he says, " before I had sunk back into the faintness 
 and darkness of the Under- World." The Under-World, 
 I think he means, in the sense of a falling away in the 
 fervour of his personal faith, not in that of any intellectual 
 dubiety. The temper which was his during these travels 
 of 1845, and in which, upon his return home, he resumed 
 his work, is shown by his lines on " Mont Blanc Revisited " : — 
 
 "They meet me, 'midst thy shadows cold, — 
 Such thoughts as holy men of old 
 
 Amid the desert found ; — 
 Such gladness, as in Him they felt 
 Who with them through the darkness dwelt, 
 And compassed all around." 
 
 His mind was now well stored ; his heart was burning 
 within him. He was full of new discoveries which he 
 held to be certain truths ; of happy enthusiasms which he 
 expected all the world to share, as soon as he could get 
 them written down. The faith of his childhood was still 
 unshaken ; he was possessed by the joy of a beautiful 
 world, as yet undimmed by any shadoAV from its sorrows ; 
 he had thought out a theory which seemed to explain 
 and sanctify the beauty and the joy. Such was the temper 
 in which he sat doAvn in his study at Denmark Hill to write 
 his famous second volume.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE SECOND VOLUME OF MODERN PAINTERS 
 
 (1845-1846) 
 
 " world, as God has made it ! All is beauty ; 
 And knowing this, is love, and love is duty." — Browning. 
 
 RusKiN reached Denmark Hill at the beginning of November 
 
 1845. The second volume oi Modern Painters, on which he 
 now worked uninterruptedly, was published on April 24, 
 
 1846. The actual composition cannot thus have taken him 
 much more than five months ; but his studies for it had 
 occupied him for three years. 
 
 The first volume was now ^'oing into a third edition, 
 and the publishers had accepted the new volume on the 
 author's terms, as decided by his father, for they had 
 already reported it as called for by the public. Some of 
 the author's drawings which had been exhibited had added 
 to his reputation. " It happened to us within the last 
 few weeks," wrote one of the reviewers, " to be a guest at 
 a meeting of the Graphic Society, where some drawings 
 from the pencil of the gentlemaii to whom the author- 
 ship of this work is ascribed were exhibited, and on that 
 occasion a member of the Royal Academy, after examin- 
 ing one of the subjects with much attention, exclaimed in 
 our hearing — ' The man who can draw like that may write 
 anything he pleases upon art.' " ^ The second volume could 
 thus count on a respectful hearing; and "the press reviews," 
 says Ruskin, "were either cautious or complimentary — 
 
 ' Church of Emilaiul Qwirterly Reviev; July 1846. 
 190
 
 RECEl^TION OF THE SECOND VOLUME 191 
 
 none, to the best of njy memory, contemptuous." i This CHAP, 
 was not quite the case ; for the Athenceum, which had ■'■^• 
 loudly assailed the champion of Turner before, now re 
 turned to the charge with a copious vocabulary of abuse 
 against his new production. "Flowers of Billingsgate," 
 "brick-bats," " kennel- water," "eructations of idle wind," 
 were among the critical amenities which it bestowed upon 
 the Graduate. But the notices were, upon the whole, highly 
 complimentary ; especially those in the quarterly reviews, 
 then more numerous and influential than now. The Foreign 
 Quarterly, for instance, in a notice of the two volumes 
 tocrether, remarked that in the second volume the author 
 "speaks in a tone of maturer judgment, and greater 
 modesty," and pronounced the book to be " the most valu- 
 able contribution towards a proper view of painting, its 
 purpose and means, that has come within our knowledge." 
 The Ecclesiastic, another quarterly review of the time, pre- 
 dicted that the writer's " love and devotion will find their 
 reward in kindling kindred flames in others, and securing 
 a rich tribute of homage and sympathy which nothing- 
 else receives besides true and original genius." One such 
 tribute, which Ruskin valued greatly, came from Dr. John 
 Brown of Edinburgh, who had written to the author, as 
 yet unknown to him, immediately upon reading the book. 
 " I need not say," replied " The Author of Modern Painters," 
 " that I am grateful to you for expressing your feelings to 
 me, and that the support of such assurances of sympathy 
 is in every way precious. You appear to feel at present 
 perhaps a little too enthusiastically ; as I suppose is gene- 
 rally the case with our first reception of that for which we 
 are prepared by previous tendencies of feeling in the same 
 direction." A little later, the identity of the author became 
 known to Dr. Brown, who had been asked to write upon 
 the book for the North British Review. The notice was 
 sufficiently complimentary : — 
 
 " This is a very extraordinary and a very delightful book, 
 full of truth and goodness, of power and beauty. If genius may 
 
 ^ Prceterita, vol. ii. § 192.
 
 192 APPRECIATION BY DR. JOHN BROWN 
 
 CHAP, be considered (and it is as serviceable a definition as is current) 
 
 TX 
 
 that power by which one man produces, for the use or the pleasure 
 
 of his fellow-men, something at once new and true, then have we 
 
 here its unmistakable and inestimable handiwork. . . . The book 
 
 gave us wings, opened new doors into heaven, brought the country 
 
 into the town, made the invisible seen, the distance near.'' 
 
 But the editor of the Review, thinking it judicious, I suppose, 
 to mingle something of the bitter, had interpolated various 
 qualifications; and amongst them, a "wish that the author 
 would determine at once and for good not to be eloquent 
 any more." Brown wrote to explain the nature of the case, 
 and Ruskin replied (June 27, 1846) : — 
 
 " I do not think there is one whit more fault-finding than is 
 fully and fairly warrantable, certainly no more than is expedient, 
 for I fear that if your kind spirit of praise had thoroughly per- 
 vaded the article there had been much chance of all being set 
 down as the work of my friends and private abettors, and much 
 of the credit it will now carry refused in consequence. Neverthe- 
 less, for my own part, I was glad to hear you had not written 
 the passages in question, for, though preparing to consider them 
 and benefit by them as I best might, I was a little aghast at the 
 request that I would never be eloquent any more ; for I do think 
 that some things cannot be said except passionately and figura- 
 tively, and my own tendencies at present are so entirely prosaic, 
 and such delight as I once had in, or power over, the fancy so 
 fast evaporating or freezing, or sinking, as Wordsworth has it, 
 from the fountain into the ^comfortless and liidden ii-ell^ that 
 it pains me to be thrust away from the last hold that I had, or 
 thought I had, upon the altar, and ordered into the ice-house of 
 mere philosophy, there to be kept cool and dry. . . ." 
 
 II 
 
 The book, which was thus favourably received, differs both 
 in style and in subject-matter from its predecessor. "The 
 calmer tone of the second volume resulted," he afterwards 
 said, "from the simple fact that the first was written in
 
 STYLE AND TONE OF THE VOLUME 193 
 
 great haste and indignation, for a special purpose and time ; CHAP. 
 — the second, after I had got engaged, almost unawares, ^^' 
 in inquiries which could not be hastily nor indignantly 
 pursued." ^ He was now dealing with arguments of high 
 philosophy, and he sought elevation and dignity of lan- 
 guage. Li theory he was opposed to any tricks of style 
 which departed from simplicity ; in practice, however, he fell 
 into some mannerisms — afterwards exposed unmercifully 
 by himself. He had been sent to Hooker by his tutor, 
 Osborne Gordon, and imitation led him into affectations, — 
 "in the notion," as he says, "of returning as far as I could 
 to what I thought the better style of old English literature." ^ 
 The second volume contains throughout high thought 
 wedded to stately language ; it includes many passages 
 which are favourites in books of selections ; and it sustains, 
 hardly with a break, a note of dignity. But probably 
 Ruskin's own verdict is likely to stand : the style of the 
 second volume is too self-conscious; it was an experiment 
 rather than a development; "it was not," he says, "my 
 proper style." ^ 
 
 In subject-matter, the second volume reflects the new 
 studies which had occupied the author during 1845. The 
 successive enthusiasms are reflected in the perorations of 
 the several volumes. The flrst had ended with an exhorta- 
 tion to Turner to "let each exertion of his mighty mind be 
 both hyirm and prophecy ; adoration to the Deity, revelation 
 to mankind." The second ends with a canticle in praise of 
 " the angjel choirs of Angelico, with the flames on their white 
 foreheads waving brighter as they move, and the sparkles 
 streaming from their purple wings like the glitter of many 
 suns upon a sounding sea, listening, in the pauses of alternate 
 song, for the prolonging of the trumpet blast, and the answer- 
 ing of psaltery and cymbal, throughout the endless deep 
 and from all the star shores of heaven." One of the objects 
 of the volume was to be an Interpreter in England — of the 
 school of Angclico at Florence, of the school of Tintoret at 
 
 1 atones of Venice, vol. i. Appendix xi. 
 
 * Sesame and Lilies, 1871 Preface, § 1. 
 
 ' Love's Meinie, § 130. 
 VOL. I. N
 
 194 ITS INFLUENCE ON PUBLIC TASTE 
 
 CHAP. Venice. The effect of the book in these respects, which 
 ^^' alone can be measured with any precision, was sure and 
 speedy. It turned the taste of the age to the primitives. 
 The acquisition for the National Gallery of many early Italian 
 pictures — a policy which Ruskin advocated strenuously in 
 a letter to the Times in 1847 — is an illustration of this con- 
 version of taste and interest. The foundation and work of 
 the Arundel Society are another. Of this Society, established 
 in 1849 and dissolved in 1897, Ruskin was from the first a 
 member of the Council, other members being his friends 
 Liddell, Newton, and Oldfield. The original prospectus of 
 the Society, after referring to the importance of meeting a 
 revived interest in art by suitable instruction, remarks — as 
 if in echo of passages of the second volume of Modern 
 Painters — that " the materials for such instruction are 
 abundant, but scattered, little accessible, and, in some 
 instances, passing away. Of the frescoes of Giotto, Orcagna, 
 Ghirlandajo, much which has never been delineated, nor 
 even properly described, is rapidly perishing." The Avater- 
 colour copies of works of art made for the Society, and 
 reproduced by it in chromo-lithography, were on its dissolu- 
 tion presented to the National Gallery. The reader who 
 examines the collection there will see how many of the 
 works to which Ruskin called attention were selected by 
 the Society for record. 
 
 In connexion with the Arundel Society I may notice here, 
 though out of chronological order, Ruskin's book on Giotto. 
 In 1853 the Society commissioned Mr. Williams to make 
 drawings of Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel at Padua. 
 The drawings, cut on wood by the brothers Dalziel, were 
 published at intervals between 1853 and 1860; and, with 
 each batch of them, descriptive letterpress by Ruskin was 
 included. With the first part, issued in 1853, his famous 
 essay on Giotto's life and genius was given. In some 
 respects modern criticism of Giotto has "got past Ruskin 
 now," and in others he himself would, later in his life, 
 have revised the essay. There is in it a certain note of 
 apology, which he certainly would not have used had the 
 book been written twenty years later. " The early efforts of
 
 GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS IN PADUA 195 
 
 Giotto," he had written in his first volume, " arc the burning CHAP. 
 messages of prophecy, delivered by the stammering lips of ^^" 
 infants." He came afterwards to regard the stammerer as 
 a mighty master.^ The Protestant bias is also noticeable in 
 the essay. And, again, as Ruskin said in an " Advertise- 
 ment," he had made no study of Giotto's life ; for historical 
 data he accepted Lord Lindsa}^ and was thus led into some 
 statements which, in the light of later inquiries, are almost 
 certainly erroneous. Ruskin, it should be noted more par- 
 ticularly, places Giotto's work at Assisi after that at Padua ; 
 the more generally received vicAV is that the frescoes in the 
 Arena Chapel were the later by some years, those in Santa 
 Croce being, again, much later still. The essay on Giotto 
 and the notes on the frescoes remain, nevertheless, the 
 standard work on their subject, and at the time of first 
 publication made almost an epoch in the study of Italian 
 art in this country. English taste, in the years when the 
 book first appeared, was only beginning to awake to a due 
 appreciation of the Primitives, and Ruskin showed the 
 way to a fuller knowledge of Giotto. The points upon 
 which he insisted — the balanced sanity of Giotto's intellect, 
 the broad humanity of his temper, his power of enterino' 
 into the heart of a subject, and his peculiar faculty of 
 dramatic presentation — these remain the essential points in 
 all authoritative criticisms of the painter, while nothing that 
 is much significant has been found for addition to Ruskin's 
 notes on the legendary, dramatic, and artistic characteristics 
 of the several frescoes. 
 
 The second volume of Modern Painters was no less suc- 
 cessful in establishing the fame of Tintoret. It has been well 
 pointed out that Ruskin had come to Venice in a right mood 
 to appreciate the sweep and grandeur of Tintoretto's genius. 
 " Fresh from the stormy grandeur of the St. Gothard, he 
 found the lurid skies and looming giants of the Visitation, 
 or the Baptism, or the Crucifixion, re-echoing the subjects 
 of Turner as ' deep answering to deep.' " ^ Between Turner 
 and Tintoret there is, indeed, both intellectual and technical 
 
 ' See chap. xiv. in the next ^ W. G. Collingwood's Life of 
 
 volume. John Ruskin, 1900, p. 104.
 
 196 RUSKIN AND TINTORETTO 
 
 CHAP, affinity. "Greater imagination, a grander impressionism 
 and conception, and a more burning zeal, rather than a 
 faithful adherence to the traditions of the schools, was 
 Tintoretto's message to the ages." ^ It was the message that 
 Turner also conveyed, and there is reason for thinking that 
 in the mighty Venetian he had recognised a kindred spirit. 
 Samuel Rogers, when on his way to Italy, had met several 
 artists returning from that country. The first was Sir 
 Thomas Lawrence, and Rogers put the question to him, 
 " What do you think the finest picture you have seen in 
 Italy ? " After slight hesitation, he replied, " The Miracle 
 of St. Mark, by Tintoretto." Rogers then said, " The next 
 painter I met was Turner, and I put the same question to 
 him. Without a moment's hesitation he said ' Tintoretto.' " ^ 
 It was part of Ruskin's mission to reveal the genius of both 
 painters to the modern world. He justly claimed^ that he 
 disclosed the supremacy of Tintoret, who had fallen almost 
 into neglect^ until this volume and the third of TJie Stones 
 of Venice were published. In this respect, as also in winning 
 better recomition for the school of Fra Ans^elico, the second 
 volume oi Modern Painters assuredly did not miss its mark. 
 Ruskin refers in The Stones of Venice ^ — with " astonishment 
 and indignation " — to the notice of Tintoret in Kugler's 
 Handbook of Painting, then and for many years to come 
 
 ^ J. B. Stoughton Holborn's What a glorious group that is 
 
 Tintoretto, 1903, p. 90. we see at the foot of the Cross ! 
 
 * Reminiscences of Frederick Good- Really, for composition, for pathos, 
 all, R.A., 1902, p. 37. appropriate and harmonious com- 
 
 3 Modern Painters, vol. ii., Epi- bination of hues, and great execu- 
 
 logue, § 13; Frceterita, i. § 180; tive power, I have never seen it 
 
 Fors Glavicjera, Letters Gl and (57. excelled, rarely equalled. The 
 
 * That is, among critics and the poetry of his Last Judgment, the 
 general public. That artists appre- hues, the teeming richness of com- 
 ciated Tintoret we have already position, — figures whirled in all 
 seen. The following tribute by possibilities of action and fore- 
 Etty may be added. Writing to shortening, — excite astonishment 
 Lawrence from Venice in 1823, he at his powers that does not easily 
 says : " You, I am sure, must have subside " (Alexander Gilchrist's 
 been much struck with the Tin- Life of Etty, i. 169). 
 
 torets here ; in the Academy, ^ Introductory remarks to 
 
 Ducal Palace, etc. ; his Last Judg- Venetian Index, 
 ment, Crucifixion, small St. Agnes.
 
 THE CHAPTERS ON THE IMAGINATION 197 
 
 the recognised authority in such matters. The note added CHAP. 
 to later editions of the Handbook is significant of the efficacy * 
 
 of Ruskin's championship : — 
 
 "The remarks in the text upon Tintoretto have been retained, 
 although they do scant justice to that great master, whose works 
 are now better known and more fully understood and appreciated 
 in England, principally through the eloquent writings of Mr. 
 Ruskin. It may be asserted with confidence that no painter has 
 excelled him in nobility and grandeur of conception, and few in 
 poetic intention." ^ 
 
 Mr. Charles Eliot Norton has well said that the chapters 
 in the second volume on Imagination, with their " illustra- 
 tions of the theme drawn from the works ... of Tintoret, 
 the artist endowed above all others with imaginative power, 
 form an unrivalled text-book for the student of the nobler 
 qualities of the art. This section of the book," he adds, " in 
 its setting forth of the function of the imaginative faculty 
 in pictorial art, may well be compared with Wordsworth's 
 Prefaces in their study of the same faculty as displayed in 
 poetry. Wordsworth's and Ruskin's treatises are mutually 
 complementary; and they afford a body of doctrine ad- 
 mirably fitted to enlighten, enlarge, and elevate the under- 
 standing of the reader in its appreciation of the work and 
 worth of the most precious and loftiest of human powers." ^ 
 
 III 
 
 The interpretation of Angelico and Tintoretto was, how- 
 ever, only one object of Ruskin's book. The other was to 
 " explain the nature of that quality of beauty which I now 
 saw to exist through all the happy conditions of living 
 organism "; ^ to explain its nature, and to explain also the 
 " theoretic faculty" of admiration by which it may be appre- 
 hended. In this respect the second volume of Modern 
 
 ^ Fifth edition, 1887, vol. ii. " Brantwood Edition " of Modern 
 p. G12. Pairiters, vol. ii. 
 
 * Introduction to the American ^ I'netentu, vol. ii. § 183.
 
 198 HISTORY OF THE VOLUME 
 
 CHAP. Painters occupies a central place in Ruskin's system, and liis 
 ^^- attitude at different times towards the book is of some interest. 
 The second volume was reprinted in 1848, 1851, 1856, and 
 1869 ; it was included, of course, in the complete new edition 
 of 1873. He was averse, however, from the republication of 
 the book, and was especially out of humour with the second 
 volume. He had outgrown its theological standpoint ; he 
 was ashamed of its sectarian narrowness; and he was dis- 
 pleased by its affectations of style. Hence, when contem- 
 plating a revised series of his Works in 1870-71, he excluded 
 the second volume of Modern Painters from its scope.^ 
 Subsequentl}^ however, he selected that very volume for 
 separate and special republication. What caused him to 
 change his mind was, firstly, the rise of the so-called 
 "lesthetic" craze, with which by the ignorant he was some- 
 times himself connected ; and, next, the constraint he felt 
 to reinforce the system of "natural philosophy and natural 
 theology," which he had accepted as the basis of his teaching 
 and which had come to be assailed on so many sides. He 
 had intended, he says, "never to have reprinted the second 
 volume oi Modern Painters" ; but "I find now," he added, 
 " that the ' general student ' has plunged into such abysses, 
 not of analytic, but of dissolytic, — dialj^tic — or even diarrhoeic 
 — lies, belonging to the sooty and sensual elements of his 
 London and Paris life, that however imperfectly or dimly 
 done, the higher analysis of that early work of mine ought 
 at least to be put within his reach ; and the fact, somehow, 
 enforced upon him, that there were people before he lived, 
 who knew what 'sesthesis' meant, though they did not 
 think that pigs' flavouring of pigs'-wash was ennobled by 
 giving it that Greek name : and that there were also people 
 who knew what vital beauty meant, though they did not 
 seek it either in the model-room, or the Pare aux Cerfs."^ 
 To the same effect is the note added in 1883 to the first 
 chapter of the second volume, in protest against the 
 " sesthetic" folly " which in recent days has made art at once 
 the corruption, and the jest, of the vulgar world." Similarly, 
 
 ' Sesame and Lilies, 1871 Preface, § 2. 
 2 Love's Meinie (1881), § 130.
 
 RUSKIN'S THEORY OF BEAUTY 199 
 
 Ruskin felt impelled to republish his second volume as a OHAP. 
 protest against " so many baseless semblances of philosophy," •'^■^* 
 and as a vindication of tljc Faith "in the creating Spirit, as 
 the source of Beauty."^ Accordingly in 1882 he prepared, 
 and in the following year published, a new and revised 
 edition of this second volume. He had come to feel in the 
 end that he had builded better than he knew, and that the 
 volume, which he had thought of discarding, might yet be 
 of special value in its time.- 
 
 What, then, is Beauty according to Ruskin ? and what, 
 the faculty which apprehends it ? " There is," he says, 
 " no other definition of the Beautiful, nor of any subject 
 of delight to the {esthetic faculty, than that it is what 
 one noble spirit has created, seen and felt by another of 
 similar or equal nobility. So much as there is in you 
 of ox, or of sw^iue, perceives no beauty, and creates none ; 
 what is human in you, in exact proportion to the perfection 
 of its humanity, can create it, and receive."^ The beautiful 
 is not, as Keats said, the true ; for the mirage of the desert 
 is fairer than its sands. Nor is it the useful ; unless the 
 most beautiful products of art are spades and millstones. 
 Nor does it depend on custom ; Gower Street may become 
 less ugly to you if you are used to it, but it is not custom 
 that is the cause of the beauty of Giotto's Tower. Nor 
 does it depend on association of ideas. Associations are 
 a source of pleasure ; so is beauty ; but beauty is not 
 therefore association. No ; beauty consists, says Ruskin, 
 in certain external qualities of bodies which are tyincal of 
 Divine attributes, and in the appearance of felicitous ful- 
 filment in vital things. Every one has heard of the repose 
 of true beauty ; why is repose beautiful ? Because it is 
 "a type of Divine permanence," and satisfies 
 
 " The universal instinct of repose, 
 The longing for confirmed tranquillity, 
 Inward and outward, humble and sublime — 
 The life where hope and memory are one." 
 
 * Deucalion (188.3), vol. ii. ch. ii. 
 
 * See further on this subject, Vol. II. chap. xxiv. 
 
 * Aratra Pentelici, § 12.
 
 '200 BEAUTY "TYPICAL" AND "VITAL" 
 
 CHAP, That is an instance of what Ruskin means by Typical 
 Beauty. Why, again, is " the ideal " beautiful ? Why is 
 the skylark beautiful ? Because it so perfectly fulfils the 
 bird-ideal; so happily performs, that is, the functions of 
 songster of the sky. Why is the face of an ideal man 
 more beautiful than that of the man in the street ? Because 
 art is "the pure mirror that can show the seraph standing 
 by each body, as signal to the heavenly land." That is what 
 is meant by Vital Beauty. Beauty, then, according to Ruskin, 
 is "the expression of the creating spirit of the universe." 
 Beautiful things are useful to men because they are beauti- 
 ful, and for the sake of their beauty. The science of nature 
 " must give heed not only to her chemical or physical com- 
 position, her truth, her utility, her richness, her fertility, 
 her evolution, but to that also which Ave worship in life and 
 despise in argument, which is graven in facts and prescribed 
 by systems, which we seek in silence and dream of with awe 
 — the Beautiful." ^ We may name the creating spirit of the 
 universe as we will, but the recognition of it is a condition 
 of the right apprehension of the beautiful. The theoretic or 
 contemplative faculty which apprehends the beautiful is not 
 a mere operation of the sense, neither is it entirely of the 
 intellect : — 
 
 " For, as it is necessary to the existence of an idea of beauty, 
 that the sensual pleasure which may be its basis should be accom- 
 panied first with joy, then with love of the object, then with the 
 perception of kindness in a superior intelligence, finally, with thank- 
 fulness and veneration towards that intelligence itself ; and as no 
 idea can be at all considered as in any way an idea of beauty, until 
 it be made up of these emotions, any more than we can be said to 
 have an idea of a letter of which we perceive the perfume and the 
 fair writing, without understanding the contents of it, or intent of it ; 
 and as these emotions are in no way resultant from, nor obtainable 
 
 ^ Ruskin et la Religion de la honoured me by giving therein a 
 
 Beauts, by Robert de la Sizeranne, sentence or two from my Studies 
 
 1897. The chapter in that book in Rusldn (1890), and I now take 
 
 headed "Nature" contains an ad- leave to quote a sentence or two 
 
 mirable summary of Ruskin's from him, 
 theory. M. de la Sizeranne
 
 THE "THEORETIC" FACULTY 201 
 
 by, any operation of the Intellect; it is evident that the sensation CHAP. 
 of beauty is not sensual on the one hand, nor is it intellectual on 
 the other, but is dependent on a pure, right, and open state of the 
 heart." i 
 
 The world of beauty is like the Beryl in Rossetti's ballad — 
 
 " None sees here but the pure alone." 
 
 It is the theoretic faculty that apprehends better than 
 reason or the senses "the claim of all lower nature on 
 the hearts of men ; ot the rock, and wave, and herb as part 
 of their necessary spirit life." And the exercise of the 
 faculty is itself the service of Heaven. This thought is 
 Aristotle's, in the great sentence of the EtJcics which Ruskin 
 thus translates: "Perfect happiness is some sort of energy 
 of Contemplation, for all the life of the gods is (therein) 
 glad; and that of men, glad in the degree in which some 
 likeness of the gods in this energy belongs to them. For 
 none other of living creatures (but men only) can be happy, 
 since in no way can they have any part in Contemplation." 
 
 Such are the ideas which Ruskin expresses in the second 
 volume of Modern Painters. " I am warned," said Emerson, 
 " by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt a 
 definition of Beauty." Ruskin's theory has been, and will 
 be, assailed ; but it is consistent with itself, it explains 
 many of the phenomena, and it harmonises, better than any 
 other philosophy of the beautiful, with a system of natural 
 religion — the religion, as Ruskin says, of Job and of Linnseus. 
 " I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now 
 mine eye seeth Thee." "As one awaked out of sleep > 
 I saw the Lord passing by — eternal, infinite, omniscient' 
 omnipotent, and I stood as in a trance." The volume has' 
 moreover, a permanent value, independent of the theory 
 which it expounds. No one, I think, can read the chapters 
 on Infinity, Unity, Repose, Symmetry, Purity, and Modera- 
 tion — or, again, those under the head of Vital Beauty — 
 without having his ideas of the beautiful enlarged, or 
 clarified. Ruskin was to continue during many years and 
 • Modern Painters, vol. ii. sec. i. ch. ii. § 8.
 
 202 THE DIGNITY OF ART 
 
 CHAP, in many volumes to illustrate the phenomena of nature and 
 the principles of their beauty which he had described and 
 defined in the two first volumes of Modern Painters ; and 
 "it is not too much to say that he, like Winckelmann, has 
 given the mind a new organ for the appreciation of beauty." ^ 
 These earlier volumes of Modern Painters did much, too, in 
 their day, and are of permanent importance as tending to 
 create a high ideal both of art and of taste. Art, which is 
 the interpretation and creation of beauty, is no recreation — 
 it is not a mere amusement, "a minister to morbid sensi- 
 bilities, a tickler and fanner of the soul's sleep." It is more 
 than this ; not because art is not to give pleasure : on the 
 contrary, it is not art unless it does ; but because the plea- 
 sures to which it is the highest function of art to appeal 
 are not mere pleasures of sense. Ruskin, as was said in the 
 leading English journal on the day following his death, 
 
 "constructed an ideal for the artist as Avell as an ideal of art. 
 He showed the artistic profession that it has a mission like the 
 pulpit. He inculcated upon it self-respect because its art is worthy 
 of respect. . . . Artists must not be unmindful that they owe 
 the fuller recognition of their title to public admiration and public 
 patronage in no small degree to the blaze of glory with which his 
 meteoric pen has invested their whole vocation. Every painter has 
 risen in stature by virtue of John Ruskin's vindication of the heights 
 to which English art must, and English artists may, aspire." ^ 
 
 Nowhere are such high ideals more powerfully presented 
 than in the second volume of Modern Painters. 
 
 ^ Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Esthetic. 
 2 y^^jjg^,^ Jan. 22, 1900.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 MARRIAGE 
 
 (1846-1848) 
 
 " The writer's whole time has lately been occupied in taking 
 drawings from one side of buildings, of which masons were 
 knocking down the other ; nor can he yet pledge himself to 
 any time for the publication of the conclusion of Modern 
 Painters; he can only ]iroiiiise that its delay shall not be owing 
 to any indolence on his part." — Preface to the first edition of 
 The Seven Lamps. 
 
 By the time the second volume of Modern Painters was in 
 the hands of the public, Raskin was again on the Continent. 
 He had felt severely the strain of writing the volume, and 
 in April 1846 he started to revisit old scenes and to show 
 his parents some of his new discoveries, No further portion 
 of Modern Painters saw the light until 1850. During this 
 intervening decade, the magnum ojms was never wholly out 
 of the author's mind, but its place of precedence was for a 
 Avhile usurped by other thoughts and tasks. " It is curious," 
 he notes in his diary of 1849, " that in literature the most 
 successful books seem to have been planned as they went 
 on." Not Ruskin's books only, but also the order in which 
 he wrote them, were planned as he went on, and his mental 
 journeying was at no time free from digressions. At the 
 end of the second volume of Modern Painters, he was rapt 
 in contemplation of "the angel choirs" of the early Italian 
 painters. He followed up that volume by some njinor 
 writings on allied subjects ; but these were anonymous, and 
 when he next appeared before the public with another 
 volume, it was found to be devoted to the principles and 
 ideals of Gothic architecture. This new study occupied 
 him for seven years, and its results were embodied in live
 
 204 THE CALL TO ARCHITECTURE 
 
 CHAP, illustrated volumes — The Seven Lamnps of Architecture 
 ■^- (1849), Tlie Stones of Venice, vol. i. (LS51), Examples of the 
 Architecture of Venice (1851), and The Stones of Venice, 
 vols. ii. and iii. (1853). 
 
 Ruskin did not realise at the time when he started off 
 on his new enterprise how long the interruption was to be. 
 When he was writing The Seven Lamps, he still thought 
 that one more volume would complete Modern Painters; 
 while, doubtless, he did not foresee how laborious the studies 
 for his projected work on Venetian architecture would 
 become. Hence he felt no hesitation in yielding to a new 
 impulse, or — it were, perhaps, better to say — in obeying a 
 new call. He was ever impetuous and enthusiastic ; what- 
 ever his hand found to do, he began doincj with all his 
 might on the instant. In 1845 he had turned from the 
 study of rocks and clouds to that of Era Angelico and 
 Tintoret, He hurried home full of fervour, and put out the 
 second volume of Modern Painters. But already, as we 
 have heard, another interest was stirring within him. His 
 gift for architectural drawing had greatly developed, and 
 he saw around him on all sides the passing away of beautiful 
 buildings which he felt that he had the capacity to under- 
 stand and the skill to record. It was a question, he said to 
 himself, of now or never. Delay would be doubly fatal. 
 He might be too late to record, and his readers would no 
 longer be able to see. Thus the same burning enthusiasm 
 that first threw him into the defence of Turner, and then 
 into the interpretation oi Tintoret, now diverted him to 
 mediaeval architecture. 
 
 Perhaps, Loo, something was due to intellectual reaction. 
 Like most great workers, he knew only one form of recreation 
 — a change of work. The close study of architecture may 
 have come as a relief from that of painting. He and his 
 parents went first to Champagnole, and an entry in his diary 
 is interesting as giving the note on the spot from which
 
 FOREIGN TOUR: 1846' 205 
 
 a famous passage in The Seven La7)ip8 was afterwards CHAP, 
 written : — ^ 
 
 " Champagnole, April 19. ... I have been walking in the 
 woods beside the river on the ascent towards St. Laurent, and I 
 have never seen anything like the luxuriance of the wood anemone 
 and oxalis ; I think Shelley's * pearled Arcturi of the earth ' would 
 apply better to the anemone than the daisy, for the star shape is seen 
 more definitely at a little distance, and reminded me over and over 
 again of constellations. . . . And when I got to the edge of the ravine, 
 and commanded the steep and far ridges of the higher Jura, there 
 was a hawk sailing slowly along the opposite cliff, just off the brow 
 of it so as to get the deep river under him, and the solemn roar of 
 the water came up from beneath, mixed with the singing of the 
 thrushes among the pine branches. I felt it more than usual, but 
 it struck me suddenly how utterly different the impression of such 
 a scene would be, if it were in a strange land, and in one without 
 history ; how dear to the feeling is the pine of Switzerland compared 
 to that of Canada. I have allowed too little weight to these deep 
 sympathies, for I think if that pine forest had been among the 
 Alleghenys, or if the stream had been Niagara, I should only have 
 looked at them with intense melancholy and desire for home." 
 
 From Champagnole they went by Geneva and Turin to 
 Vercelli and the Lakes, and thence to Venice and Florence ; 
 afterwards staying some time at Vevay and Chamouni 
 (where Riiskin had the pleasure of meeting Acland on his 
 wedding-journey), and then home by Troyes and Chatillon- 
 sur-Seine. At Venice he was already busy with elaborate 
 measurements of the buildings. He filled many pages, too, 
 with notes on Willis's recently-published Arcliitecturc of the 
 Middle Ages. He was reading also Woods' Letters of an 
 Architect. Points which he afterwards developed in The 
 Seven Lamjys were already occurring to him. Thus, it Avas 
 during this tour that he was struck by the system of inter- 
 sectional mouldings, which he discussed at length in that 
 book as a principal source of corruption in Gothic architec- 
 ture. On this tour of 1846, he was as absorbed in sections 
 and mouldings as formerly in flowers and rocks, and as busy 
 in drawing doors and windows as once in making sketches
 
 206 MODERN PAINTERS POSTPONED 
 
 CHAP, of skies and mountains. But one member of the party felt 
 serious disappointment in this diversion of interest. Ruskin 
 had dwelt with pleasurable anticipation upon the prospect 
 of initiating his parents into the beauties of Italian Gothic. 
 But his father, who was becoming an old man, had not the 
 mental agility which enabled his son to turn so easily from 
 one enthusiasm to another. Father and son " had been 
 entirely of one mind about the carved porches of Abbeville 
 and living pictures of Vandyck ; but when my father now 
 found himself required to admire also flat walls, striped like 
 the striped calico of an American flag, and oval-eyed saints 
 like the figures on a Chinese teacup, he grew restive." And 
 the son grew impatient. One afternoon as they were driving 
 past the chapel of La Spina at Pisa, the father, waking out 
 of a reverie, asked suddenly, " John, what shall I give the 
 coachman ? " " Whereupon I, instead of telling him what 
 he asked me, as I ought to have done with much com- 
 placency at being referred to on the matter, took upon me 
 with impatience to reprove, and lament over, my father's 
 hardness of heart in thinking at that moment of sublunary 
 affairs. And the spectral Spina of that chapel has stayed 
 in my own heart ever since." A letter from the elder 
 Ruskin to his friend W. H. Harrison, among whose papers 
 it has been found, shows the difference in the point of view 
 between father and son : — 
 
 "He is cultivating art at present (Venice, May 25, 1846), 
 searching for real knowledge, but to you and me this is at present 
 a sealed book. It will neither take the shape of picture nor poetry. 
 It is gathered in scraps hardly wrought, for he is drawing perpetu- 
 ally, but no drawing such as in former days you or I might compli- 
 ment in the usual way by saying it deserved a frame ; but fragments 
 of everything from a Cupola to a Cart-wheel, but in such bits that it 
 is to the common eye a mass of Hieroglyphics— all true — Truth itself 
 but Truth in mosaic." 
 
 The writer's habitual good sense hits off in a happy 
 phrase the somewhat disjointed nature of Ruskin's studies, 
 and the letter is not without its note of pathos to the 
 sympathetic ear. The father had hoped to see his son
 
 MISS MITFORD 207 
 
 become a Bishop, and the Church had been given up ; CHAP. 
 to see him become a second Byron, and poetry was now ^' 
 written no more. He had made some mark with his 
 drawings, and now he only did architectural jottings. 
 Modern Painters was winning for him a literary reputation ; 
 yet he showed no disposition to finish the book. It does 
 not appear, however, that Ruskin had as yet determined on 
 casting his architectural studies into the form of a separate 
 essay. They seem to have been originally intended for a 
 part or a section in Modern Painters. That book, hoAvever, 
 made no progress. His literary production during the next 
 two years (1817, 1848) was small. He suffered a good deal 
 from ill-health, and there were distractions. 
 
 II 
 
 On his return from the Continent, Ruskin was still much 
 occupied, as his note-books show, with architectural studies ; 
 he spent much time also at the British Museum among the 
 illummated manuscripts and the natural history collections 
 (not then removed to South Kensington). The circle of 
 his friends, acquaintances, and correspondents was now 
 enlarging ; his literary reputation was becoming more ex- 
 tended as the circulation of Modern Painters increased. 
 He Avas often to be seen at Rogers's breakfast table, 
 paying respectful homage in the presence of gracious con- 
 descension. With another, and a very different, literary 
 personage of the day — Mary Russell Mitford — he now formed 
 a friendship, which was to be one of the chief solaces of her 
 declining years. Ruskin has described her among the circle 
 of modest authors, in the days of the Annuals, who were 
 within his ken, through his " first editor," W. H. Harrison — 
 "merry Miss Mitford, actually living in the country, actually 
 walking in it, loving it." ^ To her studies of country life, and 
 of children,^ he attached no small importance in literary 
 history. Her Avritings, he said, "have the playfulness and 
 purity of the Vicar of Wakefield without the naughtiness of 
 
 * " My First Editor," reprinted in On the Old Road, 
 
 * Art of England, § 109.
 
 208 RUSKIN'S APPEARANCE AS A YOUNG MAN 
 
 CHAP, its occasional wit, or the dust of the world's great road on 
 the other side of the hedge." ^ She, on her part, was an early 
 admirer of Modern Painters. Ruskin had first been to see 
 her in January 1847. " Have you read an Oxford Graduate's 
 letters on Art ? " she wrote to a friend (January 27). " The 
 author, Mr. Ruskin, was here last week, and is certainly the 
 most charming person I have ever known. The books are 
 very beautiful, although I do not agree in all the opinions ; 
 but the young man himself is just what if one had a son one 
 should have dreamt of his turning out, in mind, manner, 
 conversation, everything."^ The visit was repeated; and 
 Miss Mitford was more and more delighted with him. " He 
 has been here two or three times," she wrote (July 26) ; " he 
 is by far the most eloquent and interesting young man that 
 I have ever seen — grace itself and sweetness." ^ 
 
 Of the personal appearance of the "interesting young 
 man " who thus won Miss Mitford's heart, the best like- 
 ness is the fall-length portrait in water-colour by George 
 Richmond, reproduced as frontispiece to this volume. It 
 shows a tall and slightly-built figure, clad in the ample 
 frock-coat and blue stock, which he always wore, the head 
 surmounted by abundant brown hair. He is sitting, as 
 Ruskin said in describing the portrait, " at a picturesque desk 
 in the open air, in a crimson waistcoat and white trousers, 
 with a magnificent port-crayon in my hand, and Mont Blanc, 
 conventionalised to Raphaelesque grace, in the distance." 
 The artist amid these pictorial graces did not miss the char- 
 acteristic hand, with its long, thin, and tapering fingers. 
 
 Miss Mitford was sixty when Ruskin first met her, she 
 was in poor health, and not overburdened with worldly goods. 
 Her Recollections of a Literary Life, published in 1852, con- 
 cluded with a chapter on Ruskin, and in it she said : " My 
 most kind friend Mr. Ruskin will understand why I con- 
 nect his name with the latest event that has befallen me, 
 the leaving the cottage that for thirty years had been my 
 shelter." His thoughtful kindness did much, in divers little 
 
 1 Letter to Miss Mitford (April 22, 1854). 
 
 2 y/jg JTricmUhips of Mary Russell Mitford, vol. ii. p. 107. 
 
 ^ Letters of Mary EvKsell Mitford, Second Series, vol. i. p. 233.
 
 LETTER TO MISS MITFORD 209 
 
 ways, we are told, to cheer her closing years. He sent her CHAP. 
 every book that would interest and every delicacy that ^' 
 would strengthen her. At the time of his first acquaintance 
 with Miss Mitford, she had become lame, as the result of a 
 fall, and he Avrote a letter of condolence : — 
 
 "[Denmark Hill] Saturday, 19^/i June [1847]. — My dear 
 Madam, — You will not, I am sure, doubt the regret with which I 
 received your last kind letter, informing me both of the disaj^point- 
 ment I must myself sustain and of its cause, so trying to you 
 yourself. I do indeed sympathise most deeply in the sorrow (it can 
 hardly but reach what may without exaggeration be so called) which 
 your present privation must cause you, especially coming in the time 
 of spring — your favourite season — a punishment certainly far too 
 heavy to be connected by you in thought with any such gossamer- 
 bodied sin as that in which you say you were once entangled, the 
 vanity of long walks ; for which vanity, if all guilty of it were to be 
 shut up in doubting castles, without keys, their cramps taking them — 
 (I beg pardon for mixing in this heterogeneous manner the giant and 
 his prey) — I fear that it would be soon said of each and all of us 
 walkers that ' nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he.' In fact, is 
 it right to think of any misfortune in the world (except such as are 
 necessarily and legally connected with every sin — mortification with 
 vanity, and lameness with over-exertion) as sent as punishment at 
 all 1 Do not twenty miseries come for a purpose for one that comes 
 for a punishment? After all, though your feet are in the stocks, 
 you have the Silas spirit, and the doors will open in the mid- 
 darkness. . . . 
 
 " I leave town on Tuesday, in order to be of what use I may 
 — Heaven only knows — at the meeting of the British Association, 
 whence, returning, I hope to stop at Reading and to find you — out. 
 Afterwards I am going to Scotland to stay quietly with a very dear 
 friend, in a cottage — a little worse than a cottage — at the side of 
 Loch Tay. I need this, for I have most foolishly accepted evening 
 invitations, and made morning calls, these last four months, until I 
 am fevered by the friction. I have done no good, incurred many 
 obligations, and suffered an incalculable harm. I know not what is 
 the matter with me, but the people seem to have put a chill on mc, 
 and taken my life out of me." 
 
 VOL. I. O
 
 210 MISS LOCKHART AND THE QUARTERLY 
 
 CHAP. Among the distractions referred to in this letter were 
 
 ^- receptions in Park Street by Lady Davy, one of the leaders 
 of literary society in that day. At her house, Ruskin used 
 to meet Miss Charlotte Lockhart, who became to him "a 
 Scottish fairy, White Lady, and witch of the fatallest sort, 
 ■ looking as if she had just risen out of the stream in Rhymer's 
 Glen." "But I never could contrive," he adds "to come to 
 any serious speech with her." Lockhart, however, had 
 invited Ruskin to write upon Lord Lindsay's Sketches of the 
 History of Christian Art. He accepted the invitation less 
 for the sake of the editor than for that of his daughter. 
 " With my usual wisdom in such matters," he says, " I went 
 away into Cumberland to recommend myself to her by 
 writing a Quarterly review." His father, who knew his 
 son's hopes and fondl}'- counted on their success, had already 
 been looking out for a suitable house in the Lake District, 
 where Ruskin and Scott's grand-daughter might establish 
 themselves. In March 1847 Ruskin settled down at the 
 Salutation Inn, Ambleside, then a country inn in a country 
 village, with George as his companion, to write the review. 
 But the sentences would not come readily, and Ruskin fell 
 into a state of despondency of which, he tells us, he knew 
 not the like again till fourteen years afterwards.^ The 
 review which appeared in the Quarterly for June 1847 gave 
 Ruskin occasion to cover ground which he had already 
 traversed in the second volume of Modern Painters, and 
 was presently to occupy in The Seven Lamjps. Lockhart, 
 he says, cut out all his best bits, and objected to a criticism 
 of Gaily Knight, on the ground that he was a protege of 
 Albemarle Street.^ As for Miss Lockhart, the review, good, 
 bad, or inditteront, elicited no encouraging response from 
 her whatever ; which was not surprising, for her interests 
 were engaged elsewhere. The review is a somewhat laboured 
 piece; and besides, on August 19, 1847, she married J. R. 
 Hope (Hope-Scott). In June Ruskin had gone up to Oxford, 
 as we have heard, to act as Secretary of the Geological 
 Section of the British Association. His despondency was 
 
 ^ See Vol. II. chap. ii. pressed criticism in /Siones o/ Feni'ce / 
 
 - Ruskin publisliod his sup- see Librarj^ Ed., vol. ix. p. 431.
 
 THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION AT OXFORD 211 
 
 increasing, and there is a note of nervous strain in bis CHAP. 
 letters : — X- 
 
 {To his Father.) " June 27, 1847. — I am not able to write a full 
 account of all I see, to amuse you, for I find it necessary to keep 
 as quiet as I can, and I fear it would only annoy you to be told of all 
 the invitations I refuse, and all the interesting matters in which I 
 take no part. There is nothing for it but throwing one's self into 
 the stream, and going down with one's arms under water, ready to 
 be carried anywhere, or do anything. My friends are all busy, and 
 tired to death. All the members of my section, but especially 
 Forbes, Sedgwick, Murchison, and Lord Northampton — and of course 
 Buckland, are as kind to me as men can be ; but I am tormented by 
 the perpetual feeling of being in everybody's way. The recollections 
 of the place, too, and the being in my old rooms, make me very 
 miserable. I have not one moment of profitably s^tent time to look 
 back to while I was here, and much useless labour and disappointed 
 hope ; and I can neither bear the excitement of being in the society 
 where the play of mind is constant, and rolls over me like heavy 
 wheels, nor the pain of being alone. I get away in the evenings into 
 the hayfields about Cumnor, and rest ; but then my failing sight 
 plagues me. I cannot look at anything as I used to do, and the 
 evening sky is covered with swimming strings and eels. My best 
 time is while I am in the Section room, for though it is hot, and 
 sometimes wearisome, yet I have nothing to say — little to do, — 
 nothing to look at, and as much as I like to hear." 
 
 An election was pending at this time. At the dissolution 
 in June 1847 Gladstone stood for the first time for the 
 University of Oxford, and Ruskin was persuaded by his 
 friend Richard Greswell of Worcester to join Gladstone's 
 Committee. It is an indication of the repute already won 
 by the author of Modern Painters that the Oxford chair- 
 man was " sure that Mr. Gladstone would appreciate at its 
 full value the support of such high personal merit and 
 extraordinary natural genius." ^ The two men had met at 
 Lady Davy's dinner-table, where they disputed across Miss 
 
 1 Morley's Life of Gladstone, vol. i. p. 329.
 
 212 STUDIES AND MOODS 
 
 CHAP. Lockhart over Neapolitan prisons : Mr. Gladstone couldn't 
 see, explains Raskin, that the real prisoners Avere the persons 
 outside.-^ 
 
 Ill 
 
 It was not surprising that the receipt of Ruskin's letter 
 from Oxford, with its account of swimming strings and 
 eels, convinced his parents that his health needed serious 
 attention. He was sent accordingly, as in 1841, to Leaming- 
 ton for a month's " cure " under Dr. Jephson. There he 
 occupied himself with miscellaneous reading ; and with 
 much study, by drawing and analysis, of botanical detail, 
 and with inner questionings on the foundations of a 
 religious faith now first becoming shaken. The courses of 
 his thought, and of his physical state, from nervous listless- 
 ness to some re- establishment of vigour, are shown in his 
 letters and diary : — 
 
 (Diary.) "Leamington, J^dy 29. — As I was walking down the 
 chief street this afternoon, somewhat languid — partly owing to the 
 weather, and partly to a disappointment in the ill-success of a laboured 
 drawing, and partly from causes unknown, I could not help looking 
 into the stationers' windows for some book to amuse me, though I 
 have now on the table TJie Guardian and Pamela, and I Promessi 
 Sj'osi, besides Wordsworth and Dante, and several books on chemis- 
 try, and a Quarterly, and Eastlake's book on oil painting, and George 
 Herbert and Plato. All these came into my mind, and at the same 
 time, very reproachfully, Wordsworth's account of the poor clergy- 
 man, Robert Walker, who 'allowed not a moment of recreation 
 except upon a Saturday afternoon, when he indulged himself with 
 a Newspaper, or sometimes with a Magazine.' What a foretaste 
 of Paradise to such a man would this room of mine be, this leisure 
 and these books ! So I walked past all the stationers, resolved not 
 to encourage any more this continually increasing volatility and 
 listlessness ; and yet so far, I have thought since I came home, that 
 much of the poor clergyman's time being given to labour in the field, 
 and the rest to matters interesting to heart and conscience, left no 
 
 * Prceterita, vol. ii. § 51.
 
 A "CURE" AT LEAMINGTON 213 
 
 room for the peculiar lassitude, which continual book occupation can CHAP. 
 hardly but induce. I will not buy any more books, but I am not ^" 
 sure that I am very wrong in wishing to do so." 
 
 {Diary.) " Aug. 7. — It was cold and dark and gusty and raining 
 by fits, at two o'clock to-day, and until four ; but I went out, deter- 
 mined to have my walk, get wet or no. I took the road to the 
 village where I had been the first day with j\Iacdonald, and about 
 a mile and a half out, I was driven by the rain into a little cot- 
 tage. ... It had rained hard while I stayed in the cottage, but had 
 ceased when I went on, and presently appeared such a bright bar of 
 streaky sky in the west, seen over the glittering hedges, as made my 
 heart leap again, it put so much of old feelings into me of far-away 
 hills and fountains of morning light ; and the sun came out presently, 
 and every shake of the trees shook down more light upon the grass. 
 And so I came to the village and stood leaning on the churchyard 
 gate, looking at the sheep nibbling and resting among the graves 
 (newly watered they lay, and fresh, like a field of precious seed). 
 One narrow stream of light ran in ups and downs across them, but 
 the shadow of the church fell over most — the pretty little grey church, 
 now one dark mass against the intense golden glittering sky ; and to 
 make it sweeter still, the churchyard itself rose steeply, so that its 
 own grand line came against this same light at last." 
 
 {To George Richmond.) "Leamington, Aug. 16. ... I am 
 packing up to leave for Dunbar and Tantallon — only sto})ping at 
 Kenilworth to finish some ivy stalks to-morrow. I am indeed better 
 at last — thanks to the perfect rest I have had here — and my 
 thoughts and faith are returning to me. I have had great good 
 from dissecting some water-plants out of the canal. My eyes do 
 not seem to serve me very well, but they are better than nine pairs 
 out of ten, and I am very thankful to have such, and to have 
 Jephson's authority on two points — first, that there is nothing 
 whatever the matter with me that I cannot conquer by quiet, 
 regularity, and exercise; and secondly, that there is nothing which 
 may not soon be the matter with me, if I go much into society or 
 sit up at night. Acland does look very happy, and I am sure he 
 is ; but Mrs. Aclands are not to be found every day — nor to be won — 
 except by Dr. Aclands ; nor Mrs. Richmonds neither. Thank you for 
 your kind afi"ection. . . ."
 
 214 DESPONDENCY 
 
 CHAP. The entry from the diary of Aug. 7 was included in 
 Prceterita, and greatly moved one of Euskin's later friends. 
 " I think even you," wrote Miss Francesca Alexander, 
 "hardly ever wrote anything so beautiful as the descrip- 
 tion of the country church and graveyard at sunset, which 
 has stayed in my mind all day, no matter what I have 
 been doing, as if I had seen some beautiful picture." 
 
 The Macdonald mentioned in the diary — William Mac- 
 donald Farquharson Macdonald — was a Scottish laird, a 
 youth now of some two-and-twenty, owner of large pro- 
 perties, in Perthshire, and zealous in the Scottish Evan- 
 gelical faith. He had visited occasionally with his mother 
 — an old friend of Ruskin's father — at Denmark Hill, and 
 had taken a strong liking to Ruskin. He chanced to be 
 staying at Leamington at this time, also under Dr. Jeph- 
 son's care, and he made Ruskin promise to visit him in 
 the autumn at his shooting lodge, Crossmount, at the foot 
 of Schehallion, between Lochs Rannoch and Tummel. 
 Ruskin went to Scotland, and the mood of depression 
 still hung upon him : — 
 
 (To W. H. Harrison.) " Dunbar, August 20. ... I am very 
 mucli obliged to you for the serious part of your letter as well as the 
 jest of it — though most grieved to hear your report of our present 
 parliament. What ^q shall come to I cannot guess. I find the laws 
 of the crabs and limpets unchanged, and confine my studies to their 
 permanent politics — and their foundational principles of pinch hard 
 and hold fast. I am much better since I left London, getting regular 
 exercise and rest. I hope I shall not again fall into the state I was in 
 all this winter, grievous to myself and stupid to everybody. Still 
 there is a certain amount of spleen, or what else it may more justly 
 be called, mingled with my present feelings which I cannot shake off. 
 I cannot understand how you merry people can smile through the 
 world as you do. It seems to me a sad one — more suffering than 
 pleasure in it, and less of hope than of either — at least if the in- 
 terpretations set l)y the most pious })eople on the Bible be true, and 
 if not, then worse still. But it is woeful to see these poor fishermen 
 toiling all night and bringing in a few casks of herrings each, twice a 
 week or so, and lying watching their nets dry on the cliffs all day ;
 
 VISIT TO CROSSMOITNT 215 
 
 their wives and children abused and dirty — scolding, fighting, and CHAP. 
 roaring through their unvarying lives. How much more enviable 
 the sea-gulls that, all this stormy day, have been tossing themselves 
 off and on the crags and winds like flakes of snow, and screaming 
 with very joy." 
 
 {To his Father.) " Dunkeld, Wednesday Evening {25tk August, 
 1847). — I intended staying here till I heard from Macdonald, for 
 it is very beautiful, but I must go on. I feel so utterly down- 
 hearted to-night that I must get away to-morrow without going 
 out again, for I am afraid of something seizing me in the state of 
 depression. I never had a more beautiful or half so unhappy a walk 
 as this afternoon ; it is so very different from Switzerland and 
 Cumberland that it revives all sorts of old feelings at their very 
 source — and yet in a dead form, like ghosts — and I feel myself so 
 changed, and everything else so ancient, and so the same in its 
 ancientness, that, together with the name, and fear, and neighbour- 
 hood of the place, I can't bear it. . . ." 
 
 From Dunkeld Raskin went on to his friend at Crossmount. 
 A day with the guns on Scheh allien was perhaps the only 
 experience of sport in Raskin's life. He did not enjoy the 
 bags of hares ; and betook himself instead to " the laborious 
 eradication of a crop of thistles which had been too success- 
 fully grown by northern agriculture in one of the best bits 
 of unboggy ground by the Tummel." The days thus spent 
 at Crossmount are " among the few in my life," he says, 
 " which I remember with entire screnit}'^, as being certain 
 I could have spent them no better." He had stubb'd his 
 bit of Thornaby waste. And there "in the thistlefield of 
 Crossmount " he had " wise thoughts and wholesome sleep 
 after them." Those thoughts "are scattered afterwards up 
 and down in Fors and Munera Pulverise Nor are they 
 absent from The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in which book 
 we may find the germs of his later teaching in the political 
 economy of art, and catch the first sound of waves of thought 
 and feeling on social questions, afterw-ards to reverberate 
 more loud and clear. 
 
 Raskin had recovered some health and spirit ; but he 
 had written querulously to his father, recalling among other
 
 216 FATHER AND SON 
 
 CHAP, things his grievance about Turner's " Splligen " (p. 126). 
 ■^- The father's reply illustrates the elder man's character : — 
 
 "(Folkestone, ith Oct., 1847.) — I have already said that the 
 tone of your later letters was so much more cheerful and confiding, 
 and expressive of some, if not continued, at least frequent snatches 
 of enjoyment, that they were most agreeable. ... A few letters 
 rather dulled my spirits, for they disclosed that, more than I had had 
 an idea of, we had been, from defects perhaps on both sides, in a 
 state of ' progression by antagonism,' ^ each discerning half the truth, 
 and supposing it the whole. I suppose we may have mutually 
 defrauded each other's character of its right and merit. In some of 
 these letters I read more of the suffering and unpleasantness I had 
 unwittingly in part inflicted on you in past hours. To my memory 
 they are burdened with no greater share of troubles than attaches, I 
 believe, to most families since the fall. I have, however, no fear for 
 the future, for tho' I have no prospect of becoming greatly changed, 
 a circumstance has made me reflect that I was exceedingly wrong 
 and short-sighted in all interruptions occasioned to your pursuits. 
 Mama says I am very exacting, and so I was about the Book-revising, 
 but never more after it was done. Whilst reading now this unlucky 
 first volume for press I had by me some loose proof sheets for second, 
 and I have been so struck with the superiority of second volume, and 
 so positively surprised at the work, that I became angry with myself 
 for having by my impatience and obstinacy about the one thing in 
 any way checked the flight or embarrassed the course of thoughts like 
 these, and arrested such a mind in its i)rogress in the track and 
 through the means which to itself seemed best for aiming at its ends. 
 You will find me from conviction done with asking you to do any- 
 thing not thought proper by yourself to do. I call this reading 
 with profit and to the purpose. Two points in your letters I only 
 remember half-distressed mo, and perhaps they were merely illus- 
 trative as used by you. You say we could not by a whole summer 
 give you a tenth of the pleasure that to have left you a month in 
 the Highlands in 18.38 would have done, nor by buying Turner and 
 Windus's gallery the pleasure that two Turners would have done 
 in 1842, you having passed two or three years with a sick longing for 
 
 ^ A reference to the title of Lord Lindsay's Essay reviewed by 
 Ruskin in the Quarterly.
 
 DRAWING 217 
 
 Turner. I take blame to myself for not sending you to the High- CHAP. 
 lands in 1838 and not buying you a few more Turners; but the first "^* 
 I was not at all aware of, and the second I freely confess I have been 
 restrained in from my very constitutional prudence. ... I have, you 
 know, my dearest John, two things to do, to indulge you and to leave 
 you and Mama comfortably provided for . . . but if you have any 
 longings like 1842 I should still be glad to know them, whilst I 
 honour you for the delicacy of before suppressing the expression of 
 them. ... On the subject noticed in one of your letters on our 
 different regard for public opinion, this is a malady or weakness 
 with me, arising from want of self-respect. The latter causes much 
 of my ill-temper, and when from misunderstanding or want of 
 information I was losing some respect for you my temper got doubly 
 bad. We are all wanting in our relations towards the Supreme Being, 
 the only source of peace and self-respect. But I never can open my 
 soul to human beings on holy subjects. . . ." 
 
 Such a letter may well have touched the son. He was 
 presently to please his father and mother in a matter upon 
 which their hearts were set. 
 
 Ruskin returned from Scotland in October, and the 
 winter of 1847-48 was spent quietly at Denmark Hill. 
 His only literary production was a second review for the 
 Quarterly — this time, of Sir Charles Eastlake's Materials for 
 a History of Oil Painting. The essay broke little new 
 ground, though his diaries show that Ruskin read up the 
 subject diligently. For the rest, his months were spent in 
 various branches of study, with a view to the continuation 
 of Modern Painters. The architectural reading was con- 
 tinued ; and his note-books show that at this time he made 
 a minute study of Homer, which he afterwards turned to 
 account in the chapter on "Classical Landscape" in the 
 third vohime of Modern Painters. His drawing — now 
 mostly devoted to trees, leaves, and flowers — was also 
 steadily practised : — 
 
 " While my father, as was his custom, read to my mother and 
 me for half-an-hour after breakfast, I always had a fresh-gathered 
 outer spray of a tree before me, of which the mode of growth, with 
 a single leaf full size, had to be done at that sitting in fine pen
 
 218 THE KING OF THE GOLDEN RIVER 
 
 CHAP, outline, filled with the simple colour of the leaf at one wash. On 
 fine days, when the grass was dry, I used to lie down on it and 
 draw the blades as they grew, with the ground herbage of buttercup 
 or hawkweed mixed among them, until every square foot of meadow, 
 or mossy bank, became an infinite picture and possession to me, 
 and the grace and adjustment to each other of growing leaves, a 
 subject of more curious interest to me than the composition of any 
 painter's master-piece." 
 
 IV 
 
 The entries in Kuskin's diary are at this time few and far 
 between. The explanation is given in an entry on December 
 22, 1847 : " My diary has of late been in letters to E. C. G." 
 The initials stand for Eupheraia Chalmers Gray. She was 
 the eldest daughter of Mr. George Gray, a lawyer, of Bowers- 
 Avell, Perth, who was an old friend of Ruskin's parents. She 
 used to visit them at Heme Hill, and it was for her that 
 Ruskin had written his King of the Golden River. She 
 was a child at that time ; and having heard of the 
 young man's literary gifts, had challenged him to write a 
 story. To a manuscript copy of the story in the handwrit- 
 ing of the Effie for whom it was written there is appended 
 in Ruskin's hand a set of verses by him which, under 
 the title "Charitie," have appeared in many forms. In the 
 manuscript they are entitled "A Morning Hymn of the 
 Treasure Valley." At the end of the story Gluck, the third 
 brother, "went and dwelt in the valley, and the poor were 
 never driven from his door," and "thus the Treasure Valley 
 became a garden again, and the inheritance, which had been 
 lost by cruelty, was regained by Love " : — 
 
 " The beams of morning are renewed. 
 The valley laughs their light to see ; 
 And earth is bright with gratitude, 
 And heaven with Charitie." 
 
 The story was published in 1851, with illustrations by 
 Richard Doyle, and attained an immediate popularity which 
 it has ever since retained, both in England and in America. 
 It has appeared in numerous forms, and has reached the
 
 "FOR A BIRTHDAY IN MAY" 219 
 
 penny libraries. It has boon translated into German, Italian, CHAP. 
 and Welsh. It has been adopted as a Board School prize- ■^• 
 book in England, and as a lesson-book in the United States. 
 Looking back upon this early work, Riiskin noted in it an 
 absence of invention; but, for the rest, it was " a fairly good 
 imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with a little true 
 Alpine feeling of my own." ^ Grimm had been his familiar 
 companion from very early years, and each new part or 
 book by Dickens was "altogether precious and admirable " 
 to him and his father. The grotesque and the German 
 setting of the tale were taken from Grimm ; from Dickens 
 it took its tone of pervading kindliness and geniality. 
 The Alpine ecstasy and the eager pressing of the moral 
 were Ruskin's own ; and so also is the style, delicately 
 poised between poetry and comedy. 
 
 The King of tlte Golden River, written in 1841, is a 
 prelude to the story of Ruskin's marriage. Six years later, 
 at which time we have now arrived. Miss Gray had again 
 been a visitor at Denmark Hill. Ruskin was her senior 
 by ten years in age, and by much more in habits of life 
 and thought. She was a beautiful girl, of a bright and 
 cheerful disposition, and, unlike the Adele of earlier time, 
 showed a sympathetic interest in Ruskin's literary and 
 artistic pursuits. He was much interested in her, showed 
 her pictures, and took pleasure in cultivating her taste 
 and improving her mind. It was for her in 1847 that he 
 wrote the verses which have boon printed under the title 
 " For a Birthday in May " : — 
 
 " Thorn, and meadow grass — sweet Think not of their grace, sweet 
 sister, sister, 
 
 Twine them as I may, Nor their colours gay, 
 
 Deemost thou a darksome garland Since their utmost glory, sister, 
 
 For thy natal day ? Is to pass away. 
 Thou thyself art fairer, sister. 
 
 Than all the iiowers of May ; Grasses of the field, sweet sister, 
 
 Had I brought thee buds and And the wreaths they bind, 
 
 blossoms, Though they deck the depth of 
 Shamed were I and they ! summer, 
 
 ^ PrcBterita, vol. ii. § G4.
 
 220 MARRIAGE: 1848 
 
 CHAP. Dread no winter wind. Through the mighty Shepherd's 
 X. Though the thrilling frost, sister, pasture 
 
 Though the sleet-storm blind, And by streams divine ! 
 
 These to earth and all her creatures May all earthly sun, sweet sister, 
 
 Are for ever kind ; On thy journeying shine, — 
 
 And let us remember, sister, Though perhaps there may be 
 
 With a quiet mind, sister, 
 
 Even thorns are fair, sister, Shadows upon mine ! 
 
 With the heaven behind. Kindly He for all, dear sister, 
 
 Will the end design, 
 
 May that happy path, sister, Who for both our sakes, sister, 
 
 Evermore be thine, Brooked the Spear and Spine." 
 
 This may have been a love poem, or it may not. But 
 Ruskin's parents argued from their son's attentions that he 
 was in love. His mother was intent on making the match, 
 which indeed, for various reasons, was equally desired by the 
 parents on both sides. Ruskin was developing signs of 
 morbid depression ; his affairs of the heart had hitherto been 
 unsuccessful ; here, in the bright and 'pretty daughter of 
 their old friends, seemed the very companion best suited to 
 cure his despondency; here, too, the very means for them 
 to gain a daughter and not lose a son. Ruskin proposed, 
 was accepted, and the ceremony of marriage took place at 
 Bowerswell on April 10, 1848. 
 
 The honeymoon was spent in the Lake District, and 
 thence Ruskin wrote thus to Miss Mitford : — 
 
 "Keswick, Good Friday {April 21, 18481). — ]\Jy dear Miss 
 Mitford, — The pain of deep self-reproach was mixed with the 
 delight which your letter gave me yesterday. Two mouths back 
 I was each day on the point of writing to you to ask you for your 
 sympathy — the kindest and keenest sympathy that, I think, ever 
 filled the breadth and depth of an unselfish heart. But my purpose 
 was variously stayed, chiefly, as I remember, by the events on the 
 Continent, fraught to me with very deep disappointment, and 
 casting me into a depression and fever of spirit which, joined with 
 some other circumstances nearer home, have, until now that I am 
 resting with my kind wife among these quiet hills, denied me the 
 
 ^ Wrongly dated 1853 in the biographers of Ruskin into mis- 
 Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford, taken deductions, 
 and the error has misled various
 
 HONEYMOON 221 
 
 heart to write cheerfully to those very dear friends to whom I would CHAP. 
 fain never write sadly. And now your letter comes, with all its 
 sweetness and all its sting. . . . But you are better and the spring 
 is come, and I hope, for I am sure you will allow me, to bring my 
 young wife to be rejoiced (under the shadow of her new and 
 grievous lot) by your kind comforting. But pray keep her out of 
 your garden, or she will certainly lose her wdts with pure delight, 
 or perhaps insist on staying with you and letting me find my way 
 through the world by myself, a task which I should not 7ioio like to 
 undertake. I should be very, very happy just now but for these 
 wild storm clouds bursting on my dear Italy and my fair France, 
 my occn[)atiou gone, and all my earthly treasures (except the one 
 I have justacquiied and the everlasting Alps) periled amidst 'the 
 tumult of the people,' the ' imagining of vain things.' Ah, my dear 
 ^liss Mitford, see what your favourite ' Berangers ' and 'Gerald 
 Griffins ' do ! ^ But these are thoughts as selfish as they are narrow. 
 I begin to feel that all the work I have been doing, and all the 
 loves I have been cherishing, are ineffective and frivolous — that 
 these are not times for watching clouds or dreaming over quiet 
 waters, that more serious work is to be done, and that the time 
 for endurance has come rather than for meditation, and for hope 
 rather than for hajipiness. Happy those whose hope, without this 
 severe and tearful rending away of all the props and stability of 
 earthly enjoyments, has been fixed ' where the wicked cease from 
 troubling.' Mine was not ; it was based on ' those pillars of the 
 earth ' which are ' astonished at His reproof. . . . ' 
 
 " My wife begs me to return her sincere thanks for your kind 
 message, and to express to you the delight with which she looks 
 
 ^ The Irish poet Gerald Griffin 'the greatest French poet.' 'Ah-! 
 
 (1803-40) is the subject of ch. Beranger,' said M. de Lamartine, 
 
 vi. in vol. iii. of Miss Mitford's ' he made advances to me, and of 
 
 llecolledioiu of a Literary Life. A course wished for my acquaintance ; 
 
 letter from Miss Mitford (to Mrs. but he is a sort of man with whom 
 
 Browning of July ;iO, 1848) records I do not choose to have any con- 
 
 a visit from Raskin and a story nexion ! ' Tliink of that ! Mr. 
 
 about her favourite Beranger. Rogers told the story himself, 
 
 " When Lamartine was in London with the greatest indignation, to 
 
 a few years ago Mr. Rogers asked the Raskins, and . they told it to 
 
 liim, with strong interest, to give me " {Life of Mury Ilussell Mitford, 
 
 him some details about Beranger, vol. iii. p. 211).
 
 222 PUBLIC ANXIETIES 
 
 CHAP, forward to being presented to yoii — remembering what I told her 
 among some of my first: pleadings with her that, whatever faults she 
 might discover in her husband, he could at least promise her friends 
 whom she would have every cause to love and to honour. She needs 
 them, but I think also deserves them. — Ever, my dear Miss Mitford, 
 believe me, faithfully and affectionately yours, J. Ruskin." 
 
 Ruskin's letter reflects, it will be seen, tlie excitement caused 
 by the events of '48, when men opened their newspapers 
 each day wondering what fresh revolution would have 
 broken out and what other king have gone into exile. In 
 Italy Charles Albert had declared war upon Austria and 
 pushed his troops beyond the Mincio. The fortune of war, 
 which was to give the victory to the Austrians under 
 Radetsky, was still uncertain, when Ruskin wrote as follows 
 to George Richmond : — 
 
 " Denmark Hill, Isf of If ay. ... I found on my return home 
 with my wife on Thursday your drawing of my father placed oppo- 
 site me in my own little study, and it is quite impossible to tell 
 you how happy I am every moment in looking at it, nor how 
 much it wins from me of fresh affection and admiration every 
 day. I am but just beginning to understand it, and to see what 
 you have put into it, and now I am glad that you chose that look 
 of gentleness rather than the more frequent (not more characteristic) 
 gloom or severity, for the portrait is becoming more and more 
 alive every day, and it gladdens me to see my father smiling on 
 me. I am coming to see you as soon as I can. I have been 
 committing and causing my wife to commit all kinds of breaches 
 of etiquette, sending no cards to any one to begin with. I daresay 
 I shall bring her to see you some day soon, and Mrs. Richmond, 
 which I suppose will be another, but a more pardonable one. 
 AVhen will you come and see me, and tell me whether it is of 
 any use to write or think about painting any more, now, or 
 whether there will be no painting to be loved but that ' which more 
 becomes a man than gilt his trophy ' 1 I feel very doubtful whether 
 I am not wasting my life, and very sad about all. Alas poor 
 Milan, and my beloved spire, and now Verona in the thick of it. . . .' 
 
 Ruskin had interrupted his honeymoon to correct the proofs
 
 ILLNESS 223 
 
 of a second edition of Modern Painters (vol, ii.) which were CHAP. 
 awaiting him at Denmark Hill. These despatched, he took •^* 
 his wife to Commemoration at Oxford, and they then started 
 on what was intended to be "a pilgrimage to the English 
 Shrines." ^ Salisbury was selected for the starting-point, and 
 there the young couple were joined by Ruskin's father and 
 mother — not the wisest arrangement in the world, one may 
 think. A tour of the English Cathedrals is the ideal honey- 
 moon for Miss Yonge's heroes and heroines, and Sarum is 
 associated with Tlic Angel in tlie House ; but Ruskin's interest 
 was not so much in ecclesiastical or domestic sentiment as in 
 architectural measurements. " My son," wrote his father to 
 Harrison, " occupies himself with the architecture of the 
 Cathedral, a lovely edifice, but I find it very slow." How 
 hard Ruskin worked is shown by many pages of notes and 
 measurements in his diary. The fruits of his labour are to 
 be seen in many pages of his next book ; but he was over- 
 taken by a feverish attack, and the projected tour to other 
 cathedrals, and to the abbeys, of England had to be aban- 
 doned. The family party returned to Denmark Hill, and 
 Ruskin was laid up by his mother in pillows and coverlets. 
 He was not, however, to be put off his cathedrals altogether, 
 and, as soon as he had recovered, he started with his wife 
 for a tour in Normandy, which resulted in the writing, 
 immediately afterwards, of Tlie Seven Lamps of Archi- 
 tecture. 
 
 ^ Preface to the first edition of 27/ e ^even Lamps.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE 
 
 (1848-1849) 
 
 " Tlie book I have called Tlie Seven Lamps was to show that 
 certain right states of temper and moral feeling were the 
 magic powers by which all good architecture had been pro- 
 duced." — Crown of Wild Olive. 
 
 " I WENT to Boulogne," wrote Ruskin's father to Harrison, 
 " and saw my son and his wife off by rail to Abbeville, where 
 he is in his element among cathedrals and tumble-down 
 houses." This account of the matter is borne out by 
 Ruskin's own letters and diaries. The tour began at 
 Abbeville on August 8, 1848, and ended, with Gisors, Amiens, 
 and Paris, on October 24. Every day of the eleven weeks 
 was spent in measuring, note-taking, sketching. Now that 
 Ruskin had again found definite occupation, all his old 
 enthusiasm revived, and he worked indefatigably and with 
 concentration. He was up at 6, he tells his father, to 
 read before breakfast which was at 8. By 9.30 he was 
 seated in some corner convenient for sketching, or was 
 busy with his measuring rules and note-books. Dinner 
 was at 1.30, and again from 4 to 6 he was sketching. A 
 "couple of crockets" would sometimes occupy him for 
 " upwards of an hour." His companions were pressed into 
 the service. There was no time for amusement, as a young 
 girl might have understood it. She could post up the 
 diary; and even George had to supplement his valeting 
 by tracing as best he might bas-reliefs and panels. Ruskin 
 was in a fever to make the most of the time, and to 
 record the beauties that he saw while yet the stones were 
 standing the one on the other. The book which embodied 
 his studies was called by a reviewer of the time " a 
 
 224
 
 TOUR IN NORMANDY: 1848 225 
 
 hymn to architectural loveliness " ; the rapture which CHAP. 
 colours the pages of the book appears also in his daily ^^• 
 letters home, and the country delighted him no less than 
 the churches : — 
 
 {To his Father.) "Abbeville, Atuj. 8. — It is most fortunate 
 that I have come here, straight from Salisbury — not even blunt- 
 ing at Winchester the severe memory of that Gothic ; for, much as 
 I admired Abbeville porch before, it comes upon me nov? in suchs 
 luscious richness, — so full, so fantastic, — so exquisitely picturesque 
 that I seem never to have seen it before. . . . 
 
 " (Aug. 9.) — I was dancing round the table this forenoon, 
 in rapture with the porch here — far beyond all my memories or 
 anticipation — perfectly superb, and all the houses more fantastic, 
 more exquisite than ever ; alas ! not all, for there is not a street 
 without fatal marks of restoration, and in twenty years it is plain 
 that not a vestige of Abbeville, or indeed of any old French town, 
 will be left. ... I seem born to conceive what I cannot execute, 
 recommend what I cannot obtain, and mourn over what I cannot 
 save." 
 
 (To his Father.) " Lisieux, Aug. 23. — You never saw anything 
 yet in France so lovely as this Normandy — ^just fancy vallies like 
 rich bits of Italy, tufted with elm, poplar, willow, and Spanish 
 chestnut, set between round sweeping grouse hills of purple 
 heather, as bare as Schehallion. I think Effie makes the heather 
 grow under her feet. But I never saw such a lovely contrast of 
 purple and green ; even in Switzerland, where we have the rose, 
 the green is blacker and not so soft." 
 
 The entries in his note-books are severely technical 
 and laboriously detailed. Every church that he visited was 
 described and measured, with accompanying sketches or 
 memoranda. These diaries, note-books, and sketches show 
 very forcibly that Ruskin's generalisations were founded 
 upon minute study of particular instances. The "personal 
 observation" of which he spoke in the first preface to The 
 Seven Lampss as justifying his essay was long and minute. 
 Industrious and indefatigable though he was, Ruskin still 
 
 VOL. 1. P
 
 226 ARCHITECTURE AND POLITICS 
 
 CHAP, felt at the end of his tour that he was only beginning to 
 ■^^' learn : — 
 
 (To Ms Father.) " Rouen, Oct. 15. — I still feel that I leave this 
 place Unseen ; this is partly, however, owing to my slowness in 
 taking in ; I cannot grasp it ; every time I walk into the Square 
 it is new to me. Still I verily believe that I now know more 
 about it than any English architect, and than most French, and I 
 have improved in my drawing in these three months considerably." 
 
 In Rouen, as in many other cities of France and Italy, the 
 memory of Ruskin's visits long survived in sacristans who 
 love their buildings. "It may be," says Mr. Theodore 
 Andrea Cook in his account of St. Ouen, " that the old 
 Sacristan, for your good fortune, will be living still to tell 
 you of the greatest Englishman he has ever heard of, John 
 Ruskin, who often looked into that quaint mirror of Holy 
 Water, and watched the strange reflection of the arches 
 soaring upwards in the nave." ^ 
 
 Ruskin's visit to France was during a time of much 
 political excitement. Louis Philippe had been driven out 
 early in the year, and the Republic proclaimed on the 
 basis of " Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and with the promise 
 to find work for all. Reaction against the system of national 
 workshops led to the revolt of eastern Paris in June, and 
 the four days' battle of the barricades. Thiers assumed 
 the leadership of the party of reaction in the Assembly, 
 and events were drifting towards the election of Louis 
 Napoleon as President. A careful reader of The Seven 
 Lmnps will mark more than one passage in the book as 
 coloured by the revolutionary events which were passing 
 almost under Ruskin's eyes. The impressions and reflections 
 which they suggested, leading him into many questionings 
 of the foundations alike of politics and of religion, appear 
 in his letters : — 
 
 (To his Father.) " Lisieux, 2ith Aiigust. — As I have been more 
 delighted than ever with this country, I have been more disgusted 
 
 ' The Story of Rouen, 1899, p. 240.
 
 THE DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF 227 
 
 than ever with its inhabitants — not but that we have met with CHAP. 
 sensible and agreeable people, and that all are so far sensible that 
 we have not spoken to one person who does not regret all that 
 has lately happened of tumult and disorder, for the substantial 
 reason that all have suffered for it. But the mental and moral 
 degradation are beyond all I conceived — it is the very reign of sin, 
 and of idiotism. It has made me think something more seriously 
 than usual of all the old difficulties which so often have arisen 
 in men's minds respecting God's government of this world, and 
 many other difficulties which stand in the way of one's faith. I 
 believe that you, as well as I, are in this same condition, are you 
 not, father ? Neither of us can believe, read what we may of 
 reasoning or of proof ; and I tell you also frankly that the more 
 I investigate and reason over the Bible as I should over any other 
 history or statement, the more difficulties I find, and the less ground 
 of belief ; and this I say after six years of very patient work of 
 this kind, at least in those hours set apart for such study. 
 
 "Now, this is very painful — especially so, it seems to me, in 
 a time like the present, full of threatening^ and in which wicked- 
 ness is so often victorious and unpunished ; nothing but sorrow can 
 come from a doubtful state of mind even in this world. I was 
 reading, too, those opening thoughts of Pascal in which he assumes 
 that there is no proof of there being a God; but, as he has a 
 right also to assume, that there is no proof of there being none — 
 (certainly the difficulties on that side are quite as great as on the 
 other) — and there shows the utter absurdity, in the state of equal 
 chance, of not risking our all, our life, conduct, etc., on the chance 
 of there being a ' good God — for if there be, the gain is infinite ; 
 and if not, the loss is nothing. Now, I think this is good logic, 
 and I began to consider what we have to risk on that side. Pascal 
 says the first thing we have to give up or lay in the stake, for 
 eternal life, is our human reason. . . . Suppose we give up all 
 reasoning about the matter and resolutely determine to believe 
 with all our hearts, I fancy that this choice and determination 
 once made, convincing proofs will soon be vouchsafed. But you 
 and I have begun at the wrong end, and have impertinently asked 
 for the proofs first — is not this so, my dearest father — and do not 
 you think it is high time for us both to try the other way ? If
 
 228 PARIS IN 1848 
 
 CHAP, one were to calculate averageable 'life at eighty years, -witli a doubt- 
 ful evening after that time, and suppose this represented by a day 
 of sixteen hours from six morning till ten night, I am now at noon, 
 you at six in the evening — with both of us the day is far spent — 
 I never think my day worth much after twelve o'clock. And yet 
 I fear — forgive me if I am wrong — that neither of us have either 
 chosen our master or begun our work." 
 
 {To Ms Father.) "Kouen, October 15. — The church service of 
 this afternoon in the cathedral was, I suppose, the last at which 
 we shall be present this journey in a Romanist church ; and it 
 has perhaps contributed more to my former ideas of the propriety of 
 splendour of music and architecture in religious service than any at 
 which I have been present of the kind ; the congregation full and 
 attentive; the archbishop coming down with his attendants, as usual, 
 to his seat opposite the pulpit, and thence blessing the people ; the 
 sermon relating the good that religious men and prelates had done 
 to the city ; its text, ' Blessed are the people who have the Lord for 
 their God ' ; the singing afterwards most saintly and sublime. I 
 felt convinced that freed from abuses, this mode of service was 
 the right one, and that if bishops were bishops indeed, and j^riests 
 priests indeed, — if the doctrines of purgatory and bought absolution, 
 of Mariolatry, and of the vicarianism of the Pope, — above all, if 
 dishonesty and doing evil that good might come and of doctrine 
 of salvation by works were cast out of the Church, and the Bible 
 made free to the people, — that all these proud pillars and painted 
 casements, all these burning lamps and smoking censers, all these 
 united voices and solemn organ peals had their right and holy use 
 in this their service, and that all these white-robed priests and 
 young troops of novice and chorister could be, and ought to be 
 devoted to their lofty duties and separated from the common world 
 without offence — yes, and with high honour, before God." 
 
 {To his Father.) "Calais, Odoher 24, 1848. ... So much 
 feting and fairing and drinking, singing, and swearing I never saw 
 nor heard since I was first in France — but all set off and foiled by an 
 under evidence of distress, degradation and danger, the most utter 
 and immediate : I have been in Paris for two days : it had always a 
 black, rent and patched, vicious and rotten look about its ghastly 
 faubourgs : but to see — as now is seen — all this gloom without the
 
 IN A CAFl^ AT CAEN 229 
 
 meanest effort at the forced gaiety which once disguised it — deepened CHAP. 
 by all the open evidences of increasing — universal — and hopeless 
 suffering : and scarred by the unhappy traces of a slaughterous and 
 dishonourable contest — is about as deep and painful a lesson — for 
 those who will receive it — as ever was read by vice in ruin. But the 
 melancholy thing is the piteous complaining of the honest inhabitants 
 — all suffering as much as the most worthless, and not knowing what 
 to do — or jwhere to look. I think the only cheerful face that I saw 
 in Paris was that of Marrast, the President of the Assembly (whom 
 we saw at the theatre) — a countenance hardly fine, but prepossessing, 
 thoughtful, and hopeful. I saw no other face that did not bear the 
 signs either of melancholy — anxiety — or outwearied dissipation — 
 more or less concealed under a dark indifference. . . . Vagabonds 
 and ruffians — undisguised — fill the streets, only waiting — not for an 
 opportunity but for the best opportunity of attack. And yet even 
 from the faces of these I have seen the malice and brutality vanish if 
 a few words of ordinary humanity were spoken to them. . . ." 
 
 Ruskin himself, when occasion offered, reasoned with the 
 people of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come: — 
 
 {To his Father.) " Rouen, Oct. 2. — -Certainly I saw nothing 
 good at Caen. I went to a caf^ to get my sketching regularly. The 
 first day I went there, about eleven o'clock, in the upper room (sanded 
 all over to conceal spitting) there followed me upstairs a party of five 
 young men, decently enough dressed, who sat down to drink beer, 
 smoke, and play at cards. We all continued our occupations for 
 about an hour and a half, when one of them having risen and come 
 to the window to see what I was about, I put aside my drawing 
 (after allowing him to see it) and began conversation by saying what 
 a happy country France was or must be — in comparison to England — 
 where the young men could afford the time and the money to spend 
 in cafes from eleven to one, who with us would be compelled to work 
 for their bread. He blushed considerably, and said it always hap- 
 pened more on Saturday which was a kind of holiday. 'Then,' 
 I said, 'on Sunday — to-morrow — of course you go to church.' 
 ' Jamais,' ihe answered, but not in a spirit of bravado : on the con- 
 trary, looking fidgetty and uncomfortable. ' Never at all ? ' I said. 
 'Jamais.' 'Then, I suppose you do not believe in God.' 'Oh yes,
 
 XI. 
 
 230 AT HOME IN PARK STREET 
 
 CHAP, certainly.' ' Well, but then do not the priests tell you that you 
 should go to church 1 " ' Oh yes, but enfin, ce n'est pas la coutume 
 i§i.' 'Well,' I said, looking all the while very innocent, and as if I 
 asked for information — 'then, of course you say your prayers in the 
 morning and when you go to bed 1 ' He looked round at this to his 
 companions who were still drinking their beer, but had left oflf their 
 game at cards to listen. The question was received with a laugh 
 indeed, but not an insolent one (as I expected) ; they seemed very 
 much astonished and a good deal ashamed and partly puzzled 
 to know what I was at, and partly amused at the evident discomfort 
 of the person immediately addressed, who re]5lied hesitatingly, ' Non, 
 non, nous ne prions jamais, c'est a dire — enfin — on fait la priere 
 quand on est triste.' " 
 
 Ruskin carried his missionary enterprise further, and meet- 
 ing the same young man again a day or two after, " ventured 
 to suggest to him that he would find the Bible a very 
 interesting book, and reading it quite as entertaining as 
 card-playing iu the morning." 
 
 II 
 
 On his return from France, Ruskin established himself 
 in a house of his own, No. 31 Park Street, Grosvenor Square, 
 and there during the winter wrote The Seven Lamps of 
 Architecture. During the same time he wrote for the Art 
 Journal an account of Samuel Prout — the artist whose 
 drawings had first familiarised him with French archi- 
 tecture, and whose work must have occurred to him at 
 every turn in Rouen and Lisieux. The paper on Prout is 
 among the most charming of Ruskin's earlier pieces, and, 
 as the biographical details were derived from the artist 
 himself, it is the standard authority on its subject. The 
 essay appeared anonymously in the Art Journal, but it 
 was signed all over by the author of Modern Painters. It 
 shows once more how full was Ruskin's mind at this period 
 of the destruction of ancient buildings, and of the value, 
 therefore, of all pictorial records of them. A time will
 
 PERSONAL APPEARANCE 231 
 
 come, he said, when Front's works " will be cherished with CHAP. 
 a melancholy gratitude, when the pillars of Venice shall ^' 
 
 lie mouldering in the salt shallows of her sea, and the 
 stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have become ballast 
 for the barges of the Seine." 
 
 A pen-picture of Ruskin at this time of eager activity 
 has been drawn by Dr. Furnivall, who was invited to call 
 at Park Street one Sunday afternoon : — 
 
 "After a short chat with the wife, I saw the door open, and 
 John Ruskin walkt softly in. I sprang up at once to take the out- 
 stretcht hand, and then and there began a friendship which was for 
 many years the chief joy of my life. Ruskin was a tall, slight fellow, 
 whose piercing frank blue eye lookt through you, and drew you to 
 him. A fair man, with rough light hair and reddish whiskers, in a 
 dark blue frock coat with velvet collar, bright Oxford blue stock, 
 black trousers and patent slippers — how vivid he is to me still ! The 
 only blemish in his face was the lower lip, which protruded some- 
 what : he had been bitten there by a dog in his early youth. But 
 you ceast to notice this as soon as he began to talk. I never met 
 any man whose charm of manner at all approacht Ruskiu'a. Partly 
 feminine it was, no doubt ; but the delicacy, the sympathy, the 
 gentleness and affectionateness of his way, the fresh and penetrating 
 things he said, the boyish fun, the earnestness, the interest he showd 
 in all deep matters, combined to make a whole which I have never 
 seen equalld." ^ 
 
 Ruskin's absorption in his work did not entirely prevent 
 social engagements : — 
 
 {To hU Father.) ''Jan. 31, 1849.— I little thought when I saw 
 you into the carriage at ten o'clock yesterday morning, that at the 
 same hour that evening I should be performing the same agreeable 
 duty to Madlle. Jenny Lind. But so it was, for a note came for me 
 as soon as I got home, from Mr. George, asking me to dine with her 
 and his sister and him, in a quiet way, at half-past six. I found, 
 when I went, only Mr. George and his sister, two lady friends staying 
 
 ^ " Forewords " to Two Letters of Shecpfolds, privately printed, 
 conccmiiKj Notes on the Construction 1890.
 
 232 AN EVENING WITH JENNY LIND 
 
 CHAP, in the house, Dr. tSkiey, aud Jenny Liud. I was much surprised at 
 first, the fact being that she is very remarkably plain, aud she was 
 fatigued by the concert the night before ; her manner most sweet 
 and ladylike. Conversation at dinner turned chiefly on Alps and 
 Alpine and Swedish scenery : speaking of the French, she said they 
 seemed to be a nation shut out from the common portion of God's 
 blessing upon men, and deservedly so. I interceded for them, and 
 said that the peasantry were not altogether spoiled, that they only 
 wanted an honest government and true religion. ' You have said All 
 in that last word,' she replied. 
 
 " After coffee she sat down at the piano and sang several little — 
 what Cattermole would call ' far away bits ' of Swedish song. I said 
 that I had heard she herself chiefly liked Mendelssohn 1 ' If 1 like 
 him,' she said, with singular intensity — evidently translating the 
 French of her thought — ' Si je I'aime ! ' then pausing for an instant — 
 ' Did you know him 1 ' ' No.' ' Better for you you did not.' ' How 
 so ? ' * The loss — too great,' she said, her voice evidently faltering 
 a little. I had no idea she was personally so attached to him, or I 
 should not have spoken of him. I said it was better to have known 
 and to remember. She remained quiet for half a minute, and then 
 sang Bellini's ' Qui la voce ' very gloriously, prolonging the low notes 
 exactly like soft wind among trees — the higher ones were a little too 
 powerful for the room, but the lowest were heard dying away as if in 
 extreme distance for at least half a minute, and then melted into 
 silence. It was in sound exactly what the last rose of Alpine sunset 
 is in colour. She then rose, and soon after left us — to my great 
 disappointment, for I was in hopes of getting a little quiet talk with 
 her, and perhaps of getting her to see the Turners at Denmark Hill. 
 However, when I began speaking to my mother about it this morning 
 she was horrified, so it is just as well I did not. She seems to look 
 upon her just as an ordinary actress. 
 
 " Mr. George has been unwell with influenza and was afraid to 
 go to the door with her, so I saw her shawled and took her to her 
 carriage. Meantime Eflfie had gone to Mrs. Milman's, where, after 
 Jenny Lind's departure, I followed her, and found Dr. and Miss 
 Buckland and Frank Buckland, Mr. and Mrs. Liddell, Lady Lyell and 
 her sister. Lord Lansdowne, Lady Mary Wood, Professor Taylor, and 
 a good many more. I had a long talk with Lord Lansdowne about
 
 XI. 
 
 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE 233 
 
 Normandy, and Effie about something else. I will get her to send CHAP, 
 you a line herself, for she knows much more about the whole of it 
 than I, but I will try and remember something for to-morrow." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Raskin can have had little time, however, for such 
 distractions. TJie Seven Lamps of Archiiechire was all 
 written between November 1848 and April 1849. It was 
 the first of his books to be illustrated, and in the original 
 edition the plates were not only drawn by the author but 
 were also etched by his own hand. These plates will always 
 give a certain interest to the first edition. They are rough 
 but vigorous, and exhibit, as Ruskin afterwards claimed 
 for them, " the architecture itself with its actual shadow 
 at the time of day at which it was drawn and with every 
 fissure and line of it " as they existed at the time. " No 
 architectural draughtsman whom I can name," says Hamerton 
 in his Etching and Etchers, " with the one glorious exception 
 of Meryon, has ever drawn buildings in a way comparable 
 to Ruskin." The illustrations were in soft-ground etching, 
 a process of which he picked up the technique as he Avent 
 along; and one at least of the plates was executed under 
 decidedly disadvantageous conditions. He had gone abroad 
 before the work was finished, and the last plate Avas bitten 
 in his wash-hand basin at the Hotel de la Cloche at Dijon. 
 The book was thus produced at high pressure. Time 
 pressed, for the buildings described were in danger of 
 destruction. Conviction pressed, for Ruskin had long 
 meditated on the principles which he was eager to expound. 
 Other work pressed, for Tlte Seven Lamps was an interlude 
 delaying the continuation of Modern Painters. The manu- 
 script of The Seven Lamps shows that the book was written 
 with all the author's habitual care,^ but it was written 
 with something more than his usual speed and concentra- 
 tion. It has a unity of subject-matter and an orderliness 
 of treatment which do not belong to Modern Painters ; 
 
 ' See on this point, below, chap, xviii.
 
 284 FAVOURABLE RECEPTION 
 
 CHAP, though, indeed, he confesses that he found great difficulty 
 in keeping his Seven Lamps "from becoming Eight — or 
 Nine — or even quite a vulgar row of foot-lights." ^ The book 
 has, too, even more than the author's habitual vitality. 
 No inconsiderable part of the essential character of beauty, 
 he says in " The Lamp of Life," depends on the expression 
 of vital energy. The Lamp is itself seen lighted, as a 
 fine critic has observed, in "this beautiful and impassioned 
 work of literature. One thing Ruskin never lacks, never 
 flags in, and that is an invincible vitality. Compared with 
 his great vitality, the vivacity of other authors is little more 
 than an insignificant or ineffectual agitation." - 
 
 A book that thus came from the heart and was lighted 
 with so much life did not fail of making an immediate 
 effect, and it has been among the most widely read of 
 all the author's works. The task of seeing the last revises 
 through the press had been entrusted as usual to W. H. 
 Harrison, and Ruskin was resting in Switzerland when it 
 appeared. During a portion of the tour Ruskin went for 
 an expedition to Courmayeur by himself, while his parents 
 stayed at Geneva. The following are extracts from letters 
 written to him by his father — sometimes ingenuous in their 
 enthusiasm, sometimes not without their paternal barb : — 
 
 (Geneva, Jidy 29.) — " Miss Tweddale says your book has 
 made a great sensation." (31st): "Thiers has surprised and de- 
 lighted the Chamber of Deputies by your doctrine of no such thing 
 as Liberty. I think he has borrowed". . . (August 4): "The 
 Spectator, which Smith sets great value on, has an elaborate 
 favourable notice on ' Seven Lamps,' only ascribing an infirmity 
 of temper, quoting railroad passage in proof. Anne was told by 
 American family servant that you were in American paper, and 
 got it for us, the New York Tribune of July 13 ; first article is 
 your book. They say they are willing to be learners from, rather 
 than critics of, such a book, etc. The Dailij News (some of the 
 Punch people's paper) has a capital notice. It begins : ' This 
 
 ^ Seven Lamps, ch. iv. (note of to Messrs. Routledge's edition, 
 1880), and Fors Clavigera, Letter 5. 1910. 
 ^ Mrs. Meynell's Introduction
 
 "HYMN TO ARCHITECTURAL LOVELINESS" 235 
 
 is a masked battery of seven pieces, which blaze away to the total CHAP. 
 extinction of the small architectural lights we may boast of, etc., ^' 
 
 etc' " (August 5) : "I have, at a shameful charge of ten francs, 
 got August magazine and Dickens, quite a prohibition for parcels 
 from England. In British Quarterbj, under Esthetics of Gothic 
 architecture, they take four works, you first ... As a critic they 
 almost rank you with Goethe and Coleridge, and in style with 
 Jeremy Taylor." 
 
 Reference to the periodicals of the time shows that Miss 
 Tweddale did not exaggerate in saying that The Seven Lamps 
 of Architecture " made a great sensation " in literary circles. 
 Reviews in the daily and weekly press were prompt and 
 numerous, and for the most part long and complimentary. 
 The monthly and quarterly magazines were equally appre- 
 ciative of the book. Almost without exception they noticed 
 it, and added to favourable criticisms long extracts or a 
 careful analysis of the author's argument. In the United 
 States, as well as in the United Kingdom, the book made 
 an immediate mark. On the whole the contemporary re- 
 views of The Seven Lamps of Architecture are creditable to 
 the critical fairness and insight of the day ; they anticipated 
 what seems likely to be the verdict of posterity. The book, 
 predicted one of the critics, will establish for itself " a place 
 among the standard works of English Literature." ^ Nor 
 was it only with the critics of the press that Ruskin's volume 
 made a hit. The title-page ("by John Ruskin, Author of 
 Modern Painters") contained the first public avowal of his 
 identity Avith the " Graduate " ; and a year or two later he 
 and his wife were invited to the Master's Lodge at Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, where his architectural studies secured 
 him interesting talks with the great archfeological authorities 
 of the day — Whewell himself and Professor Willis. Letters 
 to his father show with what consideration he was treated : — 
 
 "Trinity Lodge, Sunday evening [April 6, 1851]. — I could 
 not write to you last night. We got here at twenty minutes past 
 five, and there was a large dinner-party at ^ past six. It is a 
 
 ^ Dublin University Magazine, July 1849.
 
 236 ARCHITECTS AND THE BOOK 
 
 CHAP, beautiful house, — far superior to our Dean's at Christ Church, 
 back rooms with oriel windows deep embayed, plenty of light, 
 and fine dark furniture, carved wood, etc., all very beautiful. . . . 
 Large dinner : heads of colleges, etc., and Professor Willis, with 
 whom I foregathered, of course, and enjoyed myself. 
 
 "Monday [April 7, 1851]. ... Dr. and Mrs. Whewell are 
 most kind, and delightfully easy to live with — he is marvellously 
 different from our formalist Oxford heads. Everybody fetes us here 
 exceedingly, and I have had some nice chats with Professor Willis ; 
 but I am quite resting — taking no notes and getting as much 
 relaxation as possible. , . . To-morrow we go to Ely, with Dr. 
 Whewell and Professor Willis." 
 
 The phrase quoted above from one of the reviews — it 
 "sounds like a hymn to architectural loveliness" — well 
 expresses one quality of The Seven Lamps. Ruskin in later 
 years found fault with the fine writing of the book.^ There 
 are passages which are perhaps overcharged with ornament ; 
 but how many there are also which have imparted to the 
 mind of every reader a fresh interest in mediaeval architec- 
 ture, and invested it with an element of deeper sentiment ! 
 There is probably nobody who does not find something to 
 disagree with in The Seven Lmnps of ArcJtitecture. But 
 many of those who differ from the author most often would 
 find, upon taking a careful inventory of their mental furni- 
 ture, that they would be much the poorer, in their thoughts 
 and feelings about architecture, if he had never published 
 this book. " No man of feeling," says Mr. Frederic Harrison, 
 of the peroration to " The Lamp of Sacrifice," "who has in 
 him the echoes of this funeral sermon, can stand before a 
 great mediaeval cathedral without being conscious that it 
 has gained for him a new meaning, a sublimer pathos." ^ 
 
 Architects as a rule have not been among the greatest 
 admirers of the book ; they often misunderstand its scope ; 
 many of the author's obiter dicbh are fanciful or doubtful; 
 he did nothing to conciliate professional opinion, and the 
 ideals he set before the profession were exacting. But, as 
 with painters, so with architects: Ruskin's "hymn" has 
 
 1 See "Advice "of 1880. 
 
 ^ John Ruskin, in the " English Men of Letters " Series, p. 60.
 
 ITS LEADING IDEAS 
 
 237 
 
 exercised a potent influence in asserting the dignity, and CHAP. 
 enhancing the reputation, of their art. The profession ^^^ 
 in its corporate capacity showed its appreciation of his 
 services by proposing to confer a Gold Medal upon him in 
 1874, and by passing a vote of condolence with his relatives 
 on the occasion of his death.^ 
 
 The influence and the importance of The Seven Lamps 
 are, however, something else besides those of " a hymn to 
 architectural loveliness." Its central idea and many of its 
 leading principles made an epoch in the study of architecture, 
 and exercised considerable influence upon its practice and 
 development. That critic of an earlier book by Ruskin who 
 had told him to eschew eloquence was perhaps not altogether 
 ill-advised. The luxuriant rhetoric of the perorations in 
 The Seven Lamps, the very richness of the images and 
 illustrations,^ have led some readers, as Ruskin himself 
 often complained, to separate the style from the sense, and 
 to ignore the structure in the decoration. It was the first 
 treatise in English to teach the significance of architecture 
 
 > Mr. J. M. Brydon, Vice-Pre- 
 sident of the Royal Institute of 
 British Architects, in proposing 
 the vote, said that " Mr. Ruskin 
 had been a power in the country 
 for over half a century. In their 
 own particular art probably no 
 man in this age had influenced 
 architects as he had. He was re- 
 sponsible to a great extent for 
 that wave of Venetian Gothic 
 which passed over the country, 
 notable examples of which were to 
 be found in Oxford and in London. 
 He was the man who probably first 
 awakened the English people to 
 a knowledge of what art really 
 meant : art in the life of its 
 people, art in the true sense of 
 the word, as an ennobling faculty 
 which raised men, and induced in 
 them a longing for higher and 
 nobler things. Probably in that 
 connection no work had had more 
 
 influence and deserved higher com- 
 mendation, not only to students 
 of architecture, but to all who 
 were striving for culture, than 
 that magnificent book. The Seven 
 Lamps of Architecture, and particu- 
 larly those chapters which dealt 
 with Truth and with Sacrifice " 
 (Journal of the Royal Institute of 
 British Architects, vol. vii. (3rd 
 Series), p. 116). 
 
 ^ How fine, for instance, are the 
 phrases in which he teaches the 
 architect to " think in shadow " : 
 "Let him design with the sense of 
 cold and heat upon him ; let him 
 cut out the shadows, as men dig 
 wells in unwatered plains "... 
 let him see that the light " is 
 broad and bold enough not to be 
 swallowed up by twilight," and the 
 shadow " deep enough not to be 
 dried like a shallow pool by the 
 noon-day sun."
 
 238 TRUTH IN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 CHAP ^® national autobiography. Ruskin had seized this truth 
 XI. securely, long before he wrote the volume. It is stated — 
 incidentally, though clearly — in his first essay, that on 
 The Poetry of Architecture ; but in The Seven Larti-ps it is 
 worked out more fully. This fundamental doctrine, adds 
 Professor Norton, " is sound, and needs to be enforced to-day 
 no less than forty years ago. It is, that in architecture, as 
 well as in the other fine arts, the final test of the excellence 
 of a work is the spirit of which it is the expression, and of 
 which it gives evidence alike in its design and in its execu- 
 tion, — evidence all the more convincing because of its unin- 
 tentional and inevitable character." ^ In the treatment of the 
 several " Lamps," Ruskin's book is equally suggestive. The 
 history of architecture was enlightened by his analysis of 
 the fifty years which witnessed the perfection of French 
 Gothic — of that short " period of pause " during which the 
 architect gave equal attention to the form of the tracery 
 and the pattern of the light it enclosed, and used not the 
 line, but the mass, as the element of his decoration. And in 
 connexion with the relation of style to sense in Ruskin's 
 own art, it may be noted, in the famous passage at the end 
 of " The Lamp of Truth," with what beautiful precision the 
 diction fits the thought : — 
 
 "At the close of tlie period of pause, the first sign of change was 
 like a low breeze, passing through the emaciated tracery, and making 
 it tremble. It began to undulate like the threads of a cobweb lifted 
 by the wind. It lost its essence as a structure of stone. Eeduced 
 to the slenderness of threads, it began to be considered as possessing 
 also their flexibility. The architect was pleased with this his new 
 fancy, and set himself to carry it out ; and in a little time, the 
 bars of tracery were caused to appear to the eye as if they bad been 
 woven together like a net. This was a change which sacrificed a 
 great principle of truth ; it sacrificed the expression of the qualities 
 of the material ; and, however delightful its results in their first 
 developments, it was ultimately ruinous. ... It was not the robber, 
 not the fanatic, not the blasphemer, who sealed the destruction 
 that they had wrought ; the war, the wrath, the terror, might have 
 
 ^ Preface to the American " Brantwood Edition," 1891, pp. ix. x.
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE BOOK 239 
 
 worked their worst, and the strong walls would have risen, and the CHAP. 
 slight pillars would have started again, from under the hand of the 
 destroyer. But they could not rise out of the ruins of their own 
 violated truth." 
 
 And, more generally, TJie Seven Lamps applied to archi- 
 tecture the same touchstone of truth and sincerity that 
 Ruskin had already employed in Modern Painters. " It 
 shook conventional ideas," says Mr. Harrison, " to the 
 root, and flung forth a body of new and pregnant ideas." 
 The book contains much that is disputable ; but " the truths 
 were cemented into the foundations, and have stood solid 
 and unshaken for two generations. The law of Truth in 
 Art stands beside Carlyle's protest against 'shams'! That 
 a building should look what it is, and be what it is built 
 to serve — no one now dares dispute. That beauty itself 
 comes second to truth, and must be sought in the archi- 
 tecture of Nature herself; ... all this is now the alphabet 
 of sound art."^ And The Seven Lamps was among the 
 most potent of schoolmasters in teaching the letters.^ 
 
 The main significance of the book, and its general influ- 
 ence thus exerted, are independent of particular fashions 
 in architecture, and are not affected by the dogmatisms, 
 paradoxes, assumptions, and preferences of the author on 
 particular points. As for the sectarian bitterness which 
 flaunts itself here and there in the book, this has had no 
 severer critic than Ruskin himself. It was a principal reason 
 why he allowed the volume to remain for many years 
 (1855-80) out of print; and when he did reprint it, it 
 was with copious footnotes of self-criticism and with omission 
 of some of the more violent pieces of Protestant intolerance. 
 It is worth noting that the circumstances of the time at 
 
 1 John Ruskin, 1902, pp. 57-59. forment la partie la plus durable 
 * According to one of Ruskin's de sou ceuvre par la minutie des 
 French critics, his architectural recherches, la profondeur des con- 
 books are the most important : naissances techniques " (Le Mouve- 
 " Cast en etudiant I'architecture, mcnt iiUaliste et social dans la 
 qu'il a ecrit le plus de livres, Litterature anglaise mi XIX' siecle. 
 trouve les pages les plus t'loquentes, John RusTiin. By Jacques Bardoux 
 formuh; less idees lus plus justes. (Paris: 1900), pp. 300-301). 
 Les volumes (ju'il lui a consacrus
 
 240 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL IDEAS 
 
 CHAP, which the book was written may have afforded a reason, 
 -^^- though not a justification, for his sectarian emphasis. The 
 architectural revival of the time was associated in the 
 person of some of its leaders with High Ritualism, and 
 Ruskin may on this account have deemed it desirable to 
 emphasise strongly his Protestant standpoint. However 
 this may be, the appearance of The Seven Lamps exercised 
 considerable influence in strengthening the Gothic Revival 
 then in progress.^ To this matter, further reference will be 
 found in a later chapter ; as also to Ruskin's influence in the 
 preservation of ancient buildings. It was in the chapter 
 on "The Lamp of Memory" that he wrote the famous 
 passage on " restoration " : — 
 
 " Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie 
 from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as 
 you may of a corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old 
 walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with what 
 advantage I neither see nor care : but the old building is destroyed, 
 and that more totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a 
 heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay : more has been gleaned 
 out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of re-built Milan." 
 
 In the story of Ruskin's life, as to the student of his 
 work. The Seven Lam'ps is of further interest for the 
 anticipation of social and political ideas which were after- 
 wards to colour all his efforts. The book was written, as 
 we have seen, in the stirring times of 1848 ; his studies of 
 French architecture were made during the progress of the 
 French revolution of that year. To earnest and thoughtful 
 minds it must always be matter of desire to establish some 
 harmony between studies in different spheres; to bring 
 into relation conclusions arrived at in one field with things 
 observed in another. This attempt is manifest in many 
 passages of The Seven Lamps, and especially in the last 
 chapter. " In these books of mine," said Ruskin at the 
 end of Modern Painters, " their distinctive character, as 
 
 ^ For a discussion of the influ- Professor Kerr in the Journal of the 
 
 ence of The Seven Lamps and The Royal Institute of British Architects, 
 
 Stones of Venice on "the battle of vol. vii. (3rd Series), p. 187. 
 the styles," see an article by
 
 STONES AND MEN 241 
 
 essays on art, is their bringing everything to a root in CHAP. 
 human passion or human hope. . . . Every principle of ^^• 
 painting which I have stated is traced to some vital or 
 spiritual fact ; and in my works on architecture the pre- 
 ference accorded finally to one school over another, is 
 founded on a comparison of their influences on the life 
 of the workman — a question by all other writers on the 
 subject of architecture wholly forgotten or despised." ^ The 
 point was to be made more fully in The Stones of Venice, 
 of which (says Ruskin elsewhere) the object Avas to teach 
 " the dependence of all human work or edifice, for its 
 beauty, on the happy life of the workman."^ But the 
 doctrine is implied in much of the argument in Tlie 
 Seven Lamps, and is in places stated explicitly: — 
 
 "I believe the right question to ask, respecting all ornament, is 
 simply this : Was it done with enjoyment — was the carver happy 
 while he was about it? It may be the hardest work possible, and 
 the harder because so much pleasure was taken in it ; but it must 
 have been happy too, or it will not be living. How much of the 
 stone mason's toil this condition would exclude I hardly venture 
 to consider, but the condition is absolute." 
 
 "We are, perhaps, hardly enough in the habit of inquiring, with 
 respect to any particular form of luxury or any customary appliance 
 of life, whether the kind of employment it gives to the operative 
 or the dependent be as healthy and fitting an employment as we 
 might otherwise provide for him. It is not enough to find men 
 absolute subsistence ; we should think of the manner of life which 
 our demands necessitate ; and endeavour, as far as may be, to make 
 all our needs such as may, in the supply of them, raise, as well as 
 feed, the poor. It is far better to give work which is above the 
 men, than to educate the men above their work." 
 
 Ruskin's mind was already at work along the lines on 
 which he afterwards based his teaching at Oxford ; he was 
 connecting architecture with social reconstruction : " so, 
 from day to day, and strength to strength, you shall build 
 
 ' Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. i. § 7. 
 * Fors Clavigera, Letter 78. 
 VOL. I. Q
 
 242 STONES AND MEN 
 
 CHAP, Up indeed, by Art, by Thought, and by Just Will, an Ecclesia 
 ■^- of Engl- nd, of which it shall not be said, ' See what manner 
 of stones are here,' but ' See what manner of men.' " ^ The 
 implications in such passages were not lost upon some lof 
 Buskin's reviewers when The Seven Lamps appeared, and 
 his old enemy Blackwood's Magazine was puzzled and sar- 
 castic at his " breaking loose " in " so strange a manner." 
 It was not the first time that an apostle of a new dispen- 
 sation had been met with the question, What will this 
 babbler say ? 
 
 ^ Lectures on Art, § 125.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 AMONG THE MOUNTAINS 
 
 (1849) 
 
 "Great cathedrals of the earthy with their gates of rock, pave- 
 ments of cloud, choirs of stream and stone, altars of snow, 
 and vaults of purple traversed by the continual stars." — 
 Modern Painters. 
 
 " I HAVE been as busy as an ant," wrote Ruskin from Chamouni 
 in August 1849.^ That is a description of his life, in one 
 of its aspects ; and if it be the case that an ant's mode of 
 progression is not ahvays from point to point, of Ruskin also 
 it is true that he took his arduous divagations. He had 
 finished The Seven Lmni^s and intended next to write on 
 the architecture of Venice, but in the meanwhile he con- 
 tinued his studies for Modern Painters. He was exhausted 
 after writing the former book, and the Alps were caUing. 
 His wife felt unequal to the fatigue of foreign travel ; and 
 it was decided that she should go to her parents in Scotland 
 while he went with his to Switzerland. Cousin Mary was 
 no longer of the party. She had married some time before, 
 and died while Ruskin Avas abroad in this year. 
 
 It was among the mountains in 1849 that his principal 
 studies for the third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters 
 were made. His diaries and letters of the time are in 
 almost every page a commentary on the book. The scenes 
 which left the deepest impress were Vevay, Chamouni, the 
 Rhone Valley, and Zermatt ; nearly all the most beautiful 
 
 ' See below, p. 253. 
 
 243
 
 244 SWISS TOUR: 1849 
 
 CHAP, and the most important passages in the volumes embody 
 impressions received or observations recorded at one or other 
 of those places. Ruskin and his parents went first to the 
 Grande Chartreuse. In passing through the cells he noticed 
 that the window of each apartment looked across the little 
 garden of its inhabitant to the wall of the cell opposite, and 
 commanded no other view. To Ruskin the mountains were 
 cathedrals of the earth, and he asked the monk beside him 
 why the window was not made rather on the side of the cell 
 whence it would open to the solemn fields of the Alpine 
 valley. Whereupon, with a curl of his lip, " We do not come 
 here," said the monk, "to look at the mountains." The 
 answer is recorded several times in Ruskin's books, and in 
 Prceterita he adds his own silent retort, " What, then, by 
 all that's stupid, do you come here for at all?" A letter 
 written at the time shows that the retort was given in other 
 words : — 
 
 (T'o George Richmond.) "Vevay, May 20. . . . By-the-bye, I 
 have been to the Grande Chartreuse too — got Avet going up, and 
 couldn't finish an argument I got into with one of the monks, 
 on the impropriety of his staying up there and doing nothing. He 
 compared himself to Moses discomfiting Amalek by holding up his 
 hands. I begged him to observe that Moses only came to that when 
 he was too old to do anything else. I think I should have got the 
 better of him, if it hadn't been for the weather." 
 
 At Chambery Ruskin made pilgrimage to Les Charmettes, 
 unchanged at this time. Lord Morley in his study of 
 Rousseau has contrasted the peace and beauty of the spot 
 with " the diseased miserable life of the famous man who 
 found a scanty span of paradise in it." Ruskin notes 
 " a chat with an old man, a proprietor of some land on 
 the hillside, who complained bitterly that the priests and 
 the revenue officers seized everything, and that nothing 
 but black bread was left for the peasants." This is one 
 of several entries in his diary of the time pointing to 
 the awakening of those instincts of political revolt in 
 Ruskin's mind which were to make him claim affinity with 
 Rousseau. From Chambery Ruskin went on a short
 
 THE FIELDS OF VEVAY 245 
 
 excursion to Chamouni with his old school-friund, Richard CHAP. 
 Fall. He then rejoined his parents at Geneva, and they ^ 
 wont on to Vcvay. 
 
 II 
 
 It was at Vevay, among the narcissus meadows, then 
 scarce touched by villas and railways, that Ruskin stored 
 up the impressions which he cast into his prose-poem on 
 the grass of the field. Everybody knows the passage;^ it 
 is the one which Matthew Arnold cited as an example of 
 Raskin's genius in its best and most original exercise. 
 The first thought of the passage occurs in his diary of 
 1849 :— 
 
 " Vevay, Sunday, June 3. . . . Such grass, for strength, aud 
 lieight, and loveliness, I never saw — all blue too with masses of salvia 
 and flamed with gold, yet quiet and solemn in its own green depth ; 
 the air was full of the scent of the living grass and new-mown hay, 
 the sweet breathing of the honeysuckle and narcissus shed upon it 
 at intervals, mixed with the sound of streams, and the clear thrill of 
 birds' voices far away. ... I looked at the slope of distant grass on 
 the hill ; and then at the waving heads near me. What a gift of 
 God tliat is, I thought. Who could have dreamed of such a soft, 
 green, continual, tender clothing for the dark earth— the food of 
 cattle, and of man. Think what poetry has come of its pastoral 
 influence, what happiness from its everyday ministering, what life 
 from its sustenance. Bread that strengtheneth man's heart — ah, well 
 may the Psalmist number among God'a excellencies, ' He maketh 
 grass to grow upon the mountains.' " 
 
 It was on the same walk that another thought came to 
 him, which finds expression in the third volume of Modern 
 Painters on the weariableness of the imagination : ^ — 
 
 "Vevay, Sunday, June 3. — I walked up this afternoon to 
 Blonay, very happy, and yet full of some sad thoughts ; how perhaps 
 I should not be again among those lovely scenes, as I was now and 
 had ever been, a youth with his parents — it seemed that the sunset 
 
 ^ Modern Painters, vol. iii. oh. xiv. § 51. ' Chap. x. § 14.
 
 246 THE VALLEY OF CLUSES 
 
 CHAP, of to-day sunk upon me like the departure of youth. First I had a 
 hot march among the vines, and between their dead stone walls; 
 once or twice I flagged a little, and began to think it tiresome ; then I 
 put my mind into the scene, instead of suffering the body only to 
 make report of it ; and looked at it with the possession-taking grasp 
 of the imagination — the true one ; it gilded all the dead walls, and 
 I felt a charm in evei-y vine tendril that hung over them. It 
 required an effort to maintain the feeling : it was poetry while it 
 lasted, and I felt that it was only while under it that one could draw, 
 or invent, or give glory to, any part of such a landscape. I repeated 
 ' I am in Switzerland ' over and over again, till the name brought back 
 the true group of associations, and I felt I had a soul, like my boy's 
 soul, once again. I have not insisted enough ou this source of all 
 great contemplative art. The whole scene without it was but sticks 
 and stones and steep dusty road." 
 
 From Vevay Raskin and his parents went by Geneva to 
 Chamouni. Few modern travellers know much of the long 
 valley of approach, of which every cliff and field were 
 dear to Ruskin. It is not so much a valley, he says, as 
 a winding plain between great mountains : — 
 
 " Slopes of pasture and forest, mingled with arable land, in a way 
 which you can only at present see in Savoy ; that is to say, you have 
 walnut and fruit trees of great age, mixed with oak, beech, and pine, 
 as they all choose to grow — it seems as if the fruit trees planted 
 themselves as freely as the pines. . . . No fences anywhere ; winding 
 field walks, or rock paths, from cottage to cottage ; these last not of 
 the luxurious or trim Bernese type, nor yet comfortless chalets ; but 
 sufhcient for orderly and virtuous life : in outer aspect, beautiful 
 exceedingly, just because their steep roofs, white walls, and wander- 
 ing vines had no pretence to perfectness, but were wild as their 
 hills. All this pastoral country lapped into inlets among the cliffs, 
 vast belts of larch and pine cresting or crowding the higher ranges, 
 whose green meadows change as they rise, into mossy slopes, and 
 fade away at last among the grey ridges of rock that are soonest 
 silvered with autumnal snow. The ten-miles' length of this valley, 
 between Cluses and St. Martin's, include more scenes of pastoral 
 beauty and mountain i)0wer than all the j)oets of the world have
 
 THE HOTEL DTI MONT BLANC 247 
 
 imagined ; and present more decisive and trenchant questions jre- CHAP. 
 
 ■VTT 
 
 specting mountain structure than all the philosophers of the world ^ ^" 
 could answer." ^ 
 
 In this approach to Chamouni, Ruskin loved to linger. 
 In these later tours with his parents, he had his separate 
 carriage, so that he might stop behind, to draw or to 
 collect specimens, and catch them up as he chose. Leaving 
 the carriage at Cluses, he always walked to St. Martin ; 
 pausing, it may be, by the bridge and cottage, where 
 the cascade descends near the village of Magland — the 
 scene of a drawing by Turner; or studying the floAvers 
 beneath the vast towers and promontories of the Aiguille 
 de Varens. The village of St. Martin, opposite Sallenches, 
 was a favourite resting-place, and " The Hotel of Mont 
 Blanc" there was, he says, "of all my inn homes, the 
 most eventful, pathetic, and sacred." "Eventful," in the 
 sense of being the home of fruitful thoughts, the scene 
 of happy hours : — 
 
 " A two-storied building of solid grey stone, with gabled roof and 
 garrets ; a central passage on the second floor giving access to the 
 three or four bedrooms looking to back and front, and at the end to 
 an open gallery over the road. The last room on the left, larger than 
 the rest, and with a window opening on the gallery, used to be my 
 father's and mother's ; that next it, with one square window in the 
 solid wall, looking into the yard, mine. . . . The real and prevalent 
 prospect was first into the leaves of the walnut tree in the corner ; 
 then of the mossy stable roofs behind them ; then of the delicately 
 tin-mailed and glittering spire of the village church ; and beyond 
 these, the creamy, curdling, overflowing seas of snow on the Mont 
 Blanc de St. Gervais. The Aiguille de Bionnassay, the most graceful 
 buttress ridge in all the Alps, and Mont Blanc himself, above the 
 full fronts of the Aiguille and Dome du Goiiter, followed further to 
 the left. So much came into the field of that little four-feet-square 
 casement. . . ." ^ 
 
 A month at Chamouni followed, and this, for Modern 
 Painters, was among the most fruitful times in Ruskin's 
 
 ^ Deucalion, vol. i. chap. v. * Frccterita, vol. ii. §§ 216, 217.
 
 248 STUDIES AT CHAMOUNI 
 
 CHAP. life. With the faithful Couttet for his guide, he rambled 
 ^-'■* during long days among the glaciers, or sauntered in the 
 valley, examining, observing, sketching. And at evening 
 time we may see him leaning, as he says in his diary 
 (July 8), "on the blocks of lichened wall beside the road, 
 exchanging good-nights with the passers-by, and listening as 
 their voices left me to the filling of the valley by the sound 
 of the waves of the Arve, mixed with cattle bells and many 
 strange and dim mountain sounds, mingled in confusion 
 like the grey stones of the wall I leaned upon." Thus did 
 " beauty born of murmuring sound " pass into his thoughts 
 and words. But in company with the hours of restful 
 thought came strenuous labours. 
 
 He worked upon the stones of Chamouni as diligently 
 as upon the Stones of Venice. He noted the angles of 
 the aiguilles, observed every fleeting effect of cloud, ex- 
 amined the rocks, collected the minerals, gathered the 
 flowers. His observations were entered up in his diaries 
 and note-books as carefully as were his architectural studies 
 at Venice. His industry in drawing was as great. At a later 
 time, when he was examining his materials for the composi- 
 tion of the fourth volume of Modern Painters, he made a 
 catalogue of his sketches at Chamouni. They numbered 
 sixty-four; and of these, forty-seven belong to the year 
 1849. Extracts from his diary show how his days were 
 spent : — 
 
 "Chamouni, Sunday, June 17 fh. — Quiet south rain till twelve 
 o'clock. I have been abstracting the book of Revelation, (they say 
 the French are beaten again at Rome, and another revolution in 
 Paris) ; many signs seem to multiply around us, and yet my unbelief 
 yields no more than when all the horizon was clear. I was especially 
 struck with the general appellation of the system of the world as 
 the 'Mystery of God,' Chap. x. 7, compared with Hebrews xi. 6, 
 which I read this morning in our usual course. Theme enough for 
 the day's thought." 
 
 "Chamouni, day 15th, Wednesday, June 21th. — One of the 
 heavenly Alpine mornings, all alight : I have been trying to get 
 some of the effect of sunrise on the Montanvert, and aerial quality
 
 THE TOUR OF MONT BLANC 249 
 
 of aiguilles, — in vain. Slanting rays now touch the turf, by the CHAP. 
 chalet of Blaitiere, as perhaps they touch poor Mary's grave." 
 
 " Chamouni, 28<A day (and for this year, last, — unless I return 
 from Zermatt) : Ecening, July 10. — It has been a glorious one ; I 
 was working from Mont Blanc before breakfast, out immediately 
 afterwards ; made some notes of Aiguille Bouchard, went on to the 
 Source beside the Arveron, somewhat closer than usual, it having 
 changed its bed entirely within the last three days, and running 
 four feet deep where I used to walk ; took slopes of Dru, from 
 just beside the Arveron bridge ; then climbed the avalanche with 
 Couttet to foot of rocks near Montanvert ; could not get upon them ; 
 awkward chasm between the ice and them ; and at the only place 
 where we could get upon them, another at the other side which made 
 it a risk to pass the ridge. Got on them at last, however, higher up, 
 and took from them specimens 27, 28 . . . [notes on these, and on 
 the geology of the rocks]. ... I have never yet seen a more noble 
 and burning sunset than was on the Charmoz and lower Verte 
 to-night — a hot, almost sanguine, but solemn crimson. ... I have 
 much to thank God for, now and ever." 
 
 Lahorare est orare. Raskin's thankfulness found] its ex- 
 pression in those careful and loving studies, in words and 
 drawings, of the Chamouni aiguilles which fill so large a 
 portion of the fourth volume of Modern Painters. 
 
 Ill 
 
 His first month at Chamouni was now over, and his 
 parents returned from the Alps to Geneva. He, meanwhile, 
 attended by Couttet and George, was permitted to have 
 another month to pursue his mountain-studies. First, he 
 made the familiar Tour of Mont Blanc, proceeding by St. 
 Gcrvais and Contamines over the Col du Bonhomme to 
 Chapiu, and thence over the Col de la Seigne to Cour- 
 mayeur. There he rested for a day, being physicked for sore 
 throat by the faithful Couttet, and consoling himself " with 
 the view from my window, not a bad one, of an old Lombard 
 Tower and the range of the Col du Geant." From Cour- 
 mayeur he went over the Col Ferret to Martigny. The
 
 250 ZERMATT AND THE MATTERHORN 
 
 CHAP. Val Ferret pleased and interested him more than his 
 -^^^' walk through the Alk'e Blanche and the Val de Veni, 
 The following passages are from his diary (Courmayeur, 
 July 28) :— 
 
 " The most magnificent piece of ruin I have yet seen in the Alps 
 is that opposite the embouchure of the lower glacier of the Val de 
 Ferret, near Courmayeur ; the pines are small indeed, but they are 
 hurled hither and thither ; twisted and mingled in all conditions of 
 form and all phases of expiring life, with the chaos of massy rocks 
 which the glacier has quashed down or the opposite mountain hurled. 
 And yet, further on, at the head of the valley, there is another in 
 its way as wonderful, less picturesque, but wilder still, the remains 
 of the ehoulement of the Glacier de Triolet, caused by a fall of an 
 aiguille near the Petites Jorasses — the most phrenzied accumulation 
 of moraines I have ever seen, not dropped one by one into a heap 
 and pushed forward by the ice ploughshare, but evidently borne 
 down by some mingled torrent of ice and rock and flood, with the 
 swiftness of water, and the weight of stone, and thrown along the 
 mountain sides like pebbles from a stormy sea, but the ruins of an 
 Alp instead of the powder of a flint bed." 
 
 Ruskin had been unfortunate in coming down from the 
 Col de la Seigne tired and ill, for there are few walks in 
 the Alps more lovely than that through the pastures and 
 pine woods of the lower valley, with the snows of the 
 Mont Blanc sparkling through the branches; but many 
 travellers will find it hard to dispute the superiority which 
 he attributes to the Col Ferret over the Col de la Seigne. 
 He had passed through the Val Ferret in the morning ; 
 in evening light the walk in the reverse direction offers 
 some of the sublimest aspects in the Alps ; there is none 
 which illustrates more effectively Ruskin's comparison of 
 mountains to cathedrals than the spectacle of the huge 
 shoulder of the Aiguille de Peteret as seen from this point. 
 
 From Martigny Ruskin went up to Zermatt for some 
 days, and there made the studies on the cliffs of the Matter- 
 horn which occupy several pages in his fourth volume. 
 It is curious, as a contrast with present times, to find that, 
 though it was August, Ruskin had the inn pretty much to
 
 THE MONTANVERT 251 
 
 himself. "No one has been here," he writes (August 6), CHAP. 
 " but a party of French and Germans going over the Cervin, 
 and various German botanists and students." He writes his 
 first impressions to his father ; possibly we must read a little 
 diplomacy between the lines, for Ruskin, it will be seen, 
 wanted his leave of absence somewhat extended : — 
 
 " [Zermatt, August 6.] ... I have had glorious weather, and 
 on Friday I had such a day as I have only once or twice ; had the 
 like of among the Alps. I got up to a promontory projecting from 
 the foot of the Matte rhorn, and lay on the rocks and drew it at my 
 ease. I was about three hours at work, as quietly as if in my study 
 at Denmark Hill, though on a peak of barren crag above a glacier, 
 and at least 9000 feet above sea ; but the Matterhorn, after all, is not 
 so fine a thing as the Aiguille Dru, nor as any of the aiguilles of 
 Chamouni. ... I should like, if it were possible, to spend a couple 
 of days more on the Montanvert, and at the bases of the Chamouni 
 aiguilles — sleeping at the ]\Iontanvert. My month from the time I 
 left you at St. Martin's, 26th July, is only up this day three weeks ; 
 so that I hope it will do if I am with you at Geneva on Monday 
 evening the 27th. . . ." 
 
 Ruskin obtained an extension of time, but not without some 
 alarm on the part of his parents on account of his illness 
 at Courmayeur, and some remonstrances on the score of 
 a temporary interruption of communications. He made 
 good use of his leave in continuing his work among the 
 aiguilles, and three days at the inn on the Montanvert ^ 
 especially pleased him. He had never yet seen anything, 
 he says in his book (vol. iv. ch. xiv. § 6), to equal the 
 view from that spot. The following are extracts from his 
 diary : — 
 
 " August 22. — I think I never enjoyed any evening so much as 
 this in my life, unless it were one at Champagnole in 1845.- I 
 
 ' This was the old inn, built was replaced in 1879 by the pre- 
 
 in 1840, at the expense of the sent hotel. At Chamouni, Raskin 
 
 Commune of Chamouni, replacing always stayed at the Union, 
 the previous cabin (known as the - Described in a letter, given 
 
 " Temple de la Nature "). The inn above, p. 174.
 
 252 A GHOST HUNT AT CHAMOUNI 
 
 CHAP, had no idea what this place was, until I sat at the window quietly 
 
 "VTT 
 
 to-day watching the sunset and the vast flow of the ice, welling down 
 the gorge — a dark and billowy river — yet with the mountainous 
 swell and lifted crests that the iron rocks have round it. I have 
 been nearly all day drawing at the Aiguille Blaitiere." 
 
 Another pursuit at Chamouni was of a different kind — a 
 hunt for a ghost,: — 
 
 {To his Father.) " Sunday, Aug. 26. — I went down to near 
 Couttet's house, to see the place where the Black Lady had been 
 seen. I sent for the children who had seen her, and was really 
 delighted by their gentle and simple manner. I don't depend on 
 their veracity, however, so much as on their simplicity ; all I can say 
 is that if there be any deception now, they are very much improved 
 in their mode of getting it up since I was last here. I saw three 
 little girls, Constance, Rosine, and Caroline, and one little boy, 
 Amboise, who all spoke French ; another little fellow, very fidgety 
 all the time, could only speak through Judith's interpretation. The 
 last witness, whom I examined separately from the rest, was little 
 Elizabeth Balmat, the daughter of the Syndic. All these children 
 had seen for some hours, during Saturday and Sunday last, the 
 figure of a woman in a black dress, with something white across the 
 bosom, a white band across the forehead, and a black round bonnet 
 or cap. It leaned with its arms folded against the trunk of a pine 
 within two hundred yards of Couttet's house, and was only visible 
 at a certain distance ; the children went with me to the place and 
 showed me how far — ' deja ici commenga de la voir,' Constance said, 
 when about ten yards from the tree — a young pine beside the fence 
 of the usual cattle path from the Arve bridge. I cross-examined 
 them as to the appearance of the phantom, but could get no more 
 details satisfactorily. They seemed to have observed it accurately, 
 but there was no appearance of any understanding among them. 
 They turned indeed once or twice to each other, but it had simply 
 the look of the kind of reference which two people who have seen the 
 same thing naturally make to each other when any doubt is raised 
 respecting it. The answers were given with the most perfect quiet- 
 ness and simplicity, as also Elizabeth Bal mat's : the latter child 
 said, ' Ca m'a fait trembler beaucoup ' ; but the others said it had
 
 «AS BUSY AS AN ANT" 253 
 
 not frightened them, except a little boy who saw it first with CHAP. 
 Constance, and who ran home in a great fright. Couttet went to ■^■^• 
 the place with them on Sunday last, while the phantom was visible. 
 The first thing he did was to cut the branches oflF the tree, thinking 
 some accidental shadow might deceive the children ; but this made 
 no difference. Then he went and stood himself beside the tree 
 trunk ; the figure was then seen by the children beside him ; he 
 moved away, and it returned to its place. Monsieur L'Abb^ was 
 next sent for, but could make no impression on the Black Lady. 
 I am just going to see what he will say about it. 
 
 " (^Evening.) I have seen the Abbe, and been down again to the 
 haunted tree, and repeated Couttet's experiments, the apparition 
 being ' at home ' with the same negative results. The younger 
 priest was down there also, and exceedingly puzzled ; the strongest 
 point of the case is the thorough fright sustained by three of the 
 children. It appears that one of them last Saturday night could 
 hardly be kept in his bed, and was continually crying out that he 
 saw the figure again : and to-day Judith Couttet brought a little 
 boy from the next village and told him when at the place to look 
 and tell her if he saw anything. The blood ran into his face, and 
 she saw (she told me) that ' c'a lui fit une resolution.' She asked 
 him, by way of trial, whether it was not a ' poupet ' that some one 
 had put there. ' Ce n'est pas un poupet — c'est grand,' the child 
 answered, '^a est tout habille en rouge?' asked Judith. 'Non — 
 C'est habillee toute en noir.' ' Mais ga est jolie a voir, n'est ce pas?' 
 ' Non, 9a n'est pas joli du tout, du tout, — c'est bien laide.' The 
 child then turned aside his head, put it against Judith's side, and 
 would not look any more." 
 
 At last it was time to leave : — 
 
 [To his Father.) "Chamouni, A^lg. 28. — It was too cloudy to 
 do for aiguilles to-day, but I have been as busy as an ant, and 
 have done a great deal. But how fast time does go. I have taken 
 my place in diligence tor Thursday, and hope to be with you in 
 good time. But I quite feel as if I were leaving home to go on a 
 journey. I shall not be melancholy, however, for I have really had 
 a good spell of it ; and, this last week, I have tried to get enough 
 of it to last me for some time to come ; and I think I have. I had
 
 254 SUNSHINE IN THE ALPS 
 
 CHAP, nearly a little too much yesterday. I don't know whether it was 
 ■^^* hot at Geneva, but I was on a high glacier where there was no 
 wind, and the sun scorched me till I was forced to turn back, and 
 to carry an umbrella besides whenever I had a hand free, to which 
 I was not reduced even in Italy. I don't know anything more 
 wonderful in the Alps than the feeling of this insufferable sunshine, 
 with all the crevices in the snow about one filled with icicles. I 
 am quite well, however. Dearest love to my mother. I don't 
 intend to write again." 
 
 So, then, Riiskin left his "home" among the mountains, 
 and, having rejoined his parents at Geneva, returned to 
 home and wife at Heme Hill. He had accumulated rich 
 materials for Modern Painters; but, a fortnight later, he 
 started off on another quest, to obtain materials for The 
 Stones of Venice.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 VENETIAN WINTERS 
 
 (1849-1850, 1851-1852) 
 
 " There can be no question of the mischievous tendency of the 
 hurry of the present day, in the way people undertake their 
 very looking. I gave three years' close and incessant labour 
 to the examination of the chronology of the architecture of 
 Venice ; two long winters being wholly spent in the drawing 
 of details on the spot." — A Joy for Ever. 
 
 The same eager enthusiasm which prompted The Seven 
 Lainps led to Ruskin's next book. Tlte Stones of Venice 
 was indeed ah-eady in his mind when he was writing the 
 earlier essay, which he asked his readers to regard as only 
 an introduction to a more elaborate treatise.^ In The Seven 
 Lmnfs he defined certain states of moral temper which were 
 necessary, as he maintained, to the production of good 
 architecture. In The Stones of Venice his central theme 
 was to illustrate from the rise and fall of Venetian 
 architecture the working of moral and spiritual forces. 
 " He had," he says, " from beginning to end, no other aim 
 than to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice had 
 arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state of 
 pure national faith, and of domestic virtue ; and that its 
 Renaissance architecture had arisen out of, and in all its 
 features indicated, a state of concealed national infidelity, 
 and of domestic corruption." - The later book may thus be 
 said to be a particular illustration of general principles laid 
 down in the earlier one. He devoted his more elaborate 
 essay to Venice, not because he desired to put i forward 
 Venetian Gothic as " the most noble of the schools of 
 Gothic," but because the architecture of Venice " exemplifies, 
 
 * See the preface to the second edition of Seven Lamps. 
 - Crown of Wild Olive, § 65.
 
 256 THE "STONES" OF VENICE 
 
 CHAP, in the smallest compass, the most interestino' facts of 
 
 XTTT • 
 
 architectural history." The leading ideas in the author's 
 mind were, then, the same in both books. The same also 
 was the impulse which led to the production of the one 
 close upon the other. Just as he had hurried himself into 
 The Seven LaTiips, under pressure of the destructive forces 
 of neglect and " restoration," so now it was his feeling that 
 the charm of Venice was evanescent, his sight of the daily 
 mouldering and rending of its walls, that drove him to post- 
 pone the completion of Modern Pamters once more, until 
 he had deciphered and imparted the lessons of the Stones 
 of Venice. The title — as was often the case with Ruskin — 
 had a double meaning. He hoped to make those Stones 
 touchstones — tests of the good and the bad in all archi- 
 tecture ; crucial examples, too, of the connection between 
 national feeling and national architecture. But also it was 
 from a city fast falling into ruin that his teaching was to 
 be drawn : " Thy servants think upon their stones, and it 
 pitieth them to see her in the dust." The^ prophet had no 
 time to lose in uttering his message, for the waves were 
 gaining fast against the Stones of Venice. 
 
 There was destined, however — as not unusually with 
 Ruskin's eager undertakings — to be some delay. The Seven 
 Lamps was published in May 1849 ; The Stones of Venice 
 was not completed till October^ 1853. The principal cause 
 of the delay was the unexpected difficulty and complexity 
 of the task, to which may be added the conscientious minute- 
 ness of the author's studies. He returned from his holiday 
 among the mountains on September 16 and found his wife, 
 now much better in health, awaiting him at Denmark Hill. 
 Early in October he set out with her, bound for Venice. He 
 showed her Chamouni on the way, and they went slowly 
 through North Italy, arriving in November in Venice, where 
 they established themselves at the Hotel Danieli for the 
 winter. This sojourn lasted from November to March, and
 
 FIRST VENETIAN WINTER: 1849-50 257 
 
 like another sojourn two years later (Sept. 1, 1851-June 29, CHAP. 
 1852), was for Ruskin a period of unremitting toil. The labour -^^I^- 
 was fourfold ; he read, he observed, he noted and measured, 
 and he drew. He had already gone through a " steady course 
 of historical reading" — in Sismondi, Alison, Daru, among 
 other authors — in preparation for The Stones of Venice. At 
 Venice itself he delved into the archives and into the works 
 of sundry local writers on the art and topography of the city. 
 Such reading may have given him a ground plan, and 
 furnished him with hypotheses 2your servir ; but the conflict 
 of authorities on the chronology of the Ducal Palace, and 
 the absence of trustworthy data or established conclusions 
 in the case of other buildings, speedily threw him back on 
 his own researches ; he must take nothing, he perceived, for 
 granted or at second-hand. During this winter of 1849-50, 
 therefore, and similarly two years later, he devoted himself 
 to close study of all the remaining edifices of the city. The 
 book itself bears emphatic evidence to the minuteness of his 
 study ; but the results that he garnered for publication, the 
 conclusions at which he ultimately arrived, convey but a 
 faint idea of his preparatory studies. 
 
 The greater part of each day, so long as light availed, 
 seems to have been spent out of doors, in measuring and 
 examining the buildings, or in making drawings. He carried 
 with him little square note-books, of a size easily pocketable, 
 in which he entered measurements, contours of mould- 
 ings, and the like, occasionally with slight notes of colour. 
 Some of these books, evidently those in which he made 
 his first notes for The Stones of Venice, are preserved 
 at Brantwood. In the evening Ruskin entered up his 
 memoranda and impressions in larger note-books. In them, 
 all important measurements were recorded; distinctive or 
 remarkable features of each building examined during the 
 day were fully noted ; and suggestions or impressions were 
 Avritten out. He avoided foregone conclusions. He often 
 noted such and such an observation as provisional, requiring 
 further examination or subsequent comparison with other 
 buildings. As the work progressed, cross-references were 
 supplied, and at the end, each volume of the Venetian diary 
 
 VOL. I. R
 
 258 MINUTENESS OF HIS STUDIES 
 
 CHAP, was fully indexed. Ruskin, when he came to write the 
 ultimate treatise, spoke by the book.^ 
 
 These written materials represent, however, but half of 
 his preliminary toil. The preparation of the illustrations 
 involved great labour; but the drawings which were en- 
 graved are only a few of those that were made. The wood- 
 cuts similarly represent only a small number of hundreds 
 of careful diagrams, figures, and sketches of architectural 
 details, which the author drew during the preparation of 
 this book. Sheets with pen drawings on them or with 
 sketches in pencil and wash attached to them, are no doubt 
 fair copies of the author's first graphic memoranda, just as 
 the diaries were of his written notes. Nearly two hundred 
 of such sheets were found at his death at Brantwood. Many 
 of them have been exhibited, and some have now passed 
 into public galleries and museums. 
 
 One of his letters home gives a lively account of the 
 difficulties which he experienced in his work : — 
 
 " Venice, Sunday, 2'S>nl December. — A week or two ago I 
 commissioned my valet-de-place to obtain permission for me to draw 
 the windows of the Palazzo Bernardo ; he went, as he said, to the 
 Count Bernardo, and I had hope for once of being admitted into 
 a palace by the permission of its rightful owner. I was so — and 
 found myself in a well-furnished room, with, however, the unsuitable 
 adjunct of some clothes drying outside. The window not being the 
 one I wanted, I asked to go upstairs. Alas, the Count owned but 
 a single flat in his family palace — and I have now to get permission 
 from the lodger above. . . . Mr. Brown recommended me one man 
 
 ^ A passage in T. A. Trollope's he cites as indications of subtle 
 
 Autobiography gives the evidence design on the part of the old archi- 
 
 of one who followed in Raskin's tects in cases where abnoi-mality 
 
 footsteps : " I spent several morn- and carelessness might be sus- 
 
 ings in carefully hunting out all pected. His facts and measure- 
 
 the specimens of Byzantine archi- ments I found invariably correct, 
 
 tecture which Ruskin registers as but am disposed to think that he 
 
 still existing in Venice, and can lets his hobby somewhat run away 
 
 testify to the absolute exactitude with him in the imputation of far- 
 
 of his topographical and archi- fetched and subtle design" (/^F/i«i 
 
 tectural statements. I carefully 7 rcmem6«r, vol. iii. p. 217). 
 examined also the examples which
 
 DIFFICULTIES OF RESEARCH 259 
 
 as the only one who knew anything of those connected with the CHAP. 
 
 XIII 
 
 library in the Ducal Palace. I asked him, among other matters, 
 
 whether the windows, which have now no tracery in them, ever 
 had any. Never, he said — there was not the slightest trace of it. 
 These windows require ladders to get up to them and are difficult 
 in the opening — so it struck me as quite possible that nobody might 
 have taken the trouble to look. Yesterday I went for this special 
 purpose — got the library steps and opened all the windows, one 
 after another, round the palace. I found the bases of the shafts of 
 the old tracery — the holes for the bolts which had fastened it — the 
 marks of its exact diameter on the wall — and finally, in a window 
 at the back, of which I believe not one of the people who have 
 writtetj on the place know so much as the existence, one of its 
 spiral shafts left — capital and all. The librarian asked me after- 
 wards ' whether I had found any marks ' ; I said, ' a few traces, 
 certainly,' but told him nothing about my spiral shaft; he may 
 go and look himself, if he likes. The historical records about the 
 Palace are one mass of confusion. . . . Most of the accounts agree 
 in proving that the top was built before the bottom. I got sick of 
 this sort of thing, and set to work, to separate its sculpture into 
 classes, and I have got internal evidence of six different periods 
 of work upon it — and of more than one architect in several of the 
 periods — these broad facts I shall give in order, and let them quarrel 
 about who was who, as they like." 
 
 Ruskin's labours often reduced him, he says, into a very 
 prosaic humour with Venice. The mood appears in a letter 
 written at the time, and is recalled (with an obvious and 
 characteristic strain of humorous exaggeration) in one of 
 later date : — 
 
 {To Samuel Piogers.) "Venice, Jime 23, 1852. — What must 
 you have thought of me, after your kind answer to my request to 
 be permitted to write to you, when I never wrote? I was out of 
 healtli and out of heart when I first got here. . . . The worst of it 
 was that I lost all feeling of Venice, and this was the reason both 
 of my not writing to you and of my thinking of you so often. For 
 whenever I found myself getting utterly hard and indifferent, I 
 used to read over a little 1)it of the ' Venice ' in the Italy, and it put
 
 260 DISILLUSIONMENT 
 
 CHAP, me always into the riglit tone of thought again, and for this I 
 cannot be enough grateful to you. For though I believe that in 
 the summer, when Venice is indeed lovely, when pomegranate 
 blossoms hang over every garden wall, and green sunlight shoots 
 through every wave, custom will not destroy, or even weaken, the 
 impression conveyed at first ; it is far otherwise in the length and 
 bitterness of the Venetian winters. Fighting with frosty winds at 
 every turn of the canals takes away all the old feelings of peace 
 and stillness ; the protracted cold makes the dash of the water on 
 the walls a sound of simple discomfort, and some wild and dark 
 day in February one starts to find oneself actually balancing in 
 one's mind the relative advantages of land and water carriage, 
 comparing the Canal with Piccadilly, and even hesitating whether 
 for the rest of one's life one would rather have a gondola within 
 call or a hansom. When I used to get into this humour I always 
 had recourse to those lines of yours : — 
 
 ' The Sea is in the broad, the narrow streets, 
 Ebbing and flowing, etc. ; ' 
 
 and they did me good service for many a day ; but at last a time 
 came when the sea was not in the narrow streets, and was always 
 ebbing and not flowing ; and one day, when I found just a foot 
 and a half of muddy water left under the Bridge of Sighs, and ran 
 aground in the Grand Canal as I was going home, I was obliged 
 to give the canals up. I have never recovered the feeling of 
 them. . . ." 
 
 (To C. E. Norton.) ^^ May, 1859. — I went through so much 
 hard, dry, mechanical toil there, that I quite lost before I left 
 it, the charm of the place. Analysis is an abominable business. 
 I am quite sure that people who work out subjects thoroughly 
 are disagreeable wretches. One only feels as one should when 
 one doesn't know much about the matter. If I could give you 
 for a few minutes, as you are floating up the canal just now, the 
 kind of feeling I had when I had just done my work, when Venice 
 presented itself to me merely as so many 'mouldings,' and I had 
 few associations with any building but those of more or less pain 
 and puzzle and provocation ; — Pain of frost-bitten finger and 
 chilled throat as I examined or drew the window-sills in the wintry 
 air ; Puzzlement from said window-sills which didn't agree with
 
 "QUEEN OF MARBLE AND OF MUD" 261 
 
 the doorsteps, or back of house which didn't agree with front ; CHAP. 
 
 XITT 
 
 and Provocation from every sort of soul or thing in Venice at 
 
 once, — from my gondoliers, who were always wanting to go home, 
 and thought it stupid to be tied to a post in the Grand Canal 
 all day long, and disagreeable to have to row to Lido afterwards ; 
 from my cook, who was always trying to catch lobsters on the 
 doorsteps, and never caught any ; from my valet-de-place, who 
 was always taking me to see nothing, and waiting by appointment 
 at the wrong place ; from my English servant, whom I caught 
 smoking genteelly on St. Mark's Place, and expected to bring home 
 to his mother quite an abandoned character ; from my tame fish, 
 who splashed the water all over my room and spoiled my drawings ; 
 from my little sea-horses, who wouldn't coil their tails about sticks 
 when I asked them ; from a fisherman outside my window who 
 used to pound his crabs alive for bait every morning, just when 
 I wanted to study morning light on the Madonna della Salute ; 
 from the sacristans of all the churches, who never used to be at 
 home when I wanted them ; from the bells of all the churches, 
 which used always to ring most when I was at work in the steeples ; 
 from the tides, which were never up, or down, at the hour they 
 ought to have been ; from the wind, which used to blow my 
 sketches into the canal, and one day blew my gondolier after 
 them ; from the rain, which came through the roof of the Scuola di 
 San Rocco ; from the sun, which blistered Tintoret's Bacchus and 
 Ariadne every afternoon at the Ducal Palace ; a:,d from the Ducal 
 Palace itself, worst of all, which wouldn't be found out, nor tell 
 one how it was built. (I believe this sentence had a beginning 
 somewhere, which wants an end someotherwhere ; but I haven't 
 any end for it, so it must go as it is.) 
 
 "There was only one place in Venice which I never lost the 
 feeling of joy in — at least the pleasure which is better than joy ; 
 and that was just half way between the end of the Guidecca and 
 St. George of the Seaweed, at sunset. If you tie your boat to 
 one of the posts there you can see the Euganeans, where the sun 
 goes down, and all the Alps and Venice behind you by the rosy 
 sunlight : there is no other spot so beautiful. Near the Armenian 
 convent is, however, very good also ; the city is handsomer, but 
 the place is not so simple and lovely. I have got all the right
 
 262 A HOLIDAY IN SWITZERLAND: 1851 
 
 CHAP, feeling back now, however; and hope to write a word or two 
 ■^^^^- about Venice yet, when I have got the mouldings well out of 
 my head— and the mud. For the fact is, with reverence be it 
 spoken, that whereas Rogers says : ' There is a glorious city in 
 the Sea,' a truthful person must say, 'There is a glorious city in 
 the Mud.' It is startling at first to say so, but it goes well enough 
 with marble, ' Oh Queen of Marble and of Mud.'" 
 
 II 
 
 The winter of 1849-50 passed, and Ruskin was still only 
 at tlie beginning of liis work. On liis return home, he wrote 
 the first volume and published it (March 1851) separately ; 
 but for the completion of the book, further study on the 
 spot was necessary, and in August 1851 Ruskin and his wife 
 started again for Venice,^ making holiday on the way among 
 the Alps. At Paris they were joined by friends, the Rev. 
 Daniel Moore, their clergyman at Denmark Hill, and Mrs. 
 Moore, wdio accompanied them for a fortnight, and at Geneva 
 they picked up Charles Newton. Nor among Ruskin's 
 travelling companions should two Liber Studiorum plates 
 touched by Turner be forgotten. "You cannot conceive," 
 he writes to his father from Les Rousses (August 11), "the 
 delight I have out of the two wdth me ; they never let me 
 pass a dull moment." It seems to have been a merry party, 
 and Ruskin enjoyed himself thoroughly. His pleasure was 
 increased b}'- falling in at Champagnole with some other 
 friends, Mr. and Mrs. Pritchard (a sister of Osborne Gordon), 
 who attached themselves to the party for some days. At 
 Chamouni Ruskin took his friends to his favourite points — 
 to the wood of the Pelerins, for instance, where they had a 
 picnic, Newton declaring that they were now "in search, not 
 of the picturesque, but of the picnicturesque." There was 
 only one drawback : Ruskin had to act as courier and kept 
 all the accounts. " I assure you," he wrote, " it is not a little 
 
 ^ It is convenient to confine tervening period, April 1850 to 
 this chapter to tlie two Venetian August 1851, see the next chapter. 
 winters. For account of the in-
 
 SECOND VENETIAN WINTER: 1851-52 263 
 
 puzzling to a person who rarely adds a sum twice with the CHAP, 
 same result." But his personally conducted party were XIII. 
 appreciative and in high spirits. They were in raptures 
 with the Pass of the Great St. Bernard, though they teased 
 him by abusing Chamouni in comparison. At the Hospice 
 they "had a pleasant evening -Effie made the monks play 
 and sing not Gregorian chants merely, but very merry and 
 unclerical tunes. I was afraid we should have more banish- 
 ments to the Simplon." 
 
 At Milan Newton left them, and they set their faces 
 towards Venice and the Stones. All the while that Ruskin 
 was approaching his Venetian work, he felt it to be only 
 an interlude and an interruption. "I hope to come back 
 here with you," he writes to his parents from Geneva 
 (August 19), " when my Venetian work is off my hands, 
 and I can give myself up again to the snowy mountains 
 which I love better than ever." But arrived at Venice, 
 he soon felt its charm renewed. " It is more beautiful," 
 he writes, "than ever, and I am most thankful to be 
 able to finish or retouch my descriptions on the spot" 
 (September 2). Wherever beauty was to be found Ruskin 
 had the heart to worship it, and whatever his hands found 
 to do he did with all his might. This, as he says in an 
 interesting piece of self-revelation, contained in a letter to 
 his father (Verona, June 2, 1852), was his "genius ": — 
 
 "Miss Edgeworth may abuse the word 'genius,' but there is such 
 a thing, and it consists mainly in a man's doing things because he 
 cannot help it, — intellectual things, I mean. I don't think myself a 
 great genius, but I believe I have genius ; something different from 
 mere cleverness, for I am not clever in the sense that millions of people 
 are — lawyers, physicians, and others. But there is the strong in- 
 stinct in me, which I cannot analyse, to draw and describe the things 
 I love — not for reputation, nor for the good of others, nor for my 
 own advantage, but a sort of instinct like that for eating or drinking. 
 I should like to draw all St. Mark's, and all this Verona stone 
 by stone, to eat it all up into my mind, touch by touch. ]\[ore and 
 more lovely I find it every time, and am every year dissatisfied 
 with what I did the last."
 
 264 RAWDON BROWN 
 
 CHAP. It was thus in full zest that Ruskin settled down in 
 
 Venice to finish his work. He found, as on his previous 
 visit in 1849, an invaluable helper in Rawdon Brown. 
 Another friend was Edward Cheney, who twenty years 
 before had acted as Sir Walter Scott's cicerone in Rome, 
 and now rendered many good offices to Ruskin at Venice. 
 Ruskin much enjoyed the society of Brown and Cheney* 
 " They are both as good-natured as can be," he wrote to 
 his father (October 11), "but of a different species from 
 me — men of the world, caring for very little about any- 
 thing but Men." But if Rawdon Brown's interest was in 
 men, it was in the famous of old times, and his know- 
 ledge of the antiquities of Venice was profound. He 
 had gone to Venice in 1833 to discover the tomb of Mow- 
 bray, Shakespeare's "Banished Norfolk," and for fifty 
 years he never left the place. He could never find the 
 heart to revisit England, since it meant leaving Venice. 
 Ruskin in later years had difficulty in finding heart to 
 revisit Venice. "I don't think," he wrote to his old 
 friend in 1862, "I can come to Venice, even to see you. 
 I should be too sad in thinking — not of ten — but of 
 twenty — no, sixteen years ago — when I was working there 
 from six in the morning till ten at night, in all the joy 
 of youth." 
 
 In such work, at the time with which we are nov/ 
 concerned (1851-52), Brown's help was of the greatest 
 assistance, and is gratefully acknowledged on many a 
 page of The Stones of Venice. But the first good offices 
 which Brown rendered were in the matter of lodgings. 
 These were found in a house in the Campo Sta. Maria 
 Zobenigo : i — 
 
 (To his Father.) ^^ Sept. 7, 24. — We have got the Baroness 
 Wetzler's apartments, aftei' a great fight for a room which we in- 
 sisted on having — a room for me to write in ; we have this and a 
 kind of hall dining-room, a beautiful drawing-room, double bed-room 
 and dressing-room, three servants' rooms and kitchen, on the Grand 
 
 ' Now the Palazzo Swift, an annex of the Grand Hotel.
 
 SOCIETY AT VENICE 265 
 
 Canal, with south aspect, nearly opposite the Salute ; and on first CHAP. 
 floor, for about 17 pounds a month . . . . ^ Xlll. 
 
 " I am now settled more quietly than I have ever been since I 
 was at college, and it certainly will be nobody's fault but my own if 
 I do not write well ; besides that, I have St. Mark's Library open to 
 me, and Mr. Cheney's, who has just at this moment sent his servant 
 tnrough a tremendous thunderstorm with two books which help me 
 in something I was looking for. I have a lovely view from my 
 windows, and temptation to exercise every day, and excellent food 
 so I think you may make yourself easy about me. . . . For the first 
 time iu: my life, I feel to be living really in my own house. For I 
 never lived at any place that I loved before and have been either 
 enduring the locality or putting up with somewhat rough habitation." 
 
 Venice under the Austrian domination was a centre 
 of much fashionable and military society, and Ruskin's 
 letters home during this winter tell of many and brilliant 
 gaieties. Many notabilities of the day figure in Ruskin's 
 accounts of their tea-parties or other re-unions. Thus we 
 meet not only the Austrian Governors and Generals, but 
 also the aged Marmont, Duke of Ragusa, one of Napoleon's 
 Marshals : — 
 
 {To his Father.) " 22nd Feb. [1852].— I paid yesterday— one of 
 what are now the rarest of my payments — a morning call. Mme. 
 Esterhazy having invited me again and again to see her, I went 
 
 ^ Ruskin had " George " with lieve that coals would burn ; and 
 
 him as factotum ; his wife had Bastian (Mr. Brown's servant), 
 
 a maid. George was employed who came with the fire-irons, 
 
 among other things in taking thought it necessai-y to instruct 
 
 daguerreotypes and as copyist. George that the poker 'was to 
 
 He also maintained his reputation break the coals with,' on which 
 
 as humorist. With some difficulty George immediately asked him 
 
 they had a grate with a coal fire in a humble manner the use of 
 
 fitted up in their apartments : the tongs ; which Bastian having 
 
 " There were still tongs, poker also explained with great gravity, 
 
 and shovel wanting to an estab- George proceeded to inquire that 
 
 lishmont, which Mr. Brown raked of the shovel ; but there Bastian 
 
 up out of his stores and sent us, found him out, and appeared for 
 
 and we had a nice scene at the a moment disposed to let him feel 
 
 first lighting of the fire ; for our the weight of all the three. It 
 
 gondolier servant, Beppo, had was quite a little bit of Moliere." 
 
 never seen one, and did not be- (November 25, 1851.)
 
 ^66 AN ARCHDUKE AND KOSSUTH 
 
 CHAP, yesterday with Effie for the first time ; Marmont came in while we 
 
 XIII 
 
 Avere sitting with her, and cross-examined me not unintelligently 
 
 respecting the chief styles of the architecture I was examining at 
 Venice. The Countess' house is the prettiest thing I ever saw on 
 a small scale, only wanting some Turner pictures to complete its 
 perfection. It is a corner house, with side windows looking up and 
 down the Grand Canal — every window having its balcony, be it long 
 or short, roofed in, and hung with silk, and filled with flowers. . . ." 
 
 There were masked balls, too, and gala nights at the 
 opera ; and many private parties in honour of distinguished 
 visitors to Venice, such as the Infanta of Spain, the Duchesse 
 de Berri, Henri Cinq, or the Archduke Albert : — 
 
 (To his Father.) "Venice, iVoy. 20, 1851. — I have not much 
 of interest to communicate to you of my own adventures, but Effie 
 sometimes sees a little of what is going on in the world. She was 
 out last night at one of her best friends', a young Italian Countess, 
 or rather German married to an Italian — Countess Palavicini — a very 
 amiable creature, only strong Austrian, which, as her husband is 
 Italian, is unfortunate ; but he is very fond of her — and lives here, 
 instead of at Bologna, where his palace is, that she may see more of 
 the Austrians. She asked Effie last night to come and meet the 
 Archduke Albert, the son of the great Archduke Charles. He came 
 to tea in the quietest English domestic way, or rather in the German 
 way, which is still quieter than the English. . . . He attacked Effie 
 playfully about the Kossuth doings ; she pleaded that she was not 
 to answer for them, being Scotch. ' Nay,' he said, ' if Kossuth goes 
 to Glasgow, you will see he will be received quite as well as he is 
 at Birmingham.' . . . He is a great admirer of Palladio at Vicenza, 
 so it was just as well it Avas Effie there and not me. She gets on 
 very nicely. Lady Sorel says, Avith the foreigners, not being stiff or 
 shy like most English." 
 
 Ruskin took pride in the Avay in Avhich his Avife, 
 accompanied sometimes by himself and sometimes by 
 her Venetian friends, shone in such assemblies. The 
 Austrian High Admiral came to Venice for a launch; she 
 was invited to give the signal. They Avent on a visit of 
 charity to the Convent of the " Do good " Brethren. " You
 
 MARSHAL RADETSKY 267 
 
 will do yourself a great deal of harm at the Carnival," CHAP, 
 said the Prior to her ; " we all know what a dancer yon XIII. 
 are." " Fancy Effie's fame as a dancer having extended," 
 writes Ruskin, "to the brethren of the Island Convent." 
 There were illuminations on the water to receive the 
 Emperor, his present Majesty Francis Joseph, whom Ruskin 
 describes as " a well-made youth, with rather a thin, ugly, 
 not unpleasant face." 
 
 Sometimes, too, Ruskin went with his wife to gaieties 
 at Verona, where the famous Marshal Radetsky, then in 
 his 87th year, had his headquarters. Ruskin had a sincere 
 regard for the old General, who on his part paid both 
 to the English writer and to his wife the most graceful 
 attentions. The description, in a letter home, of one of 
 the Marshal's balls gives a lively account of old-world 
 courtesy : — 
 
 "Veroxa, 2Qth January [1852]. — We arrived here very comfort- 
 ably at two o'clock, and one of the Marshal's aide-de-camps, Count 
 Thun, was at the station. , . . 
 
 "Verona, 27t7i January. — I have been as busy as I could be all 
 day, in this heavenly city, and so could only send you the line I wrote 
 last night. I will make Effie write you an account of the Marshal's 
 ball ; one of the chief points about it was that there was entertain- 
 ment for everyhodiY ; there were musicians for the dancers, cards 
 for the whist-players, sofas for the loungers, and a library for the 
 readers, with all manner of valuable books laid open, so that instead 
 of having to stand with my back to the wall in a hot room the 
 Avhole time, I got a quiet seat — and a book of natural history. 
 Effie was well dressed, and allowed by every one to be the reine du 
 hal. The old Marshal took her up the room himself to present her 
 to the Marechale, and then to the Archduke, Charles Ferdinand, 
 another of the sons of the Archduke Charles. The dancing was 
 very much more spirited than ours : till twelve o'clock, when all 
 the ladies were taken down to supper. There had meantime been 
 tea, for all who liked it, in a room beyond the library — not tea 
 handed over a counter by confectioners' girls, as it is in London, 
 making the people's houses look like railway stations, but tea made 
 at a large comfortable table where people sat down and talked, and in
 
 268 THE MARSHAL' 'AND HIS GUESTS 
 
 CHAP, large cups, the tea-maker being one of the Marshal's aide-de-camps, 
 the Count Thun — the same who met us at the railroad. But at the 
 ladies' supper the old Marshal was head- waiter himself; he went 
 down and stood at the end of the room, just behind Princess 
 Esterhazy's chair, seeing that they all had enough ; and not only 
 so, but kept running into the kitchen to order things for them, and 
 at last brought out a bowl of soup himself, keeping his aide-de-camps 
 not less busy the whole time ; nor that a short one, for the ladies 
 were exceedingly comfortable, and sat at their supper full three- 
 quarters of an hour. This — we hear from the said Count Thun — 
 was as much in politeness to the Marshal as in kindness to them- 
 selves ; for he is exactly like my mother, nothing annoys him so much 
 as the idea that people have gone away without having been made 
 comfortable ; but especially without having enough to eat. ' II a 
 toujours peur,' says his aide-de-camp, ' qu'on meurt de faim.' With 
 this substantial attention to all his guests there was great simplicity. 
 The supper looked as if it were meant to be eaten, not to be looked at. 
 There was not a single showy dish nor piece of finery on the table." 
 
 " Verona, ith June. . . . We are excessively petted here. 
 Marshal Radetsky sent Effie his picture yesterday, with his own 
 signature. I wish I could write as well, as dashing and firm as if it 
 had been written at 30 instead of 86 ; and his chief of the staff, who 
 is not now in Verona, left his carriage for us, with all manner of 
 insists on our using it when we wanted ; and the Marshal's two aide- 
 de-camps and another young officer came to escort us in our drive in 
 the evening. It was pleasant, after being so long in Venice, to see 
 the young men's riding — the nice, loose, cavalry balanced, swinging 
 seat, and the horses as happy as their masters, but keeping their 
 place beside the carriage to a hair's-breadth." 
 
 Ruskin and his wife themselves received occasionally 
 in a quiet way, and gave evening parties to their Austrian 
 and Italian acquaintance. They were sought out, too, by 
 compatriots who chanced to be in Venice. We read, in 
 Ruskin's letters home, of Scott (Sir Gilbert) coming to tea, 
 and "a great architectural seance" afterwards; of an ex- 
 pected visit from the Bishop of Oxford (Wilbcrforce) ; of 
 "several lectures on the Renaissance" given to Mr. Gibbs, 
 tutor to the Prince of Wales, in the hope of exercising
 
 A DAY IN RUSKIN^S LIFE AT VENICE 269 
 
 "influence in that quarter" — lectures which may or may not CHAP, 
 have been passed on to his late Majesty. Of Lord Dufferin, ■^-'^•'•' 
 who came to dinner and to tea, we get a little sketch : — 
 
 (Nov. 10.) " The Venetians have certainly some reason to 
 think the English odd people. Lord Dufferin was paddling about 
 in the lagoons all the while he was here, in one of those indian- 
 rubber boats which you may see hanging up at the door of a 
 shop in Bond Street. He took it over to Lido and rowed some 
 way in the sea with it ; when he landed, an Austrian coast-guard 
 came to investigate him, and wanted to rip up his boat to see 
 what was inside ! . , ." 
 
 Ruskin was in request as cicerone. Thus we read (Sept. 
 16) : " I showed the Dean (Milman) over the Duomo of 
 Murano yesterday, abusing St. Paul's all the time, and 
 making him observe the great superiority of the old church 
 and the abomination of its Renaissance additions, and the 
 Dean was much disgusted." But we may doubt whether 
 Ruskin had it all his own way, for in a later letter (Sept. 
 20) we learn that the Dean " is very fond of hearing him- 
 self talk and very positive," though " very good and on 
 the w^iole sensible." English artists preparing pictures of 
 Venice for the exhibitions — E. W. Cooke and David Roberts 
 among the number — foregathered with their critic. Ruskin 
 tells his father how much the paternal sherry was appre- 
 ciated : " the artists declared it was like the best painting, 
 at once tender and expressive." 
 
 But these were only occasional distractions. Nothing 
 was allowed to interfere for long or seriously with the steady 
 prosecution of his work. He gives his father an account 
 of a normal day : — 
 
 " Venice, Septemhe)' 26. — I rise at half-past six : am dressed by 
 seven — take a little bit of bread and read till nine. Then we have 
 breakfast punctually : very orderly served — a little marmalade with 
 a silver leafage spoon on a coloured tile at one corner of the table ; 
 butter very fresh, in ice ; fresh grapes and figs, which I never 
 touch, on one side ; peaches on the other, also for ornament chiefly 
 — I never take them ; a little hot dish which the cook is bound 
 to furnish every morning, a roast beccafico or other little tiny
 
 270 BIBLE STUDIES 
 
 CHAP, kickshaw ; before Effie, white bread and coffee. Then I read Pope 
 
 XTTT 
 
 or play myself till ten, when we have prayers ; and Effie reads 
 
 to me and I draw till eleven. Then I write till one, when we 
 have lunch ; then I go out and sketch or take notes till three, 
 then row for an hour and a half; come in and dress for dinner at 
 five, play myself till seven ; sometimes out on the water again 
 in an idle way ; tea at seven, write or draw till nine, and get 
 ready for bed." 
 
 In the days thus spent from September 1851 to June 
 1852 Ruskin wrote the greater part of the second and 
 third volumes of Tim atones of Venice. He wrote in full 
 enthusiasm, " My head and heart," he says (Feb. 4), " are 
 altogether in my book." This, however, was but a first 
 draft, and often contained only the descriptive passages for 
 which study on the spot was essential ; general reflections, 
 as well as the pruning and polishing of the whole were left 
 over f 3r revision and further work at home. 
 
 Neither Buskin's literary work, nor his artistic pursuits, 
 nor social distractions interrupted his religious studies and 
 exercises. Here at Venice, while at work on The Stones, 
 he wrote " a commentary of 90 pages on Job " (Doc. 3). In 
 his home letters, too, there are careful analyses and collations 
 of Bible teaching on various points — on the Psalmist's con- 
 ception, for instance, of righteousness, and on the relations 
 between rich and poor. Such studies were not merely 
 literary or critical ; they tended to edification ; they were 
 aids to personal religion. He regrets in one letter that his 
 observance of outward ceremonies — such as his Scripture 
 readings, family prayers, and church-going — did not lead 
 to such true contrition as he could desire. In other letters 
 he discusses with his father the doubts and difficulties that 
 beset him in the manner of Divine revelation, and then 
 comes a piece of religious experience in which doubts and 
 despondency vanish before earnest resolutions and answered 
 prayer : — 
 
 " Good Friday [April 9, 1852]. . . . One day last week I 
 was getting very nervous about the conlimial feeling of relaxation 
 in the throat, though in itself such a trifle. ... I began thinking
 
 RELIGIOUS EXERCISES 271 
 
 over my past life, and what fruit I had had of the joy of it, which CHAP, 
 had passed away, and of the hard work of it ; and I felt nothing -^^-'-'J- 
 but discomfort in looking back ; for I saw that I had always been 
 working for myself in one way or another. Either for myself, in 
 doing things that I enjoyed, i.e. climbing mountains, looking at 
 pictures, etc. ; or for my own aggrandisement and satisfaction of 
 ambition, or else to gratify my affections in pleasing you and my 
 mother, but that I had never really done anything for God's service. 
 Then I thought of my investigations of the Bible and found no 
 comfort in that either, for there seemed to me nothing but darkness 
 and doubt in it ; and as I was thinking of these things the illness 
 increased upon me, and my chest got sore, and I began coughing 
 just as I did at Salisbury, and I thought I was going to have 
 another violent attack at once, and that all my work at Venice 
 must be given up. This was about two in the morning. So I 
 considered that I had now neither pleasure in looking to my past 
 life, nor any hope, such as would be any comfort to me on a sick- 
 bed, of a future one. And I made up my mind that this would 
 never do. So after thinking a little more about it, I resolved 
 that at any rate I would act as if the Bible icere true ; that if it 
 were not, at all events I should be no worse off than I was before ; 
 that I would believe in Christ, and take Him for my Master in 
 whatever I did ; that assuredly to disbelieve the Bible was quite 
 as difficult as to believe it ; that there were mysteries either way ', 
 and that the best mystery was that which gave me Christ for a 
 Master. And when I had done this I fell asleep directly. When 
 I rose in the morning the cold and cough were gone ; and though 
 I was still unwell, I felt a peace and spirit in me I had never known 
 before, at least to the same extent ; and the next day I was quite 
 well, and everything has seemed to go right with me ever since, 
 all discouragement and difficulties vanishing even in the smallest 
 things. . . ." 
 
 The religious tone and moral purpose which govern the 
 argument and inspire the appeal in Tlie. Stones of Venice 
 came from the very heart of the man. They were at once 
 his inspiration and his encouragement: — 
 
 {To his Father.) ''April 14, 1852.— The fact is one's days 
 must be either a laying up of treasure or a loss of it ; life is either
 
 272 CHARITIES 
 
 CHAP, an ebbing or a flowing tide: and every night one must say, Here 
 
 XIII 
 
 IS so mucb of my fortune gone — irrevocably — with nothing to re- 
 store it or to be given in exchange for it; or, Here is another day 
 of good service done and interest got, good vineyard digging, for 
 which very assuredly ' whatsoever is right, that I i shall receive.' " 
 
 The longer letter just cited indicates some unsettlement 
 of Ruskin's early faith, and in the second volume of The 
 Stones of Venice may be found the first passages in his 
 works which were written in a temper different from the 
 exclusive Protestantism that he came in after years to 
 deplore and denounce. Such a passage as that in the 
 third chapter on the Madonna of Murano heralds his sub- 
 sequent power of sympathy with every kind of sincere 
 religious emotion, and even of sincere agnosticism. ^ As 
 his own views broadened, so did his power of sympathy 
 expand. 
 
 Ruskin's religious exercises were accompanied, it should 
 be added, now as always, by much practical benevolence. 
 " I can this time show you," he writes to his father (January 
 16, 1852), " hoiv the money has gone to the last fraction. 
 I have given a great deal in charity. There is not, I think, 
 one man of the lower classes whom I have ever known 
 in Venice who docs not come begging, and with as much 
 justness of claim as habitual improvidence can give to 
 any one." His wife, too, visited the poor and sick, both in 
 the hospitals and in their own homes. Nor were home 
 charities forgotten. In these his father acted as his 
 almoner, and Ruskin sent him the names and addresses 
 of poor and deserving men, struggling artists and others 
 whom he was to search out and help. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Occasionally in the letters of this period one finds, too, 
 anticipations of those wider social problems — of the unequal 
 distribution of riches and poverty, of luxury and misery, 
 
 ' See Introduction to The Crown of JVild Olive.
 
 LETTERS TO THE TIMES ON POLITICS 273 
 
 which were afterwards to occupy so much of his time and CHAP. 
 thoughts:— XIII- 
 
 ^^ {November 12, 1851.) — I was rather struck yesterday by three 
 paragraphs in Galirpiani — in parallel columns — so that the eye 
 ranged from one to the other. The first gave an account of a 
 girl aged twenty-one, being found, after lying exposed all night, 
 and having given birth to a dead child, on the banks of the canal 
 near Maidstone, I think — but some English county town ; the 
 second was the fashions for November, with an elaborate account 
 of satin skirts ; and the third, a burning to death of a child — or 
 rather, a dying after burning — because the surgeon, without an order 
 from the parish, would neither go to see it nor send it any medicine." 
 
 In after years — and first, prominently, in Sesame and 
 Lilies — Ruskin made much of arguments or appeals from 
 cuttings in the newspapers, arranged by " Fors Clavigera" — 
 by chance, but by chance that hit the nail on the head. 
 During his present sojourn at Venice Ruskin put his 
 thoughts on public affairs into the form of three letters to 
 the Times, dealing severally with the principles of taxation, 
 representation, and education. They were not printed at 
 the time, but the manuscript of the first two was found 
 among his papers after his death ; the third seems to have 
 been used as the appendix on "Modern Education" in 
 The Stones of Venice. The other letters are now included 
 in the Library Edition of his Works, and they form an 
 important episode in Ruskin's life. They reveal the 
 development of his political view^s, and they were the 
 occasion of some estrangement between father and son. 
 More and more Ruskin had become convinced that there 
 saw something rotten in the state of political society. He 
 was a Republican as against institutions or laws which 
 oppressed the poor; and a Conservative as against theories 
 and reforms which were based on doctrines of liberty and 
 equality. Something must also be allowed for his natural 
 affection for the side of the minority. This is a view he 
 put forward himself in a letter to his father : — 
 
 ''Sunday, IQfh Novemher [1851]. — I do not suppose that at any 
 previous period of history there has been more open Communism 
 VOL. 1. S
 
 274 VIEWS ON TAXATION AND FRANCHISE 
 
 CHAP, coolly announced in the face of all men. The French Revolution 
 ■'^* was a frenzy begun in a necessary reform of vicious government, 
 but the principles which that frenzy reached at its wildest, be- 
 comes now the subject of the after-dinner declamation of our 
 respectable London citizens. There is assuredly a root for all 
 this — desperate abuses going on in governments, and real ground 
 for movement among the lower classes, which of course they are 
 little likely to guide by any very just or rational princijDle. . . , 
 However, I must mind and not get too sympathising with the 
 Radicals. Effie says with some justice that I am a great conser- 
 vative in France, because there everybody is radical, and a great 
 radical in Austria, because there everybody is conservative. I 
 suppose that one reason why I am so fond of fish (as creatures, 
 I mean, not as eating) is that they always swim with their heads 
 against the stream. I find it for me the healthiest position." 
 
 In this spirit of revolt Ruskin, from his distant eyrie at 
 Venice, surveyed the state of politics in England. Catholic 
 Emancipation had been carried, but Ireland had not been 
 pacified. Chartism had been snuffed out, but the movement 
 for Reform continued. The Corn Laws had been abolished, 
 but the Conservative party under Disraeli were still han- 
 kering after a return to protection. Early in 1851 Lord 
 John Russell's Government had been] defeated, but, on 
 Lord Stanley's failure to form an administration, had re- 
 turned to office. But internal feuds between Lord John 
 and Lord Palmerston had led to the resignation of the 
 latter, and then to the tit for tat which caused the defeat 
 of the former. In February 1852, Lord Stanley (Lord 
 Derby) was Prime Minister, with Disraeli as Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer and leader in the House of Commons. 
 
 It was at this moment that Ruskin wrote his letters. 
 In the first of them, after a passing sneer at Disraeli as 
 a mere novelist, he discussed the policy of Free Trade, 
 and the principles of taxation — stoutly defending the 
 former, and with regard to the latter advocating direct and 
 graduated taxation. He was only about half-a-century 
 before his time ; for he favoured, not only a graduated 
 income-tax, but a super-tax on large incomes. In the
 
 ALARM OF RUSKIN'S FATHER 275 
 
 second letter Riiskin advocated a system of universal CHAP. 
 suffrage combined with what in later discussions were -^IJ^^- 
 called "fancy franchises." Every man was to have his 
 vote, but votes were to be weighed as well as counted ; 
 weight being attached more especially to property and 
 education. This latter test brought him to the subject 
 of a third Letter, in which he discussed the Principles of 
 Education. He pleaded, in the subject-matter of education, 
 that it should include Natural History, Religion, and the 
 elements of Politics; and, with regard to its scope, that 
 it should be National. 
 
 This scheme was set forth by Ruskin two years after 
 Carlyle had published his Latter-Day PamjMets, to which 
 work it doubtless owed something of inspiration ; it is, 
 however, worth noticing that the disciple's treatment of 
 the theme, if similar in spirit, was more precise and definite 
 than his master's. Ruskin's political writings, now and 
 afterwards, may have been practicable or impracticable ; 
 but at any rate they were directed to practical ends ; 
 they may have looked towards the sky, but they trod 
 the earth. 
 
 Ruskin's father was a Torj^ of the old school, and an 
 admirer of Disraeli, whose process of educating his party 
 had as yet hardly begun. The Radical pill, which, with 
 some Tory gilding, Ruskin proposed to apply to the 
 body politic, was naturally unacceptable at the domestic 
 headquarters ; the Letters, to which the son attached great 
 importance, and which he particularly desired to publish 
 in the then year of grace, 1852, were put on the paternal 
 Index. The correspondence between father and son tells 
 its own story : — 
 
 " March 14. — I don't know whether you have found my Times 
 letters worth sending, or whether the Times will put them in, 
 but I rather hope so — not in the hope of their doing any good at 
 l)re3ent, but because I want to be able to refer to them in future. 
 I was a mere boy when the present design for the Houses of 
 Parliament was chosen — but I said in an instant it was vile. 1 
 did not say so in print, because I felt that no one would care
 
 276 LOYALTY AND SUFFRAGE 
 
 CHAP, for a hoy's opinion, but I heartily wish now that I had written 
 ^^^- to tlie Times, and could now refer to my then stated opinion. In 
 like manner I hope the Times will put these letters in, for twenty 
 years hence, if I live, I should like to be able to refer to them 
 and say ' I told you so, and now you are beginning to find it 
 out.' And that would give some power — then, however little it 
 may be possible to do at present." 
 
 " March 29. — I had yesterday your nice long letter from Leeds, 
 but was sorry to hear "from my mother that you were annoying 
 yourself because you did not agree with me, and I am sorry that 
 in the midst of your labour in travelling I have caused you the 
 additional work of these long letters. Keep mine until I get home, 
 and then we will talk about them, but do not vex yourself because 
 you think I am turning republican. I am, I believe, just what 
 I was ten years ago, in all respects but one, that I have not the 
 Jacobite respect for the Stuarts which I had then ; when I was 
 at College I used to stand up for James II. I have certainly 
 changed no opinion since I wrote the passage in the Seven Lamps 
 about loyalty. I meant the word to signify what it really does 
 in the long run signify — ?i9?/-alty, respect for loy or law ; for the 
 King as long as he observes and represents law ; and a love, not 
 merely of established laws at a particular time, but of the principles 
 of law and obedience in general. As for the universal suffrage 
 in my letter, if you look over it carefully you will see that I am 
 just as far from universal suffrage as you are— and that by my 
 measure, one man of parts and rank would outweigh in voting a 
 whole shoal of the mob. . . . But I hold it a gratuitous and useless 
 insult to make any man incapable of giving an opinion : oidy let 
 the proper weight be attached to his opinion. ... As for D'Israeli, 
 I have no animosity against him. I know nothing about Wood. 
 D'Israeli's works give me the idea of his being a coxcomb, but 
 clever ; only the last person fit to make a Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer. Perhaps Wood was worse ; I think it is very likely there 
 may go as much brains to write a bad novel as to make a very 
 good politician, in the modern sense of the term. ..." 
 
 A letter from Rnskin's father (dated Lancaster, 30th 
 March 1852) states his general view on the question, in 
 terms which other and less partial critics have often adopted,
 
 THE LETTERS SUPPRESSED 277 
 
 and which must have caused no little chagrin and disappoint- CHAP. 
 ment to a son whose filial affections were now beginning to XIII. 
 be separated from complete intellectual sympathy : — 
 
 " I shall see to letters for Times on my return, as you so wish 
 it. My feelings of attacks on your books and on your newspaper 
 writing differ from yours in this way. I think all attacks on your 
 books are only as the waves beating on Eddystone Lighthouse, 
 whereas your politics are Slum Buildings liable to be knocked down ; 
 and no man to whom authority is a useful engine should expose 
 himself to frequent defeat by slender forces. 
 
 "Your sneer I at the age making a clever novelist Chancellor 
 of Exchequer would already have pained yourself. D'lsraeli may 
 end weakly, but at present he commands the House, and is a match 
 for Lord John or any man in it, and his adroitness and information 
 are astonishing." 
 
 Here, for the time, the matter rested. Ruskin did not 
 press his father any further. The letters, then, were con- 
 signed to the shelf, but the views expressed in them re- 
 mained and developed in Ruskin's mind. Twelve years later 
 they were embodied in his treatise entitled Unto this Last. 
 For once his father's judgment was in part at least at 
 fault. So far as Ruskin stood for aristocracy against demo- 
 cracy in the machinery of government, his political edifice 
 has, indeed, been submerged. But the principles of fiscal 
 policy, of taxation, and of national education for which he 
 argued in 1832 have stood, and have been gradually more 
 and more adopted in this country, for sixty years — whatever 
 fate the future may have in store for them. Whether they 
 were indeed firm as Eddystone Lighthouse, the future will 
 show ; but the past has already vindicated them from the 
 character of " Slum Buildings." Meanwhile these letters 
 on politics, and the discussion of them with his father, 
 were a distraction from Ruskin's woi-k on The Stones of 
 Venice. And yet not wholly a distraction ; the thoughts on 
 social and political conditions which thus filled his mind 
 informed some of the most vital and efiective pissages in 
 that book. It is a signal instance of Ruskin's far-reaching
 
 278 PROPOSED PURCHASE OF TINTORETS 
 
 CHAP, range that the same book which gave a new interpretation 
 of a school of architecture contained also a chapter which 
 was to become the gospel of a certain school of socialism.^ 
 
 IV 
 
 Two other distractions from his recailar work, of a 
 different kind, remain to be mentioned before we leave 
 Venice. On December 19, 1851, Turner died, and though 
 the precise terms of the will were not yet known, Ruskin 
 learnt at once that he had been appointed an executor. 
 The position was to involve him in many worries, but for 
 the moment it filled him with new interests and excite- 
 ments. These, however, may more conveniently be re- 
 served for a later chapter (XXL). Another affair which 
 occupied some of his time and thoughts at Venice was the 
 acquisition which he hoped to persuade the Trustees to allow 
 him to make on their behalf of two pictures by Tintoret for 
 the National Gallery. There was an opportunity of securing 
 the "Crucifixion," in St. Cassiano, and the great " Marriage 
 in Cana," of the Salute. Among the Trustees of the National 
 Gallery was Lord Lansdowne, with whom Ruskin had 
 some acquaintance. He opened the subject to the Trustees 
 in March 1852 ; enlisted the support of Lord Palmerston ; 
 and was in correspondence further with Sir Charles East- 
 lake, who was then President of the Royal Academy as 
 well as a Trustee of the Gallery. The first answers seem 
 to have been encouraging, though Ruskin chafed — as who 
 has not ? — at the dilatoriness of official ways. " I have 
 a letter from Sir Charles Eastlake," he writes to his 
 father, on May 16, "... with some important report of 
 progress respecting National Gallery and Tintoret. I will 
 enclose you his letter on Tuesday, but must show it to 
 some people to-morrow. I fear nothing can be done — they 
 are too slow, but I am glad to find that I have some 
 power, even with such immovable people as Trustees for 
 the National Gallery." The Trustees, meanwhile, were 
 
 ^ See below, p. 311.
 
 DECLINED 13Y THE NATIONAL GALLERY 279 
 
 consulting Edward Cheney, who, as Ruskin afterwards CHAV, 
 believed, " put a spoke in the Avheel for pure spite." ^ The " 
 rejection of Ruskin's proposal is recorded in the minutes of 
 a meetmg of the Trustees on June 7, 1852 : — 
 
 ^^ Read — A letter from Mr. Ruskiu, at Venice, of the 19th May, 
 addressed to Sir Charles Eastlake, and enclosing one from j\lr. 
 Cheney, in the former of which Mr. Ruskin stated that he is willing 
 to undertake to procure for this Gallery two pictures by Tintoretto, 
 the 'Marriage at Cana' in the Madonna della Salute, and the 
 ' Crucifixion ' in St. Cassiano ; the former valued by him at .£5000, 
 the latter at £7000. But although he would use his endeavours to 
 procure them at a less cost, he is unwilling to move in the matter, 
 unless the Government will ultimately sanction the expenditure of 
 £12,000 for the two pictures. 
 
 " Resoloed — That the Trustees do not/find themselves in a position 
 to ask from the Government so considerable a sum as that required 
 by Mr. Ruskin as the basis of his negotiation for the pictures in 
 question, especially as Mr. Cheney does not entirely concur with 
 him in his valuation of the works, and as the Trustees have not 
 sufficient means of arriving at their true value ; they therefore re- 
 quest that Sir Charles Eastlake will be so obliging as to communicate 
 to Mr. Ruskin their unwillingness that he should proceed further in 
 this matter." ^ 
 
 So ended Ruskin's attempt to procure for this country two 
 of Tintoretto's finest works. It was his first disappoint- 
 ment, in matters where he was personally concerned, in 
 connexion with the National Gallery. The Turner Bequest 
 was to be attended with other disappointments, yet more 
 poignant — as we shall see hereafter. 
 
 The negotiations with the Trustees of the National 
 Gallery kept him at Venice beyond his appointed time ; 
 his lease of the Casa Wetzler was up, and at the beginning 
 of May he moved into lodgings in St. Mark's Place. "It 
 is very delicious," he wrote (May 16), "looking down upon 
 
 * Praierita, ill. ^ 29, where " Naiional Galler}/ Eetuni, 1847- 
 
 fluskin by a slip of memory dates 1852 : House of Commons Papers, 
 the transaction in 1845, 1853, No. 104, p. 47.
 
 ^80 THE ST. GOTHARD 
 
 CHAP, the place, as Turner found out long ago when he painted 
 -^^^^- the first picture I defended — 'Juliet and her Nurse.'" He 
 was detained at Venice yet further by the theft of some of 
 his wife's jewels. Ruskin had his suspicions, and at one 
 stage of the affair it looked as if he might have to accept 
 a challenge to fight a duel. From this he was extricated 
 by the good offices of Mr. Cheney. But judicial inquiries 
 detained him for some time; and it was the end of June 
 before he and his wife left, homeward bound, with the greater 
 part of the second and third volumes of his book roughed 
 out. They returned by the St. Gothard, and Ruskin stayed 
 a day or two among the scenes of some of his best-beloved 
 Turner drawings : — 
 
 "AiROLO, Sunday, ith July [1852]. — I do not know when I 
 have reached a more delightful place for a Sunday's rest. There is 
 a new inn here, not a fashionable hotel, but small, clean, and Swiss. 
 The weather was lovely yesterday, and this morning is cloudless ; 
 and the contrast between the filth and vice of Venice and the purity 
 of the scene which I have before me to-day is intense beyond ex- 
 pression. . . . The scene before my window this morning is one 
 of the most exquisite purity and peace ; a good deal like that from 
 our windows at Chamouni, but the green slopes of hill less steep, 
 and softer, all broken into sweet knolls and studded with cottages 
 and clusters of pine, and above them a mass of snowy rocks, not 
 disfigured by debris or glaciers, but with the snow glittering in 
 starry fragments upon their fianks, and crowning them with delicate 
 lines and threads of silver, and the Ticino murmuring in the valley 
 — not a white glacier stream, but clear and blue, and so far away 
 that its sound is like the gentle voice of one of our English streams ; 
 and down the valley, promontory beyond promontory of pines, all 
 dim with the morning mist and sunshine. I had no idea Airolo 
 was so beautifully placed, but one must rest at a place before it can 
 be known." 
 
 Venice was a by-work; it was among the fields and hills 
 that Raskin felt himself to be upon his native heath.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 CHAMPION OF THE PRE-RAPHAELITES 
 
 (1851) 
 
 "In the midst of this helplessness came thunder as out of a 
 clear sky — a letter from Ruskin in The Times in our defence." 
 — HoLMAN Hunt {The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood). 
 
 Our scene now chanufes from Venice to London, and in the 
 chronicle of Raskin's Hterary work from architecture to 
 painting. We leave Tlie Stones of Venice still in process 
 of being shaped, and Modern Painters uncompleted but 
 laid on the shelf, and turn to his championship of the 
 Pre-Raphaelites. 
 
 I 
 
 After the first of his Venetian winters, Ruskin had 
 returned home by Genoa and the South of France, staying 
 for some days on the road to study the cathedrals of 
 Valence, Vienne, Lyons, and Bourges. He reached England 
 in the middle of April (1850), and, after a short visit to 
 his parents at Denmark Hill, settled with his wife at 
 their house in Park Street for the London season. His 
 impressions of a crush are lively, and might have been 
 written by Dickens : — 
 
 " My dearest Mother, — Horrible party last night — stiff — large 
 — dull — fidgety — strange — run-against everybody — know-nobody 
 sort of party. Naval people. Young lady claims acquaintance with 
 me. I know as much of her as Queen Pomare.^ Talk. Get away 
 
 ^ Queen Pomare of Otaheite made a treaty with France, pro- 
 
 (Society Islands) was one of the vidin^ for the occupation of the 
 
 actors in the "Prichard affair,'* island, but Mr. Prichard, consul 
 
 which had caused some political and medical man to the Queen, 
 
 excitement a few years before the persuaded her to repudiate it and 
 
 date of this letter. The Queen had to appeal for English protection. 
 
 281
 
 282 A CRUSH AND A COURT 
 
 CHAP, as soon as I can — ask who she is — Lady Charlotte Elliott — as wise 
 
 XIV 
 
 as I was before. Introduced to a black man with chin in collar. 
 
 Black man condescending. I abuse several things to black man, 
 chiefly the House of Lords. Black man says he lives in it — asks 
 where I live — I don't want to tell him — obliged. Go away and 
 ask who black man is. Mr. Shaw Lefevre — as wise as I was 
 before. Introduced to a young lady — young lady asks if I like 
 drawing — go away and ask who she is — Lady Something Conyngham. 
 Keep away with back to the wall and look at watch. Get away at 
 last — very sulky this morning — Hope my father's better — dearest 
 love to you both. — Ever, my dearest mother, your most affec. son." 
 
 Ruskin and his wife went also to Court, and the occasions 
 are described in letters to his father : — 
 
 " Pakk St., 4 o'clock. May 1850. — I got through excellently 
 well, and I believe did what was right — and I thouglit that Prince 
 Albert put something like markedness into his bow, but that may be 
 his general manner. The Queen looked much younger and prettier 
 than I expected — very like her pictures, even like those 1 which are 
 thought to flatter most — but I only saw the profile — I could not see 
 the front face as I knelt to her, at least without an upturning of the 
 eyes, which I thought would be unseemly — and there were but some 
 two or three seconds allowed for the whole afl"air. After waiting an 
 hour and three-quarters I think they really might allow people a 
 quarter of a minute each, and time them off'. The Queen gave her 
 hand very graciously, but looked bored ; poor thing, well she might 
 be, with about a quarter of a square mile of people to bow to. I 
 met two people whom I have not seen this many a day — Kildare 
 and Scott Murray — had a chat with the former and a word with 
 Murray but nothing of interest. Dearest love to;my mother." 
 
 {Undated.) " We got through^gloriously, though at one place there 
 was the most awkward crush I ever saw in my life — the pit at the 
 Surrey, which I never saw, may, perhaps, show the like — nothing else. 
 The floor was covered with the ruins of ladies' dresses, torn lace, 
 and fallen flowers ; but Effie was luckily outf of it, and got through 
 unscathed, and heard people saying, ' What a beautiful dress ! ' just 
 as she got up to the Queen. It was fatiguing enough, but not so 
 awkward as I expected. Eftie had no difficulty nor was in any
 
 RUSKIN AND THE " P.R.B." 283 
 
 embarrassment. I hope to be out to-morrow early. Dearest love chAP. 
 to my mother." XIV. 
 
 The gaieties of the London Season did not conduce to 
 speedy progress with The Stones of Venice, nor, it would 
 seem, to his satisfaction in any respect. In a letter to his 
 father of Feb. 8, 1852, containing an account of his steward- 
 ship of time and health, he says that in the spring of 1850 
 he "came home very well and set to write my book. But 
 then came three months of society, and late hours; then 
 after a little useless trip in the autumn, good hard work 
 and a great deal of worry with the engravers, writing Stones 
 of Venice all winter." 
 
 The first volume was published on March 3, 1851. The 
 three parts of the large folio work of illustrative Plates, 
 entitled Examples of the Architecture of Venice, appeared 
 successively in May and November of the same year. After 
 the publication of the Stones, Ruskin went with his wife on 
 visits to Cambridge ^ and Farnley,^ and afterwards for a little 
 rest to Matlock. They then returned to London for the 
 season, and Ruskin became engaged in another crusade. 
 
 II 
 
 Ruskin was now one of the literary figures of the day, 
 and the circle of his acquaintance was widening. He had 
 become known — in what precise way I have never been able 
 to ascertain — to Carlyle. He was a member, though not an 
 habitue, of the Athenaeum Club. He was often with Rogers. 
 And he was seeing a good deal of Coventry Patmore. It 
 was through Patmore that Ruskin was drawn into a new 
 interest. It was supposed at the time, and has often been 
 repeated since, that Ruskin was the inspirer of the Pre- 
 Raphaelite Brotherhood. On the other hand, by reaction 
 from this view, it is sometimes asserted that Ruskin had 
 nothing: to do with the movement. The truth is between 
 the two statements. Ruskin himself afterwards explained 
 that " the painters were entirely original in their thoughts 
 ^ See above, p. 235. 2 g^e below, p. 290.
 
 284 ATTACKS ON THE BROTHERHOOD 
 
 CHAP, and independent in their practice " ; but, on the other hand, 
 one at least of them owed some inspiration to his books, and 
 they were all deeply indebted to his encouragement and 
 advocacy. The Brotherhood had been formed, as already 
 related (p. 181), in 1848. In the following year the first 
 pictures with the mystic initials P.R.B had been exhibited. 
 In 1850 had appeared the first number of their organ, The 
 Germ, with its motto " to encourage and enforce an entire 
 adherence to the simplicity of nature." In the Royal 
 Academy of 1850 two of the best-known pictures of the 
 school had been shown — Millais's " Christ in the House of 
 His Parents " and Holman Hunt's " Claudio and Isabella." 
 The Brotherhood had thus found and proclaimed its faith, 
 and brought forth works illustrative of it, before Ruskin 
 took up the cudgels on their behalf; and at the time when 
 he did so, he had no personal knowledge of any of them. 
 Nor was the merit of their work at that time his own dis- 
 covery. He had observed Millais's picture in the Academy 
 of 1850, and had not been very favourably impressed by it. 
 Dyce,the Royal Academician, "dragged me," he says, "literall}^ 
 up to the Millais picture, of ' The Carpenter's Shop,' which 
 I had passed disdainfully, and forced me to look for its 
 merits." i It is therefore clear that Ruskin was not directly 
 the mspirer of the Pre-Raphaelites. 
 
 They were, however, glad of his help, and it was at the 
 instance of one of their number that this was invoked. The 
 attacks of the critics on the Pre-Raphaelite pictures of 1850 
 had been very severe ; they were penned with the express 
 object, it would seem, of deterring purchasers. " We have 
 great difficulty," wrote BlackivoocVs Magazine of " The 
 Carpenter's Shop," " in believing a report that this un- 
 pleasing and atrociously affected picture has found a 
 purchaser at a high price. Another specimen from the 
 same brush inspires rather laughter than disgust." Such 
 attacks were renewed in the notices of the following year's 
 Academy, when Millais showed his "Mariana," "Return of 
 the Dove to the Ark," and " Woodman's Daughter," and 
 Hunt his " Valentine and Sylvia." The Times led the way 
 
 ^ Letter to Ernest Chesneau, Dec. 28, 1882.
 
 RUSKIN TO THE RESCUE 285 
 
 in a violent article, declaring that such work ' deserved no CHAP, 
 quarter at the hands of the public." " Our strongest enemy," -^^^• 
 writes Holman Hunt, " advised that the Academy, having 
 shown our works so far, to prove how atrocious they were, 
 could now, with the approval of the public, depart from their 
 usual rule of leaving each picture on the walls until the end 
 of the season, and take ours down and return them to us." 
 Officials of the Academy itself fanned the flame. " In the 
 schools (as we were told) a professor referred to our works 
 in such terms Ihat the Avavering students resorted to the 
 very extreme course of hissing us." Other newspapers and 
 magazines afterwards took up the hue and cry, and such 
 attacks were calculated to be very damaging to young artists 
 who had as yet no powerful patrons, and whose moans were 
 very narrow. The article in the Times filled Millais with 
 alarm and indignation, and he bethought himself of some 
 move to parry the blow. He was acquainted with Coventry 
 Patmore ; he had painted a portrait of the poet's first wife, 
 and the subject of one of the pictures in the Academy, 
 denounced by the Times — "The Woodman's Daughter" — 
 had been taken from Patmore's piece, so entitled, in his 
 volume of Poems. Millais knew that Ruskin was a friend of 
 Patmore, and turned in his anger and vexation to the author 
 of Modern Painters for help. Ruskin made a study of the 
 pictures forthwith, and wrote the first of his famous letters 
 to the Times on the Pre-Raphaelites, explaining their 
 principles and defending their practice. It appeared on 
 May 13, and was followed up by another on May 30. The 
 champion of the Pre-Raphaelites was already censor of the 
 arts, and hostile critics sneered at his "assumption of a 
 power to bind and loose." But he did in fact wield a power> 
 very important to struggling artists — the power to sell. 
 His praises found a purchaser presently for Hunt's picture ; 
 and Ruskin himself oftered to buy Millais's "Dove." It 
 had, however, already been bought by the artist's friend and 
 first patron, Mr. Combe of Oxford, to whom he wrote in 
 great glee, describing Ruskin's offer : " No doubt you have 
 seen the violent abuse of my pictures in the Times, which 
 I believe has sold itself to destroy us. That, however, is
 
 286 A TURNING-POINT IN P.R.B. FORTUNES 
 
 CHAP, quite an absurd mistake of theirs, for, in spite of their de- 
 nouncmg my pictures as unworthy to hang on any walls, 
 the famous critic, Mr. Ruskin, has written offering to 
 purchase your picture." 
 
 Millais and Hunt posted a joint letter of thanks to 
 Ruskin, who forthwith sought their personal acquaintance. 
 Hunt says that on the day following the receipt of the 
 letter, which had given Millais's address in Gower Street, 
 Ruskin and his wife drove to the house, and after a mutually 
 appreciated interview carried Millais off to their house and 
 induced him to stay with them for a week. " Millais's 
 exuberant interest in human experience, as well as his 
 child-like impulsiveness in conversation, made him in a few 
 days like an intimate of many years' duration." ^ " I have 
 dined and taken breakfast with Ruskin," wrote Millais to 
 Mrs. Combe on July 2, 1851, " and we are such good friends 
 that he wishes me to accompany him to Switzerland this 
 summer. . . . We are as yet singularly at variance in our 
 opinions upon Art. One of our differences is about Turner. 
 He believes that I shall be converted on further acquaint- 
 ance with his works, and I that he will gradually slacken in 
 his admiration." Hunt's artistic prospects at the time were 
 almost desperate. He had written a letter, but could not 
 tell, he says, " where to find a penny for the stamp." Ruskin's 
 intervention was " as thunder out of a clear sky." " The 
 critic had, amongst other charges, accused our pictures of 
 being false in linear perspective. This was open to demon- 
 stration. Ruskin challenged him to establish his case, and 
 the cowardly creature skulked away, and was heard of no 
 more." Ruskin's championship was, in fact, a turning-point 
 in the fortunes of the Pre-Raphaelites. It encouraged the 
 painters themselves, confirmed the wavering opinions of 
 patrons and picture-dealers, and caused many of the critics 
 to reconsider their opinions. 
 
 Three years later Ruskin again wrote to the Times in 
 praise of Pre-Raphaelite work. In the interval he had 
 lost no opportunity of calling attention to their pictures in 
 other places. Thus in revising the first volume of Modern 
 
 ^ Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. i. p. 257.
 
 THE P.ll.l^. AND MODERN PAINTERS 287 
 
 Painters for the fifth edition (1851), he alkidcd to their CHAP, 
 works as "in finish of drawing and in splendour of colour ^^^• 
 the best in the Academy " ; then came the pamphlet upon 
 Pre-Rapliaelitisifn, next to be noticed ; while in The Stones 
 of Venice he introduced frequent references to Millais, 
 Rossetti, and Hunt. A lecture on the Pre-Raphaelites at 
 Edinburgh followed in 1853. In the following year's 
 Academy Hunt exhibited one of his greatest works, "The 
 Light of the World." Ruskin had for some time been his 
 friend, and had taken a lively interest in this picture, for 
 which, during its inception, he had suggested the title of 
 " The Watchman." ^ On its completion Hunt had started 
 on a journey to the East, and Ruskin came forward as in- 
 terpreter of a work which, he felt, needed for its right 
 understanding thought as deep and serious as had gone 
 to its production. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In considering Ruskin's relations with the Pre-Raphaelites 
 it must be remembered further that though he had not 
 directly inspired them, yet their practice and their theories 
 were in accord with his teaching, and were in some sort 
 the outcome of a general tendency to which his writings 
 had contributed. We have seen already how Holm an Hunt, 
 during his student days at the Academy, had come across 
 the first volumes of Modern Painters, and " felt that it 
 was written expressly for him." In revising that volume 
 for a fifth edition, Ruskin came upon a passage which he 
 felt had been written, though he knew it not, expressly for 
 the whole Pre-Raphaelite school. It was the famous pas- 
 sage — often quoted and often, as already said, misquoted — 
 about the yoimg artist' "going to nature in all singleness 
 of heart . . . rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and 
 scorning nothiug." As he studied the works of the young 
 Pre-Raphaelites, he saw that they had carried out this 
 
 * William Holman Hunt, by F. W. Farrar, Art Annual publica- 
 tion, p. 10.
 
 288 PAMPHLET ON PRE-RAPHAELITISM 
 
 CHAP, advice to the letter, ar.d, for their reward, had been assailed 
 •^^^" with the most scurrilous abuse. He was, therefore, doubly 
 called upon to defend them — for their sake and for his 
 own. This work he set himself in a piece which appeared in 
 the autumn of 1851 — the well-known pamphlet entitled Pre- 
 Raphaelitisin. In this he mentions, as an instance of 
 the violent hostility entertained towards the new school, 
 an anonymous letter which he received the day after 
 his second letter appeared ; he defends once more their 
 pictures against the specific attacks made upon them; and 
 hints not obscurely his regret at the Academy's attitude 
 towards the most promising of its students. Then taking 
 broader scope, he seeks a harmony of his conclusions in 
 admiring both Turner, with his imaginative sweep, and the 
 Pre-Raphaelites, with their minuteness of detail. Taking 
 Millais as the typical representative of the school, he draws 
 out a contrast between the natural powers and aptitudes 
 of the two artists. The element that he finds common to 
 both is their sincerity in the study of nature. The turn 
 thus given to the pamphlet was no doubt by way of a 
 reply to criticisms. To the second of his Letters of 1851 
 the Tim,es had made editorial reply, seeking to convict 
 Ruskin, by reference to his praises of Turner, of incon- 
 sistency in supporting the Pre-Piaphaelites. In preparing 
 his later pamphlet Ruskin met this criticism boldly by 
 placing Turner, as it were, among the Pre-Raphaelites, and 
 Millais, the chief of the Brotherhood, as a Turnerian in 
 posse. 
 
 The pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism created some stir in 
 artistic circles, and produced pamphlets, and even a volume, 
 in reply to it. Ruskin himself was well pleased with his 
 own production, which (as he says in a letter) had given 
 him much trouble to compose. "I have the pamphlet 
 Pre-Rapho elitism," he wrote to his father from Venice 
 (September 11, 1851), "and think it reads excellently." 
 That was not the opinion of his old enemy in the 
 Atheiiceum, which made merry over the alleged inconsist- 
 encies in the argument, and waxed especially wrath over 
 the " vaingloriousness " of the author's Preface. Ruskin's
 
 AUTHOR AND CRITICS 289 
 
 father duly passed on this critical chastening to his son, CHAP, 
 who replied in some temper : — XIV. 
 
 {To his Father.) " Sept. 9. — It is quite true that preface reads 
 haughty enough ; but, as you say, I cannot write with a modesty I do 
 not feel. In speaking of art I shall never be modest any more." 
 
 "(Sept. 28.) . . . V7"hen I read those reviews of Pre-Raphaelit- 
 isni, I was so disgusted by their sheer broad-faced, sheepish, swinish 
 stupidity, that I began to feel, as I wrote in the morning, that I was 
 really rather an ass myself to string pearls for them. It is not the 
 malice of them — that, when it is clever, is to be met boldly and ^^ith 
 some sense of its being w^orth conquering. But these poor wretches 
 of reviewers do, in their very inmost and most honest heart, misunder- 
 stand every woi'd I write, and I never could teach them any better." 
 
 " In speaking of art I shall never be modest any more." 
 The intention was fulfilled only too well ; but when had 
 Ruskin written with any excess of modesty before ? "I 
 never could teach them any better." The reader of Ruskin's 
 books will admit, however, that the author did not weary 
 in instructing a perverse generation, and was very well 
 able to give bloAvs as hard as any he received. Ruskin, like 
 every other man of genius, has to be taken as he was. His 
 teaching, one may think, might have been more persuasive, 
 if it had been less dictatorial; but he was not so much a 
 critic, as a crusader. 
 
 Meanwhile a private appreciation of Pre-Raphaelitism 
 came from a distinguished artist and an old friend, and 
 gave Ruskin much pleasure : — 
 
 (To hits Father.) " Vevay, August 20, 1851. — I am deeply 
 grateful for George Richmond's letter, both to himself and to you for 
 copying it. Such a letter is indeed enough reward for much labour ; 
 but I am at a loss to understand the depth of the feeling he expresses, 
 for there is nothing in the pamphlet but common sense, and he, of 
 all men, has no reason to wish that his genius had been otherwise 
 employed. To how many human souls has he given comfort, com- 
 panionship, memory ; of how many noble intellects has he preserved 
 the image ! What could he have done better and have looked back 
 
 to with greater delight 1 " 
 
 VOL. I. T
 
 290 THE FARNLEY TURNERS 
 
 CHAP. Pre-Eaphaditism had even more to say about Turner 
 
 ^ ' than about the Pre-Raphaelites, and its history from this 
 point of view remains to be noticed. It may, indeed, apart 
 from its title, be called the first of Ruskin's many pamphlets 
 on that painter. It was written after a visit to Farnley. 
 Mr. Walter Fawkes, of Farnley Hall, had been one of the 
 oldest and staunchest of Turner's friends, a warm admirer 
 of his genius, and a constant purchaser of his works. Turner 
 repeatedly visited him between 1803 and 1820, and after 
 his death in 1825 " could not speak of the shore of Wharfe," 
 on which Farnley Hall looks down, " but his voice faltered." 
 At Farnley were preserved, and in large part are preserved 
 still, numerous studies of the Hall and its grounds by the 
 painter, a splendid series of drawings and a few oil-pictures. 
 Ruskin had become acquainted with Mr. Francis Hawks- 
 worth Fawkes, the son of Turner's friend, and in April 
 1851 he and his wife went to Farnley on a visit, that 
 he might study there its art treasures. On the occa- 
 sion of a later visit in 1884 Ruskin spoke the following 
 words, which were entered by his hostess in the Visitors' 
 Book :— 
 
 " Farnley is a perfectly unique place. There is nothing like it 
 anywhere ; a place where a great genius had been loved and ap- 
 preciated, who did all his best work for that place, where it is 
 treasured up like a monument in a shrine." 
 
 To Ruskin at the time of his earlier visit the shrine was 
 still instinct with the spirit of the great genius. The 
 master of the house had known the painter well, and had 
 many reminiscences of him ; it is to Mr. Hawksworth Fawkes 
 that some of the not very numerous extant letters of Turner 
 are addressed, and it was he who made from life the well- 
 known caricature-sketch of the little great man. He was 
 able to show Ruskin where Turner had painted this effect 
 or that ; to take him on Turner's favourite walks ; and to 
 tell him many an anecdote of the drawings and pictures 
 on the walls. Ruskin stayed for several days, and every 
 night he used to take one of Turner's water-colours up to
 
 THE CONSTRUCTION OF SHEEP FOLDS 291 
 
 his bedroom, to look at it the first thing in the morning. ^ CHAP. 
 Ruskin made brief memoranda of the Farnley pictures and 
 drawings and occasional references to them occur in his 
 books, but it is in the pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism that 
 his principal notice of them occurs. The pamphlet became 
 indeed an account of Turner, written round the Farnley 
 collection. To Mr. Fawkes, therefore, it was dedicated. 
 
 IV 
 
 Another pamphlet, put out by Euskin in this same 
 year (1851), created at the time a yet greater stir than 
 Pre-Rajohaelitism. This was his Notes on the Construc- 
 tion of Sheepfolds — an appendix to The Stones of Venice, 
 printed separately " for the convenience of readers interested 
 in other architecture than that of Venetian palaces." ^ 
 The Gothic Revival in England was, it will be remem- 
 bered,^ largely associated with a Catholic revival, Roman 
 and Anglican. Ruskin, on the other hand, was at this 
 time a strong and even a bigoted Protestant. It was 
 essential from his point of view to dissociate the two move- 
 ments ; the more so because Pugin, with whose works 
 Ruskin's architectural writings had some superficial kin- 
 ship, was a convert to Roman Catholicism, and made it his 
 object to "lure" men "into the Romanist Church by the 
 glitter of it." ^ Again, Ruskin's historical references to the 
 Venetian State, and its hostility to the Papal power, had in- 
 troduced remarks on the proper functions of Church and 
 State, a subject to which Catholic Emancipation, at this time 
 bitterly opposed by Ruskin, had given additional cogency. 
 The first line of thought led him to examine in a spirit 
 of critical hostility the basis of Priestly claims ; the second, 
 to consider the basis of anti-Episcopalian doctrines. The 
 result was a treatise on the principles of Church organisa- 
 tion — or, as we may call it with reference to its drift, an 
 
 ^ See the article by Mrs. Ays- * Stojies of Venice, vol. i. app. 12. 
 
 cough Fawkes, on " Mr. Ruskin at ^ See above, p. 240. 
 
 Farnley," in T}ie Nineteenth Century, * Stones of Venice, vol. i. app. 12. 
 April 1900
 
 292 ESSAY TOWARDS PROTESTANT RE-UNION 
 
 CHAP, essay towards Protestant re-union. The architectural title 
 • was a natural play on words, suggested by the circumstances 
 in which the essay originated. Those Border farmers, how- 
 ever, who, having bought the pamphlet under the idea that 
 it was a manual of husbandry, cried out that they had 
 been deceived, were not perhaps entirely without excuse. 
 " It is a very capital joke indeed," writes Ruskin to his 
 father (Oct. 20, 1853), " Archie's sending my pamphlet to 
 the farmer. I hope it may do him good." 
 
 Although the pamphlet on Church organisation was 
 thus written in a particular connexion, the subject had 
 long been in Ruskin's mind. He refers at the outset to 
 pages in his private diary, and examination of it shows 
 man}^ notes, made at various times, upon the questions 
 discussed in the pamphlet. The method of argument in 
 the pamphlet is characteristic. He was essentially a Bible 
 Christian. He Avas a constant student of the Bible ; he knew 
 it by heart, and the literal text of it was the test to which 
 he brought all statements. The Catholic theory of the 
 Church as the repository of truths not contained in, or at 
 any rate not obviously deducible from, the text of the Bible, 
 was repugnant alike to the Protestant traditions in which 
 Ruskin had been reared, and to the daily practice of his own 
 Scriptural exercises. The conclusion at which he arrived 
 by the application of his Bible test to principles of Church 
 government was that on a Protestant basis the re-union of the 
 Churches Avas perfectly possible. The High Anglicans had 
 only to renounce their pretensions to " Priesthood," and the 
 Presbyterians to waive their objections to Episcopacy, and 
 then would the text be fulfilled — " And there shall be one 
 fold and one Shepherd." There was a difficulty still in the 
 Avay — that of Baptismal Regeneration. He tackled it in an 
 Essay on Baptism which was found among his papers at 
 his death and has been included in the complete edition 
 of his writings. But apart from this, it was soon made 
 apparent that he had asked more than the rival Churches 
 were willing to grant ; but in after years it was to be borne 
 in upon him that his error lay not in too much compre- 
 hension but in too much exclusion. " It amazes me to
 
 CORRESPONDENCE WITH F. D. MAURICE 293 
 
 find " lie wrole in tlie Preface to the edition of 1875, " t*hat, CHAP, 
 
 ' XXV 
 
 so late as 1851, I had only got the length ot perceivmg 
 the schisms between sects of Protestants to be criminal 
 and ridiculous, while I still supposed the schism between 
 Protestants and Catholics to be virtuous and sublime." 
 
 But this was a lesson still to come. For the moment 
 Ruskin had enousfh to do to defend even his modest measure 
 of comprehension. The publication of the pamphlet inun- 
 dated him Avith correspondence ; some of it, commendatory ; 
 but more of it, controversial. There were also published 
 replies to his pamphlet — among them one by his friend, 
 William Dyce, the Royal Academician. The "Notes" had 
 to be reprinted almost immediately. Reviews in the news- 
 papers were numerous, and " letters to the editor " followed, 
 as is usual on the track of any religious or ecclesiastical 
 controversy. To these letters and replies Ruskin did not 
 make any published rejoinder. He had another controversy 
 and another pamphlet already on hand — Pre-Raphaelitism ; 
 and he did not resume the public discussion of sectarian 
 topics till a much later date. But in private correspondence 
 he replied to friendly critics, and a series of these letters, 
 addressed to Dr. Furnivall and F. D. Maurice, has been 
 published.! The correspondence with Maurice led presently 
 to a personal friendship, and to Ruskin's interest in the 
 Working Men's College. 
 
 His industry at this period was as great as it was 
 discursive. During the seventeen months which elapsed 
 between his return from Venice in March 1850 and his start 
 in August 1851 for a second winter there, he had written 
 the first volume of lite Stones of Venice; prepared the 
 illustrations, and written the text, for the Excimples ; revised 
 the two first volumes of Modern Painters for new 'editions ; 
 championed the Pre-Raphaelites ; written essays on Bap- 
 tismal Regeneration and Protestant Re-union. It is no 
 
 ' John Ruskin and F. D. Maurice Sheepfolds," privately printed, 1896 ; 
 on " Notes on the Coiistrudion of included in the Lib. Ed., vol. xii.
 
 294 ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS 
 
 CHAP, wonder that after it all he was in need of a holiday. This 
 ■ was the short tour in Switzerland, already described (p. 
 262), taken en route for Venice. He was in high spirits 
 during the tour, and at Venice threw himself with utmost 
 energy into his work. Another new interest, or rather the 
 addition of fresh energy to an old one, belongs to this 
 period. "In 1850 or 51," he says, "I chanced, at a book- 
 seller's in a back alley, on a little fourteenth century Hours 
 of the Virgin, not of refined work, but extremely rich, 
 grotesque, and full of pure colour. The new worlds which 
 every leaf of this book opened to me, and the joy I had, 
 counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as 
 if they had been all of beaten gold, — as many of them indeed 
 were, — cannot be told." ^ Abounding vitality and unflagging 
 zest are the notes of his life. 
 
 ^ Prceterita, vol. iii. § 18.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE STONES OF VENICE 
 
 (1852-1853) 
 
 " Denmark Hill, l.si May 1651, morning. — All London is astir, 
 and some part of all the world. I am sitting in my quiet room, 
 hearing the birds sing, and about to enter on the true beginning 
 of the second part of my Venetian work. MayjGod help me to 
 finish it — to His glory, and man's good. — J. RuSKlN." 
 
 This entry in Raskin's diary shows the spirit in which 
 The Stones of Venice was completed. The reception of 
 the first volume, issued in March 1851, had been very 
 favourable. Miss Edgeworth says that nothing will satisfy 
 an author but " large draughts of unqualified praise." Some 
 of his reviewers mixed something of bitter; but with the 
 majority the praise was undiluted. One cupful will here 
 suffice. It is from the Church of England Quarterly, 
 which, after taking credit for having been the first of the 
 quarterly reviews to recognise Ruskin's genius, and giving an 
 appreciative summary of his new volume, thus continued : — 
 
 " In all societies, whether of literature, science, or art, we hear 
 his name mentioned with respect, not only by those from whom 
 he differs, but by those whose works he has condemned ; and we 
 have before us a letter from an artist of no mean mark, who writes 
 to us in somewhat homely phrase, ' He has blown me up ; but he 
 has spoken the truth, and I hope to profit by it : he is a glorious 
 fellow ! ' " 
 
 Cultivated readers, themselves of eminence in letters, were 
 of the same opinion. Charlotte Bronte, in sending to Mrs. 
 Gaskell the first volume of The Stones of Venice, wrote : 
 " I hope you will find passages in it that will please you.
 
 296 CARLYLE ON THE STONES OE VENICE 
 
 Some parts would bo dry and teclinical were it not for 
 the character, the marked individuality, which pervades 
 every page." To another correspondent she wrote : — 
 
 "The Stones of Venice seem nobly laid and cliiselled. How 
 grandly the quarry of vast marbles is disclosed ! . . . I shall bring 
 with me The Stones of Venice ; all the foundations of marble and of 
 granite, together with the mighty quarry out of which they were 
 hewn ; and, into the bargain, a small assortment of crotchets and 
 dicta — the private property of one John Ruskin, Esq." ^ 
 
 Miss Bronte's admiration for Ruskin's work was no doubt 
 passed on to him l;)y Mr. George Smith, the friend and 
 publisher of both. But the encouragement that must have 
 pleased him most was Carlyle's : — 
 
 "Chelsea, March 9, 1851, — Dear Ruskin, — I did not know 
 yesterday till your servant had gone that there was any note in the 
 parcel ; nor at all what a feat you had done ! A loan of the gallant 
 young man's Memoirs was what I expected ; and here, in the most 
 chivalrous style, comes a gift of them. This, I think, must be in the 
 style j)^'ior to the Renaissance ! What can I do but accept your 
 kindness with pleasure and gratitude, tliough it is far beyond my 
 deserts ? Perhaps the next man I meet will use me as much below 
 them, and so bring matters straight again. Truly I am much obliged, 
 and return you many hearty thanks. I was already deep in the 
 Stones; and clearly purpose to hold on there. A strange, unex- 
 pected, and I believe, most true and excellent Seimon in Stones — as 
 well as the best piece of schoolmastering in Architectonics ; from 
 which I hope to learn much in a great many ways. The spirit and 
 purport of these critical studies of yours are a singular sign of the 
 times to me, and a very gratifying one. Right good speed to you, 
 and victorious arrival on the farther shore ! It is a quite new 
 * Renaissance,' I believe, we are getting into just now : either 
 towards new, vnder manhood, high again as the eternal stars ; or else 
 nto filial death, and marsh of Gehenna for evermore ! . . . " 
 
 It was with Carlyle's encouragement in his heart that 
 Ruskin set himself to complete the work of which in the 
 
 ^ Mrs. Giiskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, pocket eel., pp. G83, 368.
 
 AT WORK ON THE BOOK 297 
 
 first volume he had laid " The Foundations," He found, CHAP, 
 however, as we have seen (p. 262), that further studies at -^^• 
 Venice were necessary; and he did not return home, after 
 his second Venetian winter, till July 1852. He then settled 
 down forthwith to finish his book. He had given up his 
 house in Park Street before going abroad in the previous 
 summer ; he could not live any more, he said, '■ with a dead 
 brick wall opposite his windows," His father had taken and 
 furnished for him a house on Heme Hill (No, 30), next door 
 to his old home, and there he and his wife resided till the 
 following spring. There are but few letters, memorials, or 
 diary-entries of this period (1852-53) ; it must have been a 
 time of hard and continuous work, with the material for 
 two volumes of TJte Stones to be revised, re-cast, and com- 
 pleted and the plates to be prepared. How busy he was may 
 be gathered from apologetic letters to his friends. " Pray ask 
 Mrs. Harrison to forgive my rudeness," he writes to his old 
 friend and mentor, her husband, " in not having called, but I 
 am tormented by the very gentry of whom Cruikshank was 
 talking, the wood-cutters, until I begin to believe they con- 
 sider me the block they are to carve upon ; and all I can do 
 is to get my run in the forenoon each day — as much open air 
 as possible. I have not been into one house, up the hill or 
 down, save my own and my father's, for a month back." By 
 the end of the year (1852) the second volume was nearly off 
 his hands ; it was out early in the following spring, and the 
 concluding volume followed in October. 
 
 II 
 
 The Stones of Venice, though the three volumes of it 
 thus appeared at different dates, has an informing unity. 
 What Ruskin lacked, said Matthew Arnold, was the ordo 
 coneatenatioque veri} There is some justice in the criticism ; 
 but The Stones of Venice has a beginning, a middle, and an 
 end ; a sustained argument ; a unity of purpose, not seriously 
 interrupted by digressions. The orderly marshalling of 
 
 1 Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. i. p. ol.
 
 298 RECEPTION OF THE STONES 
 
 CHAP, his subject, and the pubHcation of the second and third 
 vokimes, so near together as to enable them to be read 
 and reviewed consecutively, added sensibly to Ruskin's 
 already high reputation. The novelty of his views, the 
 ingenuity and knowledge with which they were presented, 
 the imaginative eloquence of his language, made a deep 
 impression. One of his principal themes in the second 
 volume was the glory of Venetian colour, and much of 
 the quality which he described passed into his own pages. 
 The descriptions of the approach to Venice and of the first 
 vision of St. Mark's are familiar to every reader, and not less 
 celebrated is the imaginative piece in which he pictures 
 " that difference between the district of the gentian and of 
 the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they 
 lean upon the sirocco wind." To some of the new notes in 
 Ruskin's message, contained in this book, I shall presently 
 refer, but here it may be remarked in passing that the 
 passages by the way on Dante and Spenser were, with the 
 chapter "Of Imagination Contemplative" in the second 
 volume of Modern Painters, among the earliest of his excur- 
 sions into literary criticism. Even in the most methodical 
 of his books Ruskin digressed, but his readers recognised 
 that what he touched he adorned with fresh and suggestive 
 flashes of insight. If he lacked the gift of " order and 
 concatenation," he abounded, as Arnold added, in " brilliant 
 apergus." 
 
 All this was fully recognised in the reviews of the volumes 
 at the time of their publication. " Mr. Ruskin," wrote one 
 critic, " is the first really popular writer we have ever had 
 upon architecture ; and, paradoxical as this may seem, it is 
 because he is almost the first truly profound w^'iter we have 
 had on that subject." ^ "The author of this essay," said 
 another, in taking leave of the completed work, "has con- 
 densed into it a poetic apprehension, the fruit of awe of God 
 and delight in nature, a knowledge, love, and just estimate of 
 art,a holding fast to fact and repudiation of hearsay, an historic 
 breadth, and a fearless challenge of existing social problems, 
 whose union we know not where to find paralleled."- The 
 * Daihj News, August 1, 1853. " Spectator, October 8, 1853.
 
 ITS RELATION TO MODERN PAINTERS 299 
 
 volumes appeased old enemies and made new friends. "I CHAP, 
 was surprised," wrote Ruskin to his father (August 1, 1853), -^^• 
 "by the Athenceum, which I think is intended for a most 
 favourable review ; nay, I think it is their idea of eulogium." 
 The Times, which had not hitherto noticed any of Ruskin's 
 books, and which indeed in those days allotted very little 
 space to literature, now gave marked and unusual pro- 
 minence to The Stones of Venice. Two long reviews were 
 devoted to the second volume, and another of yet greater 
 length to the third.^ Ruskin was much gratified with the 
 prominence given to his book in the leading journal, 
 though on particular points many objections were taken to 
 his views. " I am much pleased," he writes to his father 
 (October 2), "with critique in Times. It is by a man who 
 has really read the book, and thought over it — incomparably 
 the best critique I ever had." 
 
 The Stones of Venice, which detained Ruskin's time and 
 thoughts for three years, to the interruption of Modern 
 Painters, occupies an important place in the history both 
 of his own views and of his influence on the art and thought 
 of the time. He himself regarded his work upon Venice as 
 an interlude, a diversion, an interruption. " All that I did 
 at Venice," he says, " was by-work, because her history had 
 been falsely written before. . . . Something also was due," 
 he adds, " to my love of gliding about in gondolas." But he 
 came to recognise that through this by-way he had been 
 led to the heart of the matter. His study of Tintoret (in 
 1845) had led him "into the study of the history of Venice 
 herself; and through that into what else I have traced or 
 told of the laws of national strength and virtue. I am 
 happy in having done this so that the truth of it must 
 stand." 2 Before coming to the lessons learnt and taught by 
 Ruskin from the stones of Venice I may remark that the 
 digression turned out to lead back to the main theme of 
 Modern Painters, which was the history of the art of land- 
 scape painting. It was "the Renaissance frosts," Ruskin 
 
 * The reviews in the Times ^ Prceterita, vol. i. § 180, vol. ii. 
 
 appeared on September 24, Octo- § 140. 
 ber 1, and November 12.
 
 300 ARCHITECTURE AS HISTORY 
 
 held, that had killed at once the vital art of architecture, 
 and the love of landscape. He was full of this point as he 
 neared the end of his book : — 
 
 " I have now done all the hard dry work," he writes to his father 
 (April 26, 1852), "and I see my superstructure in progress — a noble 
 subject : Why is it that we have now no great art, except in land- 
 scape, and what the consequences will be, if we continue in this state ; 
 while the ' except in landscape ' forms, as I told you, the subject of 
 the third volume of Modem Painters. All Modern Painters together 
 will be the explanation of a parenthesis in the Stones of Venice." ^ 
 
 Or, to put it the other way round, as Ruskin sometimes did, 
 all the Stones of Venice was the explanation of a point in 
 Modern Painters. So, again, and more generally, he says 
 in the third volume of Modern Painters that the two books 
 " are parts of one whole, divided merely as I had occasion to 
 follow out one or other of its branches ; for I have always 
 considered architecture as an essential part of landscape." 
 
 This, however, was an ex post facto harmony of conclu- 
 sions. At the time The Stones of Venice seemed a digression, 
 and its teaching may properly be isolated and regarded as 
 significant in itself. The main thesis of the book, connecting 
 it with The Seven Lamps of Architecture, is that architecture 
 is the expression of certain states in the moral temper of the 
 people by and for whom it is produced. This treatment of 
 architecture as an historical document was one of the original 
 and fruitful points in Ruskin's Venetian work, and later 
 studies in Venetian history have on the whole tended to 
 confirm the substantial accuracy of his conclusions in the 
 particular case. If it is said that he made too little of 
 political forces and ignored some commercial factors alto- 
 gether — especially, for instance, the discovery of the Cape 
 route in 1486, which to the historians had a principal eflfect 
 in hastening the decline of Venetian supremacy — the answer 
 is that he was dealings with moral causes and conditions 
 
 o 
 
 ' That is, the parenthetical ex- stroyincj the picturesque element 
 
 planation (vol. ii. oh, vi. § 30, vol. in architecture, contributed to 
 
 iii. ch. iv. § 33) of the manner in divert the love of nature into 
 
 which the Renaissance, by de- landscape painting.
 
 THE STONES AND VENETIAN HISTORY 301 
 
 which were long antecedent to that particular event, and of CHAP, 
 which, as he maintained, poUtical changes were the expres- " 
 
 sion rather than the cause. The question is whether his 
 theory, deduced from the spirit of Venetian architecture, is 
 or is not in general conformity with the other orders of facts 
 upon which general historians are wont exclusively to dwell. 
 The answer is that substantially and with some qualifica- 
 tions Raskin was right. This is the view of the modern his- 
 torian of the Republic. " Ruskin," says Mr. Horatio Brown, 
 " carried his theories further than history, faithfully studied, 
 would warrant, but in most cases he had reason on his side. 
 It may be doubted if the year 1418 and the death of Carlo 
 Zeno mark categorically the point at which the history of 
 Venice begins to decline and fall ; but, on the other hand, 
 the transition from the Gothic style to that of the Renais- 
 sance undoubtedly coincides with a radical change in the 
 character of the Venetian people and in the views and 
 aspirations of the Republic." ^ 
 
 Ruskin's work may properly be considered, therefore, to 
 have thrown important light on Venetian history. In regard 
 to Venetian architecture it has been as a revelation. The 
 success of his work in this respect tends to obscure its value. 
 For two generations past Venice has been seen through 
 Ruskin's eyes ; it is forgotten that his vision was individual 
 and original. He produced something of the same effect in 
 relation to the architecture of Venice that Turner produced 
 in relation to her scenery of sea and sky. The Venice of all 
 the painters of to-day, whether with the brush or in words, 
 is the Venice of Turner — a city of enchanted colour; but 
 in the eighteenth century the popular Venice was that of 
 Canaletto — a city of murky shadows. When we now read 
 in The Seven Lamps of Architecture that the Ducal Palace 
 is " a model of all perfection," we may or may not entirely 
 agree, but the judgment does not surprise us as a paradox. 
 And when we are told that the facade of St. Mark's is " a 
 lovely dream," we are most of us inclined to acquiesce, and 
 few, if any, are startled into indignation. But when Ruskin 
 
 ^ Translated from an article in the Nuovo Archivio Veneto, vol. xix. 
 (1900).
 
 302 APPRECIATION OF VENETIAN ARCHITECTURE 
 
 CHAP, wrote, the architects of the time regarded such opinions as 
 " * indicating the wildest caprice, if not as evidence of insanity. 
 Professional opinion was that St. Mark's and the Ducal 
 Palace were as ugly and repulsive as they were contrary to 
 rule and order. The first volume of The Stones called forth 
 an answer by "An Architect" — and at the end of the 
 brochure there is a list, showing a merry wit, of " Works 
 promised but not yet produced." This is headed as 
 follows : — 
 
 An attempt to demonstrate the loveliness of St. Marias at 
 Venice. — By a Candidate for St. Luke^s. 
 
 The architecture which Ruskin loved was denounced as 
 an unlovely "nightmare." The general public did not, 
 perhaps, entirely share such views, but Gibbon is worth 
 citing as an example of educated and cultured opinion in 
 the eighteenth century : — 
 
 " Of all the towns in Italy," he writes to his stepmother on April 
 22, 1765, "I am the least satisfied with Venice. Objects which are 
 only singular without being pleasing produce a momentary surprise 
 which soon gives way to satiety and disgust. Old, and in general, ill- 
 built houses, ruined pictures, and stinking ditches, dignified with the 
 pompous denomination of canals, a fine bridge spoilt by two rows of 
 houses upon it, and a large square decorated with the worst archi- 
 tecture I ever saw." 
 
 The " worst architecture " alluded, one may imagine, not 
 to the Renaissance arcades but to the church, the palace, 
 and the campanile.^ It would be as easy to multiply 
 instances of depreciation of the Byzantine and Gothic 
 architecture of Venice in the eighteenth and early nine- 
 teenth centuries, as to adduce echoes of Ruskin's Stones of 
 Venice from subsequent literature. The novelty of Ruskin's 
 
 ^ Disraeli in Contarini Flemimj is disappointed with St. Peter's 
 
 admires the Palladian churches, at Rome, and has " a much greater 
 
 and writes of " the barbarous sense of mystery and wonder in 
 
 although picturesque buildings the Cathedral of San Mark at 
 
 called the Ducal Palace." Dickens, Venice." He also greatly prefers 
 
 on the contrary, was a Ruskinian. Tintoret to Michael Angelo (pp. 
 
 In his Pictures from Italy (1846) he 167, 209).
 
 RUSKIN AND ST. MARK^S 303 
 
 views comes out very clearly in one of the contemporary CHAP. 
 reviews : — 
 
 " His chief architectural service consists in the light he has thrown 
 upon Lombard, and esi^ecially Venetian architecture, which, until 
 the appearance of the Seven Lamps and the Stones of Venice, was 
 popularly regarded as the result of the ' barbarous ' taste to which in 
 Wren's and Evelyn's time even the pointed Gothic was attributed. 
 He lias proved to the hearts as well as to the heads of his readers 
 that the Lombard architects were artists of profound and tender 
 feelings, and that the ignorance and want of principle which has been 
 attributed to them has only existed in ourselves. In the cases in 
 which we felt best fortified against a good opinion of the mediaeval 
 architecture of Italy, Mr. Ruf^kin has met us and overthrown our 
 theoretical objections with the most startling and unanswerable pleas. 
 For example, the architecture of St. Mark's at Venice has, from of old, 
 been the butt for students, as well of the classic as of the Gothic 
 schools, to aim their wit at. Its ill-shaped domes; its walls of 
 brick incrusted wdth marble ; its chaotic disregard of symmetry in 
 the details ; its confused hodge-podge of classic, Moresque, and 
 Gothic were strong points in the indictment. But Mr. Ruskin 
 comes and assures us," etc., etc. {Daily News, August 1, 1853). 
 
 Ruskin's work upon the early architecture of Venice was 
 original and fruitful in relation both to the Byzantine and 
 to the Gothic styles. He justly claims for himself in con- 
 junction with Lord Lindsay the position of a pioneer (in 
 this country at any rate) in the appreciation of Byzantine 
 art.i It is now well known and understood that the Church 
 of the Holy Wisdom at Constantinople exercised a wide 
 influence on the architecture both of the East and of the 
 West. Ruskin's Stones of Venice, with its elaborate account 
 of St. Mark's — one of the buildings which derive from St. 
 Sofia — had much effect in arousing interest in Byzantine 
 architecture. " The half century that has passed since he 
 wrote has thrown a flood of light," says Mr. Frederic Harrison, 
 " upon the history of Byzantine art and its far-radiating 
 influence on all forms of art in the West. It is a remark- 
 able instance of Ruskin's genius that, long before the special 
 ' Seve7i Lamps, ch. iii. § 15 (note of 1880).
 
 304 THE BYZANTINE REVIVAL 
 
 CHAP, studies in Southern Italy and the Mediterranean seaboard 
 which have given us so much new information, he does seem 
 to have said nothing which the later studies have disproved, 
 if, indeed, he does not seem from time to time implicitly 
 to have felt the truth." ^ In the present day the study of 
 Byzantine art has led to an adoption of Byzantine architec- 
 ture, of which Mr. Bentley's Roman Catholic Cathedral at 
 Westminster, now in process of being incrusted internally 
 with marble and mosaics, is so conspicuous an illustration. 
 It is thus not unreasonable to trace back to The Stones of 
 Venice, with its vindication of St. Mark's from the charge 
 of barbarism, some share in the influences which have led 
 to a Byzantine Revival. In his study of the details of 
 St. Mark's, again, Ruskin broke new ground, at any rate 
 for English readers. The elaborate works on the subject 
 Avhich now exist were subsequent to his book and owed 
 their origin to his enthusiasm. He described the church 
 as an illuminated Bible, and he was the first English writer 
 who devoted any serious attention to reading its letters. 
 He has been followed by many writers, English, French, and 
 Italian. Signer F. Ongania, of Venice, in the preface to his 
 sumptuous and elaborate series of volumes on St. Mark's 
 (1881-88), describes the magnitude of his undertaking and 
 his discouragements ; but, he adds, " there served to inspire 
 him with courage the voice and the wise counsels of the 
 celebrated English writer, John Ruskin," to whom accord- 
 ingly he dedicated the English translation. 2 
 
 In the study and appreciation of the Gothic of Venice, 
 as well as in the vindication of its Byzantine basilica, Ruskin 
 
 J John Ruskin, 1900, p. 71. have been refaeed and to some 
 
 Mr. Harrison has given an inter- extent rebuilt ; the south-west 
 
 esting sketch of the intluence and portico has been reconstructed ; 
 
 character of the arts of Constant!- some of the pavement inside 
 
 nople in his Rede Lecture, Byzan- has been re-laid ; and on the 
 
 tine Histonj of the Early Middle Ages, cathedral generally many of the 
 
 1900 : see especially pp. 29-33. old Greek marbles have been re- 
 
 * The reader who now visits St. placed by inferior Carrara. A 
 
 Mark's should remember that the similar remark applies to the 
 
 building has been much " restored " Ducal Palace, which has been very 
 
 since Ruskin wrote. The north largely " restored " since Ruskin 
 
 and south fronts of the church described it.
 
 VENETIAN GOTHIC 305 
 
 was as^ain a pioneer. "No one," he says, "had ever drawn CHAP, 
 the traceries of the Ducal Palace till I did it myself . . . ; '^^• 
 and not a soul in England knew that there was a sj'stem 
 in Venetian architecture at all, until I made the measured 
 (to half and quarter inches) elevation of it, and gave the 
 analysis of its tracery mouldings and their development 
 from those of the Frari." The Gothic Revival in England 
 did not originate with Ruskin, but he gave to it a stimulus 
 and an extension. He introduced Venetian Gothic into 
 the movement; he made it popular, and gave to it the 
 force derived from his resources of argument, imagination, 
 and eloquence. " We do not remember anything in the 
 history of art in England," wrote a reviewer in the year 
 following the completion of Tlie Stones of Venice, "at all 
 corresponding in suddenness and extent to the effect which 
 the works of Mr. Ruskin have already exercised upon the 
 popular taste directly, and through popular taste on the 
 taste and theories of artists themselves."^ The character 
 of this influence has been traced by the historian of the 
 movement : — 
 
 " Students who, but a year or so previously, had been content to 
 regard Pugin as their leader, or who had modelled their works of art 
 on the principles of the Ecclesiologist, found a new field open to them 
 and hastened to occupy it. They prepared designs in which the ele- 
 ments of Italian Gothic were largely introduced ; churches in which 
 the ' lily capital ' of St. Mark's was found side by side with Byzantine 
 bas-reliefs and mural inlay from !Murano ; town halls wherein the 
 arcation and baseless columns of the Ducal Palace were reproduced ; 
 mansions which boi rowed their parapets from the Calle del Bagatin, 
 and windows from the Ca' d'Oro. . . . They made drawings in the 
 Zoological Gardens, and conventionalised the forms of birds, beasts, 
 and reptiles into examples of ' noble grotesque ' for decorative 
 sculpture. They read papers before Architectural Societies, embody- 
 ing ^fr. Raskin's sentiments in language which rivalled the force, if 
 it did not exactly match the refinement, of their model. They made 
 friends of the Pre-Eaphaelite painters (then rising into fame), and 
 promised themselves as radical a reform in national architecture as 
 
 ' North British Review, May 1854, in a notice of The Stones of 
 Venice, vols. ii. and iii. 
 
 VOL. I. U
 
 306 TPIE GOTHIC REVIVAL 
 
 CHAP, liad been inaugurated in the field of pictorial art. Nor was this 
 ^^^* all. Xot a few architects who had already established a practice 
 began to think that there might be something worthy of atten- 
 tion in the new doctrine. Little by little they fell under its 
 influence. Discs of marble, billet-mouldings, and other details of 
 Italian Gothic crept into many a London street-front. Then bands 
 of coloured brick (chiefly red and yellow) were introduced, and the 
 voussoirs of arches were treated after the same fashion. But the 
 influence of Mr. Ruskin's teaching reached a higher level than this, 
 and manifested itself in unexpected quarters. Years afterwards, in 
 the centre of the busiest part of our busy capital — the very last place 
 one would have supposed likely to be illumined by the light of The 
 Seven Lamps — more than one palatial building was raised, which 
 recalled in the leading features of its design and decoration the 
 distinctive character of Venetian Gothic." ^ 
 
 A Gothic building which Ruskin much admired is the 
 Assize Courts at Manchester, erected in the years 1859-64 
 from the designs of Waterhouse. " Much beyond everything 
 yet done in England on my principles," wrote Ruskin to 
 his father (Dec. 9, 1863); "the workmen were pleased to 
 see me; the clerk of the works, when he was a youth, 
 copied out the whole three volumes of the Stones of Venice 
 and traced every illustration." Mr. Eastlake mentions a 
 curious evidence of the extent to which Ruskin's archi- 
 tectural writings had impressed themselves upon the life 
 of the time. The Latin Epilogue to the Westminster Play 
 is generally a reflex of some popular taste or current topic 
 of sufficient notoriety to afford scope for good-humoured 
 satire. In 1857 the epilogue to the Adeliihi of Terence 
 contained the following dialogue : — 
 
 Ctedpho. Grtecia in hac cXtj palmam fert semper. 
 yEschinus. Ineptis ! 
 
 Est cumulus nudoe simplicitatis iuers. 
 
 * A Hiatory of the Gothic Revival, buildings," with dates and other 
 
 by Charles L. Eastlake, 1872, pp. particulars, from which the de- 
 
 278-280. Mr. Eastlake's volume velopment of the Revival and 
 
 is copiously illustrated, and con- Ruskin's influence upon it may 
 
 tains in an appendix a list be traced. 
 of " selected examples of Gothic
 
 THE WESTMINSTER PLAY ON RUSKIN 307 
 
 Ars contra mediaeva hand lege ant limite iniquo CH.AP. 
 
 Contenta, hue, illuc, pullulat ad libitum. ... -^ • 
 
 CtesipTio. An rectum atque fidem saxa laterque decent 1 
 
 jEschiniii^. Graia et Romanji nihil immoralius usquam 
 Archi — est — tectxwa.— {fuming to ^^ llie Secen Lavijis") pagina 
 
 sexta — tene. 
 Sic ipsus dixit. 
 
 Ctesiplio. Vix hsec comprendere possum 
 
 j^schinus. Scilicet ^sthesi tu, miserande, cares. 
 
 And every reader will remember the lines in Charles 
 Kingsley's "The Invitation— To Tom Hughes" (1S56):— 
 
 " Leave to Robert Browning Dirty stones of Venice, 
 
 Beggars, fleas and vines ; And his Gas-lamps Seven — 
 
 Leave to mournful Ruskin We've the stones of Snowdon 
 
 Popish Apennines, And the lamps of heaven." 
 
 Ruskin also had his heavenly lamps and the stones of 
 Chamouni beneath them, but Kingsley's lines were not, 
 of course, to be taken seriously. 
 
 Two points may specially be noticed in w^hich Ruskin's 
 work gave a new turn to the architectural movement of the 
 day. The Gothic Revival, as above stated, was largely bound 
 up with Catholicism, Roman and Anglican. Ruskin put the 
 movement on a Protestant* basis, and thus won for it a hear- 
 ing in circles where it had hitherto been suspect. So, again, 
 the movement had been mainly ecclesiastical. Ruskin 
 made it civic. He showed that when an architecture is 
 truly national its spirit pervades alike the temple and 
 the palace ; he illustrated — both in The Stones of Venice 
 and again in his Edinburgh Lectures on Architecture and 
 Painting — the derivation of ecclesiastical forms from civil 
 buildings, and he contested vigorously the popular idea 
 that Gothic was good only for churches. "It was one of 
 the purposes of The Stones of Venice," said Ruskin in his 
 inaugural Lectures on Art at Oxford, "to show that the 
 lovely forms of cathedral domes and porches, of the vaults 
 and arches of their aisles, of the canopies of their tombs, 
 were every one of them developed in civil and domestic
 
 308 BUILDINGS INITJTENCED BY THE STONES 
 
 CHAP, building." It is significant that of the modern buildings 
 " ■ which may be traced most directly to Ruskin's influence, 
 one was a museum, another an insurance office, and the 
 third a palace of justice. 
 
 It is the fate of every movement to pay the penalty 
 of success in being caricatured and vulgarised. Ruskin 
 makes complaint of this in the preface to the third edition 
 of The Stones of Venice (1874). "No book of mine," he 
 there says, " has had so much influence on contemporary 
 art," and goes on to deplore the mottling of manufactory 
 chimneys with black and red brick and the introduction 
 of Italian Gothic into the porches of public-houses. This 
 order of Victorian architecture, which has sometimes been 
 distinguished as the streaky bacon style, is indeed unlovely 
 enough, and Ruskin condemned it whole-heartedly. At 
 the time when he was leaving his house at Denmark Hill 
 for Brantwood, some one had said that his direct influence 
 on architecture was always wrong, and his indirect influence 
 right. He begged in reply to be further instructed in 
 this matter : — 
 
 "because, if that be so, I will try to exercise only indirect influ- 
 ence on my Oxford pupils. But the fact to my own notion is other- 
 wise. I am proud enough to hope, for instance, that I have had 
 some direct influence on Mr. Street ; and I do not doubt but that the 
 public will have more satisfaction from his Law Courts than they 
 have had from anything built within fifty years. But I have had 
 indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between this 
 and Bromley ; and there is scarcely a public-house near the Crystal 
 Palace but sells its gin and bitters under pseudo- Venetian capitals 
 copied from the Church of the Madonna of Health or of Miracles. 
 And one of my principal notions for leaving my present house is that 
 it is surrounded everywhere by the accursed Frankenstein monsters 
 of, ^'/zdirectly, my own making." 
 
 " For Venetian architecture developed out uf British moral 
 consciousness I decline," he says again, "to be answerable." 
 Of a building for which he did answer — the Museum at 
 Oxford — we shall hear in a later chapter (XXII.). By one 
 of the same architects was the Crown Life Insurance Office
 
 INFLUENCE, DIRECT AND INDIRECT 309 
 
 (1855) ia New Bridge Street, Blackfriars, of which Rossetti CHAP, 
 said : " It seems to me the most perfect piece of civil archi- ■^^• 
 tecturc of the new school that I have seen in London, I 
 never cease to look at it with delight."' But Ruskin for 
 his part feared that the effect produced by his preaching and 
 by the practice of architects such as Benjamin Woodward 
 was only transitory. " The architecture we endeavoured 
 to introduce is inconsistent," he wrote, " alike with the 
 reckless luxury, the deforming mechanism, and the squalid 
 misery of modern cities; among the formative fashions 
 of the day, aided, especially in England, by ecclesiastical 
 sentiment, it indeed obtained notoriety ; and sometimes 
 behind an engine furnace, or a railroad bank, you may 
 detect the pathetic discord of its momentary grace, and, 
 with toil, decipher its floral carvings choked with soot. 
 I felt answerable to the schools I loved, only for their 
 injury."^ 
 
 What has been spoken of as the Gothic Revival was, 
 however, it should bo remembered, not merely a crusade 
 to advocate a particular style of architecture, it was part 
 of a movement directed towards enlisting better enthu- 
 siasm in the pursuit of the art, and attracting to it greater 
 public interest and support. From this point of view 
 Ruskin's aid was, as already has been pointed out (p. 237), 
 of the highest value. It is worth noting that in 1852 
 was held the first architectural exhibition, and two years 
 later was founded the Architectural Museum. 
 
 Ill 
 
 It may be doubted, however, whether the influence 
 of The Stones of Venice was not greater in the social than 
 in the artistic sphere. We have seen how already in 
 The Seven Lamps Ruskin had been drawn from the artistic 
 side of his subject to consider questions relating to the 
 organisation of labour. The tost of good ornament, he had 
 
 ' Letters of Dante Gabriel Rofixetti ^ " The Mystery of Life and its 
 
 to William Allinglmm, 181)7, p. 145. Arts," in Sesame aiid Lilies, § 104.
 
 310 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL INFLUENCE 
 
 CHAP, found, was this — was it done from the heart ? was the 
 workman happy while he was about it ? Then, at Venice, 
 his thoughts were again turned to a point at which his 
 artistic analysis, his social interests, and his historical 
 inquiries seemed to converge. As he considered the essen- 
 tials of Gothic architecture, he became more and more 
 convinced that its virtue was found in the free play of 
 individual fancy ; that the highest achievements had only 
 been possible when the artist was a craftsman and the 
 craftsman an artist. " The chief purpose," he wrote in 
 after times to Count Zorzi, in the letter already quoted, 
 " with which, twenty years ago, I undertook my task of 
 the history of Venetian architecture, was to show the 
 dependence of its beauty on the happiness and fancy of 
 the workman, and to show also that no architect could 
 claim the title to authority of Tnagister unless he himself 
 wrought at the head of his men, captain of manual skill, 
 as the best knight is captain of armies." So it had been, 
 he found, in Venice — in the days of the best health and 
 strength of the Republic. Must it not be so also in 
 modern states, if they were to consist of communities, 
 healthy in their organisation, happy in their activities, 
 and free in their constitution — in that positive sense of 
 freedom which means liberty to all men to make the best 
 of their capacities ? "What he found positively in his 
 study of Gothic architecture, he found also negatively in 
 that of the Renaissance at Venice. When art was reduced 
 to formalism its vitality was gone; and "the Fall" was 
 of the State, as well as of its architecture. The third 
 volume thus connected itself closely with the central 
 chapter in the second. Ruskin's thoughts at Venice were 
 much given to the political and social mysteries of life — 
 the inequalities of worldly fortune, the existence side by 
 side of idle luxury and servile toil. He had written, also, 
 his first essays on questions of politics and political economy 
 (p. 273). He had been brought into personal contact with 
 popular revolutionaries, and with the Austrian officers of law 
 and order. He sought for some synthesis of all these 
 things, and he found it in the central pages of the sixth
 
 ARTS AND CRAFTS 311 
 
 chapter of the second volume, on " The Nature of Gothic CHAP. 
 Architecture," and on the true functions of the work- •^^• 
 man in art. True art, he said, can only be produced by 
 artists; true freedom is the freedom of the soul. '-There 
 might be more freedom in England, though her feudal 
 lords' lightest Avords were worth men's lives, and though 
 the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows 
 of her fields, than there is while the animation of her 
 multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, 
 and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into 
 the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a 
 line." This chapter, said Ruskin in the following year, 
 ' was precisely and accurately the most important in the 
 whole book." ^ 
 
 "I should be led far from the matter in hand," he 
 wrote, "if I were to pursue this interesting subject." 
 He was to be led far in later years ; and at the time the 
 effect of his words Avas far-reaching, too. Nowhere did 
 the seed sown in that chapter fall upon more fruitful 
 ground than at Oxford, where Burne-Jones and William 
 Morris were undergraduates. "Ruskin became for them," 
 says Morris's biographer, " a hero and a prophet, and his 
 position was more than ever secured by the appearance 
 of The Stones of Venice in 1853. The famous chapter on 
 ' The Nature of Gothic Architecture,' long afterwards lov- 
 ingly reprinted by Morris as one of the earliest productions 
 of the Kelmscott Press, was a new gospel and a fixed 
 creed." 2 In his preface, Morris tells us what effect Ruskin's 
 words had upon him, and Avhat was his estimate of their 
 significance. The chapter is, he says, " one of the very 
 few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century," 
 and " to some of us when we first read it, it seemed to 
 point out a new road on which the world should travel." 
 Morris in after years was to throw himself with fiery zeal 
 into an endeavour to drive the world along that road ; 
 and there were others at the time who felt, like those eager 
 undergraduates at Oxford, that this chapter was essentially 
 
 ' Lectures on Architecture and « Tlir Li/c of JFilliam Morris, hy 
 
 Painting, 1854, ^ 76. J- W. 3Iafkail, 1899, vol. i. p. :5S.
 
 31^ THE NATURE OF fiOTHIC 
 
 CHiP. a tract for the times. The first suggestion for a separate 
 " • publication of the chapter seems to have come from Dr. 
 John Brown. In sending on a letter from Brown, Ruskin 
 writes to his father (Aug. 1, 1853): "Please notice what 
 he says about publishing sixth chapter cheap, separate — 
 ' The Nature of Gothic ' — for railway reading. Would 
 you propose this to Mr. Smith ? " Nothing seems to have 
 come of the suggestion for the moment, but in the following 
 year it was adopted in another form. The story has been 
 told by the prime mover in the matter, Dr. Furnivall : — 
 
 "The first reprint of this grand chapter of The Stones of Venice, 
 and its sub-title, ' And Herein of the True Functions of the Work- 
 man in Art,' were due, not to the ' Master ' himself, but to his 
 humble disciple and friend — myself. Through my sending him a 
 prospectus of our Working Men's College, Ruskin kindly offered 
 to help us, and take the art classes. We were to hold our opening 
 meeting in Hullah's Hall, in Long Acre, at the corner of Eudell 
 Street, where the big coach factory now is. I felt that we wanted 
 some printed thing to introduce us to the working men of London, 
 as we knew only the few we had come across in our co-operative 
 movement, and all our Associations had failed. F. D. Maurice had 
 written nothing good enough for this purpose, but Ruskin had. So 
 I got leave from him and his publisher, Mr. George Smith, to reprint 
 this grand chapter, ' On the Nature of Gothic ' ; and I had to add 
 to it the sub-title, 'And Herein of the True Functions of the 
 Workman in Art,' to show working men how it touches them. I 
 had ' Price Fourpence ' put on the title ; but we gave a copy to 
 everybody who came to our first meeting — over 400 — and the tract 
 well served its purpose. Afterwards an orange wrapper and a 
 folding woodcut from the Stones were added to the reprint, and it 
 was sold at 6d. for the benefit of the college." ^ 
 
 It is not ofiiCn that the preacher of a new gospel finds 
 his words taken up thus promptly as the text for practical 
 effort. Through these cheap reprints some of the central 
 and most characteristic passages of Ruskin's teaching found 
 opportunities of influence in a wide circle. The Kelmscott 
 
 1 Tlie Dailj News, April 4, 1899.
 
 RUSKIN AND VENICE 313 
 
 reprint of 1892 was an expensive book, intended for Llie CHAP 
 few ; bat the chapter was again issued at a cheap price, -^^ • 
 in 1899, with Morris's preface, and has once more had a 
 large popular sale. 
 
 IV 
 
 On the morning of July 14, 1902, after a life in part of 
 exactly a thousand years, the famous Campanile of St. 
 Mark's fell crashing to the ground. Three years later, 
 when a new Campanile was being erected, there was a 
 meeting held in the Ducal Palace to commemorate Ruskin's 
 
 o 
 
 Venetian work. The orator on the occasion connected the 
 two events : — 
 
 " Gentlemen, thanks to you, the sailors of the future will see 
 again the Tower of St. Mark clear on the horizon— that wonderful 
 straight column that our eyes always sought, that they seek, but in 
 vain, to-day, which rises from the soil of your city like a beam of 
 light sent from the earth to heaven. You have already begun the 
 work ; we can hear, from this place, the rattling of the hammers 
 on the stone. We may hope that it will ere long be accomplished. 
 To-day, however, you are engrossed with another monument. Your 
 memory recalls the great figure of Ruskin to your imaginations, and 
 from henceforth, so you will it, we shall meet that figure everywhere, 
 at the threshold of St. Mark as at the Tower of Torcello, near the 
 Madonna of the Garden as at the foot of the dead Doges at San 
 Zanipolo. 
 
 " And this monument that you raise to Ruskin, immaterial as it 
 is, has no need to fear the fate of the Campanile. Whatever earth- 
 quakes may befall, it will for ever appear clear, luminous to the 
 navigator (and we are all navigators), to the men of the twentieth 
 century who seek for a lighthouse and a port. 
 
 "Our eyes will see it — never. Our hearts will find it every- 
 where." ^ 
 
 ^ RusJcin at Venice: a Lecture by Robert de la Sizeraniie, trans- 
 (jiven during the liuskin Comviemora- lated by Mrs. Frederic Harrison. 
 tion at Venice, September i21, lOUo,
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 WITH MILLAIS IN GLENFINLAS 
 
 (1853) 
 
 " For work we must, and what we see, we see, 
 And God he knows, and what must be, must be." — Clough. 
 
 RusKiN was exhausted after his work on The Stones of Venice, 
 and, as soon as the book was off his hands, decided to take 
 a long holiday with his wife in Scotland. He needed rest, 
 and he desired a quiet time during which to think out a 
 course of lectures which he had undertaken to deliver at 
 Edinburgh in the autumn. He spent several weeks in 
 the company of Millais in Glenfinlas, and this sojourn was 
 destined to have an influence upon the private fortunes 
 of both men. 
 
 Ruskin was essentially a missionary and a preacher. 
 He had accepted the invitation to lecture with alacrity as 
 an opportunity for widening his circle of influence. In 
 the choice of travelling companions for his summer holi- 
 day he saw an opportunity also for didactic enterprise. He 
 had a profound admiration for the genius of Millais, into 
 whose defence he had entered enthusiastically two years 
 before. He had a firm belief in the great work of which 
 the genius of his friend was capable, if rightly directed. 
 As was the case with Rossetti, a year or two years later, 
 so now with Millais : Ruskin wanted to keep his eye, as it 
 were, on the young artist, to mould the ripening genius 
 into accord with his own ideals, to instruct him in the 
 way he should go. Millais also was in need of a holiday 
 after a long spell of work, and Ruskin proposed that they 
 should go north together.
 
 VISIT TO WALLINGTON 315 
 
 The holiday party consisted of five persons : Ruskin and CHAP. 
 his wife, Miss M'Kenzie, wlio was a friend of the latter, XVI. 
 Millais and his brother William. They went first to Wall- 
 ington, on a visit to Ruskiu's friends, Sir Walter and Lady 
 Trevelyan. This was his first visit to a house where he 
 was often afterwards to stay. Ruskin in after years had 
 "no memory, and no notion when he first saw Pauline, 
 Lady Trevelyan"; already in 1851 they were fast friends. 
 "I enclose a letter for Lady Trevelyan," he writes to his 
 father from Venice (Sept. 22, 1851), "which after reading 
 please seal and send. Her letter is enclosed also, which 
 I am sure you will like — you will see she is clever ; if you 
 knew how good and useful she was also, you would be 
 flattered by her signature to me — ' your own dutiful and 
 affectionate scholar.'" It was at Wallington also that 
 Ruskin first met a man who became one of his dearest 
 friends, Dr. John Brown. On the same occasion he visited 
 Sir John Swinburne at Capheaton in order to see his 
 Turners. 
 
 After a stay of some days at Wallington, the party set 
 out for the Trossachs, travelling by stage-coaches. They 
 took the journey leisurely, and visited many picturesque 
 romantic places on the way, such as Melrose, Stirling, and 
 Dunblane. Millais and his brother found apartments in the 
 New Trossachs Hotel, but took most of their meals with 
 the Ruskins, who were accommodated in the schoolmaster's 
 house, at Brig o' Turk, a few hundred yards aAvay. They 
 were a merry party, and in spite of constant rain the days 
 passed cheerily. " Both Millais and I," wrote Ruskin to 
 Miss Mitford (August 17), "came down hero to rest; he 
 having painted, and I corrected press, quite as much as was 
 good for either of us ; but he is painting a little among the 
 rocks, and I am making some drawings which may be useful 
 to me ; and when either of us are tired we go and build 
 bridges over the stream, or piers into the lake, or engage in 
 the more laborious and scientific operation of digging a canal 
 to change the course of the stream, where it is encroaching 
 on the meadowy." Millais was in the same holiday mood. 
 " This year/' he wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Combe, " I am giving
 
 316 MILLAIS AND RUSKIN 
 
 myself a holiday, as I have worked five years hard. . . . 
 Ruskin comes and works with us, and we dine on the rocks 
 all together. . . . We have in fine weather immense enjoy- 
 ment painting out on the rocks, and having our dinner 
 brought to us there, and in the evening climbing up the 
 steep mountains for exercise, Mrs. Ruskin accompanying 
 us." On wet days and in the evenings there were discussions 
 on art or Scottish history. Millais would make fun of the 
 old masters, or draw sketches for a comic history of Scotland. 
 Several of his sketches are given in the Life of him by his 
 son. One of them shows a game of battledore and shuttle- 
 cock; Ruskin does not figure in it, but Dr. Acland, who was 
 on a visit to Ruskin, is taking a hand. Of the party in a 
 more serious mood, we get a glimpse in letters from Dr. 
 Acland. He was impressed by the intensity of Millais. 
 " The point is in his work, and not in his words. He is a 
 man with powers and perception granted to very few ; not 
 more imagination, not more feeling, but a finer feeling and 
 more intuitive and instantaneous imagination than other 
 men. Of this his nonsense affords the most striking proof." 
 On Ruskin, Millais had made the same impression : — 
 
 " Millais is a very interesting study," he writes to his father 
 (July 24), " but I don't know how to manage him ; his mind is so 
 terribly active, so full of invention that he can hardly stay quiet a 
 moment without sketching either ideas or reminiscences ; and keeps 
 himself awake all night with planning pictures. He cannot go on 
 this way ; I must get Acland to lecture him." 
 
 By Ruskin's own earnestness and enthusiasm Acland was 
 profoundly struck. " Ruskin," he writes, " has knocked off 
 my sketching for ever, having quite convinced me that the 
 paltry drawings I have been in the habit of doing are most 
 injurious to the doer in his moral nature. What I can try 
 to do is to draw something really well. I hope to be well 
 enough to try to-morrow a bit of rock and water." And 
 asrain : " Ruskin I understand more than I have before ; 
 truth and earnestness of purpose are his great guides, and 
 no labour of thought or work is wearisome to him"; and
 
 PORTRAIT OF RUSKIN BY MILLAIS 317 
 
 asfain, " I ong-ht to say, as a key to Ruskin, I had no idea of CHAP, 
 the intensity of his religious feeKng before now." ^ ^ ^" 
 
 Though both Ruskin and Millais went to Scotland for re- 
 laxation, they stayed to work. Millais's principal work was 
 his famous portrait of Ruskin. It was at Acland's sugges- 
 tion that this portrait of Ruskin standing on the rocks, 
 with the torrent thundering beside him, was undertaken. 
 Ruskin was rejoiced, seeing in this work the promise of such 
 a loving and faithful study of wild nature as had never yet 
 been accomplished : — 
 
 {To Ms Father.) -'July 6. — Millais lias fixed on his place, a 
 lovely piece of worn rock, with foaming water and weeds and moss, 
 and a noble overhanging bank of dark crag; and I am to be 
 standing looking quietly down the stream ; just the sort of thing 
 I used to do for hours together. He is very happy at the idea of 
 doing it, and I think you will be proud of the picture, and we shall 
 have the two most wonderful torrents in the world. Turner's ' St. 
 Gothard ' and Millais' ' Glenfinlas.' He is going to take the utmost 
 possible pains with it, and says he can paint rocks and water better 
 than anything else. I am sure the foam of the torrent will be 
 something quite new in art." 
 
 Ruskin's diary is also full of Millais's picture. He kept a 
 sort of time-table of the number of hours' work put into the 
 picture each week — in the first week, four days, from 11 
 or 12 to 5 or 6 ; next week, three days 11-5, two 4-7 ; third 
 week, four days 1-5, one 4-7 ; fourth week, three days 12-6 ; 
 fifth week, three days, "a good forenoon"; sixth week, 
 a "good three hours," on four days; seventh week, "good 
 days, about three hours each " ; eighth week, only two "good 
 days"; ninth, three " good forenoons " ; on two other days, 
 an hour each ; the tenth and last week recorded showed 
 three " excellent days." The portrait was not completed till 
 the following winter, for on January 12 and 19, 1854, there 
 are entries in Ruskin's diary of sittings to Millais. 
 
 * Sir Henry JFenticorth Acland, Bart., K.C'.B., F.E.S..- A Memoir, by 
 J. B. Atlay, pp. 173-174.
 
 318 FROM THE STUDY TO THE PLATFORM 
 
 II 
 
 Rnskin himself made many drawings at Glenfinlas ; but 
 his chief Avork at this time was the preparation of the 
 Edinburgh lectures. The suggestion that he should give 
 these lectures came from his friend J. F. Lewis, the painter, 
 and it pleased him. But his father and mother did not like 
 the idea. They seem to have thought that there was some- 
 thing derogatory in appearing on a platform as a public 
 lecturer; or perhaps, though they put it in that way, they 
 were afraid of their son overstraining his powers ; and 
 Ruskin's father, who was already beginning to wonder 
 whether Modern Painters would ever be resumed and 
 finished, saw in this new departure a fresh danger of dis- 
 sipation of energies. In his replies to such remonstrances, 
 Ruskin tried to reassure his parents on all points : — 
 
 " (August 18.) — I do not mean at any time to take up the trade 
 of a lecturer ; all my real efforts will be made in writing, and all 
 that I intend to do is merely, as if in conversation, to say to these 
 people, who are ready to listen to me, some of the simple truths 
 about architecture and painting which may perhaps be better put 
 in conversational than literary form. I shall, however, write the 
 lectures first that I may be sure of what I have to say, and send 
 them you to look over." 
 
 ^^ {August 19.) ... I cannot now get off without a great fuss, 
 as I have sent a synopsis of the four lectures to be regularly printed 
 with the others published at the commencement of the season. I 
 rather liked the idea of giving my first lecture in your native city ; 
 and therefore met the request more immediately and unhesitatingly 
 than I should have done had it come from any other quarter ; besides 
 that, I have many friends and admirers in Edinburgh, and am in 
 some respects far better understood there than in London. The 
 Edinburgh artists — Harvey, D. 0. HilV Noel Paton, etc., are all 
 eager to meet me, while the London ones are all too happy to get 
 
 1 Sir George Harvey (1806- Hill (1802-1870), landscape and 
 
 1876), an original member and portrait painter, secretary to the 
 
 afterwards President of the Royal Scottisii Society of Arts. 
 Scottish Academy ; David Octavius
 
 MILLAIS AND RU SKIN'S LECTURES 319 
 
 out of my way, and the only letter you have yet got, showing true CHAP. 
 appreciation of luy book, except George Richmond's, is from the 
 Edinburgh Dr. Brown. If I succeed at all, I shall do my cause 
 more immediate good than by twenty volumes (although I consider 
 that for ultimate purposes writing is best) ; and I cannot fail alto- 
 gether because I shall assuredly have plenty to say, and shall say 
 it in a gentlemanly way, if not fluently. I have given plenty of 
 lectures with only one or two people to listen to me, and I don't 
 see why it should be a great condescension to spend the same words 
 on the cleverest people in Edinburgh. . . . 
 
 " {October 2.) — The lectures have not delayed Modern Painters, 
 as I did not intend to write any more till I had a rest. The 
 lectures have been cjuite by the way. I will promise you the first 
 chapter of Modern Painterx as a New Year's gift, if I remain in 
 good health." 
 
 Having decided, then, to give the lectures, Ruskin 
 occupied himself at Glenfinlas in preparing both the dis- 
 courses themselves and the drawings with which he meant 
 to illustrate them. He went over some of the ground with 
 Millais, who took up the subject of architecture with avidity. 
 He had already mastered Tlie Stones of Venice. " If you 
 have leisure to read, ' he Avrote to Mr. Combe, " get Ruskin's 
 two last volumes, which surpass all he has written." In a 
 later letter he says : — 
 
 "Ruskin and myself are pitching into architecture; you will hear 
 shortly to what purpose. I think now I was intended for a Master 
 Mason. All this day I have been working at a window, which I 
 hope you will see carried out very shortly in stone. In my evening 
 hours I mean to make many designs for church and other archi- 
 tecture, as I find myself quite familiar with constructions, Ruskin 
 having given me lessons regarding foundations and the building of 
 cathedrals, etc., etc. This is no loss of time — rather a real relaxation 
 from everyday painting — and it is immensely necessary that some- 
 thing new and good should be done in the place of the old ornamenta- 
 tions. . . . Do, if you can, come and hear Ruskin's lectures." 
 
 Ruskin, it will thus be seen, had made a convert by his 
 lectures before they were delivered ; and one catches in
 
 320 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING 
 
 CHAP. Millais's words a reflection of that spirit of eager zeal and 
 ^^^- fervid enthusiasm of which Ruskin when he lectured seemed, 
 in later years at any rate, a living embodiment. Millais's 
 help, however, was not limited to the role of sympathetic 
 listener at rehearsals. " We are busy making drawings for 
 the lectures," he writes in a later letter ; the artist's drawing 
 of a tiger, which was shown at the first lecture, was given 
 as the frontispiece to the original edition of the lectures. 
 
 The lectures were fixed for the beginning of November, 
 and on October 26 the Ruskins left Glenfinlas. They 
 paid a visit on the way to William Stirling (afterwards Sir 
 William Stirling-Maxwell), the historian of the artists of 
 Spain, at Keir, reaching Edinburgh — " arrived safe," Ruskin 
 writes, " diagrams and all " — on October 29. The first of 
 the four lectures — that on Domestic Architecture — was 
 delivered on the evening of November 1. Friends and 
 admirers had travelled to Edinburgh to hear and see the 
 author of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice. His 
 father and mother, however — either as still disapproving, 
 or from nervousness — had remained at home, and Ruskin's 
 letters to them give full accounts of it all : — 
 
 "Wednesday morning [2 Nov., 1853]. — Everything went off 
 capitally, and I was heard very well without any exertion. I found 
 myself quite at my ease, and that people thought so, and they are 
 all very much pleased." 
 
 " Wednesday evening. — Dr. Guthrie, Sir W. and Lady Trevelyan, 
 and Mr. .Jameson, formed our dinner party to-day. Dr. Guthrie just 
 as delightful out of pulpit as in it — a Scottish Mr. Melvill ; much 
 interesting conversation about ragged schools. He paid nie many 
 most kind compliments on my lecture, but begged me to give them 
 a passage or two of the highly worked kind, so I must write a little 
 bit for them. I find them all so inclined to hear what I have to say 
 that I must really work up the lectures to a little higher mark, and 
 am going to bed to meditate over a passage or two. Guthrie asked 
 me to tell him whether I worked up my writing or not ; I told him, 
 of course, the truth in a moment, that whenever I thought a piece 
 worth working out, I wrote it over four or five times. He said ' he 
 was sure of it, but as people had disputed it with him he wanted to
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF RUSKIN AS LECTURER 321 
 
 have it from my own mouth ; that Macaulay did the same, and that, CHAP, 
 in fact, it couldn't be done in any other way.' . . ." aVI. 
 
 A contemporary critique of the lectures gives an account 
 of the lecturer's appearance and manner : — 
 
 " The door by the side of the platform opens, and a thin gentle- 
 man with light hair, a stiff white cravat, dark overcoat with velvet 
 collar, walking, too, with a slight stoop, goes up to the desk, and 
 looking round with a self-possessed and somewhat formal air, pro- 
 ceeds to take off his great-coat, revealing thereby, in addition to the 
 orthodox white cravat, the most orthodox of white waistcoats. . . . 
 ' Dark hair, pale face, and massive marble brow — that is my ideal of 
 Mr. Euskin,' said a young lady near us. This proved to be quite a 
 fancy portrait, as unlike the reality as could well be imagined. Mr. 
 Ruskin has light sand-coloured hair ; his face is more red than pale ; 
 the mouth well cut, with a good deal of decision in its curve, though 
 somewhat -wanting in sustained dignity and strength ; an aquiline 
 nose ; his forehead by no means broad or massive, but the brows full 
 and well bound together ; the eye we could not see in consequence 
 of the shadows that fell upon his countenance from the lights over- 
 head, but we are sure it must be soft and luminous, and that the 
 ;ioetry and passion we looked for almost in vain in other features are 
 concentrated there. . . . 
 
 " And now for the style of the lecture, you say ; what was it ? 
 Properly speaking, there were in the lectures two styles essentially 
 distinct, and not well blended, — a speaking and a writing style ; the 
 former colloquial and spoken off-hand ; the latter rhetorical and 
 carefully read in quite a different voice — ^we had almost said intoned. 
 When speaking of the sketches on the wall, or employing local illus- 
 trations, — such as the buildings of the city, — he talked in an apt, 
 easy, and often humorous manner ; but in treating the general 
 relations of the subject, he had recourse to the manuscript leaves on 
 the desk, written in a totally different style, and, naturally enough, 
 read in a very different tone of voice. The effect of this transition 
 was often strange ; the audience, too, evidently sometimes had a 
 difficulty in following the rapid change, and did not always keep 
 up with the movement. It would on all accounts have been better 
 had one style been observed throughout. This was plainly seen in 
 VOL. I. X
 
 322 REPORTS TO HIS PARENTS 
 
 CHAP, the lectures ou Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, which were ahnost 
 
 XVT 
 
 entirely read, and certainly had far more unity and compactness than 
 
 either of the previous ones. Mr. Ruskin's elocution is peculiar ; he 
 has a difficulty in sounding the letter ' r ' ; but it is not this we now 
 refer to, it is to the peculiar tone in the rising and falling of his 
 voice at measured intervals, in a way scarcely ever heard except in the 
 public lection of the service appointed to be read in churches." . . . 
 {Edinburgh Guardian, November 19, 1853.) 
 
 One gathers from this description that Ruskin did not 
 attain at the first attempt the freedom and mastery which 
 he afterwards displayed in the lecture-room ; but those 
 who have heard his later lectures will recognise some 
 familiar traits. The contrast, of which the reporter seems 
 to complain, between more rhetorical and more familiar 
 parts of the lecture, was maintained by Ruskin in most 
 of his Oxford discourses. In the lecture-room, again, he 
 cultivated and developed the manner which the reporter 
 well describes as, " apt, easy, and often humorous." In 
 the preparation and display of his diagrams and drawings 
 Ruskin was often studious of humorous effect. When he 
 published the Edinburgh lectures, two of the plates were 
 furnished with covering flaps, so that the reader might 
 in each case examine the figure at the top before seeing 
 the one at the bottom. Ruskin adopted some similar 
 device when showing the original illustrations, and the 
 humorous effect of incongruity was thus enhanced. 
 
 The description of his lectures, just cited, appeared at 
 the conclusion of the course; we must return to Ruskin's 
 letters for particulars of them. The second lecture (Nov. 4) 
 was equally successful : — 
 
 "{November 5.) — I got on capitally again last night; at least 
 everybody says so. I was not so well satisfied myself, for the lecture 
 was longer, and I had not a thorough command of it, and had to 
 read a good deal ; and I had a sense of sham in speaking the fine 
 bits learned oflf by heart, which kept me from being at ease. The 
 odd thing is that everybody tells me I seemed more at ease than in 
 my first lecture, and spoke far better. The lobbies were filled with 
 people standing."
 
 EDINBURGH SOCIETY 323 
 
 The old people at home thirsted, however, for further and CHAP. 
 more detailed accounts : — • 
 
 " Edinburgh, Sunday, 6tJi November. ... I should have 
 given you more explicit accounts of time of lectures, etc., had I 
 considered the thing of any importance. . . . When, however, I 
 heard that Lady Trevelyaa and others of my friends were coming 
 hundreds of miles to hear me, and found how much importance the 
 Edinburgh people attached to the thing themselves, I saw that I 
 must do more than I at first intended ; and now when I find that 
 I have to address a thousand people each night, besides crowded 
 passagefulls, just as if I were Mr. Melvill himself, there is nothing 
 for it but doing as well as I possibly can ; and, as I explained to you 
 before, it has forced me to write you such miserable letters, wanting 
 all the quiet time I ever get for retouching." 
 
 " Thzirsday evening, 17 th November. ... I don't think they are 
 generally of opinion hero that I am a gentle lecturer or a cloudy one. 
 They think me rather violent and clear, more of the mountain stream 
 than of the mist. Lady Trevelyan says everybody was alike delighted 
 with the last, and that she heard a man whose time was very valu- 
 able, muttering, near here, at being obliged to wait for an hour in 
 order to get a place, but saying afterwards that he would have 
 Avaited tv)o hours rather than have missed it." 
 
 Even yet his parents were not satisfied. He had told them 
 what he said, how he said it, and how he was received ; he 
 had not mentioned how he was dressed : — 
 
 " My dress at lectures," wrote Ruskin to his father (Dec. 1), " was 
 my usual dinner dress, just what you and my mother like me best 
 in ; coat by Stulz.^ It only produced an effect here, because their 
 lecturers seem usually to address them, and they come to hear, in 
 frock coats and dirty boots." 
 
 Ruskin seems to have been much lionised on the occasion 
 of this visit to Edinburgh (during which he lodged in 
 Albyn Place), and in a letter (November 27) to his father, 
 he gives a long list of the various people, small and great, 
 who had paid him attention and whose calls or other 
 
 ^ Stuiz is named as the typical tailor in Carlyle's Past and Present, 
 book iii. ch. xiii.
 
 324 STUDY OF ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS 
 CHAP, civilities he had been backward in returnins:. In most 
 
 XVI. 
 
 is- 
 
 cases the names are accompanied by little character-sketches 
 • — sometimes caustic but never ill-humoured — of most of 
 the leaders of Edinburgh society in that day, including Lord 
 Cockburn, Hugh Miller (the geologist), Sir George and Lady 
 Home, My. Dennistoun (author of The Bukes of Urbino), 
 and Sir William Hamilton. The friends made on this 
 occasion whom he most valued were Dr. John Brown — 
 " called by his friends the ' beloved physician ' — and Professor 
 John Stuart Blackie." Here is Ruskin's first impression of 
 tlie latter : — 
 
 " Professor and Mrs. Blackie. Professor very funny, very clever ; 
 wife very nice, a great admirer of mine ; Professor (of Greek) a great 
 adversary, but all above board ; has been ill. I have had to inquire 
 for, and contend with him. I have quarrelled him well again." 
 
 The more he saw of the Professor the more he liked him : — 
 
 " (Deeemher 4.) ... I have made some agreeable and valuable 
 friends, most especially Professor Blackie, a thoroughly original, 
 daring, enthusiastic, amiable, eccentric, masterly fellow. . . . He has 
 taught me more Greek in an hour than I learnt at Oxford in six 
 months, having studied the living language. I am in a great state 
 of delight at knowing for the first time in my life that it is a living 
 one. The Professor gave me to-day a Greek newimiior, about a week 
 old, printed at Athens, and in good old Attic Greek hardly differing 
 in a syllable from the language of Alcibiades, except in its subject- 
 matter." 
 
 Ill 
 
 After leaving Edinburgh Ruskin went on some visits, 
 includincj one to Hamilton, where the Duke had invited him 
 to see the manuscripts. Ruskin in his diary noted some of 
 the most beautiful of them, and made drawings from them. 
 How highly he valued the collection was to appear thirty 
 years later when the manuscripts came into the market. He 
 then issued an appeal for funds in the hope of securing some 
 of them for public collections.^ On returning to London, 
 
 1 See General Statement Explain- George's Ouild, dated February 21, 
 iiig the Nature of and Purpose of St. 1882.
 
 THE ETHICS OF COLLECTING 325 
 
 Ruskin entered at the British Museum upon a systematic CHAP. 
 study of the iUuminatcd manuscripts in that opulent col- 
 lection; on his visits to the Museum (1853-54) he was 
 often accompanied by Millais. Page after page in his diaries 
 contains notes upon the MSS. The notes are hardly m- 
 telligible or significant to any one else, but it is at any rate 
 possible, and it is interesting, to follow his method of study. 
 He went all through the collection, noting dates and styles. 
 Then he threw them into groups, according to subjects or 
 styles or arrangements of colours. He made careful notes 
 on the manuscripts in his own possession, indexing their 
 initial letters and subjects. The studies thus indicated in 
 his diaries were often utilised for incidental illustration in 
 his books. 
 
 The intense delight which Ruskin experienced in these 
 " fairy cathedrals " was attended, however, by some qualms 
 of conscience. The artistic and the moral sides of his nature 
 were then often at strife, and it was only gradually that a 
 reconciliation was reached. The mood is seen very clearly 
 in some letters to his father : — 
 
 "Sunday, 23rd [October, 1853]. . . . My love of art has been 
 a terrible temptation to me, and I feel that I have been sadly self- 
 indulgent lately — what with casts, Liber Studio7'um, missals, and 
 Tintorets. I think I must cut the whole passion short off at the root, 
 or I shall get to be a mere collector, like old Mr. Wells of Redleaf,^ 
 or Sir W. Scott, or worst of all Beckford or Horace "Walpole. I am 
 sure I ought to take that text to heart, ' covetousness which is 
 idolatry,' for I do idolize my Turners and missals, and I can't con- 
 ceive anybody being ever tried with a heavier temptation than I 
 am to save every farthing I can to collect a rich shelf of thirteenth- 
 century manuscripts. There would be no stop to it, for I should 
 always find the new ones illustrating all the rest. I believe I shall 
 have to give up all idea of farther collection, and to rest satisfied 
 with my treasures." 
 
 ^ Mr. Wells, of Redleaf, Pens- be found in many books of artists' 
 
 hurst, for many years a sea-captain reminiscences ; see, e.g., Frith's 
 
 intheEastlndiaCompany's service, Autobiogrcqjhy, i, 319, and J. C. 
 
 formed a larffo collection of modern Horsley's Recollections of a Royal 
 
 works of art. Notices of him may Academician, p. 55.
 
 326 "ST. LOUIS'S PSALTER" 
 
 CHAP. Later letters confirm these good resolutions, if such they 
 were, and one of them is further interesting as premonitory 
 of feelings which were soon to grow in intensity : — 
 
 " Wednesday morning, l%th Nov. . . . My next birthday is the 
 keystone of my arch of life — my 35th — and up to this time I 
 cannot say that I have in any way ' taken up my cross ' or ' denied 
 myself ' ; neither have I visited the poor nor fed them, but have 
 spent my money and time on my own pleasure or instruction. I find 
 I cannot be easy in doing this any more, for I feel that, if I were to 
 die at present, God might most justly say to me, ' Thou in thy life- 
 time receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things.' 
 I find myself always doing what I Uke, and that is certainly not the 
 way to heaven. I feel no call to part with anything that I have, 
 but I am going to preach some most severe doctrines in my next book, 
 and I must act up to them in not going on spending in works of art." 
 
 The letter goes on to propound a scheme for ending and 
 revising his collection, but a little loophole is allowed ; " I 
 won't make a vow that if, by any chance, I should hear of 
 some exquisite thirteenth-century work being in the market, 
 I may not consider whether I should be justified in buying 
 it to take care of it." The chance was soon to occur, and 
 the temptation (or opportunity) was not allowed to pass. In 
 his diary for 1854 is the following entry: — 
 
 ^^ February 26. — On Friday the 24th I got the greatest treasure 
 I have yet obtained in all my life — St. Louis's Psalter." 
 
 The exquisite Psalter so named by Ruskin was an unfail- 
 ing delight to him, and many references to it occur in 
 his books.^ 
 
 Whatever Ruskin possessed, he desired to share. This 
 desire, and the free scope he gave to it, saved him effectually 
 from " getting to be a mere collector." His books, he used 
 to say, were " for use and not for curiosities." He treated 
 them in a way which can hardly be recommended for 
 general practice. He annotated some of his most valuable 
 
 * This Psalter and Hours of Thompson, who has printed an 
 Isabella of France is now in the illustrated monograph upon it. 
 library of Mr. Henry Yatos
 
 RUSKIN AND HIS TREASURES 327 
 
 manuscripts not merely in pencil, but in ink. He cut them CHAP, 
 to pieces, re-arranged theni to his own desire, and of the 
 " St. Louis's Psalter " he dispersed many of the pages. Some 
 were given to his school at Oxford ; others found their way 
 to the Bodleian Library ; and others were given to his friend 
 Professor Norton. Some entries in his diary may well 
 cause "a mere collector" to despair :—" Dec. 30, 1853. — Cut 
 out some leaves from large missal." ''Jan. 1, Sunday. — 
 Put two pages of missal in frames." ''Jan. 3. — Cut missal 
 up in evening; hard work." Dean Kitchin relates an 
 anecdote in this connexion: "One day at Brantwood, I was 
 looking through these lovely specimens of monastic skill, 
 and finding the St. Louis missal in complete disorder, I 
 turned to Mr. Ruskin, who was sitting in his wonted chair 
 in his library, and said, ' This MS. is in an awful state ; could 
 you not do something to get the pages right again ? ' and he 
 replied, with a sad smile, ' Oh yes ; these old books have in 
 them an evil spirit, which is always throwing them into 
 disorder ' — as if it were through envy against anything so 
 beautiful: the fact was that he had played the 'evil spirit' 
 with them himself."^ But his ripping up of such treasures 
 was at any rate done, as Mr. Collingwood observes,- "not 
 for wanton mischief, or in vulgar carelessness, but to show 
 to his classes at lectures," or to give to friends of that which 
 he valued most. Other valuables he treated in the same 
 way, and sometimes, it must be admitted, with less praise- 
 worthy reason. If a book would not fit a particular shelf, 
 he had no compunction in sending for a tool and chopping 
 not the shelf, but the book. Several of the books in his 
 library received this summary execution. 
 
 IV 
 
 Ruskin returned home, to Heme Hill, at the end of 
 the year, resumed his sittings to Millais, and prepared the 
 Edinburgh lectures for publication. Though these Lectures 
 
 ^ Ruskin in Oxford and Other Studies, 1904. 
 * Ruskin Relics, 11J03, p. 184.
 
 328 MARRIAGE ANNULLED 
 
 CHAP, on Architecture and Painting broke no new ground — being 
 ■^^* rather a re-statement, on a smaller scale and in a more 
 popular and direct form, of the leading ideas and doctrines 
 contained in his previous books — the revision of thera 
 for the press involved a good deal of hard work. The 
 book, which appeared in April 1854, was widely noticed 
 in the press ; and at the same time Ruskin's private affairs 
 were much canvassed in literary and artistic circles. For 
 in the same month his wife left him. She returned to her 
 parents and immediately instituted a suit. Ruskin declined 
 to put in any answer, and went abroad. The marriage 
 was annulled on July 15, and a year later, on July 3, 1855, 
 Euphemia Chalmers Gray was married at Bowerswell to 
 Millais.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 MODERN PAINTERS CONTINUED 
 
 (1854-1856) 
 
 " Where is Thy favour'd haunt, eternal Voice, 
 
 The region of thy choice, 
 Where, undisturb'd by sin and earth, the soul 
 
 Owns Thine entire control ? — 
 'Tis on the mountain's summit dark and high, 
 
 W^hen storms are hurrying by : 
 'Tis mid the strong foundations of the earth, 
 
 Where torrents have their birth," — The Christian Year. 
 
 " There is a great deal of talking about the Ruskins here at 
 present," wrote Mrs. Carlyle in May 1854, " and the separa- 
 tion is understood to be permanent." " I know nothing 
 about it," she added ; which did not, however, prevent her, 
 any more than it has ever prevented any other lively 
 gossip in like case, from having much to say about it ; 
 and in the same letter she aimed a pointed shaft at both 
 parties to the case. I do not propose to engage in the 
 chatter. The marriage in many respects had not been 
 happy on either side, and the last chapter sufficiently 
 indicates how the end of it came about. The event 
 was an incident, rather than a crisis, and a vexation, 
 more than an abiding grief, in Ruskin's life. "I have had 
 many deep sorrows," he said once to a friend, "but this 
 was not one of them." He was speaking after a lapse of 
 many years, but his letters and diaries of the time tell the 
 same tale. Mr. Hall Caine had a story from Rossetti which 
 illustrates Ruskin's dispassionate separation of personal 
 feelings from artistic interest. His father had threatened 
 to put a penknife through the portrait of his son by
 
 330 AFl^ER THE SEPARATION 
 
 CHAP. Millais; whereupon Ruskin smuggled it into a cab and 
 ■ carried it off, for safe custody, to Rossetti's studio. The 
 famous picture became the property of Sir Henry Acland. 
 The true romance, and the love-tragedy, of Ruskin's life 
 were yet to come. The routine was not yet to be changed, 
 A letter to a friend shows the face which he meant to 
 present to the world : — 
 
 {To F. J. FuENiVALL.) " Monday eoening {April 24). — Many 
 and sincere thanks for your kind note. You can be of no use to 
 me at present, except by not disturbing me, nor thinking hardly 
 of me, yourself. You cannot contradict reports; the world must 
 for the present have its full swing. Do not vex yourself about 
 it, as far as you are sorry, lest such powers as I may have should be 
 shortened. Be assured I shall neither be subdued, nor materially 
 changed, by this matter. The worst of it for vie has long been 
 passed. If you should hear me spoken ill of, ask people to wait a 
 little. If they will not wait, comfort yourself by thinking that time 
 and tide will not wait either. 
 
 " Your letter has been a great pleasure to me. I shall not 
 probably be able to see you before I leave town, but I will write to 
 you from abroad and let you know as soon as I return. I cannot 
 be very long away. I shall always, of course, be grateful for a 
 letter from you. Send it to Denmark Hill with ' to be forwarded ' on 
 it. It gave me great delight to know that you and your friends 
 enjoyed yourselves here the other day. So did I heartily." 
 
 II 
 
 Before the domestic crisis had occurred, Ruskin had 
 already planned a visit to Switzerland, in order to continue 
 his studies for the remaining volumes of Modern Painters. 
 The plan was carried out, but in the company of his 
 parents, as in the earlier days, and he was on the Continent 
 from the beginning of May to the end of September. The 
 moment ho was in sight of Calais — the port of entry to 
 his Alpine paradise — the studies for Modern Painters were 
 resumed. It was on the steam-packet that he made the 
 study of its jib which is engraved in Prceterita, noting,
 
 FOREIGN TOUR WITH HIS PARENTS: 1854 331 
 
 in his diary, tlie beauty of its curves ; and this too was the CHAP. 
 last of his approaches to Cahiis before he wrote his "glorious 
 thing," as Rossetti called it/ on the old tower with which 
 the fourth volume of Modern Painters opens. On the road 
 from Calais to Amiens he notes the beauty of the tree- 
 sceuery, and this also was the foundation of a passage in 
 the third volume. A passage from his diary at Amiens, 
 describing a walk " amonij the branching currents of the 
 Somme," was given in the fourth volume. Then he 
 revisited some of his favourite cathedrals, afterwards 
 making his way, by Champagnole as always, to Geneva. 
 At Vevay they stopped some days, and here he was already 
 at work on Modern Painters. " I am writing," he says in 
 the first chapter of the third volume, " at a window which 
 commands a view of the head of the Lake of Geneva," 
 and it was there that he penned his definition of poetry — 
 " the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds 
 for the noble emotions"; to which he afterwards made 
 the necessary addition, " in musical form.'' From Vevay 
 he proceeded through the Simmenthal to Thun. The 
 Simmenthal and the country about Fribourg inspired a 
 passage in the fourth volume. Beautiful in itself, it 
 exerts, he says, an added charm as containing " far-away 
 promise " of scenery yet greater and more impressive, and 
 is thus peculiarly calculated to excite " the expectant 
 imagination." Something of the same idea was expressed 
 by a later poet in describing the same scenery : — 
 
 "Far off the old snows ever new 
 With silver edges cleft the blue 
 
 Aloft, alone, divine ; 
 The sunny meadows silent slept, 
 Silence the sombre armies kept, 
 The vanguard of the pine." ^ 
 
 At Fribourg he spent some time in sketching its walls and 
 towers, for another of his purposes on this foreign tour 
 was to study Swiss history, and in connexion therewith 
 
 * D. G. liossetti's Letters to William Allingham, p. 181. 
 2 F. W. H. Myors ; " Simmenthal."
 
 332 A "CALL FROM GOD" 
 
 CHAP. " to eng^rave a series of drawinsfs of the following Swiss 
 
 XVII • . 
 
 ' towns: Geneva, Fribourg, Basle, Thun, Baden, and Schaff- 
 
 liausen." This work was never completed, but many such 
 
 drawings were made. Next, Ruskin spent two or three 
 
 weeks in the Bernese Oberland, and at Lucerne. Some of 
 
 his sketches there were utilised to illustrate " The Law of 
 
 Evanescence " in the fourth volume. His diary at this 
 
 time shows once more the spirit of religious solemnity in 
 
 which he approached his task. He was "Nature's Priest," 
 
 appointed by a direct call to testify to the Divinity of 
 
 Nature and of Truth ; a steward of the mysteries, bound in 
 
 duty and in gratitude to reveal the holiness and the beauty 
 
 which he was privileged to see : — 
 
 " June 24. — My father called me at half-past four this morning 
 at Interlachen. I was out as the clock struck five, and climbed 
 as steadily as I could among the woods north of the valley, for 
 an hour and a half, then emerging on the pure green pasture of 
 the upper mountains. The Jungfrau and two Eigers were clear 
 and soft in the intense mountain light; a field of silver cloud 
 filled the valley above the lake of Brienz ; the eastern hills fused 
 in mist, splendid in the white warmth of morning. I stood long, 
 praying that these happy hours and holy sights might be of more 
 use to me than they have been, and might be remembered by me 
 in hours of temptation or mortification. 
 
 " Lucerne, July 2, 1854. — Third Sunday after Trinity. I hope 
 to keep this day a festival for ever, having received my third call 
 from God,^ in answer to much distressful prayer. May He give 
 grace, to walk hereafter with Him in newness of life, to whom be 
 glory for ever. Amen." 
 
 In the same spirit is his first entry on finding himself 
 once more in his happy valley: — 
 
 " Chamouni, Jtibj 10. — Thank God, here once more, and feeling 
 it more deeply than ever, I have been up to my stone upon the 
 Breven, all unchanged and happy. It is curious that the first 
 book I took up here, after my New Testament, was the Cliridian 
 
 1 For Ruskin's first call, see 179 or p. 186 or pp. 188-9, 
 p. 120 or p. 127; for a second, p.
 
 "MOUNTAIN GLORY "—" MOUNTAIN GLOOM" 333 
 
 Year, and it opened at the poem for the 20th Sunday after Trinity, CHAP. 
 ■which I had never read before. XVII. 
 
 " 18^/i JuJi/. — Every day here I seem to see further into nature, 
 and into myself — and into futurity." 
 
 It was amid such scenes — and " such sounds as make deep 
 silence in the heart, For Thought to do her part" — that, 
 during a busy and happy fortnight at Chamouni, Ruskin 
 revived the impressions and completed the studies which 
 informed the greater portion of his fourth volume. It was 
 during this visit to Chamouni that he made, in particular, 
 the experiments in light which are explained in its third 
 chapter; and "weighed the minute-burden of sand in the 
 streams." i His diary shows also that he was very busy in 
 collecting and studying the Alpine flowers. It is signifi- 
 cant of the mood in which these studies were made that the 
 portions of the Bible now selected for his daily annotation 
 were the Beatitudes and the Revelation. Another entry 
 in the diary shows the peace and health which he found 
 in these pursuits : — 
 
 "Sallenches, 13^^ August. — How little I thought God would 
 ■ bring me here again just now ; and I am here, stronger in health, 
 higher in hope, deeper in peace, than I have been for years. The 
 green pastures and pine forests of the Varens softly seen through 
 the light of my window. I cannot be thankful enough, nor happy 
 enough. Psalm Ixvi. 8-20." 
 
 From the "Mountain Glory" Ruskin passed to the 
 " Mountain Gloom." It was at Sion, as appears from a long 
 entry in his diary for September 5, 1854, that he made the 
 notes afterwards expanded in the nineteenth chapter of the 
 fourth volume. He was now on his way home, and after 
 spending a day or two in Paris to make some further studies 
 in the Louvre, reached Dover on October 2. The contrast 
 between the primness of England and the picturesqueness 
 of the Continent struck him once more very strongly : — 
 
 " Keading, October 1 1. — There is one thing very noticeable in 
 England as compared with France. In France one never sees such 
 
 ^ Stones of Venice, vol. iii., Epi- observations recorded in Modern 
 logue ; the reference being to the Painters, vol. iv. oh. xii.
 
 334 STUDIES FOR MODERN PAINTERS 
 
 CHAP, an inscription as 'To let, a Genteel house up tliis road.' There is 
 • no gentility in France. One sees ' Une belle maison,' ' Une jolie 
 chambre commode,' * propre,' but never anything corresponding to 
 our 'genteel.' I think they try to rise in France; but not to 
 appear to have risen. They have ambition, not pretension. Neither 
 is there anything, in the small cottage dwellings, of nomenclature 
 such as with us — ' Balmoral Cottage,' ' Saxe-Coburg ' — Villas, etc., 
 to places ten feet square. The French have a gloomy dignity quite 
 beyond this — a self-assertion probably in truth founded on a greater 
 pride and selfishness. ..." 
 
 And so forth ; the reader of Modern Painters will already 
 have recognised here the notes for the opening passages 
 in the fourth volume. 
 
 It will be seen that by the time Ruskin reached home, 
 his mind, his note-books, and his sketch-books were filled 
 with materials for the continuation of that book; but he 
 had a long row to hoe before the materials could be planted 
 in their proper places, and everything be fitted into a 
 connected scheme. This writing of the third and fourth 
 volumes took him from fifteen to eighteen months — by no 
 means a long time considering their bulk, the care with* 
 which he always composed, and the fifty plates with which 
 the volumes were illustrated. But now, as always, he had 
 many other interests and some diversions. These are touched 
 upon in a letter ^vritten as he was nearing home : — 
 
 {To Lady Trevelyan.) " Paris, Sept. 24, '54. — I received your 
 letter two days ago at Sens, and we are all most truly sorry for 
 Sir Walter, and for you. Poor Sir Walter has indeed had much 
 to suffer — first in his anxiety about your health, and then when 
 you were getting better these bitter sorrows striking him again 
 and again, like the Northumberland rain beating on his bare fore- 
 head as we crossed the moor. You are both of you good people, 
 and I think that must be the reason you have so much to sufi"er — 
 you would have been too happy, but for such things as these. 
 Men must have sorrow in this world, and it takes hard blows to 
 make them sorrowful when they are good. ... I have got over 
 my distress and darkness now, thank God, and I am veiy full of 
 plans, and promises, and hopes, and shall have much to talk to
 
 MULTIFARIOUS INTERESTS 335 
 
 you about when I see you, though I do not think I shall be able CHAP. 
 to come north this autumn now. ... I am rolling projects over ^^I^- 
 and over in my head. I want to give short lectures to about 200 
 at once in turn, of the sign painters, and shop decorators, and 
 writing masters, and upholsterers, and masons, and brickmakers, 
 and glass-blowers, and pottery people, and young artists, and young 
 men in general, and school-masters, and young ladies in general, 
 and school-mistresses; and I want to teach Illumination to the 
 sign painters and the younger ladies; and to have prayer books 
 all wHtten again (only the Liturgy altered first, as I told you), 
 and I want to explode printing, and gunpowder — the two great 
 curses of the age ; I begin to think that abominable art of printing 
 is the root of all the mischief — it makes people used to have every- 
 thing the same shape. And I mean to lend out Liher Studiorums 
 and Albert Dlirers to everybody who wants them ; and to make 
 copies of all fine thirteenth-century manuscripts, and lend them 
 out — all for nothing, of course ; and to have a room where any- 
 body can go in all day and always see nothing in it but what is 
 'jood, with a little printed explanatory catalogue saying tvhy it 
 is good ; and I want to have a black hole, where they shall see 
 nothing but what is bad, filled with Claudes, and Sir Charles 
 Barry's architecture, and so on ; and I want to have a little Academy 
 of my own in all the manufacturing towns, and to get the young 
 artists — Pre-Eaphaelite always — to help me ; and I want to have 
 an Academy exhibition, an opposition shop, where all the pictures 
 shall be hung on the line — in nice little rooms decorated in a 
 Giottesque manner — and no bad pictures let in, and none good 
 turned out, and very few altogether — and only a certain number 
 of people let in each day, by ticket, so as to have no elbowing. 
 And as all this is merely by the way, while I go on with my usual 
 work about Turner, and collect materials for a great work I mean 
 to write on politics — founded on the thirteenth century — I shall 
 have plenty to do when I get home. ..." 
 
 He had, indeed, as will be seen in the following chapters; 
 but before describinu' in detail the multifarious interests 
 which divided his attention daring the continuation of 
 Modern Painters, it will be convenient to give a short 
 sumraar}' of his work from 1854 to 1856, and to say
 
 336 VOLUMES 3 AND 4 OF MODERN PAINTERS 
 
 CHAP, something of the third and fourth volumes, which were 
 ^^^^- both published in the latter year. On his return from the 
 Continent in October 1854, he took up a drawing-class at 
 the Working Men's College (Chap. XIX.). In the spring of 
 1855 he put out the first of a series of annual Academy 
 Notes (Chap. XX.). This work, continued with steady appli- 
 cation to Modern Painters, taxed his strength severely, as 
 he summarily notes in Frceterita : — 
 
 "I get cough which lasts for two months, till I go down to 
 Tunbridge Wells, to my doctor cousin, William Kichardson, who 
 puts me to bed, gives me some syrup, cures me in three days, and 
 calls me a fool for not coming to him before, with some rather 
 angry warnings that I had better not keep a cough for two months 
 again." 
 
 He went also to Deal, and there made the studies of shipping 
 presently to be used in his preface to Turner's Harbours 
 of England. Returning to Denmark Hill, he devoted the 
 winter (1855-56) to Modern Painters. The third volume 
 was published in January 1856; the fourth, in April; and 
 the Harbours, in May. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The structure of a book thus resumed after an interval of 
 ten years — and ten years, be it remembered, which had seen 
 the author pass almost from boyhood to manhood — naturally 
 showed differences and developments. Naturally, too, the 
 later part of the book was not at all what the author had 
 intended. To begin with, the conclusion of the book was to 
 have been one volume ; ^ it became three. Again, in resum- 
 ing his book, Ruskin adopted a less systematic method. He 
 discarded the elaborate synopsis of contents, and did not 
 force his chapters into a rigidly consecutive scheme. He 
 had begun, as he says in the third volume, to distrust 
 systems and system-mongers. 
 
 The fact is that though there is throughout Modern 
 Painters an underlying unity of purpose and consistency 
 
 ^ See Stones of Venice, vol. ii, ch. vi. § 62,
 
 SCHEME OF THE BOOK 337 
 
 of thoiiGrht, vet if it is to be understood ariorht, it must bo CHAP. 
 
 • • • • WTT 
 
 regarded as five different books, the division into which does ^^^• 
 not entirely correspond either with the division into vohimes 
 or with the framework mapped out at the beginning of the 
 book. (1) The First Volume is a defence of Turner, against 
 the charge that his later pictures were " unnatural." This 
 volume was, as Ruskin says,^ the expansion of a magazine 
 article, and was written in all the heat and haste of youthful 
 enthusiasm. (2) Then came a pause, during which the 
 author's principal study was among the early Italian 
 painters and Tintoretto. Both alike commanded his pas- 
 sionate admiration. The Second Volume thus became in 
 part a hymn of praise, inspired by the religious ideal of 
 Giotto and his circle ; and in part an essay upon the Imagi- 
 nation, inspired by Tintoret's works in the Scuola di San 
 Rocco. (3) Ten years now intervened — years of widened 
 and deepened study in many directions. The earlier chapters 
 of the Third Volume arc an interlude, necessary in order to 
 establish a harmony between what had preceded and what 
 was to follow. (4) The Fourth Volume and the first two 
 Parts of the Fifth (Parts vi. and vii., in the arrangement of 
 the whole book) are an essay on the Beauty of Mountains, 
 Trees, and Clouds ; while, lastly, (5) the remainder of that 
 final volume, written four years later,^ is a treatise on " the 
 relations of Art to God and man." 
 
 We are concerned here, first, with what I have called 
 the interlude. In looking back over his first two volumes, 
 and forward to what he had yet to say, Ruskin was struck 
 with obvious difficulties and apparent contradictions. He 
 had started with defining the greatest art as that which 
 contained the greatest ideas ; he had thus insisted on 
 the spiritual side of art. Then he had turned to his 
 defence of Turner; and there, owing to the nature of 
 the ' attacks he had to meet, his principal object was to 
 prove that Turner had given more material and actual 
 
 ' Preface to Modern Painters, in the first draft, at about the 
 
 vol. V. same time as the Fourth "Volume, 
 
 ^ It is probable that Parts vi. but were held over, owing to the 
 
 and vii. were written, at any rate bulk of that volume. 
 
 VOL. I. y
 
 338 APPEARANCE OF CONTRADICTIONS 
 
 CHAP, truth than other painters. Then why did not his pictures 
 • convey the same impression of truth to ordinary spectators ? 
 But, again, in his second volume, he had been led to 
 praise in terms hardly less enthusiastic than those applied 
 to Turner, the frescoes of the Italian " primitives," so naive, 
 so limited in imitative resources, though representing 
 so beautifully a religious ideal. Then what are the true 
 limits of idealism in art ? Sometimes, in defending Turner, 
 Raskin seemed to be pleading for idealism as against the 
 material imitation of the Dutch painters ; at other times, to 
 be pleading for realism as against the ideal compositions of 
 the school of Claude. He perceived the difficulties which 
 all this presents to careless readers, and the appearance of 
 contradiction to which it exposed him. And yet, once more: 
 since the second volume of Modern Painters appeared, 
 Ruskin had been prominently before the public as the 
 champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose early work was 
 distinguished among other characteristics by its elaborate 
 finish and minuteness of detail. The critics with one 
 consent fell upon Ruskin for his inconsistency in admiring 
 at once the closely manipulated foregrounds of Millais in 
 his early works and the misty distances of Turner. What, 
 then, was it, in final analysis, in which the greatness of 
 Turner consisted — in truths that he recorded, or in visions 
 that he invented ? Was it the material, numberable beauties 
 of nature that he puts before us, or was he great for adding 
 
 " the gleam, 
 The light that never was on land or sea, 
 The consecration and the poet's dream " 1 
 
 It was to resolve such questions, to clear up these 
 ambiguities, that was Ruskin's first object in resuming 
 Modern Painters. The reader will observe throughout the 
 earlier chapters of the third volume a recurring refrain of 
 allusion to hostile criticisms and apparent contradictions. 
 To some extent Ruskin, as we have already seen, never 
 sought to deny the existence of self-contradictions in his 
 work. His principal book was written at intervals during 
 seventeen years ; he was twenty-four when he began it, and
 
 POLYGONAT. TRUTH 339 
 
 forty-one when he ended it, and he had been learning all CHAP. 
 the tinje. And, again, though Truth is one, yet since Error XVII. 
 is various, the statements of the truth must be as many- 
 sided as the faults which it has to correct. Ruskin illus- 
 trates this thought in his diary of 1849 from his supreme 
 arbiter — the text of the Bible : — 
 
 " It will 1)0 found that throughout the Scriptures there are on 
 every subject two opposite groups of texts ; and a middle group, 
 which contains the truth that rests between the two others. The 
 opposite texts are guards against the abuse of the central texts — 
 guards set in opposite directions ; and if these guards are considered 
 as themselves containing the truth, instead of being a mere fence 
 against some form of error, all maniier of falsehood may be supported 
 in scriptural language. But on the otlier hand, this complicated 
 structure, while it betrays the careless, rewards the faithful reader ; 
 and when it is fully understood presents a form of security against 
 error such as could not in any otherwise have been attained (like 
 the Mont Blanc set between opponent fan-shaped strata) — a security 
 which every thoughtful and earnest reader has felt. For instance, ' Re- 
 joice evermore ' and ' Blessed are they that mourn ' are two gu.arding 
 and contradictory texts ; and the truth they guard is the central 
 text ' But and if ye suffer for righteousness' sake, happy are ye.' " 
 
 Fortified by these reflections, Ruskin often gloried in the 
 charge that he was apt to contradict himself. " I shall 
 endeavour for the future," he writes, " to put my self- 
 contradictions in short sentences and direct terms, in order 
 to save sagacious persons the trouble of looking for them." ^ 
 It is possible by taking passages from their context, and 
 isolating them from the statements to which they are 
 severally opposed, to represent Ruskin in turn as preaching 
 distinctness and indistinctness in art, finish and incom- 
 pleteness, idealism and realism, minuteness and breadth. 
 But, having in the first two volumes of Modern Painters 
 stated at different places different sides of the polygon of 
 truth as he conceived it, he now set himself in the third 
 volume to define his central position on many of the vexed 
 questions which have been indicated above. The book 
 ^ Two Paths, § 86 7i.
 
 340 RUSKIN^S CENTRAL POSITION 
 
 CHAP, exhibits many "oscillations of temper" and "progressions 
 * of discovery"; but "in the main aim and principle," he 
 says, " there is no variation from its first syllable to its last. 
 It declares the perfectness and eternal beauty of the work 
 of God ; and tests all work of man by concurrence with, or 
 subjection to that."^ In the application of this general 
 principle to particular questions, Ruskin's central position 
 may be stated somewhat as follows : That art is the greatest 
 which expresses the greatest number of the noblest ideas. 
 Art is the expression of an artist's soul. A man may 
 have soul and not be able to paint, in which case he ought 
 not to be a painter. But be his manipulation never so 
 perfect, he is not a great artist unless he is also capable ot 
 receiving and imparting noble impressions. In the third 
 volume, " nominally treating of ' Many Things,' will be found," 
 says Ruskin himself, " the full expression of what I knew 
 best ; namely, that all ' things,' many or few, which we ought 
 to paint, must be first distinguished boldly from the nothings 
 which we ought not." ^ The business of the landscape- 
 painter is to paint his impressions. The noblest impressions 
 derivable from natural scenery are not those which lend 
 themselves most easily to deceptive imitation. The way to 
 receive noble impressions from Nature is first to study her 
 with unquestioning fidelity. Imagination is a form of vision ; 
 it is idle and unprofitable unless it is of things seen by the 
 mind's eye as truthfully, as precisely, as much in accordance 
 with ideal truths as if seen by the corporeal eye. Finish in 
 art is relative to the object pursued. It may be wasted on 
 unworthy objects and thrown away on secondary matters; it 
 is never right unless it is the means of giving an additional 
 truth. "There is nothing that can be labelled in any of 
 this," perhaps some one may say ; " this body of doctrine is 
 not exactly realism, nor idealism, nor impressionism, and 
 Ruskinism cannot be identified with any of them." That 
 is true, and is perhaps what Ruskin meant when he said 
 that no true disciple of his would ever be a Ruskinian,^ for 
 
 ^ Preface to Modern Painters, vol. v. 
 
 2 The Three Colours of Pre-Bajphaelitism (1878), § 16. 
 
 » St. Mark's Rest, § 209.
 
 A HARMONY OF CONCLUSIONS 34.1 
 
 what he taucrht was only what he had learnt from the CHAP. 
 
 • XVTl 
 
 good and great of many different ages and many diverse ^ 
 
 schools. 
 
 Riiskin himself nowhere states the case so clearly as in 
 some pages which were found among his papers after his 
 death, and which seem to have been intended for an addition 
 to the passage in Tlte Stones of Venice where he says "that 
 art is valuable or otherwise, only as it expresses the person- 
 ality, activity, and living perception of a good and great 
 human soul," and again that " all art is great, good, and 
 true only so far as it is distinctively the work of manhood 
 in its entire and highest sense " : — 
 
 " I believe it has been acutely felt by all men who have ever 
 devoted themselves to the elucidation of abstract truth, that exactly 
 in proportion to the scope, depth, and importance of any given 
 principle was the difficulty of so expressing it as that it should not 
 be capable of misapprehension, and of guarding it against certain 
 forms of associated error. . . . And this I have long felt to be also 
 the case with every great principle of art which it has been my 
 endeavour in this and my other Avritings to assert or defend. There 
 is not any one but has, as it were, two natures in it — at least two 
 different colours or sides — according to the things in connexion with 
 which it is viewed ; and therefore, exactly in proportion to the 
 breadth and universality which I have endeavoured to give to all 
 my statements, is their liability to appearances of contradiction, and 
 the certainty of their being misunderstood by any person who does 
 not take the pains to examine the connexion. 
 
 "This is peculiarly the case with respect to the principle now 
 under consideration. ... It is not only the most important, but it 
 is the head and sum of all others ; it is in fact this which, asserted 
 first in the opening chapters of Modern Painters, I have been en- 
 deavouring in all that I have written subsequently, either in various 
 ways to establish or to show the consequences of, if established. . . . 
 
 "In the second chapter of the first volume of Modern Painters 
 it was generally alleged that all art was great according to the 
 Greatness of the ideas it conveyed — not according to the perfec- 
 tion of the means adopted for conveying them. The essence of the 
 Art was said to be in the thought — not in the language, and the
 
 342 "HEAD AND SUM" OF MODERN PAINTERS 
 
 CHAP, subjects of inquiry laid before the reader were the different kinds of 
 ■ Ideas which art could convey. It was assumed, therefore, that all 
 great or, as commonly worded, fine art was essentially Ideal or of 
 the Soul, as distinguished from the lower art which is principally 
 of the body — that is, of the hands, limbs, and sight — but not of 
 the soul. There is not a definite separation between the two kinds — 
 a blacksmith may put soul into the making of a horseshoe, and an 
 architect may put none into the building of a church. Only exactly 
 in proportion as the Soul is thrown into it, the art becomes Fine ; 
 and not in proportion to any amount of 2)ractice, ingenuity, strength, 
 knowledge, or other calculable and saleable excellence thrown into 
 it. This is the one truth which thoroughly to understand and act 
 upon will create a school of art in any kind ; and which to mis- 
 understand and deny will for ever render great art impossible. This 
 one truth I have throughout had at my heart — variously struggling 
 and endeavouring to illustrate it — according to the end immediately 
 in view. In the part of Modern Painters, just referred to, the kinds 
 of ideas conveyable by art were resolved into three principal classes 
 — ideas of Truth, Beauty, and Relation; and it was my purpose 
 with respect to all three classes to show, that the Truth of greater 
 art was that which the soul apprehended, not the sight merely ; that 
 the Beauty of great art was in like manner that which the soul 
 perceived, not the senses merely ; that the Thoughts of great art 
 were those which the soul originated, and not the Understanding 
 merely. But because the volume of Modern Painters was written in 
 definite defence of a great artist against whom it was alleged by the 
 commonality of critics that the only merit of his work — if it had 
 merit at all — was in its imaginative power, and that there was no 
 truth nor resemblance to Nature in his pictures, I met these persons 
 first upon their own ground, and devoted that first volume to the 
 demonstration that not only Turner did paint the material and 
 actual truth of Nature, but that the truth had never in landscape 
 been fully painted by any other man. And in doing this I had to 
 meet two distinct classes of opponents, first and principally those 
 who looked for nothing in art but a literal and painstaking imitation 
 of the externals of Nature, as in the works of the Dutch school, 
 against whom I had to prove that the truths thus sought were but a 
 small part of the truth of Nature, and that there were higher and
 
 THE TllUTH OF TURNER 343 
 
 more occult kinds of truth which could not be rendered but by CHAP. 
 some sacrifice of imitative accuracy, and which Turner had by such 
 sacrifice succeeded in rendering for the first time in the history of 
 art. But in the second place and collaterally I had to meet those 
 men who in their love of system or ' composition ' disregarded or 
 denied the truth of Nature altogether, and supposed that the Imagi- 
 nation was independent of truth. Against whom I had to assert 
 the dignity and glory of Truth, and its necessity as the foundation 
 of all art whatsoever. ... As there is an ultimate truth, which only 
 the soul perceives, and there is an ultimate expression, which only 
 the soul employs, very often the most thoughtful and expressive art 
 must be that which is in one sense least like Nature ; that is to say, 
 symbolical or comprehensive instead of imitative. To all this kind 
 of expression, in which the true early schools were unrivalled, the 
 modern artist is either utterly dead, or only unconsciously and 
 imperfectly sensitive ; and therefore in all I have written it has 
 been necessary for me to meet alternately two forms of opposition 
 just as antagonistic to each other as to truth — one that of the 
 Formalists, who despised Nature, and the other that of the lower 
 and more ignorant Naturalists, who despised symbolism — and there- 
 with the whole range of the magnificent thoughts opened in work of 
 the early ages." 
 
 Some of these double-sided principles are discussed in the 
 earlier chapters of the third vohime of Modern Painters; 
 and in connexion with them should be read, according to 
 the analysis here suggested, the first few chapters of the 
 fourth volume. The purpose of those chapters (i.-v.) is to 
 clear up other difficulties connected with the practice of 
 Turner; marking the proper meaning and sphere of the 
 picturesque ; contrasting topographical accuracy with essen- 
 tial truth of impression ; explaining Turner's principles of 
 light, and the truths Avhich arc revealed in " Turnerian 
 mystery." 
 
 IV 
 
 The second portion of the third volume (chapter xi. 
 onwards) has a somewhat different purpose, and Ruskin 
 here adopts a different treatment. His method now becomes
 
 344 THE HISTORY OF LANDSCAPE 
 
 CHAP, historical, and the subject-matter of the chapters is the 
 XVII. History of Landscape as deducible from art and literature — 
 the History, that is, of men's feelings towards natural scenery 
 — a subject which is resumed at the end of the fourth 
 volume, in the chapters on " The Mountain Gloom " and 
 " The Mountain Glorj^" where Ruskin discusses the influ- 
 ence of mountains on the life and character of peoples. 
 These ten chapters (the last eight of the third, and the 
 last two of the fourth) form, in subject-matter, a separate 
 treatise ; they have a most attractive theme, which Ruskin 
 was the first to treat. The subject is a very large one; its 
 proper discussion would require, he says, " knowledge of the 
 entire history of two great ages of the world," and he does 
 not claim for his chapters more than helpfulness in sug- 
 gestion. At a later time he admitted that the logic of his 
 conclusions had not entirely satisfied himself. What is the 
 cause or nature of love of mountains ? If it is all that 
 Ruskin claimed for it, why does it not affect all noble 
 minds alike, and why must the account between Gloom and 
 Glory be so evenly balanced ? " The more I analysed," he 
 says, " the less I could either understand or justify," and 
 " the less I felt able to deny the claim of prosaic and ignobly- 
 minded persons to be allowed to like the land level." " In 
 the end," he adds, "I found there was nothing for it but 
 simply to assure those recusant and grovelling persons that 
 they were perfectly wrong, and that nothing could be ex- 
 pected, either in art or literature, from people who liked 
 to live among snipes and widgeons." ^ But if Ruskin's 
 historical and literary sketch of the Influence of Landscape 
 cannot claim to have said the last word on the subject of 
 which it treats, it abounds in suggestive thoughts ; it has 
 attracted many inquirers on to the same field, and the title 
 of one of the chapters — " Of the Pathetic Fahacy " — has 
 become a stock phrase in subsequent literary criticism. The 
 analyses of poetry, incidentally contained in this volume, 
 together with those in the second volume, form, indeed, a 
 singularly stimulating and suggestive essay in literary criti- 
 cism. His particular judgments are indeed open to question ; 
 1 The Art of Emjlaml (1883), § 174.
 
 MOUNTAIN BEAUTY 345 
 
 what judgments which are individual and genuine are not ? CHAP. 
 Thus Rossetti quarrelled with Kuskiu's praise of Longfellow's ^^■'■^• 
 Golden Legend, as also with the extracts from Browning, in 
 the fourth volume. "Really," he wrote, "the omissions in 
 Browning's passage are awful, and the union with Longfellow 
 worse. How I loathe Wishi-wasJti, — of course without read- 
 ing it." 1 So, again, Matthew Arnold in his Oxford lectures 
 On Trandating Homer found fault with Ruskin for reading 
 into the Iliad more sentiment than in fact exists there. 
 Other critics at the time objected to this or that judgment. 
 Yet Ruskin's sense of the excellent was so keen and so 
 strong, and his analysis of his individual impressions so 
 subtle, that few men can read these chapters without 
 stimulus. " I never read anything," says Sir Leslie Stephen, 
 of Ruskin's analysis of the imaginative faculty, "which 
 seemed to me to do more to make clear the true char- 
 acteristics of good poetry." 2 
 
 Whether or not Ruskin succeeded in establishing a 
 logical basis for mountain-lovers, he certainly did much to 
 increase their number and supply noble grounds for their 
 love. The chapters on "Mountain Beauty "which occupy 
 the greater part of the fourth volume were the result, as 
 we have seen, of studies and observations carried on during 
 many years ; and if, as he somewhere saj^s, the greatest 
 service in art or literature is to see accurately and report 
 faithfully, these records of what he had seen among the 
 mountains must be accounted among the most important 
 portions of his work. This was Ruskin's own opinion. 
 " The subject of the sculpture of mountains into the forms 
 of perpetual beauty which they miraculously receive from 
 God was," he says, " first taken up by me in the fourth 
 volume of Modern Painters, and the elementar}' principles 
 of it, there stated, form the most valuable and least faultful 
 part of the book." ^ "His power of seeing the phenomena 
 vividly was as remarkable," says Sir Leslie Stephen, " as 
 
 ^ Letters to irHliam Alliiujliain, ^ Introduction to W. G. Col- 
 
 p. 181. lin^wood's Limestone Alps of Savoy, 
 
 * 2'he National Review, April 1884. 
 1900.
 
 346 THE ALPINE CLUE 
 
 CHAP, his power, not always shared by scientific writers, of making 
 -^^^^" description interesting. I owe him a personal debt. Many 
 people had tried their hands upon Alpine descriptions since 
 Saussure ; but Ruskin's chapters seemed to have the fresh- 
 ness of a new revelation. The fourth volume of Modern 
 Painters infected me and other early members of the Alpine 
 Club with an enthusiasm for which, I hope, we are still 
 grateful. Our prophei indeed ridiculed his disciples for 
 treating Mont Blanc as a greased pole. We might well 
 forgive our satirist, for he had revealed a new pleasure which 
 we might mix with ingredients which he did not fully 
 appreciate." ^ The Alpine Club, it should be stated, was 
 not yet in existence, nor had any attempt as yet been made 
 to scale the Matterhorn. Ruskin was not a climber in the 
 Alpine Club's sense of the word, but he knew and loved the 
 mountains as few other men have done, and in one respect 
 at least he was an Alpine pioneer. He was the first to draw 
 the Matterhorn accurately — the first, too, he says, to photo- 
 graph it,2 and the plates, no less than the descriptive 
 chapters, in the fourth volume, may well have acted as a 
 revelation and an incitement to the original founders of 
 the Alpine Club — men who, as Sir Leslie Stephen says, had 
 learnt, in part from Ruskin, to find in climbing scientific 
 and artistic interests as well as athletic exercise. Another 
 past President of the Club, Mr. Douglas Freshfield, has 
 borne testimony to Ruskin's services in this respect. Ruskin, 
 he says, "had a faculty of precise observation, the basis of 
 all scientific research, which made him the most formidable 
 of critics to any man of science whose eyesight might be 
 temporarily affected by some preconceived theory. But this 
 appreciation of detail in no way interfered with Ruskin's 
 romantic delight in the whole, in the sentiment and spirit 
 of mountain landscapes. No writer has added so much to 
 our enjoyment of Alpine scenery." ^ 
 
 In Ruskin's mind, however, there was a deeper object 
 in view than to arouse interest in Alpine scenery. The 
 
 1 The National Eci-iew,ATpril 1900. » The Alpine Journal, May 1900, 
 
 " Introduction to W. G. Col- vol. xx. p. 127. 
 lingwood's Limestone Alps of Savoy.
 
 RECEPTION OF VOLUMES 3 AND 4 347 
 
 human interest was never long absent from his thoughts CHAP, 
 when contemphiting scenes of natural beauty or grandeur. -^^^I- 
 It was not only that he moralised the mountains. Matthew 
 Arnold says of the nature-poetry of Wordsworth that it 
 enables us, not so much to front "the cloud of mortal 
 destiny," as to " put it by." To Ruskin, the study of nature 
 was, on the other hand, a call to action. It has been sug- 
 gested above that, from one point of view, the chapters of 
 the fourth volume on "The Mountain Glory" and "The 
 Mountain Gloom " belong to the analysis of landscape- 
 sentiment which is given in the third volume ; and that is 
 true, but their actual place was essential in Ruskin's scheme : 
 they contained the practical gist, as he intended it, of his 
 mountain-studies. "All the investigations undertaken by 
 me at this time were connected in my own mind," he says, 
 "with the practical hope of arousing the attention of the 
 Swiss and Italian mountain peasantry to an intelligent 
 administration of the natural treasures of their woods and 
 streams." 1 He formed schemes a few years afterwards for 
 coming himself to live among the Alps, and trying his 
 hand at relieving the Mountain Gloom.^ And here, in these 
 volumes, he begs his readers, if they condemn the seclusion 
 of the anchorites, to show themselves worthier by seeking 
 inspiration for practical benevolence from the mountain 
 solitudes ; he desires to interest them in the hard struggles 
 of the peasant-life, and bids them remember how much 
 might be done by well-devised charity " to fill a whole Alpine 
 valley with happiness." 
 
 The attractiveness of his themes, the addition of the 
 illustrations, and the splendour of his style — chastened in 
 these later volumes, and freed from the affectations of the 
 second, assured them an appreciative welcome. He found 
 too, that his words on other subjects were beginning to be 
 listened to. His appendices in Stones of Venice and Modern 
 Painters on Education attracted far more attention, he says, 
 because part of his architectural and pictorial work, than 
 ever afterwards his exclusively commercial and social 
 
 ^ Deucalion, ii. (" Revision "). 
 See Vol. II. p. G2.
 
 348 REVIEW BY MORRIS AND BURNE-JONES 
 
 CHAP, analyses/ He found interested listeners even in official 
 XVII. circles, and a year or two later Royal Commissions and Select 
 Committees called him before them. Meanwhile reviews 
 in the press were numerous, and, on the whole, very com- 
 plimentary ; his increasing popularity brought, on the other 
 hand, some of the heavier organs into the field against him. 
 One attack— that in the Quarterly Review for March 1856 
 — is worth mentioning as having called forth in reply one 
 of the few productions of Burne-Jones's pen. This was an 
 article entitled " Ruskin and the Quarterly" which he con- 
 tributed to the Oxford and Cambridge Magaziiie for June 
 1856, and which represented the joint feelings and views of 
 himself and William Morris.- They repudiate with scorn 
 the counter-assertion of the Quarterly " that the function 
 of art is not to express thought but to make pretty things," 
 and describe how from the dead-level of criticism given 
 over to worship of the conventional and the merely pretty, 
 " this man John Ruskin rose, seeming to us like a Luther 
 of the arts." An earlier article in the same magazine had 
 referred to Ruskin as " speaking, if ever man spoke, by the 
 spirit and approval of heaven." ^ These books, said George 
 Eliot a little later, of the third and fourth volumes of Modern 
 Painters, " contain, I think, some of the finest writing of 
 the age. He is strongly akin to the sublimest part of 
 Wordsworth." * "I gave him my grateful thanks," wrote 
 Edward T bring in after years ; " it is a noble book, and did 
 noble work at the time, and will continue to do so. It did 
 what I should have thought impossible ; it smashed up for 
 ever the narrow technicalities of artists, and altered the 
 point of view not only for them, but for the whole world, 
 and gave the seeing eye, and thought, and feeling a practical 
 reality which they will never lose but never had before. . . . 
 I am grateful to him for having put me into a new world 
 
 ^ See his account of a visit to me that, while representing the 
 
 Lord Palmerston in Prfclerita, iii. opinions of both Morris and Burne- 
 
 § 29. Jones, it was for the most part 
 
 ^ The article is attributed to written by the latter. 
 Morris in Mr. H. Buxton Fornian's " April 18.56, pp. 212-225. 
 
 'flic Books of JFillium Morris (1897, * George ElioVs Life, vol. ii. 
 
 p. 27) ; but Mr. Mackail informs p. 7.
 
 THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND 349 
 
 of observation, beauty, power, and progressive thought which CHAP 
 amounted to what I have called it — a new world ; and every 
 day adds to the obligation." ' 
 
 The Introductory Essay in Tlce Harbours of England by 
 Turner and Ruskln, and the descriptions of the drawings, 
 form a supplementary chapter to Modern Painters. The 
 scientific portions of that book were, as Ruskin says,^ 
 "divided prospectively, in the first volume, into four 
 sections, . . . meant to define the essential forms of sky, 
 earth, water, and vegetation; but finding," he adds, "that 
 I had not the mathematical knowledge required for the 
 analysis of wave-action, the chapters on sea-painting were 
 never finished, the materials for them being partly used in 
 The Harbours of England." From this point of view, then, 
 the book was a continuation of the chapters on sea-painting 
 in the first volume of Modern Painters. From another 
 point of view, it was a chapter supplementary to the fourth 
 and fifth volumes, for the analysis of the several drawings 
 by Turner illustrates the artist's principles of composition as 
 expounded in Modern Painters. 
 
 Ruskin's father considered that his son's essay was " an 
 extremely well done thing," and " more likely to be received 
 without cavil than anything he had written." The judgment 
 of competent criticism has endorsed the former opinion, 
 and the reviewers of the day justified the latter. The Intro- 
 ductory Essay, Avritten in the middle of Ruskin's active life, 
 and in the plenitude of his power, has generally been recog- 
 nised as among his masterpieces. The subject — the treat- 
 ment of sea and shipping in art — had hitherto been almost 
 untouched, save by Ruskin himself (in the first volume of 
 Modern Painters). It was handled with the fulness of 
 illustration and the nicety of analysis characteristic of his 
 best work. The style shows his special powers at their best ; 
 it is imaginative without being fanciful, and the language, 
 though rich and luxuriant, is free alike from over-emphasis 
 and from over-elaboration. " No book in our language/' 
 says Mr. Frederic Harrison in his essay on "Ruskin as 
 
 1 Life of Edward Thrimj, by G. R. Parkin, 1898, vol. ii. p. 245. 
 • Preface to In Montibus Sanctis.
 
 350 A PROSE-POEM ON THE SEA 
 
 CHAP. Master of Prose," " shows more varied resources over prose- 
 XVII. writing, or an English more pure, more vigorous, more 
 enchanting." Never, too — at least in prose — had the beauty 
 and mystery of the sea, or the glory of ships and shipping, 
 received expression so rapturous and yet so penetrating as 
 that which Ruskin in this essay pours forth. It compelled 
 admiration in quarters the least favourably predisposed. 
 I have quoted in earlier chapters the tirades of the lead- 
 ing literary journal against Ruskin; let us read here its 
 ungrudging tribute to his Harbours of England: — 
 
 " Since Byron's ' Address to the Ocean,' a more beautiful poem 
 on the sea has not been written. It is a prose poem worthy of a 
 nation at whose throne the seas, like captive monsters, are chained 
 and bound. It is worthy of the nation of Blake and Nelson, of 
 Drake and Howe, and true island hearts will beat quicker as they 
 read. To first appreciate, and first to enable others to appreciate, 
 some fresh and unheeded beauty of the universe, is a gift second 
 only to that of creation. After this book has been mastered and 
 got by heart — as it will be — the waves that lap and wash our clifi's, 
 that now heap on them rough kisses, and now rush on them like 
 hungry leopards, will speak to Englishmen in a fuller and more 
 articulate voice. A great mind has at last come and almost 
 deciphered the meaning of the surge's moan, and the deep sea's 
 shout of madness. The chemist may still look on the sea as a 
 saline draught, and the cosmographer deem it a thing to fill up 
 maps with; but Mr. Kuskin, with his earnest, meditative wisdom, 
 teaches us to see in the unexhausted theme of poets and painters 
 a beauty as yet untouched and a mystery as insolvable as eternity." ^ 
 
 The Harbours of England touches also one of the most 
 characteristic sides of the great English painter's genius, 
 and links inseparably the names of Turner and Ruskin. 
 
 ^ Athenmm, July 26, 1856.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 IN A LITERARY WORKSHOP 
 
 I know of no genius but the genius of hard work." 
 
 —J. M. W. Turner. 
 
 "Writing never gave me," says Ruskin, "the kind of pain 
 of which Carlyle so wildly complains, — to my total amaze- 
 ment and boundless puzzlement, be it in passing said ; for he 
 talked just as vigorously as he wrote, and the book he makes 
 bitterest moan over, Friedrich, bears the outer aspect of 
 richly enjoj-ed gossip, and lovely involuntary eloquence of 
 description or praise. My own literary work was always 
 done as quietly and methodically as a piece of tapestry. I 
 knew exactly what I had got to say, put the words firmly in 
 their places like so many stitches, hemmed the edges of 
 chapters round Avith what seemed to me graceful flourishes, 
 touc'jed them finally with my cunningest points of colour, 
 and read the work to papa and mamma at breakfast next 
 morning as a girl shows her sampler." — Such is his account 
 in Prceterita of the method of his authorship. " It gave me 
 no serious trouble," he adds ; " I should think the pleasure 
 of driving, to a good coachman, of ploughing, to a good 
 farmer, much more of dressmaking, to an inventive and 
 benevolent modiste, must be greatly more piquant than the 
 most proudly ardent hours of book-writing have over been 
 to me." The master of a literary workshop is the first 
 authority upon its methods; but the passage just quoted 
 will sucTfrest, I think, that Ruskin's account is to be taken 
 with some allowance for the note of subtle humour which 
 ma.kos itself heard throughout Prceterita. There is a 
 distinction, too, to be drawn between the preliminary work 
 
 351
 
 352 RUSKIN^S ACCOUNT OF HIS WORKMANSHIP 
 
 CHAP, upon which his books were founded and the later task of 
 XVIII. putting the materials into shape. The serious reading, the 
 close studies, and much of the thought and emotion which 
 went to the makino- of his earlier books were done during 
 his sojourns abroad. "It often required," he says, "a week 
 or two's hard walking to determine some geological problem, 
 now dismissed in an unnoticed sentence ; and it constantly 
 needed examination and thought, prolonged during many 
 days in a picture gallery, to form opinions which the reader 
 may suppose to be dictated by caprice, and will hear only 
 to dispute." ^ Preceding chapters have told the story of 
 such preliminary studies, and a later chapter will illustrate 
 it further. It is only the final work at home that Ruskin 
 likens to the girl's sampler. And even here it would be a 
 great mistake to suppose that the stitches were put into 
 their places, and the edges hemmed, without expenditure 
 of time, thought, and trouble. Ruskin himself, in many 
 other passages, has told us the contrary. The arrangement, 
 both of his materials and of his sentences, cost him, in 
 fact, infinite labour. Writing of his work, upon the later 
 volumes of Modern Painters, he said: "The arranscement 
 of materials which I have been collecting for ten years brings 
 with it perpetual memories of things which were left to be 
 done at the last — i.e., just now — and the quantity of mortar 
 which I want, to put all together, is so great that I must 
 needs go to gather stubble, for myself — nobody being able to 
 help me, and time a hard taskmaster." ^ And then with 
 regard to the literary workmanship : "a sentence of Modern 
 Painters," he says, "was often written four or five times 
 over in my own hand, and tried in every word for perhaps 
 an hour — perhaps a forenoon — before it Avas passed for the 
 printer," ^ So, again, in a letter to his father (Jan. 18, 1852) 
 he said : — 
 
 " I took great pains with most of the Seven Lamps, and, I re- 
 collect, as I read over the passages, the labour they cost me — some 
 
 ^ Modern Painter.'^, preface to vol. iii. 
 
 2 Letter to Mrs. Acland, July 10, 1855. 
 
 ^ Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 123. See also above, p, 320.
 
 HIS STYLE 353 
 
 of them being as highly finished as it is, I believe, possible for CHAP. 
 me to finish prose. I remember, for instance, that the last half- 
 page of the 'Lamp of Beauty' cost me a whole forenoon — from 
 ten to two, and that then I went out to walk quite tired, and yet 
 not satisfied with the last sentence, and turned and re-turned it 
 all the way to Dulwich." 
 
 I am able to certify this account of laborious revision as 
 being true, not only of the books specially mentioned by 
 Ruskin, but of all of which the manuscript is extant. 
 
 II 
 
 Ruskin has been named by Lord Morley as one of 
 the " three giants of prose style " who strode across the 
 literature of the nineteenth century.^ Matthew Arnold cited 
 a passage from Modern Painters as marking the highest 
 point to which the art of prose can ever hope to reach- 
 Tennyson, on being asked to name the six authors in 
 whom the stateliest English prose was to be found, gave — 
 Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, De Quincey, and 
 Ruskin. I have lived for many years behind the scenes, 
 as it were, of Ruskin's pageant of style — a pageant as 
 full of variety as of splendour. Through his diaries, note- 
 books, and letters, I have been admitted to all the secrets 
 of his literary workshop. What, I may be asked, are the 
 secrets ? I suppose the truest ansAver would be to say 
 that there are none. You may analyse a style into its 
 component parts as systematically as you like ; you may 
 trace, label, and collate as diligently as you can ; and you 
 will be little nearer in the end, than in the beginning, to the 
 secret of a great writer's charm and power. The essential 
 features are those which are underived, incommunicable, 
 individual. The style is the man. "The wind bloweth 
 where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but 
 canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth : so 
 is every man that is born of the spirit." But there is 
 always a certain interest in tracing a great writer's models 
 
 ^ See below, p. 389. 
 VOL. I. Z
 
 354 LITERARY MODELS 
 
 CHAP, and methods. Ruskin's prose style was even in his earhest 
 XVIII. essays his own, and, except in the case of the second vokime 
 of Modern Painters, he did not consciously imitate any 
 model. But every day he had great models before him. 
 There were two tasks which he seldom omitted ; they were 
 undertaken primarily for edification and enlightenment, 
 but they also influenced his style. He rose with the sun, 
 and before breakfast made notes of a few verses of the 
 Bible — discussing with himself the precise force and mean- 
 ing of every word, exactly as he tells us in Sesame to do 
 with all our serious reading; and then he took down his 
 Plato and translated a passage from the Republic or the 
 Laivs. Plato was more particularly the study of his later 
 period, and it coloured much of his writing. The Platonic 
 charm which mingles humour and seriousness, the Platonic 
 irony which propounds a paradox with mischievous inno- 
 cence, are very frequent in Fors Clavigera. They were 
 almost the staple of many of his " Arrows of the Chace," and 
 they rippled sparklingly through much of his conversation 
 — to the sad bewilderment, sometimes, of people who, when 
 they are serious at all, like to be serious altogether. Ruskin's 
 Bible studies were constant throughout his life. The Bible 
 is the indispensable handbook to any close study of his 
 works; and it must be in Greek and Latin, as well as 
 in English, for he was in the habit of comparing the three, 
 quoting from the Septuagint, the Vulgate, or the Authorised 
 Version, according as he found one or the other the fullest 
 in meaning or grandest in sound. Many a long and arduous 
 search has this habit caused to his editors. It was all 
 very well to have a Cruden's Concordance at your elbow, 
 but Cruden went mad before he had thought of indexing 
 the other versions. Thanks be unto him, however, for 
 having included the Apocrj'pha — a portion of the Hebrew 
 Scriptures with which Ruskin Avas as familiar as with the 
 Canonical Books. The constant study of the Bible coloured 
 alike Ruskin's thought and his style ; it is ingrained in the 
 texture of almost every piece from his pen. Some one has 
 counted sixty Bible references in a single lecture. I have 
 not counted, but I think that the total number of such
 
 KNOWLEDGE OF THE BIBLE 355 
 
 references, traced in the Index to his Complete Works, CHAP. 
 must be about 5000. He knew the Bible almost by heart, X'V'ITI. 
 and he generally quoted it in his books from memory. 
 The accuracy of his memory, here as in other matters, 
 was very great. I can recall only one slip, and that a very 
 small one, in his references to the Bible. It occurs in the 
 chapter on the Early Renaissance in The Stones of Venice. 
 He is there speaking of the learning which the mighty 
 Venetian masters wore without feeling it encumber their 
 living limbs. " But I speak," he goes on, " of the Renais- 
 sance as an evil time, because, when it saw those men go 
 burning forth into the battle, it mistook their armour for 
 their strength ; and forthwith encumbered with the painful 
 panoply every stripling who ought to have gone forth 
 only with his own choice of three smooth stones out of 
 the brook." Now the number of smooth stones which David 
 chose him out of the brook was five. The two odd stones 
 are hardly worth throwing at Ruskin's memory. 
 
 The verification of references was a task Avhich Avas not 
 congenial in Ruskin's literary workshop, and sometimes it 
 was, of deliberation, omitted. In one of his essays he had 
 quoted Keats's line as " For ever shalt thou love, and she 
 be fair.'"' Mr. Wedderburn pointed out the slight misquota- 
 tion, when reading the proof of the paper ; but Ruskin 
 left it, saying, " Never mind, they'll see I quoted from 
 memory." He was, and he was not, a great reader. He 
 was not a reader in the sense of a student who sets himself 
 to master everything that has been written on a given 
 subject. He eschewed commentaries. But he was a large 
 reader of the original texts in classical literature — mostly 
 in English, Greek, Latin, and Dante (to whom his references 
 number some hundreds), but a good deal also in French. 
 He filled many note-books, but his entries in them were 
 (except in the case of the Greek and Latin writers) more 
 in the nature of his own reflections on things read, than 
 by way of collections in aid of memory. The range and 
 extent of his literary allusiveness entailed very heavy 
 labour in the editing of his works ; for he seldom gave 
 his references, and, when he did, not infrequently gave
 
 356 ALLUSIVENESS 
 
 CHAP, them wrongly. He was fond of introducing allusions, not 
 XVIII. Qj^iy ^Q literature, but to events, sayings, or writings of the 
 passing day. He read the newspapers diligently, and was 
 in the habit, as I have already noted,i of filing significant 
 items. Some volumes of newspaper-cuttings, which once 
 stood in his workshop, have come under my observation. 
 Those who read Ruskin without a knowledge of his allu- 
 sions to passing incidents will certainly miss much of the 
 meaning, even if they do not gather sometimes a most 
 erroneous impression. For instance, in various places 
 Ruskin girds at the then Bishop of Manchester, Dr. Fraser — 
 accusing him, in one place, of " not being able to see much," 
 and, in another, of "lascivious thirst." Putting the two 
 charges together, a reader might suppose that Ruskin 
 accused the blameless Bishop of some personal failing. 
 Well, he did accuse Dr. Fraser of a good deal, but not of 
 anything like that. What he was referring to in each 
 passage was a speech once made by the Bishop in which, 
 defending Manchester's desire to drink of the waters of 
 the Lake Country, he had added that after all he supposed 
 that not many people had ever seen Thirlmere. 
 
 Another trick of Ruskin's writing is what may be 
 called a habit of esoteric allusiveness ; but this is only to 
 be found in some of his pieces. He had, as he said, three 
 different ways of writing : — 
 
 "One with the single view of making myself understood, in 
 which I necessarily omit a great deal of what comes into my head. 
 
 "Another in which I say what I think ought to be said, in 
 what I suppose to be the best words I can find for it. 
 
 " And my third way of writing is to say all that comes into 
 my head for my own pleasure, in the first words that come, 
 retouching them afterwards into approximate grammar." ^ 
 
 Ruskin in this third manner is often difficult to follow. 
 I will give a passage in illustration. He is talking about 
 the infinite patience which the art of engraving requires, 
 
 » See above, p. 273. " The Queen of the Air, § 134.
 
 HIS ESOTERIC MANNER 357 
 
 and has compared it to that of the patient Griselda ; and CHAP. 
 then he goes on : — 
 
 " I cannot get to my work in this paper, somehow ; the web 
 of these old enigmas entangles me again and again. That rough 
 syllable which begins the name of Griselda, ' Gries,' ' the stone ' ; 
 the roar of the long fall of the Toccia seems to mix with the sound 
 of it, bringing thoughts of the great Alpine patience ; mute snow 
 wreathed by grey rock, till avalanche time comes — patience of 
 mute tormented races till the time of the Grey league came ; at 
 last impatient. (Not that hitherto it has hewn its way to much : 
 the Rhine foam of the Via Mala seeming to have done its work 
 better.) But it is a noble colour that Grison Grey; — dawn colour 
 — graceful for a faded silk to ride in, and wonderful, in paper, for 
 getting a glow upon, if you begin wisely." ^ 
 
 This passage will, I imagine, be largely unintelKgible to 
 many readers. But one who knows his Raskin and is 
 familiar with the turns and twists of the author's thought 
 will have understood how Griselda brings into his head 
 memories of the Tosa Falls beneath the Gries glacier ; 
 then, how one Pass recalled another to his mind and made 
 him think of the long oppression of Rastia under petty 
 tyrants, and of the long Alpine patience of " The Mountain 
 Gloom " ; and then, how the rule of the petty chieftains 
 was at last shaken otf by the formation of the Grison 
 Confederation, in which one of the constituents was the 
 Grey League ; hence the name of the present canton 
 (Graubtlnden, Grisons). Next, in thinking of the central 
 defile, the Via Mala, he doubts whether the men of the 
 Graubiiaden have hewn their own way in the world 
 so decisively as the foaming river. Then the colour of 
 Grison Grey recalls to him at one moment Tennyson's 
 Enid ("Earl, entreat her by m}'' love. Albeit I give no 
 reason but my wish, That she ride with me in her faded 
 silk"); and, at the next. Turner's brilliant water-colour 
 sketches on grey paper — wonderful achievements, possible 
 only to one who had begun wisely by long discipline and 
 
 * The Cestus of Aglaia, § 35.
 
 358 CAREFUL REVISION 
 
 CHAP, had learnt the art of making each touch tell from the 
 
 XVIII. beginning. Every one of those allusions has its parallel 
 
 passage in some other place of the author's writings. Ruskin 
 
 in his esoteric manner has to be interpreted by Ruskin. The 
 
 titles of many of his books are full of the same manner. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But what were his methods in his other and more 
 general manners, when he had the single view of making 
 himself understood and said what he desired in the best 
 words he could find for it ? What was his secret ? He 
 would have told us, I think, what he reported Turner 
 as saying, " I know of no genius but the genius of hard 
 work." There is no writer who gives a stronger impression 
 of ease than Cardinal Newman — a great master of simple 
 and lucid English, greater in these particular respects, 
 if we take the whole body of their writings, than Ruskin. 
 Yet even Newman said : " I have been obliged to take 
 great pains with everything I have written, and I often 
 write chapters over and over again, besides innumerable 
 corrections and interlined additions." Ruskin's method was 
 the same. The search for the right word, for the fitting 
 sentence, was often long ; and paragraphs and chapters 
 were written over and over again before they satisfied him. 
 And this applies equally to his most simple writing, such 
 as is to be found, for instance, in The Elements of Drawing ; 
 and to his most elaborate passages, such as the exordiums 
 and perorations in Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps, and 
 Tlce Stones of Venice. He carried on the process to the 
 stage of proofs, revises, and re-revises. Facsimiles of pages 
 re-written on the printed proof are included in the Library 
 Edition, and in this connexion Dr. Furnivall gave me an 
 anecdote. To Ruskin's father the publisher came one day 
 exhibiting a thickly scored final revise and explaining that 
 continuance in such practices would absorb all the author's 
 profits. " Don't let my son know," said the old gentleman ; 
 " John must have his things as he likes them ; pay hitn
 
 THE DESCRIPTION OF CALAIS TOWER 359 
 
 whatever would become due, apart from corrections, and CHAP. 
 send in a separate bill for them to me." Few authors, ^^m* 
 it may be feared, are blessed with so indulgent a parent. 
 
 Let us noAv open the door of the workshop, and note a 
 few instances of the revisions which occupied so many hours 
 and days of Ruskin's literary life. I will take first the 
 description of the old tower of Calais, a passage much 
 admired, as we have heard, by Rossetti. The following was 
 the first draft : — 
 
 "The large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it; the decay and 
 record of its years written so visibly upon it, yet without danger, 
 sign of weakness, or decay ; the stern, meagre massiveness and quiet 
 gloom of its poverty ; gnawed away by the channel winds, and over- 
 grown with the black and bitter sea grasses ; stripped of all comeli- 
 ness as if by a blight ; its slates and tiles all shaken and rent, and 
 yet not falling ; its brickwork full of bolts and holes and grisly fis- 
 sures, and yet stable like a bare brown rock ; its stripped barrenness 
 and desertness ; its utter carelessness of what regards it or thinks of 
 it in passing by ; putting forth no claim upon u s ; having no beauty, 
 nor desirableness, nor pride, nor grace, and yet asking for no pity, 
 neither; it is not like ruins, pensive, piteous, feebly or fondly 
 garrulous of its better days and yet useless ; but useful still, going 
 through its own daily work, as some old fisherman beaten grey by 
 storm, yet drawing his daily net ; so it stands with no memory of its 
 youth, nor sweetness, tenderness of age, complaint of its past nor 
 wofulness ; but in blanched and meagre massiveness and serviceable- 
 ness, gathering souls together beneath it ; the sound of its bells for 
 prayer still rolling through its rents ; and the grey peak of it seen far 
 across the sea, principal of the three that rise above the waste of 
 surfy sand and hillocked shore — the lighthouse, for Life and Death ; 
 and the Hall belfry, for Labour and Rest ; and this Church Tower, 
 for Praise." 
 
 The passage went through many intermediate shapes before 
 its final form was arrived at ; but comparing this first form 
 with the last, the reader will note how the author omitted 
 superfluous words, pared down alliterations, and knit the 
 sounds together into closer harmony with the sense. Mr.
 
 360 ASSONANCE AND ALLITERATION 
 
 CHAP. Frederic Harrison, in a careful analysis of Ruskin's literary 
 '^^■'■■'•■'•" technique, has observed how much the author relies upon 
 assonance for his effect; meaning by assonance, as distinct 
 from alliteration, " the recurrence of the same, or of cognate 
 sounds, not merely in the first letter of words, but where the 
 stress comes, in any part of a word, and that in sounds 
 whether vowel or consonant."^ The passage just given is 
 cited in illustration, and it is interesting to note that, while 
 some of the effects in question — as, for instance, the ex- 
 pressive phrase "the sound . . . rolling through its rents" 
 — were written down at once, others were obtained after 
 many retouchings — as, for instance, in the last words, with 
 the triple alliteration, the second of them being inverted 
 {"beUry for ^a^our"). To such analysis as this — most in- 
 structive to the student, and similar to that which the critic 
 himself applied to Turner's compositions — Ruskin would 
 perhaps have remarked, in the words which, as he mentions, 
 were used by Tennyson when some one pointed out to the 
 poet various laws deducible from his versification : " It's all 
 true ; I do observe them, but I never knew it." ^ 
 
 Another passage in the fourth volume of Modern Painters 
 is cited by Mr. Harrison for its majestic effect as a whole, 
 and for its incidental felicities — the account of the peasants 
 of the Valais, in the chapter on " The Mountain Gloom." 
 Here, again, the first draft will repay careful comparison 
 with the final version in the text : — 
 
 " They know not the name of beauty nor of knowledge. They 
 k7ioio dimly that of virtue. Love, patience, hospitality, truth, faith, 
 — these things they know so far as they can be known. To glean 
 their meadows side by side, so happier ; to bear the bitter frost and 
 burden up the breathless mountain side, tvithout murmuring ; to bid 
 the stranger drink from their vessel of milk ; to look dimly forward ; 
 to see at the foot of their low death-beds the form of a pale figure 
 upon a cross, dying patiently as they ; all this separates them from 
 the cattle and the stones ; of all this they are capable ; but in all this 
 
 * " Ruskin as Master of Prose," - Addresses on Decorative Colour, 
 
 in Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and other § 30 (Lib. Ed., vol. xii. p. 500). 
 Literary Estimates, 1899, p. 62.
 
 THE SEARCH FOR THE RIGHT WORD 361 
 
 unrewarded as far as concerns this present life. For them there is CHAP, 
 neither hope nor action of spirit ; for them no progress or joy. Hard -^^^J-i- 
 roof, dark night, laborious day, thirst, weary arms at sunset ; tJiese 
 are their life. No books, no thoughts, no change of passion. Only 
 sometimes a day of rest and a little sitting in the sun under the 
 church wall as the bell tolls thin and far in the mountain air ; a 
 pattering of a few prayers, not understood, in the dark chapel ; an 
 eoening spent by the more sober in a vague act of adoration, and so 
 back to the sombre home, with the cloud upon them still unbroken — 
 a strange cloud of rocky gloom, heavy and hopeless, born out of 
 the wild torrents and shapeless stones, and unlightened, even in 
 their religion, except by the hope of some better thing unknown, 
 mingled with threatening, and obscured by an unspeakable horror* 
 —a feverish scent as it ivere of martyrdom and torture mingled with 
 the incense, a perpstual memory of shattered bodies and tvarped v)ills, 
 and lamenting spirits and hurtling flames — the very cross, for them, 
 hedragged more deeply with gouts of blood than for others." 
 
 The words here printed in italics were either omitted, altered, 
 or transposed in the ultimate text ; and if the reader will 
 compare the latter with this early draft, he will perceive 
 how much the total effect was enhanced, and how many of 
 the felicities by the way were introduced, during the author's 
 revision. Some of these — the onomatopoeic line, for instance, 
 " as the bell tolls thin and far in the mountain air " — were 
 thought of at once ; but observe how different and more 
 simple is the effect of " to bear the burden up the mountain 
 flank, unmurmuringly," than in the first version; or note 
 how the closing words — " the very cross, for them, dashed 
 more deeply than for others, with gouts of blood " — have 
 gained by a simple transposition, and the alteration of the 
 word " bedragged." Ruskin spared no labour, it will be seen, 
 to assist his mastery of language and intuitive sense for 
 melody. 
 
 The next passage will illustrate the search for the right 
 word. Every one remembers the beautiful close of the 
 chapter on "The Lamp of Sacrifice": — 
 
 " All else for which the builders sacrificed has passed away — all 
 their living interests, and aims, and achievements. . . . But of them.
 
 362 THE OPENING OF THE STONES OF VENICE 
 
 CHAP, and their life and toil upon tlie earth, one reward, one evidence, is left 
 * to us in those grey heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken 
 with them to the grave their powers, their honours, and their errors ; 
 but they have left us their adoration." 
 
 The word which I have italicised gave Ruskin some trouble 
 to find. He rejected successively "those grey eminences" 
 and " those grey shadows." If the passage be read with the 
 substitution of either of those rejected words, some of the 
 effect and charm will be found to have gone. And with it, 
 something else as well, to which I will return presently. 
 
 Another illustration will show Ruskin's labour in build- 
 ing up pointed and impressive sentences. Who that has 
 once read it can ever forget — the opening passage of The 
 Stones of Venice ? — 
 
 " Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, 
 three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its 
 sands : the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of 
 these great powers only the memory remains ; of the Second, the 
 ruin ; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their 
 example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied 
 destruction." 
 
 The passage is beautiful in itself, and forms, alike in its 
 cadence and in its thouo'ht, an overture to the whole work. 
 But now read this, the first of several rejected versions (here 
 given in the facsimile) : — 
 
 " Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the sea, as 
 well as over the earth, Three Thrones have been founded upon its 
 sands, the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Two of these 
 great powers have departed ; of one, only the memory remains ; of 
 the second, the ruins ; and the third will in vain have inherited the ir 
 greatness if it cannot take warning from their example." 
 
 Every reader will have felt how much less near to per- 
 fection is the earlier version; indeed, here and there it is 
 by comparison fiat and trite, besides being less harmonious 
 and impressive in sound. It is interesting to note how 
 the process of polishing was done. The number of words 
 in each version is, curiously, the same — sixty-eight. In
 
 N 
 
 N 
 
 o 
 
 < 
 
 g 
 Ed 

 
 J^ 
 
 
 
 -e^t^u^ — ^^ . 
 
 /t^ c£,^ ,_^ eu,^^M 
 
 
 '^ 
 
 /•/-n 'i 
 
 
 V ."^^ -^ 
 
 
 ;/ ..-»-t/ 
 
 
 
 
 #
 
 STYLE AND THOUGHT 363 
 
 the work of revision the superfluous words — such as as CHAP. 
 ivell rt,s over the earth and, with regard to Tyre and Venice, " 
 that their powers have departed, and at the end if it cannot 
 take ivarning — were omitted. By compression in these cases 
 Ruskin knits his clauses more closely together, and finds 
 room, in the same given quantity of words, to introduce 
 an ending which is not only beautiful in sound but which 
 conveys an additional thought : — 
 
 "The Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their 
 example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied 
 destruction." 
 
 The new thought, it will be seen, is that not merely is the 
 fate of Tyre and Venice decreed for an example, but that 
 the greater the power of our empire, the greater also is 
 its responsibility — that to whom much is given, from him 
 much will be required ; and thus the opening of the book 
 leads up with added emphasis to the passage a little later 
 in which the author proposes — 
 
 " to record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to nie to be 
 uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves that beat like passing 
 bells against the Stones of Venice." 
 
 So, then, with Ruskin the work of revision meant some- 
 thinsr more than a search for beautiful sound ; it meant 
 the attainment of deeper and fuller sense. And exactly 
 the same thing may be observed, I think, even in his 
 alterations of single words. In the passage, for instance, 
 given above from "The Lamp of Sacrifice," why is it that 
 "those grey heaps of deep- wrought stone" should be pre- 
 ferred to the other words which he tried ? Eminences 
 made, it is true, an unpleasant jingle with the preceding 
 evidence; but shadows might have sounded well enough. 
 Why did he reject it ? Was it not because the word heaps, 
 with the associations which it suggests, added a fresh 
 thought ? — conveying to us, as we read, the idea of labour 
 and sacrifice in the builders — as in Matthew Arnold's lines : — 
 
 "With aching hands and bleeding feet 
 They dig and heap, lay stone on stone."
 
 364 NOT A MERE "WORD-PAINTER" 
 
 CHAP. These '^instances illustrate a further fact than which 
 
 ' none impressed me more in the course of editing Ruskin's 
 writings. He revised and elaborated not merely in search 
 of pleasant sound or rhetorical pomp, but to chasten, to 
 deepen, and to impress. If any reader be interested in 
 such details, he will find in the notes to the Library Edition 
 a large number of instances — showing the gradual selection 
 of final words and phrases, the discovery of felicities after 
 long search, the rejection of rhetorical adornments ; and 
 in almost every case he will see that the revision was 
 towards greater compression or simplicity. Here I content 
 myself with a general observation. Ruskin did not despise 
 the more mechanical resources of his art — why should he ? — 
 he employed largely the methods of alliteration, assonance, 
 antithesis. But neither these, nor metaphor, allusion, images 
 were of the essence of the matter. And that is why he 
 hated to be called a mere word-painter. He was a word- 
 painter, but he painted always " with his eye on the 
 object" and with his mind on the thought. Ruskin him- 
 self in one of his later pamphlets gave incidentally a case 
 in point. The chapter in Modern Painters on " The Firma- 
 ment," which appears in most volumes of elegant extracts 
 from Ruskin, contains this passage : — 
 
 " I understand the making of the firmament to signify that, so far 
 as man is concerned, most magnificent ordinance of the clouds ; — the 
 ordinance, that as the great plain of waters was formed on the face 
 of the earth, so also a plain of waters should be stretched along the 
 height of air, and the face of the cloud answer the face of the ocean ; 
 and that this upper and heavenly plain should be of waters, as it 
 were, glorified in their nature, no longer quenching the lire, but now 
 bearing fire in their own bosoms ; no longer murmuring only when the 
 winds raise them or rocks divide, but answering each other with their 
 own voices from pole to pole ; no longer i-estrained by established 
 shores, and guided through unchanged channels, but going forth at 
 their pleasure like the armies of the angels. . . ." 
 
 Such passages as this, he said, " usually thought of by the 
 public merely as word-painting," " are in reality accurately
 
 HANDWRITING 365 
 
 abstracted, and finally concentrated, expressions of the CHAP. 
 
 XVTTT 
 
 general laws of natural phenomena " : — 
 
 " Thus the sentence ' murmuring only when the winds raise them, 
 or rocks divide,' does not describe, or word-paint, the sound of 
 waters, but (with only the admitted art of a carefully reiterated ' r ' ) 
 sums the general causes of it ; while, again, the immediately following 
 one, defining the limitations of sea and river, 'restrained by estab- 
 lished shores, and guided through unchanging channels,' attempts no 
 word-painting either of coast or burnside ; but states, with only such 
 ornament of its simplicity as could be got of the doubled 't' and 
 doubled ' ch,' the fact of tlie stability of existing rock structure which 
 I was, at that time, among geologists in asserting." ^ 
 
 And, generally, if any of us were to sit down and work 
 out a description of something we had been looking at — 
 a cathedral front, an Alpine meadow, a blade of grass, a 
 picture by Tintoret — and then were to compare our descrip- 
 tion with Ruskin's, wherein should we find the difference 
 to consist ? It would not, I think, be merely that our 
 sentences were less beautiful or eloquent ; but we should 
 find also, most of us, that we had stated fewer facts, and 
 conveyed the impression of fewer, or less significant, thoughts. 
 To Ruskin's art of writing may be applied what he laid down 
 about the art of painting. " Finish," he said, in art simply 
 means " telling more truth." 
 
 IV 
 
 Ruskin's handwriting shows three main " periods " — an 
 early, a middle, and a late. The early — that which may 
 be seen in the manuscript of his letters to Dale, now in the 
 British Museum — is legible and regular, but not marked by 
 any great individuality. In the middle period — to which 
 the specimen given in this chapter belongs — the writing is 
 daintier; there is more character in it, especially in the 
 formation of the capitals. It must be to this period that an 
 
 ^ Preface to Cosli Enarrant (1885). 
 - Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. ix. § 18.
 
 366 « MY FIRST EDITOR " 
 
 CHAP, anecdote told by Mr. W. M. Rossetti refers. " My brother was 
 
 Y VTTT - 
 
 one day in a picture-gallery (perhaps the National Gallery), 
 and he took out of his pocket, for perusal, a letter recently 
 received from Ruskin. Some person (unknown to Rossetti) 
 passed by, and gave a glance at the handwriting, and he 
 then said to my brother : ' Will you excuse me for saying 
 that, in passing, my eye happened to fall upon that letter, 
 and, being an expert in handwriting, I cannot resist the con- 
 viction that the writer must be one of the most remarkable 
 men living : might I inquire who it is ? ' " ^ In his last 
 period, Ruskin wrote with greater freedom and his curves 
 were further flung ; but there were marked difterences 
 according! as he was careful or careless, well or ill, calm or 
 excited. 
 
 After revising his manuscript, Ruskin used often to 
 have it read out to him by a friend or assistant, in order 
 the better to judge of the sound of his words. He very 
 rarely dictated, but it was one of the duties of his personal 
 servant — successively " George," Crawley, and Baxter — to 
 make fair copies of his rough drafts; a task often undertaken 
 in later years by Mrs. Severn. The last revises of all were 
 entrusted to his friend, W. H. Harrison, who looked out for 
 printers' errors and kept a stern eye upon Ruskin's grammar 
 and punctuation : — 
 
 " He was inexorable in svich matters," said Euskin, " and many 
 a sentence in Modern Painters, which I had thought quite beautifully 
 turned out after a forenoon's work on it, had to be turned outside-in, 
 after all, and cut into smallest pieces and sewn up again, because he 
 had found out there wasn't a nominative in it, or a genitive, or a 
 conjunction, or something else indispensable to a sentence's decent 
 existence and position in life. Not a' book of mine, for good thirty 
 years, but went, every word of it, under his careful eyes twice over 
 — often also the last revises left to his tender mercy altogether on 
 condition he wouldn't bother me any more." ^ 
 
 Harrison was " inexorable," and also meticulous. The author 
 
 ' Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pre-Raphaelitism, p. 11. 
 
 2 "My First Editor," reprinted in On the Old Road.
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS IN HIS BOOKS 367 
 
 and his proof-reviser had many a long-drawn tussle over a CHAP, 
 preposition or a comma. "You have an unfilial hatred," ^ 
 wrote Harrison in submitting to a defeat, " for your mother 
 tongue." Ruskin used to say that for his own part his 
 grammar was always home-made. A friend once asked him 
 " how a master of English could allow himself to write such 
 a sentence as 'And I didn't want to.'" He replied, with a 
 laughing parody, " I have never yet written good English 
 grammar, and I never mean to." 
 
 Unlike some authors, Ruskin was not a slave to his tools, 
 and had no indispensable apparatus or fad. Much of his 
 literary work was done in foreign inns or wayside lodgings, 
 and he thus became independent of his surroundings. At 
 home, he wrote not on a desk, but on the flat of the table ; a 
 habit which may have encouraged the rounded back of his 
 later years. He used for choice a cork penholder with a 
 fine steel pen, and he generally wrote on ruled foolscap 
 paper. His workroom at Denmark Hill was at the back of 
 the house, over the breakfast room, and looked into the 
 garden. A large oblong table occupied " so much of the — 
 say fifteen by five-and-twenty — feet of available space within 
 bookcases, that the rest of the floor virtually was only a 
 passage round it." 
 
 This workshop was not literary only. He was not merely 
 an author; he was also the artist who illustrated his own 
 books. We must picture it as strewn not only with manu- 
 scripts, proofs, revises, but also with leaves and flowers to 
 be drawn, with engravings in all states for correction and 
 retouching. Something has been told, in previous chapters, 
 of the amount of practice and study in drawing which went 
 to the making of his books ; but a particular instance, given 
 in greater detail, will best illustrate the industry of his 
 workshop. Much of the argument in the fourth volume of 
 Modern Painters is enforced from Turner's Alpine drawing 
 which Ruskin called sometimes " The Gates of the Hills," 
 and sometimes " The Pass of Faido " or " The St. Gothard." 
 Turner's first sketch of the scene was made in 1842 ; it 
 is now among the sketches lent by the National Gallery 
 to the Ruskin Drawing School at Oxford. The drawing
 
 368 "THE PASS OF FAIDO " 
 
 CHAP, from the sketch, to which the artist himself used charac- 
 • teristically to refer as " that litter of stones," was made 
 in 1843 as a commission from Ruskin. He was full of 
 admiration for it, and one of his principal purposes in his 
 Continental journey in 1845 was to find the scene depicted 
 by the artist. He spent some days at Faido, sketching the 
 spot and noting the processes of selection and invention 
 followed by Turner (see above, p. 184). In 1852, on his way 
 back from Venice, he again visited the scene (p. 280), And 
 now observe the quantity of study which, founded on these 
 personal observations, he put into his analysis of Turner's 
 drawing. From his sketches on the spot he etched a topo- 
 graphical outline (Plate 20). He made " a careful transla- 
 tion into black and white " of the left-hand upper part of 
 Turner's drawing ; this was shown in the Ruskin Exhibition 
 at Manchester, 1904 (No. 146, upper drawing). He etched 
 the same portion (Plate 37, " Crests of the Slaty Crystal- 
 lines"). Again, he traced the leading lines in this portion 
 of the drawing (Fig. 70). He made a reduced outline of 
 the whole drawing, exhibited at Manchester (No. 146, 
 lower drawing), and etched it (Plate 21). He copied 
 the central portion of the drawing to be engraved as 
 the frontispiece to the fourth volume (" The Gates of 
 the Hills ") ; the drawing for this engraving was also 
 exhibited at Manchester. Finally he drew a piece of the 
 torrent bed on the left, for the engraving called " Rocks 
 in Unrest," in the fifth volume (Plate 81). I have seen it 
 suggested that Ruskin was not qualified to be an art-critic 
 because his range of study was restricted. This biography 
 will, I think, impress a reader as much with the extent, as 
 with the limitations, of his study. But it is true in some 
 degree that he studied non tnulta sed tnultum,, and the 
 detailed study given to this drawing by Turner was very 
 characteristic of him. What he preached, he practised. 
 " Foolish and ambitious persons," he says, " think they can 
 form their judgment by seeing much art of all kinds. ... To 
 have well studied one picture by Tintoret, one by Luini, one 
 by Angelico, and a couple of Turner's drawings, will teach 
 a man more than to have catalogued all the galleries of
 
 IIUSKIN AND HIS ENGRAVERS 369 
 
 Europe." ^ "Power of criticism does not consist in knowing CHAP. 
 the names or the manner of many painters, but in discerning 
 the excellence of a few." ^ And again, "The sum of enjoy- 
 ment depends not on the quantity of things tasted, but on 
 the vivacity and patience of taste." ^ 
 
 To the work of making the drawings was added that of 
 supervising the engraving of them. The three latter volumes 
 of Modern Painters alone contained 84 full-page plates and 
 225 other illustrations printed with the text. And even 
 these figures do not give the full measure of Ruskin's work ; 
 for before deciding to incur the expense of so many steel 
 plates, he had made experiments in another kind, drawing 
 the subjects, afterwards engraved on steel, on wood blocks.* 
 A considerable number of the plates were etched by Ruskin 
 himself; for the rest, he had at his disposal the services of 
 a school of engravers which had not yet been threatened 
 by the competition of photography. They included J. C. 
 Armytage, T. S. Boys, J. Cousen, R. P. CufF, J. H. Le Keux, 
 and Thomas Lupton. The trouble which Ruskin took in 
 supervising the work, and the pleasant relations which he 
 maintained with his engravers, are shown by various letters 
 and statements : — 
 
 (To Ms Father.) "Venice, March \7, 1852. — Cuff's experiment 
 most excellent ; you rightly find fault with the want of the little 
 refinements in distribution of shades, but these things can never be 
 expected in a copy. If these refinements icere perceived and followed, 
 Cuff would cease to be Cuff and become Ruskin. A touch or^two 
 on the missed i)arts would put it nearly right : although the difterence 
 between a thing done by the artist's OAvn hand, and a copy, however 
 able, is always the difference between gold and gilding. But Cuff 
 has done this little bit excellently, and with a degree of 2iaifis to copy 
 accurately which only he and Armytage will take. Nevertheless, it 
 will have to be done again, for it is to go on a large plate with five 
 
 ' Xotex on his drammja by Turner, 17-19 R. 
 - Cambridge Address, § 7. 
 
 => U7ifo this Last, ^ 84. See also Vol. II. p. 196. 
 
 * Some of the blocks, drawn on by Rnskin^ were exhibited at Man- 
 chester (Nos. 528-534). 
 
 VOL. I. 2 A
 
 370 RUSKIN AND HIS PRINTERS 
 
 CHAP, other traceries, and there was a mistake in the measurements of 
 
 x^m- this." 
 
 {To J. H. Le Keux.) Circ. 1858.— "The subjects of the next 
 volume are Trees, Clouds, Waves, Buildings, Dragons, Moral Senti- 
 ments, and Things in General. You shall engrave a dragon or a 
 moral sentiment if you like ; but something, please, for I shall be 
 sadly short of my illustrations." 
 
 (Statement by Mr. Le Keux.) " Mr. Ruskin never fixed a price ; 
 I charged what I liked ; he never complained— in fact, offered more. 
 One Plate, * The Tree Stump of Claude,' he said I had made too good, 
 having put in too much touch. I promised to alter it. On my next 
 visit I took him another proof, which is the Plate printed. He asked 
 me how I had altered it so well. I told him I had not altered the 
 Plate, but had engraved another, as it was much less trouble than 
 scraping out and altering. ' Then charge me for both Plates,' was 
 his request. I did so. Mr. Ruskin was especially pleased with ' The 
 Moat of Nuremberg.' The tree stem of Albert Diirer, reproduced line 
 for line in the Plate of tree stems, he thought a marvel." ^ 
 
 What Le Keux charged, I do not know ; but Boys received 
 £33, 10s. for a plate, and Lupton £40. These figures show 
 how costly the illustrated volumes were to produce, and 
 explain the high prices at which the original editions 
 Avere sold. 
 
 Ruskin was on the same friendly terms with his printers 
 and proof-readers, and showed them the same generous 
 consideration, as in the case of his engravers. His Academy 
 Notes often had to be printed in a hurry. " I believe," he 
 wrote to his publisher, "that Spottiswoode must have kept 
 some of their men to finish this. I am very much obliged 
 to them, and should like the printers Avho stayed in to do 
 it to have half-a-crown each from me for a holiday present." 
 He was never too busy to add a pleasant word in sending 
 proofs to the printer's reader. Thus: "All is right now but 
 the ' Robert Stevenson,' page 11. I mean the great engi- 
 neer; you must put the name right, if it isn't — / don't 
 know engineers' names." And again: "Dear Mr. Chester, 
 
 ^ Bibliography of Ruskin, by Wise and Smart, vol. ii. p. 34.
 
 FRIENDSHIP WITH BOOKSELLERS 371 
 
 I never knew anything so wonderful as the way you have CHAP, 
 got my scrawl printed. Literally, only two words wrong ^^^^^• 
 in the 18 pages." With Mr. Jowett, the head-printer at 
 Messrs. Hazell, Watson & Viney's Aylesbury works, where 
 Ruskin's later books were set up, he maintained a familiar 
 correspondence — discussing not only technical points, , but 
 literary matters, and ending "ever affectionately yours." 
 His relations with booksellers similarly show his geniality 
 and warm-heartedness. Books to him, as to Milton, were 
 " not absolutely dead things " ; they were " kings and states- 
 men lingering patiently, not to grant audience but to gain 
 it " ; ^ and the bookseller was thus a court-chamberlain, 
 whose private ear it was a privilege to have. Ruskin had 
 dealings during many years with the late Mr. Bernard 
 Quaritch ; and though they had their disputes, Ruskin en- 
 joyed few things more than a chat and a rummage in Mr. 
 Quaritch's shop. The late Mr. F. S. Ellis, again, printed 
 a series of Ruskin's letters to him,'-^ and the course of the 
 correspondence is very characteristic. In ordering books, 
 Ruskin soon begins dropping critical remarks by the way. 
 An invitation to Brantwood follows. "Truly" and "faith- 
 fully" pass into " affectionately " ; and finally, when Mr. Ellis 
 had given some prudent advice which Ruskin valued, he 
 becomes " Papa" Ellis — a brevet relationship which he had 
 the honour of sharing with Rawdon Brown and Carlyle. On 
 one occasion Ruskin had ordered a copy of Sir Thomas More. 
 "Thank you," he replied, in acknowledging the book, "for 
 getting the Utopia for me. What an infinitely Avise — 
 infinitely foolish — book it is ! Right in all it asks — insane, 
 in venturing to ask it, all at once — so making its own 
 wisdom folly for evermore ; and becoming perhaps the most 
 really mischievous book over written — except Don Quixote," 
 I doubt if such a thing exists as a business letter from 
 Ruskin, pure and simple. Whoever served him in any 
 business capacity had to be his friend. Not engravers, 
 printers, and booksellers only, but the dealers who supplied 
 
 ' Sesame and Lilies, § 6. Ruskin to a London Bibliopole, 
 
 * Stray Letters from Professor privately printed 1892.
 
 372 THE HUMAN RELATIONSHIP 
 
 CHAP, him with minerals, and the cutters whom he employed to 
 polish his specimens, received with their orders some ex- 
 pression of his views or good wishes. A mere cash nexus 
 never satisfied him. There was nothing mechanical in his 
 workshop. In small things as in great it was the human 
 relationship that he sought.
 
 CHAPTER XTX 
 
 THE WORKING MEN'S COLLEGE 
 (1854-1858) 
 
 " Not what we give but what we share, 
 For the trift without the giver is bare." — Lowell. 
 
 In the remainder of this volume, I propose to depart from a 
 severely chronological order. The period in Ruskin's life, 
 during which he wrote the third and fourth volumes of 
 Modern Painters (1854-56), and after many delays (1856-60) 
 completed the book, was one of most multifarious ac- 
 tivity. We shall obtain a better idea, I think, of his work, 
 his interests, his thoughts, his influence, by considering 
 various aspects of them separately, than if we followed his 
 movements by the calendar. I shall deal, therefore, with 
 him successively, as teacher at the Working Men's College 
 and drawing-master at large (Chap. XIX.) ; as Art Censor 
 (Chap. XX.) ; as Turner's Executor (Chap. XXI.) ; and as 
 Public Lecturer (Chap. XXII.). Then, some account will be 
 given of his home-life, his friendships, his correspondence 
 (Chaps. XXIII., XXIV.); and, finally, the studies and the 
 mental developments, made and experienced for the most 
 part during tours abroad, will be described which went to 
 the completion of Modern Painters (Chap. XXV.). A very 
 brief summary, supplementary to that given above (p. 336), 
 will here suffice to enable the reader to bring the various 
 threads into chronological connexion. After sending the 
 third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters to press in 
 the spring of 1856, Ruskin went abroad. He hurried 
 home in the autumn upon hearing that Turner's bequest 
 had been handed over to the nation, and he set to work 
 
 373
 
 37i DESIRE FOR ACTION AND PERSONAL SERVICE 
 
 CHAP, at once on various Notes and Catalos^ues. Durinoj the 
 winter he was further engaged, partly in connexion with 
 his classes at the Working Men's College, in writing The 
 Elements of Drawing. In 1857 he did much farther work 
 on the Turner collection ; he delivered various public 
 lectures; and after a holiday in Scotland resumed work 
 at the College and m the National Gallery. In 1858 he 
 finished his sorting of the Turner drawings ; again gave 
 lectures, and for several months was on the Continent. 
 In 1859 he gave more lectures, wrote Tlie Elements of 
 Perspective, and again spent some months on the Continent. 
 In each year (1855-59) he wrote a pamphlet on the Royal 
 Academy and other picture exhibitions ; and during this 
 period he was much concerned with the building of the 
 Oxford Museum. In the spring of 1860 the last volume 
 of Modern Painters was sent to press. A full life, it will 
 be seen ! 
 
 II 
 
 In the last chapter we followed Ruskin into his literary 
 workshop ; but he was never entirely a recluse or a student. 
 Still less was he ever an esthete, absorbed in art for art's 
 sake. He wanted to do, as well as to write. He would 
 have agreed with that fine sajdng by Edward FitzGerald, 
 out of which Tennyson made his poem " Romney's Re- 
 morse," on the beauty of good action " even as a matter 
 of art." The more Ruskin found that the influence of his 
 books was spreading, the more he yearned to supplement 
 writing by personal effort. " One may do more with a 
 man," he once said, " by getting ten Avords spoken with 
 him face to face, than by the black lettering of a whole 
 life's thought." ^ Something also in his public activities 
 at this time was due, I think, to the circumstances of 
 his domestic life. Tongues were wagging ; and he wanted 
 to face the world. But chiefly Ruskin desired to find an 
 inner harmony between the artistic and the moral sides 
 of his nature. More and more his studies among books and 
 
 ^ Fors Claviycra, Letter 17.
 
 THE ARCHITECTURAL MUSEUM 375 
 
 pictures and in nature Avere coming to be mingled with CHAP. 
 urgent thoughts of political reformation and personal ser- XIX. 
 vice. He could not entirely be satisfied with quiet work 
 in his study at Denmark Hill. He wanted his actions, 
 as well as his written words, to advance the Kingdom. 
 
 Ill 
 
 One scope for practical work he found in lectures and 
 classes to artisans at the Architectural Museum. A prin- 
 cipal aim of this institution, which had been founded in 
 1851, was to render possible the training of workmen in 
 the arts of their crafts. " Singularly enough among all 
 the antiquarian collections in London, accessible to the 
 public, there were none which included a good assortment 
 of casts from decorative sculpture, and the few which did 
 exist were almost exclusively taken from classic and Italian 
 examples. The advisability of securing such objects for 
 the inspection and study, not only of young architects, 
 but of art-workmen, became apparent to all who knew how 
 much the success of modern Gothic depends on the spirit 
 and vigour of its details." ^ The Architectural Museum 
 was founded by a few architects and amateurs to supply 
 the deficiency, and Rusk in threw himself heartily into 
 assisting a scheme which fell in so entirely with the ideas 
 and aspirations expressed by him in The Seven Lamps of 
 ArchitectiLre and in the chapter of The Stones of Venice on 
 " The Nature of Gothic." During his stay in Venice, he 
 had casts of Venetian architecture made for presentation 
 to the Museum. He also secured casts from the panels 
 on the north doorway of Rouen Cathedral and from those 
 of the great door of Notre Dame of Paris. The first casts 
 of Gothic architectural sculpture available for public study 
 in this country were thus due to Ruskin. He also presented 
 to the Museum a scries of the Seals of England, and placed 
 there a selection of his drawings of foreign architecture. 
 His interest in illuminated manuscripts found expression 
 
 • C. L. Eastlako's Hidory of the Gothic Revival, p. 299.
 
 37a THE OPEVf^G OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE 
 
 CHAP, in a course of three lectures on "Decorative Colour" 
 XI^- which he delivered at the Museum during the winter 
 months (1854), and he also attended in the evenings to 
 direct the students in the study and practice of the art of 
 illumination. The pleasures of acquisition, in the case of 
 illuminated books, were thus combined with the fulfilment 
 of service to others. The students attending the Museum 
 were formed into a society, and he instituted prizes among 
 them for work in architectural sculpture. It was to this 
 " Architectural Museum Society," on the occasion of a pre- 
 sentation of the Ruskin Prizes, that one of the lectures 
 printed in Tlie Ttuo Paths — that on Conventional Art — 
 was delivered. One of the prize winners was O'Shea, a 
 workman employed on the Oxford Museum. 
 
 To the year 1854 belongs a pamphlet by Ruskin which 
 shows the same architectural enthusiasm, and the same 
 mingling of artistic interest with social sympathies. As 
 is not uncommonly the case with his works, the title — 
 TJte Opening of the Crystal Palace — gives no very imme- 
 diate or obvious indication of its contents. The real sub- 
 ject is a plea for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments ; 
 the title tells us only of the occasion which suggested the 
 piece. In June 1854 the newspapers had been full of the 
 new Palace at Sydenham. It was thought intolerable 
 that the Great Exhibition should pass away as though 
 it had never been. It was decided, therefore, to construct 
 out of its materials a permanent Hall of Glass which should 
 continue and extend the educational and artistic influence 
 of the Exhibition. The Palace was designed by Sir Joseph 
 Pax ton, and Avas opened by Queen Victoria and the Prince 
 Consort in state on June 10, 1854. Ruskin, as appears 
 from this pamphlet, and from passages in his other writings, 
 shared to the full the high and generous hopes with which 
 the Palace was started upon its chequered career. " It is 
 impossible," he says, " to estimate the influence of such 
 an institution on the minds of the working classes"; and 
 he took particular interest in a collection of casts of 
 sculpture and architecture which had been made for 
 exhibition in the Palace. But in the ppoans of popular
 
 THE PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 377 
 
 enthusiasm which saw, in the Exhibition and the PaUxce, CHAP. 
 the birth of a new Order of Architecture, as well as the " ^ • 
 dawn of a New Era, Ruskin could have no sympathy. 
 He had already protested in The Stones of Venice against 
 the notion that the construction of a greenhouse "larger 
 thau ever greenhouse was built before " had any artistic 
 signiticance, however great its mechanical ingenuity might 
 be. And while the British public was congratulating itself 
 on having achieved, in its halls of glass, " an entirely novel 
 order of architecture," the old architecture of the world was 
 perishing every day by fire, war, revolution, and neglect; 
 and by a foe even more destructive than any of these — 
 namely, "restoration." This is the main theme of the 
 pamphlet, which thus carries a stage further the plea for 
 the preservation of ancient buildings already advanced in 
 The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and repeated in scattered 
 passages of later writings. But here Ruskin adds a practical 
 suggestion. " An association," he says, " might be formed, 
 thoroughly organised so as to maintain active watchers 
 and agents in every town of importance, who, in the first 
 place, should furnish the society with a perfect account of 
 every monument of interest in its neighbourhood, and then 
 with a yearly or half-yearly report of the state of such 
 monuments, and of the changes proposed to be made upon 
 them." Raskin's scheme was that which William Morris 
 carried out twenty-three years later in the formation of 
 " The Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings " — a title 
 altered by Morris for popular usage into " The Anti-Scrape." 
 Of this Society both Ruskin and Carlyle Avere original 
 members. Ruskin suggested, further, that the Association 
 should in cases of need save ancient monuments from de- 
 struction by purchase — an object partly aimed at by the 
 recently formed "National Trust." The pamphlet is of 
 further interest as containing — like most of Ruskin's writings 
 on architecture — an incidental passage which is eloquent of 
 his strong and growing social sympathies. In this passage 
 he describes the " few feet of ground (how few !) which are 
 indeed all that separate the merriment from the misery." 
 The time was presently to come when, in words of yet
 
 378 THE WORKING MEN'S COLLEGE 
 
 CHAP, more poignant appeal, he was to call upon his generation 
 to "raise the veil boldly" and "face the light"; and when, 
 having made his appeal to others, he was himself to embark 
 on direct schemes of social amelioration. 
 
 IV 
 
 Meanwhile Ruskin found another, and a more continu- 
 ously absorbing, scope for personal service, at the Working 
 Men's College, situated first in Red Lion Square and after- 
 wards in Great Ormond Street. This is one of many institu- 
 tions which owe their origin to the co-operative movement, 
 promoted by a small group of men inspired by the leader- 
 ship of Frederick Denison Maurice. " There was then, it 
 must be remembered, no means by which a working man or 
 a poor man could get, in a systematic way, any education 
 going beyond the bare elements of knowledge." ^ School 
 Boards had not been heard of. The churches and chapels 
 did much for elementary education, but their etibrts touched 
 only a fraction of the people. The masses were agitating 
 for political rights, but they were as yet ill-equipped for 
 their exercise. " Mechanics' Institutes " had existed for 
 some years, but, said Dickens, " I have never seen with these 
 eyes of mine a mechanic in any recognised position on the 
 platform of a Mechanics' Institute." Here and there, too. 
 Evening Classes had been established, but they aimed at 
 nothing higher than the three R's. The Working Men's 
 College aimed at bringing within the reach of the working- 
 classes the same hind of education that the upper classes 
 enjoyed. It saw in education a means of life, as well as of 
 livelihood. It sought not to help working-men to "get on" 
 and "rise out of their class," but to improve themselves by 
 satisfying the needs of their mental and spiritual natures. 
 It was to provide, too, something more than lectures ; it 
 was to give teaching and also personal contact between the 
 teacher and the taught. All this sounds like a commonplace 
 to-day, but at the time it Avas new and revolutionary. It 
 
 ^ R. B. Litclifiuld, The Berjinnimja of the IVorlcinrj Men'a Golletjc.
 
 RUSKIN'S DRAWING-CLASS 379 
 
 precisely fitted in with the ideas at which Ruskin had been CHAP. 
 arriving, and he wrote to Maurice offering to take charge of XIX. 
 the art-teaching. "His volunteered adhesion," writes the 
 historian of the College, " was of immense service. It not 
 only gave a splendid start to the Art teaching, but helped 
 the enterprise as a whole by letting the world know that 
 one of the greatest Englishmen of the time was in active 
 sympathy with it." 
 
 His example and persuasion enlisted other volunteers, 
 and Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and Burne-Jones at various 
 times lent their aid. Lowes Dickmson, who continued to 
 teach for some sixteen years, was himself one of the original 
 founders of the College. At first Ruskin, Rossetti, and 
 he worked together every Thursday evening. " There is no 
 fear about teaching," wrote Ruskin to Rossetti ; " all that 
 the men want is to see a few touches done, and to be told 
 where and why they are wrong in their work, in the simplest 
 possible way." In the Easter term, 1855, the class was sub- 
 divided ; Rossetti teaching the figure, Ruskin and Dickinson 
 taking the elementary and landscape class, which in turn 
 was afterwards subdivided, Ruskin taking a class by himself. 
 He did not always attend throughout the summer term, 
 though he frequently had his class come down to him in 
 the country to sketch. Cabs were provided to meet the men 
 at Camberwell Green on Saturday afternoon and take the 
 party to the appointed sketching place, and the outing 
 would finish with tea at the Greyhound Inn, Dulwich, or 
 at Ruskin's house on Denmark Hill. During the rest of 
 the year Ruskin taught regularly at the College from the 
 autumn of 1854 until May 1858. In the spring of 1860 he 
 returned to his class for a term ; but a prolonged period of 
 residence abroad then severed his regular connexion with 
 the College, though he continued to visit it occasionally to 
 give addresses or informal lectures. It Avill thus be seen 
 that Ruskin's help to the College was much more than 
 a spasm of sympathy or an indulgence in the presently 
 fashionable occupation of intermittent philanthropy. 
 
 Ruskin taught his class both by precept and by practice. 
 He gave many lectures and addresses at the College, and
 
 380 HIS LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE 
 
 CHAP, these were attended by others besides the students of his own 
 ^I^- class. On such occasions he would bring pictures or illumin- 
 ated manuscripts for exhibition and explanation, or would de- 
 scribe his experiences and impressions on some foreign tour. 
 Or he would season a discourse on art and life with some 
 unexpected illustration. " I am only trying," he said once, 
 " to teach you to see. Two men are walking through Clare 
 Market. One of them comes out at the other end not a bit 
 wiser than he went in. The other notices a bit of parsley 
 hanging over the edge of a butter-woman's basket, and 
 carries away with him images of beauty which in the course 
 of his daily work he incorporates with it for many a day." 
 No more of the lecture has been recorded, but any one 
 familiar with Ruskin's writings will know how it may have 
 been continued. He would have gone on to illustrate the 
 beauty of the fine divisions in the leaf of parsley, to define 
 its special manner of delightfulness as contrasted with other 
 leaves, and then, perhaps, to trace the curious influence of 
 the plant, from the days of the Parsley Crown to the butter- 
 woman's basket, and so back to Clare Market. Or, again, in 
 response to some question about social and political con- 
 ditions, he would pour forth other questions, in the hope of 
 leading the men to think out ultimate problems. On one 
 occasion the subject of parliamentary reform was opened: — 
 
 "You are all agape, my friends," said Ruskiu, "for this mighty 
 privilege of having your opinions re})resented in Parliament. The 
 concession might be desirable, — at all events courteous, — if only 
 it were quite certain you had got any opinions to represent. But 
 have you ? Are you agreed on any single thing you systematically 
 want 1 Less work and more wages, of course ; but how much 
 lessening of work do you suppose is possible? Do you think the 
 time will ever come for everybody to have no work and all wages 1 . . . 
 Have you planned the permanent state which you wish England 
 to hold ? Do you want her to be nothing but a large workshop 
 and forge, so that the name of ' Englishman ' shall be synonymous 
 with 'ironmonger,' all over the world? or would you like to keep 
 some of your lords and landed gentry still, and a few green fields 
 and trees? . . . Your voices are not worth a rat's squeak, either
 
 REMINISCENCES BY PUPILS 381 
 
 iu Parliament or out of it, till you have some ideas to utter with CHAP. 
 them." ^^• 
 
 Riddling words: yet not without a practical purpose. The 
 point of them was, as the sequel showed, that the working- 
 men might, if they chose, appoint their "own parliament, 
 to deliberate upon the possible modes of the regulation of 
 industry." The Trade Union Congress, often described as 
 " The Parliament of Labour," was yet in the future at the 
 time when Ruskin spoke. These addresses, whether on art 
 or politics or (more frequently) upon both, made a deep 
 impression. Madox Brown, by no means prejudiced in 
 Ruskin's favour, wrote after hearing one of them : " Ruskin 
 as eloquent as ever, ard as wildly pojular with the men." 
 " We used to look forward to these talks," says " One who 
 was often present," "with great interest. Formless and 
 planless as they were, the effect on the hearers w^as immense. 
 It was a wonderful bubbling up of all manner of glowing 
 thoughts ; for mere eloquence I never heard aught like it." ^ 
 The lectures at the College were only occasional ; Ruskin's 
 continuous work was in the teaching of his class. Here, as 
 in all that he undertook, he lent his mind out. He threw 
 into his teaching all the resources of his skill; and, in 
 material matters, whatever he had, he shared : — 
 
 "How generous he was ! " writes one of his pupils. " He taught 
 each of us separately, studying the capacities of each student. For 
 one pupil he would put a cairngorm pebble or fluor-spar into a 
 tumbler of water, and set him to trace their tangled veins of 
 crimson and amethyst. For another he would bring lichen and 
 fungi from Anerley Woods. Once, to fill us with despair of colour, 
 he bought a case of West Indian birds uustuffed, as the collector 
 had stored them, all rubies and emeralds. Sometimes it was a 
 Gothic missal, when he set us counting the order of the coloured 
 leaves in each spray of the MS. At other times it was a splen- 
 did Albert Dlirer woodcut. . . . One by one, he brought for us to 
 examine his marvels of water-colour art from Denmark Hill. He 
 would point out the subtleties and felicities in their composition, 
 
 ^ Letters of Rossetti to Allingham, p. 90. 
 
 ' From a letter in The Bookman, March 1900.
 
 382 HIS SKETCHES AT THE COLLEGE 
 
 CHAP, analysing on a blackboard their line schemes. . . . He had reams 
 
 XIX 
 
 of the best stout drawing-paper made specially for us, supplying 
 
 every convenience the little rooms would hold. He commissioned 
 William Hunt of the Old Water-Colour Society to paint two 
 subjects for the class, and both were masterpieces." ^ 
 
 Another pupil dwells on the gift which Ruskin's teaching 
 showed for perceiving a feature, not immediately apparent, 
 in an object, but which, secondary though it was, gave charm 
 or character to the whole : — 
 
 " I was copying Turner's ' Mill near the Grande Chartreuse,' 
 and Mr. Ruskin pointed out to me that I had made a rock too 
 pointed in form. ' Look ! ' he said, sketching on the margin of 
 my paper as he spoke ; ' the rock is of that general form, with 
 fissures in its sides, the water flows over its top and rounds that 
 top, then runs down the clefts in its sides and wears away their 
 edges, so that a certain roundness comes into the whole mass.' 
 For a short time I leave off writing to look at this sketch, and 
 I count the lines that compose it : thirty-eight lines, as nearly as 
 I can make them out ; they were done in about as many seconds, 
 and the work is a splendid suggestion of a Avater-Avorn rock. Below 
 it is a sketch of a tree, slighter and less expressive, but sufficient 
 for the lesson which he gave me. He explained that my tree did 
 not tell its own story sufficiently, and, as he sketched, pointed out 
 that the tree would naturally have grown upright, but being on 
 the side of a steep bank, it declined a little from the perpendicular ; 
 as it grew higher and became heavier from increase of branch and 
 leafage, it declined still farther from the perpendicular, but the 
 lower part of the trunk, being older and stronger than the upper 
 part, was only a little out of the upright; as the branches grew, 
 they naturally shot upward, those on the upper side of the trunk 
 have a free course and grow fairly well, but those on the under 
 side of the trunk fall over with it and droop more and more the 
 nearer they are to the ground ; as they near the top, they get a 
 better chance and grow in a more normal fashion, whilst the forms 
 of the masses of leafage on the two sides of the tree differ from 
 
 1 " A Memorable Art Class," in Salman (engraver of the wood- 
 Good IVordu, Aug. 1897, by Tlionms blocks in Augustus Hare's Works).
 
 SCOPE OF HIS TEACHING 383 
 
 each other in consequence of this difference in the growth of the CHAP. 
 
 XIX 
 
 branches. All this history of a life, as shown in the form of a 
 
 tree, astonished at the same time that it convinced me of its truth, 
 as he spoke and illustrated his meaning by his sketch." ^ 
 
 Many of Ruskin's sketches made at the College are 
 preserved, and there are feAv pieces from his hand of which 
 a sympathetic collector would sooner possess an example. 
 They show his decision of line, and they are memorials of 
 his helpfulness. Yet for all his pains he felt that ho was but 
 an unprofitable servant. At the close of one of the terms at 
 the College, t'wo visitors went up to thank him for all the 
 good that he was doing. " I shall never forget," says one 
 of them, "the sad and wistful smile that came over his face 
 as he turned a little aAvay saying, ' Oh, do you think so ? 
 it seems to me as if I looked back only on a misspent life 
 and wasted opportunities." ^ 
 
 To a Royal Commission in 1857 Ruskin described the 
 object of his teaching at the College. "My efforts are 
 directed," he said, " not to making a carpenter an artist, 
 but to making him happier as a carpenter." But the native 
 bent was sometimes too strong to be denied ; while, on the 
 other hand, Ruskin's encouragement may in other cases 
 have led a man to overrate his powers or to abuse his master's 
 generosity. The record of his classes is, however, a worthy 
 one. Some names have been mentioned already, and others 
 may be added. " George Allen as a mezzotint engraver, 
 Arthur Burtjess as a draughtsman and wood-cutter, John 
 Bunney as a painter of architectural detail, W. Jeffrey as an 
 artistic photographer, E. Cooke as a teacher, William Ward 
 as a facsimile copyist, have all done work whose value 
 deserves acknowledgment, all the more because it was not 
 aimed at popular effect."^ The class included all sorts and 
 conditions of workers : and Ruskin had an idea, which he 
 called his " Protestant Convent plan," of establishing a 
 community of craftsmen, who were to carry out under 
 
 ' " Recollections of Ruskin," by ^ xhe Rev. Henry Solly, in The, 
 
 J. P. Emslie, in The JVorking Men's Inqtiirer, Feb. 10, 1900. 
 College Journal, 1908, pp. 322-328, » W. G. CoUingwood, Life and 
 
 341-346. JVork of John Ruskin, p. 155.
 
 384 SOME OF HIS PUPILS 
 
 CHAP, modern conditions the labour of a mediaeval scriptorium— 
 bound together in some sort of brotherhood, and engaged in 
 copying illuminated manuscripts, in making records of old 
 pictures and buildings, and in other art-work. Nothing 
 came of this plan at the time, though we shall hear in 
 the next volume how in a different form Ruskin realised 
 something of his idea. 
 
 With some of the pupils named above Ruskin became 
 very closely attached. He devoted one of his latest essays ^ 
 to the memory of Arthur Burgess, who, however, died at 
 a comparatively early age. William Ward, who remained 
 attached to Ruskin to the end, was the son of a commercial 
 traveller (though also a man of mystical bent, and the 
 author of several pamphlets), and was himself a clerk in the 
 City of London, A friend had lent him The Seven Lmn'ps 
 of Architecture, and the book, he says, "came like a revela- 
 tion." On hearing that its author was teaching a class at 
 the Working Men's College, he promptly enrolled himself 
 as a pupil in 1854; and so quickly was his latent artistic 
 ability developed that already in 1856 Ruskin advised him 
 to become a drawing-master. He did so, and Ruskin sent 
 him many pupils. Somewhat later, he began the close 
 study of Turner, by which, both as copyist and as collector 
 and dealer, he became known to many lovers of art. Ruskin 
 was constant in encouragement, in assistance, in praise ; 
 spent much pains in training Mr. Ward's skill as a copyist ; 
 and repeatedly called public attention to the value of his 
 work. 
 
 George Allen, at the time when he began attending the 
 classes at the College, was a joiner, in which capacity he 
 was employed for some years upon the interior fittings of 
 Dorchester House, Park Lane.^ His skill is attested by 
 the fact that when Morris and Rossetti founded their 
 famous Firm, Allen was invited to become a partner and 
 take charge of the Furniture Department. He was also 
 offered an appointment in the household of Queen Victoria 
 
 1 In The Century Guild Hohhy Horse for 1887 ; reprinted in the 
 Library Edition, vol. xiv. pp. 349-356. 
 ^ See Munera P^dveris, § 151.
 
 GEORGE ALLEN 385 
 
 as Superintendent of the furnishing of the Royal Palaces. CHAP. 
 These offers, however, he declined in order to devote him- -^^-'-^' 
 self entirely to Ruskin's service, in which he remained 
 successively as general assistant, engraver, and publisher 
 for fifty years. He had married the maid of Ruskin's 
 mother, and he thenceforward became attached, in one 
 capacity or another, to all Ruskin's varied undertakings. His 
 progress at the Working Men's College had been rapid. 
 On one occasion Mr, Allen was engaged with another pupil 
 in copying an Albert Diirer, and Ruskin wrote : " By 
 examining these two drawings together the student will, 
 I hope, learn to appreciate the delicacy of touch involved 
 in fine carpentry, for it was simply the transference to 
 the pen and pencil of the fine qualities of finger that had 
 been acquired by handling the carpenter's tools that I 
 obtained results at once of this extreme precision ; in each 
 case, of course, the innate disposition for art having 
 existed." ^ Ruskin presently encouraged Mr. Allen to 
 specialise in the art of engraving, which he studied under 
 J. H. Le Keux, the engraver of many of the finest plates 
 in Modern Painters, and Lupton, who engraved some of the 
 original Liher plates for Turner. In engraving Ruskin's 
 work, Mr. Allen was keenly observant of any subtle grada- 
 tions, and always carefully recorded any concentrated darks 
 or lights — a characteristic charm, he used to say, in Ruskin's 
 clrawinsrs. Of the orio[inal illustrations in Modern Painters, 
 three were from drawings by Mr. Allen ; he also engraved 
 three plates for the edition of 1888, and in all executed 
 ninety other plates for Ruskin. Many of his studies are 
 included among the examples in the Ruskin Drawing School 
 at Oxford ; and he is one of three or four assistants whose 
 work has often been mistaken for Ruskin's. 
 
 With many working-men or young art-students, not 
 directly connected with the College, Ruskin found time, 
 in the midst of his intensely laborious life, to maintain 
 correspondence or acquaintance. Among them was Mr. 
 J. J. Laiug. He was a young Scottish architect, who had 
 
 ^ Catalogue of the Budimentm-y Seriea, 1878, No. 241 (Library Edition, 
 vol. xxi. p. 287). 
 
 VOL. I. 2 B
 
 386 CORRESPONDENCE WITH J. J. LAING 
 
 CHAP, written to Ruskin for assistance and advice. It is the 
 ^^^- tragedy of his short life that is told in Letter 9 of Fors 
 Clavigera. He came up to London, as there described, 
 to put himself under Ruskin ; was employed by him as 
 copyist ; left for a while to enter an architect's office ; re- 
 turned to Ruskin's employment ; wore himself out " in 
 agon}^ of vain effort," and died in 1862. A long series of 
 letters to him has been printed. One extract must here 
 suffice, as a type of the solicitude which Ruskin took for 
 the welfare, moral and material, of the many young men 
 who sought his advice : — 
 
 "Fribourg, August Qfh, 1854. — Dear Mr. Laing, — I was 
 indeed very glad, as you thought I should be, to have your long, 
 chatty letter — one can never have letters too long when one is 
 travelling — only some parts of said letter are founded on a little 
 misappreliension of my meaning. I am sure I never said anything 
 to dissuade you from trying to excel, or to do great things. I only 
 wanted you to be sure your efforts were made with a substantial basis, 
 so that just at the moment of push, your footing might not give way 
 beneath you : and, also, I wanted you to feel that long and steady 
 effort — made in a contented way — does more than violent efforts 
 made for some strong motive, or under some enthusiastic impulse. 
 And I repeat, for of this I am perfectly sure, that the best things 
 are only to be done in this way. It is very difficult thoroughly to 
 understand the difference between indolence and reserve of strength 
 — between apathy and serenity — between palsy and patience. But 
 there is all the difference in the world, and nearly as many men 
 are ruined by inconsiderate exertion as by idleness itself. To do 
 as much as you can healthily and happily do each day, in a well 
 determined direction, with a view to far-off results, and with present 
 enjoyment of one's work, is the only proper, the only eventually 
 profitable way. I find scattered through your letter some motives 
 which you have no business to act upon at all — ' that I may show 
 those of my own blood that they may be proud of me,' ' if for 
 nothing else than to show my prejudiced folks that I 'could do 
 something,' are by no means sufficient reasons for going into the 
 life class. I am afraid of this prize-getting temper in you : chiefly, 
 I suppose, because I have suffered much from it myself. , . . Though
 
 THE PERILS OF PRIDE 387 
 
 I see you act under the influence of many good and noble motives, CHAP. 
 wishing to keep and comfort your mother and to do good to your " * 
 fellow creatures, yet it seems to me that you do not quite know how 
 inexpressibly subtle and penetrating the principle of pride is : how 
 it mingles itself with, and even pretends itself to be, and takes the 
 likeness of, the noblest feelings in the world ; and what a constant 
 struggle it needs even to detect, much more to expel it. It is like 
 oxygen in iron — the hottest fire will not expel it altogether ; and it 
 steals in with the very air we breathe, turning all our steel into rust. 
 Therefore it is that I urge on you the consideration of what I know 
 to be true — that it is not by any effort of which you can possibly be 
 vain, that you will do great things. ... If you are to do anything 
 that is really glorious, and for which men will for ever wonder at 
 you, you will do it as a duck quacks — because it is your nature to 
 quack — when it rains. . . . 
 
 "You say you must work hard to keep you from evil. Will not 
 hard play do as well ? I don't think God has put any passions in 
 the human frame which may not be subdued in a healthy manner as 
 long as it is necessary to subdue them. I wish you would ask a 
 clergyman about this. I would accept your promise with gratitude, 
 if I thought that it would be safe for you to make it. But I believe 
 there is no means of preserving rectitude of conduct and nobleness 
 of aim but the Grace of God obtained by daily, almost hourly, wait- 
 ing upon Him, and continued faith in His immediate presence. Get 
 into this habit of thought, and you need make no promises. Come 
 short of this and you will break them, and be more discouraged than 
 if you had made none. The great lesson we have to learn in this 
 Avorld is to give it all up. It is not so much resolution as renuncia- 
 tion, not so much courage as resignation, that we need. He that 
 has once yielded thoroughly to God will yield to nothing but God. 
 As to the Missal, it is the first page, 3, 4 Genesis, that I would 
 like. Mind you don't do it but at your leisure. I shall be delighted 
 to see you in London." 
 
 V 
 
 For some years before the Working Men's College was 
 started, Riiskin had been in the habit of giving drawing- 
 lessons by letter. Many examples of the kind may be seen
 
 388 DRAWING-LESSONS BY LETTER 
 
 CHAP, in the Library Edition of his Works. They were often 
 illustrated by pen-sketches, and Ruskin would also send 
 from his collection drawings and engravings for purposes of 
 study. Such letters and examples were sent not only to 
 personal friends, such as Clayton and Acland, but also to 
 correspondents unknown to Ruskin otherwise than by their 
 promising talent or desire to learn. The trouble which he 
 would take in such cases is a most striking illustration of 
 the eager desire to share his gifts and of the passion for 
 teaching which possessed him. His advice was the more 
 sought when his classes at the Working Men's College began 
 to be talked about. He says of Rossetti, whom he had 
 impressed into the same service, that " he was the only 
 one of our modern painters who taught disciples for love 
 of them." Ruskin's own position in the matter was also 
 unique. He was by this time the acknowledged chief 
 among contemporary writers on art ; he was the only 
 critic who had the will — perhaps also the only one who 
 has been competent — to translate his principles into 
 practice, and teach with the pencil and the brush the 
 system which he advocated with the pen. He was appealed 
 to by anxious students and amateurs, as also by official 
 Commissions, as at once a writer and a practical teacher. 
 It was in order to extend his influence in this direction, 
 and to save his time by printing a " circular letter " to his 
 correspondents, that he set himself during the winter of 
 1856-57 to write The Elements of Drawing. With the 
 general public, this book had an immediate success, which 
 has been steadily sustained. It was original in method; 
 it treated a technical matter with rare simplicity of argu- 
 ment ; and it illumined details by a constant reference to 
 first principles. Among the arts which Ruskin here em- 
 ploys, to persuade or interest his readers, is one of which 
 he became increasingly fond — namely, the suggestion of 
 analogies. Sometimes they are introduced incidentally, 
 with little further object perhaps than to give point and 
 piquancy to a sentence or an illustration. But more often 
 they are of set purpose, being intended not merely to 
 arrest the reader's attention and stimulate his thought or
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING 389 
 
 imasrination. but also to connect artistic with moral laws, CHAP 
 and to suggest an underlying harmony in the universe. The 
 book is remarkable, too, for its combination of workman- 
 like attention to detail with the enunciation of great prin- 
 ciples ; as, for instance, in the discussion of composition. 
 Simple and elementary though it is in some respects, it 
 is yet pre-eminently " a full book." I may refer, for in- 
 stance, to the wealth of instruction — given, as it were, 
 by the way, and consigned to a footnote (§ 5) — upon the 
 distinction between rendering what you see, and what you 
 know to be there. The truth that Ruskin there condenses 
 into the happy phrase — " the innocence of the eye ' — lies at 
 the root of the philosophy of drawing, and may thus be 
 called elementary, but it has never been so pointedly and 
 so clearly expressed. 
 
 To the student of Ruskin's style The Elements of Drawing 
 is of special interest. Those who examine his style in the 
 light of his whole literary production will be struck by 
 nothing more than its admirable flexibility. He wrote 
 about everything, and in all his books, no doubt, there 
 are some characteristics of his genius which may always 
 be traced. But he had as many manners as he had 
 audiences ; there were as many notes within his range as 
 there were eftects at which to aim. This is an aspect of 
 Ruskin as a man of letters which is sometimes missed by 
 those who know him perhaps only by one book. An 
 eminent critic has pleaded for " an epoch of a quieter 
 style," and has instanced Ruskin (with Carlyle and Macaulay) 
 among the giants in prose, who have "the rights of giants," 
 but whose splendid excesses are bad examples.^ But Ruskin, 
 too, had a quiet style. He is a master not only of pomps 
 and diapasons, but also of simplicity and limpid ease. In 
 this simpler style The Elements of Drawing is a master- 
 piece. " The words are now so exact and so illuminous," 
 wrote at the time a critic not always friendly to the author, 
 " that they fall like lightning to destroy or illumine." - 
 
 ^ " On the Study of Literature," in Lord Morley's Studies in LiterU' 
 tiire (1891). 
 
 - The Athena'um, July 11, 1857.
 
 390 RUSKIN AS DRAWING-MASTER 
 
 CHAP. Nothing is harder to explain than technicahties of the 
 • arts ; and nowhere is Riiskin more simple and intelligible. 
 The method of work adopted both in The Elements of 
 Draiving, and in Raskin's classes at the Working Men's 
 College, has often been misunderstood. The book, it should 
 be said, follows in the main the system as taught by the 
 author at the College, with such modifications as the absence 
 of a master rendered desirable. The misunderstanding of 
 the system appears very clearly in a criticism of The Ele- 
 ments of Draiving by William Bell Scott, to which Ruskin 
 replied in a letter first reprinted in Arroivs of the Ghace. Scott 
 was master in the Government School of Design at New- 
 castle, and afterwards an examiner in the art schools at South 
 Kensington. Raskin's class at the Working Men's College 
 and his text-book were intended as a practical protest against 
 certain phases and ideas in the current teaching of the time. 
 But they were not intended as a complete substitute for 
 all other methods and agencies. He neither desired nor 
 attempted to make artists or professional designers. Scott's 
 criticisms fell wide of the mark from a misunderstanding 
 on these points. Scott complained, that pupils who studied 
 under Ruskin's system at the Working Men's College did 
 not attain the same facility in designing for the manu- 
 facturers that rewarded the students of other systems. 
 The reply is that Ruskin never promised them any such 
 proficienc}''. Scott complained, again, that Ruskin's system 
 included no drawing from the antique ; that " etching with 
 a pen from lichenous sticks" was not a sufficient educa- 
 tion in drawing; and that adherence to Ruskin's exercises 
 never had made an artist and never would. The reply is 
 that Ruskin never said, or supposed that it would. He 
 always urged young people intending to study art as a 
 profession to enter the Academy Schools. His object was 
 not to instruct professional artists, but to show how the 
 elements of drawing might best be made a factor in general 
 education. What he claimed for his system was that it 
 was calculated to teach refinement of perception ; to train 
 the eye in close observation of natural beauties and the 
 hand in delicacy of manipulation ; and thus to help his
 
 SCOPE OF HIS SYSTEM ^91 
 
 pupils to understand what masterly work meant, and to CHAP, 
 recognise it when they saw it. His original Memorandum, -^^-^• 
 written for the information of students intending to join 
 his drawing-class at the College, was fortunately preserved 
 by Dr. Furnivall: — 
 
 "The teacher of landscape drawing wishes it to be generally 
 understood by all his pupils that the instruction given in his class 
 is not intended either to fit them for becoming artists, or in any 
 direct manner to advance their skill in the occupations they at 
 present follow. They are taught drawing, primarily in order to 
 direct their attention accurately to the beauty of God's work in the 
 material universe; and secondarily that they may be enabled to 
 record, with some degree of truth, the forms and colours of objects 
 when such record is likely to be useful. ..." 
 
 Rossetti thought highly of Ruskin's methods. "Ruskin's 
 class," he wrote (Jan, 23, 1855), "has progressed astonish- 
 ingly and I must try to keep pace with him." ^ He sought 
 to encourage habits of observation rather than mere faci- 
 lity of hand, and to fix the pupil's attention on natural 
 objects rather than on "nonsense lines." In these respects 
 Ruskin's methods have had considerable influence. Even 
 the " lichenous stems," which aroused W. B. Scott's con- 
 temptuous ire, have been adopted in some official quarters. 
 The Home Office has recently taken over from the old 
 Science and Art Department the teaching of drawing in 
 the Reformatory and Industrial Schools. The officials 
 responsible for the work do not suppose that they will 
 succeed in turning all their reformed hooligans into artists, 
 but their syllabus shows that they hope to teach the 
 clumsy-fingered lads what deftness of handling means, 
 and to arouse in them, perhaps, some appreciation of the 
 delicacy of natural forms. Among the drawing-copies is 
 included Ruskin's study of an oak spray.^ Another fruitful 
 result of Tlie Elements of Drawing may be mentioned. 
 Ruskin was the first to point out the advantages of the 
 
 ^ Letters to William Allinyliam, in Modern Painters. See the i'raiw- 
 p. 98. inc] Syllabus for Guidance in Home 
 
 ^ "The Dry.id's Toil," Plate 51 Office Schools, 1903.
 
 392 TURNER^S LIBER STUDIORUM 
 
 CHAP. Liber Studiorum of Turner as the best school of Landscape 
 Art. In the fifth volume of Modern Painters he gave his 
 analysis of the human motives in that work ; in The 
 Elements he first laid down a system of study from it. 
 During his Professorship at Oxford he constantly recurred 
 to the subject, and impressed upon his pupils the import- 
 ance of patient study from the Liber. Such study is now 
 a recognised part of the "South Kensington" system. Sir 
 Frank Short, when a student at the South Kensington 
 Art Schools, copied some of the plates in the Liber, as 
 recommended by Ruskin in The Elements of Drawing : — 
 
 "Already an accomplished artist and etcher, his progress in 
 acquiring facility in mezzotint-engraving was rapid, and he soon 
 produced successful copies of some of the plates. All this coming 
 to the knowledge of Mr. Ruskin, he was much interested, visited Mr. 
 Short in his studio, and told him that there was ' a great future for 
 landscape mezzotint-engraving, which, in its highest development, 
 had only been foreshadowed by the early men.' He also said to 
 Mr. Short, in his characteristic way, * Take care of your eyes, and 
 your lungs, and your stomach, and stick to it.' Mr. Short sub- 
 sequently engraved, in facsimile, a number of the plates in such a 
 manner as to call forth high praise from Mr. Ruskin, and admiration 
 from every connoisseur of the Libert 
 
 The result was that Mr. Short was commissioned by the 
 Science and Art Department to prepare, as a volume in 
 " The South Kensington Drawing-Book," A Selection from 
 the Liber Studiorum: a Drawing-Book suggested by the 
 writings of Mr. RusJcin. This was published in 1890 ; 
 "it aims at placing a selection of the most noted of these 
 works, for practical instruction, within the reach of every 
 Art School in the kingdom, and through the medium of 
 the Government system of Art Prizes, within the grasp of 
 any clever young student." Thus after many years has 
 been realised one of the objects which Ruskin had most at 
 heart in writing TJie Elements of Drawing. Through his 
 friend, Professor Norton, Ruskin was instrumental also, 
 it may be added, in making the Liber Studiorum better 
 known in America. In 1874 Professor Norton delivered a
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF PERSPECTIVE 393 
 
 series of lectures on Turner's Works, and in the same year CHAP, 
 the Cambridge University Press (U.S.A.) published a 
 Catalogue of the Plates of Turners Liber Studiorum : ivith 
 an Lntroductio7i and Notes. The text of this volume 
 consists almost entirely of extracts from Ruskin's writings 
 on the subject. 
 
 TJte Elements of Drawing has been widely read in 
 America, it has been translated into German, and also into 
 Italian — thus returning, as may in a certain sense be said, 
 to its country of origin. Ruskin remarks ,of his system 
 of teaching that, though " at variance with the practice of 
 all recent European academy schools," it was yet founded 
 on that of Leonardo. "I think," he said in his Inaugural 
 Address as Professor at Oxford, "you need not fear being 
 misled by me if I ask you to do only what Leonardo bids " ; 
 and indeed the similarity of teaching in the Treatise on 
 Painting and TIte Elements of Drawing is often very 
 marked, as Ruskin's Italian editor has been at pains 
 to show. 
 
 The Elements of Perspective followed The Elements of 
 Drawing after a space of two years. To the study of 
 theoretical perspective Ruskin attached little importance 
 in art-education ; the essential thing was to cultivate in 
 practice precision of observation, and this he sought to 
 inculcate by other exercises. But the theory of perspective 
 was a favourite study of his own ; some of his earliest 
 essays were concerned with it. Accordingly he set himself 
 in 18.59 to complete his text-book of elementary drawing 
 by a companion volume on the elements of perspective. 
 The book is not, and could not have been, light reading. 
 Ruskin attained, however, in it a considerable measure of 
 lucidity, and its mastery is certainly not more difficult than 
 that of Euclid. He was fond of pure geometry, and in the 
 reduction of the elements of perspective to a series of pro- 
 positions in Euclid's manner he found congenial recreation. 
 The book was written during a holiday in the country.
 
 CHAP. 
 XIX. 
 
 394 DRAWING PUPILS 
 
 VI 
 
 The publication of Tlte Elements of Drawing widened, 
 in its turn, the circle of his pupils. He received in increas- 
 ing number requests for advice and assistance in the practice 
 of drawing. Such requests came both from humble students, 
 otherwise unknown to him, and from great ladies. Among 
 workmen who sought his aid in this way was Thomas 
 Dixon, the cork-cutter at Sunderland, to whom he after- 
 wards addressed the letters which form the volume entitled 
 Time and Tide. When he had not the time to give personal 
 and continuous instruction, he would put his correspondents 
 in communication with one or other of his assistants — Mr. 
 William Ward or Mr. George Allen — and would himself 
 pay an occasional visit or write a letter of advice and 
 encouragement. But in some cases the pupils who sought 
 his advice became personal friends. At Wallington, he 
 gave lessons to Miss Stewart Mackenzie, then about to 
 marry Lord Ashburton.^ Among other amateurs who set 
 much store by his advice and instructions were Charlotte, 
 Countess Canning, and her sister Louisa, Marchioness of 
 Waterford. " I enclose a nice letter from Lady Waterford," 
 he writes to his father (August 6, 1858); "the sketch of 
 the St. Catherine of which she speaks is one I asked her 
 to do for me of a pet figure of mine at Venice." Ruskin 
 greatly admired the work of both sisters. "I had just 
 got your portfolio back from Clanricarde," writes Lady 
 Stuart de Rothesay (October 5, 1858) to her daughter, 
 Lady Canning, "Avhen Ruskin came to visit Somers. I 
 hardly expected him to appreciate your bold flowers, and 
 only showed him a few specimens, but he was in raptures, 
 and said they were the grandest representations of flowers 
 he had ever seen. . . . He had expended his admiration, I 
 suppose, for when Somers showed his own exhibition, he 
 was captious and said, ' You copy nature too closely ! It 
 
 1 Autohiogrcq^hical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, 1892, 
 vol. ii. p. 12.
 
 LADY WATERFORD 395 
 
 is the place itself! they arc views, not pictures.'"'^ A few CHAP 
 days later (November 3, 1858), Lady Stuart de Rotliesay -^^ 
 adds : " He begs to be allowed to see some more of your 
 flowers, and lie mentions having 'got Lady Waterford's 
 Charity Girl to look at — She's stunning ! ' I told Loo 
 this, and she hates the word so much, she would infinitely 
 have preferred abuse." ^ Abuse, Lady Waterford could 
 never have received from Ruskin ; but his admiration for 
 her rare talent was tempered with chastening advice. " I 
 am getting on with a fresco," she writes from Ford Castle 
 (March 21, 18G4), "which, thanks to Mr. Ruskin's useful 
 critique, I am making of a much warmer colour"; and 
 again (Sept. 22, 18G4), "Ruskin condemned (very justly) 
 my frescoes, and has certainly spirited me up to do better." ^ 
 He was a stimulating, if an exacting critic, and he remained 
 on terms of friendship with Lady Waterford till her death 
 in 1891. 
 
 Another friendship formed through Ruskin's repute as 
 an art-teacher left a deeper impress upon his life. Among 
 Lady Waterford's friends was Mrs. La Touche of Harristown, 
 Kildare, in which county Mr. La Touche occupied a position 
 of importance. Lady Waterford had introduced Ruskin to 
 Mrs. La Touche in London, and presently she, with her 
 daughter Rose, paid a visit to Denmark Hill. "I have too 
 long delayed," wrote Mrs. La Touche (Feb. 1858), "thanking 
 you, in my own name and Rose's, for the pleasant hours we 
 spent last Thursday. You, who live with and for Art, will 
 not easily guess how much enjoyment you afforded to me 
 who am wholly unaccustomed to such an atmosphere — out 
 
 ^ TJie Story of Two Nohle Lives, Marchioness of Waterford has ex- 
 
 by Augustus J. C. Hare, 1893i pressed a wish to Ruskin to see 
 
 vol. ii. p. 478. me paint in water-colour, as she 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 479. Ruskin's use says my method is inscrutable to 
 
 of the word " stunning " reflects her. She is herself an excellent 
 
 his intercourse with Dante Ros- artist, and would have been really 
 
 setti, in whose circle " stunning '' great, I believe, if not born such 
 
 and " stunner " were the favourite a swell and such a stunner " (Dante 
 
 terms of admiration. In a letter Gabriel Rossetti : his Family Letters, 
 
 to his mother (July 1, 1855) Ros- 1859, vol. ii. p. 140). 
 setti wrote : "An astounding event ^ Ibid., vol. iii. pp. 251, 25^ 
 
 is to come off to-morrow. The
 
 396 ACQUAINTANCE WITH MRS. LA TOUCHE 
 
 CHAP, of Dreamland. The 'Val d'Aosta,' and the Rossetti, and 
 ^^^- some of the Turners have been before me ever since. Rose 
 was very eloquent about them on the way home ; she will 
 not forget them, and will refer to them in memory hereafter 
 with better understanding of their meaning." The letter, 
 which is printed in the Memoir of Mrs. La Touche, goes on 
 to discuss the beauties of London sunsets and of the Atlantic 
 coasts in Ireland. It is the letter of a clever woman and of 
 a close reader of Ruskin's books. "Extremely pretty still, 
 herself," Ruskin says of her, in describing their first meet- 
 ing ; " not at all too old to learn many things ; but mainly 
 anxious about her children. . . . Named, by her cleverest and 
 fondest friend, ' Lacerta ' — to signify that she had the grace 
 and wisdom of the serpent, without its poison." Rose, the 
 second daughter, was nine years old on January 3, 1858 : — 
 
 " Neither tall nor short for her age ; a little stiff in her way of 
 standing. The eyes rather deep blue at that time, and fuller and 
 softer than afterwards. Lips perfectly lovely in profile; — a little 
 too wide, and hard in edge, seen in front ; the rest of the features 
 what a fair, well-bred Irish girl's usually are ; the hair, perhaps, 
 more graceful in short curl round the forehead, and softer than one 
 sees often, in the close-bound tresses above the neck. . . ." 
 
 Ruskin at the time was nearly forty ; they were half a life 
 asunder : — 
 
 " ' I thought you so ugly,' she told me, afterwards. She didn't 
 quite mean that ; but only, 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." 
 
 The mother, admiring Ruskin, knowing his kindness, and 
 desiring to have the gifts of her daughters rightly developed, 
 begged that he would take an interest in their education 
 He consented gladly, and Avas made free of their school- 
 room in Norfolk Street. And thus began the romance, and 
 the tragedy, of Ruskin's life.
 
 CHAFTER XX 
 
 ART CENSOR 
 (1855-1859) 
 
 "Poem by a Pekpectly Furious Academician. 
 
 I takes and paints, 
 Hears no complaints, 
 And sells before I'm dry ; 
 Till savage Ruskin 
 He sticks his tusk in, 
 Then nobody will buy. 
 
 N.B. — Confound Ruskin ; only that won't come into poetry 
 — but it's true." — Punch. 
 
 The vogue of Ruskin's books on art, and his wide circle 
 of friends, pupils, and admirers, naturally led to frequent 
 appeals for his opinion on current works of art. His private 
 diaries and letters show that he was constantly being asked 
 by amateurs for advice as to what they should buy ; and a 
 chief object of his books was to teach disciples what they 
 should admire. A series of Academy Notes, begun in 1855 
 and continued annually until 1859, was thus undertaken 
 to serve as a kind of "circular letter," telling people "the 
 pictures in the Exhibitions of the year which appear to me 
 most interesting, either in their good qualities or in their 
 failure." The later Notes included the principal water- 
 colour exhibitions, and the French Gallery, as well as the 
 Royal Academy. The Notes were intended also as particular 
 criticisms designed to support and illustrate general state- 
 ments m Ruskin's works. The success of his letters to 
 the Times on the Pre-Raphaelites (1851), in stemming the 
 tide of hostile criticism against the young school, probably 
 suggested to him the more regular and methodical exercise 
 
 397
 
 398 ACADEMY NOTES 
 
 CHAP, of his now considerable authority. "I do not at all care," 
 •^■^' he wrote in a letter of 1854 to Dr. Furnivall, " for reputation 
 in the matter. I Tnust speak if I see people thinking what 
 I know is wrong, and if there is any chance of my being 
 listened to. I don't say I wouldn't care for reputation if I 
 had it, but until people are ready to receive all I say about 
 Art as ' unquestionable,' just as they receive what Faraday 
 tells them about Chemistry, I don't consider myself to have 
 any reputation at all worth caring about." It was as one 
 claiming authority that Ruskin wrote his Academy Notes. 
 "Twenty years of severe labour," he said, "devoted exclu- 
 sively to the study of the principles of Art, have given me 
 the right to speak on the subject with a measure of confi- 
 dence." He exercised the right boldly; his criticisms were 
 fearless and trenchant. They may be described from this 
 point of view as a revival in prose form of the Lyric Odes to 
 the Royal Academicians which Dr. Wolcot, writing as Peter 
 Pindar, had put out seventy years before (1782-86). Ruskin 
 showed no respect for names merely as names. He abased, 
 so far as in him lay, some of the proud ; he exalted many 
 who were at the time of no reputation. " He does not 
 condescend," wrote a reviewer, by way of reducing the Notes 
 ad absurdum, "to notice Mr. Hart; but sees a future of 
 good in Mr. Leighton." Time has in both cases vindicated 
 Ruskin's criticism. In 1855 Leighton (then twenty-five 
 years of age) exhibited the picture, now in the Royal Collec- 
 tion, of " Cimabue's Madonna carried in procession through 
 the streets of Florence." Ruskin gave a long notice of the 
 picture, extolling its beauty and defending it against certain 
 technical criticisms, but adding some others of his own. 
 The importance which he thus attached to the picture 
 induced Browning to take the young artist to see Ruskin, 
 and much friendly intercourse followed. Leighton was one 
 of the young painters who had taken to heart the injunction 
 given to them in the first volume of Modern Painters; the 
 preparation for an historical painter must be, he felt, the 
 faithful study of nature.^ He valued highly, as his letters 
 
 ^ See his citation of Euskin's words in a letter of 1853 (Life of Lord 
 Leighton, vol. i. p. 109).
 
 RECOGNITION OF RISING TALENT 399 
 
 show, Ruskin's criticism of his pictures, though modestly CHAP. 
 disclaiming the more enthusiastic of the praise. Ruskin ■^^-^■ 
 had written in 1864 of " the development of what he calls 
 ' enormous power and sense of beauty.' " Leighton did not 
 deny that he had some sense of beauty, but " I have not" 
 he wrote, " and never shall have enormous power." Ruskin 
 was " in one of his queer moods," he writes at an earlier time 
 (1861), "when he came to breakfast with me — he spent his 
 time looking at my portfolio and praised my drawings most 
 lavishly — he did not even look at the pictures. However, 
 nothing could be more cordial than he is to me." 
 
 Not all the painters whom Ruskin selected for notice 
 won renown ; but looking over these Notes after half a 
 century has elapsed, the reader will be struck, as Mr. Coiling- 
 wood has observed, by the shrewdness with which Ruskin 
 " put his finger upon the weak points of the various artists, 
 and no less upon their strong points"; and will remark 
 "how many of the men he praised as beginners have risen 
 to eminence, how many he blamed have sunk from a specious 
 popularity into oblivion. . . . The men who laid their failure 
 to his account were the weaklings whom he urged to at- 
 tempts beyond their powers, with kindly support miscon- 
 strued into a prophecy of success." i 
 
 It was a main object of the Notes to encourage and 
 trace the growth of the Pre-Raphaelite influence. In what- 
 ever respects British art after 1855 showed an advance in 
 sincerity of purpose and thoroughness of study, much of the 
 credit is due to the criticisms of Ruskin which at once in- 
 spired or confirmed the painters and directed the taste of 
 the public. A considerable portion of Academy Notes is 
 devoted to Millais, whose genius Ruskin was the first to 
 proclaim, and never ceased to acknowledge, though he felt 
 impelled to blame what he considered signs of some falling 
 away on the artist's part from the ideals of his youth. This 
 was in the Notes for 1857, in which Ruskin, in noticing " Sir 
 Isumbras at the Ford " and " The Escape of a Heretic," ex- 
 horted Millais to "return to quiet perfectness of work." 
 Millais bitterly resented this criticism, and believed it to be 
 ^ Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 162.
 
 400 NOTICES OF MILLAIS 
 
 CHAP, inspired by personal motives.^ The facts negative such a 
 supposition. Ruskin's notices of Millais's pictures in 1855 
 and 1856 were enthusiastic. In 1859 he repeated his warn- 
 ing of 1857, but extolled the artist's " mighty painting." 
 Millais's criticism of his critic at this period is interesting : 
 " Ruskin will be disgusted this year, for all the rubbish 
 he has been praising before being sent into the Royal 
 Academy has now bad places. There is a wretched work 
 hke a photograph of some place in Switzerland, evidently 
 painted under his guidance, for he seems to have lauded 
 it up sky-high ; and that is just where it is in the minia- 
 ture room ! He does not understand my work, which is 
 now too broad for him to appreciate, and I think his eye is 
 only fit to judge the portraits of insects." ^ The "wretched 
 work like a photograph" was Brett's Pre-Raphaelite 
 landscape, "Val d'Aosta." It was not Ruskin who had 
 changed his tone for unworthy personal motives; it was 
 Millais who had changed his artistic methods. Nor is 
 it true to say that Ruskin was incapable of understand- 
 ing the broader brush-work of Millais. On the contrary, he 
 expressed profound admiration for the free-hand painting of 
 the master. What he found amiss was a certain slovenliness, 
 as he deemed it, alike in conception and in treatment. And 
 did not the artist himself show some premonition when he 
 wrote in the older days, " People had better buy my pictures 
 now, when I am working for fame, than a few years later, 
 when I shall be married and working for a wife and 
 children"? No one, it will be seen, was quicker than 
 Ruskin to applaud, when towards the end of the artist's 
 career he returned to the more poetical and imagina- 
 tive themes of his youth. I recall a conversation which I 
 had with Ruskin on the picture-shows of 1885 — the year 
 of Millais's "The Ornithologist, or the Ruling Passion." 
 " There are only three things," said Ruskin, "worth looking 
 at. One is Millais's big picture at the Academy — with the 
 entirely noble old man and the noble young girl in front. 
 The second is Briton Riviere's Stolen Kisses ; and the third 
 
 ^ Life and Letters of Millais, vol. i. p. 323. 
 2 Ibid., vol. i. p. 342.
 
 THE NOTES AND LANDSCAPE 401 
 
 is a little drawing of Mrs. Allingham's at the Old Water- CHAP. 
 Colour Society. In all Millais's other pictures there is his ■^■^* 
 scornful flinging of unfinished work ; but there's never any 
 denying his power. Whether he is good one year, or bad, 
 he is always the most powerful of them all." " I have never 
 seen any work of modern art with more delight and admira- 
 tion than this," he wrote of the same picture; and of the 
 Exhibition of Millais's Works at the Grosvenor Gallery in 
 1886 he said :— 
 
 "Looking back now on the painter's career — crowned as it has 
 lately been by some of the best pieces of freehand painting in the 
 world, I am more disposed to regret his never having given expres- 
 sion to his power of animal-painting, wholly unrivalled in its kind, 
 than any of the shortcomings in his actual work. — J. R., 1886." 
 
 It was a signal merit of Ruskin's Academy Notes that 
 he called attention year after year to pieces of modest and 
 quiet landscape by painters then unknown, which might 
 otherwise have escaped notice altogether. His encourage- 
 ment gave the decisive impetus to Alfred Hunt ; he detected 
 and praised the beautiful and still too little known work of 
 Inchbold ; he was among the warmest, as among the earliest, 
 admirers of J. C, Hook; his criticisms called attention to 
 the pictures of Brett, and Boyce, and Knight, of Henry 
 Moore, and of Mr. Raven and Mr. Whaite. Among foreign 
 painters, Ruskin was the first to call attention in this country 
 to the domestic idyls of Frere. 
 
 With some of the painters Ruskin sought friendship, in 
 order that he might the better encourage and assist them. 
 Thus in 1858 he spent some time in Switzerland with Inch- 
 bold, and in later years continued to befriend, and also play 
 the master to, the artist. He gives, with a touch of humour 
 not to be taken too literally, an account of all this in a letter 
 to his father : — 
 
 "TuEiN, Augud 9 [1858]. — The two little drawings of which 
 you speak in my bedroom are Inchbold's ; the cottage one, I chose 
 and made him draw at Lauterbrunnen ; the Thun, bought when 
 he couldn't sell anything, to help him a little. It isn't good for 
 
 VOL. I. 2 C
 
 402 J. W. INCHBOLD— J. BRETT 
 
 CHAP, much, but it is like a sweet Swiss evening. I wanted and ordered 
 ^ " ■ of him (paying him when he was at Chamouni last year) four more 
 cottages; but he got entirely oif the rails at Chamouni, and the 
 cottages are failures. I stayed with him some time, or rather made 
 him stay with me, at Bellinzona, in order to make him understand 
 where he was wrong. He was vexed with his work and yet thought 
 it was right, and didn't know why he didn't like it, nor why nobody 
 liked it. It was a delicate and difficult matter to make him gradually 
 find out his own faults (it's no use telliny a man of them), and 
 took me a fortnight of innuendoes. At last I think I succeeded in 
 making him entirely uncomfortable and ashamed of himself, and then 
 I left him." 
 
 So also Raskin was for some years on terms of helpful friend- 
 ship with Brett. The following letter of 1858 refers to the 
 picture Avhich Millais rejoiced to find " skied " : — 
 
 "TuKiN, Augtist 26. — I mentioned that Mr. Brett was with me 
 at La Tour. He has been here a week to-day. I sent for him at 
 Villeneuve, Val d'Aosta, because I didn't like what he said in his 
 letter about his present work, and thought he wanted some lecturing 
 like Inchbold : besides that, he could give me some useful hints. 
 He is much tougher and stronger than Inchbold, and takes more 
 hammering ; but I think he looks more miserable every day, and 
 have good hope of making him completely wretched in a day or 
 two more — and then I shall send him back to his castle. He is 
 living in that castle which I sketched so long ago in Val d'Aosta — 
 Chateau St. Pierre." 
 
 Brett's picture was bought by Ruskin, and hung in the 
 drawing-room at Heme Hill until his death. 
 
 In cases where Ruskin was not personally knowai to 
 the painters, his criticisms often were no less powerful in 
 suggestion, encouragement, or rebuke. For instance, at the 
 beginning of the Notes for 1858 he had pointed out the 
 beauty of the delicate pink of apple blossoms against the 
 soft clear blue of a spring sk}^ and expressed his surprise 
 that among all the modest and gentle beauties of nature 
 which the new school had particularly made it their study 
 to express, none of them should have chosen this. In the
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE NOTES 403 
 
 exhibition of the followinsf year, it was noticed that " three CHAP, 
 distinguished artists had set themselves the task in con- 
 sequence." ^ 
 
 Of another criticism of Ruskin's — that in the Notes of 
 1858 on Carrick's " Weary Life " — a fine and touching inci- 
 dent is recorded. Ruskin was abroad at the time : — 
 
 " Vokins wished me to name to you," wrote his father (June 3, 
 1858), "that Carrick, when he read your criticism on 'Weary Life,' 
 came to him with the cheque Vokins had given, and said your 
 remarks were all right, and that he could not take the price paid 
 by Vokins, the buyer ; he would alter the picture. Vokins took back 
 the money, only agreeing to see the picture when it was done." 
 
 II 
 
 Such anecdotes ilhistrate the interest which Ruskin's 
 criticisms excited, and the influence which they exerted. 
 " Mr. Ruskin's authoritative Notes," wrote a reviewer in 1858, 
 " are now looked anxiously for by a number of ductile people, 
 as something dogmatic and decisive, from which there is 
 no appeal. . . . Besides, Mr. Ruskin's trenchant self-assertion 
 of censorship creates a sort of tumult among artists, which 
 is caught up and echoed by people out of doors, and enjoyed 
 with all the zest of a scandal." ^ It was not, hoAvever, only 
 " trenchant self-assertion " that gave influence to his Notes. 
 He wrote with authority, but he gave chapter and verse for 
 it, and his criticisms were such as appealed to artists, as 
 well as to the general public. It is sometimes said that 
 Ruskin showed no knowledge or appreciation of pictures as 
 
 * Namely, Millais in his From Millais (who paints blossoms 
 
 " Spring," J. C. Horsley in as big as babies' heads, growing 
 
 " Blossom-time," and Mr. Hughes on trees in full leaf) down to the 
 
 in "The King's Orchard" (Econo- sorriest scrub who seeks a teacher's 
 
 iHi.s?, May 28, 1 859). So in another certificate from the Department 
 
 critique we read : " Ruskin has of Art, all appear to have taken 
 
 much to answer for. Probably the apple -blossom fever, and to 
 
 such an avalanche of misconcep- have painted the blossoms when 
 
 tion and untruth was never let at the height of their delirium." 
 loose on the patient art-loving, ^ Tlie Leader, May 22, 1858. 
 
 nature - loving wanderer before.
 
 404 TECHNICAL CRITICISMS 
 
 CHAR pictures, that he cared only for meaning and not at all for 
 -^-^- method, that he judged art from a purely literary standard. 
 This view can only be entertained by those whose knowledge 
 of Ruskin's works is partial or superficial ; it is completely 
 traversed by the criticisms in Academy Notes? In the Notes 
 on Prout and Hunt, of a later date, Ruskin reaffirms a 
 principle which he had often previously asserted — that 
 "interest in the story of a picture does not in the least 
 signify a relative interest in the art of painting," and 
 that the first thing needful in these matters is "to 
 understand what painting is as mere painting." Ruskin's 
 critics may say, if they like, that the technical standards 
 he applied were mistaken ; to say that he applied none 
 at all is to state what is simply not the case. It is 
 amusing to find that at the time when these critiques on 
 the Academy appeared, the objection taken to them in the 
 press was that they were too technical, and not sufficiently 
 " literary." Thus one of the critics, in noticing the pamphlet 
 of 1856, cites Ruskin's remarks about Holman Hunt's 
 "Light of the World" — that "no one could sympathise 
 more with the general feeling in it," but that " unless it had 
 been accompanied with perfectly good nettle painting" he 
 would never have praised it; and then continues, "Let any 
 one realise liis own state of mind if he believed the Light 
 of the World to be, indeed, before him ; and if he thinks in 
 that Blessed Presence he could have any eye for nettles, 
 he will tolerate Mr. Ruskin's criticism, admire the temper 
 of his mind, and think him a sound art critic : not other- 
 wise."^ So, again, another reviewer complained of Ruskin 
 for making technical objections to a picture by Egg which 
 was " so full of pointed narrative." * 
 
 ^ See, for instance, a lecture judge. Or consider the criticism 
 on Ruskin delivered at the Royal of Roberts's " Duomo at Milan " 
 Academy by Mr. Val Prinsep, R.A., (1857) ; or that of Maclise's " Peter 
 and reported in the JVestminster the Great" (1857): these are the 
 Gazette of January 20, 1903. observations of a student of nature 
 
 * See, for instance, to the and a sketcher. 
 note on Herbert's " King Lear " » 77^^ Guardian, July 10, 1856. 
 
 (1855): criticism of that micro- * The ^rf /ojtraa/!, August 1855, 
 
 scopic and technical character is p. 238. 
 not the work of a merely literary
 
 RUSKIN'S CENSORSHIP 405 
 
 In this connexion it is interesting to remark how in CHAP. 
 these Notes, as in other writings of the same or later date, ■^■^• 
 Ruskin uses musical analogies to enforce his points. Thus 
 in discussing the system of light and shade in a water-colour 
 drawing by Fripp, he remarks that " treble notes must not 
 be sharp and thin; the higher they are the more tender 
 they must be, and in a certain sense the richer; it is the 
 rich trebles that are sweet and precious." In the ElcTnents 
 of Drawing (1856), and again in The Two Paths (1858), he 
 constantly turns to music in order to illustrate artistic 
 points, in the criticism of painting, which are best, or only, 
 to be understood in terms of the sister art. Those who 
 imagine that Ruskin had no eye for the subtler harmonies 
 of pictures as pictures would do well to consider these 
 passages and to compare with them what he says about 
 the essentially "decorative" art of Albert Moore (1875). 
 
 Ruskin's annual Notes attracted, then, much attention; 
 and Punch, reflecting the public opinion of the day, pub- 
 lished the "Poem by a Perfectly Furious Academician" 
 which I have placed at the head of this chapter. The Notes 
 were, as an artist of the time bears witness, " eagerly looked 
 for and as eagerly purchased." ^ Artists, as we know, " never 
 read criticisms," but they somehow discover what the critics 
 say. The pleasure of some who were favourably noticed, 
 the wrath of those Avho were severely handled or (perhaps 
 worse still) not mentioned at all, may be traced in several 
 memoirs of the period. Men who had Ruskin's ear took 
 measures to induce him to notice unregarded merit. The 
 bitterness of those who dissented from his opinions may be 
 judged from the tone of a criticism of the first number of 
 Academy Notes in the Quarterly Review. Ruskin Avas 
 therein accused of "a cold and hardened habit," "an un- 
 feeling heart," and of " malice, bitterness, and uncharitable- 
 ness " ; and covert allusions were introduced to his personal 
 affairs.2 In a lighter vein were various skits, in pen and 
 
 ^ Pen and Pencil SkelcJies, by H. whoso pictures had been criticised 
 
 S. Marks, R. A., 1894, vol. ii. p. 163. in tho Notes. (Seo Letters and 
 
 * The writer of this Review was Journals of Lady Eastlake, vol. ii. 
 
 L;uly Eastlake, wife of the P.R.A., p. 82.)
 
 406 REPLIES TO THE NOTES, AND PARODIES 
 
 CHAP, pencil, prose and verse, whicli the Notes inspired. The skits 
 XX. ^vere sometimes shown to Riiskin, and he enjo3^ed them. 
 Among the authors of such skits was H. S. Marks, R.A., 
 who owed to his parody of the Notes for the year 1856 a 
 subsequent friendship with Ruskin. "The Notes for the 
 year 1856 I made the subject," he says, "of a little skit, 
 with coloured caricatures of the pictures, and parodies of 
 Mr. Ruskin's style in writing and critical views. I bound 
 the few pages roughly together, for the thing never got 
 beyond manuscript form. ... At some gathering of artists 
 Woolner told me that he had mentioned my brochure to 
 Mr. Ruskin, who immediately expressed a wish to see it. 
 I posted it to him the next morning, with an explanatory 
 line or two, which was promptly acknowledged by the great 
 writer, who thanked me for sending him the Notes, ' and 
 still more for the compliment of you knowing I should 
 enjoy them.' " ^ Sir Edward Hamley also wrote a skit on 
 "Mr. Dusky's" Notes, and Ruskin had moreover many 
 imitators as well as parodists. 
 
 But the frankness of his criticisms was not appreciated 
 or understood. Ruskin did not allow his personal feelings 
 to lead him either to hostile or to favourable prejudice. He 
 played the part of Minos with severe impartiality: "strictly 
 examining the crimes" of all who entered the Academy. 
 He had, as he claimed, the right to speak with authority ; 
 but it must be confessed that he sometimes spoke also with 
 arrogance. As, for instance, in the passage added to the 
 first number, where he says that when he has attacked a 
 picture it will hereafter be found that " the worst policy 
 which the friends of the artist can possibly adopt will be 
 to defend it." Nor can it have been any comfort to artists 
 thus attacked to learn that he never said half what he could 
 say in dispraise. Among the artists thus chastened was 
 David Roberts, R.A. "Feeling, perhaps," says an Acade- 
 mician with much sympathy, " that Roberts might find it 
 difficult to reconcile an attempt to do him a serious injury 
 with the usual interpretation of the term friendship, the 
 ■critic wrote a private note to the artist, explaining his action 
 ^ Pen and Pencil Sketches, by H. S. Marks, R.A., vol. ii. p. 164.
 
 SUSPENSION OF THE NOTES 407 
 
 on the hypothesis of a self-imposed duty to the pubHc, and CHAP, 
 concluded his note by the expression of a hope that severe -^^* 
 criticism would not interfere with the sincere feeling of 
 friendship which the writer hoped would always exist," etc., 
 etc. To this Roberts replied that the first time he met 
 the critic he would give him a sound thrashing ; and he 
 ventured to "hope that a broken head would not interfere 
 with the sincere feeling of friendship which he hoped would 
 
 always exist," etc., etc.^ " D the fellow," exclaimed one 
 
 young artist, " why doesn't he back his friends ? " 
 
 III 
 
 After 1859 the Notes were suspended. " Thenceforward," 
 Ruskin explained, " it seemed to me useless, so far as artists 
 were concerned, to continue criticism which they would 
 esteem dishonourable unless it was false." ^ In 1875, how- 
 ever, the publication of Academy Notes was resumed for 
 that year only, and only the Exhibition of the Royal 
 Academy itself was noticed. Ruskin had, on a first in- 
 spection, been so much pleased with some of the pictures 
 of the year that he determined to write "an entirel}' good- 
 humoured sketch " of modern English painting. In this 
 resolve, he found it impossible to persevere ; it was much 
 more nearly achieved eight years later in the Oxford course 
 of lectures on The Art of England. Further inspection of 
 the Exhibition made it appear typical to him of tendencies 
 in modern life and thought which it was his prerogative 
 to chastise. It was in this mood that, in writing to Mr. 
 Wedderburn, he said, "The R. A. Exhibition is so important 
 that I must write a ' Notes ' upon it as I used to do." After 
 all, whatever theories of their function may be entertained 
 by artists, their work cannot but be in a measure both 
 didactic and historical ; didactic, in that for good or evil it 
 stimulates the fancy or directs the thoughts of spectators ; 
 
 1 My Autobiography and Reminiscences, by W. P. Frith, R.A., 1887, 
 vol. i. p. 128. 
 
 =* Preface to the Notes of 1875.
 
 408 THE NOTES RESUMED IN 1875 
 
 CHAP, historical, in that it corresponds to the feelings and interests 
 ■^■^' of the time. It was from this point of view that Ruskin 
 found the Exhibition of 1875 particularly instructive, and 
 this explains the different form into which his Notes were 
 now thrown. He did not take the reader round the rooms 
 in order, but grouped the notable pictures under various 
 heads according to their subject-matter. That he enjoyed 
 his work, and was satisfied with " the devil " he put into it, 
 appears from one of the familiar letters to his bookseller- 
 friend, Mr. F. S. Ellis : " There's a nice spicy flavour in it 
 now, I think — as a whole — quite a ' loving cup ' for the 
 Academy." And in a similar vein he wrote to Mr. Allen, 
 " These Academy Notes will have some sting in them at any 
 rate; 'they have cost me dreadful trouble." Just as in 
 Carlyle, the judicious reader makes some mental allowance 
 for the sardonic humour of that artist in vituperation, so 
 Ruskin's work will never be rightly understood except by 
 those who remember that there was in him, and especially 
 in his later writings, a certain element of elfish humour.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 TURNER'S EXECUTOR 
 
 (1851-1852, 1856-1858, 1861-1862, 1881) 
 
 " The account of gain and loss, of gifts and gratitude, between 
 Turner and his countrymen, was for ever closed. He could 
 only be left to his quiet death at Chelsea, — the sun upon his 
 face ; they, to dispose a length of funeral through Ludgate, and 
 bury, with threefold honour, his body in St. Paul's, his pictures 
 at Charing Cross, and his purposes in Chancery." — Preface to 
 Modern Painters, vol. ill. 
 
 Letters, catalogues, notes and reports upon Turner's Bequest 
 to the British Nation occupied a large part of Ruskin's time 
 and thought during the years 1856-58 ; in the present 
 chapter a connected account is given of this branch of his 
 life's work. 
 
 Turner died on the 19th of December 1851. Ruskin was 
 at Venice at the time, at work upon The Stones of Venice. 
 His father at once sent the news to him, and he replied as 
 follows : — 
 
 "December 28, 1851. — I received your letter some hours ago, 
 telling me of the death of my earthly Master. I was quite prepared 
 for it, and am perhaps more relieved than distressed by it — though 
 saddened. It will not aflfect my health, nor alter my arrangements. 
 The sorrow which did me harm was past when I first saw that his 
 mind had entirely failed ; but I hope I shall have another letter 
 from you soon, for I cannot tell by this whether it has yet been 
 ascertained that his portfolio is safe or whether — of which I lived 
 in continual dread — he has destroyed anything. I shall not enter 
 into any particulars about pictures to-night — being Sunday — but 
 merely sit down to acknowledge your letter. For one thing I 
 
 409
 
 410 THE DEATH OF TURNER, 1851 
 
 CHAP, was not altogether prepared — the difference of feeling with which 
 one now looks at the paper touched by his hand — the sort of affection 
 which it obtains as that on which something of his life remains. I 
 have the Farnley — as you the Rigi — beside me, perhaps the most 
 touching picture of the two now ; I think it more beautiful than 
 I ever did before." 
 
 The contents of Turner's will had not yet reached him, 
 and Ruskin supposed that the master's portfolios would come 
 into the market. His first concern, therefore, was to write 
 to his father with instructions of what he was to buy : — 
 
 "Monday mornitig [December 29]. — I slept very well, only 
 waking early. I feel it a little more than I thought I should, 
 however — everything in the sunshine and the sky so talks of him. 
 Their Great Witness lost. . . . 
 
 " Touching pictures — the first and most important of all are the 
 original sketches of my St. Gothard and Goldau ; and, if possible, 
 the original sketches of all the Swiss drawings we have. . . . These 
 sketches are in such pure thin water-colour that you may crumple 
 them like bank-notes, without harm. There are, I know, unless 
 he has destroyed them, a vast quantity, for which the public won't 
 care a farthing. It is just possible that for five or six hundred 
 pounds you might secure the whole mass of them — getting them 
 for from three to four guineas each, or even less. I don't mean 
 all his sketches, but all his Swiss sketches since 184-1 ■ ... I 
 understand the meaning of these sketches, and I can work them 
 up into pictures in my head, and reason out a great deal of the 
 man from them which I cannot from the drawings. Besides, no 
 one else will value them, and I should like to show what they 
 are. By-the-bye, Griffith mentioned some of Fribourg, which I 
 have never seen — very fine ; please try to see these, and do try 
 to get some of those above mentioned : I have been so often 
 disappointed about these sketches that I feel as if there were 
 some fatality in them." 
 
 Ruskin was again, and in a double sense, to be disappointed. 
 The sketches and drawings left by Turner were not to pass 
 into the possession of his disciple and interpreter, and they 
 were to be treated with scanty respect by those whose
 
 TURNER^S HOUSE DESCRIBED 411 
 
 property they became. But all this was not yet laiown by CHAP. 
 Ruskin, and his instructions to his father continued in many -^-^I- 
 letters. A few days later Ruskin heard that he had been 
 appointed an executor by Turner, and the contents of the 
 will — with its bequest of pictures and drawings to the nation, 
 and of the bulk of his other property to found a Charitable 
 Institution for Decayed Artists — became known. There 
 was no legacy to Ruskin, except of nineteen guineas to him 
 (as also to each of the other executors) to buy a mourning 
 ring. "Nobody can say you were paid to praise," wrote 
 Ruskin's father ; sending also an interesting description of 
 Turner's house : — 
 
 " I have just been through Turner's house witli Griffith. His 
 labour is more astonishing than his genius. There are £80,000 of oil 
 pictures, done and undone. Boxes, half as big as your study table, 
 filled with drawings and sketches. There are copies of Liber Studio- 
 rum to fill all your drawers and more, and house walls of proof plates 
 in reams — they may go at Is. each. . . . 
 
 "Nothing since Pompeii so impressed me as the interior of 
 Turner's house ; the accumulated dust of forty years partially cleared 
 oft'; daylight for the first time admitted by opening a window on the 
 finest productions of art buried for forty years. The drawing-room 
 has, it is reckoned, .£25,000 worth of proofs, and sketches, and draw- 
 ings, and prints. It is amusing to hear dealers saying there can be 
 no Liber Studiorums — when I saw neatly packed and well labelled as 
 many bundles of Liber Studiorum as Avould fill your entire bookcase, 
 and England and Wales proofs in packed and labelled bundles like 
 reams of paper, as I told you, piled nearly to ceiling. . . . ^ 
 
 "The house must be as dry as a bone — the parcels were appa- 
 rently quite uninjured. The very large pictures were spotted, but 
 not much. They stood leaning, one against another, in the large low 
 rooms. 't^oiHQ finished go to nation, many unfinished not: no frames. 
 Two are given unconditional of gallery building — verij fine : if (and 
 
 1 The Lihcr Studiorum proofs dealer, for £10,000 ; but as he was 
 
 did not ultimately pass to the not given an opportunity of in- 
 
 nation, but remained the property specting them in detail, he declined 
 
 of the next-of-kin. It is said that the offer. They then wore sent to 
 
 they were offered to Gambart, the auction, and fetched £30,000.
 
 412 RUSKIN AS EXECUTOR AND « INTERPRETER " 
 
 CHAP. ^^^^ ^^ ^ condition) ^Zace(i iest^ie Claude. The style much like the 
 XXI. laying on in Windmill Lock in dealer's hands, which, now it is 
 cleaned, comes out a real beauty. I believe Turner loved it. The will 
 desires all to be framed and repaired, and put into the best showing 
 state; as if he could not release his money to do this till he was 
 dead. The top of his gallery is one ruin of^/glass and patches of 
 paper, now only just made weather-proof. . . . 
 
 "I saw in Turner's rooms, Geo. Morlands and Wilsoiis, and 
 Claudes, and portraits in various styles, all by Turner. He copied 
 every man, was every man first, and took up his own style, casting 
 all others away. It seems to me you may keep your money, and 
 revel for ever and for nothing among Turner's Works." 
 
 ^ Raskin himself (January 1) confessed to being " at first a 
 little pained at all the sketches being thus for ever out of 
 my reach ; yet I am so thoroughly satisfied and thankful for 
 the general tenour of the will that I can well put up with 
 my own loss. Indeed I shall gain as much as I lose— in the 
 power of always seeing all his works m London, free of 
 private drawing-rooms. If the rest of the executors would 
 only make me curator of the gallery I should be perfectly 
 happy." "I understand now" (January 6), he added, "his 
 continual and curious hesitation in parting with a picture ; 
 he was ahvays doubtful if he had money enough for his 
 great purpose, and yet wanting to keep as many pictures 
 together as possible." Ruskin was enthusiastic and eager 
 to take up the duties and opportunities which seemed to 
 be opening before him. He planned to leave his work at 
 Venice and pay a flying visit to London. This idea, on 
 second thoughts, he abandoned. His father pressed him to 
 undertake a Life of Turner. This idea, also, on reflection, 
 he abandoned ; it would be work enough to plan and build 
 and arrange and interpret the great Turner Gallery : — 
 
 " 5i'/i January [1852]. ... I have been thinking about writ- 
 ing Turner's life, but have nearly made up my mind to let it 
 alone, merely working in such bits of it as please me with Modern 
 Painters. Biography is not in my way. Besides, I should be too 
 long about it; there will be a dozen lives of him out before
 
 SCHEME FOR A TURNER GALLERY 413 
 
 mine would be ready. It would be curious if I got the whole CHAP. 
 
 . . XXI. 
 
 collection of his works to illustrate, and explain, and build the 
 
 gallery for — and so take the position of his Interpreter to future 
 
 generations." 
 
 That position Riiskin was to hold, but not in the way he 
 dreamed of. For it soon appeared that the will was to 
 be contested. Ruskin did not think that the opposition 
 would be serious ; still less did it enter his head that all 
 Turner's main purposes would be defeated. He made no 
 doubt that the pictures would, in accordance with the 
 painter's wish, be kept together, and that a Turner's Gallery 
 would, as he directed, be built to receive them. The only 
 question which seemed open to him was who should have 
 the designing and ordering of the Gallery : — 
 
 "January 1 [1852]. ... I hope and believe that the 
 National Gallery people u-onH build a new wing, but will leave us 
 to do it ; and that it will be a year or two before it is begun, and 
 that then I shall have the management of it — (this between you and 
 me) — for I would build such a gallery as should set an example for 
 all future picture galleries. I have had it in my mind for years. I 
 would build it in the form of a labyrinth, all on ground storey, but 
 with ventilation between floor and ground ; in form of labyrinth, 
 that in a small space I might have the gallery as long as I chose — 
 lighted from above — opening into larger rooms like beads upon a 
 chain, in which the larger pictures should be seen at their right 
 distance, but all on the line, never one picture above another. Each 
 picture with its light properly disposed for it alone — in its little 
 recess or chamber. Each drawing ^vith its own golden case and 
 closing doors — with guardians in every room to see that these were 
 always closed when no one was looking at ihat picture. In the 
 middle of the room — glass cases with the sketches, if any, for the 
 drawing or picture, and proofs of all engravings of it. Thus the mass 
 of diffused interest would be so great that there would never be a 
 crowd anywhere : no people jostling each other to see two pictures 
 hung close together. Room for everybody to see everything. The 
 roof of double plate-glass of the finest kind, sloping as in Crystal 
 Palace, but very differently put together : no drip. £50,000 would
 
 414 TURNER'S WILL 
 
 CHAP, do it all splendidly, and leave ,£30,000 for interest, for repairs, and 
 
 XXI 
 
 servants' salaries." ^ 
 
 Ruskin was never to build this labyrinthine Turner Gallery. 
 We most of us, said Goethe, begin life by conceiving mag- 
 nificent buildings which we intend to erect, but we are 
 satisfied at the close of life if we have cleared awaj^ a small 
 portion of the ground. Ruskin's Turner Gallery, with its 
 spacious dispositions for the due display of the artist's 
 works in all sorts, was destined, no less than Turner's own 
 gift to his profession, to be a Fallacy of Hope ; but Ruskin 
 was able, as we shall presently see, to do a great deal 
 towards clearing away obstacles to the exhibition of a 
 portion at least of the master's drawings. 
 
 The story of the last and saddest of all Turner's Fallacies 
 of Hope belongs rather to the life of Turner than to that 
 of Ruskin. But some account of the will and its codicils 
 is necessary in order to explain Ruskin's part in the 
 matter. The reader requires, moreover, to bear in mind 
 the fate of Turner's bequest in perusing many passages 
 of bitter irony or invective in Ruskin's works. The pur- 
 poses which Turner had, at one time or another, in view 
 in making his will were, roughly speaking, as follow : — 
 
 (1) He left various small legacies to his relatives and 
 other persons intimately connected with him. 
 
 (2) He bequeathed to the National Gallery " the follow- 
 ing pictures or paintings by myself, namely. Dido Building 
 Carthage, and the picture formerly in the Tabley Collec- 
 tion . . . subject to, for, and upon the following reservations 
 and restrictions only ; that is to say, I direct that the said 
 pictures or paintings shall be hung, kept, or placed, that 
 is to say, Always between the two pictures painted by 
 Claude, the Seaport and Mill." 
 
 (3) To the Royal Academy he bequeathed a sum of 
 money for the purposes of a dinner on his birthday, of 
 endowing a Professorship in Landscape, and of awarding 
 
 ' When the will came to be 479 (" Sun rising in a mist ") in the 
 
 proved. Turner's property was NutionalGallery; the Claudes, Nos. 
 
 valued at £140,000. 14 and 12. 
 ^ The Turners are Nos. 498 and
 
 THE WILL DISPUTED 415 
 
 every two or three years a Turner's Gold Medal to the CHAP. 
 best landscape. js-vj. 
 
 (4) " As to my finished Pictures, except the Two men- 
 tioned in my Avill, I give and bequeath the same unto the 
 Trustees of the National Gallery, provided that a room or 
 rooms are added to the present National Gallery, to be, 
 when erected, called Turner's Gallery, in which such pic- 
 tures are to be constantly kept, deposited, and preserved." 
 In the meanwhile the whole contents of his house in Queen 
 Anne Street (including therefore unfinished pictures as 
 well as finished) were to be kept intact. If the National 
 Gallery did not build the Gallery within ten years, the 
 bequest was to lapse, and the house was to be used as a 
 Turner Gallery. 
 
 (5) Lastly and principally, he directed that the residue 
 of his estate, real and personal, should be devoted to estab- 
 lishing " a Charitable Institution for the maintenance and 
 support of Poor and Decayed Male Artists, being born in 
 England and of English Parents only and lawful issue." 
 This portion of his will was dated 1832, as also the bequest 
 of the two pictures to be hung beside the two by Claude. 
 The appointment of Ruskin as a Trustee and Executor was 
 contained in a later codicil of 1S48. 
 
 The documents thus roughly summarised were volu- 
 minous and obscure. Turner had not employed a solicitor 
 to draft his Avill, but seems to have called in the assistance 
 of solicitors' clerks. His st3do in writing was always misty, 
 and of all forms of obscurity that induced by the employ- 
 ment of legal phraseology by laymen is the most unintelli- 
 gible. One thing, however, was clear ; the main purpose 
 of Turner's will was contrary to the Charitable Uses Act 
 (9 George II. c. 36), by which the Statutes of Mortmain 
 were extended to gifts to charities. The Avill was contested 
 accordingly by the next-of-kin, and a long Chancery suit 
 was in prospect. Ptuskin, feeling that this was business for 
 which he was little fitted, renounced the executorship. 
 " To enable me to work quietly,'' he wrote to his father 
 from Venice (February 17, 1852), " I must beg you to get me 
 out of the executorship ; as the thing now stands it would
 
 416 SETTLEMENT OF 1856 
 
 CHAP, be mere madness in me to act, and besides, I should get 
 •^-^- no good by it." 
 
 The disposition of Turner's property was held in sus- 
 pense until 1856, when a compromise was agreed to by the 
 parties, to which effect was given by a decree of the Court 
 of Chancery, dated March 19, 1856. The Royal Academy 
 received £20,000. The " Carthage " and the " Sun rising in 
 a Mist" went to the National Gallery to hang beside the 
 Claudes. The next-of-kin, whom Turner certainly intended 
 to get next to nothing, got the bulk of the property 
 (except the pictures) ; the Charity for Decayed Artists — 
 the one thing upon which the testator's mind was steadily 
 fixed from first to last in his confusing dispositions — was 
 entirely overthrown. The part of the decree, however, 
 which more immediately concerns us, relates to the pictures. 
 By the settlement arrived at, " all the pictures, drawings, 
 and sketches by the testator's hand, without any distinction 
 of finished or unfinished, are to be deemed as well given for 
 the benefit of the public." 
 
 It was at this point that Ruskin's interest in the matter 
 revived. Though he had renounced his executorship, he 
 still felt himself under a trust to Turner's memory to do 
 what he could to promote the due arrangement and display 
 of the works which had come into possession of the nation. 
 The works in Tamer's rooms and portfolios coming within 
 the description of the decree were to be selected by referees, 
 and handed over to the Trustees of the National Gallery. 
 This was done in the autumn of 1856, and Ruskin's work 
 was then to commence. Hearing when he was abroad that 
 the Turner sketches and pictures and drawings had at last 
 been handed over to the National Gallery, he hurried back 
 to the scene of action. 
 
 II 
 
 There now ensued a succession of the Letters, Reports, 
 and Catalogues from his pen : — 
 
 (1) First came a letter to the Times, October 28, 1856, 
 in which Ruskin gave a preliminary account of the treasures
 
 OFFER TO ARRANGE THE DRAWINGS 417 
 
 now belonging to the nation. In the same letter he offered CHAP. 
 suggestions Avith regard to the best way of making the ^^^^l^- 
 drawings and sketches accessible. With the oil-pictures 
 he was not concerned ; but he felt that no one would treat 
 the drawings " with more scrupulous care, or arrange them 
 with greater patience " than he would himself. He had 
 doubts, as we have heard, whether anybody else would 
 deem them of any value at all — an estimate which, so far 
 as the official world was concerned, was to be sorrowfully 
 fulfilled. He offered, accordingly, to undertake the task of 
 sorting and arranging the whole collection of drawings and 
 sketches. A few weeks later Ruskin followed up his letter 
 to the Times by a private one to Lord Palmerston, who 
 had just become Prime Minister, and with whom he had 
 some acquaintance. The letter is here printed from a copy 
 found among Ruskin's papers : — 
 
 "Denmark Hill, 1.S/^ December, 1856. — My Lord, — I am little 
 used to the formalities of business, and I pray your pardon if I 
 do wrong in addressing you ; but I believe rather that I did wrong 
 in making an otfer connected with the public service through an 
 irregular channel. Will you permit me, in as short and few words 
 as I can, to lay it before your Lordsliip 1 
 
 " The number of drawings and sketches, by the late J. M. j W. 
 Turner, now belonging to the nation, amounts to several — I believe 
 to many — thousands. They were left by him in disorder, and the 
 interest attaching to them depends in great degree on the mode of 
 their arrangement ; while further there are a large number of them 
 whose subjects are at present unknown, but which, having devoted a 
 great part of my life to inquiries into the mode of Turner's studying 
 from nature, I believe myself to be able, more or less, to elucidate. 
 I am willing to arrange and catalogue these sketches, making the 
 catalogue as far as I can explanatory, and furnishing printed copies 
 of it at my own expense to all public institutions in such number as 
 Her Majesty's Government may judge necessary. I am further ready 
 to prepare and frame, for exhibition to the public, a hundred of the 
 sketches, at my own cost, in order to show the practical working of 
 the system on which I should wish them to be shown. It would 
 then be in the power of the Government to direct or modify, as they 
 
 VOL. I. 2D
 
 418 LETTER TO LORD PALMERSTON 
 
 CHAP, saw good, the carrying out of the system in question, which, as I have 
 already explained it in a letter which the Trustees of the National 
 Gallery honoured me by their permission to lay before them, I will 
 not trouble your Lordship by detailing here. 
 
 " This I am ready to do, on condition of having the Curatorship, 
 without salary, of the sketches in question, so that no operation in 
 mounting, framing, or otherwise preparing them for exhibition could 
 take place without my concurrence ; my own directions respecting 
 them being subject to the approval of that member of the Government 
 who is responsible for the safety of the National Collection. 
 
 " I do not know if your Lordship attaches much importance to 
 statements of motines : but, as I have spent great part of my life in 
 endeavours to explain, and to vindicate the value of, the works of 
 Turner, I do not think I am deceiving myself, and assuredly I am 
 not endeavouring to deceive you, in stating that my motives for 
 making this offer are, first, that I heartily desire the sketches may 
 be taken care of, and believe I should take more loving care of them 
 than any one else ; secondly, that I desire they should be useful to 
 the public, and believe I could make them more useful by the way I 
 would arrange them ; and lastly, that I should have much pleasure 
 in the work itself. On this last ground I have good hope that the 
 results I should obtain in a given period would not be less satis- 
 factory than if the work were entrusted to a salaried officer. 
 
 " Finally, as the simplest test of my fitness for the task, I may 
 perhaps be permitted to refer to' the preservation and arrangement of 
 my own collection, now the third in importance among the private 
 Turner collections of England. — I am, my Lord, with sincere respect, 
 your Lordship's humble and obedient servant, John Ruskin." 
 
 Lord Palmerston must have promptly recommended Ruskin's 
 offer to the favourable notice of the Trustees of the Gallery, 
 for early in February he was authorised by them to begin 
 work as he proposed. This work occupied a considerable 
 portion of his time during the early months of 1857, and 
 thereafter until May 1858. 
 
 (2) Meanwhile the Trustees and Directors on their part 
 had begun to exhibit some of Turner's works. By the 
 middle of November, 1856, a selection of thirty-four oil- 
 pictures, which had been cleaned, varnished, and framed,
 
 THE TURNER GALLERY: 1856 419 
 
 was opened to public exhibition in some of the lower rooms CHAP, 
 of Marlborough House (at that time assigned to the Science -^^• 
 and Art Department). Ruskin thereupon set to work upon 
 a descriptive and explanatory catalogue. He worked hard, 
 and the hard work told on him, for he notes in his diary 
 that he felt symptoms of a nervous breakdown. The pamph- 
 let was issued on January 12, 1857, and was entitled Notes 
 on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House, 1S56. This 
 catalogue, which passed rapidly through several editions, 
 includes one, at least, of Ruskin's finest descriptive passages 
 — the account of the Old Temeraire — and is indeed full of 
 those qualities, " of which," as a critic of the time truly 
 observed, " he cannot divest himself in the slightest sketch 
 or most matter-of-fact catalogue." ^ 
 
 Next, the Trustees ' considered it desirable that a cer- 
 tain number of the coloured finished drawings should be 
 exhibited as soon as frames could be prepared for them." 
 In February 1857, 102 drawings were therefore exhibited on 
 screens in Marlborough House; many of the Liber Studi- 
 orum drawings were exhibited also. For this exhibition, 
 which was intended to be temporary only, Ruskin prepared 
 no catalogue. Nor was he responsible for the selection. 
 
 (3) Ruskin was strongly opposed to the manner of 
 exhibition adopted in this first display of Turner's water- 
 colours. The drawings included some of the most delicate 
 and important of the whole series, and he pointed out 
 the injury likely to result from continuous exposure to 
 light, but he did not confine himself to negative criticism. 
 He had already in his letter to the Times proposed a plan 
 for keeping the more delicate and finished drawings, pre- 
 viously protected with glass, in closed cases. He explained 
 the plan in more detail in the appendix to his Notes on the 
 Turner Gallery. The National Gallery Report for 1857 
 states : — 
 
 " Mr. Ruskin having proposed a plan for keeping such drawiugs 
 previously protected with glass, in closed cases; at the same time, 
 by other arrangements, affording facilities for inspecting them ; the 
 
 ^ The Economist^ January 31, 1857.
 
 4^0 CATALOGUE OF TURNER SKETCHES : 1851 
 
 CHAP. Trustees have authorised his carrying out, to a certain extent, the 
 XXI. method suggested, in order that they may judge of its fitness on a 
 larger scale, and in reference to the conservation and convenient 
 inspection of drawings in museums generally." 
 
 In pursuance of this authority, Ruskin selected for glaz- 
 ing and placing in sliding frames in cabinets, one hundred 
 of the drawings and sketches. He provided the maho- 
 gany cabinets at his own expense ; and for these selected 
 drawings he wrote a " Catalogue of the Turner Sketches in 
 the National Gallery. Part I. For private circulation " 
 (1857). This catalogue — which in its original form is among 
 the rarer Ruskiniana — is reprinted in the Library Edition, 
 and it is very interesting. He accompanies Turner on 
 an imaginary sketching-tour, and arranges the notes on 
 the several drawings so as to illustrate the points which the 
 artist desired to seize at each place. 
 
 Ruskin's plan for framing the drawings and placing 
 them in closed cabinets has been the means of saving most 
 of those in the National Gallery from fading. It is worth 
 noting that another collector, the late Mr. Henry Vaughan, 
 subsequently made it a condition of his bequest of Turner 
 drawings to the National Galleries of Scotland and Ireland, 
 that they should be publicly exhibited only during one 
 month in each year, and that the month of least light 
 (January) ; at other times they were to remain in cabinets 
 such as Ruskin devised. 
 
 (4) The Hundred drawings, as thus arranged and 
 catalogued, were not exhibited to the public ; they were 
 prepared, as already explained, for the inspection of the 
 Trustees. The plan was approved, and Ruskin was author- 
 ised to carry it out on a more extended scale, and in 
 this process the arrangement of the First Hundred was 
 broken up. In the end cabinets were provided for 400 
 drawings. These remained at the National Gallery. Ruskin 
 did not, however, at the time prepare any catalogue for 
 them ; it was not till his catalogue of 1881 that any list 
 of them was printed for public use. 
 
 Ruskin's work at the time was next devoted to a
 
 CATALOGUE OF TURNER DRAWINGS 421 
 
 catalogue of a different selection. On the adoption by CHAP, 
 the Trustees of his plan for the arrangement in cabinets ■^-^• 
 of the larger portion of the best Turner drawings, those 
 first placed on the walls in Marlborough House were 
 withdrawn from exhibition. It was, however, considered 
 desirable that besides the collection of drawings arranged 
 in cabinets, and not therefore always visible to every comer, 
 there should be arranged for permanent exhibition a selection 
 of Turner's sketches and drawings, " calculated (in Ruskin's 
 words) to exhibit his methods of study at different periods, 
 and to furnish the general student with more instructive 
 examples than finished drawings can be." Ruskin accord- 
 ingly selected and arranged for this purpose various drawings 
 (in addition to the 400 mentioned above). For this selection 
 he wrote and printed a catalogue, entitled : — 
 
 Catalogue of the Shetrhes and Drawings hy J. M. W. 
 Turner, R.A., exhibited in Marlborough House in the year 
 1857-1858. Accompanied with Illustrative Notes. 
 
 The reader's attention must be taxed to follow here 
 as:ain the future fortunes of this collection. This second 
 set of drawings selected by Ruskin is sometimes referred to 
 by him as the " Kensington Series." The reason is this. 
 Owing to the want of space at the National Gallery (which 
 at that time housed the Royal Academy also), the greater 
 part of the English pictures had for some time been ex- 
 hibited at Marlborough House. That house was at the 
 end of 1859 allotted to the Prince of Wales. The British 
 portion of the National Gallery was accordingly removed 
 to the South Kensington Museum, where it remained until 
 the enlargement of the Gallery in Trafalgar Square in 1876. 
 The Turner oil-pictures had been removed to Trafalgar 
 Square in 1861, owing to the necessity of complying with 
 a clause in Turner's will. The exhibited portion of the 
 Turner drawings remained at South Kensington till the 
 later year, " Exhibited," 1 have written ; but Ruskin 
 altered the word. "At Kensington they were," he wrote 
 in 1868, "and are, placed for exhibition; but they are 
 not exhibited, for the room in which they hang is always
 
 422 SORTING THE SKETCHES 
 
 CHAP, empty." ^ "I have never found more than two people 
 (students excepted)," he wrote elsewhere, " m the rooms 
 occupied by Turner's drawings at Kensington, and one of 
 the two, if there are two, always looks as if he had got 
 in by mistake." - 
 
 The return of these drawings to the National Gallery 
 in 1876 was followed by a rearrangement. The " Kensmgton 
 Series" was renumbered throughout and Ruskin's order 
 of arrangement was broken up. 
 
 (5) Ruskin's work, meanwhile, in examining, sorting, 
 and framing the drawings and sketches in the National 
 Gallery, went on during the winter of 1857-58.^ He 
 was assisted by Mr. George Allen. "I was at work 
 altogether on this task," Mr. Allen told me, "for eight 
 months. Mr. Ruskin was very jealous of any one but 
 his own assistants touching the drawings, lest harm 
 should befall them. After our day's work at the Gallery 
 Mr. Ruskin and I used to take the measurements of draw- 
 ings to Denmark Hill, when I cut with my own hands 
 about 800 thick ixuise-^^artout mounts — these were taken 
 to the Gallery and the drawings inserted there." Ruskin 
 gave an account of his labours in the preface to the fifth 
 volume of Modern Painters. He worked, he said, " every 
 day, all day long, and often far into the night " ; and " I 
 have never in my life," he added, " felt so much exhausted 
 as when I locked the last box, and gave the keys to 
 Mr. Wornum, in May 1858." His account of his steward- 
 ship was, however, rendered to the Trustees two months 
 earlier ; it may be read in the Report of the Director of the 
 National Gallery, 1858. The same Report contains the 
 following expression of thanks to Ruskin : — 
 
 "The voluraiuous collection of drawings has been carefully 
 examined and partly arranged by Mr. Ruskin, to whom the Trus- 
 tees and the public are indebted for his indefatigable attention in 
 
 ^ " The Mystery of Life and its their subjects, it seemed undesir- 
 
 Arts," Hcsame and Lilies, § 101. able to preserve, were burned by 
 
 ^ Cestus of Aglaia, ^ 4. Ruskin, on the authority of the 
 
 * It is understood that several Trustees (see W. M. Rossetti's 
 
 sketches which, from the nature of Rossetti Papers, 1903, p. 383).
 
 DIFFICULTY OF THE AVORK 42J3 
 
 this long and difficult undertaking. The plan which Mr. Ruskin CHAP, 
 originally proposed for the preservation of the more delicate coloured 
 drawings from the eflfects of light, by placing them in cases fitted to 
 contain a given number, has been carried out. A selection of other 
 drawings, requiring only to be carefully mounted, will in due time 
 be made." 
 
 That Ruskin's work was not unattended with some of the 
 friction and jealousies which attend upon divided responsi- 
 bilities appears from a letter to Mr. Woruum, then Keeper 
 of the Gallery : — 
 
 " My dear Wornum, ... I am sorry to find you putting yourself 
 in sumething of an antagonistic attitude, as if I wished to bring a 
 charge against you. If I could go on w^orking with you, and look 
 after the drawings myself — I heartily w'ould. I cannot, because I am 
 ill, and I don't think you have the time. If you chose to help in the 
 matter you might get a person appointed under you w^ho would save 
 you all the trouble, and you would have the credit of making the 
 collection available. If you like to keep it shut up, and have all 
 the trouble of looking after it yourself, it is your affair. . . ." 
 
 But the toil was not all wearisomeness and vexation. A 
 pleasant glimpse of Ruskin at work in the National Gallery 
 in these years is given in the memoirs of his friend, Stacy 
 Marks, R.A. They had previously been in correspondence, 
 and then Ruskin wrote, " If you come down to the National 
 Gallery any day, and ask the policeman for me, we may 
 meet, and at least know each other's faces " : — 
 
 " I went (says Marks) and found the eloquent exponent of 
 Turner in rooms in the basement of the building, surrounded by 
 piles of sketch-books and loose drawings by the master, which he 
 was arranging, mounting, and framing, — a congenial employment, a 
 labour of love, to which he devoted months of time, with no recom- 
 pense beyond the pleasure which the occupation afforded him. I can 
 remember little of our conversation except that it was chiefly about 
 Turner and his work. I had gone to the Gallery with an ill-defined 
 feeling of awe of the great man I was about to see, but this was 
 dissipated directly I had shaken hands with him. There was none of
 
 424 CATALOGUE OF DRAWINGS AND SKETCHES 
 
 CHAP, the posing of the genius ; I found him perfectly simple, unaffected, 
 kindly, and human." ^ 
 
 But if the work was not all vexation, neither was it all 
 pleasure. Ruskin speaks in Modern Painters of his sorrow 
 at the bad condition of so many of the drawings, and of his 
 " anxiety and heavy sense of responsibility." ^ To these feel- 
 ings must be added his disappointment at the uncertainties 
 and delays on the part of the Trustees, or rather of the 
 Government, in making due provision for the display of 
 Turner's bequest. 
 
 (6) But the patience and care which Ruskin had promised 
 were not exhausted. In his old age he returned to the task 
 which had occupied so much of his time and energy in 
 middle manhood. The catalogues of Turner drawings which 
 he had previously prepared were both out of date. To the 
 drawings in the cabinets there was no catalogue, and even 
 their arrangement in the cabinets, though more systematic, 
 was not completely consistent. The arrangement of the 
 drawings on the walls of the rooms of what Ruskin called 
 " the cellar" of the Gallery was in no intelligible order. He 
 determined to tackle the task again ; but he was prevented 
 by ill-health, and ultimately contented himself with a scheme 
 for a rearrangement of the drawings, instead of preparing a 
 new descriptive catalogue. He hoped against hope that the 
 Treasury would find the money, and the authorities of the 
 Gallery have the will, to rearrange the collection systemati- 
 cally and exhibit it worthily. His hopes were not to be 
 realised, but he did his part by recasting (on paper) the 
 whole collection, as then available, and arranging the draw- 
 ings "in an order which might conveniently become per- 
 manent." This order was set forth, and explained, in a 
 
 Catalogue of the Drawings and Sketches hy J. M. W. Turner, 
 R.A., at present exhibited in the National Gallery. Kevised 
 and Cast into Progressive Groups, with Explanatory Notes. 
 1881. 
 
 The reader is already wearied, I fear, by so long a story 
 
 1 Pen and Pencil Sketches, by H. S. Marks, R.A., 1894, vol. ii. p. 165. 
 " Preface (§ 3) to Modern Painters, vol. v.
 
 NATIONAL NEGLECT OF TURNER BEQUEST a 425 
 
 of the wanderinofs of the Turner drawins^s. But if it is tire- CHAP. 
 
 • > XXI 
 
 some to follow this retrospect, what must Ruskm's own 
 
 vexation have been at the time, at seeing, as he did, his 
 own work, in large measure, wasted; the drawings, to him 
 so priceless, treated as of little account, and dispersed from 
 pillar to post ; and, what was worse still, Turner's own wishes 
 and directions almost entirely disregarded ! Turner's be- 
 quest, wrote Ruskin bitterly, was valued "not even at so 
 much as the space of dead brick wall it would cover; his 
 work being left for years packed in parcels at the National 
 Gallery, or hung conclusively out of sight under the shadowy 
 iron vaults of Kensington." ^ 
 
 Turner left his oil-pictures to the nation on condition 
 that they should be hung together in a Turner Gallery. No 
 such Gallery was built in Ruskin's lifetime, nor, in the full 
 sense intended by Turner, has it been built now. His pictures 
 are dispersed between the National Gallery in Trafalgar 
 Square, the Tate Gallery at Millbank, and provincial galleries. 
 During Ruskin's lifetime, and for nearly ten years after- 
 wards, others of the pictures were not exhibited at all. 
 For fifty years he threw out to deaf ears the proposition 
 that a picture which was worth buying or worth accept- 
 ing was also worth so much wall-space as would enable 
 it to be seen. The dispersal of the pictures is legal, for it 
 was authorised by Act of Parliament in 1883, and in some 
 measure it may be expedient. But in Ruskin's time no 
 consideration was paid, and not enough consideration is paid 
 now, to Turner's intention in painting his pictures. "Of 
 what use are they except together ? " This was a cry from 
 the very heart of the man, and it applies to much more 
 than the designs for the Liher Studioriim. Pictures which 
 Turner painted in an intended sequence are scattered, and 
 the studies are often separated from the pictures made from 
 them. These things afilicted Ruskin sorely, and were among 
 the causes of many of his bitterest invectives. He did what 
 he could by occasional letters to the press to recall the nation 
 to its neglect of the Turner Bequest, and he sought to interest 
 such persons of importance as he could obtain access to. 
 ^ Cestus of Aglaia, § 4.
 
 426 MEMORANDUM FOR LORD ST. LEONARDS 
 
 CHAP. The following " Memorandum sent to Lord St. Leonards " was 
 ^ " * found among Ruskin's papers ; it is dated July 10, 1861 : — 
 
 " I have always understood that in the arrangement of Mr. 
 Turner's property which was agreed upon by the parties to the suit, 
 the pictures which were to be taken by the public were to be taken 
 under, and subject to, the conditions prescribed by the testator. 
 
 " 2. That the public became, by that arrangement, possessors of a 
 larger number of pictures than the testator intended, does not appear 
 to me to invalidate the obligation to carry out the conditions attached 
 to the possession of the smaller number. 
 
 " 3. I believe if these conditions be not speedily complied with, 
 the injuries which the pictures in question are sustaining by their 
 present mode of exhibition will materially diminish the value of the 
 national property in them. 
 
 "4. A large part, in my opinion the most valuable part of the 
 works in question, consisting of water-colour drawings, cannot be 
 exhibited at Kensington, nor can the public derive any advantage 
 from them or make any use of them until a proper gallery is erected 
 for their preservation and exhibition." 
 
 But Ruskin's continued protests did not as yet avail. Up to 
 the time of his death, and until public attention was called 
 in the Library Edition of his Works and elsewhere to the 
 neglect, many thousands of the drawings were left, ill-cared 
 for and seldom seen, in tin boxes in the cellars of the 
 National Galleries. An inspection of these boxes, which I 
 was allowed to make in 1904, was a somewhat melancholy 
 experience. Ruskin had spent lavishly of his time in a 
 preliminary sorting of the 19,000 drawings and sketches. 
 They were tied up in brown-paper bundles, each of which 
 bore a number corresponding to a general schedule. The 
 brown-paper wrappers, when I saw them, had upon them 
 the dust of fifty years, which had not in all cases obliterated 
 Ruskin's memoranda. Many of these referred to the gradual 
 destruction of the drawings ; the note " mildew. — j. r." 
 occurred with painful frequency. One bundle of very fine 
 water-colour sketches, of the late period, was thus noted. 
 Mr. George Allen recalled Ruskin's indignation at finding that 
 some of the Turner collection had been put under tarpaulin
 
 RUSKIN'S DISAPPOINTMENT 427 
 
 in an exposed place during the enlargement of the Gallery ; CHAP, 
 he employed Mr. Allen to go through the sketches and wipe 
 off the mildew with a sable brush. '• I should have tried to 
 get abroad again before this," Ruskiu wrote in May 1862 to 
 Rawdon Brown, " but found they had let all the Turner draw- 
 ings get mildewed at the National Gallery during its repairs. 
 So I stayed to get the mildew off as well as I could, and hence- 
 forth I've done with the whole business ; and have told them 
 they must take it off, themselves, next time, or leave it on — 
 if they like." I regret to sa}^ that it was left on ; though 
 the statement that ''all the Turner drawings" are mildewed 
 was happily only an epistolary exaggeration. Some of the 
 bundles I found to be badly touched ; and as these included 
 a few not so noted by Ruskin, it seemed that the evil had 
 spread since 1862. Attention was called to these matters in 
 August 1904, and in April 1905 the Trustees commissioned 
 Mr. A. J. Finberg to undertake a complete examination of 
 the whole collection. The work has been admirably douo ; 
 the drawings and sketches arc now well arranged in card- 
 board cases ; Mr. Finberg's Inventory is likely to open a new 
 era in the study of Turner ; and in course of time it may be 
 hoped that more of the drawings will be made available for 
 exhibition.^ But Ruskin did not live to see anything of this. 
 What he saw was the treatment of the drawings and sketches 
 as if they were " waste paper." And in this fact he felt that 
 ten years of his life had been, in a chief purpose of them, 
 wasted also.- The feeling contributed to the mood of 
 despondency which marked some following years. Yet 
 there were times, in years later still, when he felt that the 
 future might still be his. "Turner's most precious draw- 
 ings," he wrote in 1883, "are kept in the cellar of the 
 National Gallery : — nevertheless my work is done ; and so 
 far as the English nation studies the Arts at all, will tell, in 
 its due time." ^ 
 
 * I may be allowed to refer, Turners at the National Gallery 
 
 in this connexion, to suggestions (1905). 
 
 made in my Introduction to vol. - Sesame and Lilies, § 102. 
 
 xiii. of the Library Edition, and ^ Epilogue to Modern Painters, 
 
 to my little brochure, Buried vol. ii., 1883.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 PUBLIC LECTURER— THE OXFORD MUSEUM 
 
 (1856-1860) 
 
 " I hope that you will have pleasure in the results of these 
 lectures of mine, though you don't like lecturing as a principle ; 
 nor do I, but it does much good. People do like so much to 
 be saved the trouble of reading and thinking. If I wanted 
 to produce immediate eftect in any direction, I am quite sure 
 a month or two's course of lectures would do more good than 
 many books. But the book influences the best people, though 
 not the most." — Ruskin (Letter to his father, Feb. 28, 1859). 
 
 DuKiNG the years in which Ruskin was writing the latter 
 volumes of Modern Painters he became widely known as 
 a Public Lecturer. " I want also," he had written in 1858 
 when describing his multifarious activities, " to give lectures 
 in all the manufacturing towns," ^ He did not quite accom- 
 plish that, but between March 1856 and March 1860 he 
 delivered in all seventeen speeches, addresses, or lectures, 
 and many of these were collected into volumes. The 
 Politicao Economy of Art (renamed afterwards A Joy for 
 Ever and its Price in the Market) consists of lectures de- 
 livered at Manchester in connexion with the " Art Treasures " 
 Exhibition held there in 1857. The Tivo Paths is a collec- 
 tion of lectures delivered, during 1857-58-59, in London and 
 various places in the country. What was his motive ? what 
 were his objects ? Not, of course, money-making. He was 
 in no need of money, and he seldom accepted any for his 
 lectures. His objects in going upon the platform were the 
 same as those which his books were meant to serve; he 
 sought to increase the range of his audience, to widen, if 
 not to deepen, his influence. 
 
 ' See below, p. 472. 
 
 428
 
 POPULARITY OF RUSKIN^S LECTURES 429 
 
 The verdict on his Edinburgh lectures had been inde- CHAP, 
 eisive ; some hearers thought his delivery ineffective. But ^^I^- 
 practice improved his manner, and in the accounts of these 
 later lectures Ave read only of crowded and enthusiastic 
 audiences, charmed with the lecturer's facility, adroitness, 
 and rhetorical skill. Those Avho shared the platform with 
 him sometimes complained that he filled the stage only 
 too completely. This was the case, according to one of 
 the other actors, at Cambridge, Avhen Ruskin, Cruikshank, 
 and Redgrave were invited down to assist at the opening 
 of the School of Art (Oct. 29, 1858):— 
 
 "I found, rather to my disgust," says Redgrave, "that music 
 was to be mixed up with the speaking, and also that Ruskin had 
 asked to have a full hour, so that it behoved me to make my speech 
 as short an possible, if all was to be compressed into decent time. 
 We met at eight o'clock p.m. The Vice-Chancellor introduced me 
 to the meeting, and I knocked off my business speech as speedily as 
 possible. Then there was another musical flourish, and Ruskin 
 mounted the stage. He began by saying that when he spoke 
 impromptu he said too much, or he said too little, or he forgot half 
 he wished to say, or he was misunderstood, and therefore he had 
 ttritten his speech (cunning fellow, eh ! before such an audience), 
 and begged leave to read it. He was as cool and as much at his 
 ease as I was anxious, and that is saying a good deal. His dis- 
 course took quite an hour and a half ; then there was a rush for 
 refreshments, and poor Cruikshank felt he was nowhere ; in fact, he 
 got up to say he had no time or opportunity to say anything." ^ 
 
 But if his fellow-speakers were disappointed, his audiences 
 were delighted. " He secures the confidence of his listeners," 
 wrote one of them, of the same lecture, "by showing them, 
 by the novelty of thought, expression, and illustration, that 
 he has been taking pains in preparing what he is saying 
 to them. He drops in passing all sorts of startling or 
 piquant dashes of criticism ; . . . gives some experiences 
 ^ Richard Redgrave, G.B., R.A. : a Memoir, 1891, p. 205.
 
 430 HIS MISSIONARY SPIRIT 
 
 CHAP, and observations gathered in recent travel, always well 
 -^■^^I- told and always amusing . . . ; but, above all, there is 
 always some main leading idea which permeates and gives 
 consistency to the whole, and which satisfies every hearer 
 that the speaker has a definite purpose in view, and that 
 amidst all discursiveness of thought, afiluence of words, 
 and novelty of illustration, it is never really lost sight of, 
 much less forgotten." ^ 
 
 His parents, as before in the case of the Edinburgh 
 lectures, objected to what they considered the dissipation 
 of energy, and even loss of caste, involved in catering, 
 even in intellectual matters, to popular audiences. Ruskin 
 defended himself in the letter which I have placed at 
 the head of this chapter. He wanted not only to increase 
 the range of his influence, but to produce "immediate 
 effect." He had the instinct for action; he sought to in- 
 fluence the doers as well as the thinkers ; he wanted to 
 see, in the everyday world, some fruit of his principles 
 and labours. It was in this spirit that he took to the 
 public platform. His studies and pursuits and methods 
 were difterent from those of the politicians, but his aim 
 was in this respect the same as theirs. He wanted to 
 secure the vote and interest of those whom he addressed 
 on behalf of causes which he believed to be practical. 
 
 II 
 
 This missionary spirit, this addressing of himself to 
 questions of action and not only of speculation, is particularly 
 manifest in the Manchester lectures on The Political Economy 
 of Art (July 1857). Art was, as it were, the medium in 
 which he worked ; the eft'ect he sought to produce was 
 political. With these lectures he took particular pains, 
 retiring for uninterrupted quiet in writing them to the 
 village of Cowley, two miles from Oxford, and then less 
 a suburb of the city than it is now. Professor Norton was 
 staying at Oxford at the time. " Ruskin read a great 
 
 ' Literary Gazette^ December 11, 1858.
 
 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART 431 
 
 part of the lectures to me," he says, " and the readings led CHAP. 
 to long discussions, of which I now remember only, to use ^^H- 
 his own phrase, ' an inconceivable humility 'on his part in 
 listening to my objections to his views, and an invincible 
 ' obstinacy ' (his own word again) in maintaining his opinions. 
 In the main I was desirous to hold him to the work of the 
 imasfination, and he was set on subordinating it to what he 
 esteemed of more direct and practical importance." ^ But 
 though Ruskin's purpose was grave, his spirit at the 
 time was, adds Professor Norton, full of buoyancy and 
 cheerfulness. It communicated itself to the delivery of the 
 lectures themselves, which was marked, according to the 
 contemporary reports, by great vigour and verve. The 
 second of them lasted an hour and three-quarters, but was 
 listened to with " most marked attention." The proceeds of 
 the sale of tickets were given, at Ruskin's request, to the 
 Working Men's College. 
 
 These lectures, which Ruskin published with additions 
 later in the year, have a special significance in the corpus 
 of his Works. They contain the first systematic treatment 
 of a subject which had hitherto been touched upon by him 
 only incidentally. He was satisfied at the time with his 
 book. " It's not very dull," he wrote to a friend, " and of all 
 the books I have written, it's the only one I'm proud of." ^ 
 After reading the book, for republication twenty-two years 
 later, he said that the exposition of the truths, to which he 
 had given the chief energy of his life, would here be found 
 " first undertaken systematically and in logical sequence ; 
 and what I have since written on the political influence of 
 the Arts has been little more than the expansion of these 
 first lectures, in the reprint of which not a sentence is 
 omitted or changed." ^ The ncAv title which he selected for 
 that reprint — " A Joy for Ever {and its Price in the Market) " 
 — was intended as a summary of all his teaching ; " the end," 
 he said at Oxford, "of my Avhole Professorship Avould be 
 
 ^Preface to the American Rothesay, quoted in A. J. C. Hare's 
 
 "Brantwood Edition" of A Joy Story of Two Noble Lives (1893), 
 
 for Ever. vol. ii. p. 479. 
 
 * Letter to Lady Stuart de * Preface to A Joy for Ever.
 
 432 SALIENT POINTS IN THE BOOK 
 
 CHAP, accomplishod, — and far more than that, — if only the EngHsh 
 * nation could be made to understand that the beauty which 
 is indeed to be a joy for ever, must be a joy for all." ^ 
 
 To the general subject of Ruskin's political and economic 
 teaching it will be necessary to recur more fully in the next 
 volume. Here I need only note some of the salient points 
 in these lectures. Ruskin began by comparing the body 
 politic to a farm or a household, in which the rule should be 
 co-operation, not competition ; in which each member should 
 be set to the work most proper to him. His theory of 
 government was paternal. He held, in the language of later 
 times, that the State should be a "model employer" and 
 furnish an example in arts and crafts — producing even 
 drawing materials of the highest quality — not by way of 
 competition with private enterprise, but in order to set a 
 standard. Above all, the State should more fully educate the 
 people, and provide for the veterans of industry comfortable 
 homes. In a single and memorable phrase he compressed — 
 as he said a few 'years later — the whole of his political 
 economy — " Soldiers of the Ploughshare as well as Soldiers 
 of the Sword!" "Do you look out," wrote George Eliot 
 to a friend, "for Ruskin's books whenever they appear. 
 His little book on The Political Economy of Art contains 
 some magnificent passages, mixed up with stupendous speci- 
 mens of arrogant absurdity on some economical points." ^ 
 In which category, one may wonder, did she place the 
 pregnant phrase which has become the watchword of a 
 certain school of political thought and of a particular political 
 movement ? Then turning from the State to the individual, 
 Ruskin scourged the tasteless luxury and ignorant patronage 
 of the time. He pleaded for the preservation of ancient 
 buildings, for the encouragement of artistic work in orna- 
 ment and dress, for better-informed standards of taste in 
 pictures and in furniture, for more public spirit in the 
 patronage of art. 
 
 The passion and irony with which Ruskin enforced his 
 
 1 Aratra PenteUci, § 17. Life, by J. W. Cross (1885), vol. ii. 
 
 ^ Letter to Miss Sara Hennell p. 7. 
 January 17, 1858 ; in George Eliot's
 
 PROTEST AGAINST « LAISSEZ FA IRE " 433 
 
 points, the beautiful descriptions with which ho adorned CHAP. 
 them, make The Political Economy of Art one of his most ^^I^- 
 characteristic and stimulating pieces. Much of its subject- 
 matter, when stripped, in the foregoing summary, of his rich 
 eloquence, may sound familiar to readers of to-day. But 
 the date and the circumstances of the lectures must be 
 remembered. What is now accepted as common ground 
 was not then conceded or understood, and it was these very 
 lectures by Ruskin that helped to win the victory. They 
 were given in the sacred city of that " Manchester School " 
 whose political doctrines of hiissez faire, always hateful to 
 him, were then much in the ascendant. With characteristic 
 courage and enjoyment of the fray, he bearded the lion in its 
 own den; or perhaps we might rather say "tickled" — so 
 deftly and adroitly did he perform the operation. His 
 listeners heard him gladly ; but the pundits of the press, 
 when they came to read his heresies in cold blood, were at 
 once angry and scornful. Many of the reviewers fixed upon 
 Ruskin's remark in his preface, that he had read no Political 
 Economy, as disqualifying him from writing on the subject ; 
 he had, however, thought much upon it, and perhaps with 
 the more originality for his abstention from the text-books.^ 
 The Manchester Examiner and Times, then a leadinsf oroan 
 of Liberalism, dismissed his pleas for State intervention as 
 " arrant nonsense " ; ^ while other critics quoted against him, 
 as if that clenched the matter for ever, one or other of 
 Macaulay's diatribes against the extension of State inter- 
 ference.^ 
 
 The trend of political thought has shifted far since the 
 days when such sentences by Macaulay were supposed to be 
 the last word on the functions of Government. It is worth 
 noticing, however, that though Ruskin's message was at the 
 time scouted in many quarters as rank heresy, it yet accorded 
 well with the hopeful spirit of the mid- Victorian era, and 
 
 ^ See his reply to the Clitics in Gazette, January 23, 1858, which 
 
 Two Paths, § 189 ?i. cited a familiar passage, about the 
 
 2 In a leading article in that State as " Lady Bountiful " and 
 journal of July 14, 1858. " Paul Pry," in the essay on 
 
 3 See, for instance, the Literary " Southey's Colloquies on Society." 
 VOL. I. 2 E
 
 434 HOPEFUL SPIRIT 
 
 CHAP, that to the prophet himself the fulfilment of his hopes and 
 dreams seemed but a little way off. "A time will come," he 
 said — "I do not think even now it is far from us" — that 
 time of which, a generation later, his disciple William Morris 
 was still writing as not far distant : " the wonderful days 
 a-coming " when 
 
 "... what wealth then shall be left us when none can gather gold 
 To buy his friend in the market, and pinch and pine the sold? 
 Nay, what save the lovely city, and the little house on the hill, 
 And the wastes and the woodland beauty, and the happy fields 
 
 we till ; 
 And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead ; 
 And the wise men seeking out marvels, and the poet's teeming 
 
 head ; 
 And the painter's hand of wonder ; and the marvellous fiddle-bow, 
 And the banded choirs of music : all those that do and know. 
 For all these shall be ours and all men's, nor shall any lack a share 
 Of the toil and the gain of living in the days when the world grows 
 
 fair ! " i 
 
 The hopeful spirit — the buoyant tone, as of Browning's 
 " glad confident morning," which marks Ruskin's first essays 
 on the political economy of art — was to contrast strongly 
 with the spirit of his later writings on similar subjects. 
 " When he spoke again on questions of Political Economy 
 it was in another tone, and with words of darker presage." ^ 
 
 III 
 
 The good hope of contributing something to the speedy 
 amelioration of social and political conditions was not the 
 only motive derived from the conditions of the time which 
 took Ruskin to the platform during these years. Many of 
 his lectures and addresses were delivered to Schools of Art 
 or Drawing Classes. The decade in which he was speaking 
 
 1 "The Day is Coming," in Poems hy the Way, 1891. The poem 
 first appeared in Chants for Socialists, published by the Socialist League 
 in 1885. 
 
 * Preface by Professor Norton to the American "Brantwood 
 Edition " of A Joy for Ever.
 
 LECTURES ON ARl^ EDUCATION 435 
 
 had seen a considerable extension of the machinery for CHAP. 
 State education in art. In 1835 a Select Connnittee had XXII. 
 been appointed " to inquire into the means of extending a 
 Knowledge of the Arts and of the Principles of Design 
 among the people (especially the manufacturing population) 
 of the country." The recommendations of this Committee 
 led to the establishment in 1837 of a Central Government 
 " School of Design " (at Somerset House), and in 1841 of 
 similar local Schools of Design in various manufacturing 
 centres. The idea was that there was some specific and 
 limited way in which design could be taught, and that the 
 teaching should be directly associated Avith manufacturing 
 processes. To protest against this idea was one of Ruskin's 
 main objects. The "Schools of Design" had already been 
 found to be a failure; and in consequence of the report of 
 another Select Committee in 1849 the basis of the Govern- 
 mental scheme was widened. The " Council of the Govern- 
 ment School of Art " became a " Department of Practical Art " 
 (1851), with a General Superintendent (Mr., afterwards Sir 
 Henry, Cole) and an Art Adviser (Mr. Richard Redgrave, R.A.). 
 In 1853 there was a further reorganisation, the Department 
 becoming that of " Science and Art " ; it was removed in 1852 
 from Somerset House to Marlborough House, and in 1857 from 
 Marlborough House to South Kensington. The official idea 
 then was to supplement schools for teaching design by 
 schools for the improvement of public taste. This was a 
 reform in the right direction; but Ruskin continued im- 
 penitently insistent upon the fatal mistake of supposing that 
 design could be effectually taught by rule and as a branch 
 of manufacturing activity ; still convinced, too, that the 
 teaching of drawing, as an integral branch of general educa- 
 tion, was far more important than the special teaching of 
 design. The conclusions which Ruskin formed were entirely 
 corroborated at a later date by William ]\Iorris, who was able 
 to speak from wide and long experience as an employer of 
 labour for purposes of artistic production. "I often have 
 great difficulty," he told the Royal Commission on Technical 
 Education in 1882, "in dealing with the workmen I employ 
 in London, because of their general ignorance." "This
 
 436 PLACE OF DRAWING IN GENERAL EDUCATION 
 
 CHAP, general ignorance," adds his biographer, "was just what had 
 to be met by general education, not by specific technical 
 instruction. But drawing, as the basis of all manual arts 
 whatever, he held to be an essential element in general 
 education which should be worthy of the name. ' I think 
 undoubtedly everybody ought to be taught to draw, just as 
 much as everybody ought to be taught to read and write.' " ^ 
 This is one of the main propositions which Ruskin laid down 
 in his lectures. Thirty years later it was in some sort 
 accepted, when by the Code of 1890 drawing was made a 
 compulsory subject in elementary schools for boys. 
 
 On the themes thus indicated Ruskin constantly preached 
 in his lectures of this period. " There is no way of getting 
 good art but one — at once the simplest and most difficult — 
 namely to enjoy it." Artistic design can only be encouraged 
 by a public capable of enjoying it. The object of education 
 in art is not to make money but to get knowledge and 
 pleasure. " Do you suppose it is a law of God or nature 
 that people shall be paid in money for becoming wiser and 
 happier ? " Sometimes he was careful to connect his views on 
 artistic matters with political doctrine. Thus in 18G0, when 
 invited to give evidence before a Select Committee on Public 
 Institutions, he improved the occasion by informing the 
 Committee that their investigations into the reform of 
 museums and galleries would be labour lost, unless it was 
 accompanied by reforms in social and economic conditions. 
 Among particular matters mentioned by Ruskin was the 
 importance of Early Closing. His evidence is also of interest 
 as containing a sketch of a museum as he conceived it ought 
 to be arranged ; in later years he was in some measure to 
 realise his ideal at Sheffield. 
 
 A paper which attracted attention was a contribution to 
 the movement for associating the Universities with Middle- 
 Class Education which at this time (1857-58) was beginning 
 to take shape. The paper was written in the form of a letter 
 to Temple, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, then H.M. 
 Inspector of Training Colleges. Ruskin described clearly 
 the place which, he thought, might be assigned to Art in a 
 1 Mackail's Life of William Morrifi, vol. ii. p. 48.
 
 ART AND A UNIVERSITY CURRICULUM 437 
 
 University curriculum ; thirteen years later he was able, as CHAP. 
 the first Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford, to give practical XXII. 
 expression to his theories. In the same letter he laid stress 
 on the importance of giving' a more human note to History, 
 and of associating Archaeology with the other studies of the 
 University. Here, as in so much that he wrote on the 
 subject of education, he was a pioneer. Green's Sliort History 
 — "not of English Kings or English Conquests, but of the 
 English People " — was not published till 1874 ; and it is 
 only of late years that Archaeology has taken its place in the 
 studies of Schools and Universities. Temple, in forwarding 
 the paper to Sir Thomas Acland for publication,^ wrote an 
 interesting appreciation of Ruskin's work. " Is not Ruskin's 
 letter beautiful?" he said, adding: "The liberal arts are 
 supreme over their sciences. Instead of the rules being 
 despotic, the great artist usually proves his greatness by 
 rightly setting aside rules ; and the great critic is he who, 
 while he knows the rule, can appreciate the ' law within the 
 law ' which overrides the rule. In no other way does Ruskin 
 so fully show his greatness in criticism as in that fine incon- 
 sistency for which he has been so often attacked by men 
 who do not see the real consistency that lies beneath." It 
 should be added that Ruskin in these years filled the office 
 of " Examiner in Drawing " in the " Middle Class Examina- 
 tions " then lately established by the University of Oxford. 
 
 IV 
 
 In thus seeking to influence the course of national 
 education in art, Ruskin had a further and a particular 
 object. This is stated in one of the letters to his father, 
 in which he apologises for his persistency in lecturing : — 
 
 "Bolton, Sundaij [Feh-uari/ 27, 18.^)9J. — IMy consent to give 
 these two addresses was not merely in good nature ; the jjublication 
 of Sir Gardner Wilkinson's book had forced me to think carefully 
 
 ^ In Some Account of the Origin in Arts and Certificates for the year 
 and Objects of the New Oxford Ex- ISoS, by T. D. Acland, 1858. 
 aminationn for the Title of Associate
 
 438 LECTURES AGAINST CONVENTIONALISM 
 
 CHAP, over some essential principles wliicli it contradicted, and wliicli were 
 
 XXII 
 
 not clearly enough stated in any of my books. 1 wanted to announce 
 
 these as soon as I could to stop misunderstanding and the mischief 
 of part of Wilkinson's book, which otherwise would have gone on 
 doing harm for another year. ..." 
 
 The book referred to is Sir Gardner Wilkinson's work on 
 Decorative Art (1858) — a book, as Kuskin says, " excellent 
 in almost all points," but yielding " too much indulgence 
 to that old idea tliat nature is to be idealised or improved 
 when it is brought down to manufacture or to decoration." 
 The book insisted, as Ruskin did also, on the essential unity 
 of art, and on the dignity of decorative work; but the 
 " indulgence " tended to confirm views to which Ruskin was 
 resolutely opposed. 
 
 In one of his addresses he defended what are now best 
 known as " Morris carpets," with floral designs. He " could 
 not see, since the first thing we did usually to make the 
 ground fit to be walked upon by any festive procession was 
 ahvays to strew flowers upon it, why we should refuse to have 
 flowers on our carpets lest we should stumble over them, 
 any more than we should refuse to have pictures on our 
 walls lest we should knock our heads through them." ^ 
 Nature versus Conventionalism in art was the cause for 
 which Ruskin fought, and this is the principle which gives 
 unity to all the discourses collected in The Two Paths. This 
 is one of Ruskin's most brilliant books, containing some of 
 his best-known sayings — such as that, of Titian, " a strange 
 undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name which 
 means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater 
 than they." The dependence of all noble design, in any 
 kind, on the sculpture or painting of Organic Form, was 
 the law which he sought to illustrate. How happy is his 
 satire on formal symmetry in design : — 
 
 " You are taught in some of our schools to turn a leaf the other 
 way, opposite to itself ; and the two leaves set opposite ways are 
 
 ^ " Remarks on the Recent Pro- Arts, March 12, 1856; reprinted 
 gress of Design as applied to in the Library Edition, vol. xvi. 
 Manufacture," at the Society of pp. 427-430.
 
 THE TWO PATHS 439 
 
 called a " design " : and thus it is supposed possible to produce CHAP. 
 ornamentation, though you have no more brains than a looking-glass '^^-^■'-'■• 
 or a kaleidoscope has. But if once you learn to draw the human 
 figure, you will find that knocking two men's heads together does 
 not necessarily constitute a good design." 
 
 And how fine his account of the lordly kingdom which is 
 open to the architect as sculptor : — 
 
 " From visions of angels, down to the least important gesture of 
 a child at play, whatever may be conceived of Divine, or beheld of 
 Human, may be dared or adopted by you ; throughout the kingdom 
 of animal life, no creature is so vast, or so minute, that you cannot 
 deal with it, or bring it into service ; the lion and the crocodile will 
 couch about your shafts ; the moth and the bee will sun themselves 
 upon your flowers ; for you, the fawn will leap ; for you, the snail be 
 slow ; for you, the dove smooth her bosom, and the hawk spread 
 her wnngs toward the south. All the wide world of vegetation 
 blooms and bends for you ; the leaves tremble that you may bid 
 them be still under the marble snow; the thorn and the thistle, 
 which the earth casts forth as evil, are to you the kindliest servants ; 
 no dying petal, nor drooping tendril, is so feeble as to have no help 
 for you ; no robed pride of blossom so kingly, but it will lay aside 
 its purple to receive at your hands the pale immortality. . . ." 
 
 Ruskin, it will be seen, gave of his best in these public 
 lectures, and they were well appreciated. This was especially 
 the case with the lectures at Manchester on " The Unity of 
 Art " (Feb. 22, 1859) and at Bradford on " Manufacture and 
 Design" (March 1). He had driven down to Manchester — 
 perhaps he liked the idea of so practical a protest against 
 machinery, as a preliminary to his lecture. But he found 
 the driving tour restful, and he had the faculty of work- 
 ins: i^nd writint; wherever he chanced to be. Much of his 
 Manchester lecture — as also his second letter on the Oxford 
 Museum — was thus written on the road. The fresh air and 
 the scenery invigorated him, and conduced to the verve and 
 " go " which he threw into his discourses. The lecture at 
 Manchester was a great success. " The people here," he 
 wrote to his father (Feb. 22), 'have liked me upon art much
 
 440 LECTURES AT MANCHESTER AND BRADFORD 
 
 CHAP, better than on political economy. They all expressed them- 
 XXII. selves excessively pleased. Sir Elkanah and Lady Armitage 
 were there and seemed very glad to see me again, scolding 
 me a little for not using their house as mine. I am going 
 to breakfast there to-morrow." The lecturing tour seems to 
 have been arranged by Gambart the picture-dealer (the 
 founder, too, of the French Gallery), who had, a year or two 
 before, introduced Ruskin to Rosa Bonheur. " I like him 
 very much," wrote Ruskin (Feb. 24), " and he tells me 
 much that is very useful to me ; he is so straightforward 
 and eager, and has a great deal of real feeling besides : 
 which he showed yesterday at Manchester by asking for 
 messages home to mamma and you. . . . Gambart break- 
 fasted with us at Sir Elkanah's, and we formed plans at 
 breakfast for buying all Venice from the Austrians — pictures, 
 palaces, and everything — and; asked Sir Elkanah to set the 
 project on foot, in Manchester" — the political economy of 
 art again, it will be seen. At Manchester, on this occasion, 
 Ruskin visited also Mrs. Gaskell, of whose works he was 
 a great admirer. From Manchester Ruskin went to Bolton, 
 where he stayed for some days before fulfilling his next 
 lecturing engagement. This was at Bradford, in connexion 
 with the opening of a newly formed School of Design, and 
 Ruskin took particular pains in the preparation of his 
 lecture. It "attracted," we read,^ "a very numerous and 
 distinguished assembly. Never perhaps since Mr. Thackeray's 
 lectures has such an audience within the same compass been 
 gathered together." The audience showed "rapt attention 
 and delight." Ruskin himself was pleased. " All went well 
 last night," he writes to his father (March 2), " and every- 
 body seemed much delighted — a comfortable room to speak 
 in, and the Mayor of Bradford for Chairman, and perfectly 
 silent and attentive audience." It is in this lecture that 
 the famous description of mediaeval Pisa occurs, with its 
 beautiful close : — 
 
 " And over all these, ever present, near or far — seen through the 
 leaves of vine, or imaged with all its march of clouds in the Arno's 
 
 ^ Bradford Observer, March 3, 1858.
 
 THE "BATTLE OF THE STYLES" 441 
 
 stream, or set with its depth of blue close against the golden hair CHAP. 
 and burning cheek of lady and knight, — that untroubled and sacred XXII. 
 sky, which was to all men, in those days of innocent faith, indeed 
 the unquestioned abode of spirits, as the earth was of men ; and 
 which opened straight through its gates of cloud and veils of dew 
 into the awfulness of the eternal world ; — a heaven in which every 
 cloud that passed was literally the chariot of an angel, and every 
 ray of its Evening and Morning streamed from the throne of God. — 
 What think you of that for a School of Design 1 " 
 
 There Avas another movement of the time which Ruskin 
 eagerly desired to influence. The " hattle of the styles " 
 came to its height in the years 1857-58-59. The battle- 
 ground was the new Government Offices. In 1856 the 
 Government had invited English and foreign architects 
 in general competition to submit designs for the new 
 public offices. More than two hundred designs were sent 
 in ; they were exhibited in Westminster Hall in 1857. All 
 the educated w^orld went to see them ; the public prints 
 were filled with criticisms and controversy. Parliamentary 
 Committees, Parliamentary debates, and public deputations 
 were busy wdth the dispute. In the end, after much delay, 
 Gilbert Scott was appointed architect for the India Office 
 (1858) — the other buildings being left over for subsequent 
 erection. Scott's design was Gothic, and the victory seemed 
 to have been Avon. But in the folloAving year the Govern- 
 ment of Lord Derby, Avhich had given Scott the commission, 
 Avent out, and Lord Palmerston came in. Among Lord 
 Palmerston's stock of antipathies, a specially hot place 
 Avas given to Gothic architecture. It Avas dark, he said ; 
 it Avas inconvenient : it Avas Jesuitical. " It Avas all very 
 Avell for our ancestors to build in that Avay, because they 
 kncAV no better; but Avhy should Ave?" Lord Palmerston 
 carried his point, and Scott Avas compelled to abandon his 
 original Gothic design for one in the Italian manner.
 
 442 RUSKIN AS GOTHIC PROTAGONIST 
 
 CHAP. Ruskin was on the Continent at the moment, and wrote 
 ^^^^- to a friend on the subject : — 
 
 {To E. S. Dallas.) "Thun, Aug. 18, 1859. . . . Nice sensible 
 discussions you're having in England there about Gothic and Italian, 
 aren't you 1 And the best of the jest is that besides nobody knowing 
 which is which, there is not a man living who can build either. 
 What a goose poor Scott (who will get his liver lit for jja^e de 
 Sfrashurg with vexation) must be, not to say at once he'll build 
 anything. If I were he, I'd build Lord P. an office with all the 
 capitals upside down ; and tell him it was in the Greek style, 
 inverted, to express typically Government by Party : Up to-day, 
 down to-morrow." 
 
 The interest taken in the battle of the styles, the position 
 which Ruskin held as the inspirer of the Gothic hosts, the 
 prejudices against which he contended, are all reflected in a 
 leading article in a popular journal: — 
 
 "If the discussion lasts we shall all be Vitruvians or Wiuckel- 
 manns by Christmas ; photographs of sea-green Venice will shadow 
 every wall ; tea-tables will chat of Corinth ; and Doric pediments 
 will support Renaissance sideboards. . . . Lord Palmerston hits 
 off his theory in a light, airy, and cheerful style ; the Calvinists 
 are cursing worse than ever ; the Puseyites are at work upon 
 their Madonnas from Portland. . . . The Palace is to look penal, 
 and the prison festive ; it was always so in England, and we have 
 abandoned every hope of reform. Still there are some who benefit 
 by these exhibitions of rapid idiosyncrasy. . . , Above and beyond 
 all, it is a godsend, a windfall, an apocalypse for Mr. Ruskin. That 
 architectural Imperator, who claims the championship of English 
 art, is in raptures with the generation that listens to him when 
 he discourses on ogives and mullions, on leaden casements and 
 high-pitched roofs. ... It is matter of congratulation that the 
 Government, repudiating the ecclesiastical sympathies of the late 
 First Commissioner of Public Works [Lord John Manners], has 
 given a check to the mitre and crozier architects who would convert 
 a public office into a sanctuary loaded with carvings and brasswork, 
 lit by fantastic windows, and expensive without being commodious " 
 {Daily Telegraph, August 31, 1859).
 
 THE OXFORD MUSEUM 443 
 
 Ruskin by his Seven Lamps and Stones of Venice had CHAP, 
 done much to assist a Gothic Revival, but there was now 
 a reaction, and in the battle over the Government Offices 
 in Whitehall the classical school won the day. In the 
 next large piece of building by Government — the Law 
 Courts in the Strand — the victory went to the Gothic side ; 
 and that again has been followed by a reaction, in the 
 newer Government Offices in Whitehall. Meanwhile the 
 battle of the styles had been fought out upon another 
 field, and here Ruskin entered the lists. 
 
 The foundation of a Museum at Oxford was the result 
 of a long and arduous struggle. Acland had begun the 
 agitation in 1847 with a memorandum, signed by himself 
 and other scientific teachers, in which he urged " the erec- 
 tion of an edifice within the precincts of the University 
 for the better display of materials illustrative of the facts 
 and laws of the natural world." In 1848 he put out a 
 pamphlet urging the creation of an Honour School in 
 Natural Science. " A general insight into natural laws, 
 he maintained, was ennobling; and he referred effectively 
 to the second volume of Modern Painters which was then 
 creating a profound sensation at Oxford." i At last, in 
 1854, the building of a Museum was sanctioned, and 
 architects were invited to send in designs. A pamphlet 
 for their guidance was issued, and in considering the 
 actual edifice it is important to remember that the esti- 
 mated cost was limited to £30,000, and that convenience 
 of interior arrangement was to be considered more essen- 
 tial than exterior decoration. The designs Avere received, 
 and they were exhibited to the public in the Radcliffe 
 Camera. After a process of elimination, two were reported 
 to Convocation as being suitable. One of these bore the 
 motto Fiat justitia, mat caelum, and was in the Palla- 
 dian style ; ^ the other, bearing the motto Nisi Dominus 
 cedijicaverit domum, was Gothic — " Veronese Gothic of the 
 
 ^ Sir Henry Acland : a Memoir, (son of the architect of the Houses 
 by J. B. Atlay, 1903, p. 153. of Parliament). 
 
 * The architect was E. M. Barry
 
 444 ACCEPTANCE OF THE GOTHIC DESIGN 
 
 CHAP, best and manliest type," Professor Hort described it, "in 
 -^■^II- a new and striking combination." ^ On the eve of the 
 poll, Acland put out an anonymous pamphlet advocating 
 the Gothic design. There was a rain of pamphlets in the 
 University, and the opponents of the Museum, hoping to 
 profit by the division of opinion on the two designs, rallied 
 for a last assault. But by sixty- eight votes to sixty-four 
 Convocation passed the vote for the Museum, the design 
 selected being that with the motto Nisi Dominus. The 
 successful design was the Avork of Benjamin Woodward, 
 of the Dublin firm of Deane, Woodward & Deane. The 
 foundation stone was laid on June 20, 1855. 
 
 Ruskin had been heart and soul with Acland in advo- 
 cating the Gothic design. Nowhere in England had the 
 Gothic lingered so late as in Oxford ; nowhere, it may well 
 have seemed to Ruskin, was it so important that the Gothic 
 should be revived. On the evening of the day which de- 
 cided the matter in Convocation (December 12, 1854), he 
 wrote to Acland: — 
 
 " I have just received your telegraphic message from Woodward, 
 and am going to thank God for it and lie down to sleep. It means 
 jnuch, I think, both to you and me. I trust you will have no 
 anxiety, such as you have borne, to bear again in this cause. The 
 Museum in your hands, as it must eventually be, will be the root 
 of as much good to others as I suppose it is rational for any single 
 living soul to hope to do in its earth-time." 
 
 Ruskin's enthusiasm is easy to understand. It was not 
 merely the adoption of the Gothic style that pleased him ; 
 it was also the employment of architects who had seized 
 the spirit, as well as the form, of Gothic work, and had 
 already attained some success in the training of workmen 
 as artists, and not as tools. Woodward had in 1853 entered 
 into partnership with Sir Thomas Deane, and in that year 
 the firm began the building of the new library at Trinity 
 College, Dublin, in the style of the Byzantine Renaissance 
 at Venice. In lecturing in Dublin ten years later, Ruskin 
 referred to that building (which was completed in 1857) 
 ^ Memoir of Acland, p. 207.
 
 BEN.JAMIN WOODWARD, ARCHITECT 445 
 
 as "the first realisation I had the joy to see of the principles CHAP. 
 I had, until then, been endeavouring to teach, but which, XXII. 
 alas, is now to me no more than the richly canopied 
 inonunient of one of the most earnest souls that ever gave 
 itself to the arts, and one of my truest and most loving- 
 friends, Benjamin Woodward." ^ The building at Dublin 
 was the more the realisation of Ruskin's principles, in that 
 an experiment was made both in enlisting the support of 
 eminent artists to design decorations, and also in leaving 
 sculptural details to the taste of individual workmen who 
 copied natural foliage in an unconventional style. Ruskin 
 took a keen interest in the details of the building, and 
 secured some interesting collaborateurs : — 
 
 "Miss S[iddal]," wrote Eossetti to Allingliam (July 4, 1855), 
 " made some lovely designs for him (Woodward), but Ruskin thought 
 them too good for his workmen at Dublin to carve. One, however, 
 was done (how I know not) and is there ; it represents an angel with 
 some children and all manner of other things, and is, I believe, close 
 to a design by Millais of mice eating corn." ^ 
 
 " Yesterday in Dublin," wrote William Allingliam (May 28, 
 1855), " I saw but hastily the part-finished building in Trinity 
 College, which is after Ruskin's heart. Style, early Venetian 
 (I suppose), with numberless capitals delicately carved over 
 with holly-leaves, shamrocks, various flowers, birds, and so 
 on. There are also circular frames here and there in the 
 wall, at present empty, to be filled no doubt with eyes of 
 coloured stone. Ruskin has written to the architect, a 
 young man, expressing his high approval of the plans, so 
 by-and-by all you cognoscenti will be rushing over to 
 exaunne the Stones of Dublin." 
 
 With the young architect Ruskin had formed, through 
 their mutual friend Rossetti, an affectionate friendship. 
 Benjamin Woodward, who was of Irish birth, was of an 
 
 * Sesame and Lilies, § 103. found, and adds that " Sir Thomas 
 
 * Letters of JJante Gabriel Rossetti Deane, the son of Woodward's 
 to JVilliam AUiruihatn, li^97, p. I'^l. partner, is sure that neither 
 Dr. Birkbeck Hill, the editor of Millais's nor Miss Siddal's design 
 those letters, states, however, that was used " {ibid., p. 146). 
 
 the mice eating corn are not to bo
 
 446 RUSKIN^S CO-OPERATION 
 
 CHAP, enthusiastic temperament and most lovable nature — a man, 
 ^^^- says one who knew him, " of rare genius and deep artistic 
 knowledge, beautiful in face and character, but with the 
 shadow of an early death already stealing over him." ' He 
 spent unremitting labour upon the Museum, as also on 
 another building at Oxford, to which reference will pre- 
 sently be made, but he did not live to see the completion 
 of his work. In 1860 he fell a victim to consumption; 
 went to the south of Franco for the winter, and died at 
 Lyons on his return journey on May 15, 1861, in his 
 forty-sixth year. 
 
 The building of the Oxford Museum gave to Rnskin 
 and his friend an opportunity of carrying still further the 
 attempt to revive freedom of design in the craftsman in the 
 spirit of mediaeval Gothic art. Ruskin's enthusiasm at the 
 prospect is reflected in a letter to Acland : — 
 
 " I hope to be able to get Millais and Rossetti to design flower 
 and beast borders — crocodiles and various vermin — such as you are 
 particularly fond of — Mrs. Buckland's ' dabby things '—and we will 
 carve them and inlay them with Cornish serpentine all about your 
 windows. I will pay for a good deal myself, and I doubt not to find 
 funds. Such capitals as we will have ! " 
 
 Rossetti did not design anything for the Museum, though 
 he enlisted other artist friends in the cause; and in other 
 respects Ruskin was as good as his word and better. He was 
 in constant communication with Woodward, and interested 
 himself in every detail — in the architectural decoration 
 of the exterior, in the interior decoration, the statues, the 
 marbles, the ironwork which supported the roof. He drew 
 a large number of designs for windows ; and one at least of 
 
 ^ Reminiscences of Oxford, by the his partners, the elder Deane was 
 
 Rev. W. Tuckwell, 1900, p. 48. a chatterbox, the younger stam- 
 
 Woodward was famous also for mered ; hence the saying of Jeune, 
 
 his gift of silence — " the stillest the Vice-Chancellor, of the difB- 
 
 creature that ever breathed out of culty of dealing with architects 
 
 an oyster shell " was Rossetti's of whom " one won't talk, one 
 
 description (Mackail's Life of can't talk, and one never stops 
 
 JVilliam Morris, vol. i. p. 122). Of talking."
 
 RUSKIN AS BRICKLAYER 447 
 
 the actual windo-ws of the facade was carved fi'om his design.^ CHAP. 
 He is said also to have designed six iron brackets for the -^-^H- 
 roof.2 He also reared with his own hands one of the brick 
 columns. " Acland used to show it with great pride to 
 visitors at the Museum ; legend relates that the workmen 
 found it necessary to demolish the column and reconstruct 
 it by less eminent hands." ^ This was not Ruskin's first ex- 
 perience of the kind, as appears from a letter to a friend : — 
 
 (7'o Mes, John Simox.) "Cowley, July 3, 1857. ... I have 
 got lodgings in a farmhouse in the middle of a field, with a garden 
 of gooseberries and orange lilies ; and a loose stone wall round it, all 
 over stone-crop. It is two miles and a half from Oxford, and I write 
 there — here — I don't know if it is 'here, or there' grammatically 
 — till half-past twelve every day : then walk into Oxford and dine 
 with my friend Dr. Acland, and after dinner take a lesson in brick- 
 laying. He is building a study; and I built a great bit yesterday, 
 which the bricklayer my tutor in a most provoking manner pulled all 
 down again. But this bit I have done to-day is to st;md." 
 
 He was fond of trying his hand at all the arts and crafls 
 " Half my power," he said, " of ascertaining facts of any kind 
 connected with the arts, is in my stern habit of doing the 
 thing with my own hands till I know its difficulty." He 
 worked with a carpenter until he could take an even shaving 
 six feet long off a board ; and with a house-painter, long 
 enough " to feel the master's superiority in the use of a 
 blunt brush." But the instrument he finally decided to be 
 the most difficult of management was the trowel. He had 
 to abandon all hope of obtaining the least skill with it, 
 
 ^ So Raskin himself states in Smart's Bihl'io(,ra2:hy of Ihiskin 
 
 Sesavie and Lilies, § 103. See also vol. i. p. 94, where it is stated that 
 
 below, p. 484. It is not easy, how- "Photographs of a series of eight 
 
 ever, to identify the window with brackets, designed by Mr. Raskin 
 
 complete certainty ; in all proba- for the Oxford Museum, are pub- 
 
 bility it is the one on the first lished by Messrs. Bedford, Lemere 
 
 floor, next, on the spectator's left, and Co., 147 Strand, W.C." The 
 
 to the centre of the building. photographers have now destroyed 
 
 ^ This statement rests on the the negatives, 
 
 authority of a note in Wise and s Memoir of Acland, p. 223.
 
 448 THE OXFORD UNION PAINTINGS 
 
 CHAP, unless he gave up all thoughts of any future literary or 
 
 .XXII. political career.^ 
 
 Besides thus lending a hand himself, Raskin both con- 
 tributed funds and enlisted the support of other patrons 
 and artists. The money voted by the University sufficed 
 only for the bare shell of the building ; all embellishments 
 and decorations had to be met out of private resources. 
 Ruskin gave £300 to improve the work of one set of windows, 
 and his father provided funds for one of the statues (that 
 of Hippocrates). In conjunction with Rossetti, he also in- 
 duced Woolner and Alexander Munro, and other eminent 
 sculptors, to execute some of the figures for hardly more 
 than nominal remuneration. 
 
 A further group of artists gathered round Woodward in 
 connexion with another building which he was employed 
 to erect in Oxford. This was the old Debating Hall (now 
 the Library) of the Union Society — a specimen of modern 
 Venetian Gothic, in red brick, with stone dressings. Rossetti 
 had gone down to Oxford with Woodward in the Long 
 Vacation of 1857 to see the progress of the Museum ; he was 
 greatly struck with the beauty of the Union building ; — 
 
 " Thinking of it only (says Kossetti) as his beautiful work, and 
 without taking into consideration the purpose it was intended for 
 (indeed, hardly knowing of the latter), I offered to paint figures of some 
 kind on the blank spaces of one of the gallery window bays ; and another 
 friend who was with us, William Morris, offered to do the same for 
 a second bay. Woodward was greatly delighted with the idea, as 
 his principle was that of the mediaeval builders, to avail himself in 
 the building of as much decoration as circumstances permitted at the 
 time, and not pi-efer uniform bareness to partial beauty. He had 
 never before had a decided opportunity of introducing picture work 
 in a building, and grasped at the idea. 
 
 " In the course of that long vacation, six other friends of ours — 
 Edward Burne- Jones, Arthur Hughes, V. C. Prinsep, John Pollen 
 (the painter of the lovely roof of Merton chapel), K. S. Stanhope, and 
 Alexander Munro — ^joined in the project, which was a labour of love 
 on all our parts — the expenses of materials alone being defrayed from 
 
 1 Pra'terita, vol. ii. § 197.
 
 ROSSETTI^S ENTHUSIASM 449 
 
 the building fund. Each of the five painters took one window bay, CHAP. 
 and the sculptor the stone shield above the porch, and the work pro- -^-^J^I- 
 ceeded merrily in concert for five months. 
 
 "The subject taken for illustration throughout was the ancient 
 romance of the Morte d'Arthur, and the pictures were painted on a 
 large scale in distemper. The roof was also covered with a vast 
 pattern- work of grotesque creatures by Morris, assisted by amateur 
 workmen, who offered on all hands, chiefly University men who 
 stayed in Oxford that ' Long ' for that purpose." ^ 
 
 Unfortunately, " the purpose it was intended for " was 
 not the only thing which Rossetti and his friends had failed 
 to take into consideration. The brickwork was not damp- 
 proof, and no ground was laid over it except a coat of white- 
 wash. Even in 1858 the paintings had begun to be defaced, 
 and little now remains except fitful gleams of colour — 
 telling of famous friendships and noble enthusiasms, but in 
 their decay telling also of the failure that is appointed for 
 zeal without knowled<je and enthusiasm without forethoug^ht. 
 Ruskin, whose knowledge of the methods of ancient wall- 
 painting was ample, can hardly have expected much good 
 of this experiment of painting in distemper on a naked wall. 
 He was caught, however, as all others were, by Rossetti's 
 enthusiasm, and offered to pay him for a second painting 
 in another of the bays, " provided there's no absolute non- 
 sense in it, and the trees are like trees, and the stones like 
 stones." But he had misgivings. " You know," he wrote 
 to Rossetti's brother, " the fact is they're all the least bit 
 crazy, and it's very difficult to manage them." 
 
 1 From a letter to Alexander paintings is in J. W. Mackail's 
 
 Gilchrist, printed in Anne Gil- Life of William Morris, vol. i. pp. 
 
 Christ : her Life and Writings, \^%1, 117-126. Rossetti's account of 
 
 p. 90. This letter, of which only Morris's assistants is not quite 
 
 a portion is here cited, is the accurate. In the Memorials of 
 
 fullest contemporary account of Edicard Burne-Jones, 1904, vol. i. 
 
 the matter. See also "A Chapter p. 168, a letter is quoted record- 
 
 from a Painter's Reminiscence : ing that Ruskin, on coming down 
 
 The Oxford Circle," by Val to see the work, " pronounced 
 
 Prinsep, R.A., in the Maxjazine of Rossetti's picture to be 'the finest 
 
 Art for February 1904 (pp. 167- piece of colour in the world,' 
 
 172). The best account of the and 'chooses Edward's next to 
 
 subsequent history of the ill-fated Rossetti's.'" 
 
 VOL. I. 2 F
 
 450 THE MUSEUM CRAFTSMEN 
 
 CHAP. There are few episodes in the literary and artistic history 
 
 XXII. q£ England in the nineteenth century more interesting than 
 the story of the wall-paintings of the Oxford Union, which 
 brings together so many illustrious names, and speaks of 
 so many ideals and aspirations. The tradition of the art 
 of wall-painting had unfortunately been lost ; but the co- 
 operation of many artists in the decoration of a single 
 buildino-, their enthusiasm, their search for a Guinevere and 
 its romantic sequel, and their merry humours recall many a 
 page in Vasari. " This jovial campaign," Rossetti called it ; 
 and many are the anecdotes told of the innocent hilarities 
 which enlivened it.^ 
 
 Meanwhile at the Museum another revival of mediaeval 
 conditions was in progress. Woodward brought over, as 
 already stated, many of his Irish workmen with him. Of 
 these the most talented was O'Shea, whose artistic talent 
 and ready wit greatly delighted Ruskin. O'Shea was one 
 of the successful competitors for a prize which Ruskin 
 offered in 1858 for an historical sculpture, and it was he 
 who carved the window M^hich Ruskin designed.' But in 
 large measure the Irish workmen were left to their own 
 devices. " Every morning," says Mr. Tuckwell, "came the 
 handsome red-bearded brothers Shea, bearing plants from 
 the Botanic Garden, to reappear under their chisels in the 
 rough-hewn capitals of the pillars." ^ Animals, as well as 
 plants, sprang to life under their hands. It was a great 
 delight to Ruskin to be assured by the architects that the 
 interest given to the workmen by the variet}^ of their work 
 so increased the efficiency of the labour that capitals of 
 various design could be executed cheaper than capitals to 
 uniform pattern.'^ The comfort and improvement of the 
 workmen were not uncared for. Acland had secured the 
 building of an institute, with reading-rooms and other 
 conveniences, for the men. It was here, on an evening in 
 April 1856, that Ruskin delivered an address, enlarging on 
 
 ^ See, for instance, Tuckwell's Bemimscences of Oxford, p. 50. 
 ^ See above, p. 376, and Sesame and Lilies, § 103. 
 ^ Eeviiniscences of Oxford, p. 49. 
 * A Joy for Ever, ^ 32,
 
 "PARRHOTS AND OWWLS " 451 
 
 the scope for originality and interest which workmen would CHAP, 
 find in buildings designed on such principles as those which ^^^^^• 
 governed the Oxford Museum. 
 
 The workmen's originality was not always, however, 
 acceptable to the authorities. Ruskin in one of his Oxford 
 lectures recalled the offence which was taken, when the 
 first sculptures appeared on the windows of the Museum, at 
 " the unnecessary introduction of cats." ^ But there were 
 Avorse offences against conventional taste still : — 
 
 " O'Shea rushed into my house one afternoon (says Acland ^) 
 and — in a state of wild excitement — related as follows: — 'The 
 Master of the University,' cried he, ' found me on my scaffold just 
 now.' 'What are you at?' says he. 'Monkeys,' says I. 'Come 
 down directly,' says he ; ' you shall not destroy the property of 
 the University.' ' I work as Mr. Woodward orders me.' " 
 
 O'Shea was dismissed, but not before he had taken his 
 revenge : — 
 
 "I found him on a single ladder in the porch, wielding heavy 
 blows such as one imagines the genius of Michael Angelo might 
 have struck when he was first blocking out the design of some 
 immortal work. 'What are you doing, Shea? I thought you 
 were gone.' Striking on still, Shea shouted — ' Parrhots and Owwls ! 
 Parrhots and Owwls ! Members of Convocation ! ' There they 
 were, blocked _ out alternately. What could I do? 'Well,' I said, 
 meditatively, 'Shea, you must knock their heads off.' 'Never,' says 
 he. ' Directly,' said I. Their heads went. Their bodies, not yet 
 evolved, remain to testify to the humour, the force, the woes, the 
 troubles, in the character and art of our Irish brethren." 
 
 It is like a piece of the Middle Ages ; just such a story may 
 one read into many a grotesque and grinning gargoyle of 
 some old cathedral. 
 
 Such of the windows as are carved are decorated entirely 
 with representations of animal or vegetable life. Over the 
 doorway is carved in low relief the figure of an angel bearing 
 in his right hand a book — the open book of Nature — and 
 
 ^ Aratra Pentelici, § 134. 
 
 ^ In Appendix ii. to the 1893 edition of The Oxford Museum.
 
 452 DESCRIPTION OF THE BUILDING 
 
 CHAP, in his left, three living cells — typical of the mysteries of life. 
 
 ^^^^^- The detached building on the spectator's right, constructed 
 for a chemical laboratory, recalls the famous kitchen at 
 Glastonbury. (This portion of the Museum has, however, 
 been somewhat altered from its original form.) Entering by 
 the central door, one passes on either side, sculptured on 
 capitals of the pillars, the parrots and owls aforesaid. We 
 then find ourselves in a large quadrangular hall, covered 
 by a glass roof which is supported on cast-iron columns. 
 The ornaments of the spandrels are in wrought-iron. 
 Here, again, Ruskin's great principle of ornamentation is 
 carried out. The representation is of interwoven branches, 
 with leaf and flower and fruit, of various trees of native or 
 exotic growth. The same principle is applied in various 
 parts of the minor decorations — in the capitals, and in 
 the trefoils of the girders, there nestle leaves of elm, brier, 
 water-lily, passion-flower, ivy, and holly. The central court 
 is surrounded by an open arcade of two storeys. On 
 the ground-floor are thirty-three piers and thirty shafts ; 
 on the upper, thirty-three piers and ninety-five shafts. 
 The shafts were carefully selected, under the direction of 
 the Professor of Geology (the late Professor Phillips), in 
 order to furnish examples of many of the most important 
 rocks of the British Isles. The capitals and bases represent 
 various groups of plants and animals, arranged for the most 
 part according to their natural orders. On massive corbels, 
 projecting from the front of the piers, are placed the statues 
 of great men of science. 
 
 Such was in brief outline the building^ which was 
 gradually rising during these years (1855-59). It em- 
 bodied some of Ruskin's dearest principles ; but as the work 
 progressed a certain feeling of disappointment crept over 
 those who were responsible for it. Ruskin felt that there 
 was something wrong, but for some time was not quite sure 
 what it was. The spectator who examines the principal 
 fa9ade is struck by an effect as of something meagre and 
 
 ^ An account of the building Gothic Revival iri England, pp. 
 with iUustrations may be seen 283-287. 
 ill C. L. Eastlake's History of the
 
 RUSKIN'S PLEA FOR ITS ENRICHMENT 453 
 
 pinched. This is largely caused by the severity, flatness, CHAP. 
 and lack of richness in the central doorway. It was Wood- ^^^^• 
 ward's hope to have a recessed and richly-carved porch. 
 Woolner prepared a drawing for the proposed porch, with 
 niches for statues as Ruskin desired, ^ but Convocation 
 refused to sanction the expenditure, and the scheme was 
 abandoned. Atjain, the decoration of the windows is not 
 completely carried out. Of the six in the upper storey to 
 the right, as one faces the centre of the fa9ade, the first 
 is alone carved ; in the lower row, one is begun, the others 
 are left undeeorated. On the other side, four of the six in 
 the upper row are done, and again one only below. In the 
 interior the same incompleteness may be observed. Of the 
 400 capitals and bases, about 300 remained uncarved in 
 Ruskin's time, though during the last few years the work 
 has been continued. 
 
 It was in order to explain the design and purpose of the 
 Museum, and in the hope of enlisting further public support, 
 that Acland and Ruskin prepared the little book entitled 
 The Oxford Museum, first published in April 1859. Ruskin's 
 contributions consisted of two letters. In the first he 
 vindicates the adoption of the Gothic design, and explains 
 the spirit of the decorations. Incidentally he repeats that 
 plea for a more public-spirited patronage in the arts which 
 he had put forward in 'The Political Economy of Art. In 
 the second letter he points out how much the building 
 w\as likely to suffer from inadequate funds ; notices the 
 impossibility of summoning at a moment's call a sufficient 
 number of duly qualified craftsmen; and supports, with 
 much eloquence and earnestness, the plea for enriching the 
 doorway. In conclusion he claims recognition and gratitude 
 for the Museum, rather as an example than as in itself a 
 perfect specimen of the Gothic which he loved ; " the 
 building, the first exponent of the recovered truth, will 
 only be the more venerated the more it is excelled." In 
 writing this passage, Ruskin had in his mind more than he 
 
 * Woolner's drawing was pre- arch and in the spandrels of the 
 seuted by Acland to the University actual door were done by Woolner 
 Galleries. The carvinirs over the without remuneration.
 
 454 HON. STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH 
 
 CHAP, cared to say at the time. Many years later, in a public 
 lecture within the walls of the Museum, he explained 
 frankly in Avhat ways the building had "failed signally of 
 being what he hoped." He had never meant, he explained, 
 that " a handsome building could be built of common 
 brickbats," or that "you could secure a great national 
 monument of art by letting loose the first lively Irishman 
 you could get hold of." ^ But the Museum — with all its 
 defects — is of special interest in a survey of Ruskin's life 
 and work, for as a building it was in some sort a practical 
 and standing commentary " On the Nature of Gothic Archi- 
 tecture : and herein of the True Functions of the Workman 
 in Art." Thus did the Stones of Venice have their living 
 influence on the stones of Oxford. 
 
 At this time his College conferred a signal honour upon 
 him. In 1858 Honorary Studentships were created at 
 Christ Church, and on December 6 the first election 
 Avas held. Those chosen for the compliment were Henry 
 Acland, Cornewall Lewis, Gladstone, Gore Ouseley, and 
 Ruskin. This was a distinction of which Ruskin was 
 always proud. 
 
 ^ Readings in "Modern Painters,"
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 HOME AND FRIENDS 
 
 " I have had, Heaven be thanked, many and true friends, young 
 and old, who have boon of boundless help and good to me, — 
 nor I quite helpless to them ; j^et for none of whom have I 
 ever obeyed George Herbert's mandate, ' Thy friend put in 
 thy bosom ; wear his eyes Still in thy heart, that he may see 
 what's there.' " — Prcderita. 
 
 Neither Ruskin's literary work, nor the other occupations 
 which have been described in preceding chapters, pre- 
 vented him during the years now under consideration from 
 seeing something of his friends, from keeping up much 
 correspondence with them, or from receiving visitors at 
 his parents' house on Denmark Hill. 
 
 He was acquainted, in the first place, with the chief 
 poets of the time — among them, with Coventry Patmore, 
 a " greatly honoured and loved friend." He was godfather 
 to one of the poet's sons, and presented another with a 
 nomination to Christ's Hospital ; and though he was not 
 fond of dining out, he seems to have made an occasional 
 exception in favour of Patmore's parties. At one of these, 
 it is interesting to hear, the guests were Browning, Ruskin, 
 and Tennyson. Of Patmore's poetry he was a warm ad- 
 mirer. The first of the following letters refers to Tamer- 
 ton Church Toiver and other poems; the second, to The 
 BetrotJicd, the first part of The Angel in the House : — 
 
 '■'■June 2, 1853. — I received the volume of poems, with the 
 letter, and am very much interested in them ; their versification 
 is quite beautiful, and much of tlieir thought. If they were 
 
 455
 
 456 FRIENDSHIP WITH COVENTRY PATMORE 
 
 CHAP. Tennyson's, everybody would be talking of tliem, but they are a 
 
 XXIII 
 
 ' little too like Tennyson to attract attention as they should." 
 
 Circ. 1855. — "I am more and more pleased with the Angel 
 
 You have neither the lusciousness nor the sublimity of Tennyson, 
 
 but you have clearer and finer habitual expressions and more 
 
 accurate thought. For finish and neatness I know nothing equal 
 
 to bits of the Angel : 
 
 ' As grass grows taller round a stone ' — 
 ' As moon between her lighted clouds '— 
 
 and such other lines. Tennyson is often quite sinfully hazy." 
 
 1860. — "We've just had some grapes sent us from the country, 
 which appear to me in the present state of English weather 
 phenomenal ; — we send them therefore to you, as a poet, as an 
 example of grapes grown entirely under the influence of Imagina- 
 tion, for they must have fancied all the sunshine that has ripened 
 them. In case you have not got my yesterday's letter, I am glad of 
 another bit of paper whereon to testify my intense delight with 
 the new poem. My Mother is confined to bed just now, and I 
 read it to her nearly all through yesterday, neither of us liking to 
 stop. I want to see the Jlrd letter of advice which Mrs. Graham 
 wrote to Jane. Also I want some more letters from Mildred, 
 Knock out some of the midshipman, and put in some more Mildred, 
 please, in next edition. I like poetry very well — but I like fun 
 better. You certainly deserve to be made a Bishop. Won't the 
 people who live in Closes, and the general Spirits of Mustiness, 
 preside over your fortunes benevolently henceforward ! Also all 
 the people who have nothing to do but to be graceful. My word ! 
 when you go out this season you'll be petted. More than Mr. 
 Punch himself." 
 
 This last letter refers to Faithful for Ever (1860), the third 
 part of The Angel in the House. The poem was derided in 
 some of the reviews for banahty, and Ruskin wrote to defend 
 his friend.^ This defence of Patmore's simplicity of diction 
 is one of Ruskin's most interesting pieces of literary criticism. 
 He illustrates his point by comparing the simplicity of TJce 
 Odyssey with the more " dignified " language of Pope's 
 
 * In The Critic, Oct. 27, 1860 ; the letter was reprinted in Ruskin's 
 Arrows of the CJtace.
 
 DEFENCE OF THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE 457 
 
 version. As for the passages selected by the critics for CHAP. 
 ridicule, the poeoi contains, said Ruskin, " as all good art ^^^^^^• 
 does, many very curious shortcomings (to appearance), and 
 places of rest, or of dead colour, or of intended harshness," 
 but these should not be taken out of connexion with the 
 work as a whole. As well might a critic separately engrave, 
 a bit of a coat-lappet, to prove a portrait-painter no artist 
 or give the discords without their resolutions, to prove 
 Mozart no musician. " I am bound, for my own part," said 
 Ruskin in conclusion, " to express my obligation to Mr. 
 Patmore, as one of my severest models and tutors in use 
 of English, and my respect for him as one of the truest 
 and tenderest thinkers who have ever illustrated the most 
 important, because commonest, states of noble human love." 
 Ruskin expressed a similar judgment both in his Elements 
 of Drawing and in Sesame and Lilies. It is interesting to 
 know that his admiration for the poem was not coloured by 
 any bias for the friend. Patmore had published the first 
 part of The Angel anonymously, and it was sent, again 
 anonymously in the first place, to Ruskin. " Rossetti was 
 with him a day or two after he received it ; Ruskin asked 
 him if he had seen, or knew anything about, ' a glorious book 
 called The Angel in the House.' " 
 
 II 
 
 With Elizabeth Barrett, also, Ruskin was an admirer of 
 the poet before he became acquainted with the writer. In 
 the first volume of The Stones of Venice, he had written of 
 " the burning mystery of Coleridge," and " spirituality of 
 Elizabeth Barrett," and this must have been "the word 
 dropped in one of his books " of which Mrs. Browning 
 afterwards said to him that she "picked it up and wore 
 for a crown." - In 1852 Mr. and Mrs. Browning spent some 
 months in London; and Ruskin went to call upon them, 
 
 ^ See a letter from Patmore to William Alliughain in the 'Memoirs 
 and Correspondence of Patmore, vol. ii. p. 179. 
 
 ^ Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, vol. ii. p. 191.
 
 458 MRS. BROWNING^S POETRY 
 
 CHAP, and the visit was presently returned. " We went to Denmark 
 XXIII. jj;ij yesterday," wrote Mrs. Browning (September 1852), " to 
 have luncheon with the Ruskins, and see the Turners, which, 
 by the way, are divine. I like Mr. Ruskin much, and so does 
 Robert. Very gentle, yet earnest, — refined and truthful. 
 We count him among the valuable acquaintances made this 
 year in England." ^ His reference, in the second volume of 
 Stones of Venice (1853), to the "noble poem," Gasa Guidi 
 Windows, must have given Mrs. Browning much pleasure, 
 for contemporary criticism was less favourable to the piece 
 than it deserved. In private letters Ruskin mingled compli- 
 ments with criticism : — 
 
 (To Mrs. Browning.) "Denmark Hill, March 4, 1855. . . . 
 I have been lately reading your poems with an admiration which 
 I fear you might be offended with me if I were to express to the 
 full (I am not sure, by-the-bye, if I could) to yourself, but at least 
 you will permit me to thank you for the hallowing and purifying 
 influence of their every line — a baptism of most tender thoughts, 
 which to me — whom many untoward circumstances of life have 
 had too much power to harden and darken into deadness and bitter- 
 ness — is of unspeakable preciousness. ... I am going to bind your 
 poems in a golden binding, and give them to my class of working 
 men — as the purest and most exalting poetry in our language. 
 
 " Only, pray, in the next edition, alter that first verse of the 
 Drama of -£Jx-i7e— Gehenna and when a^ — and I must try to coax 
 you to send some of the long compounded Greek words — which 
 I, for one, can't understand so much as a syllable of — about their 
 Greek business." 
 
 "The soul of a cynic," wrote Mrs. Browning in the course 
 of her reply, " at its third stage of purification, might feel 
 the value of gold laid on the binding of a book by the hand 
 of John Ruskin." " When has a letter given me so much 
 
 ^ Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, vol. ii. p. 87. 
 " "Rejoice in the clefts of Gehenna, 
 
 My exiled, my host ! 
 Earth has exiles as hopeless as when a 
 
 Heaven's empire was lost."
 
 ADMIRATION AND CRITICISM 459 
 
 pleasure ? " said Robert Browning on reading Ruskin's praises. CHAP. 
 But Ruskin pressed his criticisms : — XXlll. 
 
 {To Mrs. Browning.) ^^ Apn'l 6, 1855. . . . Assuredly you 
 ought to consider with yourself, not merely how the poetry may 
 be made absolutely as good as possible, but how also it may be 
 put into a form which shall do as much good as possible ; and 
 if an expression, though really a good one, be such as to startle 
 away a large number of careless readers, who otherwise might 
 gradually have become careful ones, I think, unless there be very 
 strong justification for it, )^ou would agree with me in thinking 
 it right to cancel that expression. For instance, the ' nympho- 
 Icptic ' in ' The Lost Bower.' I don't, myself, know Avhat it means, 
 and I haven't had time to look in the dictionary for it ; and what 
 is still worse, I don't expect to find it when I do look. . . . 
 
 " Among various works I have in hand at present, one is the 
 endeavour to revive the art of Illumination. And the day before 
 yesterday, I made my best workman, who has recovered thoroughly 
 the art of laying on the gold, copy out the beginning of the Catarina 
 to Camoens, which, on the whole, is my favourite, and which I mean 
 to make one of the most glorious little burning books that ever had 
 leaf turned by white finger." 
 
 Mrs. Browning defended her " nympholeptic " and the rest, 
 and urged more generally that " the mass of readers never 
 receive a poet (you, who are a poet yourself, must surely 
 observe that) without intermediation ; the few understand, 
 appreciate, and distribute to the multitude below." Ruskin, 
 in the course of his reply, retorted thus : — 
 
 (To Mrs. Browning.) '■'•June I9th. . . . When you have suc- 
 ceeded in all your designs upon the English language, I might 
 perhaps most graphically describe it as 
 
 Tesseric, pentic, hectic, heptic,^ 
 Phoenico-djemonic, and dyspeptic, 
 Hipped-ic, Pipped-ic, East-wind-nipped-ic, 
 Stiffened like styptic, doubled in diptych, 
 Possi-kophaly-chorsecliptio. 
 
 " That last line, by-the-bye, is really a triumph of expression — 
 
 *■ Auglice — all at sixes and sevens. [J. R.]
 
 460 ROBERT BROWNING^S "OBSCURITY" 
 
 CHAP, at least it will be, when it is ' distributed to the multitude.' 
 
 XXTTT 
 
 ' Apropos of that same distribution, it is all very well in theory, 
 
 but if you over-bake your verses in the poetic fire, who is to chop 
 them up? We will have it out, when we meet." 
 
 A little later in the year Mr. and Mrs. Browning were in 
 England, and personal acquaintance with Ruskin was resumed. 
 " We spent an evening with Ruskin," wrote Mrs. Browning, 
 " who was gracious and generous, and strengthened all my 
 good impressions. Robert took our young friend Leighton to 
 see him afterwards and was as kindly received." ^ Browning's 
 intercourse with Ruskin at this period may not have been 
 without effect on the studies in poetry, which were to occupy 
 some space in the third and fourth volumes of Modern 
 Painters. In the latter volume Ruskin refers to the poet's 
 " unerring " insight into the mind of the Middle Ages, and 
 notices his " seemingly careless and too rugged lines." He 
 seems to have read Browning with some difficulty at first, 
 and this was a sore point with the poet's wife. He tried 
 again, and wrote appreciatively. So they took courage to 
 send him Men and Women — "not," wrote Mrs. Browning, 
 "that you may say 'pleasant things' of them, or think 
 yourself bound to say anything indeed, but that you may 
 accept them as a sign of the esteem and admiration of both 
 of us. I consider them on the whole an advance upon his 
 former poems, and am ready to die at the stake for my faith 
 in these last." Ruskin read the new poems, and sent a 
 letter of appreciation which greatly pleased the poet — " a 
 dear, too dear, and good letter," he called it to Rossetti." 
 Bat Ruskin had confessed his occasional bewilderment, 
 and Browning in the course of his reply defended his 
 " obscurity " : — 
 
 "Paris, Dec. 10th, '55. . . . For the deepnesses you think you 
 discern, — may they be more than mere blacknesses ! For the hopes 
 you entertain of what may come of subsequent readings, — all suc- 
 cess to them ! For your bewilderment more especially noted — how 
 
 ^ Letters of Elizabeth Barrett to various Correspondents, edited by 
 Browning, vol. ii. p. 210. T. J. Wise, 1895, vol. i. p. 21. 
 
 * Letters from Robert Browning
 
 AURORA LEIGH 461 
 
 shall I help ihai ? We don't read poetry the same way, by the CHAP. 
 same law ; it is too clear. I cannot begin writing poetry till my 
 imaginary reader has conceded licences to me which you demur 
 at altogether. I knoiv that I don't make out my conception by my 
 language, all poetry being a putting the infinite within the finite. 
 You would have me paint it all plain out, which can't be ; but by 
 various artifices I try to make shift with touches and bits of outlines 
 which succeed if they bear the conception from me to you. You 
 ought, I think, to keep pace with the thought tripping from ledge 
 to ledge of my 'glaciers,' as you call them ; not stand poking your 
 alpenstock into the holes, and demonstrating that no foot could have 
 stood there; — suppose it sprang over there ? . . ." 
 
 In the following year Mrs. Browning published Aurora 
 Leigh, and Riiskin wrote enthusiastically about the poem : — 
 
 {To Robert Browning.) " Denmark Hill, 27th Nov. 1856. — I 
 think Aurora Leigh the greatest poem in the English language, unsur 
 passed by anything but Shakespeare — not surpassed by Shakespeare's 
 sounds, and therefore the greatest poem in the language. I write 
 this, you see, very deliberately, straight, or nearly so, which is not 
 common with me, for I am taking pains that you may not think 
 (nor anybody else) that I am writing in a state of excitement ; 
 though there is enough in the poem to put one into such a state. 
 I have not written immediately either, partly because I did not 
 know if you were at Florence yet, partly because I wished to read 
 the poem quite through. I like it all, familiar parts and unfamiliar, 
 passionate and satirical, evil telling and good telling, philosophical 
 and dramatic. — all. It has one or two sharp blemishes, I think, in 
 words, here and tliere, chiefly Greek. I think the ' Hat aside ' a 
 great discord in the opening — it tells on me like a crack in the 
 midst of the sweetest fresco colour. Phalanstenj I can't find in 
 Johnson's dictionary, and don't know what it means. Dynastick 
 hurts me like a stick — one or two passages in the art discussion I 
 haven't made out yet. For the rest, I am entirely subdued and 
 raised — to be Mrs. Browning's very humble votary and servant. . . ." 
 
 ( To Robert Browning.) " 2%th Dec. 1856.— Dear ^^. Brown- 
 ing, — Out goes the ^Ir. — for I love you, and you know how much I 
 honour you besides, so I needn't be respectful. I do hope, however,
 
 462 WORK AGAINST THE GRAIN 
 
 CHAP, you have got my letter about Aurora — I sent one, ever so long ago, 
 declaring my entire faith in it as the greatest poem in the English 
 language. It has turned my head altogether and I can't talk of 
 anything else. Last week I chanced to be sitting at dinner next to 
 Lord Byron's granddaughter,^ and quite forgetting who she was, I 
 must needs come out with this energetic confession of faith in A^irora 
 Leigh the moment it was named— to my great discomfiture the 
 moment after, when I recollected whom I was talking to. But it's 
 no use saying how magnificent it is, for you know, and the world is 
 acceptant to the best of its ability. I have not seen, nor heard, a 
 single bad word or sneer about it, and all the best people shout, with 
 me, rapturously. ..." 
 
 Among the best people who shouted rapturously was, as 
 we shall hear in the next chapter, Rossetti. Many of 
 Ruskin's letters of this period are addressed to Mr. and Mrs. 
 Browning — " for I never think of you two separately," he 
 said — and they were in the habit of writing joint letters to 
 him. One of his letters was gloomy ; perhaps he was sad 
 in order that he might be comforted ; in which case Mrs. 
 Browning's reply (Jan. 1, 1859) gave him, in affectionate 
 terms, what he needed. She tells him among other things 
 that his sadness is only " the languor after victory " ; and 
 she speaks with delight of all he is "permitted to do for 
 England in matters of art." Ruskin replied as follows : — 
 
 {To Mr. and Mrs. Browning.) " lUh Jan. 1859. ... I am 
 much helped by all you say in your letters — being apt, in spite of 
 all my certainty 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 writing; 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 /'m truly benevolent, 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 — 
 
 * LadyAnneMilbanke (married, " Letters of Elizabeth Barrett 
 
 1869, to Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt). Browning, vol. ii. p. 299.
 
 THE ITALIAN QUESTION 463 
 
 never writing nor saying a word — rejoicing tranquilly or intensely in CHAP. 
 
 • "VVTTT 
 
 pictures, in music, in pleasant faces, in kind friends. But now — ^^-^viii. 
 about me there is this terrific absurdity 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 ridiculous 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 moment. 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 advice to each other and show, without 
 any 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 trap-door of the hansom, faces 
 all over mud — no right road to be got gone upon after all — nothing 
 but a drunken effort at turning, ending in ditch. I hope to get just 
 one more howl executed, from which I hope great effects — upon the 
 Moon — and then, see if I don't take to Kennel and Straw, comfortably. 
 There was another thing in your letters comforting to me — your 
 delightful want of patriotism — loving Italy so much ; for I sometimes 
 think I am going quite wrong when I don't feel happy in coming 
 home, I have a right to love Italy more now, since it has made Mrs. 
 Browning so much stronger. Poor Italy, there won't be much of 
 her left to love, I'm afraid, soon. . . ." 
 
 The year 1859 saw the Franco-Sardinian war for the Hbera- 
 tion of Italy. Mrs. Browning's letters to Ruskin show her 
 passionate enthusiasm for the Italian cause and her indig- 
 nation with the anti-French sentiment in England. Here 
 she and Ruskin were heartily in sympathy ; and " "vve thank 
 you and love you," she wrote, " dear, dear Mr. Ruskin, more 
 than ever for your good word about our Italy." Later in 
 the year he took up his parable in the public press, and 
 letters sent to the newspapers on the Italian Question, about 
 which he wrote to Mrs. Browning, must, with some qualifi- 
 cations, have pleased her greatly. He was not indeed so 
 optimistic about modern Italy as she, nor yet at all times 
 so anti- Austrian ; but this correspondence is of interest as
 
 464 THE DEATH OF MRS. BROWNING 
 
 CHAP. 2:ivmQf to him also some link in that " Sfolden ring " which 
 
 XXIII. 
 
 & 
 
 the English poetess made, as the Italian poet said, between 
 Italy and England. In July came the Peace of Villafranca — 
 a bitter disappointment, put what gloss upon it she might ; 
 Ruskin speaks of it, in letters of the time, as her death- 
 warrant. The year 1860, which opened with the cession 
 of Savoy and Nice to the Emperor Napoleon, witnessed 
 presently Garibaldi's liberation of Southern Italy. On 
 October 27 Lord John Russell sent his famous despatch to 
 the British Minister to the Court of Sardinia justifying the 
 King for furnishing the assistance of his arms to the Roman 
 and Neapolitan States. The despatch was printed in the 
 Times of November 5, and on reading it Ruskin at once 
 wrote to Mrs. Browning : — 
 
 "Nov. 5. ... I should hardly have had spirit to write to you 
 even now, but that there is in to-day's paper at last something like 
 a Voice from England. Late — how late ! Yet, thank heaven, at 
 last a voice, and I suppose she has been in an occult and cowardly 
 way, yet still, positively, helping for some time back. I never 
 thought to have to thank Lord John for anything; here, however, 
 is — whether his own or not — the first piece of steady utterance we've 
 had. Now, if Italy can only be true to herself; but alas, for her 
 inveterate Idleness. "What do you think she ca7i do, in way of 
 foodful, soulful work 1 However, with what oscillation or failure 
 may be appointed for her, she will — as all nations will — now go 
 forward, I believe, not Hades-way, as Carlyle says." 
 
 More correspondence followed. Mrs. Browning told him 
 how greatly she enjoyed his letters, and in the last of 
 them he says, " I'm going to write often now." That 
 was on May 13, 1861. On June 29 she passed away. 
 Her death was a great loss to Ruskin. " And there's 
 Mrs. Browning gone, too," he wrote to Mrs. Burne-Jones 
 (July 20), " who uus a friend, and such a one ; but one 
 must not think about oneself in talking of her, it is all 
 the Earth's loss." It was some time before he could bring 
 himself to write a letter of condolence : — 
 
 {To Robert Browning.) "Lucerne, Nov. 17, 1861. — I do not 
 know what others of your friends may have ventured to write or
 
 TENNYSON'S POETRY 465 
 
 to say to you. I could say nothing — can say nothing — but that CHAP. 
 
 I love you, and there are few people whom I do — and that when 
 
 you care to see me, or hear from me, I shall thankfully come if I 
 
 can, or write if I cannot. I think also I may venture to say this : 
 
 that however enthusiastic the love, or devoted the respect, borne 
 
 by all, whose respect or love was in any wise worthy of her, to 
 
 Mrs. Browning, there was not one among them who more entirely 
 
 and reverently shared in aim and hope with her than I : nor one 
 
 who regards her loss with a more grave, enduring bitterness and 
 
 completeness of regret — not the acute, consolable sufifering of a 
 
 little time, but the established sense of unredeemable, unparalleled 
 
 loss, which will not pass away, 
 
 "I have been ill — not a little, neither; and am so still, more 
 mentally than otherwise, however — and am little fit to face sad 
 thoughts — not that I have many others to face. But I cannot 
 write to you — indeed, of what should I write to you? — every 
 Avay my superior in powers of thought, and of suffering." 
 
 Ill 
 
 Of Tennyson's poetry Ruskin was a great admirer, 
 though he preferred the earlier to the later work. The 
 references to Tennyson in Ruskin's books are numerous, 
 and so also were they in his letters and conversation. 
 " Perhaps one of the most wonderful pieces of sight in all 
 poetry," he wrote to a friend (Dec. 3, 1859), " is — nay, that's 
 just it ; I was going to say a bit of Tennyson — the piece 
 of Alp in the Princess, but Tennyson's all alike, one thing 
 as perfect as another. What an epithet of elephants' 
 trunks — ' their serpent hands.' " That is in " Vivien " ; the 
 Alpine idyl, "Come down, O maid, fron) yonder mountain 
 height," was counted by the poet himself, too, as amongst 
 his "most successful work." ^ In The Two Paths Ruskin 
 wrote: " 'No description that I have ever given of anything 
 is Avorth four lines of Tennyson." Patmore questioned this 
 estimate, and Ruskin replied : — 
 
 " I assure you it is true, ^[y r/ift is wholly rationalistic and 
 deductive — my descriptions are genuine in emotion, but wholly 
 
 ^ Memoir by his Son, vol. i. p. 252. 
 VOL. I. 2 G
 
 i66 AN INVITATION 
 
 CHAP, wanting in highest quality : and I am in all matters of this one 
 mind, that four lines of Best is worth ajiy quantity of Seconds. 
 I've written a good deal about waterfalls — pneumatically enough. 
 But the single line, 
 
 * That, like a broken purpose, waste in air,' 
 
 is worth all put together. . . . You'll see I don't depreciate myself 
 in all ways." 
 
 To like efiect, Mr. Wedderburn remembers Kuskin saying, 
 at a breakfast-party to his diggers at Oxford, that "he 
 would sacrifice nearly all his books to have written one 
 of Tennyson's lines — the last line of Will : ' The city sparkles 
 like a grain of salt.' " In 1855 Ruskin first wrote to 
 Tennyson : — 
 
 "Denmark Hill, March 21. — Dear Mr. Tennyson, — I venture 
 to write to you, because as I was talking about you with Mr. Woolner 
 yesterday, he gave me more pleasure than I can express by telling 
 me that you wished to see my Turners. By several untoward chances 
 I have been too long hindered from telling you face to face how much 
 I owe you. So you see at last I seize the wheel of fortune by its 
 nearest spoke, begging you, with the heartiest entreaty I can, to 
 tell me when you are likely to be in London, and to fix a day if 
 possible that I may keep it wholly for you, and prepare my Turners 
 to look their rosiest and best. Capricious they are as enchanted 
 opals, but they must surely shine for you. Any day will do for 
 me if you give me notice two or three days before ; but please 
 come soon, for I have much to say to you, and am eager to say 
 it, above all to tell you how for a thousand things I am gratefully 
 and respectfully yours, J. Ruskin." 
 
 I do not know whether Tennyson accepted the invitation, but 
 it was either then or not very long afterwards, at Patmore's 
 table, that they made personal acquaintance. Ruskin wrote 
 again when Maud was being much criticised, to say " as 
 a compliment to myself, not to you, that I think with 
 you in all things about the war." In the same letter he 
 pleaded — successfully — for the re-insertion of " Some one 
 had blundered" in Tlte Light Brigade. In 1858 Ruskin
 
 THE IDYLLS OF THE KING 467 
 
 and Tennyson met sometimes at Little Holland House. CHAP. 
 "I have just seen Ruskin," the poet wrote in his diary ^^II- 
 (Nov. 1858) ; " he says that the signor's (G. F. Watts) portrait 
 of me is the grandest thing he has seen in that line ; but 
 so he said of Woolner's bust." In 1859 " Enid," " Vivien," 
 "Elaine," and " Guinevere " were published, and Ruskin sent 
 his opinion of the new volume : — 
 
 "Strasbueg, Se2^t. 1859. — Dear Mr. Tennyson, — I have had 
 the Idylls in my travelling desk ever since I could get them across 
 the water, and have only not written about them because I could 
 not quite make up my mind about that increased quietness of style. 
 I thought you would like a little to know what I felt about it, 
 but did not quite know myself what I did feel. . . . 
 
 "The four songs seem to me the jewels of the crown, and bits 
 come every here and there — the fright of the maid, for instance, and 
 the ' In the darkness o'er her fallen head ' — which seem to me finer 
 than almost all j^ou have done yet. 
 
 " As a descri[)tion of various nobleness and tenderness the book 
 is without price ; but I shall always wish it had been nobleness 
 independent of a romantic condition of externals in general. . . . 
 Treasures of wdsdom there are in it, and word-painting such as 
 never was yet for concentration ; nevertheless 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, masterful, and unerring transcript of an actuality, and 
 the relation of a story of any real human life as a poet would watch 
 and analyze it, would make all men feel more or less what jjoetry 
 was, as they felt what Life and Fate were in their instant workings. 
 
 " This seems to me the true task of the modern poet. And I think 
 I have seen faces, and heard voices, by road and street side, which 
 claimed or conferred as much as ever the loveliest or saddest of 
 Camelot. As I watch them, the feeling continually weighs upon
 
 468 TENNYSON ON RUSK IN 
 
 CHAP, me, day by day, more and more, that not the grief of the world 
 
 XXIII 
 
 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.' . . ." 
 
 In later years the two men occasionally met, and Tennyson 
 followed Ruskin's excursions into literary criticism. The 
 poet's son records a luncheon and gives some of the conversa- 
 tion. As Ruskin was taking his leave, Tennyson asked, " Do 
 you know that most romantic of lyrics?" quoting the "It 
 was a' for our rightfu' King" of Burns. "Do I not?" said 
 Ruskin; " I am so glad you like it, Tennyson ; I place it among 
 the best things ever done by any one." Tennyson was asked 
 what he thought of Ruskin's appreciation of Byron in Fiction, 
 Fair and Foul} He agreed with it in ranking Byron's poetry 
 very high, but he did not find much in the particular poem 
 — The Island — from which Ruskin had quoted admiringly. 
 On the other hand, he thought very good Ruskin's remarks 
 on Shakespeare, in the same essay. He read Ruskin's 
 Elements of Prosody also, and agreed with the criticism of 
 a particular passage in Coleridge. Tennyson's estimate of 
 Ruskin's own writing has already been cited (p. 353). 
 
 IV 
 
 Another poet whose work Ruskin admired, and whose 
 friendly acquaintance he valued, was James Russell Lowell. 
 Professor Norton had sent him Lowell's poems. " I have 
 written your initials and mine," Ruskin wrote (Oct. 24, 1858), 
 "in the two volumes of Lowell (how delightful the new 
 prefaces to the Fable !). He does me more good in my dull 
 fits than anybody, and makes me hopeful again. What a 
 beautiful face he has!" Lowell at this time was editor of 
 the Atlantic Monthly, and asked Ruskin to write something 
 for it : — 
 
 {To J. R. Lowell.) ^^ Dec. 5, 1859. — It was indeed a happy 
 morning for me this, bringing me your letter — besides a delightful 
 
 1 William Allincjham : a Diary, 1907, pp. 300, 326.
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
 one from Norton. For many causes lately I have been needing some CHAP. 
 help, and this from you is the greatest I could have, and best, though ^'^-^^"•• 
 there are few days pass without my getting some help from you and 
 finding something strange and beautiful, bearing on the questions 
 which are teasing us here in the old world ; with none of the rest 
 of age, only its querulousness and sleeplessness. I am myself in 
 a querulous and restless state enough, — what head I have nearly 
 turned, or turned at least in the sense in which the cook predicates 
 it of our cream when she can't get any butter. I can get no butter 
 at present (couldn't even get any bread at two guineas a page), being 
 on the whole vacantly puzzled and paralyzed, able only to write a 
 little now and then of old thoughts, to finish Modern Painters, which 
 must be finished. Whenever I can write at all this winter I must 
 take up that, for it is tormenting me, always about my neck. If no 
 accident hinders it will be done this spring, and then I will see if 
 there is anything I can say clearly enough to be useful in my present 
 state of mystification. I told Norton in my last letter a few of 
 the things I am trying to find out, and I've found out none yet. 
 I like other people's writings so much better than my own — 
 Tennyson's, Carlyle's, yours, Helps's, and one or two others'es — 
 that I feel much driven to silence and quiet, trying to paint rather 
 than write more. In the meantime Modern Painters is giving me 
 more trouble than I can well stand, and I cant do anything else 
 till it is out of the way. . . ." 
 
 " My dear friend and teacher," Ruskin called Lowell in the 
 last volume of Modern Painters ; and Lowell, on his side, m 
 a published address on the choice of books, hoped " to see 
 the works of Ruskin within the reach of every artisan among 
 us," adding in another lecture that Ruskin held " a divining 
 rod of exquisite sensitiveness for the rarer and more recondite 
 sources of purifying enjoyment as well as for those more 
 obvious and nearer to the surface." 
 
 Ruskin had first seen Charles Eliot Norton in November 
 1855 when he had come ^vith a letter of introduction to 
 Denmark Hill, as many American visitors came, to see the 
 famous collection of Turner drawings. In the following 
 summer they met by chance, as Ruskin has described, on 
 the lake of Geneva, and walked together, a day or two later,
 
 470 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 
 
 CHAP. " up the winding path among the mountain meadows of 
 - XLlL Sallanches." " Thus I became possessed," says Ruskin, " of 
 my second friend, after Dr. John Brown, and of my first real 
 tutor," " The friendship had begun," says Norton, " which 
 was to last till the end of life." Correspondence with Norton 
 becomes frequent from this point onwards : — 
 
 (To G. E. Norton.) ''Dec. 28, 1856. ... I hope the enjoy- 
 ment of that damp and discordant city and that desolate and 
 diseaseful Campagna, of which your letter assures me, may be 
 received as a proof of your own improved health, and brightness 
 of heart and imagination. I think, perhaps, I abuse Rome more 
 because it is as sour grapes to me. When I was there I was a 
 sickly and very ignorant youth ; and I should be very glad, now, 
 if I could revisit what I passed in weariness or contempt ; and I 
 do envy you (sitting as I am just now in the Great Western hotel 
 at Paddington, looking out upon a large number of panes of grey 
 glass, some iron spikes, and a brick wall) that walk in sight of 
 Sabine hills. Still, reasoning with myself in the severest way, 
 and cliecking whatever malice against the things I have injured, 
 or envy of you, there may be in the feelings with which I now think 
 of Rome, these appear to me incontrovertible and accurate con- 
 clusions, — that the streets are damp and mouldy where they are 
 not burning ; that the modern architecture is fit only to put on a 
 Twelfth cake in sugar {e.y., the churches at the Quattro Fontane) ; 
 that the old architecture consists chiefly of heaps of tufa and bricks ; 
 that the Tiber is muddy ; that the Fountains are fantastic ; that 
 the Castle of St. Angelo is too round ; that the Capitol is too square ; 
 that St. Peter's is too big ; that all the other churches are too little ; 
 that the Jews' quarter is uncomfortable ; that the English quarter 
 is unpicturesque ; that Michael Angelo's Moses is a monster ; that 
 his Last Judgment is a mistake ; that Raphael's Transfiguration is 
 a failure ; that Apollo Belvidere is a public nuisance ; that the 
 bills are high ; the malaria strong ; the dissipation shameful ; the 
 bad company numerous ; the Sirocco depressing ; the Tramontana 
 chilling; the Levante parching; the Ponente pelting; the ground 
 unsafe ; the politics perilous, and the religion pernicious. . . ." 
 
 {I'o the same.) "Nod. 29, 1858. . . . I'm better now, a little, 
 but doubtful and puzzled about many things. Lowell does me more
 
 A LIST OF WANTS 4-71 
 
 good than anybody, what between encouraging me and making me CHAP. 
 laugh. Mr. Knott makes me laugh more than anything I know in " " 
 the world — the punning is so rapid and rich, there's nothing near 
 it but Hood, and Hood is so awful under his fun that one never can 
 laugh. Questi jjoveri — what are we to do with them 1 You don't 
 mean to ask me that seriously? Make pets of them, to be sure — 
 they were sent to be our dolls, like the little girls' wax ones — only 
 we can't pet them until we get good floggings for some people, 
 as well." 
 
 [To the same.) '^ Dec. 28, 1858. ... I rather want good wishes 
 just now, for I am tormented by what I cannot get said, nor done. 
 I want to get all the Titians, Tiutorets, Paul Veroneses, Turners, 
 and Sir Joshuas in the world into one great fireproof Gothic gallery 
 of marble and serpentine. I want to get them all perfectly engraved. 
 I want to go and draw all the subjects of Turner's 19,000 sketches 
 in Switzerland and Italy, elaborated by myself. I want to get 
 everybody a dinner who hasn't got one. I want to macadamize 
 some new roads to Heaven with broken fools'-heads. I want to 
 hang up some knaves out of the way, not that I've any dislike to 
 them, but I think it would be wholesome for them, and for other 
 people, and that they would make good crow's meat. I want to 
 play all day long and arrange my cabinet of minerals with new 
 white wool. I want somebody to amuse me when I'm tired. I 
 want Turner's pictures not to fade. I want to be able to draw 
 clouds, and to understand how they go, and I can't make them 
 stand still, nor understand them — they all go sideways, TrXdyun ^ 
 (what a fellow that Aristophanes was ! and yet to be always in 
 the wrong in the main, except in his love for ^schylus and the 
 country. Did ever a worthy man do so much mischief on the face 
 of the Earth?) Farther, I want to make the Italians industrious, 
 the Americans quiet, the Swiss romantic, the Roman Catholics 
 rational, and the English Parliament honest — and I can't do any- 
 thing and don't understand what I was born for. I get melancholy 
 — overeat myself, oversleep myself — get pains in the back — don't 
 know what to do in any wise. What with that infernal invention 
 of steam, and gunpowder, I think the fools may be a puff or barrel 
 
 * Clouds, 325. See the Preface where Raskin quotes and comments 
 to ed. 2 of Modern Painters, vol. i., upon the passage.
 
 472 RUSKLN AND HIS FRIENDS 
 
 CHAP, or two too many for us. Nevertheless, the gunpowder has been 
 
 XXTTT 
 
 ' doing some work in China and India. . . . 
 
 "P.*S'. — I want also to give lectures in all the manufacturing 
 towns, and to write an essay on poetry, and to teach some masters 
 of schools to draw ; and I want to be perfectly quiet and undisturbed 
 and not to think, and to draw, myself, all day long, till I can draw 
 better ; and I want to make a dear High Church friend of mine sit 
 under Mr. Spurgeon." 
 
 {To the same.) " Thun, Aug. 15, 1859. . . . It's very odd I 
 don't keep writing to you continually, for you are almost the only 
 friend I have left. I mean the only friend who understands or feels 
 with me. I've a good many radical half friends, but I'm not a 
 radical and they quarrel with me — by the way, so do you a little — 
 about my governing schemes. Then all my Tory friends think me 
 worse than Robespierre. Rossetti and the P.R.B. are all gone crazy 
 about the Morte d' Arthur. I don't believe in Evangelicalism — and 
 my Evangelical (once) friends now look upon me with as much 
 horror as on one of the possessed Gennesaret pigs. Nor do I 
 believe in the Po]»e — and some Roman Catholic friends, who had 
 great hopes of me, think I ought to be burned. Domestically, I ana 
 supposed worse than Blue Beard ; artistically, I am considered a 
 mere i^acket of squibs and crackers. I rather count upon Lowell 
 as a friend, though I've never seen him. He and the Brownings 
 and you. Four — well — it's a good deal to have — of such, and I 
 won't grumble — but then you're in America, and no good to me — 
 except that I'm in a perfecti state of gnawing remorse about not 
 writing to you ; and the Brownings are in Italy, and I'm as alone as 
 a stone on a high glacier, dropped the wrong way, instead of among 
 the moraine. Some day, when I've quite made up my mind what 
 to fight for, or whom to fight, I shall do well enough, if I live, 
 l)Ut I haven't made up my mind what to fight for — whether, for 
 instance, people ought to live in Swiss cottages and sit on three- 
 legged and one-legged stools; whether people ought to dress well 
 or ill ; whether ladies ought to tie their hair in beautiful knots ; 
 whether Commerce or Business of any kind be an invention of the 
 Devil or not; whether Art is a Crime or only an Absurdity; 
 whether Clergymen ought to be multiplied, or exterminated by 
 arsenic, like rats ; whether in general we are getting on, and if so
 
 SELF-PORTRAITURE 473 
 
 wliere we are going to ; whether it is worth while to ascertain any CHAP. 
 
 . XXIII 
 of these things; whether one's tongue was ever made to talk with 
 
 or only to taste with. (Send to Mr. Knott's house ^ and get me 
 
 some raps if you can.) 
 
 " Meantime, I'm copying Titian as well as I can, that being the 
 
 only work 1 see my way to at all clearly, and if I can ever succeed 
 
 in painting a bit of flesh, or a coil of hair, I'll begin thinking 'what 
 
 next,' ..." 
 
 V 
 
 Amons: the friends who disliked Ruskin's incursions into 
 politics was Acland, and to him the following apology was 
 addressed : — 
 
 ^^ April. 27, 1856. . . . I enjoyed the quiet time you were kind 
 enough to spare to me at Henley as much as you did — perhaps 
 more — as I was under no panic about your politics. And if you 
 consider the following facts I don't think you will see ground to 
 fear mine. 
 
 " First. I have a clear mathematical head. This is just as 
 certain as that I have a head at all, which I suppose is objectively 
 certain. I know it is a mathematical head, because at my little go 
 I offered to do any problem in Euclid's three first books without a 
 diagram, writing it out by reference to an imaginary diagram in my 
 head. I can do that to this day, to almost any extent ; that is to 
 say, reason out any geometrical question without pen or paper, and 
 dictate its statement blindfold.^ 
 
 " Secondly. I have reasoned out a good many principles of 
 general philosophy and political economy by myself, and I have 
 always found myself in concurrence with Bacon and Adam Smith 
 as soon as I had settled said jDrinciples to my own satisfaction ; and 
 as I believe those two people to have been no fools, I see no reason 
 for concluding that I am one myself. 
 
 " Thirdly. I am forced by precisely the same instinct to the 
 consideration of political questions that urges me to examine the laws 
 of architectural or mountain forms. I cannot help doing so ; the 
 
 ^ In Lowell's rollicking poem, Mr. Knott's house was haunted by 
 " raps that unwrapped mysteries." 
 * See above, p. 62.
 
 474 A DEFENCE OF HIS POLITICS 
 
 CHAP, questions suggest themselves to me, and I am compelled to work 
 
 XXTIT 
 
 ' them out. I cannot rest till I have got them clear. 
 
 "Fourthly. I am perfectly honest in all my purposes. It is 
 precisely and accurately against my own dearest interests that I am 
 acting in praising Turner. No landed proprietor ever coveted land 
 more earnestly than I covet possession of Turners. Yet I am every 
 day putting my whole strength into the declaration of their merit to 
 others, raising their price to myself. I have proved a right to say, 
 therefore, that I am upright in my other purposes. 
 
 " Fifthly. I am good-natured, and desirous of making people 
 about me happy, if I can. There are many people who are proudly 
 honest, yet hard-hearted : I am instinctively honest, yet kind-hearted. 
 I do not mean that I am affectionate — that is to say, dependent for 
 my pleasure on the society of others, — far fi-om it ; but I am kind, in 
 a general way, to all human creatures. 
 
 " Sixthly. I am wholly unambitious. I don't mean I am not 
 vain — that is, fond of praise ; I am intensely fond of it, and very 
 much pained by blame. But I don't care for Power, unless it be to 
 be useful Avith ; the mere feeling of power and responsibility is a bore 
 to me, and I would give any amount of authority for a few hours 
 of Peace. 
 
 " Seventhly. I have perfect leisure for inquiry into whatever I 
 want to know. I am untroubled by any sort of care or anxiety, 
 unconnected with any particular interest or group of persons, un- 
 affected by feelings of Party, of Ptace, of social partialities, or of 
 early prejudice, having been bred a Tory — and gradually developed 
 myself into an Indescribable thing — certainly not a Tory. 
 
 "Eighthly. I am by nature and instinct Conservative, loving 
 old things because they are old, and hating new ones merely because 
 they are new. If, therefore, I bring forward any doctrine of Inno- 
 vation, assuredly it must be against the grain of me ; and this in 
 political matters is of'.infinite importance. 
 
 " Lastly, I have respect for religion, and accept the practical 
 precepts of the Bible to their full extent. 
 
 " Consider now all those qualifications one by one. Consider 
 how seldom it is that they all are likely to meet in one person, and 
 whether there be, on the whole, chance of greater good or evil accruing 
 to people in general from the political speculations of such a person.
 
 CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 475 
 
 " I ought to have added one more qualification to the list. I CHAP. 
 
 XXIII 
 
 know the Laws of Work, and this is a great advantage over Idle 
 
 Speculations. 
 
 " Against all these qualifications you will perhaps allege one — at 
 first ugly-looking — disqualification. ' You live out of the world, and 
 cannot know anything about it.' 
 
 " I believe that is almost the only thing you can say, but it 
 does sound ugly at first, and sweeping. I answer, that just because 
 I live out of it, I know more about it. Who do you suppose know 
 most about the lake of Geneva — I, or the Fish in it 1 It is quite true 
 the Fish know a thing or two that I don't^ — certain matters about 
 feeding places, deep holes, and various other characters of Bottom. 
 Nevertheless as to the general Nature of the lake of Geneva, future 
 prospects of it, and probabilities of all said fish ever being entirely 
 broiled by a volcanic explosion, or petrified in their beloved bottom 
 by advance of delta, I know more than they. 
 
 " I do not suppose you will answer — as other people might — that 
 I am too conceited to know anything about it. There are two kinds 
 of self-estimation — a fool's, and that which every man who knows his 
 business has of himself. They look like each other in expression, but 
 they are not the same. ..." 
 
 VI 
 
 A friend who entirely approved of Raskin's political out- 
 look was Carlylc ; and he was not quite a friend — a mentor, 
 rather. "What can you say of Carlylc," said Raskin to 
 Froude, " but that he was born in the clouds and struck by 
 the lightning ? " — " ' struck by the lightning,' " adds Froude, 
 " not meant for happiness, but for other ends ; a stern fate 
 which nevertheless in the modern world, as in the ancient, 
 is the portion dealt out to some individuals on whom the 
 heavens have been pleased to set their mark." ^ Carlylc 
 was the revered Master; Ruskin the beloved disciple. A 
 visitor to Chelsea describes Carlylu as reclining on a sofa, 
 while Ruskin knelt on the floor, leaning over Carlyle as they 
 
 1 Thomas Carlyle : a History of the First Forty Years of his Life, 1882, 
 vol. ii. p. 475.
 
 476 MRS. CARLYLE 
 
 CHAP, talked, and kissing his hand on takmg leave.^ The descrip- 
 Ajvi±i. ^j^Qj^ jg typical of their relations. I do not know when, or 
 how, they first met — it was certainly before 1851, as is 
 proved by Carlyle's letter of March 9 in that year, about The 
 Stones of Venice.^ The arts were not much in Carlyle's way, 
 but he found Ruskin's talk an exception : — 
 
 " Ruskin was here the other night," he wrote to his brother 
 (November 27, 1855); — "a bottle of beautiful soda-water, — some- 
 thing like Rait of old times, only with an intellect of tenfold vivacity. 
 He is very pleasant company now and then. A singular element, — 
 very curious to look upon, — in the present puddle of the intellectual 
 artistic so-called 'world' in these parts at this date."^ 
 
 At this time Ruskin was not an infrequent visitor to Carlyle 
 and his wife. "It was a relief," wrote Mrs. Carlyle in her 
 journal (May 15, 1856), " when Ruskin called for us, to go to 
 a great soiree at Bath House, lliere I found my tongue, 
 and used it 'not wisely but too well.'"'* Ruskin did not 
 love that tongue, and was heard in after years to speak of 
 her as " the shrew." ^ But he admired her cleverness, and to 
 her some of his best letters were addressed. First, however, 
 I must give one to Carlyle : — 
 
 " Denmark Hill, Jan. 23, 1855. — Dear Mr. Carlyle, — I had 
 some thoughts of making a true foray upon you this evening — having 
 been rendered desperate by Woolner's telling me that it was thi-ee 
 years since I had seen you — but this morning it looks so much as 
 if, could I once get to Chelsea, you might have some difficulty in 
 getting quit of me again till a thaw came, that I will not venture. 
 Only I warn you that I really must come and see you one of these 
 days — if you won't come and see us. 
 
 " People are continually accusing me of borrowing other men's 
 thoughts, and not confessing the obligation. I don't think there is 
 anything of which I am more utterly incapable than of this meanness ; 
 
 ^ William AUingham : a Diary, Jane Welsh Carlyle, 1903, vol. ii. 
 
 1907, p. 275. p. 97. 
 
 ^ Chapter xv., above, p. 296. ^ " Ruskin and Girlhood : Some 
 
 ^ Nexv Letters of Carlyle, 1904, Happy Reminiscences," by L. Allen 
 
 vol. ii. p. 177. Harker, in Scribiiers Magazine, Nov. 
 
 * New Letters and Memorials of 1906.
 
 CART.YLF/S INFLUENCE 477 
 
 but it is very difficult always to know how much one is indebted to CHAP. 
 
 XXIII 
 other people, and it is always most difficult to explain to others the 
 
 degree in which a stronger mind may guide you, without your having 
 
 at least intentionally borrowed this or the other definite thought. 
 
 The fact is, it is very possible for two people to hit sometintet^ on the 
 
 same thought, and I have over and over again been somewhat vexed 
 
 as well as surprised at finding that what I really had, and knew I 
 
 had, worked out for myself, corresponded very closely to things that 
 
 you had said much better. I entreat you not to think when (if you 
 
 have ever patience to do so) you glance at anything I write — and 
 
 when you come, as you must sometimes, on bits that look like bits of 
 
 yourself spoiled — to think that I have been mean enough to borrow 
 
 from you knowingly, and without acknowledgment. How much 
 
 your general influence has told upon me, I know not, but I always 
 
 confess it, or rather boast of it, in conversation about you, and you 
 
 will see what — considering the way malicious people catch at such 
 
 confessions — is certainly a very frank one, at the close of the lecture 
 
 of which I send you a Builder containing a report. I have marked 
 
 the passage, p. 639. ^ 
 
 " With sincere regards to Mrs. Carlyle, believe me, my dear Sir, 
 most faithfully yours, J. Ruskin." 
 
 {To Me. and Mrs. Cahlyle.) ^^ March 1859.— When may I 
 come and see you? Friday — Saturday — Monday — or Tuesday — 
 evening? I've been in Yorkshire. In, also, lands of figurative 
 rock and moor — hard work — and peat-bog puzzle. No end visible. 
 Not getting on with German. Frederick yet unread. Nothing 
 done. All sorts of things gone worse undone — Stitches run down. 
 Entirely dim notions of what ought to be done. Except — that I 
 ought to come and tell you all about it." 
 
 He had sent as a gift to Cheyne Row a print of Diirer's 
 Melencolia : — 
 
 {To Mrs. Carlyle.) "Z)er. 1859. — I am so very glad you liked 
 the things, and especially the flowers — for indeed the Melancholy is 
 not exactly likeable. What it jneans — no one knows. ' Cavernous 
 meaning ' is just the word for it. In the main, it evidently means 
 
 ^ A lecture at the Architec- Colour " : Library Edition, vol. xii. 
 tural Museum on "Decorative p. 507.
 
 478 DR. AND MRS. JOHN SIMON 
 
 CHAP, the full sense of the terror, mystery, turmoil, responsibility of the 
 XXIII. Tj^Qrld^ ending in great awe and sadness — and perpetual labour — 
 (as opposed to French Ugerete) lightly crowned with budding bay 
 — winged, as in true angelic service. (The Wolf hound of fiercer 
 sorrow laid asleep at her feet.) Strong bodied. Having the Keys 
 of all knowledge. Compare Tennyson's : — 
 
 ' Seemed to touch it into leaf. 
 The Words were hard to understand.' 
 
 — Ever affectionately yours, J. Ruskin. 
 
 " Poor little Nero ! But he will love you just as much, even 
 when he is blind — and move his little paws just as prettily." 
 
 On the tour of 1856, which gave Ruskin the friendship 
 of Norton, he and his parents met also Dr. and Mrs. Simon. 
 The acquaintance ripened between them all into a very 
 warm friendship — celebrated by Ruskin, as usual, with 
 familiar names. John Simon became, from the identity of 
 Christian name, his " dear brother John," and Mrs. Simon 
 his " dear P. R. S." (Pre-Raphaelite Sister and Sibyl), or 
 more shortly " S." " She, with her husband," says Ruskin 
 in Prceterita, " love Savoy even more than I " ; and " She, 
 in my mother's old age, was her most deeply trusted friend." 
 John Simon, M.D., President of the Royal College of 
 Surgeons, and F.R.S. (created K.C.B. in 1887), of Anglo- 
 French descent, was, as is well known, one of the chief 
 masters of sanitary science in this country, and in the year 
 before the Ruskins met him had been appointed to the 
 newly created post of Medical Officer to the Privy Council. 
 It is to his reports made in this capacity that Ruskin more 
 than once refers in his books. He had in 1848 married 
 Miss Jane O'Meara. " Her warm Irish nature was concealed 
 from strangers," says Lady Burne- Jones, who with her hus- 
 band owed friendship with Sir John and Lady Simon to 
 Ruskin's introduction, " by a singularly impassive manner : 
 but, that once penetrated, her fine qualities revealed them- 
 selves: amongst them were constancy in friendship and a 
 rare courage and magnanimity in times of trial." ^ There 
 
 ^ Memorials of Edivard Burne-Jones, vol. i. p. 257.
 
 LIKES AND DISLIKES 479 
 
 are other friends who may more conveniently be introduced CHAP, 
 at a later stage in our story; here a few letters may be 
 added as specimens of Ruskin's large and various corre- 
 spondence at this time : — 
 
 {To Mrs. Hugh Blackburn.) "March 17 {circ. 1855-56).— I 
 sent you a horrible scrawl of a letter the other day ; and put off 
 the answer to your interesting questions about people and places, 
 not because I wanted time to think over them, but because I wanted 
 to explain why I must answer at random — or nearly so. . . . 
 
 "In the Bible, then, my favourite, ion the whole,' is Job — 
 Daniel is a little too high above me— and John too fond of saying 
 the same thing over and over again. I should have liked excessively 
 to have known Habakkuk, but, not having known him, cannot quite 
 say whether I should have liked him or not. My chief antipathy, 
 putting monsters — Judas and Nabal and such like — out of the ques- 
 tion, is Jacob. 
 
 " In History, I am absolutely at a dead stand between Cromwell 
 and St. Louis; but I suppose if I had known them both I should 
 have drawn a little more to St. Louis. I have never examined 
 tlie histories of rascals enough to make a choice. The first who 
 comes into my head is King John. 
 
 " In Romance. I am again divided between Sir Charles Grandi- 
 son and Don Quixote. If Don Q. had not been mad, I should have 
 liked Turn best — on the whole I believe I do. Of ladies — Imogen. 
 I had liked to have insulted the blessed creature and you, by saying 
 where she was. For romantic antipathies there are, of course, too 
 many well-got-up monsters to render the choice either easy or 
 interesting. I think Glossin in Guy ManneHmj as disagreeable a 
 fellow as one often comes across. 
 
 " Lastly for places. . . . i\Iy greatest horror in Europe is the 
 main street in Carlsruhe. If, for an affection, you want a narrower 
 answer than Chamouni, I am a little puzzled between the top of 
 tlie Montanvert and a small rock on the flank of the Breven. I 
 have been haj'^piest on the Montanvert, but oftenest at this rock, 
 where I generally pass my evenings when at Chamouni. Xext to 
 the valley of Chamouni, and even running it rather hard, I love 
 the little Scaliger churchyard at Verona. I think I have been
 
 480 A PUZZLE ABOUT TURNER 
 
 CHAP, more intensely happy for a little while in the churchyard, brit not 
 
 ■^^^^^ so enduringly. Now, please, tell me yours." 
 
 {To Mrs. John Simon.) ''Nov. 28, 1857.— My dear S.,— I 
 just write a line to relieve your mind, and say I understand all 
 that about the inspiration, and think it helpful and nice ; and I 
 think you are quite right in the main about Turner. But the odd 
 thing is that there should have been plenty men of irregular or 
 even wicked lives who could yet draw a pretty face sometimes, or 
 a handsome one; and besides, they show degradation in all they 
 do of animals or living creatures, as much at least as in their 
 human figures. But Turner discerns the most exquisite siibtleties 
 of beauty in a fawn — the utmost majesty in an eagle — the utmost 
 naivety and innocence in a donkey — and yet never draws one 
 beautiful or even pretty human face or form. I am so much the 
 more struck with this at present that I see his hard tries to do it 
 sometimes — to paint the landing of Prince Regents — the opening 
 of the Walhalla — or the parting of Borneo and Juliet — and it 
 seems so amazing to me that he should be able to paint a fawn 
 rightly, but not an Italian girl — and a pig, but not a Prince Regent 
 — and a donkey, but not a German philosopher. I don't know 
 when I have been so entirely puzzled about anything — I've got 
 the toothache with thinking over it." 
 
 {To Dr. Chambers.) ''Jan. 3, 1859. . . . Of course the first 
 thing one has to urge on a young Prince is in this as in all other 
 matters, that he should think for himself. ISTot, that is, take up an 
 opinion carelessly, and maintain it positively, because it is his, but 
 that he should himself do the hard and painful work of making the 
 thought really his own, and for himself testing its truth. A King is, 
 of course, exposed to all kinds of efforts to deceive him ; the interest 
 in obtaining his approval is so great that all mean persons are for 
 ever striving to blind him to the merits of others and recommend 
 their own — impartial teaching is a thing almost impossible in his 
 case. I am myself rough and bold enough in general in what I say, 
 but I never would say so hard a thing of a living artist in the 
 Prince's hearing as I would say in the hearing of a person of small 
 power ; so that the honestest men are influenced and warped by his 
 rank, and the dishonest men put to their skilfullest pinches. Above 
 all, therefore, let him be taught to ask of himself sternly, ' Is this so
 
 LESSONS FOR THE PRINCE OF WALES 481 
 
 indeed ? Do I personally and for myself judge that it is so ? ' You CHAP. 
 
 ■V'v'TTT 
 
 must struggle, therefore, to get his mind to act as freely as possible, ^^^■»^^■'• 
 never, so far as you have power, to let him admire a picture because 
 it has fame ; if possible, let him judge of it before knowing its 
 master. Never tell him whom a picture is by, till he has guessed ; 
 this I mean in the ordinary course of guidebook study. The study 
 of art may be made far more amusing as well as more useful by such 
 methods. . . . 
 
 " Secondly, a King is peculiarly exposed to delight in and en- 
 courage art as a means of Luxury or pride — to like it for its state 
 and glitter. Therefore one of the chief results of your travels in 
 Italy ought to be to convince the Prince of Wales that the ruin 
 of that country, and nearly of all other countries which have ever 
 been notably ruined, has been in great part brought about by their 
 refinements of art aj)plied in luxurious and proud oflice ; — that 
 Emperors, Kings, Doges, and republics have risen and reigned by 
 simplicity of life ; fallen and perished by luxury of life. Be assured 
 that all the arts, followed in wantonness, and for show and state, 
 lead straight to destruction. ..." 
 
 And so forth, and so forth, with a " thirdly " and a 
 "lastly," at great length. Ruskin was always on the look 
 out for opportunities of teaching ; and took equal pains 
 with a schoolmistress submitting a drawing-copy and with a 
 brief for a companion of the Heir- Apparent. Dr. Chambers 
 had been selected as physician to accompany the Prince of 
 Wales on a visit to Italy, where he was to pursue his studies 
 for five months. He went to Rome, but owing to the out- 
 break of war in Italy was immediately recalled. His late 
 Majesty was thus spared this addition to those improving 
 designs of the Prince Consort, to which, as we now know, 
 the young Prince offered a policy of passive resistance.^ 
 
 VIII 
 
 In addition to a voluminous correspondence, Ruskin 
 during these years received many visitors and friends at 
 
 ^ See the article on " The Character of King Edward VII." in the 
 Quarterly Review, July 1910. 
 
 VOL. I. 2 H
 
 482 RUSKIN AND HIS PARENTS 
 
 CHAP, his hoD3e on Denmark Hill. Yet it was not his home, 
 ■^^^ either. He Avas a man of forty in 1859, and was at the 
 height of his literary reputation. But he was still a child 
 in the house of his parents. A sense of restraint was 
 growing upon him, and presently became almost in- 
 supportable ; but though Ruskin confessed this in letters 
 to intimate friends, he never suffered the least trace of 
 irritation to appear in his open relations Avith his parents. 
 Mr. Frederic Harrison, with Avhom, as a fellow-teacher at 
 the Working Men's College, Ruskin had become acquainted, 
 was often at Denmark Hill in these years, and has thus 
 described the father and the son : — 
 
 " John James Ruskin, the father, certainly seemed to me a man 
 of rare force of character ; shrewd, practical, generous, with pure 
 ideals both in art and in life. With unbounded trust in the genius 
 of his son, he felt deeply how much the son had yet to learn. I 
 heard the father ask an Oxford tutor if he could not ' put John in the 
 way of some scientific study of Political Economy.' ' John ! John ! ' I 
 have heard him cry out, ' what nonsense you're talking ! ' when John 
 was off on one of his niagnificeat paradoxes, unintelligible as Pindar 
 to the sober Scotch merchant. . . . There were moments when the 
 father seemed the stronger in sense, breadth, and hold on realities. 
 And when John was turned of forty, the father still seemed some- 
 thing of his tutor, his guide, his support. The relations between 
 John Ruskin and his parents were among the most beautiful things 
 that dwell in my memory. . . . This man, well past middle life, in 
 all the renown of his principal works, who, for a score of years, had 
 been one of the chief forces in the literature of our century, continued 
 to show an almost child-like docility towards his father and his 
 mother, respecting their complaints and remonstrances, and gracefully 
 submitting to be corrected by their worldly wisdom and larger experi- 
 ence. The consciousness of his own public mission and the boundless 
 love and duty that he owed to his parents could not be expressed in 
 a way more beautiful. One could almost imagine it was in the spirit 
 of the youthful Christ when he said to his mother, ' Wist ye not that 
 I must be about my Father's business V " ^ 
 
 ^ "Memories of John E,uskin," in Literature, Feb. 3, 1900,
 
 A VISIT TO DENMARK HILL 483 
 
 Of the mother, and of Ruskin's charm, there is a vivid CHAP. 
 description in the letters of James Smetham. This earnest ^XIII. 
 artist, much befriended by Rnskin, was a pupil at the 
 Workinsr Men's CoUeu'e ; his first visit to Denmark Hill 
 (Feb. 1^55) was an event in his hfe : — 
 
 "I walked there 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 a footman and coachman, and grand 
 rooms glittering with pictures, chiefly Turner's, and that his father 
 and mother live with him, or he ■with them. . . . 
 
 " His mother is a ruddy, dignified, richly-dressed old gentle- 
 woman of seventy-five, who knows Chamouni better than Camber- 
 well : evidently a (lood old lady, with the Christian Treasury tossing 
 about on the table. She puts ' John ' down and holds her own 
 opinions, and flatly contradicts him ; and he receives all her opinions 
 with a soft reverence and gentleness that is pleasant to witness. . . . 
 
 "The old lady was quaintly kind. 'Has John showed this?' 
 ' Has he showed you the other 1 ' and to all her sudden injunctions 
 he replied by waiting on me in a way to make one ashamed. ... 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 believes 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. Unhanging a Turner from 
 the wall of a distant room, he brought it to the table and put it into 
 my hands ; then we talked ; then he went up into his study to fetch 
 down some illustrative 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, hanging 
 and unhanging, and stopping a few minutes to talk. There would 
 have been, if I had not seen from the first moment that he kneio 
 me well, something embarrassing in the chivalrous, hovering way he
 
 484 A LETTER TO MRS. CARLYLE 
 
 CHAP, had ; as it was, I felt much otherwise, quite as free aud open as you 
 XXII J. jjj your little study. ... I was in a sort of soft dream all the way 
 
 home ; nor has the fragrance, which, like the June sunset, 
 ' Dwells in heaven half the night,' 
 
 left my spirit yet." ^ 
 
 To none of his friends or visitors did Ruskin give any in- 
 dication of the sense of " the infinite waste of time," noted 
 in Prceterita, "in saying the same things over and over 
 to the people who came to see our Turners." 
 
 Such, then, as have been described in this chapter 
 and in the five preceding it, were Ruskin's occupations — 
 writing, lecturing, drawing, teaching — during the years of 
 the later volumes of Modern Painters. His multifarious 
 activities and the medley of his interests — reflected in the 
 very title of the third volume, " Of Many Things " — are 
 hit off in a letter of apology to Mrs. Carlyle : — 
 
 "Not that I have not been busy — and very busy, too. I have 
 written, since May, good 600 pages, had them rewritten, cut up, 
 corrected, and got fairly ready for press — and am going to press with 
 the first of them on Gunpowder Plot Day ; with a great hope of 
 disturbing the Public Peace in various directions. Also, I have 
 prepared about thirty drawings for engravers this year, retouched 
 the engravings (generally the worst part of the business), and etched 
 some on steel myself. In the course of the 600 pages I have had to 
 make various remarks on German Meta^jhysics, on Poetry, Political 
 Economy, Cookery, Music, Geology, Dress, Agriculture, Horticulture, 
 and Navigation, all which subjects I have had to ' read up ' accord- 
 ingly, and this takes time. Moreover, I have had my class of work- 
 men out sketching every week in the fields, during the summer ; and 
 have been studying Spanish proverbs with my father's partner, who 
 came over from Spain to see tlie great Exhibition. I have also de- 
 signed and drawn a window for the Museum at Oxford ; and have 
 every now and then had to look over a parcel of five or six new 
 designs for fronts and backs to the said Museum. During my above 
 mentioned studies of Horticulture I became dissatisfied with the 
 
 ^ Letters of James Smetham, pp. 52- 55.
 
 A MEDLEY OF OCCUPATIONS 485 
 
 Linnaean, Jussieuan, aud Everybody-elsian arrangement of plants, CHAP. 
 
 XXIII 
 
 and have accordingly arranged a system of my own; and unbound 
 
 my botanical book, and rebound it in brighter green, with all the 
 pages through other, and backside foremost — so as to cut oflf the old 
 paging numerals ; and am now printing my new arrangement in a 
 legible manner, on interleaved foolscap. I consider this arrangement 
 one of my great achievements of the year. My studies of political 
 economy have induced me to think also that nobody knows anything 
 about that, and I am at present engaged in an investigation, on 
 independent principles, of the Natures of Money, Rent, and Taxes, in 
 an abstract form, Avhich sometimes keeps me awake all night. My 
 studies of German metaphysics have also induced me to think that 
 the Germans don't know anything about them ; and to engage in a 
 serious inquiry into the meaning of Bunsen's great sentence in the 
 beginning of the second volume of Hippolytus, about the Finite 
 realization of the Infinity ; which has given me some trouble. The 
 course of my studies of navigation necessitated me going to Deal to 
 look at the Deal boats; and those of Geology to rearrange all my 
 minerals (and wash a good many, which, I am sorry to say, I found 
 wanted it). I have also several pupils, far and near, in the art of 
 illumination, an American young lady to direct in the study of land- 
 scape painting, and a Yorkshire young lady to direct in the purchase 
 of Turners — and various little bye things besides. 
 " But I am coming to see you."
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 RUSKIN AND ROSSETTl 
 
 " As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay 
 With canvas drooping, side by side, 
 Two towers of sail at dawn of day 
 
 Are scarce long leagues apart descried ; 
 When fell the night, upsprung the breeze, 
 
 And all the darkling hours they plied. 
 Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas 
 By each was cleaving, side by side." 
 
 Clough ("Qua Cursum Ventus"). 
 
 The friendship between Ruskin and Rossetti is a curiously 
 interesting episode in the personal history of English art 
 and literature during the nineteenth century. It throws so 
 much light on Ruskin's character as to claim a separate 
 chapter in his biography ; it makes some contribution also 
 to the eternally vexed question, whether likeness or unlike- 
 ness be the best ground of friendship. There was enough of 
 the •• idem velle et idem nolle " between Ruskin and Rossetti 
 to make a friendship possible; enough, too, of difference 
 to add piquancy to it; but not enough readiness to give 
 and take on equal terms to lend it permanence. Ruskin 
 hoped to be obeyed ; Rossetti was accustomed to dominate. 
 To either of the two, a man with the genius for friendship 
 might apply the words of Dr. Johnson in the famous con- 
 versation : " Sir, I am not saying that yoti could live in a 
 friendship with a man from whom you differ; I am only 
 saying that / could." 
 
 Ruskin's first acquaintance with Rossetti was a result 
 of the championship of the Pre-Raphaelites, recounted in 
 an earlier chapter (XIV.). Domestic causes had broken the
 
 FIRST ACQUAINTANCE WITH ROSSETTI 487 
 
 friendship with Millais, and the rupture seems to have made CHAP, 
 Ruskin the more anxious to cultivate Rossetti, whom he 
 regarded as the intellectual leader of the Pre-Raphaelite 
 movement. Ruskin had already done the painter a useful 
 service by commending his work to M'Cracken, who there- 
 upon bought the Avater-colour (now at Oxford) of " Dante 
 drawing an angel in memory of Beatrice." This led to 
 Ruskin's personal acquaintance with Rossetti, as appears 
 from a letter of the latter to Madox Brown, dated April 
 14, 1854:— 
 
 " M'Cracken of course sent my drawing to Ruskin, who the other 
 day wrote me an incredible letter about it, remaining mine respect- 
 fully (! !), and wanting to call. I of course stroked him down in my 
 answer, and yesterday he called. His manner was more agreeable 
 than I had always expected. . . . He seems in a mood to make my 
 fortune." ^ 
 
 And, again, a month later, to the same correspondent : 
 " Millais has written to me that Gambart wants me to paint 
 something, so I imagine Ruskin is beginning to bear fruit." 
 The date of the folloAving letter from Ruskin is that at 
 which his wife had left him ; Rossetti's father had recently 
 died : — 
 
 " Denmark Hill, May 2. — You must have been surprised and 
 hurt at my not having written to you before — but you may perhaps 
 already have heard, or at all events will soon hear, that I have had 
 much upon my mind during the last week, and have been unable to 
 attend to my daily duties — of which one of the most urgent would at 
 another time have been that of expressing to you my sympathy on 
 the occasion of your late loss. I should be sincerely obliged to you 
 if you would sometimes write to me (as I shall not, I fear, be able to 
 see you before I leave town), telling me how you are, and what you 
 are doing and thinking of. I am truly anxious that no sorrow — still 
 less undue distrust of yourself — may interfere with the exercise of 
 your very noble powers, and I should deem it a great privilege if you 
 would sometimes allow me to have fellowship in your thoughts and 
 
 * D. G. Rossetti : his Family Letters, with a Memoir, by W. M. Rossetti, 
 vol. i. p. 180.
 
 488 EXCHANGE OF GIFTS 
 
 CHAP, sympatliy with your purposes. I have ordered my bookseller to send 
 you copies of all that I have written (though I know not of what use 
 it can possibly be to you) ; and if you will insist in having so great 
 an advantage over me as to give me a little drawing in exchange — as 
 Glaucus gave his golden arms for Diomed's brazen ones — I shall hold 
 it one of my most precious possessions ; but besides this, please do a 
 drawing for me as for Mr. Boyce, for fifteen guineas. Thus I shall 
 have two drawings instead of one. And do them at your pleasure — 
 of whatever subjects you like. I send the piece of opal of which I 
 spoke, by parcels-delivery company, this afternoon. It is not a fine 
 piece, but I think you will have pleasure in sometimes letting your 
 eye rest upon it. I know no colours possessing its peculiar char- 
 acter, and a magnifying glass used to its purple extremity will 
 show wonderful things in it. ..." 
 
 Ruskin then went abroad, and wrote as follows to Rossetti : — 
 
 "Geneva, June 4. — Dear M«. Rossetti, — I have just scratched 
 out the Mr. in the above address and hope you will leave it out in your 
 answer to me this time. We will not go on Mr.-ing each other. . . . 
 I know that, so far from being envious of them, you are thoroughly 
 happy in their success ; but yet you feel that there is as much in you 
 as in them, and you have a kind of gnawing pain at not standing 
 side by side with them. You feel as if it were not worth while now 
 to bring out your modern subjects, as Hunt has done his first.^ Now, 
 as to the original suggestion of the power which there is in modern 
 life if honestly treated, I firmly believe that, to whomsoever it in 
 reality may belong in priority of time, it belongs to all three of you 
 equally in right of possession. I think that you, Hunt, and Millais, 
 would, every one of you, have made the discovery, without assistance 
 or suggestion from the other. One might make it quicker or slower 
 
 ' Rossetti's subject of modern of somewhat similar bearings." 
 
 life was " the picture called Holman Hunt, however, strongly 
 
 ' Found,' which work," says Mr. combated the suggestion that his 
 
 W. M. Rossetti, " he was now in- picture of " The Awakened Con- 
 
 clined to lay aside on the ground science" was anticipated in idea 
 
 that Hunt, in his picture ' The by the design of " Found " : see 
 
 Awakened Conscience ' (begun and his Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre- 
 
 finished at a date later than Eaphaelite Brotherhood, 1905, vol. 
 
 the beginning of 'Found'), had ii. pp.428 e . 
 been treating a modern subject
 
 PROPOSALS OF HELP 489 
 
 than another, and I su})pose that, actually, you were the first who CHAP, 
 did it. But it would have been impossible for men of such eyes and ^'^-^* • 
 hearts as ^lillais and Hunt to walk tlie streets of London, or watch 
 the things that pass each day, and not to discover also what there 
 was in them to be shown and painted. 
 
 " Now for your subjects. I like the two first — the ' Found,' 
 and the ' ]\f ary Magdalene at the door of Simon's House ' — ex- 
 ceedingly : the latter, however, much the best, partly because I have 
 naturally a great dread of subjects altogether painful, and I can be 
 happy in thinking of ]\Iary Magdalene, but am merely in pain while 
 I think of the other i-ubject. The first also is a dreadfallij difficult 
 one, and I can imagine you half killing yourself in trying to get at 
 what you want, in vain. . . . 
 
 "I sincerely trust that your best anticipations with respect to 
 your pupil may be fulfilled." 
 
 The " pupil " was Miss Siddal, afterwards Rossetti's Avife, and 
 on his return Ruskin set about, if not making Rossetti's 
 fortune, at any rate relieving him and her from finan- 
 cial anxiety. This matter is referred to in the following 
 letter : — 
 
 {Undated, 1854-55.) "Dear Rossetti, — I daresay you do not 
 quite like to answer my somewhat blunt question in my last letter ; 
 I was somewhat too brief in putting it ; I was unwell, and could 
 not write at length. My motive in asking you was simply that I 
 did not know how best to act for you, and what to propose about 
 sending Miss S[iddal] to Wales or Jersey, or anywhere else that 
 might not in some way be disagreeable to you ; and also because 
 I thought that the whole thing might perhaps be much better 
 managed in another way, and your own powers of art more healthily 
 developed, and your own life made happier. 
 
 " I daresay our letters may now cross ; but it does not matter, 
 for, whatever may be the contents of yours, I am sure there will 
 be one feeling apparent in it, and that will be a dislike of putting 
 yourself under obligation to any one in carrying out any main 
 purpose of your life. I think it well, therefore, to tell you some- 
 thing about myself, and what you really ought to feel about me in 
 this matter.
 
 490 RUSKIN ON HIMSELF 
 
 CHAP. " 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. I am neither the one nor the other. I am very 
 self-ii:dulgent, very proud, very obstinate, and very resentful ; on 
 the other side, I am very upright — nearly as just as I suppose 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 that 
 I might raise myself. I believe I once had affections as Avarm as 
 most people ; but partly from evil chance, and partly from foolish 
 misplacing of them, they have got tumbled down and broken to 
 pieces. It is a very great, in the long-run the greatest, misfortune 
 of my life that, on the whole, my relations, cousins and so forth, 
 are persons with whom I can have no sympathy, and that circum- 
 stances have always somehow or another kept me out of the way of 
 the people of whom I could have made friends. So that I have no 
 friendships, and no loves. 
 
 " Now you know the best and worst of me ; and you may rely 
 upon it it is the truth. If you hear people say I am utterly hard 
 and cold, depend upon it it is untrue. Though I have no friend- 
 ships and no loves, I cannot read the epitaph of the Spartans at 
 Thermopylae with a steady voice to the end ; and there is an old 
 glove in one of my drawers that has lain there these eighteen years, 
 which is worth something to me yet. If, on the other hand, you 
 ever feel disposed to think me particularly good, you will be just as 
 wrong as most people are on the other side. My pleasures are in 
 seeing, thinking, reading, and making people happy (if I can, con- 
 sistently with my own comfort). And I take these pleasures. And 
 I suppose, if my pleasures were in smoking, betting, dicing, and 
 giving pain, I should take those pleasures. It seems to me that one 
 man is made one way, and one another — the measure of effort and 
 self-denial can never be known, except by each conscience to itself. 
 Mine is small enough. 
 
 "But, besides taking pleasure thus where I happen to find it, I 
 have a theory of life which it seems to me impossible as a rational 
 being to be altogether without — namely, that we are all sent into 
 the world to be of such use to each other as we can, and also that
 
 COMMISSIONS TO ROSSETTI AND MISS SIDDAL 491 
 
 my particular use is likely to be in the things that I know some- CHAP. 
 thing about — that is to say, in matters connected with painting. 
 
 " Thus then it stands. It seems to me that, amongst all the 
 painters I know, you on the whole have the greatest genius, and 
 you appear to me also to be — as far as I can make out — a very 
 good sort of person. I see that you are unhappy, and that you 
 can't bring out your genius as you should. It seems to me then 
 the proper and necessary thing, if I can, to make you more happy, 
 and that I should be more really useful in enabling you to paint 
 properly and keep your room in order than in any other way. If 
 it were necessary for me to deny myself, or to make any mighty 
 exertion to do this, of course it might to you be a subject of grati- 
 tude, or a question if you should accept it or not. But, as I don't 
 happen to have any other objects in life, and as I have a comfortable 
 room and all I want in it (and more), it seems to mc just as natural 
 I should try to be of use to you as that I should offer you a cup of 
 tea if I saw you Avere thirsty, and there was plenty in the teapot, 
 and I had got aU I wanted. 
 
 " I am not going to make you any offer till you tell me, if you 
 are willing to do so, what your wishes and circumstances really are. 
 What I meant was to ask if an agreement to paint for me regularly, 
 up to a certain value, would put you more at your ease ; but I will 
 not enter into more particulars at present, for I hardly know, till 
 I have settled some business with my father, what my circumstances 
 really are. . . . Meantime I hope this letter will put you more at 
 your ease, and that you will believe me always affectionately yours. 
 
 " Que thing, by-the-bye, I hope you will not permit even for a 
 moment to slide into your head. That anything I am doing for 
 workmen, or for anybody, is in any wise an endeavour to regain 
 position in public opinion. I am what I always was; I am doing 
 what I always proposed to do, and what I have been hindered by 
 untoward circumstances from doing hitherto ; and the only tempta- 
 tion which is brought upon me by calumny is, not to fawn for public 
 favour, but to give up trying to do the public any good, and enjoy 
 myself misanthropically. I forgot to say also that I really do covet 
 your drawings as much as I covet Turner's ; only it is useless self- 
 indulgence to buy Turner's, and useful self-indulgence to buy yours.
 
 492 MUTUAL FRIENDSHIP 
 
 CHAP. Only I won't have them after they have been more than nine times 
 * rubbed entirely out, remember that." 
 
 The arrangement ultimately made for Rossetti's benefit w^as 
 that Ruskin " undertook to buy, if he happened to like it, 
 whatever Rossetti produced, at a range of prices, such as 
 the latter would have asked from any other purchaser, and 
 up to a certain maximum of expenditure on his own part. 
 If he did not relish a work, Rossetti could offer it to any 
 one else." " I cannot imagine," says Mr. W. M. Rossetti, 
 "any arrangement more convenient to my brother, who 
 thus secured a safe market for his performances, and 
 could even rely upon not being teazed to do on the nail, 
 work for which he received payment in whole or in part." 
 
 Towards Miss Siddal, called Lizzie or, more familiarly, 
 " Guggum " by Rossetti and his circle, and " Ida " by Ruskin 
 (who took the name no doubt from Tennyson's Princess), 
 he showed the same considerate generosity. She had 
 been down to spend a day with Ruskin and his parents at 
 Denmark Hill. " All the Ruskins," wrote Rossetti to Madox 
 Brown (April 13, 1855), " were most delighted with Guggum. 
 John Ruskin said she was a noble, glorious creature, and 
 his father said, by her look and manner, she might have 
 been a Countess." Miss Siddal also was a designer, and 
 Ruskin was greatly struck with her talent. He arranged to 
 settle on her an annual sum of £150, " taking in exchange 
 her various works up to that value and retaining them, or 
 (if preferred) selling some of them, and handing over to her 
 any extra proceeds." ^ 
 
 II 
 
 The acquaintance between Ruskin and Rossetti soon 
 passed into a friendship — of sincere affection, it would seem, 
 on both sides. Ruskin was ten years Rossetti's senior ; the 
 one was thirty-five, the other twenty-five, when they met. 
 But though Ruskin was the patron and the elder of the two, 
 they associated for several years on the terms of easy equality 
 
 ^ W. M. Rossetti's Danle Gabriel Rossetti, vol. i. p. 184.
 
 ROSSETTFS SKETCHES 493 
 
 essential to real friendship. Letters both to Rossetti and to CHAP. 
 Miss Siddal (then in very delicate health) show how careful ^^l^* 
 Ruskin had been to make light of the financial assistance. 
 He gave, he said, only to please himself; Rossetti need feel 
 no more sense of obligation than in accepting " a cup of tea," 
 and Miss Siddal was to " be so good as to consider herself as 
 a beautiful tree or a bit of a Gothic cathedral," which he was 
 trying to preserve for merely selfish reasons : — 
 
 {To D. G. Rossetti.) ^^ Friday. . . . Now about yourself and 
 my drawings. I am not more sure of anything in this world (and 
 I am very positive about a great many things) than that the 
 utmost a man can do is that which he can do without effort. All 
 beautiful work — singing, painting, dancing, speaking — is the easy 
 result of long and painful practice. Immediate effort always leads 
 to shrieking, blotching, posturing, mouthing. If you send me a 
 picture in which you try to do your best, you may depend upon it 
 it will be beneath your proper mark of power, and will disappoint 
 me. If you make a careless couple of sketches, with bright and 
 full colour in them, you are sure to do what will please me. If 
 you try to do more, you may depend ui)on it I shall say 'Thank 
 you for nothing,' very gruffly and sulkily. I don't say this in 
 the slightest degree out of delicacy, to keep you from giving me 
 too much time. If I really liked the laboured sketch better, I 
 would take it at once. I tell you the plain truth — and I always 
 said the same to Turner — ' If you will do me a drawing in three 
 days, I shall be obliged to you ; but if you take three months to 
 it, you may put it behind the fire when it is done.' And I should 
 have said precisely the same thing to Tintoret, or any other very 
 great man. . . ." 
 
 {To Miss Siddal.) ..." The world is an odd world. People 
 think nothing of taking my time from me every day of my life 
 (which is to me life, money, power, all in all). They take that, 
 without thanks, for no need, for the most trivial purposes, and 
 would have me lose a whole day to leave a card with their foot- 
 men ; and yozi, for life's sake, will not take that for which I have 
 no use — you are too proud. You would not be too proud to let 
 a nurse or friend give up some of her time, if you needed it, to 
 watch by you and take care of you. What is the difference
 
 494 MISS SIDDAL'S ILLNESS 
 
 CHAP, between their giving time and watchfulness and my giving such 
 ^^^I^- help as I can? 
 
 "Perhaps I have said too much of my wish to do this for 
 Eossetti's sake. But, if you do not choose to be helped for his 
 sake, consider also that the plain hard fact is that I think you 
 have genius ; that 1 don't think there is much genius in the world ; 
 and I want to keep wliat there is, in it, heaven having, I suppose, 
 enough for all its purposes. Utterly irrespective of Rossetti's feel- 
 ings or my own, 1 should simply do what I do, if I could, as I 
 should try to save a beautiful tree from being cut down, or a bit 
 of a Gothic cathedral whose strength was failing. If you would 
 be so good as to consider yourself as a piece of wood or Gothic 
 for a few months, I should be grateful to you. . . . 
 
 "If you would send me a little signed promise — ^' I will be 
 good ' — by Rossetti, I should be grateful ; you can't possibly oblige 
 me in any other way at present ; you would only vex me if you 
 sent me the best drawing that ever was seen." 
 
 {To Henry Acland, M.D.) — "I am going to burden you still 
 with some other cares on the subject of Pre-Ptaphaelitism, of which 
 you have already had painful thoughts enough. 
 
 " I have not asked Rossetti for permission to tell you (but I 
 am sure I only do both him and you justice in assuming such 
 permission) that one of the chief hindrances to his progress in 
 art has been his sorrow at the state of health of the young girl, 
 some of whose work I showed you. I fear this sorrow will soon 
 be sealed — and with what effect upon him, I cannot tell ; I see 
 that his attachment to her is very deep, but how far he is pre- 
 pared for the loss I know not. . . . 
 
 " She cannot go about to see things much, but I should be 
 very glad ;if you would get her a lodging at Oxford for a little 
 while and examine her — and direct her liow to manage herself — 
 then sending her to the place you think fittest. She will be able, 
 I have no doubt, to pay the two pounds a week. I answer in haste, 
 doubting not that when I have shown your letter to Rossetti he 
 will be able to persuade her to give up the Jersey plan — but she 
 cannot move for some days yet. I will let you know when to 
 get the rooms for her. She is the daughter of a watchmaker. 
 Rossetti first got her to sit to him for his higher female faces,
 
 ROSSETTFS LIKING FOR RUSKIN 495 
 
 and thus found out her talent for drawing, taught her, and got CHAP, 
 attached to her, and now she is dying unless the rest and change ^^-^■'■^• 
 of scene can save her. She is five-and-twenty." 
 
 Acland's prescription was a winter abroad, and Rnskin gave 
 her the means of going. 
 
 On Rossetti the obligations conferred by Ruskin did not 
 weigh heavily. " I had no idea," he once wrote to Madox 
 Brown, " that you were so monumental a character as to 
 have a banker — a dangerous discovery ! " ^ The Ruskin 
 bank was also used, and sooner or later — generally later — 
 Rossetti gave good value in drawings for consideration re- 
 ceived. Ruskin did not hold Rossetti too closely to the 
 bargain, though he did mdeed object on one occasion when 
 he had offered funds for a sketching-tour in Wales and 
 Rossetti assumed that the ofter would equally hold for a trip 
 to Paris. The arrangement with Ruskin relieved Rossetti 
 of pecuniary anxieties, but did not enslave his art. He 
 accepted the terms the more gladly, because gratitude was 
 accompanied both by respect for Ruskin's genius and by 
 a real liking for the man. " He is the best friend I ever 
 had," he wrote in one of his Faviily Letters- (1855); and 
 similarly to William Allingham in the same year : " I have 
 no more valued friend than he, and shall have much to say 
 of him." 3 " For Ruskin as a man and as a man of letters 
 Rossetti had," says Mr. Hall Caine, " a profound admiration. 
 He thought the prose of much of Modern Painters among 
 the finest in the language, and he used to say that Ruskin's 
 best talking in private life was often as vivid and im- 
 passioned." * For one thing, Ruskin talked Rossetti into 
 their famous co-operation at the Working Men's College. 
 " Ruskin," wrote Rossetti to Allingham (November 1854), 
 "has most liberally undertaken a drawing-class, which he 
 attends every Thursday evening, and he and I had a long 
 confab about plans for teaching. He is most enthusiastic 
 
 ^ Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pre- * " Some Personal Memories," 
 
 Raphaelitism, p. 102. in the Daily News, Feb. 3, 1900. 
 
 '^ Vol. ii. p. 137. See also Mr. Hall Caine's My Slonj, 
 
 3 Letters of D. G. Rossetti to JF. p. 120. 
 Allingham, p. 139.
 
 496 MUTUAL BANTER 
 
 CHAP, cabout it, and has so infected me that I think of offering an 
 XXIV. evening weekly for the same purpose."^ At the College, 
 then, as often at Denmark Hill or in Rossetti's stndio, he 
 and Ruskin met — painting together, taking counsel on art 
 and poetry, discussing books and men and policies. The 
 letters of each of the men draw an equally pleasant picture 
 of their friendship. Ruskin assumed the position of critic 
 and mentor — suggesting subjects, pointing out defects, 
 deploring the painter's incessant retouchings. Rossetti, 
 on his side, accepted all this for a while in good part, 
 especially as he took his own way, nevertheless; and 
 Ruskin, here as always in private intercourse, was as ready 
 to learn as to teach. He begs Rossetti's assistance in selec- 
 tion of colours ; he asks to be allowed to come and see 
 him paint. Mr. A. P. Elmslie, who was a student at the 
 Working .Men's College in 1856, has given an anecdote 
 which illustrates the friendly relations of the two art- 
 teachers there. Rossetti walked round Ruskin's class-room 
 one evening, when the latter was absent. " How's this ? " 
 he said ; " nothing but blue studies — can't any of you see 
 any colour but blue ? " " It was by Mr. Ruskin's directions," 
 one of the students answered. "Well, Avhere do you get 
 all this Prussian blue from ? " asked Rossetti ; and then, 
 opening a cupboard, " Well, I declare, here's a packet with 
 several dozen cakes of this fearful colour. Oh, I can't allow 
 it ; Mr. Ruskin will spoil everybody's eye for colour — I shall 
 confiscate the whole lot ; I must do it, in the interests of 
 his and my pupils. You must tell him that I've taken 
 them all away." When a few evenings later Ruskin was 
 told what had happened, he " burst into one of those 
 boisterous laughs in which he indulged whenever anything 
 very much amused him." ^ Ruskin's criticisms of Rossetti's 
 methods were conveyed in much the same vein of mock- 
 heroics. His letters of reproof and remonstrance are enter- 
 taining, and should be read with an understanding of the 
 
 1 Letters to W. Allingham, p. 83. Working Men's College, 1854-1904, 
 
 2 Memorials of Edward Burne- edited by the Rev. J. Llewelyn 
 Jones, vol. i. p. 192. See also Mr. Davies. 
 
 Elmslie's paper, p. 44, in The
 
 ROSSETTrS POEMS 497 
 
 mutual banter in which the friends wore indulging,' and of CHAP, 
 the playful affection with which Ruskin seasoned his familiar ^^^^• 
 talk. Ruskin said that he must decline to take drawings 
 " after they have been more than nine times entirely 
 rubbed out." " You are a conceited monkey," he wrote, 
 " thinking your pictures right when I tell you positively 
 they arc wrong. What do yoii know about the matter, 
 I should like to know ? " Ruskin appears not to have pre- 
 served Rossetti's letters to himself, but letters to other 
 correspondents suggest the kind of Avay in which Rossetti 
 paid Ruskin back. Ruskin Avas for diligence and concentra- 
 tion ; and to that end proposed to throw Rossetti into prison : 
 " we will have the cell made nice, airy, cheery, and tidy, 
 and you'll get on with your work gloriously." That was all 
 very well, but Ruskin himself had allowed ten years to inter- 
 pose between successive volumes of Modern Painters, " who, 
 I tell him," wrote Rossetti, " will be old masters before the 
 work is ended." 2 Their views on many subjects differed, 
 and Rossetti, we may be sure, never feigned acquiescence. 
 Sometimes he was frankly bored ; as with the first chapter 
 of Unto this Last, when it appeared in the Cornhill : " who 
 could read it," he wrote to AUingham, " or anything about 
 such bosh? " "Ruskin I saw the other day," he says again, 
 " and pitched into, he talked such awful rubbish ; but he is 
 a dear old chap, too, and as soon as he was gone I Avrote my 
 sorrows to him." ^ 
 
 To Rossetti the poet as to Rossetti the painter, the friend- 
 ship was stimulating and helpful. Rossetti had shown Ruskin 
 his translations from the Italian. Ruskin greatly admired 
 them and gave the money-guarantee which seems to have 
 been required to secure their publication.* In 1856 Rossetti 
 had published in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine 
 his "Burden of Nineveh." Ruskin had no inkling of the 
 authorship, and wrote to Rossetti " wild to know the author " 
 
 1 Mr. A. C. Benson, in his mono- ' Letters to W. Allincjham, pp. 
 
 graph on Rossetti, p. 32, seems to 228, 2G9. 
 me somewhat to miss this point. * See Messrs. Smith, Elder 
 
 ^ D. G. Rossetti: Family Letters, and Co.'s letter in Rossetti Papers, 
 
 with a Memoir, vol. ii. p. 139. p. 437. 
 
 VOL. I. 2 I
 
 498 A CRITICISM OF JENNY 
 
 CHAP, of SO "glorious" a poem. The sequel is told in a letter to 
 Allingham. " By-the-bye, it was Ruskin made me alter 
 that line in Tlie Blessed Damozel. I had never meant to 
 show him any of my versifyings, but he wrote to me one 
 day asking if I knew the author of Nineveh and could 
 introduce him — being really ignorant, as I found — so after 
 that the flesh was weak. Indeed, I do not know that it 
 will not end in a volume of mine, one of these days." ^ It 
 appears that Rossetti showed Ruskin all his poems, then 
 written, and asked him to submit one or other of them to 
 Thackeray for the Cornhill : — 
 
 " Dear Rossetti, — I have read Jenny, and nearly all the other 
 poems, with great care and with great admiration. In many of 
 the highest qualities they are entirely great. But I should be 
 sorry if you laid them before the public entirely in their present 
 state. I do not think Jenny would be understood but by few, 
 and even of those few the majority would be offended by the 
 mode of treatment. The character of the speaker himself is too 
 doubtful. He seems, even to me, anomalous. He reasons and 
 feels entirely like a wise and just man — yet is occasionally drunk 
 and brutal : no affection for the girl shows itself — his throwing 
 the money into her hair is disorderly — he is altogether a dis- 
 orderly person. The right feeling is unnatural in him, and does 
 not therefore truly touch us. I don't mean that an entirely right- 
 minded person never keeps a mistress : but, if he does, he either 
 loves her — or, not loving her, would blame himself, and be horror- 
 struck for himself no less than for her, in such a moralizing fit. 
 My chief reason for not sending it to Thackeray is this discord- 
 ance and too great boldness for common readers. But also in 
 many of its verses it is uumelodious and incomplete. ' Fail ' does 
 not rhyme to 'Belle,' nor 'Jenny' to 'guinea.' You can write 
 perfect verses if you choose, and should never write imperfect 
 ones. None of these objections apply to the Nocturn. If you will 
 allow me to copy and send that instead of the Jeniiy^ I will do it 
 instantly. Many pieces in it are magnificent, — and there is hardly 
 one harsh line. . . . 
 
 ' Rossetti Papers, p. 194.
 
 MRS. BROWNING; AND MISS ROSSEl^TI 499 
 
 "Or I \vill take The Portrait /\i you like it better. Only you CHAP. 
 must retouch the two first stanzas. The 'there is not any differ- "^^-''^' • 
 ence' won't do." 
 
 With reerard to these criticisms, Mr. W. M. Rossetti remarks 
 that Ruskin "had misapprehended the relation which the 
 poem intends to represent." His objection to rhyming 
 "Jenny" to "guinea" was (properly, as many may think) 
 rejected; that to "fail" and "Belle" was accepted; so 
 were Ruskin's criticisms of The Portrait: the words to 
 which he objected did not appear in the poem, as published, 
 and the whole of it was revised. It was Rossetti who 
 brought Ruskin to a proper appreciation of Browning. 
 " On reading Men and Women, and with it some of the 
 other works which he didn't know before, Ruskin declared 
 them rebelliously," wrote Rossetti, " to be a mass of conun- 
 drums, and compelled me to sit down before him and lay 
 siege for one whole night; the result of which was that 
 he sent me next morning a bulky letter to be forwarded to 
 B., in which I trust he told him he was the greatest man 
 since Shakespeare ! " ^ He did not quite do that, but he 
 told Browning, as we have heard, that Mrs. Browning had 
 written " the greatest poem in the English language." 
 Rossetti was hardly less rapturous than his friend over 
 Aurora Leigh. "An astounding work," he wrote of it; 
 " I know that St. Francis and Poverty do not wed in these 
 days in St. James' Church, with row^s of portrait figures 
 on either side, and the corners neatly finished with angels. 
 I know that if a blind man were to enter the room this 
 evening and talk to me for some hours, I should, with the 
 best intentions, be in danger of twigging his blindness before 
 the right moment came . . . ; yet with all this knowledge 
 I have felt something like a bug ever since reading Aurora 
 Leigh. Oh, the wonder of it ! " Of the poems of Rossetti's 
 sister, Christina, Ruskin was severely critical, when they 
 were first submitted to him in manuscript : — 
 
 {To D. G. Rossetti.) ''Jan. 24, 1861.— I sate up till late last 
 night reading poems. They are full of beauty and power. But no 
 
 * Letters of Rossetti to W, Allincjham, p. 163. - Ihid., p. 189.
 
 500 ROSSETTI IN CHEYNE WALK 
 
 CHAP, publisher — I am deeply grieved to know this — would take them, 
 A.7VJ. V . gQ f^Yl are they of quaintnesses and offences. Irregular measure 
 (introduced to my great regret, in its chief wilfulness, by Coleridge) 
 is the calamity of modern poetry. The Iliad, the Divina Commedia, 
 the ^neid, the whole of Spenser, Milton, Keats, are written without 
 taking a single license or violating the common ear for metre ; your 
 sister should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre 
 until she can write as the public like. Then if she puts in her 
 observation and passion all will become precious. But she must 
 have the Form first. All love to you and reverent love to Ida." 
 
 Rossetti sent on this letter to his brother " with very great 
 regret — most senseless, I think. I have told him something 
 of the sort in my answer." ^ When the poems were published, 
 however — whether with or without revision, I cannot tell — 
 Ruskin pronounced them " very, very beautiful." ^ 
 
 III 
 
 Thus, then, we may picture the two friends together — 
 sometimes agreeing, sometimes agreeing to differ. Ruskin, 
 who, though not prim, was not Bohemian, found a good deal 
 to put up with, and chide, in the irresponsible ways of 
 Rossetti and his fiancee. He loved them as they were, but 
 wished they could be better, and do as he bade them, " If 
 you would do what I want," he wTote, "it would be much 
 easier " ; they were " absurd creatures," both of them ; and as 
 for Rossetti's rooms, the " litter" of them was disreputable. 
 Yet, curiously enough, after the death of Rossetti's wife, when 
 he set up house in Cheyne Walk in a partnership which 
 already was to include Swinburne and George Meredith, 
 Ruskin proposed himself as another tenant. Perhaps he did 
 not mean the offer very seriously ; at any rate nothing came 
 of the proposal — which was fortunate, we may be sure, for all 
 parties. Meredith has given a characteristic picture of the 
 domestic interior. Ho drove over to Chelsea to inspect the 
 apartments, which he had irresponsibly agreed to occupy. 
 
 ^ D. a. Ros.^ctti: His Family 2 yj-om a letter of 1862 to Mrs. 
 
 Letters, with a Memoir, vol. ii. p. 165. John! Simon.
 
 HIS MARRIAGE 501 
 
 " It was past noon. Rossetti had not yet risen, though it CHAP, 
 was an exquisite day. On the breakfast table on a huge ^^I^- 
 dish rested five thick slabs of bacon, upon which five rigid 
 eggs had slowly bled to death. Presently Rossetti appeared 
 in his dressing-gown with slippers down at heel, and devoured 
 the repast like an ogre." This decided Mr. Meredith. He 
 sent in a quarter's rent in advance, and remained in his own 
 lodgings. Ruskin, who was a delicate liver, would have 
 done the same, except that he might have tried to reform 
 the Bohemian master of the house. Rossetti, moreover, had 
 a catholic taste in live stock. Now, Ruskin was also fond of 
 animals ; of cats, one may suppose, because they are domestic, 
 of dogs because they are obedient, of sheep because they 
 arc gentle. There is a quaint entry in one of his later 
 diaries noting his pleasure in giving orders that a sheep was 
 to be allowed a free run over the Brantwood grounds. But a 
 pet sheep is one thing. Rossetti's animal friends at Chelsea 
 included owls, rabbits, dormice, hedgehogs, a woodchuck, a 
 marmot, a kangaroo, wallabies, a deer, armadillos, a raccoon, a 
 raven, a parrot, chameleons, lizards, salamanders, a laughing 
 jackass, a zebu, a succession of wombats, and at one time, 
 I believe, a bull. Ruskin, who was an occasional visitor, 
 must have been devoutly thankful that he had not exchanged 
 the peaceful amenities of Denmark Hill for the menage and 
 menagerie of his friend. 
 
 Rossetti had married Miss Siddal in May 1860, and 
 Ruskin presently sent his congratulations : — 
 
 " Denmark Hill, Sej^t. 4. — This is the first letter I have written 
 since my return. I specially wished to congratulate you and Ida 
 by word of mouth rather than by letter ; but I could not get your 
 address at Chatham Place yesterday. Please let me come and see 
 you as soon as you can, and believe in my sincere affection and most 
 earnest good wishes for you both. — Ever affectionately yours, 
 
 *' J. Ruskin. 
 
 " I am trying to get into a methodical way of writing letters ; but 
 when I had written this, it looked so very methodical that I must 
 put on a disorderly postscript. I looked over all the book of sketches 
 at Chatham Place yesterday. I think Ida should be very happy to
 
 502 A RIFT WITHIN THE LUTE 
 
 CHAP, see how much more beautifully, perfectly, and tenderly you draw 
 
 ''^ • when you are drawing her than when you draw anybody else. She 
 
 cures you of all your worst faults when you only look at her." 
 
 A little rift Avithin the lute appears in a letter which is 
 undated but appears to belong to 1860 : — 
 
 "Dear Rossetti, — Thank you for your kind letter. I quite 
 understand your ways and way of talking. . . . 
 
 " But what I do feel genei-ally about you is that without intending 
 it you are in little things habitually selfish — thinking only of what 
 you like to do, or don't like : not of what would be kind. Where 
 your affections are strongly touched I suppose this would not be so 
 — but it is not possible you should care much for me, seeing me so 
 seldom. I wish Lizzie and you liked me enough to — say — put on a 
 dressing-gown and run in for a minute rather than not see me ; or 
 paint on a picture in an unsightly state, rather than not amuse me 
 when I was ill. But you can't make yourselves like me, and you 
 would only like me less if you tried. As long as I live in the way 
 I do here, you can't of course know me rightly. 
 
 " I am relieved this morning from the main trouble I was in 
 yesterday ; and am very affectionately yours, J. Buskin. 
 
 " Love to Lizzie. 
 
 "I am afraid this note reads sulky — it is not that: I am 
 generally depressed. Perhaps you both like me better than I suppose 
 you do. I mean only, I did not misinterpret or take ill anything 
 yesterday ; but I have no power in general of believing much in 
 people's caring for me. I've a little more (faith in Lizzie than in 
 you — because, though she don't see me, her bride's kiss was so full 
 and queenly-kind : but I fancy I gall you by my want of sympathy 
 in many things, and so lose hold of you." 
 
 In 1862 came Mrs. Rossetti's tragic death, and Ruskin 
 trusted " that henceforward I may be more with you, as I 
 am able now better to feel your great powers of mind, and 
 am myself more in need of the kindness with which they are 
 joined." But it was not to be so. For one thing, Rossetti, 
 in the period of his life which followed the death of his wife,
 
 THE BREACH 503 
 
 quarrelled with most of his old friends. Besides, Ruskin CHAP, 
 was didactic and Rossetti impatient. Rossetti's personality ^^1^- 
 fascinated most men who came under his spell ; he was 
 accustomed to speak, and to have his words accepted, 
 without question. It was from Ruskin alone among his 
 friends that ho heard unfavourable criticism. Moreover, 
 Rossetti, whose suspiciousness of his friends was soon 
 to become a form of mania, was aggrieved by reports 
 which reached him, and which he did not stop to verify, 
 that drawings by himself and his wife were being sold 
 by Ruskin. On his side, Ruskin was out of sympathy with 
 the new, and more voluptuous, development of Rossetti's 
 art, and loudly intolerant of his technical faults. Ro.ssetti 
 renewed his complaints about Ruskin's disposal of his draw- 
 ings; Ruskin retorted with pungent remarks on Rossetti's 
 associates. Rossetti, it is clear, while maintaining his own 
 opinions, still wrote kindly, and even aftectionately. But 
 the bond of sympathy was broken: — 
 
 {To D. G. Rossetti.) — " I am very grateful to you for this letter, 
 and for the feelings it expresses towards me. I was not angry, and 
 there was nothing in your note that needed your asking my pardon. 
 You meant them — the first and second — just as rightly as this pretty 
 third, and yet they conclusively showed me that we could not at 
 present, nor for some time yet, be com})anions any more, though 
 true friends, I hope, as ever. 
 
 " I am grateful for your love — but yet I do not want love. I 
 have had boundless love from many people during my life. And in 
 more than one case that love has been my greatest calamity — I have 
 boundlessly suffered from it. But the thing, in any helpful degree, 
 I have never been able to get, except from two women of whom I 
 never see the only one I care for, and from Edward Jones, is ' under- 
 standing.' I am nearly sick of being loved — as of being hated — for 
 my lovers understand me as little as my haters. I had rather, in 
 fact, be disliked by a man who somewhat understood me than much 
 loved by a man who understood nothing of me. 
 
 " Now I am at present out of health and irritable, "and entirely 
 resolved to make myself as comfortable as I can, and therefore to 
 associate only with people who in some decree think of me as I think
 
 504^ RUSKIN'S REQUIREMExNTS 
 
 CHAP, of myself. I may be wrong in saying I am this or that, but at 
 
 XXTV 
 
 • present I can only live or speak with people who agree with me that 
 
 I am this or that. And there are some things which I know I know 
 or can do, just as well as a man knows he can ride or swim, or 
 knows the facts of such and such a science. Now there are many 
 things in which I always have acknowledged, and shall acknowledge, 
 your superiority to me. I know it, ;as well as I know that St. 
 Paul's is higher than I am. There are other things in which I just 
 as simply know that / am superior to you. I don't mean in writing. 
 You write, as you paint, better than I. I could never have written 
 a stanza like you. Now in old times I did not care two straws 
 whether you knew or acknowledged in what I was superior to you, 
 or not. But now (being, as I say, irritable and ill) I do care, and 
 I will associate with no man who does not more or less accept my 
 own estimate of myself. For instance, Brett told me, a year ago, 
 that a statement of mine respecting a scientific matter (which I knew 
 a fond before he was born) was 'bosh.' I told him in return he was 
 a fool ; he left the house, and I will not see him again ' until he is 
 wiser.' Now you in the same manner tell me ' the faults in your 
 drawings are not greater than those I put up with in what is about 
 me,' and that one of my assistants is a ' mistakenly transplanted 
 carpenter.' And I answer — not that you are a fool, because no man 
 is that who can design as you can — but simply that you know 
 nothing of me, nor of my knowledge, nor of my thoughts, nor of 
 the sort of grasp of things I have in directions in which you are 
 utterly powerless ; and that I do not choose any more to talk to you 
 until you can recognize my superiorities as / can yours. 
 
 " And this recognition, observe, is not a matter of will or 
 courtesy. You simply do not see certain characters in me, and 
 cannot see them : still less could you (or should I ask you to) 
 pretend to see them. A day may come when you will be able. 
 Then, without apology, without restraint — merely as being different 
 from what you are now — come back to me, and we will be as we 
 used to be. It is not this affair of the drawings — not this sentence 
 — but the ways and thoughts I have seen in you ever since I knew 
 you, coupled with this change of health in myself, which render 
 this necessary — complicated also by a change in your own methods 
 of work with which I have no sympathy, and which renders it 
 
 1
 
 HIS SUBSEQUENT RELATIONS 505 
 
 impossible for me to give you the kind of praise which would give CHAP. 
 you pleasure. There are some things in ^Yhich I know your present ^X-XJV. 
 work to be wrong : others in which I strongly fed it so. I cannot 
 conquer the feeling, though I do not allege that as a proof of the 
 wrongness. The points of knowledge I could not establish to you, 
 any more than I could teach you mineralogy or botany, without 
 some hard work on your part, in directions in which it is little likely 
 you will ever give it. It is of course useless for me, under such 
 circumstances, to talk to you. . . ." 
 
 A letter written explicitly in irritation ; yet even so, only to 
 be understood as the final awakening to a gradual estrange- 
 ment of soul from soul. Others than Ruskin found Rossctti 
 impossible as a friend; but others than Rossetti might well 
 have found Ruskin's terms exacting. " He has never rubbed 
 his mind agaiubt others," said Jowett of him, in later years. 
 This letter to Rossetti reveals a temper of aloofness and of 
 pride which was to grow^ in Ruskin. For a while the friend- 
 ship betw^een the two men was kept in being. " Ruskin 
 called on Gabriel on Wednesday," says Mr. W. M. Rossetti in 
 his diary for December 7, 1866, " and all went off most cor- 
 dially, Ruskin expressing great admiration of the ' Beatrice 
 in a Death- trance.' " i This was the " Beata Beatrix " bought, 
 perhaps at Ruskin's suggestion, by his friend Mrs. Cowper- 
 Temple, and now in the National Gallery by her bequest. 
 In 1868 Ruskin sought, we are told, to enlist Rossotti's co- 
 operation " in efforts for social amelioration on a systematic 
 scale " ; ^ the actual suggestion was probably that Rossetti 
 should join the Committee on the Unemployed, in which 
 Ruskin was at that time deeply interested. This, however, 
 was not at all in Rossetti's line, and the two friends did not, 
 it is believed, meet again. They continued, however, occa- 
 sionally to correspond. Ruskin showed " kind and unassum- 
 ing generosity " to an Italian friend of Rossetti,^ and " there 
 is a letter from Ruskin to Rossetti, as late as August 1870, 
 perfectly amicable, and including a reference to the Foems 
 
 ' Rossetti Papers, p. 199. 
 
 2 Memoir of D. G. Rossetti, vol. i. p. 262. 
 
 * Rossetti Papers, p. 361.
 
 506 RUSKIN'S ESTIMATE OF ROSSETTI 
 
 CHAP, then published." ^ The break in their personal intercourse 
 AJ\.± V . jjj jjQ y^Q^ affected Ruskin's appreciation of his friend's genius. 
 In The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism, written in 1878, 
 he mentioned many of Rossetti's pictures as "of quite 
 imperishable power and value, as also many of the poems to 
 which he gave up part of his painter's strength." Ruskin's 
 references to his " much loved friend," Gabriel Rossetti, in 
 The Art of England (1883) show how warmly he cherished 
 the memory of his friend ; and Mr. Hall Caine, who saw 
 much of Rossetti in his later years, tells me that he never 
 spoke of Ruskin but with gratitude and loyalty. In Prce- 
 terita, Ruskin had intended to speak of Rossetti more fully, 
 but a short characterisation alone was written. " He was 
 really," says Ruskin, "not an Englishman, but a great Italian 
 tormented in the Inferno of England ; doing the best he 
 could ; but the ' could ' shortened by the strength of his 
 animal passions, without any trained control, or guiding 
 faith." What he thus spoke of the dead, he had said in 
 effect to his friend. " I don't say you do wrong, because you 
 don't seem to know what is wrong, but just to do whatever 
 you like as far as possible — as puppies and tomtits do." 
 
 ^ Memoir, vol. i. p. 263.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 THE END OF MODERN PAINTERS 
 (1856-1860) 
 
 "And now, in writing beneath the cloudless peace of the 
 snows of Chamouni, what must be the really final words of 
 the book which their beauty inspired and their strength 
 guided, I am able, with yet happier and calmer heart than 
 ever heretofore, to enforce its simplest assurance of Faith, 
 that the knowledge of what is beautiful leads on, and is the 
 first step, to the knowledge of the things which are lovely 
 and of good report ; and that the laws, the life, and the joy 
 of beauty in the material world of God, are as eternal and 
 sacred parts of His creation as, in the world of spirits, 
 virtue ; and in the world of angels, praise." — Epilor/ue to 
 Modern Painters, 1888. 
 
 TuE maulfoll activities wliicli have been dscribed in pre- 
 ceding chapters were pursued in the busy world of men. 
 The completion of Modem Painters required a different 
 kind of experience — 
 
 " The silence that is in the starry sky. 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 
 
 It was in the Fairies' Hollow at Chamouni or among the 
 shade of the Unterwaldcn pine ; in the solitude of the 
 Scottish moors ; in the sacred places of Swiss history ; or 
 from his library windows, open to the stars and clouds, 
 that Ruskin carried on the studies of natural beauty, and 
 conceived the imaginative fancies and piercing thoughts, 
 which he was afterwards to clothe with literary art. Foreign 
 travel, too, always stimulated his powers. " It is good for 
 me," he wrote to his father from Turin (July 19, 1858), " to 
 be on the Continent, as I get a sensation every now and 
 then — and knowledge always : in England I can enjoy 
 myself in a quiet way as I can in the garden at home, but 
 
 507
 
 508 FOREIGN TOUR: 1856 
 
 CHAP. I get no strong feeling of any kind." This chapter, there- 
 XXV. fQj.Q^ ^j}l Ijq mainly concerned with his summer tours in 
 1S56, 1857, 1858, and 1859. It is characteristic of Ruskin's 
 strenuous life that the crowning volume of his principal 
 work should be the fruit of holiday tasks and holiday 
 thoughts. 
 
 (1856) 
 
 We left Ruskin in an earlier chapter (XIX., p. 373) 
 as he was about to start in May 1856 for a tour with his 
 parents in Switzerland. He had been through a hard spell 
 of winter's work in finishing the third and fourth volumes 
 of Modern Painters ; he must have needed the holiday, and 
 he was in the mood to enjoy it. The diary shows him in 
 fidl activity and enthusiasm. At Calais — now how much 
 changed from then ! — he finds " for once nothing changed 
 anywhere: the young leaves lovely, and the old spire seen 
 through them." At Senlis, the view from the cathedral was 
 " quite magnificent, and the clear, crystalline French sun- 
 light like Paradise." The travellers went by their old road 
 to Bale, and spent seven or eight weeks in the towns or 
 on the lakes of Northern Switzerland, in the Bernese Ober- 
 land, and at Fribourg. One of the main objects which 
 Ruskin proposed to himself on this tour was a continuation 
 of the intended series of illustrations of Swiss towns (p. 332). 
 The illustrations were to accompany a book on Swiss history, 
 and the diary contains various memoranda of dates and 
 events ; to which, in after years, Ruskin added the comment, 
 " Things begun, unfinished : No. 1 — Swiss Battles." The 
 list was destined to become a long one ; he was for ever 
 phxnning more schemes than even his prodigious industry 
 and unaffrighted plunges into new subjects could complete. 
 " My father," he writes of this tour, " begins to tire of the 
 proposed work on Swiss towns, and to inquire whether 
 the rest of Modern Painters will ever be done." Perhaps 
 he had tired of the historical project a little himself; at 
 any rate, the snows of Chamouni began to call, and in
 
 STUDIES AT CHAMOTTNI 509 
 
 the middle of July the party moved to Vovay, Geneva, CHAP. 
 St. Martin, and Chamouni. Arrived among the aiguilles, ^XV. 
 Ruskin was soon deep in his geological studies: "at work 
 with pickaxe and spade before breakfast," we read more 
 than once in the diar3^ " for an hour and a half." He paid 
 another flying visit to Chamouni in 1858, and was there 
 again for a few days in 1859 ; but this, in 1856, was the 
 longest of the visits which immediately preceded the fifth 
 volume of Modern Pointers. He visited all his favourite 
 haunts — the Fairies' Hollow at Chatelard, the Breven, and 
 the rest ; he was very busy with his sketch-book, and noted, 
 as well as drew, the movements of the clouds among the 
 mountains. On this occasion he met an old friend. " At 
 Chamouni," wrote Sir Henry Laj^ard,^ " I fell in with Ruskin, 
 and enjoyed a walk with him on the glaciers ; he is always 
 eloquent and agreeable." 
 
 It was on this occasion also, as already related, that Ruskin 
 made the friendship of Charles Eliot Norton. " I have 
 not a memory of these days," said Norton in later years, 
 "in which I recall him except as one of the pleasantest, 
 gentlest, kindest, and most interesting of men." ^ " He seemed 
 to me," adds Norton, " cheerful rather than happy. The 
 deepest currents of his life ran out of sight." There was, for 
 one thing, no longer that complete inward unity which is 
 necessary to happiness ; Ruskin was beginning to outgrow 
 the simple and assured religious faith of his childhood and 
 early manhood. Then, again, more and more, as the years 
 went by, he was to be oppressed by the contrast between 
 the beauty of the world of nature and the hardness of the 
 human lot, the blindness, the indifference, or the folly of 
 mankind towards the things which pertain to their peace. 
 The responsil)ilities of human life, the shortness of the 
 allotted span, as measured by the infinity of things to be 
 learnt and to be done, weighed heavily upon a man whose 
 curiosity was as unbounded as his versatility. There is 
 a Sunday meditation in his diary of this period (Geneva, 
 September 7, 185G) which reveals some of the inner currents 
 
 ' Autolnorjrajihy , vol. ii. p. 209. 
 
 2 Letters of Ruskin to Norton, vol. i. p. 5.
 
 510 COUNTING HIS DAYS 
 
 CHAP, of Ruskin's life. He makes a numerical " calculation of 
 ^^ • the number of days which under perfect term of human 
 life I might have to live." He works the sum out to 
 11,795, and for some years onward the days in his diary 
 are noted by the diminishing numbers.^ Throughout this 
 tour of 1856 he was constantly at work, not only drawing, 
 observing, geologising, but also, in accordance with his in- 
 variable custom, reading ; and by reading Ruskin meant 
 reading, marking, learning. The diary of this summer shows 
 him busy, among many things, with notes on the morality 
 of Redgauntlet,' and with an analysis and collation of all 
 the texts in the Bible relating to Conduct and Faith. In 
 the evenings he read aloud to his mother, selecting on this 
 occasion several of George Sand's stories; on these also he 
 made critical notes. 
 
 II 
 
 (1857) 
 
 Ruskin and his parents returned by Paris, where he again 
 spent several days in studying the pictures at the Louvre. 
 He was home early in October, and plunged at once into some 
 of that various work which is described in earlier chapters. 
 Turner's pictures had to be described, and the drawings 
 arranged. His classes at the Working Men's College 
 simultaneously claimed his attention ; and, as an offshoot 
 from this work, he wrote during the winter of 1856-57 
 The Eletnents of Drawing. At the beginning of the new 
 year he was further engaged in lecturing. The spring 
 and summer of 1857 brought fresh tasks. There were his 
 Academy Notes to be written ; and in July the Manchester 
 lectures on The Political Economy of Art were delivered. 
 
 After a visit to Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan at 
 Wallington, he was taken off by his parents to the High- 
 lands for a holiday (July to October). Of this tour no 
 diary has been found. The short sketch which Ruskin 
 
 ^ With some interruptions from Ruskin; he was seventy in 1889, 
 ill-health, the "perfect term of which was in fact the end of his 
 human Hfe " was allotted to working years.
 
 TOUR IN SCOTLAND: 1857 511 
 
 gives of it in his autobiography suggests that he was not CHAP. 
 too well pleased at being diverted from his favourite haunts ^^^^^• 
 among the Alps. But the journey left vivid impressions 
 upon his mind, and was fruitful, both in minute studies of 
 nature and in general observations. The opening pages of 
 The Two Paths are eloquent with Ruskin's impressions of a 
 country " stern and wild," which is devoid of any "valu- 
 able monuments of art," while yet it is the nurse of noble 
 heroism, and is able to "hallow the passions and confirm 
 the principles " of its children " by direct association with the 
 charm, or power, of nature." Ruskin worked hard during 
 the autumn at drawing. A single drawing at Blair Athol 
 took him, he says, " a week at six hours a day." 
 
 He hurried back from Scotland on receiving official 
 intimation that the Trustees of the National Gallery had 
 decided -to entrust the arrangement of the Turner drawings 
 to him. This, as we have seen, was his main work during 
 the ensuing months, and it was very heavy. But he also 
 revised for publication the lectures on The Political Economy 
 of Art, and wrote the Addenda to them. Work for Modern 
 Painters, though it was put on one side, did not pass from 
 his mind, and during this autumn of 1857 he made many 
 studies of '■ Cloud Beauty." He once said that he "bottled 
 skies" as carefully as his father bottled sherries; here, from 
 his diary, are some samples : — 
 
 "November 1. 11,442. — A vermilion morning at last, all 
 waves of soft scarlet, sharp at edge, and graduated to purple and 
 grey scud moving slowly beneath it from the south-west, heaps of 
 grey cumuli — between the scud and cirrus — at horizon [sketch]. It 
 issued in an exquisite day — a little more cold and turn to east in 
 wind ; but clear and soft. All purple and blue in distance, and 
 misty sunshine near on the trees, and green fields. Very green they 
 are — the fields, that is ; and the trees hardly yet touched on the 
 Norwood western hillside with autumn colour. Note the exquisite 
 effect of the golden leaves scattered on the blue sky, and the horse- 
 chestnut, thin and small, dark against them in stars [sketch]." 
 
 '' Nove7nher 3. 11,440. — Dawn purple, flushed, delicate. Bank 
 of grey cloud, heavy at six [sketch]. Then the lighted purple cloud
 
 512 STUDIES OF SKIES 
 
 CHAP, sliowing through it, open sky of dull yellow above — all grey, and 
 darker scud going across it obliquely, from the south-west — moving 
 fast, yet never stirring from its place, at last melting away. It 
 expands into a sky of brassy flaked light on grey — passes away into 
 grey morning." 
 
 It was on collections of memoranda such as these, made 
 both in pen and pencil during a long series of years, that 
 the chapters on the Clouds in the fifth volume were based. 
 Ruskin's study windows commanded a wide expanse of 
 open country ; and in the large garden behind his house 
 at Denmark Hill he had materials ready to hand for his 
 studies in trees and leaves and flowers. The autumn flowers 
 he did not love as he did the autumn skies. " Garden 
 spoiled," he notes in his diary, " by vile chrysanthemums." 
 The poetry of these "autumn fairies," which Maeterlinck 
 has expressed so prettily, seldom appealed to Ruskin. He 
 loved best the most natural flowers, and "the pensiveness 
 which falls upon us as the leaves drift by in their fading," 
 filled him often with sadness. In later years he disliked 
 the season of autumn, and always longed for the return of 
 spring. Mrs. Severn would sometimes call his attention to 
 the beauty of the autumn woods, but he had made up his 
 mind against them ; though, to please her, he would admire 
 them "just this time." 
 
 Ill 
 
 (1858) 
 
 Ruskin's work at the National Gallery, which moreover 
 was not allowed to interrupt his teaching at the Working 
 Men's College, did not exhaust his energies during the 
 winter of 1857-58. In January, February, and April he 
 gave lectures, and in May there were again Academy Notes 
 to be written. By the time that these were off his hands, 
 and that he had finished the arrangement of the Turner 
 drawings, he was thoroughly tired out, and he set forth in 
 May for a long holiday in Switzerland and Italy. On this 
 occasion his parents did not accompany him, and the daily
 
 FOREIGN TOUR: 1858 513 
 
 letter to his father trives us full particulars of his movements CHAP, 
 and impressions. " I mean," he said to his father (Calais, ' 
 
 May 13, 1858), "to write my diary as much as I can by 
 letter; it will amuse mamma and you, and be just as useful 
 to me as if in a book." The tour lasted four months ; and 
 became a long journey in more than one sense. He was 
 to be led into trains of thought and study which carried 
 him far. He went leisurely through France, and thence by 
 Bale to Rheinfelden, where he stayed a week. One of the 
 objects of his tour was to identify the scene of some of 
 Turner's sketches in the National Gallery : — 
 
 "Rheinfelden, il/ay 20. — If you want to see where I am, just 
 call at the National Gallery as soon as you go back to town, and ask 
 Wornum to let you look at the frames Nos. 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 ; they 
 are all very like, except only that the town, which Mr. Turner has 
 made about the size of Strasburg, consists of one street and a few 
 lanes, and what he had drawn as mountains are only the wooded Jura, 
 but pretty in shape. . . . But the most beautiful thing of all is the 
 old moat round the whole town, now filled with the sweetest possible 
 gardens, chiefly in flower with white narcissus and deep red tulips, — 
 not striped, but one mass of red, bloomed with blue like a plum, and 
 others purple ; the grey walls above covered with ivy, and with all 
 their towers yet unfallen : you will see them in Turner's sketches." 
 
 The old moat is the subject of the drawmg which was 
 engraved for Plate 84 in Modern Painters and entitled 
 '■ Peace." Another of his drawings of Rheinfelden is en- 
 graved at the same place (Plate 83), being one of those 
 which he made " to show the exact modifications made 
 by Turner as he composed his subjects." 
 
 From Rheinfelden Ruskin went by Stein (looking across 
 the Rhine to the old town of Sakingen) and Laufi'enbourg to 
 Brugg. Thence he went to see and sketch the Castle of 
 Hapsburg, The next halting-place was Bremgarten, where 
 Madame de Genlis had in 1793 taken refuge with her pupil, 
 Mademoiselle d' Orleans, and where he was interested in 
 findincr some memorials of her. Next he went to Tixm a 
 town still little known to the tourist — the Swiss Nurembersf, 
 some call it — combining the interest of many old buildings 
 
 VOL. I. 2 K
 
 514 THE LAKE OF ZUG 
 
 CHAP, with a sylvan lake and pastoral scenery. The art of the 
 -^-^^- Swiss did not impress Ruskin, but the quiet landscape 
 lapped him round in contented peace : — 
 
 ^^ Sunday [May 30]. — I was thinking, as I walked here yester- 
 day among the callages, why it was that I am so especially fond of 
 Switzerland, as distinguished from other countries ; and I find the 
 reason to be that I am so peculiarly sociable (provided only that 
 people don't talk to me). In all other countries the masses of the 
 people are collected in cities, and one passes through large extents 
 of land without seeing more than a few cottages of agricultural 
 labourers ; but in Switzerland the mass of the people is dispersed 
 through the whole country : their power and life are mainly there ; 
 and one passes, not through field after field of merely cultivated land, 
 but through estate after estate of various families, each having its 
 family mansion, its garden, meadow and corn land, and the cheerful- 
 ness and bustle of all kinds of business, together with the various 
 character of old and young, of master and servant, of labour and, in 
 a certain simple way, luxury. There is also a kind of society in the 
 mere redundance of animal life which is very pleasing to me. In 
 going over the Northumberland moors near Lady Trevelyan's, if you 
 stop and listen, you will hear nothing but the wind whistling — a 
 rattling brook perhaps among some stones, now and then the cry 
 of a curlew, now and then the bleat of a lamb ; all plaintive and 
 melancholy. Yesterday, as I told you, the evening was quite wind- 
 less, and when I stopped and listened there were all the following 
 sounds going on at once : — 
 
 " 1. Grasshoppers. Very merry indeed. 
 
 " 2. Grilles (a brown insect, half grasshopper, half fly ; more 
 shrill and clear in voice than the grasshopper — like a quantity of 
 little Jews' harps among the grass). Very merry also. 
 
 " 3. Birds in general, twittering softly, but in great numbers. 
 
 " 4. Bees. Very loud everywhere. 
 
 " 5. Runlets of water in the grass and from wooden pipes — a 
 peculiarly Swiss sound, quite different from the noise of stony 
 streams. 
 
 " 6. Doves. 
 
 " 7. Cuckoos. 
 
 " 8. Church bells.
 
 PASTORAL PEACE 515 
 
 " 9. Peasant cracking his whip, some way off in a bye-road CHAP 
 (objectionable, except that it seemed to please him). -^ • 
 
 "10. Ditto singing 'Ranz de.s vaches' (objectionable also, but 
 romantic). 
 
 "Now that's companionable and pleasant." 
 
 These thoughts afterwards coloured a ■\vcll-known passage in 
 one of his books : — 
 
 " So long as men live by bread, the far away valleys must laugh 
 as they are covered with the gold of God, and the shouts of His 
 happy multitude ring round the winepress and the well. . . . No 
 scene is continually and untiringly loved, but one rich by joyful 
 human labour ; smooth in field ; fair in garden ; full in orchard ; 
 trim, sweet, and frequent in homestead ; ringing with voices of vivid 
 existence. No air is sweet that is silent; it is only sweet when 
 full of low currents of under sound — triplets of birds, and murmur 
 and chirp of insects, and deep-toned words of men, and wayward 
 trebles of childhood. As the art of life is learned, it will be found 
 at last that all lovely things are also necessary ; — the wild flower 
 by the wayside, as well as the tended corn ; and the wild birds 
 and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle ; because 
 man doth not live by bread only, but also by the desert manna ; 
 by every wondrous word and unknowable work of God." ' 
 
 With this impression of pastoral peace, recollections of 
 human endurance and valour mingled in Ruskin's mind and 
 letters, as afterwards in the pages of his fifth volume; for 
 from Zug he drove to one of the sacred spots of Swiss his- 
 tory — the field of Morgarten ; and then on to Brunnen, in the 
 heart of the Tell country, where also there was the interest 
 of identifying Turner's views. From Brunnen he moved 
 on to Fluelen, where he met his painter-friend, Inchbold.^ 
 His days on the Bay of Uri were to be fruitftil by-and-by. 
 Among the most beautiful passages in the fifth volume is 
 that which describes the lake and woods of the Vierwald- 
 statter-see ; and in after years he took pleasure in the thought 
 that, whatever else may have been faulty in his work, he 
 had at least done full justice to the Unterwalden Pine. 
 
 ^ Unto this Last, § 82. * See above, p. 401.
 
 516 THE BEAUTY OF BELLINZONA 
 
 CHAr. From Fluelen he drove over the St. Gothard to Bellm- 
 
 ^^ • zona. He was ah-eady familiar with the town, as the lecture 
 on " Iron " in The Two Paths shows. On this occasion he 
 had intended to make but a short halt there, but was so 
 charmed with the place — in those days before the railway — 
 that he stayed a month : — 
 
 " Belltnzona [June 14]. ... I have never yet seen else- 
 where quite such a place as this. What the climate is you may 
 guess by the white mulberries being now ripe ; they are stripping 
 the tiees, and the ground is white with fallen fruit, luscious as 
 honey. Imagine this climate in the midst of gneiss rocks — exactly 
 like those of the Garry at Killiecrankie, only vaster — and towering 
 back into ridge beyond ridge of mountain, terrace, and crest; you 
 can hardly conceive how wonderful it is to stand beside the torrents, 
 sweeping in bright waves over these rocks, with all the look of the 
 loveliest Highland stream, but above — instead of mountain ash and 
 low heath — groves and overhanging shades of sweet chestnut and 
 roofs of continuous vine, the rock ferns shooting out among the vine 
 tendrils. I have often seen Italian scenery of this kind in limestone, 
 but never yet in gneiss, flecked with quartz like that of the Matter- 
 horn, and glittering with broad plates of black mica ; painted oratories 
 at every turn, and little chapels ; the brooks coming down through 
 the very vineyards over stony beds crossed by foot-bridges ; the great 
 fortresses showing their towers continually through the gaps in the 
 leaves above ; and the people — not jiale and diseased as in Yal 
 d'Aosta, nor ugly as in Switzerland, but nearly all beautiful and 
 full of quick sight and power, faces burning with intelligence and 
 strength of sensation — useless, on account of idleness, but bright to 
 look upon. And with all this, in an hour and a half, if I like, I can 
 be in the climate of Cumberland, without the damp of it, for the 
 hills rise steep on both sides of the valley to the snow-line — no 
 glaciers, nor perpetual snow, but, for a month yet, snow in all the 
 hollows ; and, to make things complete in a not unimportant point, 
 superb trout — none of your white lake-bred things, but stream trout 
 • — pink like roses, and fresh like cream." 
 
 These were weeks of quiet thinking and of sketching. Thus 
 he writes from Bellinzona (June 17) : " I am much stronger 
 
 i
 
 TURIN 517 
 
 than when I left home, and shall probably soon begin CHAP. 
 
 V V " V 
 
 writing a little M. P. in the mornings, but I want to get -^^*- 
 a couple of months of nearly perfect rest before putting 
 any push of shoulder to it." 
 
 From Bellinzona (after a day or two's excursion to 
 Locarno) Ruskiu drove to the head of the lake, and took 
 the steamer for Baveno and the Isola Bella. Writing 
 thence to his father (July 8), Ruskin mentions a political 
 observation which made a great impression on him, for he 
 used it more than once as an illustration in his economic 
 writings : ^ — 
 
 "Xo pity nor respect can be felt for these people, who have sunk 
 and remain sunk, merely by idleness and wantonness in the midst 
 of all blessings and advantages : who cannot so much as bank out — 
 or in — a mountain stream, because, as one of their priests told me 
 the other day, every man always acts for himself : they will never 
 act together and do anything at common expense for the common 
 good ; but every man tries to embank his own land and throw the 
 stream upon his neighbours ; and so the stream masters them all 
 and sweeps its way down all the valley in victory. This I heard 
 from the curate of a mountain chapel at Bellinzona, when I went 
 every evening to draw his garden." 
 
 From Baveno Ruskin climbed the Monterone, and con- 
 demned it as the stupidest " of all stupid mountains — grass 
 all the way, no rocks, no interest, and the dullest view of 
 the Alps I ever yet Si\w in my life " (July 13). At Arona 
 he stopped a night and made some notes on Turnerian 
 Topography there, and thence he went by rail to Turin. 
 There he stayed five or six weeks, enjoying the town life 
 after his seclusion in the mountains : — 
 
 "Turin, July 1.5. — It is just two months since I arrived late at 
 Bar-le-Duc from Paris, and was shown up the rough wooden stairs 
 to the rougher room of a French country inn. With the exception 
 of a single evening at the Trois Rois at Basle, my life since has 
 been entirely rural, not to say savage — it having been my chance 
 or need to lodge in an unbroken succession of either primitive or 
 
 * See Unto this Last, § 72 n., and Library Edition, vol. xvii. p, 551.
 
 518 AN ARTISTIC TURNING-POLNT 
 
 CHAPt decidedly bad inns. I am very sorry to say that after this rustica- 
 '^^-^ • tion I find much contentment in a large room looking into your 
 favourite square, a note or two of band, a Parisian dinner, and half 
 a pint of Meet's champagne with Monte Viso ice in it." 
 
 The diary (still in the form of letters) shows him as 
 keenly observant as ever, noting, for instance, the contrasts 
 between French and Italian dress, and studying " the Paul 
 Veronese types" in the streets: — 
 
 " I have made up my mind," he writes (August 19), " that it is 
 quite impossible for anybody to be a figure painter in the North, 
 except in the stifi" Holbein way. The myriads of beautiful things 
 one sees in this climate — where heads are always bare, and generally 
 necks and arms ; where people live in the open air, and in walking 
 along a street, one walks through household after household, watch- 
 ing all their little domestic ways of going on — are more to a real 
 painter than all the Acadamy teaching he could get in a lifetime." 
 
 The comfort and gaiety of Turin — still, it will be re- 
 membered, the capital of the Sardinian Kingdom — made 
 Ruskin in the mood to enjoy the pictures by Paolo Veronese 
 which are among the principal treasures of the Gallery in 
 that city. To the studies then commenced he always 
 attached a turning-point in his mental development, so 
 far as the criticism of art was concerned. He had started 
 on the path of his critical pilgrimage spellbound by the 
 " physical art-power of Rubens." Then, under strong re- 
 action, he fell into the arms of the Primitives, and Angelico 
 was the god of his artistic idolatry. He was fully conscious 
 of the power and charm of the Venetians, but he regarded 
 their art as "partly luxurious and sensual," and their 
 religion as insincere. His study of Veronese at Turin, and 
 afterwards of Titian in the German Galleries, drew him away 
 once more from the Purist to the Naturalist ideal, and Titian 
 and Veronese became to him standards of " worldly visible 
 truth," no less than of perfection in art — the earlier school, 
 "worshippers not of a worldly and visible Truth, but of 
 a visionary one doing less perfect work." Ruskin was to 
 undergo one other transition and no more — discovering at 
 Assisi in 1874 " the fallacy that Religious artists were
 
 THE WORLDLY POWER OF THE VENETIANS 519 
 
 weaker than Irreligious." The story of these " oscilla- CHAP. 
 tions of temper and progressions of discovery " is fully ^^*^- 
 told by Ruskin himself in Fors Clavigera} It is with 
 the last stage but one that we are now concerned — the 
 stage which Ruskin had reached when he sat doA\'n to 
 write the concluding chapters of Modern Painters, with 
 *■ the enchanted voice of Venice " sounding in his ears. 
 The new problems which began to compel his attention 
 as he worked and wondered before Veronese's pictures at 
 Turin are stated very clearly in a note, which I found 
 among his papers, on an " Annunciation " by Orazio Lomi 
 (Gentileschi) : — 
 
 *' Besides being well studied in arrangement, the features of both 
 figures are finely drawn in the Roman style — the ' high ' or Raphael- 
 esque manner — and very exquisitely finished; and yet they are 
 essentially ignoble ; while, without the least effort, merely treating 
 their figures as pieces of decoration, Titian and Veronese are always 
 noble ; and the curious point is that both of these are sensual 
 painters, working apparently with no high motive, and Titian per- 
 petually with deKnitely sensual aim, and yet invariably noble ; while 
 this Gentileschi is perfectly modest and pious, and yet base. And 
 Michael Angelo goes even greater lengths, or to lower depths, than 
 Titian ; and the lower he stoops, the more his inalienable nobleness 
 shows itself. Certainly it seems intended that strong and frank 
 animality, rejecting all tendency to asceticism, monachi.sm, pietism, 
 and so on, should be connected with the strongest intellects. Dante, 
 indeed, is severe, at least, of all uameable great men ; he is the 
 severest I know. But Homer, Shakespeare, Tintoret, Veronese, 
 Titian, Michael Angelo, Sir Joshua, Rubens, Velasquez, Correggio, 
 Turner, are all of them boldly Animal. Francia and Angelico, and 
 all the purists, however beautiful, are poor weak creatures in com- 
 parison. I don't understand it; one would have thought purity 
 gave strength, but it doesn't. A good, stout, self-commanding, 
 magnificent Animality is the make for poets and artists, it seems 
 to me. . . . Has God made faces beautiful and limbs strong, and 
 created these strange, fiery, fantastic energies, and created the 
 
 ^ Letter 76 (March 1877).
 
 520 STUDIES OF "THE QUEEN OF SHEBA " 
 
 CHAP, splendour of substance and the love of it ; created gold, and pearls, 
 
 XXV 
 
 and crystal, and the sun that makes them gorgeous ; and filled human 
 
 fancy with all splendid thoughts ; and given to the human touch 
 its power of placing and brightening and perfecting, only that all 
 these things may lead His creatures away from Him ? And is this 
 mighty Paul Veronese, in whose soul there is a strength as of the 
 snowy mountains, and within whose brain all the pomp and majesty 
 of humanity floats in a marshalled glory, capacious and serene like 
 clouds at sunset — this man whose finger is as fire, and whose eye 
 is like the morning — is he a servant of the devil ; and is the poor 
 little wretch in a tidy black tie, to whom I have been listening this 
 Sunday morning expounding Nothing with a twang — is he a servant 
 of God ? It is a great mystery. I begin to suspect we are all wrong 
 together — Paul Veronese in letting his power waste into wantonness, 
 and the religious people in mistaking their weakness and dulness 
 for seriousness and piety. It is all very well for people to fast, who 
 can't eat ; and to preach, who cannot talk nor sing ; and to walk 
 barefoot, who cannot ride, and then think themselves good. Let 
 them learn to master the world before they abuse it." 
 
 The impressions received from the pictures of Paolo Veronese 
 at Turin were founded on intense observation. Of "The 
 Queen of Sheba" he made the most elaborate studies : — 
 
 "Turin, July 23. ... I am very comfortable here, and I may 
 as well work through the drawing now it is gone so far. It is just 
 about the size of the rocks of Blair Athol, and worked in the same 
 way, and will contain about the same quantity of work — a little less, 
 perhaps, as one necessarily uses rather a bolder touch in drawing 
 from Veronese ; but that took me a week at six hours a day, and this 
 will take me a fortnight at two or three. It is only the negro girl 
 with her two birds, one of gold and one of enamel, with ruby eyes, 
 for a present to Solomon, and a bit of the white and gold train of her 
 mistress behind her ; but it begins to look very well. I am never 
 tired of laughing at the Queen of Sheba's dog ; he seems to snarl 
 harder and stand stiff er on his little legs every day." 
 
 "Turin, Aug. 25. — The light and shade drawing of the head is, 
 in a certain sense of the word, 'done' — i.e., I don't want to do any 
 more to it ; but to finish it as I could finish, would take about three
 
 A RELIGIOUS TURNING-POINT 521 
 
 months. I quite understand how Leonardo is said to have taken CHAP. 
 
 V V y 
 ten years to a single head. Veronese, I have no doubt, did it perfect ' 
 
 in about two hours ; but Veronese is Veronese, and I am not." 
 
 Ruskin's minute patience, as he worked day after day upon 
 the Veronese, greatly impressed the casual visitors, one of 
 whom has described him at work : — 
 
 "A great contrast to the Italians at Turin was Mr. Ruskin, 
 whom we saw constantly. He was sitting all day upon a scaffold in 
 the gallery, copying bits of the great picture by Paul Veronese. . . . 
 One day in the gallery I asked him to give me some advice. He 
 said, ' Watch me.' He then looked at the flounce in the dress of a 
 maid of honour of the Queen of Sheba for five minutes, and then he 
 painted one thread : he looked for another five minutes, and then he 
 painted another thread. At the rate at which he was working he 
 might hope to paint the whole dress in ten years : but it was a lesson 
 as to examining what one drew well before drawing it." ^ 
 
 On such close examination were Ruskin's conclusions 
 founded. 
 
 The revelation of Paolo Veronese had a religious as well 
 as an artistic significance : the two things being indeed, in 
 Ruskin's mind, essentially connected. The process of " un- 
 conversion," as he calls it— the abandonment of his old 
 evangelical faith — was accomplished when he returned from 
 a service in the Waldensian chapel to the " Queen of Sheba " 
 in the Gallery. In the chapel " a little squeaking idiot was 
 preaching to an audience of seventeen old women and three 
 louts that they were the only children of God in Turin ; and 
 that all the people in Turin outside the chapel, and all the 
 people in the world out of sight of Monte Viso, would be 
 damned." Ruskin walked back into the condemned city, 
 and up into the gallery where Veronese's picture glowed in 
 full afternoon light. " The windows being open, there cam.e 
 in with the warm air, floating swells and falls of military 
 music, from the courtyard before the palace, which seemed 
 to me more devotional, in their perfect art, tune, and disci- 
 pline, than anything I remembered of evangelical hymns. 
 
 ^ Augustus Hare, The Story of my Life, vol. ii. p. 107.
 
 522 A RELIGION OF HUMANITY 
 
 CHAP. And as the perfect colour and sound gradually asserted their 
 • power on me, they seemed finally to fasten me in the old 
 article of Jewish faith, that things done delightfully and 
 rightly were always done by the help and in the Spirit of 
 God." A rational and moral being does not change his 
 creed on the instant because he has heard a foolish sermon 
 in a suburban chapel and seen a beautiful picture on a bright 
 afternoon. That hour's meditation in the gallery of Turin 
 " only concluded," said Ruskin, " the courses of thought 
 which had been leading me to such end through many 
 years." The pages of this biography have shown how his 
 religious belief had been fastened from childhood upon the 
 strictest Protestantism. When he was a boy, he had been 
 trained by his parents to notice some vital distinction when- 
 ever he passed from a Protestant to a Catholic canton. On 
 the present journey he had passed from pastoral cantons in 
 Catholic Switzerland to the Protestant valleys of the Vaudois. 
 He had made a little tour among them from his headquarters 
 at Turin, and the reflection which he brought back with him 
 was that "good and true pieces of God's work" had been 
 done by stout and stern Roman Catholics among the Swiss 
 mountains no less than by the Vaudois peasants. He was 
 thus reaching what he elsewhere calls the true " religion of 
 humanity" — the religion whose rule of conduct is "that 
 human work must be done honourably and thoroughly, 
 because we are now Men ; — whether we ever expect to be 
 angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter " ; 
 and " that in resolving to do our work well is the only sound 
 foundation of any religion whatsoever." ^ This is the prin- 
 ciple which in the fifth volume of Modern Painters colours 
 many of Ruskin 's chapters. 
 
 Some other thoughts that came to Ruskin in the Gallery 
 at Turin, or on the Capuchin Hill and the Superga, are 
 recorded in the lecture which he gave at Cambridge shortly 
 after his return to England. The first note of the passage 
 in the lecture to which I refer occurs in a letter to his 
 father : — 
 
 " July 27. — I went this afternoon over the villa which perhaps 
 
 ^ Fors Glavigera, Letter 76.
 
 THE ENIGMA OF ART-HISTORY 523 
 
 you may remember commands a noble view of the city, just above tlie CHAP, 
 bridge over the Po ; it is called Vigna della Kegina, and is stated by ^-^ v • 
 Murray ' to have been built by Cardinal ]\Iaurice, when he had ceased 
 to be a cardinal for the purpose of marrying his niece.' This same 
 cardinal, uhile yet in the Church, commissioned Albani to paint him 
 the four pictures of the seasons which are still in the gallery, order- 
 ing the painter to give him in them una rojiiosa qnantita di amoretti, 
 and certainly Albani has supplied Cupids in the cluster. But the 
 palace in its abandoned state on the hill is like a lesson of the 
 passing away of all things founded on the pursuit of mere pleasure." 
 
 In the lecture he describes the panorama of Alps and plain,^ 
 and then the deserted garden of the Cardinal: — 
 
 " So stands this palace of pleasure ; desolate as it deserves — deso- 
 late in smooth corridor and glittering chamber — desolate in pleached 
 walk and planted bower — desolate in that worst and bitterest aban- 
 donment which leaves no light of memory. . . . 
 
 "And day by day as I walked there, the same sentence seemed 
 whispered by every shaking leaf, and every dying echo, of garden and 
 chamber. ' Thus end all the arts of life, only in death ; and thus 
 issue all the gifts of man, only in his dishonour, when they are 
 pursued or possessed in the service of pleasure only.' This then is 
 the great enigma of Art History, — you must not follow Art without 
 pleasure, nor must you follow^ it for the sake of pleasure. And the 
 solution of that enigma is simply this fact ; that wherever Art has 
 been followed only for the sake of luxury or delight, it has con- 
 tributed, and largely contributed, to bring about the destruction 
 of the nation practising it : but wherever Art has been used also to 
 teach any truth, or supposed truth — religious, moral, or natural — 
 there it has elevated the nation practising it, and itself with the 
 nation." 
 
 At Turin, as ahvays, he observed the passing effects of 
 cloud and storm ; as also during excursions to the Superga, 
 to St. Michele (the romantic building -svhich crowns the 
 Monte Pirchiriano above the town of S. Ambrogio), and to 
 Rivoli ; and the observations made at the foot of the Alps 
 
 ' I am fortunate in possessing of part of the panorama there 
 a water-colour sketch by Ruskin described.
 
 524 CLOUD-STUDIES 
 
 CHAP, or among the valleys, of the Cenis yielded many of the cloud- 
 ^^^- studies given in the fifth volume of Modern Painters. 
 Ruskin's attendants on this tour, like George on a former 
 one, entered into their master's tastes. " I had a very 
 delightful evening yesterday," he writes to his father 
 (August 14). " I drove to Rivoli (the battle of Rivoli place), 
 which is an old Italian town on the first gneiss rock that 
 rises out of the plain, at the foot of the Alps. It looks up 
 the valley of the Cenis westwards, but projects so far into 
 the plain that it commands the whole range of the Alps on 
 both sides as completely as the Superga does. . . . Couttet 
 and Crawley had been disputing which was the finest view, 
 this or the Superga, Couttet holding for this. On my giving 
 the verdict in his favour, he was very triumphant (and came 
 to me for judgment), and crowed over Crawley considerably; 
 but I only heard of it Crawley's final and unanswerable state- 
 ment, ' Chack personn conny song goo.' " It was Crawley 
 who, in reporting his master's ill-health to Burne-Jones,i 
 said, "how much he wished he could see him ' take pleasure 
 in a Halp again.' " 
 
 Ruskin's work at Turin was at last concluded, and he 
 went north to Susa, walking thence over the Cenis in order 
 to geologise. From St. Jean de Maurienne he took the 
 railway to Aix, finding it, strange to say, " very enjoyable, 
 though dusty ; where the scenery is so huge, the railroad 
 merely makes a splendid moving panorama of it, not a 
 whizzing dream." ^ After a few days at Annecy, Ruskin 
 drove to Bonneville, and so to St. Gervais, where he met Mr. 
 and Mrs. Simon. Here Ruskin was once more " among his 
 own mountains." "I am very glad to find," he writes from 
 Annecy (September 3), "that my feeling for my dear old 
 Genevoise country is not dulled ; I never thought it more 
 beautiful." He went over to Chamouni to see the Couttets, 
 and then returned by Geneva to Paris (where he saw the 
 Brownings), and so home. He had much work before him — 
 
 ^ Memorials of Edward Barne- compare Stevenson's plea for the 
 
 Jones, vol. ii. p. 85. charm of landscape as seen from 
 
 ^ Letter to his father from the railway train (see his " Ordered 
 
 Annecy, September 3. One may South " in Virginihus Puerisque).
 
 TURNERIAN TOPOGRAPHY 525 
 
 much food, too, for thought received during his travels to CHAP. 
 be digested. The quiet country lanes which then surrounded ^^^^^• 
 his home were grateful to him. Such hours are noted in 
 the diary : — 
 
 ^^ Monday, October 18/A. — The loveliest two days, Saturday and 
 yesterday, I ever saw at this season. On Saturday, sitting for an 
 hour in the lane under Knight's Hill, the ground covered Mith 
 gossamer, all the fields rippling with a stream of sunshine like a 
 lake, yet no perceptible wind." 
 
 IV 
 
 (1859) 
 
 " The winter was spent mainly," says Ruskin of 1858- 
 1859, " in trying to get at the mind of Titian ; not a light 
 winter's task." ^ But he had much else on hand — a paper 
 for the Social Science Congress, the address at Cambridge, a 
 second letter to Acland on the Oxford Museum. There were 
 friends across the sea who rejoiced in his activity and grow- 
 ing influence. " Go on again," wrote Robert Browning, 
 " like the noble and dear man you are to us all, and especi- 
 ally to us two out of them all. Whenever I chance on an 
 extract, a report, it lights up the dull newspaper stuff Avrapt 
 round it, and makes me glad at heart and clearer in head." 2 
 Then came the lectures at Manchester and Bradford, as 
 already related (p. 439). His father regretted all this disper- 
 sion of energy, and the delay Avhich it caused to the com- 
 pletion of Modern Painters. But for a little tour which he 
 worked in Avith the lectures in the North Ruskin was able 
 to make a good plea : he was continuing his studies in 
 Turnerian Topography: — 
 
 "Bolton Bridge {February 1^, 1859). — This is just a splendid 
 place, and never was there so true a drawing as our Bolton. The 
 hills are just about five times as high as they really are, but they are 
 
 ^ Preface to Modern Painters, ^ Letters of Elizabeth Barrett 
 
 vol. v. Bron-nivg, 1897, vol. ii. pp. ,300, 302.
 
 526 FOREIGN TOUR: 1859 
 
 CHAP, enlargements of Facts, and more facts than the reaHty and the trees 
 
 XXV !) 
 
 ■ and shingle bank are all there. 
 
 " Bolton Bridge, Tuesday {March 1). — I am very sorry to 
 stay away from home so long, but it is necessary for me to see 
 these Yorkshire subjects, which I look upon as on the whole the 
 chief tutors of Turner's mind, before finishing my fifth volume. 
 His exaggerations are not entirely excusable, and it is very inter- 
 esting to determine exactly where, and when, he first went wrong. 
 He is to landscape precisely the kind of romance writer that Scott 
 was to history, at once truer and falser than anybody else." 
 
 On returning home from this Yorkshire tour, Ruskin 
 prepared for pubhcation under the title The Two Paths the 
 lectures he had recently given, and next wrote his Academy 
 Notes. Then he was ready for another Continental tour. It 
 was to be the last on which his parents accompanied him, 
 and before they reached their favourite haunts in Savoy and 
 Switzerland they broke new ground. Ruskin had been asked 
 somewhat pointedly by the National Gallery Site Commis- 
 sion in 1857 whether he had "recently been at Dresden" or 
 was " acquainted with the Munich Gallery." He had never 
 been to either place. This omission he felt bound to repair. 
 Moreover he was now particularly anxious, in connexion 
 with his studies of Titian, to see the works of that master m 
 the German galleries. They went accordingly by Brussels 
 to Cologne, Dtisseldorf, Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, and 
 Ruskin's diary is mainly occupied with notes on the pictures 
 at these places. At Dresden, he was especially delighted 
 with the Family Group by Paolo Veronese, which is de- 
 scribed in the fifth volume. A careful copy of a portion 
 of the picture, which he made at this time, is preserved at 
 Brantwood. 
 
 Of the Munich Gallery, also, Ruskin made notes, accom- 
 panied, as usual, by many pen-and-ink sketches ; he made, 
 too, a careful water-colour copy of the little girl in one of 
 Vandyck's portrait-pieces. With the Berlin Gallery — alike 
 in its arrangement and its contents — he was much delighted. 
 Among its greatest treasures he reckoned Holbein's portrait 
 of George Gyzen ; this he described in his paper on " Sir
 
 MODERN GERMAN ART 527 
 
 Joshua and Holbein." ^ A general impression of the Gallery, CHAP. 
 witli an account of this German tour generally, is given in XXV. 
 letters to artist-friends : — 
 
 {To Clarkson Staxfield.) "Dresden, 23nZ June [1859]. — 
 Time goes fast when it is travel spent, and I am ashamed ti> think 
 how long it is since we left home, and I have not told you — as 
 you said you would like me to do — what adventures we have met 
 with in the disturbed state of the Continent. In the fiist place, 
 we met with a very excited old gentleman in Brunswick, who 
 told us the French were in Milan, and looked at us fiercely as if 
 he thought it was our fault. M'e told him it wasn't, and tliat 
 we wanted the sexton to let us into the Cathedral, upon which 
 the old gentleman went to get hiin for us ; and ij; the second 
 place, we saw fifteen thousand fighting men in helmets of this 
 shape [sketch] (the ornament at the top being in appearance a 
 hall candlestick and its function a ventilator) march past Prince 
 Frederick William at Berlin. We were smothered in dust, and 
 very late in getting breakfast, but the fifteen thousand candlestick 
 men did us no other harm. In the third place, we heard the 
 Austrian National Hymn played three times over to some people 
 in a tea-garden in Hanover, but no popular movement followed. 
 And in the last place, five boys in paper caps made a very disagree- 
 able noise for three-quarters of an hour in a back lane under my 
 window at Berlin, one evening, which I have reason to think was 
 intended for an imitation of Prussian military music playing national 
 airs. I have no remembrance at present of any other inconvenience 
 resulting from the disturbed state of the Continent. I was think- 
 ing of you yesterday as we were watching a ferry-boat cross the 
 Elbe with a cart and horse in it, just one of the pretty little flat 
 bits with a strong figure group which you like. . , ." 
 
 "Thun, Aug. 22. . . . Of the frescoes at Munich, Kaulbach's 
 are the most ludicrous, Cornelius's the most atrocious. Hess's 
 the least excusable — for he might have been a painter but for his 
 vanity, while Kaulbach and Cornelius never could have painted 
 under any circumstances. But enough of them." 
 
 {To George Richmond.) "Munich, Ibih July [1859]. . . . 
 Never in my 1 fe have I yet been thrown into such a state of 
 
 ^ Cornhill Magazine, March 1860 ; reprinted in On the Old lioad.
 
 528 NUREMBERG— CHAMOUNI 
 
 CHAP, hopeless and depressing disgust as by this journey in Germany. 
 
 XXV. rjij^g intense egotism and ignorance of the modern German painter 
 (in his work) is unspeakable in its offensiveness. The eternal 
 vanity and vulgarity mistaking itself for Piety and poetry — the 
 intense deadness to all real beauty, puflfed up into loathsome 
 caricatures of what they fancy to be German character — the absorp- 
 tion of all love of God or man into their one itch of applause 
 and Fine-doing, leave me infinitely more sorrowful than the worst 
 work of the French or Italians. In France one gets some really 
 vigorous Slaughter-house work — some sense of a low sort of beauty 
 — some Natural concupiscence at least, if nothing else natural. 
 But the German is too vain to enjoy anything. I doubt not their 
 painters are all excellent men. Virtuous — Domestic — amiable — kind 
 — Cream of everything — Fancy cream of everything mashed up 
 in a bowl — with an entire top of Rotten eggs — and you have the 
 moral German art Avith its top of vanity. . . ." 
 
 Ruskin's visit to Nuremberg during this tour made a strong 
 impression on him ; it is reflected both in the text and in 
 the ilhistrations of the fifth volume. From Nuremberg 
 he went to Munich, and thence to Schaffhausen. Writing 
 to Professor Norton from . that place (July 31), he refers to 
 the conclusion of Modern Painters : — 
 
 " I am at work upon it, in a careless, listless way — but it won't 
 be the worse for the difi'erent tempers it will be written in. There 
 will be little or no bombast in it, I hope, and some deeper truths 
 than I knew — even a year ago." 
 
 "I was up at three," he says in the same letter, "to watch 
 the dawn on the spray of the Fall." Next he spent a month 
 in the Bernese Oberland ; and then leaving his parents for 
 a while at Geneva, he went yet again to his beloved valley 
 of Chamouni. There, as usual, he worked hard at the 
 rocks ; but his diary shows that his thoughts were turned 
 also to other subjects. There is the beginning, for instance, 
 of an essay on Political Economy. His habitual study of 
 the Bible took the form of notes on St. Matthew's Gospel, 
 and an essay on Faith. His literary companion was Dante. 
 
 I
 
 MODERN PAINTERS FINISHED 529 
 
 After ten days in Paris, Ruskin reached home early in CHAP. 
 October 1859. A little later he went on a visit to Miss Bell's 
 school at Winnington/ where he worked upon The Elements 
 of Perspective, and then there was no further interruption 
 until Modern Painters was finished. The fifth, and final, 
 volume was issued in June 1860. The volume was written, 
 in a sense, under pressure — the closest and most compeUing 
 that could have been applied — the pressure of entreaty from 
 his father. Ruskin described it in one of his Oxford lectures.^ 
 His father had seen him collecting materials for fifteen years 
 and was weary of waiting for the conclusion. It was by the 
 first volume of Modern Painters that his son had leapt into 
 fame ; it would be by this great work, the father thought, 
 that the fame would be most securely established. He 
 yearned to see, before he died, the end crown the work. 
 Accordingly "when he came home from the long journey 
 of 1859 and found signs of infirmity increasing upon him, 
 he said to me one day, ' John, if you don't finish that book 
 now I shall never see it.' So I said I would do it for him 
 forthwith, and did it — as I could." 
 
 "As I could, not as I would"; perhaps Ruskin, as he 
 wrote, was thinking of this motto of the most minute and 
 conscientious of Flemish painters. The world of art and 
 letters is under some debt to the father who thus constrained 
 his son ; for whether, if left to himself, Ruskin would ever 
 have finished his book at all, may well be doubted. His 
 industry was prodigious, but it was equalled by his curiosity, 
 and he lacked the habit of concentration. Moreover, his 
 mind was at this time becoming increasingly absorbed in 
 quite other questions than those which were immediately 
 involved in the concluding parts of Modern Painters. One 
 sees what was to come in several passages in the fifth volume. 
 Thus, in discussing the effect upon the human mind of 
 
 1 See ch. vi. in the next volume. 
 
 * Readings in " Modern Painters." 
 
 VOL. I. 2 L
 
 530 RUSKIN^S FATHER AND THE BOOK 
 
 CHAP, beauty in art, he refers to the unsettlement of his convictions, 
 and to his doubts of " the just limits of the hope in which he 
 may permit himself to continue to labour in any course of 
 Art." And so, again, his discussions of painters and pictures 
 were, he tells us, " continually altered in shape, and even 
 warped and broken, by digressions respecting social questions, 
 which had for me an interest tenfold greater than the work 
 I had been forced into undertaking." At the end of the 
 volume we see the transition towards economic questions in 
 progress. He is ostensibly still discussing the choice of 
 subjects and ideas in pictures ; but the inquiry leads him to 
 consider " the right economy of labour." In the summer 
 which saw the publication of this fifth volume, the digressions 
 established themselves as Ruskin's first preoccupation. If 
 it had not been for his father's pressure, Ruskin might have 
 been caught in the maelstrom of economics before Modern 
 Painters had been finished at all. The book may thus be 
 said to be a monument of a double allegiance — of devotion 
 to his master, Turner, and also of devotion to his father, of 
 whose shrewdness, affection, and good sense the reader of the 
 correspondence in this biography must already, I think, have 
 received a strong impression. The force of the motive derived 
 from the defence of Turner was by this time spent. Ruskin's 
 advocacy had won the case, but had won it too late, for 
 Turner had passed "beyond these voices." Nor was that all. 
 It was a main object with Ruskin to teach that " all great 
 art depended on nobleness of life." What he had gathered 
 of Turner's life had not shaken his conviction ; but it had 
 suggested the diflSculty of proving it in a case where the 
 gold was so much mixed with the clay. " I kncAv his life 
 had been noble," said Ruskin in after years, " but not in ways 
 that I could convince others of, and it seemed to me that all 
 my work had been in vain." ^ And there were other diffi- 
 culties which beset the completion of his task. He described 
 them in his Preface ; and we must take note of them here, 
 for the discussion will serve to bring out some characteristics 
 of the volume. 
 
 First, then, Ruskin had to resume threads which had 
 * See, again, Readings in " Modern Painters."
 
 CURTAILMENT OF THE ORIGINAL DESIGN 531 
 
 been dropped for some time. It is not indeed to be supposed CHAP. 
 that the whole of this vohime was composed during the X^^- 
 winter of 1859-60. Some portions were written, in first 
 draft, at the same time with the fourth volume. Other 
 portions were written at Turin in 1858. " I get now," he 
 wrote to his father (July 27), " a good many spare half-hours 
 for thinking over Modern Painters, and sometimes doing a 
 little, and hope soon to get into the run of it. It will be a 
 finished, I hope glowing volume, but perhaps a little less 
 sparkling than younger ones." But the whole material had 
 to be sifted and rearranged ; this process was laborious, and 
 may well have been disheartening. For the longer he had 
 worked and studied, the more conscious he became of the 
 amount of work and study which remained to be done. The 
 scheme of the treatise required him in this final volume to 
 deal successively with Beauty of Water, Beauty of Vegetation, 
 and Beauty of Sky. With Beauty of Mountains he had 
 dealt in the preceding volume, and the subject had occupied 
 him for 338 pages. And these discussions were only sub- 
 divisions of Ideas of Beauty; the whole subject of Ideas 
 of Relation remained to be treated also. Had the full scheme 
 been carried out on the scale of the discussion of Mountain 
 Beauty, there had been no counting of the volumes which 
 should have been written. The first step was to throw some 
 of the cargo overboard. " I cut away," he wrote to Dr. John 
 Brown, "half of what I had written." The proposed section 
 on Sea Beauty was given up altogether, as Ruskin explains 
 in the Preface. Next, he found it impossible to deal as 
 exhaustively as he had desired with Beauty of Vegetation. 
 He had, indeed, for many years been a diligent botanist ; 
 understanding by the term botany the study of the aspects 
 of flowers. With their laws of growth he was not familiar ; 
 this was a new subject of inquiry, and with Ruskin to take 
 up a new subject meant to turn upside down anybody else's 
 treatment of it. "Many of the results" of his inquiry into 
 " the origin of wood " could " only be given," he says, " if 
 ever, in a detached form." Some of these results he srave 
 in the year following the publication of the fifth volume 
 in a lecture at the Royal Institution on "■ Tree Twigs." This
 
 532 "BEAUTY OF VEGETATION" 
 
 CHAP, lecture, though containing some further illustrations, cor- 
 •^ • responded in method and in spirit with the chapters in 
 the fifth volume. There was in it the same close study 
 of natural aspects combined with poetical fancy, and the 
 same imaginative connexion of those aspects with ideas of 
 morality and mythology. The poetry of the leaf-aspects, 
 as Ruskin draws it out in those chapters, might serve as 
 a commentary on Shelley's lines : — 
 
 " No sister-flower would be forgiven 
 If it disdained its brother." 
 
 Ruskin, as Froude well remarks, had the gift of convert- 
 ing the minutest observations of natural phenomena into a 
 poem.^ Very characteristic of Ruskin is the division and 
 subdivision of plants, with names for the categories which are 
 themselves felicities of poetical observation — the division 
 into (A) Tented Plants, so called because they pass as the 
 tented Arab passes, leaving no memorial of themselves ; 
 and (B) Building Plants — builders because it is by the work of 
 the leaves that the tree is built up ; and then the subdivision, 
 as of (B) into (a) Shield builders, and (/3) Sword builders ; 
 according as the leaves resemble broad shields, or sharp 
 swords. His method, at once discursive and comprehensive, 
 was characteristically hit off by Carlyle, who had heard the 
 lecture on " Tree Twigs " : — 
 
 "Friday last," he wrote to his brother John (April 23, 1861), "I 
 was persuaded — in fact had unwarily compelled myself, as it were — 
 to a lecture of Ruskin's at the Institution, Albemarle Street — lecture 
 on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. 
 A crammed house, but tolerable to me even in the gallery. The 
 lecture was thought to 'break down,' and indeed it quite did 'as 
 a lecture ' ; but only did from emharras des ricJiesses — a rare case. 
 Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf 
 notions, which were manifold, curious, genial ; and, in fact, I do not 
 
 1 Carlyle' s Life in London, 1885, vol. ii. p. 245, where also the following 
 letter is printed.
 
 "CLOUD BEAUTY" 533 
 
 recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing I liked so well CHAP. 
 as this chaotic one." ^ XXV. 
 
 With the next subject of his inquiry — " Of Cloud 
 Beauty " — Ruskin was entirely at home ; but here, too, the 
 more he knew the more he became conscious of the depth 
 of the unknown. Looking back upon his work some years 
 later he said that Modern Puiniers was " a mere sketch of 
 intention, in analysis of the forms of cloud and wave": 
 there were not enough scientific data, he said, to render the 
 analysis complete.- The note of diffidence which makes 
 itself heard in this volume was finely commented upon by 
 one of its most sympathetic readers at the time : — 
 
 " Such a sky ! Such films and threads of infinite tenuity ! Such 
 flat roofs of cirri, lying high up in perspective, beyond the reach of 
 science ! Ruskin's ' don't know ' in the last volume about clouds is 
 very manly and noble after his spouterism in the first volume of 
 Modern Painters on the same subject. There he spoke as if he had 
 * entered into the Springs of the Sea ' ; ' walked in search of the 
 Depth ' ; ' seen the treasures of the Snow, the treasures of the Hail,' 
 and ' by which way the light is parted,' and ' the way for the 
 lightning of thunder,' and knew whether the ' rain had a father, 
 and who had begotten the drops of dew and had numbered the 
 clouds of heaven.' I love him more for the subdued, reverential, 
 renunciatory tone of his last writings, which come not from less 
 knowledge but more wisdom." ^ 
 
 Again, under the head of clouds, Ruskin did not get all done 
 that he had intended. " I may, perhaps, some day," he said, 
 
 ' Another note on this lecture, would not have gone at all, for 
 
 though at second hand, is given he hates art in reality ; but R. 
 
 in the Letters of James Smctham sent him a ticket. Gilchrist and 
 
 (p. 94) : "I went," he writes, "to several others we heard of thought 
 
 Gilchrist's on Saturday. Found the lecture a failure ; but 0. 
 
 him living next door to Carlyle. would not add the weight of his 
 
 The day before he had gone with opinion to this, whatever he might 
 
 C. to hear Ruskin lecture at the think." Ruskin himself speaks of 
 
 Royal Institution. (Carlyle kept the failure as "gnawing" him. 
 inquiring the time every ten - Eagle's Nest, § 129. 
 
 minutes, and at last said, 'I think ^Letters of James Smetham, 1891, 
 
 he ought to give over now.') p. 97. 
 Ruskin is a favourite of his, or liu 
 
 VOL. I. 2 L 2
 
 534 INTEREST IN GREEK MYTHOLOGY 
 
 CHAP, "systematise and publish my studies of clouds separately." 
 • The studies were to be accompanied by numerous illustra- 
 tions, for which his sketch-books and diaries would have 
 afforded abundant material. This plan was not carried out ; 
 though it would perhaps have been in some measure fulfilled, 
 if his health had allowed him to continue the publication of 
 Coeli Enarrant — a collection ot passages dealing with the 
 clouds, of which only one part appeared (1885). In con- 
 nexion with it Ruskin had been in correspondence with Sir 
 Oliver Lodge, and he looked forward to revising his chapters 
 in the light of his friend's scientific knowledge. That was 
 not to be ; and in the chapters as they stand, Ruskin leaves 
 open many questions which, had he been able to complete 
 his revision, he might have treated differently. Just when 
 his pen had to be laid aside, he felt that he was beginning to 
 learn. " This has been a very bright day to me," he wrote 
 to Miss Kate Greenaway on June 26, 1885. "I've found out 
 why clouds float, for one thing ! ! ! and think what a big 
 thing that is." And again, on June 29 : — 
 
 " Clouds are warmer and colder according to the general tempera- 
 ture of the air, but always enable the sun to warm the air within 
 them in the fine weather, when they float high. I have yet to learn 
 all about the wet weather on this new condition myself." 
 
 The Part in the fifth volume treating " Of Cloud Beauty " 
 introduces a new note in Ruskin's work, which was hence- 
 forth often to recur. In connexion with his cloud-studies, 
 and also with the mythological interest which was strongly 
 shown in many of Turner's pictures, Ruskin was led to the 
 examination of Greek myths. Their physical and their 
 moral significance alike attracted him ; and the studies, 
 commenced in the last volume of Modern Painters, were 
 afterwards continued in The Queen of the Air, as well as in 
 some minor essays. A glance at the titles which he gave to 
 Plates in the fifth volume of Modern Painters will show the 
 fascination which the subject had for him — the rain-clouds 
 became "The Graise," the storm-clouds "Medusa" or "The 
 Locks of Typhon " ; the fading splendour of Giorgione's fresco, 
 " The Hesperid iEgle." There will be more to say on this
 
 PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSITION 535 
 
 subject when we come to what Ruskin called his " Myth CHAP. 
 Book " ; but here we may note from his diaries how constant X-^* • 
 during these years of preparation for the present volume had 
 been his classical studies. The Clouds of Aristophanes had 
 long been a favourite play. During the summer of 1858 he 
 read " three or four times over in two months " the Flutus — 
 a reading which was suggestive in many ways. But mean- 
 while it gave him, he says, " disgust with himself, for not 
 knowing Greek enough to translate it." This is a piece of 
 self-depreciation -which need not be taken too literally ; for 
 his diary shows that he studied the play deeply, analysing 
 its characters, discussing its purpose, and collecting from it 
 passages illustrative of Greek life and thought. In the fifth 
 volume we may note the beginning of that minute study of 
 words which he carried forward in Munera Pulveris and 
 elsewhere. In plunging, perhaps with inadequate equipment, 
 into the perilous sea of etymological derivation, it may be 
 that fancy, or prima facie impressions, sometimes led him 
 astray. But, though he troubled himself with little appa- 
 ratus dassicus, he read his books over and over again, and 
 noted carefully any allusion, suggestion, or usage which fitted 
 in with his own line of thought. Of commentaries on the 
 classics he made very little use, and (during the Continental 
 journeys on which much of his work was done) even an 
 adequate supply of the harmless, necessary dictionaries was 
 not always at hand ; his work was all done for himself. 
 
 The next Part in the volume — that which deals with 
 " Invention Formal," or, in more common parlance, with 
 Composition in art — though it contains some of the most 
 acute of Ruskin's analyses of Turner's work, is hardly on 
 the same scale of thoroughness as other parts of the work. 
 Here, again, the author seems to have been in some measure 
 oppressed by his subject. He had sometimes been supposed 
 to slight the quality of composition in pictures ; it was, he 
 says, on the contrary the quality which, above all others, 
 gave him delight ; but the more he studied it, the more 
 difficult of exposition did it turn out to be. When he began 
 the volume it is clear that he meant the section on Composi- 
 tion to be much fuller than it ultimately became. Thus in
 
 536 "IDEAS OF RELATION" IN ART 
 
 CHAP, one of the chapters on Veafetation he introduces Plates from 
 Turner's " Richmond," as it were incidentally, remarking that 
 what he has " chiefly to say of them belongs to our sec- 
 tion on Composition" ; but such principal discussion did not 
 get itself said. When he came to the place he finds that 
 the subject is too large, and in part hardly susceptible of 
 analysis except by the method of actual copying of the 
 works of great composers. But here, too, his habit of dis- 
 persing himself over various books must be remembered. 
 He had already dealt with the subject of composition — 
 very methodically and suggestively, if incompletely — in The 
 EleTYients of Drawing. The student of Ruskin should, there- 
 fore, read together those pages and these on the same subject 
 in Modern Painters. Among the inquiries which, under the 
 head of " Invention Formal," Ruskin had intended to take 
 up was that of " the effects of colour-masses in juxtaposi- 
 tion " ; ^ but this subject also he put aside : its treatment 
 would have delayed the appearance, and increased the bulk, 
 of the volume. 
 
 The last Fart of the volume deals with "Invention 
 Spiritual " ; that is to say, with those " Ideas of Relation " 
 which pictures may convey by their " choice of subject and 
 the mode and order of its history." The subject is endless; 
 and Ruskin said, in after years, that though he had finished 
 Modern Painters, it had no conclusion.^ It is clear that 
 here, also, he largely curtailed his original scheme ; but these 
 final chapters contain, nevertheless, as they stand, much that 
 is the most instructive in all his criticism, whether of art or 
 of life ; much also that is finest in expression. The chapters,^ 
 in which he traces the outlook of men m successive ages upon 
 problems of death and destiny, are more than a history of 
 " ideas of relation " in art — full of suggestion though they are 
 from this point of view ; but they are also, as a reviewer said 
 at the time of their first appearance, " a splendid rhapsody on 
 human progress," * What Ruskin said of the volume, in the 
 
 1 See his statement in the paper entitled " The Black Arts," Library- 
 Edition, vol. xiv. p. .362. 
 
 ^ See, again, Readings in ^^ Modern Painters." 
 
 ' Viz., pt. ix. ch. ii. to ch. ix. 
 
 * "Shirley " in Fraser's Magazine, December 18G0, p. 729.
 
 STYLE OF THE FIFTH VOLUME 537 
 
 letter already quoted — that it would be "glowing" if CHAP, 
 "perhaps a little less sparkling" — is here pre-eminently ^^^^^• 
 true ; and the altered note marks the transition to his later 
 style — a style which has been characterised by Professor 
 Norton; the diction is "simpler, less elaborate, for the 
 most part less self-conscious"; the "purple patches" are 
 less frequent, but " its whole substance is crimsoned with 
 the passionate feeling that courses through the eager and 
 animated words." ^ The sentences tend to become shorter; 
 the argument is more concentrated ; the points are closer 
 packed; and the images or allusions are brought from a 
 wider range and charged more fully with meaning; the 
 epithets are less frequent, but each of them throbs with 
 intensity. The descriptions of Venice may be cited as in- 
 stances of compression; as this: " Fearless, faithful, patient, 
 impenetrable, implacable, — every word a fate — sate her 
 senate." Or this, for a picture in a short sentence : 
 "Ethereal strength of Alps, dreamlike, vanishing in high 
 procession beyond the Torcellan shore ; blue islands of 
 Paduan hills, poised in the golden west." And the reader 
 will perhaps bear with me for quoting here the final 
 passage of the book — characteristic of some of the points 
 just noticed with regard to its style, characteristic also of 
 the passion of humanity which was now to enfold and 
 supplement Ruskin's study of art : — 
 
 "•Thy kingdom come,' we are bid to ask then ! But how shall 
 it come ? With power and great glory, it is also written ; and yet 
 not with observation, it is also written. Strange kingdom ! Yet its 
 strangeness is renewed to us with every dawn. 
 
 " When the time comes for us to wake out of the world's sleep, 
 why should it be otherwise than out of the dreams of the night? 
 Singing of birds, first, broken and low, as, not to dying eyes, but 
 eyes that wake to life, ' the casement slowly grows a glimmering 
 square " ; and then the gray, and then the rose of dawn ; and last 
 the light, whose going forth is to the ends of heaven. 
 
 ^ Introductions to the American " Brantwood " editions of Vald'Arno 
 and Sesame and Lilies.
 
 538 « PEACE " 
 
 CHAP. "This kingdom it is not in our power to bring; but it is, to 
 
 receive. . . . The simoom-dragon may still be served if we will, in 
 the fiery desert, or else God walking in the garden, at cool of day. 
 Coolness now, not of Hesperus over Atlas, stooped endurer of toil ; 
 but of Heosphorus over Sion, the joy of the earth. The choice is no 
 vague nor doubtful one. High on the desert mountain, full descried, 
 sits throned the tempter, with his old promise — the kingdoms of this 
 world, and the glory of them. He still calls you to your labour, as 
 Christ to your rest ; — labour and sorrow, base desire, and cruel hope. 
 So far as you desire to possess, rather than to give ; so far as you 
 look for power to command, instead of to bless ; so far as your own 
 prosperity seems to you to issue out of contest or rivalry, of any kind, 
 with other men, or other nations ; so long as the hope before you 
 is for supremacy instead of love ; and your desire is to be greatest, 
 instead of least ; — first, instead of last ; — so long you are serving 
 the Lord of all that is last, and least ; — the last enemy that 
 shall be destroyed — Death ; and you shall have death's crown, with 
 the worm coiled in it ; and death's wages, with the worm feeding on 
 them ; kindred of the earth shall you yourself become ; saying to the 
 grave, ' Thou art my father ' ; and to the worm, ' Thou art my 
 mother, and my sister.' 
 
 "I leave you to judge, and to choose, between this labour, and 
 the bequeathed peace ; these wages, and the gift of the Morning 
 Star ; this obedience, and the doing of the will which shall enable 
 you to claim another kindred than of the earth, and to hear another 
 voice than that of the grave, saying, ' My brother, and sister, and 
 mother.' " 
 
 VI 
 
 The publication of the fifth volume of Modern Painters, 
 concluding the work, attracted very general attention in the 
 press, and called forth a chorus of congratulation, the more 
 noticeable by contrast with the chorus of condemnation 
 which was to greet the author's next appearance in the 
 literary arena. "No author of our day," wrote a reviewer of 
 the time, "has at once excited more admiration, and yet 
 been assailed with more vehement censure than John
 
 "FINIS CORONAT OPUS" 539 
 
 Ruskin."^ But by this time he had conquered most of CHAP, 
 his assailants. - " He has outlived," wrote another critic, ^^^• 
 " and outwritten the obloquy and abuse that once assailed 
 him ; and while yet in the prime of life has attained the 
 proud position of one of the greatest of all writers, living 
 or dead, on the subject of art."^ Now that the treatise 
 was at last finished, and its full scope revealed, the grandeur 
 of the task was appreciated. The general verdict was ex- 
 pressed by a literary journal which had published much 
 bitter depreciation of the author's earlier volumes. " Our 
 duty is," said the Athenceum, " to report that the work is 
 well, admirably, and nobly done. In method, single, clear, 
 and as a whole eloquent to a marvel, as the Avorld knows ; 
 and taken in the mass, these five volumes contain the most 
 valuable contributions to art-literature the language can 
 show." It was a work, wrote another reviewer (not hitherto 
 favourable), not only of criticism, but of poetical creation. 
 "Several poems in this closing volume," said "Shirley," 
 " are superb. There is a grand song about the Pine, such as 
 some greybeard bard in the Halls ot Horsa might have 
 sung; a glorious Greek hymn of Death and Resurrection; 
 idylls about the leaves and the lichen and the mosses; an 
 ode to Venice, blue and vivid as its own sea and sky. The 
 very titles to the chapters are chosen by a poet." Various 
 instances were given; and "here," said "Shirley" in con- 
 clusion, " we close our criticisms ; and here (there having 
 been strife between us) we must record our conviction that 
 Mr. Ruskin has completed a book which is destined to live, 
 and that this, its closing volume, is its flower and crown." 
 Upon the completion of Modern Painters, Ruskin's 
 
 ' The Christian Ohxerver, Sep- was noticed, and opportunity was 
 
 tember 1862: an article on "John taken to introduce a coarse per- 
 
 Ruskin as a Religious Writer," sonal attack upon the author. The 
 
 being a review of Modern Painters reviewer was apparently proud of 
 
 and his other works. his bad taste, for the article was 
 
 * Blackwood's Marjazine was an reprinted in 1874 (Paradoxes and 
 
 exception. In an article signed Puzzles, by John Paget). 
 " Peregrine " and entitled " A Day ' The Eclectic Revicu; November 
 
 at Antwerp : Rubens and Ituskin " 1860. 
 (September 1861), the fifth volume
 
 540 ON THE THRESHOLD OF A NEW ERA 
 
 CHAP, reputation, if the voice of the public organs of opinion be 
 ^^ the test, stood at its highest point. His literary career, as 
 we have traced it in this volume, had been steadily pro- 
 gressive in popular applause. He had created the taste 
 by which he was to be admired. His life, too, had on the 
 whole been prosperous and rich in happiness. But already, 
 by the time that the fifth volume of Modern Painters was 
 in the hands of admiring readers, Ruskin was engaged in a 
 new work which was to change praise into yet louder repro- 
 bation. We stand on the threshold, too, of a new era in his 
 life. He was to know the fire of unfulfilled love and the cold 
 of departing faith. He was to experience the bitterness of 
 seeming failure ; and his gifts of mind and heart were to 
 die before his death. In the end, perhaps, he was to reach 
 as Prophet a reputation higher than was now his as Writer ; 
 but it was to be " mixed with grey leaf and thorn-set stem ; 
 no fastening of diadem but with such sharp embroidery." ^ 
 
 ^ Introduction to The Crown of Wild Olive. 
 
 END OF VOL. I. 
 
 Printed by Bali.antyne, Hanson &= Co, 
 Eiiinburgh &* Loudon
 
 V> ^ THE LIBRARY 
 ^d6^ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 C Q^ Santa Barbara 
 
 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE 
 STAMPED BELOW. 
 
 (Jl£C-^.:s& 
 
 •» 
 
 BC^^F^k? S 
 
 50w-l,'63(D4743s8)476
 
 Y5^ 
 
 oo 
 
 
 3 1205 00619 3872 
 
 or 
 
 iiiiiiiSiiM '""'"' ''"'"' 
 
 A A 001 425 360 3