Ua ^. This h- - k is DUE on the last date stamped below MAR ■• UN/vSr^"^^ BRANCH ^^ ANGELES. CAUP. 780^ ALFRED TENNVSON From a photograph by the Autotype Company, London RECORDS OF Tennyson, Rlskin, Browning BY ANNE RITCHIE ILLUSTRATED 1 zn6 HARPER & BR OTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON 1899 i\ "Mind that there is always a certain cachet about great men — they speak of common life more largely and generously than common men do — they regard the world with a manlier countenance, and see its real features more fairly than the timid shufflers who only dare to look up at life through blinkers, or to have an opinion when there is a crowd to back it." — English Humorists. " ' I remember poor Byron, Hobhouse, Trelawney, and myself, dining with Cardinal Mezzocaldo at Rome,' Captain Sumph began, 'and we had some Orvieto wine for dinner, which Byron liked very much. And I remember how the Cardinal regretted that he was a single man. We went to Civita Vecchia two days afterwards where Byron's yacht was — and, by Jove, the Cardinal died within three weeks, and Byron was very sorry for he rather liked him.' "'A devilish interesting story, indeed,' Wagg said. 'You should publish some of these stories. Captain Sumph, you really should,' Shandon said." — Pendcnnis. Copyright, 1892, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved. SlAKifOlv^n. TO HELENA FAUCIT, LADY MARTIN AND TO SIR THEODORE MARTIN, K.C.B. DciMcatcO WITH OLD AFFECTION AND REMEMBRANCE 1 1 ISIay, 1892 Imogen. " 'Mongst Friends" Cymbeline, IIL vi. CONTENTS PAGE ALFRED TENNYSON i JOHN RUSKIN . . 6r ROBERT AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 127 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Alfred Tennyson Frontispiece Tennyson's Birthplace, Somersby Rectory, Lincolnshire . 5 Mrs. Tennyson g Tennyson's Children 15 Clevedon Court ig The Meeting of the Severn and Wye 24 Caerleon upon Usk 27 Burleigh House, by Stamford Town 30 Almesbury 33 Farringford House, Isle of Wight 37 In the New Forest 41 Tennyson Reading "Maud" 45 Farringford Beacon 47 The Oak Lawn, Aldworth 4g The Edge of Blackdown, Showing Tennyson's House . 53 Tennyson's Home at Aldworth, Surrey .... 57 The Tennyson Coat of Arms 60 Brantwood 63 John Ruskin 71 Looking from Brantwood Towards the Head of Coniston Lake 75 The Turret Room — Ruskin's Bedroom . . . . 7g Coniston— Old Hall and Old Man 85 Entrance to Brantwood gi Elizabeth Barrett Browning 133 Robert Browning 141 Mrs. Browning's Tomb at Florence 151 Mr. Milsand -159 ALFRED TENNYSON ''yl footfall Ibcre Suffices to iiptiini to the warm air Half geriin'iiatii/g spices ; mere decay Trodiices richer life ; and day by day New pollen on the lily- petal grows. And still more labyrinthine buds the rose.' SORDELLO- THERE is a place called Somersby in Lincolnshire, where an old white rectory stands on the slope of a hill, and the winding lanes are shadowed by tall ashes and elm-trees, and where two brooks meet at the bottom of the glebe field. It is a place far away from us in silence and in distance, lying upon the " ridged wolds." They bound the horizon of the rectory garden, whence they are to be seen flowing to meet the sky. I have never known Somersby, but I have often heard it described, and the pastoral country all about, and the quiet, scattered homes. One can picture the rectory to one's self with something of a monastic sweet- ness and quiet: an ancient Norman cross is standing in the church-yard, and perhaps there is still a sound in the air of the bleating of flocks. It all comes before one as one reads the sketch of Tennyson's native place in the Homes and Haunts of the British Poets: the village not far from the fens, '"in a pretty pastoral district of softly sloping hills and large ash-trees. . . . The little glen in the neighborhood is called by the old monkish name of Holywell." Lord Tenny- son sometimes speaks of this glen, which he remembers white with snow-drops in their season ; and who will not recall the exquisite invocation : "Come from the woods that belt the gray hill-side, The seven elms, the poplars four That stand beside my father's door, 3 And cliiefly from the brook that loves To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves. . . . O ! hither lead thy feet ! Pour round mine ears the livelong beat Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds, Upon the ridged wolds." The wind that goes blowing where it listeth, once, in the early beginning of this century, came sweeping through the garden of this old Lincolnshire rectory, and, as the wind blew, a sturdy child of five years old with shining locks stood opening his arms upon the blast and letting himself be blown along, and as he travelled on he made his first line of poetry and said, " I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind," and he tossed his arms, and the gust whirled on, sweeping into the great abyss of winds. One might, perhaps, still trace in the noble, familiar face of our Poet Laureate the features of this child, one of many deep-eyed sons and daughters born in the quiet rectory among the elm-trees. Alfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of August, 1809. He has heard many and many a voice calling to him since the time when he listened to the wind as he played alone in his father's garden, or joined the other children at their games and jousts. They were a noble little clan of poets and of knights, coming of a knightly race, with castles to defend, with mimic tournaments to fight. Somersby was so far away from the world, so behindhand in its echoes (which must have come there softened through all manner of green and tranquil things, and, as it were, hushed into pastoral silence), that though the early part of the century was stir- ring with the clang of legions, few of its rumors seem to have reached the children. They never heard at the time of the battle of Waterloo. They grew up together playing their own games, living their own life ; and where is such ''rj . ^ 5 > O n t/T c — o p" X g = e > » r, I 2 •O 03 s ^ a c 5 » I life to be found as that of a happy, eager family of boys and girls before Doubt, the steps of Time, the shocks of Chance, the blows of Death, have come to dim or shake their creed ? These handsome children had beyond most children that wondrous toy at their command which some people call unagination. The boys played great games like Arthur's knights ; they were champions and warriors defending a stone heap, or again they would set up opposing camps with a king in the midst of each. The king was a willow wand stuck into the ground, with an outer circle of immortals to defend him of firmer, stiffer sticks. Then each party would come with stones, hurling at each other's king, and trying to overthrow him. Perhaps as the day wore on they became romancers, leaving the jousts deserted. When dinner-time came, and they all sat round the table, each in turn put a chapter of his story underneath the potato-bowl — long, end- less stories, chapter after chapter diffuse, absorbing, unend- ing, as are the histories of real life ; some of these romances were in letters, like Clarissa Harlowe. Alfred used to tell a story which lasted for months, and which was called "The Old Horse." Alfred's first verses, so I once heard him say, were written upon a slate which his brother Charles put into his hand one Sunday at Louth, when all the elders of the party were go- ing into church, and the child was left alone. Charles gave him a subject — the flowers in the garden — and when he came back from church little Alfred brought the slate to his brother all covered with written lines of blank verse. They were made on the model of Thomson's Seasons, the only poetry he had ever read. One can picture it all to one's self: the flowers in the garden, the verses, the little poet with waiting eyes, and the young brother scanning the lines. '' Yes, you can write," said Charles, and he gave Alfred back the slate. 7 I have also heard another story of his grandfather, later on, asking him to write an elegy on his grandmother, who had recently died, and when it was written, putting ten shil- lings into his hands and saying, " There, that is the first money you have ever earned by your poetry, and, take my word for it, it will be the last." The Tennysons are a striking example of the theory of family inheritance. Alfred was one of twelve children, of whom the eldest, Frederick, who was educated at Eton, is known as the author of very imaginative poems. Charles was the second son, and Alfred was the third, Charles and little Alfred were sent for a few years to the Grammar School at Louth, where the Laureate was not happy, al- though he still remembers walking adorned with blue rib- bons in a procession for the proclamation of the corona- tion of George the Fourth. The old wives said at the time that the boys made the prettiest part of the show. Charles Tennyson — Charles Turner he was afterwards called, for he took the name with a property which he in- herited— Avas Alfred's special friend and brother. In his own most sweet degree, Charles Tennyson too was a true poet. Who that has ever read his sonnets will cease to love them ? His brother loves and quotes them with affection. Coleridge loved them ; James Spedding, wise critic, life-long friend, read them with unaltered delight from his youth to his much-honored age. In an introductory essay to a volume of the collected sonnets, published after Charles Turner's death, Mr. Spedding quotes the picture of a summer's day- break •. " Rut one sole star, none other anywhere ; A wild-rose odour from the fields was borne ; The lark's mysterious joy filled earth and air, And from the wind's top met the hunter's horn ; The aspen trembled wildly; and the morn Breathed up in rosy clouds divinely fair." PMMHPnnn^ffi^ MRS. TENNYSON After the paintinjj at Aldwonh by G. H. Watts, R.A. Charles Tennyson was in looks not unlike his younger brother. He was stately, too, though shorter in stature, gentle, spiritual, very noble, simple. I once saw him kneel- ing in a church, and only once again. He was like some- thing out of some other world, more holy, more silent than that in which most of us are living ; there is a picture in the National Gallery of St. Jerome which always recalls him to me. The sons must have inherited their poetic gifts from their father. He was the Rev. George Clayton Ten- nyson, LL.D., a tall, striking, and impressive man, full of accomplishments and parts, a strong nature, high-souled, high- tempered. He was the head of the old family; but his own elder-brother share of its good things had passed by will into the hands of another branch, which is still represented by the Tennysons d'Eyncourt. Perhaps be- fore he died he may have realized that to one of his had come possessions greater than any ever yet entailed by lawyer's deeds — an inheritance, a priceless Benjamin's por- tion, not to be measured or defined. n Alfred Tennyson, as he grew up towards manhood, found other and stronger inspirations than Thomson's gen- tle Seaso?is. Byron's spell had fallen on his generation, and for a boy of genius it must have been absolute and overmas- tering. Tennyson was soon to find his own voice, but mean- while he began to write like Byron. He produced poems and verses m endless abundance : trying his wings, as peo- ple say, before starting on his own strong flight. One day the news came to the village — the dire news which spread across the land, filling men's hearts with consternation — that Byron was dead. Alfred was then a boy about fifteen. " Byron was dead ! I thought the whole world was at an end," he once said, speaking of these by-gone days. " I thought everything was over and finished for every one — that nothing else mattered. I remember I walked out alone, and carved ' Byron is dead' into the sandstone." I have spoken of Tennyson from the account of an old friend, whose recollections go back to those days, which seem perhaps more distant to us than others of earlier date and later fashion. Mrs. Tennyson, the mother of the family, so this same friend tells me, was a sweet and gentle and most imaginative woman, so kind-hearted that it had pass- ed into a proverb, and the wicked inhabitants of a neigh- boring village used to bring their dogs to her windows and beat them in order to be bribed to leave off by the gentle lady, or to make advantageous bargains by selling her the worthless curs. She was intensely, fervently religious, as a poet's mother should be. After her husband's death (he had added to the rectory, and made it suitable for his large family) she still lived on at Somersby with her children and their friends. The daughters were growing up, the elder sons were going to college. Frederick, the eldest, went first to Trinity, Cambridge, and his brothers followed him there in turn. Life was opening for them, they were seeing new aspects and places, making new friends, and bringing them home to their Lincolnshire rectory. In Mcmoriam gives many a glimpse of the old home, of which the echoes still reach us across half a century. "O sound to rout the brood of cares, The sweep of scythe in morning dew, The gust that round the garden flew, And tumbled half the mellowing pears ! O bliss, when all in circle drawn About him, heart and ear were fed To hear him, as he lay and read The Tuscan poets on the lawn : Or in the all-golden afternoon A guest, or happy sister, sung. Or here she brought the harp and flung A ballad to the brightening moon." Dean Garden was one of those guests here spoken of, who with Arthur Hallam, the reader of the Tuscan poets, and James Spedding and others, used to gather upon the lawn at Somersby — the young men and women in the hght of their youth and high spirits, the widowed mother leading her quiet life within the rectory walls. Was it not a happy sister herself who in after-days once described how, on a lovely summer night, they had all sat up so late talking in the starlight that the dawn came shining unawares ; but the young men, instead of going to bed, then and there set off for a long walk across the hills in the sunrise. "And suck'd from out the distant gloom A breeze began to tremble o'er The large leaves of the sycamore,* And fluctuate all the still perfume, And gathering freshlier overhead, Rock'd the fuU-foliaged elms, and swung The heavy-folded rose, and flung The lilies to and fro, and said 'The dawn, the dawn,' and died away; And East and West, without a breath, Mixt their dim lights, like life and death, To broaden into boundless day." * I am told that the sycamore has been cut down, and the lawn is altered to another shape. 13 Ill One thing which cannot fail to strike us when we are looking over the records of these earlier days is the remark- able influence which Alfred Tennyson seems to have had from the very first upon his contemporaries, even before his genius had been recognized by the rest of the world. Not only those of his own generation, but his elders and masters seem to have felt something of this. I remember hearing one of Tennyson's oldest friends, Dr. Thompson, the late Master of Trinity, say that " Whewell, who was a man him- self, and who knew a man when he saw him,'' used to pass over in Alfred Tennyson certain informalities and forget- fulness of combinations as to gowns, and places, and times, which in another he would never have overlooked. Whewell ruled a noble generation — a race of men born in the beginning of the century, whose praise and loyal friendship were indeed worth having, and whose good opin- ion Tennyson himself may have been proud to possess. Wise, sincere, and witty, these contemporaries spoke with au- thority, with the moderation of conscious strength. Those of tliis race that I have known in later days — for they were many of them my father's friends also — have all been men of unmistakable stamp, of great culture, of a certain digni- fied bearing, and of independence of mind and of nature. Most of them have succeeded in life as men do wiio are possessed of intellect and high character. Some have not made the less mark upon their time because their names are less widely known ; but each name is a memorable chapter 14 TEXNVSON S CHILDREN After the paiming at Aldvvorth by G. F. Watts, R.A. in life to one and another of us who rememl^er them. One of those old friends, who also loved my father, and whom he loved, who has himself passed away ; one who saw life with his own eyes, and spoke with his own words has de- scribed Tennyson in his youth, in a fragment which is a remembrance, a sort of waking dream, of some by-gone days and talks. How many of us might have been glad to listen to our poet, and to the poet who has made the philosophy of Omar Khayam known to the world, as they discoursed together ; of life, of boyish memories, of books, and again more books; of chivalry — mainly but another name for youth — of a possible old age, so thoroughly seasoned with its spirit that all the experience of the world should serve not to freeze but to direct the genial current of the soul ! and who that has known them both will not recognize the truth of this description pi Alfred in early days ? " A man at all points, of grand proportion and feature, significant of that inward chivalry becoming his ancient and honorable race ; when himself a ' Yonge Squire,' like him in Chaucer, ' of grete strength,' that could hurl the crowbar farther than any of the neighboring clowns, whose humors, as well as of their betters — knight, squire, landlord, and lieu- tenant—he took quiet note of, like Chaucer himself ; like Wordsworth on the mountain, he too when a lad abroad on the world, sometimes of a night with the shepherd, watching not only the flock on the greensward, but also ' the fleecy star that bears Andromeda far off Atlantic seas,' along with those other Zodiacal constellations which Aries, I think, leads over the field of heaven." Arthur Hallam has also written of him in some lines to R. J. Tennant of " a friend, a rare one, A noble being full of clearest insight, . . . whose fame Is couching now with ])antherized intent. As who shall say, I'll spring to him anon. And have him for my own." All these men could understand each other, although they had not then told the world their secrets. Poets, critics, i6 men of learning — such names as Trench and Monckton Milnes, George Stovin Venables, the Lushingtons and Kinglake, need no comment ; many more there are, and deans and canons — a band of youthful friends in those days meeting to hold debate " on mind and art, And labor, and the changing mart, And all the framework of the land ; When one would aim an arrow fair, But send it slackly from the string ; And one would pierce an outer ring, And one an inner, here and there ; And last the master-bowman, he. Would cleave the mark." The lines to J. S. were written to one of these earlier associates. "And gently comes the world to those That are cast in gentle mould." It was the prophecy of a whole lifetime. There were but few signs of age in James Spedding's looks, none in his charm- ing companionship, when the accident befell him which took him away from those who loved him. To another old com- panion, the Rev. W. H. Brookfield, is dedicated that sonnet which flows like an echo of Cambridge chimes on a Sabbath morning. B 17 IV It is in this sonnet to W. H. Brookfield that Tennyson writes of Arthur Hallam : " Him the lost light of those dawn- golden days." Arthur Hallam was the same age as my own father, and born in 1811. When he died he was but twenty-three; but he had lived long enough to show what his life might have been. In the preface to a little volume of his collected poems and essays, published some time after his death, there is a pathetic introduction. " He seemed to tread the earth as a spirit from some better world," writes his father; and a correspondent, who is, as I have been told, Arthur Hallam's and Tennyson's common friend, Mr. Gladstone, says, with deep feeling : " It has pleased God that in his death, as well as in his life and nature, he should be marked beyond ordinary men. When much time has elapsed, when most bereavements will be forgotten, he will still be remembered, and his place, I fear, will be felt to be still vacant ; singularly as his mind was calculated by its native tendencies to work powerfully and for good, in an age full of import to the nature and destinies of man." How completely these words have been carried out must strike us all now. The father lived to see the young man's unconscious influence working through his friend's genius, and reaching whole generations unborn. A lady, speaking of Arthur Hallam after his death, said to Tennyson, "I think he was perfect." " And so he was," said Lord Tennyson. 18 5 < C- PI 5" o S z o =■ C c- C «< c r(^-i ''»^^v S&* ;■-■■■■ -^^ •« -'^'^^^s-^ . - "'.■:.- ^. ) '/^^;^:::^^l^SCtr € - vf^S ■^a^^^^ -tt-v I " as near perfection as a mortal man can be." Arthur Hallam was a man of remarkable intellect. He could take in the most difficult and abstruse ideas with an extraordinary rapidity and insight. On one occasion he began to work one afternoon, and mastered a difficult book of Descartes at a single sitting. In the preface to the Memorials Mr. Hallam speaks of this peculiar clearness of perception and facility for acquiring knowledge ; but, above all, the father dwells on his son's undeviating sweetness of disposition and ad- herence to his sense of what was right. In the Quarterlies and Reviews of the time, his opinion is quoted here and there with a respect which shows in what esteem it was already held. At the time w^hen Arthur Hallam died he was engaged to be married to a sister of the poet's. She was scarcely seven- teen at the time. One of the sonnets addressed by Arthur Hallam to his betrothed was written when he began to teach her Italian : " Lady, I bid thee to a sunny dome, Ringing with echoes of Italian song ; Henceforth to thee these magic halls belong, And all the pleasant place is like a home. Hark, on the right, with full piano tone, Old Dante's voice encircles all the air ; Hark, yet again, like flute-tones mingling rare Comes the keen sweetness of Petrarca's moan. Pass thou the lintel freely ; without fear Feast on the music. I do better know thee Than to suspect this pleasure thou dost owe me Will wrong thy gentle spirit, or make less dear That element whence thou must draw thy life — An English maiden and an English wife." As we read the pages of this little book we come upon more than one happy moment saved out of the past, hours of delight and peaceful friendship, saddened by no fore- boding, and complete in themselves. "Alfred, I would that you beheld me now, Sitting beneath an ivied, mossy wall. . . . Above my head Dilates immeasurable a wild of leaves, Seeming received into the blue expanse That vaults the summer noon." There is something touching in the tranquil ring of the voice calling out in the summer noontide with all a young man's expansion. It seemed to be but the beginning of a beautiful happy life, when suddenly the end came. Arthur Hallam was travelling with his father in Austria when he died very sud- denly, with scarce a warning sign of illness. Mr. Hallam had come home and found his son, as he supposed, sleep- ing upon a couch ; but it was death, not sleep. " Those whose eyes must long be dim with tears " — so writes the heart-stricken father — "brought him home to rest among his kindred and in his own country." They chose his rest- ing-place in a tranquil spot on a lone hill that overhangs the Bristol Channel. He was buried in the chancel of Cleve- don Church, in Somerset, by Clevedon Court, which had been the early home of his mother, an Elton by birth. In all England there is not a sweeter place than the sunny old Court upon the hill, with its wide prospects and grassy terraces, where Arthur Hallam must have played in his childhood, whence others of his kindred, touched with his own bright and beautiful spirit, have come forth. When Mr. Hallam. after a life of repeated sorrows, at last went to his rest with his wife and his children, it was Alfred Tennyson who wrote his epitaph, which may still be read in the chancel of the old Clevedon Church. Once in their early youth we hear of the two friends, Tennyson and Hallam, travelling in the Pyrenees. This was at the time of the war of Spanish independence, when many generous young men went over with funds and good energies to help the cause of liberty. These two were tak- ing money and letters written in invisible ink to certain conspirators who were then revolting against the intolerable tyranny of Ferdinand, and who were chiefly hiding in the Pyrenees. The young men met, among others, a Senor Ojeda, who confided to Tennyson his intentions, which were to caliper la gori^^i' a tons ics cures. Senor Ojeda could not talk English or fully explain all his aspirations. ''Mais 7Viis coii- fiaissez mon coeur,'" said he, effusively; and a pretty black one it is, thought the poet. I have heard Tennyson described in those days as "straight and with a broad breast," and when he had crossed over from the Continent and was com- ing back, walking through Wales, he went one day into a little way-side inn, where an old man sat by the fire, who looked up, and asked many questions. '"Are you from the army ? Not from the army ? Then where do you come from ?" said the old man. " I am just come from the Pyre- nees," said Alfred. "Ah, I knew there was a something," said the wise old man. John Kemble was among those who had gone over to Spain, and one day a rumor came to distant Somersby that he was to be tried for his life by the Spanish authorities. No one else knew much about him e.xcept Alfred Tennyson, who 23 ^>^i-^f;^-x*2^ 2^-^v THE MEETING OF THE SEVERN AND WYE. Started before dawn to drive across the country in search of some person of authority who knew the Consul at Cadiz, and who could send letters of protection to the poor prisoner. It was a false alarm. John Kemble came home to make a name for himself in other fields. Meanwhile Alfred Ten- nyson's own reputation was growing, and when the first two volumes of his collected poems were published in 1842, fol- lowed by The Princess, in 1847, ^is fame spread throughout the land. Some of the reviews were violent and antagonistic at first. One especially had tasted blood, and the " Hang, draw, and Quarterly,'' as it has been called, of those days, having late- ly cut up Endyinion, now proceeded to demolish Tennyson. But this was a passing phase. It is curious to note the sudden change in the tone of the criticisms — the absolute surrender of these knights of the pen to the irresistible and brilliant advance of the unknown and visored warrior. The visor is raised now, the face is familiar to us all, and the arms, though tested in a hundred fights, are shining and un- conquered still. William Howitt, whom we have already quoted, has writ- ten an article upon the Tennyson of these earlier days. It is fanciful, suggestive, full of interest, with a gentle myste- rious play and tender appreciation. Speaking of the poet himself, he asks, with the rest of the world at that time : "You mav hear his voice, but where is the man? He is wandering in some dream-land, beneath the shade of old and charmed forests, by far-off shores, where ' all nit^lit The plunging seas draw backward from the land Their moon-led waters white ; by the old mill-dam, thinking of the merry miller and his pretty daughter ; or wandering over the open wolds where ' Norland whirlwinds blow.' From all these places — from the silent corridor of an an- cient convent, from some shrine where a devoted knight re- cites his vows, from the drear monotony of ' the moated grange,' or the forest beneath the 'talking oak' — comes the voice of Tennyson, rich, dreamy, passionate, yet not impa- tient, musical with the airs of chivalrous ages, yet mingling in his song the theme and the spirit of those that are yet to come." . . . This article was written many years ago, when but the first chords had sounded, before the glorious Muse, passing beyond her morning joy, had met with the sorrow of life. l!ut it is well that as we travel on through later, sadder scenes we should still carry in our hearts this romantic music. One must be English born, I think, to know how English is the spell which this great enchanter casts over us; the very spirit of the land falls upon us as the visions he evokes come closing round. Whether it is the moated grange he shows us, or Locksley Hall that in the dis- tance overlooks the sandy tracts, or Dora standing in the corn, or the sight of the brimming wave that swings through quiet meadows round the mill, it is all home in its broadest, sweetest aspect. It would not be easy for a generation that has grown up to the music of Tennyson, that has in a manner beaten time to it with the pulse of its life, to imagine what the world would be without it. Even the most original among us must needs think of things more or less in the shape in which they come before us. The mystery of the charm of words is as great as that by which a wonder of natural beauty comes around us, and lays hold of our imagination. It may be fancy, but I for one feel as if summer-time could scarcelv be summer without the son": of the familiar green books. 26 VI In Memoriam, with music in its cantos, belonging to the school of all men's sad hearts, rings the awful DeProfundis of death, faced and realized as far as may be by a human soul. It came striking suddenly into all the sweet ideal beauty and lovely wealth which had gone before, with a revelation of that secret of life which is told to each of us in turn by the sorrow of its own soul. Nothing can be more simple than the form of the poem as it flows. "Short swallow-flights of song, that dip Their wings in tears, and skim away," as the poet says himself, but it is something else besides — something which has given words and ease to many of those who in their lonely frozen grief perhaps feel that they are no longer quite alone, when such a voice as this can reach them : "Peace; come away: the song of woe Is after all an earthly song : Peace ; come away : we do him wrong To sing so wildly : let us go." And as the cry passes away, come signs of peace and dawn- ing light : "Be neither song, nor game, nor feast; Nor harp be touch'd, nor flute he blown ; No dance, no motion, save alone What lightens in the lucid east 29 "Of rising workls l)y yonder wood. Long sleeps the summer in the seed ; Run out your measured arcs, and lead The closing cycle rich in good." And the teacher who can read the great book of nature in- terprets for us as he turns the page. With /;/ Menwritim, which was not pubHshed till 1850, Alfred Tennyson's fame was firmly established ; and when BURLEIGH HOUSE, BY STAMFORD TOWN Wordsworth died (on Shakespeare's day in that same year) its author was appointed by the Queen Poet Laureate. There is a story* that at the time Sir Robert Peel was con- sulted he had never read any Tennyson, but he read "Ulys- ses " and warmed up, and acknowledged the right of this new-come poet to be England's Laureate. The home at Somersby was broken up by this time, by * See Lord Houghton's Memoirs. 30 I marriages and other family events. Alfred Tennyson had come to live in London. He was poor; he had in turn to meet that struggle with wholesome poverty which brings the vagueness of genius into contact with reality, and teaches, better, perhaps, than any other science, the patience, the for- bearance, and knowledge of life which belong to it. The Princess, with all her lovely court and glowing har- monies, had been born in London, among the fogs and smuts of Lincoln'^ Inn, although, like all works of true art, this poem must have grown by degrees in other times and places as the poet came and went, free, unshackled, medi- tating, inditing. He says that " Tears, Idle Tears," was sug- gested by Tintern Abbey: but who shall define by what mysterious wonder of beauty and regret, by what sense of the "transient with the abiding?" /;/ Mcmoriam was followed by the tirst part of the Idylls, and the record of the court King Arthur held at Camelot, and at "old Caerleon upon Usk" on that eventful Whitsun- tide when Prince Geraint came quickly flashing through the shallow ford to the little knoll, where the queen stood with her maiden, and . . . " listen'd for tlie distant hunt, And chiefly for the baying of Cavall." If /;/ Memoriam is the record of a human soul, the Idylls mean the history, not of one man or of one generation, but of a whole cycle, of the faith of a nation failing and falling away into darkness. The first " Idyll " and the last, I have heard Lord Tennyson say, are intentionally more archaic than the others. " The whole is the dream of man coming into practical life, and ruined by one sin." Birth is a mys- tery, and death is a mystery, and in the midst lies the table- land of life, and its struggle and performance. The poet once told us that the song of the knights march- 31 ing past the King at the marriage of Artiiur was made one spring afternoon on Clapham Common as he walked along. "Blow trumpet, for the world is white with May; Blow trumpet, the long night hath roll'd away! Blow through the living world — 'Let the King reign.'" So sang the young knights in the first bright days of early chivalry. "Clang battle-axe, and clash brand! Let the King reign. The King will follow Christ, and we the King." And then when the doom of evil spread, bringing not sor- row alone, but destruction in its train, not death only, but hopelessness and consternation, the song is finally changed into an echo of strange woe ; we hear no shout of triumph, but the dim shocks of battle, ' ' the crash Of battle-axe on shatter'd helms, and shrieks After the Christ, of those who falling down Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist." All is over with the fair court ; Guinevere's golden head is low ; she has fled to Almesbury — "Fled all night long by glimmering waste and weald, And heard the Spirits of the waste and weald Moan as she fled, or thought she heard them moan: And in herself she moan'd, ' Too late, too late !' Till in the cold wind that foreruns the morn, A blot in heaven, the Raven, frying high, Croak'd, and she thought, 'He spies a field of death.'" And finally comes the conclusion, and the " Passing of Arthur," and he vanishes as he came, in mystery, silently floating away upon the barge towards the East, whence all religions are said to come. 32 As the writer notes down these various fragments of re- membrance, and compiles this sketch of present things, she cannot but feel how much of the past it all means to her, and how very much her own feeling is an inheritance which has gathered interest during a lifetime, so that the chief claim of her words to be regarded is that they are those of an old friend. Her father's warmth of admiration comes back vividly as she writes, all his pleasure when he secured " Tithonus " for one of the early numbers of the Cornhill Magazine, his imm.ense and outspoken admiration for the Idylls of the King. I have heard them all speak of these London days when Alfred Tennyson lived in poverty with his friends and his golden dreams. He lived in the Temple, at 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields, and elsewhere. It was about this time that Carlyle introduced Sir John Simeon to Tennyson one night at Bath House, and made the often-quoted speech, "There he sits upon a dung-heap surrounded by innumerable dead dogs ;" by which dead dogs he meant " CEnone " and other Greek versions and adaptations. He had said the same thing of Landor and his Hellenics. "I was told of this," said Lord Tennyson, " and some time afterwards I repeated it to Carlyle : ' I'm told that is what you say of me.' He gave a kind of guf- faw. ' Eh, that wasn't a very luminous description of you,' he answered." The story is w-ell worth retelling, so completely does it illustrate the grim humor and unaffected candor of a dys- peptic man of genius, w-ho flung words and epithets without malice, who neither realized the pain his chance sallies might give, nor the indelible flash which branded them upon people's memories. The world has pointed its moral finger of late at the old man in his great old age, accusing himself in the face of all, 35 and confessing the overpowering irritations which the suf- fering of a lifetime had laid upon him and upon her he loved. That old caustic man of deepest feeling, with an ill temper and a tender heart and a racking imagination, speak- ing from the grave, and bearing unto it that cross of pas- sionate remorse which few among us dare to face, seems to some of us now a figure nobler and truer, a teacher greater far, than in the days when his pain and love and remorse were still hidden from us all. Carlyle and Mr. Fitzgerald used to be often with Tenny- son at that time. They used to dine together at the " Cock " tavern in the Strand among other places ; sometimes Ten- nyson and Carlyle took long, solitary walks into the night. Here is Carlyle's description of the poet, written to Emer- son in America : "Tennyson came in to us on Sunday evening, a truly in- teresting Son of Earth and Son of Heaven. . . . One of the finest-looking men in the world. His voice is musical, me- tallic — fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that may be between ; speech and speculation free and plente- ous. I do not meet in these late decades such company over a pipe. ... A true human soul or some authentic ap- proximation thereto, to whom your soul can say, Brother; a man solitary and sad as certain men are, dwelling in an at- mosphere of gloom — carrying a bit of chaos about kirn, in short, which he is Tuamifacturing into cosmos T I have vent- ured to put the italics ; had I letters of gold to write with I would set them to the stately words. The other day a lady was describing a by-gone feast giv- en about this time by the poet to Lady Duff Gordon, and to another young and beautiful lady, a niece of Mr. Hallam's. Harry Hallam, his younger son, was also asked. Lord Ten- nyson, ih his hospitality, had sent for a carpenter to change the whole furniture of his bedroom in order to prepare a 36 proper drawing-room for the ladies. Mr. Brookfield, com- ing in, was in time to suggest some compromise, to which the host reluctantly agreed. One can imagine that it was a delightful feast, but indeed it is always a feast-day when one breaks bread with those one loves, and the writer is glad to think that she, too, has been among those to sit at the kind board where the salt has not lost its savor in the years that have passed, and where the guests can say then grace not for bread and wine alone. May she add that the first occasion of her having the honor of breaking bread in company with Lord Tennyson was in her father's house, when she was propped up in a tall chair between her parents .-' VII Some of the writer's earliest recollections are of days now long gone by, when many of these young men of whom she has been speaking, grown to be middle-aged, used to come from time to time to her father's house, and smoke with him, and talk and laugh quietly, taking life seriousl), but humorously too, with a certain loyalty to others and self-respect which was their characteristic. They were somewhat melancholy men at soul; but for that very rea- son, perhaps, the humors of life may have struck them more especially. It is no less possible that our children will think of us as cheerful folks upon the whole, with no little affectation of melancholy and all the graces. I can remember on one occasion through a cloud of smoke looking across a darkening room at the noble, grave head of the Poet Laureate. He was sitting with my father in the twilight after some family meal in the old house in 39 Kc:isington. It is Lord Tennyson himself wiio has le- minded me how upon this occasion, while my father was speaking, my little sister looked up suddenly from the book over which she had been absorbed, saying, in her sweet childish voice, " Papa, why do you not write books like Nicholas NicklebyV^ Then again I seem to hear, across that same familiar table, voices without shape or name, talking and telling each other that Lord Tennyson was mar- ried — that he and his wife had been met walking on the terrace at Clevedon Court ; and then the clouds descend again, except, indeed, that I still see my father riding off on his brown cob to the Tennysons' house at Twickenham (Chapel House, which I can remember with its oak staircase and the carved figure of a bishop blessing the passers-by) to attend the christening of Hallam, their eldest son. In after- days we were shown the old ivy -grown church and the rectory at Shiplake, by the deep bend of the Thames, where their marriage took place, after long years of faithful constancy. It was at Somersby that Alfred Tennyson first became acquainted with his wife. She was eldest daughter of Henry Selwood, the last but one of a family of country gentlemen settled in Berkshire in the time of Charles I., and before that, in Saxon times, as it is said, more impor- tant people in the forest of their name. Her mother was a sister of Sir John Franklin. Not many years after their marriage Mr. and Mrs. Tenny- son settled at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight. There is a photograph I have always liked, in which it seems to me the history of this home is written, as such histories should be written, in sunlight, in the flashing of a beam, in an instant, and forever. It was taken in the green glade at Farringford. Hallam and Lionel Tennyson stand on either side of their parents, the father and mother and children, 40 hand in hand, come advancing towards us — who does not know the beautiful lines to the mother : "Dear, near, and true — no truer Time himself Can prove you, though he make you evermore Dearer and nearer." And though years have passed in which the boys with their wind-blown locks grew up to man's estate, so that it is now their boys who are in turn picking the daffodils under the Farringford hedge, yet the old picture remains, in which that one dear remembered figure, so early carried by the flood far " from out our bourne of Time and Space," seems to shine brighter than the rest. VIII One autumn, when everything seemed happy at home, Mrs. Cameron took me with her to Freshwater for a few de- lightful weeks, and then, for the first time, I lived with them all, and with kind Mrs. Cameron, in the ivy-grown house near the gates of Farringford. For the first time I stayed in the island, and with the people who were dwelling there, and walked with Tennyson along High Down, treading the turf, listening to his talk, while the gulls came sideways, flashing their white breasts against the edge of the cliffs, and the poet's cloak flapped time to the gusts of the west wind. The house at Farringford itself seemed like a charmed palace, with green walls without, and speaking walls within. There hung Dante with his solemn nose and wreath ; Italy gleamed over the doorways; friends' faces lined the pas- 43 sages ; books filled the shelves, and a glow of crimson was everywhere ; the great oriel drawing-room window was full of green and golden leaves, of the sound of birds and of the distant sea. The very names of the people who have stood upon the lawn at Farringford would be an interesting study for some future biographer : Longfellow, Maurice, Kingsley, the Duke of Argyll, Locker, Dean Stanley, the Prince Consort. Good Garibaldi once planted a tree there, off which some too ar- dent republican broke a branch before twenty-four hours had passed. Here came Clough in the last year of his life. Here Mrs. Cameron fixed ber lens, marking the well-known faces as they passed : Darwin and Henry Taylor, Watts and Aubrey de Vere, Lecky and Jowett, and a score of others. I first knew the place in the autumn, but perhaps it is even more beautiful in the spring-time, when all day the lark trills high overhead, and then when the lark has flown out of hearing the thrushes begin, and the air is sweet with scents from the many fragrant shrubs. The woods are full of anemones and primroses ; narcissus grows wild in the lower fields ; a lovely creamy stream of flowers flows along the lanes, and lies hidden in the levels ; hyacinth pools of blue shine in the woods; and then with a later burst of glory comes the gorse, lighting up the country round about, and blazing on the beacon hill. The little sketch here given was made early one morning by Frederick Walker, who had come over to see us at Freshwater. The beacon hill stands behind Farringford. If you cross the little wood of night- insrales and thrushes, and follow the lane where the black- thorn hedges shine (lovely dials that illuminate to show the hour), you come to the downs, and climbing their smooth steeps you reach "High Down," where the beacon-staff stands firm upon the mound. Then, following the fine of the cliffs, you come at last to the Needles, and may look 44 TENNYSON READING MAUD From a sketch by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1855. [See Note on pagu 60., down upon the ridge of rocks that rise, crisp, sharp, shin- ing, out of the blue wash of fierce, dehcious waters. The lovely places and sweet country all about Farring- ford are not among the least of its charms. Beyond the Primrose Island itself and the blue Solent, the New Forest spreads its shades, and the green depths reach to the very shores. Have we not all read of the forest where Merlin was becharmed, where the winds were still in the wild FARRINGFORD BEACON From an unpublished sketch by Frederick Walker woods of Broceliande ? The forest of Brockenhurst, in Hampshire, waves no less green, its ferns and depths are no less sweet and sylvan, than those of Brittany. Before an oak, so hollow, huge, and old It look'd a tower of ruin'd mason-work. At Merlin's feet the wily Vivien lay." 47 Some people camping in the New Forest once told me of a mysterious figure in a cloak coming suddenly upon them out of a deep glade, passing straight on, looking neither to the right nor the left. " It was either a ghost or it was Mr. Tennyson," said they. In Sir John Simeon's lifetime there was a constant inter- course between Farringford and Swanston. Sir John was one of Tennyson's most constant companions — a knight of courtesy he calls him in the sad lines written in the garden at Swanston. Maud grew out of a remark of Sir John Simeon's, to whom Tennyson had read the lines, "O that 'twere possible After long grief and pain," which lines were, so to speak, the heart of Maud. Sir John said that it seemed to him as if something were wanting to explain the story of this poem, and so by degrees it all grew. One little story was told me on the authority of Mr. Henry Sidgwick, who was perhaps present on that occasion. Ten- nyson was reading the poem to a silent company assembled in the twilight, and when he came to the birds in the high hall garden calling Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud, he stopped short, and asked an authoress who happened to be present what birds these were. The authoress, much alarmed, and feeling that she must speak, and that the eyes of the whole company were upon her, faltered out, " Nightin- gales." "Pooh," said Tennyson, "what a cockney you are ! Nightingales don't say Maud. Rooks do, or some- thing like it. Caw, caw, caw, caw, caw." Then he went on reading. Reading, is it ? One can hardly describe it. It is a sort of mystical incantation, a chant in which every note rises and falls and reverberates again. As we sit around the 48 THE OAK LAWN, ALDWORTH twilight room at Farringford, with its great oriel-window looking to the garden, across fields of hyacinth and self- sowed daffodils towards the sea, where the waves wash against the rock, we seem carried by a tide not unlike the ocean's sound ; it fills the room, it ebbs and flows aw^ay ; and when we leave, it is with a strange music in our ears, feeling that we have for the first time, perhaps, heard what we may have read a hundred times before. Let me here note a fact, whether a tort or apropos of nightingales: once when Mr. Tennyson was in Yorkshire, so he told me, as he was walking at night in a friend's gar- den, he heard a nightingale singing with such a frenzy of passion that it was unconscious of everything else, and not frightened though he came and stood quite close be- side it ; he could see its eye flashing, and feel the air bub- ble in his ear through the vibration. Our poet, with his short-sighted eyes, can see farther than most people. Al- most the first time I ever walked out with him, he told me to look and tell him if the field -lark did not come down sideways upon its wing. Nature in its various aspects makes up a larger part of this man's life than it does for other people. He goes his way unconsciously absorbing life, and its lights and sounds, and teaching us to do the same as far as may be. There is an instance of this given in the pamphlet already quoted from, where the two friends talk on of one theme and an- other from Kenelm Digby to Aristophanes, and the poet is described as saying, among other things, that he knows of no human outlook so solemn as that from an infant's eyes, and that it was from those of his own he learned that those of the Divine Child in Raffaello's Sistine Madonna were not overcharged with expression. Here is a reminiscence of Tennyson's about the echo at Killarney, where he said to the boatman, " When I last was here I heard eight echoes, and now I only hear one." To SI which the man, who had heard people quoting the bugle song, replied, " Why, you must be the gentleman that brought all the money to the place." People have different ideas of poets. Mrs. B , of Totland's Bay, once asked a Freshwater boy, who was driv- ing her, " if he knew Mr. Tennyson." "He makes poets for the Queen," said the boy. "What do you mean?" said the lady, amused. " I don't know what they means," said the boy, " but p'liceman often seen him walking about a-making of 'em under the stars." The author of Euphranor has his own definition of a poet : " The only living — and like to live — poet I have known, when he found himself beside the ' bonnie Doon,' whether it were from recollec- tion of poor Burns, or of ' the days that are no more ' which haunt us all, I know not — I think he did not know — ' broke into a passion of tears ' (as he told me). Of tears, which during a pretty long and inti- mate intercourse I had never seen glistening in his eyes but once, when reading Virgil — ' dear old Virgil,' as he called him — together ; and then — oh, not of Queen Dido, nor of young Marcellus even, but of the burn- ing of Troy, in the second /Eneid — whether moved by the catastrophe itself, or the majesty of the verse it is told in, or as before, scarce know- ing why. For as King Arthur shall bear witness, no young Edwin he, though, as a great poet, comprehending all the softer stops of human emotion in that diapason where the intellectual, no less than what is called the poetical, faculty predominated." " You will last," Douglas Jerrold said. And there was Carlyle's " Eh ! he has got the grip of it," when Tennyson read him the Revenge. But perhaps the best compliment Mr. Tennyson ever received was one day when walking in Covent Garden, when he was stopped by a rough-looking man, who held out his hand, and said : " You're Mr. Tenny- son. Look here, sir, here am I. I've been drunk for six days out of the seven, but if you will shake me by the hand, I'm d d if I ever get drunk again." X o z o H a z z •< VI o z o IX Aldworth was built some twenty years ago, when Lady Tennyson had been ordered change, and Freshwater was found to be unbearable and overcrowded during the sum- mer months. It must be borne in mind that to hospitable people there are dangers from friendly inroads as well as from the attacks of enemies. The new house, where for many years past the family has spent its summers, stands on the summit of a high, lonely hill in Surrey, and yet it is not quite out of reach of London life. It is a white stone house with many broad windows facing a great view and a long terrace, like some one of those at Siena or Perugia, with a low parapet of stone, where ivies and roses are trained, making a foreground to the lovely haze of the distance. Sometimes at Aldworth, when the summer days are at their brightest, and Blackdown top has been well warmed and sunned, I have seen a little procession coming along the terrace walk, and proceeding by its green boundary into a garden, where the sun shines its hottest, upon a sheltered lawn, and where standard rose-trees burn their flames: Lord Tennyson, in his cloak, going first, perhaps dragging the garden chair in which Lady Tennyson was lying ; Hal- lam Tennyson following, with rugs and cushions for the rest of the party. If the little grandsons and their mother, in her white dress and broad, shady hat, and Lionel Tenny- son's boys, absorbed in their books of adventure, are there, the family group is complete. One special day I remember when we all sat for an hour round about the homely chair 55 and its gentle occupant. It seemed not unlike a realization of some Italian picture that I had somewhere seen : the tranquil eyes, the peaceful heights, the glorious summer day, some sense of lasting calm, of beauty beyond the present hour. Lord Tennyson works alone in the early hours of the morning, and comes down long after his own frugal meal is over to find his guests assembling round the social break- fast-table. He generally goes out for a walk before lunch- eon, with his son and a friend, perhaps, and followed by a couple of dogs. Most of us know the look of the stately figure, the hanging cloak, and broad felt hat. There used to be one little ceremony peculiar to the Tennyson family, and reminding one of some college cus- tom which continued, that when dinner was over the guests used to be brought away into a second room, where stood a white table, upon which fruit and wine were set, and a fire burned bright, and a pleasant hour went by, while the master of the house sat in his carved chair and discoursed upon any topic suggested by his guests, or brought forth reminiscences of early Lincolnshire days, or from facts remembered out of the lives of past men who have been his friends. There was Rogers, among the rest, for whom he had a great affection, with whom he con- stantly lived during that lonely time in London. "I have dined alone with him," I heard Lord Tennyson say, "and we have talked about death till the tears rolled down his face." Tennyson met Tom Moore at Rogers's, and there, too, he first met Mr. Gladstone. John Forster, Leigh Hunt, and Landor were also friends of that time. One of Tenny- son's often companions in those days was Mr. Hallam, whose opinion he once asked of Carlyle's French Revolution. Mr. Hallam replied, in his quick, rapid way, " Upon my s6 z < o z_ in* X o s a > > r D ^ O it) H J5 (A c is so to ■< word, I once opened the book, and read four or five pages. The style is so abominable I could not get on with it." Whereas Carlyle's own criticism upon the History of the Middle Ages was, " Eh ! the poor, miserable skeleton of a book !" Was it not Charles Lamb who wanted to return grace after reading Shakespeare, little deeming in humble sim- plicity that many of us yet to come would be glad to return thanks for a jest of Charles Lamb's. The difference be- tween those who speak with reality, and those who go through life fitting their second-hand ideas to other peo- ple's words, is one so marked that even a child may tell the difference. When the Laureate speaks, every word comes wise, racy, absolutely natural, and sincere ; and how gladly do we listen to his delightful stories, full of odd humors and knowledge of men and women, or to his graver talk ! I re- member thinking how true was the phrase of Lionel Tenny- son's concerning his father, " When a man has read so much and thought so much, it is an epitome of the knowledge of to-day we find in him," an epitome indeed touched by the solemn strain of the poet's own gift. I once heard Tennyson talking to some actors, to no less a person in- deed than to Hamlet himself, for after the curtain fell the whole play seemed to flow from off the stage into the box where we had been sitting, and I could scarcely tell at last where reality began and Shakespeare ended. The play was over, and we ourselves seemed a part of it still ; here were the players, and our own prince poet, in that familiar simple voice we all know, explaining the art, going straight to the point in his own downright fashion, criticising with delicate appreciation, by the simple force of truth and conviction carrying all before him. "You are a good actor lost," one of these, the real actor, said to him. It is a gain to the world when people are content to be 59 themselves, not chipped to the smooth pattern of the times, but simple, original, and unaffected in ways and words. Here is a poet leading a poet's life ; where he goes there goes the spirit of his home, whether in London among the crowds, or at Aldworth on the lonely height, or at Farring- ford in that beautiful bay. The last time I went to see him in London he was smoking in a top room in Eton Square, It may interest an American public to be told that it was Durham tobacco from North Carolina, which Mr. Lowell had given him. I could not but feel how little even cir- cumstance itself can contribute to that mysterious essence of individuality which we all recognize and love. In this commonplace London room, with all the stucco of Belgravia round about, I found the old dream realized, the old charm of youthful impression. There sat my friend as I had first seen him years ago among the clouds. Note. — This early sketch was preserved by Robert Browning, to whose courtesy we are indebted for its use, and v/as one of the interest- ing pictures of the Rossetti exhibition held in London after the painter's death. ]Mrs. Browning was anotlier of the distinguished company. THE TENNYSON COAT OF ARMS JOHN RUSKIN " Let hiiowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in ns dwell ; That mind and soul, according well, Maj> make one vmsic as before." w:, BRANTWOOD [EN the writer of this essay tries to go back to her first impres- sions of John Ruskin, she finds that they must date from the round-table in the middle of her father's drawing- room in Kensington — the little drawing-room in Younf 63 Street, with the bow-windows, the oak-leaved carpet, the poHshed bookcase with its glass doors, and the aforesaid round-table with its dial of books arranged in a circle, and faithfully marking the march of time. For, looking at a list of Mr. Ruskin's works, I find that the Seven Lamps of Architecture was published in 1849, soon after we came to live in England in our father's house. And in this year there appeared among the Punches and the lovely red silk Annuals and Keepsakes that illuminated the bow-windowed room a volume bound (so it seemed to us children) in moulded slabs of pure chocolate. I can still recall the look of the broad margins, the pictures, and noble-looking printed pages, and although the Annuals with the fascinat- ing brides and veiled ladies, and the ghosts and guitars and brigands, were perhaps more to our childish tastes, even then we realized in some indefinite way the importance of the big brown book which opened like a casket, and gath- ered some impressions of palace windows and of carved shadows from its pages — impressions to be afterwards turned into actual stone and sunlight. As time went on, the Stones of Venice in due course took their place upon our dial, and meanwhile the name of the writer of the beautiful authoritative books is among those other echoes, which are so familiar that one can scarcely tell when they begin to sound. In the first page of the eleventh chapter of Prceterita occurs the name of " Mrs. John Simon, who," says Ruskin, " in my mother's old age was her most deeply trusted friend." It was at this lady's house, sitting by the kind hostess of many a year to be, that the writer first saw the author of Modern Painters, while at the other end of the table Mr. Simon, now Sir John (" Brother John," Ruskin dubbed him long since), sat carving, as was his wont, roast mutton — " be it tender and smoking and juicy " — and dis- 64 pensing, as is still his wont, trimmings and oracles and epigrams with every plateful. I could even now quote some of the words Ruskin spoke on that summer's evening in Great Cumberland Street, and I can see him as he was then almost as plainly as on the last time that we met. His mood on that first occasion Avas one of deep depression, and I can remember being frightened as well as absorbed by his talk. Was he joking ? was he serious ? I could hardly follow what he said then, though now it all seems simple enough. But good company is like good wine, and improves by keeping, and let us hope that this applies to the recipients as well as to the feast itself. Ruskin seemed less picturesque as a young man than in his later days. Perhaps gray waving hair may be more becoming than darker locks, but the speaking, earnest eyes must have been the same, as well as the tones of that de- lightful voice, with its slightly foreign pronunciation of the r, which seemed so familiar again when it welcomed us to Coniston long, long years after. Meeting thus after fifteen years, I was struck by the change for the better in him ; by the bright, radiant, sylvan look which a man gains by living among woods and hills and pure breezes. 65 II The road to Brantwood* runs beneath the old trees which shade the head of Coniston Water, and you leave ihe village and the inn behind, and the Thwaite, with its pretty old gardens and peacocks, and skirt the beautiful grounds of Monk Coniston ; you pass the ivy tower where the lords of the manor keep their boats ; and the reeds among which the swallows and dragon -flies are darting; and as you advance, if you look back across the green hay- fields and wooded slopes of Monk Coniston, you can see Weatherlam and Ravenscrag, with Yewdale for a back- ground, while Coniston Old Man on the opposite side of the lake rises like a Pilatus above the village, and soars into changing lights and clouds. Then, as you walk still farther along the road, leaving all these things behind, you pass into a sweet Arcadia, in which, indeed, one loses one's self again in after- times. You go by Tent Lodge, where Tennyson once dwelt, where the beautiful Romneys are hanging on the walls ; you pass the cottage with roses for bricks, and with jasmines and honeysuckles for thatch, and the farm where the pet lamb used to dwell, to the terror of the children (it seemed appropriate enough to Wordsworth's * Ruskin, writing of liis earliest recollections of Coniston in Prceterita, says : " The inn at Coniston was then actually at the upper end of the lake, the road from Amble- side to the village passing just between it and the water, and the view of the long reach of lake, with its softly wooded lateral hills, had for my father a tender charm which ex- cited the same feeling as that with which he afterwards regarded the lakes of Italy. Lowwood Inn also was then little more than a country cottage, and Ambleside a rural village, and the absolute peace and bliss which any one who cared for grassy hills and for sweet waters might find at every footstep and at every turn of crag or bend of bog. was totally unlike anything I ever saw or read of elsewhere." 66 country, but I can remember a little baby girl wild with ter- ror and flying from its gambols) ; then, still following the road, you reach a delightful cackling colony of poultry and ducks, where certain hospitable ladies used to experiment- alize, and prove to us whether or no eggs are eggs (as these ladies have determined eggs should be) ; then comes Low Bank Ground, our own little farm lodging among the chest- nut-trees and meadows full of flowers. It had been the site of a priory once, and on this slope and in the shade of the chestnut-trees, where monks once dwelt, the writer met Rus- kin again after many years. He, the master of Brantwood, came, as I remember, dressed with some ceremony, meeting us with a certain old-fashioned courtesy and manner ; but he spoke with his heart, of which the fashion doesn't change happily from one decade to another; and as he stood in his tall hat and frock-coat upon the green, the clouds and drifts came blowing up from every quarter of heaven, and I can almost see him while he talked with emphasis and remem- brance of that which was then in both our minds. Low Bank Ground is but a very little way from Brantwood ; you can go there by land or by water. If you v/alk, the road climbs the spur of the hill, and runs below moors by a wood where squirrels sit under the oak-trees and honeysuckles drop from the branches ; or, if you like to go by the lake, you can get Timothy from the farm to row you. " A dash of the oars, and you are there," as Ruskin said, and accord- ingly we started in the old punt for our return visit to Brantwood. The sun came out between rain clouds as the boat struck with a hollow crunch against the stones of the tiny landing pier. Timothy from the farm, who had come to pilot us, told us with a sympathetic grin that Mr. Ruskin — " Rooskin," I think he called him — " had built t' pier, and set t' stoans himsel' wi' the other gentlemen, but they had to send for t' 67 smith from the village to make t' bolts faaster." The pier is fast enough, running out into the lake, with a little fleet safely anchored behind it, while Brantwood stands high up on the slope, with square windows looking across the waters. Just on the other side of the lake, wrapped in mysterious ivy wreaths, where the cows are whisking their tails beneath the elms, rise the gables of the old farm, once the manor- house where " Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," once dwelt. Sir Philip Sidney used to come riding across the dis^ tant hills to visit her there — so tradition says. The mere thought of Coniston Water brings back the peaceful le- gends and sounds all about Ruskin's home : the plash of the lake, the rustle of the leaves and rushes, the beat of birds on their whirring wings, the flop of the water-rats, the many buzzing and splashing and delicious things. A path up a garden of fruit and flowers, of carnations and straw- berries, leads with gay zigzags to the lawn in front of the Brantwood windows. The house is white, plain, and comfortable, absolutely unpretending. I remember noticing, with a thrill, the um- brella-stand in the glass door. So Mr. Ruskin had an um- brella just like other people ! It seemed to me to be a dwelling planned for sunshine, and sunshine on the lakes is of a quality so sweet and rare that it counts for more than in any other place. The brightness of Brantwood, the squareness, and its unaffected comfortableness, were, I think, the chief characteristics. You had a general impres- sion of solid, old-fashioned furniture, of amber-colored dam- ask curtains and coverings ; there were Turners and other water -color pictures in curly frames upon the drawing- room walls — a Prout, I think, among them ; there was a noble Titian in the dining-room, and the full-length portrait of a child in a blue sash over the sideboard, which has be- come familiar since then to the readers of Pr(Zterita ; and 68 -^^ J r most certainly was there an absence of any of the art-diph- thongs and peculiarities of modern taste : only the simplest and most natural arrangements for the comfort of the in- mates and their guests. Turkey carpets, steady round-tables, and above all a sense of cheerful, hospitable kindness, which seems to be traditional at Brantwood. For many years past Mrs. Severn has kept her cousin's house, and welcomed his guests with her own. That evening — the first we spent at Brantwood — the rooms were lighted by slow sunset cross-lights from the lake without. Mrs. Severn sat in her place behind a silver urn, while the master of the house, with his back to the window, was dispensing such cheer, spiritual and temporal, as those who have been his guests will best realize. Fine wheaten bread and Scotch cakes in many a crisp circlet and crescent, and trout from the lake, and strawberries such as only grow on the Brantwood slopes. Were these cups of tea only, or cups of fancy, feeling, inspiration ? And as we crunched and quaffed we listened to a certain strain not easily to be described, changing from its graver first notes to the sweet- est and most charming vibrations. Ill Who can ever recall a good talk that is over.? You can remember the room in which it was held, the look of the chairs, but the actual talk takes wings and flies away. A dull talk has no wings, and is rememberd more easily ; so are those tiresome conversations which consist of sentences which we all repeat by rote, sentences which have bored us a hundred times before, and which do not lose this property by long use. But a real talk leaps into life ; it is there al- most before we are conscious of its existence. What system of notation can mark it down as it flows, modulating from its opening chords to those delightful exhilarating strains which are gone again almost before we have realized them, Ruskin w^as explaining his views in his own words as we sat there. I should do him ill justice if I tried to transcribe his sermon. The text was that strawberries should be ripe and sweet, and we munched and marked it then and there ; '.that there should be a standard of fitness applied to every detail of life ; and this standard, with a certain gracious malice, Avit, hospitality, and remorselessness, he began to apply to one thing and another, to one person and another, to dress, to food, to books. I remember his describing to my brother-in-law Leslie Stephen the shabby print and paper that people were content to live with, and contrasting with these the books he himself was then printing for the use of the shepherds round about. And among the rest he showed us Sir Philip Sidney's pharaphrase of the Psalms, which he has long since given to the world in the Biblio- theca Pastor Hin. Let us trust these fortunate shepherds are worthy of their print and margins. If, as I have already said, we compare the talk of great men and women "who will cause this age to be remem- bered," one element is to be found in them all — a certain directness, simplicity, and vivid reality ; a gift for reaching their hearers at once, giving light straight from themselves, and not in reflections from other minds ; sunshine, in short, not moonshine. Perhaps something of this may be due to the habit of self-respect and self-reliance which success and strength of purpose naturally create. Many uncelebrated people have the grace of convincing simplicity, but I have never met '. really great man without it. As one thinks of it, one ree gnizes that a great man is greater than we are 70 JOHN RUSKIN — [From portrait by Hubert Herkomer, A. K. A.] From the etching published by Fine Art Society, London because his aim (consciously or unconsciously) is juster, his strength stronger and less strained ; his right is more right than ours, his certainty more certain ; he shows us the best of that which concerns him, and the best of ourselves too in that which concerns us in his work or his teaching. If we look at the Elgin marbles, for instance, we feel that the standard of human attainment is forever raised by those broken lines in eternal harmony, and we also indefinitely realize that while looking at them we ourselves are at our best in sculpture ; and so listening back to the echoes of a lifetime, we can most of us still hear some strains very clear, very real and distinct, out of all the confusion of past noise and chatter ; and the writer (nor is she alone in this) must ever count the magic of the music of Brantwood oratory among such strains. Music, oratory, I know not what to call that > wondrous gift which subjugates all who come within its reach. " God uses us to help each other so, lending our minds out." ^ If ever a man lent out his mind to help others, Ruskin is the man. From country to country, from age to age, from element to element, he leads the way, while his audience, laughing, delighted, follows with scrambling thoughts and apprehensions and flying leaps, he meanwhile illustrating each delightful, fanciful, dictatorial sentence with pictures by the way — things, facts, objects interwoven, bookcases opening wide, sliding drawers unlocked with his own mar- vellous keys — and lo ! we are perhaps down in the centre of the earth, far below Brantwood and its surrounding hills, among specimens, minerals, and precious stones, Ruskin still going ahead, and crying " sesame " and " sesame," and revealing each secret recess of his King's Treasury in turn, pointing to each tiny point of light and rainbow veined in marble, gold and opal, crystal and emerald. Then, perhaps, while we are wondering, and barely beginning to apprehend ^—2 73 his delightful illustrations, the lecturer changes from natural things to those of art, from veins of gold meandering in the marble and speaking of ages, to coins marking the history of man. I was specially struck by some lovely old Holbein pieces of Henry VHI. which he brought out. I can still see Ruskin's hand holding the broad gold mark in its palm. Who could help speculating at such a moment .'' Whence had it come, that golden token, since Holbein laid his chisel down ? From what other hands had it reached this one ? Had Shakespeare once had the spending of it, had Bacon clutched at it, or had Buckingham flung it to the wind, or had Milton owned it, perhaps, before Cromwell called the King's money back into his own treasury ? Any- how, this golden piece has escaped the Puritan's crucibles, and here it is still, to show us what a golden coin has been, and lying safe in the Brantwood treasury. IV It is now several years since we were at Coniston, and I may have perhaps somewhat confused the various occasions when we went to Brantwood. One year the family was ab- sent during our stay, but tokens of present kindness came day after day — basketfuls brought up by the gardener, roses and the afore-mentioned strawberries, and other ripe things that had colored in its sunshine. Another year when we were staying at the farm Ruskin was at Brantwood, alone with a young relative, and he asked us to go up and see him. Again I remember one of those long monologues, varied, absorbing, combining pictures and metaphors into one delightful whole, while the talker, carried 74 I along by his own interest in his subject, would be starting to his feet, bringing down one and another volume from the shelf, opening the page between his hands, and beginning to read the passage appropriate to his theme. It was some book of Indian warfare that he brought down from its place, and as he opened it he then and there began his sermon : spoke of the example which good Christian men and wom- en might set in any part of the world , quoted Sir Herbert Ed- wards, whom he loved and admired, as an example of what a true man should be. He spoke of him with kindling eyes, warming as he went on to tell, as only a Ruskin could tell it, the heroic history of the first Sikh war. What happened in India yesterday he did not know ; he said he sometimes spent months without once looking at the papers, and in de- liberate ignorance of what was happening and not happen- ing in their columns. There is a story told of Ruskin receiving a telegram not long ago from some member of the royal family, of which he could not construe the meaning until he called in the telegraph boy, who then informed him of an event with which the country had been ringing for weeks past, and to Avhich the telegram related. I further remember, among other things, after his little lecture upon "True Knights," a delightful description of what a True Lady should be. " A princess, a washer-woman," he said — "yes, a washer-woman ! To see that all is fair and clean, to wash with water, to cleanse and purify wlierever she goes, to set disordered things in orderly array — this was a Njvoman's mission." Which sentence has often occurred to me since then at irritating moments of household adminis- tration. Ruskin has written something not unlike it in his lecture upon "Queen's Gardens;" but how different is the impression left, even by such printers' type as his, from that of the words and the voice flowing on in its measure ! 77 (! The writer, speaking to one of Ruskin's most constant and faithful readers, once compared him to a Prospero, thinking of this strange power of his over the minds of those who are in liis company, of the sweet harmonies he can raise at will, of the wanderings he can impose upon his subjects, and of his playful humors and fanciful experiments upon the audience, " be it to fly, to swim, to dive into the fire, to ride on the curl'd cloud." Mrs. Fanny Kemble, who was the lady in question (she sat with a volume of Modern Paint- ers open before her), said ; " No ; I myself see no resem- blance whatever between the two : Prospero dealt with magic and unreality ; the power of Ruskin lies in the extraordinary reality of his teaching. Think what a vision of beauty lies spread before that man." And this is certainly high and worthy praise, coming from one who herself belongs to the noble race of spiritual pastors and masters. Mrs. Kemble concluded by quoting Ruskin's account of a heap of gravel by the road-side, which she had just been reading, and which she said had struck her as one Of the most remarkable de- scriptions ever written in the English language. V Ruskin has said somewhere that his three great masters have been Tintoret, Carlyle, and Turner. When John Rus- kin, the son of John Ruskin, was bornMn 1819, Titian had been dead over two hundred years ; Carlyle, beginning life, was living in Edinburgh, where he was supporting himself by literature and by articles in Dr. Brewster's Encyclopcedia ; Turner was a man of forty-four, already Avell advanced in life; he had published his Liber Sti/dionim, painted many v« f ^l THE TURRET ROOM — RUSKIN b BEDROOM noble pictures; he had built his house in Queen Anne Street, and was then starting for Italy. It was a dull and unromantic time in the history of England, a time reach- ing beyond the fifty years' radius of our recent Jubilee. Men, weary of war, were resting and counting its cost; the poor were suffering, the rich were bankrupt ; the old King was dying, Princess Charlotte was dead ; the Regent was absorbed in his schemes and selfish ends ; corn was at starvation prices ; mobs were breaking out in discon- tent and riot-, and yet no less than in more propitious hours were the divine sparks falling from heaven — upon chil- dren at their play, upon infants in their cradles, who were to grow up with hearts kindled by that sacred flame which, refracted from generation to generation, keeps the world alive. 79 "See a disenchanted nation Spring like day from desolation ; To Truth its state is dedicate, And Freedom leads it forth." So wrote Shelley, at that time looking his last at the Bay of Naples, and completing the first act of his Prometheus, while Browning and Tennyson were childreii at play in their fathers' gardens — Tennyson hidden far away among Lin- colnshire wolds and levels, Browning plucking his own brand . of Promethean fire somewhere on the heights that encircle the great city where Ruskin, still lying in his cradle, had not as yet found a miraculous voice to cry out with, and to protest that though love of Truth and Justice might be the same for both, Shelley's Freedom and John Ruskin's Free- dom were as unlike as night and day.* " I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school — Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's," says Ruskin in the first lines of Prceterita, going back to those early days when his lately married father and mother had settled down in Bloomsbury, and when he him- self first comes upon the scene, " a child with yellow hair, dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad, light blue sash and blue shoes to match," standing at a window, and watching the events of the street. As one reads Prceterifa it seems as if John Ruskin wrote his history not with ink, but painted it down with light and color; he brings the very atmosphere of his life and its phases before us with such an instantaneous mastery as few besides have ever reached — the life within, without the sweet eternal horizons (even though they be but Norwood * " My own teaching has been and is that Liberty, whether in the body, soul, or political estate of men, is only another word for Death, and tlie final issue of Death — Putrefaction ; the body, spirit, and political estate being healthy only by their bonds and laws " — 1875, Fors, Letter 411, 80 hills and ridges), the living and delightful figures in the foreground. Its author has chosen to christen the story Prcrterita, but was ever a book less belonging to the past and more en- tirely present to our rnood than this one ? Not Goethe's own autobiography, not even Carlyle's passionate reminis- cences, come up to it in vividness. There are so few words, such limpid images are brought flashing before us, that in our secret consciousness we /-emember rather than we read." Are we not actually living in its pages, in the dawning light of that austere yet glorious childhood ? Half a century rolls back, and we see the baby up above at the drawing-room Avindows, standing absorbed, watching the water-carts, and that wondrous turn-cock, "who turns and turns till a fount- ain springs up in the middle of the street," and as we still watch the child, gazing out with his blue, deep-set eyes, the brown brick walls somehow become transparent, as they did for Ebenezer Scrooge, and we are in the same mysterious fashion absorbed into the quiet home and silent life. We get to know the inmates with some immaterial friendship and intimacy. The father, " that entirely honest man " of rare gifts and refinement, going and coming to his wine- merchant's office in Billeter Street ; the mother, combining the spirit of Martha and of Mary, unflinching, orderly, living for her husband and her son, not rejecting the better part, but forcing every member of her household to conform to her views of both worlds, and binding down their lives by some emphatic and restraining power. But how soon the child born to such liberty of thought, to such absolute obedi- ence of will, learns to escape from his bonds, to create his own life and world ! His very playthings (all others being denied to him) he makes for himself out of the elements, the air above, the waters beneath, the craters of the coal-heavers as they empty the sacks at the door. " My mother's general principles of the first treatment were to guard me with steady watchfuhiess from all avoidable pain or danger; and for the rest to let me amuse myself ; but the law was I should find my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first al- lowed, and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic., poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my birth days, thinking to overcome my mother's resolution by splen- dor of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she could find in all the Soho Bazar, as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that would dance. . . . My mother was obliged to accept them, but afterwards quietly told me it was not right I should have them, and I never saw them again." This Croydon aunt must have been a good and loving aunt to little John. "Whenever my father was ill," he says — " and hard work and sorrow had already set their mark on him — we all went down to Croydon to be petted by my homely aunt, and walk on Duppas Hill and on the heather of Addington." He dwells with affectionate remembrance upon the house and its gables and early fascinations for him. " My chosen domain being the shop, the back room, and the stones round the spring of crystal water at the back door (long since let down into the modern sewer), and my chief companion my aunt's dog Towser, whom she had taken pity on when he was a snappish, starved vagrant, and made a brave and affectionate dog of, which was the kind of thing she did for every living creature that came in her way all her life long." Mrs. Ruskin, with all her passionate devotion to her son, seems to have had no idea whatever of making a little child happy. The baby's education was terribly consistent; he was steadily whipped w^hen he was troublesome or when he tumbled down-stairs. "We seldom had company even on week-days, and I was never allowed to come down to 82 dessert until much later in life, when I was able to crack other people's nuts for them, but never to have any myself, nor anything else of a dainty kind. Once at Hunter Street I recollect my mother giving me three raisins in the forenoon out of the store -cabinet." But not all the rules and rails and restrictions of Hunter Street and Brunswick Square could prevent the child from finding out for himself that brick walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage. He stands in the light of the window, in his silent, thoughtful fashion, creating his own existence for himself, and just as the turn -cock turned and turned until a fountain sprang from the pavement, so even in baby life does Ruskin lay his master-hand upon the stones, and lo ! the stream of life be- gins to flow. In later days he smites the rock, and bids the children drink living waters from the spring of life eternal, sometimes also to be mingled with those waters of strife "called Meribah."* VI It was up on the summit of Heme Hill that John Ruskin the elder (when he felt that his affairs justified him in so doing) bought the semi-detached house standing among the almond blossoms, from whence Ruskin dates the pref- ace to Prmterita. " I write these few prefatory words on my father's birthday," says Ruskin, in the year 1886, "in what was once my nursery in his old house, to which he brought my mother and me sixty- two years since, I being then four years old." We have good reason to be grateful to a writer who sets down for our happy reading such remembrance, such silence, * See the first volume of Modern Painters and certain numbers of Deucalion, etc. 83 as this. Almost every child has some natural glamour and instinct of its own by which the glare of life is softened, and the first steep ways garlanded and eased and charmed. We call those men poets who retain this divine faculty all their lives, and who are able to continue looking at the world with the clear gaze of childhood, discerning the unchanging ^natural things and beauties in the midst of all the wanderings V)f disappointment and confusion. Such a poet is Ruskin, if ever a man was born one. Take the story of little John at play in his childish garden, where the mulberry-tree and the white heart cherry-tree are growing : " The ground was ab- solutely beneficent with magical splendor of abundant fruit, fresh green, soft amber, and rough bristled crimson, bending the spinous branches, clustered pearl and pendent ruby, joyfully discoverable under the large leaves that looked like vine." ..." The differences of primal importance which~T observed," he says, " between the nature of this garden and that of Eden, as I imagined it, were that in this one all the fruit was forbidden, and there were no companionable beasts." Then follows a touch of which many a parent will ruefully acknowledge the truth : " My mother, finding her chief per- sonal pleasure in her flowers, was often planting or pruning beside me, at least if I chose to stay beside her. . . . Her presence was no restraint to me, and also no particular pleasure, for, from having always been left so much alone, I had generally my own little affairs to see to, and by the time I was seven years old I was already independent mentally both of my father and mother, and having nobody else to be dependent upon, began to lead a yery small, poky, con- tented, conceited, Cock-Robinson-Crusoe sort of life." How these words set one to the measure and the feeling: of that isolated mystical little life in the central point of the universe, as he says it appeared to him, as it must generally appear to geometrical animals ! 84 p When little John grew older he learned to read and to spell with what seems absolutely wonderful quickness. Every morning after breakfast he sat down with his mother to read the Bible. " My mother never gave me more to learn than she knew I could easily get learned, if I set myself honestly to work, by twelve o'clock. She never allowed anything to disturb me when my task was set ; and in gen- eral, even when Latin grammar came to supplement the Psalms, I was my own master for at least half an hour before the half-past one dinner." The list of those portions of the Psalms and chapters of the Bible which little John Ruskin had to learn by heart is conscientiously given, and might seem to some of us an appalling list. But upon this he comments as follows : " Truly, though I have picked up the elements of a little further knowledge, and owe not a little to the teaching of many people, this maternal installa- tion of my mind in that property of chapters I count very confidently the most precious, and on the whole the one essential, part of my education." " Peace, Obedience, Faith," were the three great boons of his early life, he says, and *'the habit of fixed attention." The defects of it are told very forcibly in language which is pathetic in its directness. " I had nothing to love. My parents were, in a sort, visible powers of nature to me ; no more loved than the sun and moon." And thus he sums it up. His life was too formal and too luxurious ; " by protection innocent, instead of by practice virtuous." Ruskin should have been a novelist. It is true, he says he never knew a child more incapable than himself of tell- ing: a tale, but when he chooses to describe a man * or a woman, there stands the figure before us ; when he tells a * Take these few lines descriptive of Severn : " Lightly sagacious, lovingly hu- morous, daintily sentimental, as if life were but for him the rippling chant of his fa- vorite song, ' Gente '. e qui l^uccellatore.'' " 87 story, we live it. His is rather the descriptive than the con- structive faculty ; his mastery is over detail and quality rather than over form. How delightfully he remembers ! How one loves his journeys in Mr. Telford's post-chaise, where he sits propped upon his own little trunk between father and mother, looking out at the country through the glass windows. Mr. Ruskin the elder is travelling for or- ders, and he brings his family north, and finally to his sis- ter's home in Perth, where we read of the Scottish aunt and the playfellow cousins, of the dark pools of Tay, of the path above them, " being seldom traversed by us children, except at harvest-time, when we used to go gleaning in the fields beyond." "I hesitate in recording as a constant truth_ior the world the impression left on me, when I went gleaning with Jessie, that Scottish sheaves are more golden than are found in other lands, and that no harvests elsewhere visible to human eyes are so like the. corn of heaven* as those of Strath Tay and Strath Earn." Was ever story more simple, more pathetic, than the story of little Peter and his mother ! " My aunt, a pure dove- priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland Dodona, was of a far gentler temper, but still to me remained at a wistful distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of three of her children before her husband's death. Little Peter especially had been the corner-stone of her love's building ; and it was thrown down swiftly. White-swelling came in the knee ; he suffered much, and grew weaker grad- ually, dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient. She wanted him one day to take half a glass of port-wine, and took him on her knee and put it to his lips. 'Not now, mamma ; in a minute,' said he, and put his head on her shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and died." * Psalms, Ixxviii., 24. 88 Little Peter's mother followed him before many years, and the rest of her children having passed one by one through the dark river, Mary, the only survivor, comes to live in the Ruskin household, " a serene additional neutral tint " in the home. The two children read the Bible together, write abstracts of the sermons in the chapel at Walworth, which they at- tend. On the Sundays when the family remain at home the father reads Blair's sermons aloud, or if a clerk or cus- tomer dines with them, "the conversation in mere necessary courtesy would take the direction of sherry" (Dickens him- self might have envied this touch), while the two children sit silent in their corner with the Pilgrini's Progress and Quarles's Emblems and Fox's Book of Martyrs to pass the time. On week-days John, who is now ten years old, is learning Greek with Dr. Andrews, copying Cruikshank's illustrations, and writing English doggerel. When Ruskin was turned twelve his mother had taken him six times through the Bible \ he had had various clas- sical masters, drawing masters, and other teachers ; he had begun to study mineralogy, was allowed to taste wine, to go to a theatre, and on festive days to dine with his father and mother, and to listen to his father's reading of the Nodes Ambrosiance and of Byron. On Ruskin's thirteenth birthday his father's partner, Mr. Henry Telford, gives him Rogers's Italy, with its illustrations, and, so he says, de- termined the main tenor of his life. "The drawing-master liad vaguely stated that the world had been greatly dazzled and led away by some splendid ideas thrown out by burner, but until then Turner had not existed for the quiet family on Heme Hill." Besides all these rising interests there are also the de- scriptions of the people (not very numerous) who begin to cross the stage, we get glimpses of the neighbors, and we seem to know them as we know the people out of Vanity Fair, or out of Miss Austen's novels : Mr. Telford, the owner of the travelling carriage and the giver of illustrated books ; the two clerks at their work — Henry Ritchie, who loves Margate — (If you want to be happy, get a wife and come to Margate, he writes) — and Henry Watson and his musical sisters. Then there is Miss Andrews, who sang " Tambourgi, Tambourgi ;" old Mrs. Munroe, with Petite, her white poodle ; and her daughter Mrs. Richard Gray, "entirely simple, meek, loving, and serious, saved from be- ing stupid by a vivid nature full of enthusiasm, likelier hus- band's." It is English middle-class life for the most part, described with something of George Eliot's racy reality. VII In the early chapters of Prceterita there is the story of Ruskin's first acquaintance with the enchanting Domecq family, which played so important a part in his young life — the four girls who, arriving unexpectedly, reduced him "to a heap of white ashes," which mercredi des cendres, we read, lasted four years. We are not exactly told which of the sisters — whether Adele, the graceful blonde of fifteen, Ce- cile, the dark-eyed, finely browed girl of thirteen, or Elise or little Caroline of eleven, was the chief favorite. They had all been born abroad ; they spoke Spanish and French with perfect grace, English with broken precision ; he de- scribes "a Southern Cross of unconceived stars floating on a sudden into my obscure firmament of a London suburb." The writer can picture to herself something of the charm go e-7 « 4 , ' -^ quietly amassing the fortune he spends so generously and in so liberal a spirit. The history of the Turners is also to be noted : of the collection gradually increasing; of the father's pleasure, of the son's delight, in the pictures of Richmond Bridge and Gosport ; in the drawing of Winchelsea, "the chief recrea- tion of my fatigued hours.'" Sir John Simon tells a story of a visit Ruskin once paid to a sale of pictures, and of his return home dispirited, saying there was but one picture he had wanted in the whole collection, and that one was already sold. And there it was before him. It was his father who had bought it, thinking it was one he would be sure to de- light in. Ruskin the elder must have had a most unerring, and remarkable critical faculty, and it was undoubtedlyA from him that John Ruskin inherited his own genius for art. There is the record of the paternal gift of i^2oo a year in the funds upon the son's coming of age, out of which an- other Turner is bought for £']o. " It was not a piece of painted paper, but a Welsh castle and village and Snowdon in blue cloud that I bought for my seventy pounds." VIII Ruskin was entered as Gentleman-Commoner at Christ- church, Oxford, and came up in January, 1837. " I was entered as Gentleman- Commoner without further debate, and remember still as if it were yesterday the pride of walking out of the Angel Hotel and past University Col- lege, holding my father's arm, in my velvet cap and silk gown." The father and mother had set their hearts on his going G 97 into the Church. He would have made a bishop, said his father long years after, with tears in his eyes ; and we may read now, indeed, of the first sermon Raskin ever preached, a baby one, in which he describes himself as standing up with a red cushion before him, and thumping and preach- ing •' People be good." * Ruskin remained at Oxford until 1840. The story of his stay there, of his work, of his friends, is all delightful reading ; not the least touching part of it all is the account of his mother (with his father's entire acquiescence) leaving her home, her daily habits, and establishing herself in lodg- ings in the Oxford High Street, so as to be at hand in case of need. Ruskin's own filial devotion is also to be admired. He tells us that his wishes and his happiness were the chief preoccupations of their lives, and he accepts the loving tie generously, as all sons do not. Speaking of his degree, Ruskin says : " When I was sure I had got through, I went out for a walk in the fields north of New College (since turned into the Parks), happy in the sense of recovered freedom, but extremely doubtful to what use I should put it. There 1 was at two -and -twenty, with such and such powers, all second-rate except the analytical ones, which were as much in embryo as the rest, and which I had no means of measuring; such and such likings hitherto in- dulged rather against conscience, and a dim sense of duty to myself, my parents, and a daily more vague shadow of Eternal Law. What should I be or do ?" This question was to be answered very shortly by publication of the first volume of Modern Painters. Before coming away from Ox- ford I must not omit to quote a curious passage concerning Dean Liddell, " one of the rarest types of nobly presenced Englishmen, the only man in Oxford in his day who cared * Nor, indeed, has he happily ceased to preach this sermon, the text of which brings back to one's mind the touching words of dying Scott. 98 about art, and whose ' keen ' saying concerning Turner, ' that he had got hold of a false ideal,' " is here noted (curiously enough) by Ruskin as one which would have been eminently helpful to him at the time, had it been then impressed upon him. After that we come to the history of that illness after overwork which sent Ruskin and his parents abroad again for an indefinite period, travelling away by Rouen and Tours,~ by the Rhone to Avignon, thence by the Riviera to Florence and the South, in search of health. There is also this epi- taph upon Oxford : " Oxford taught me as much Greek as she could, and though I think she might have also told me that fritillaries grew in Ififley meadow, it was better that she left me to find them for myself. 1 must get on," he con- tinues, "to the days of opening sight and efifective labor, and to the scenes of nobler education, which all men who keep their hearts open receive in the end of days." It is always interesting to ascertain when a great man be- gins his life's work ; but, after all, it is scarcely the printing of the book or the framing of the picture which puts a date to the hour in which the mind ripens or carries out its con- ception ; and the casual mention in Prceterita of the publi- cation of Modem Painters shows how much of thought and feeling had already gone towards the book, of which the act- ual publishing seemed the least memorable part to the au- thor. Speaking of the first volume of Modern Painters, he only says: ''It took the best part of the winter's leisure," and dismisses the subject with, ■' The said first volume must have been out by my father's birthday ; its success was as- sured by the end of the year." The book made its mark then and there. Those qualities which Ruskin prefers to call his analytical qualities seem to others to be a happy combination of intuition, of industry, and vivid imagination. Though the graduate's principles and teachings were variously esteemed, every one acknowl- 99 edged their importance, and it seems but justice to Mr. Ruskin to suggest tliat he was not altogether accountable for the seriousness with which his admirers have sometimes accepted his eloquent paradoxes and humors. It is hardly fair, perhaps, to look back alrthe by-gone criticisms of this startling and eloquent publication. Reviewers writing long after, with experience and knowledge of the road, can drive their team steadily, cracking their long whips with a sense of dignity and final authority which is admirable for retro- spective commonplace ; but how are they to rein in a Pe- gasus who has inadvertently found himself harnessed to the old coach, and who puts out his wings and flies straight up into the air ? Pegasus in his flight does not hesitate to kick out right and left, overturning as he goes the various " Van Somethings and Bac Somethings," with other shrines that we would more gladly sacrifice. Blackwood of those days took up the battle in an overbearing and angry spirit. The reviewer comes to the defence of the giants and windmills this new Don Quixote is attacking right and left— Claude, Salvator, Cuyp, Berghem, Ruysdael, etc. "You cannot judge with judgment if you have not the sun in your spirit and passion in your heart," cries the young champion, deal- ing his thrusts. But this is not language to be applied to such authorities as those of Blackwood then, or perhaps of the Edinburgh nowadays ; and the critics in return strike at the 2raduate with the sun in their eyes, and with passion in their words if not in their hearts. A second article which appeared in Blackwood some years later was far more within the limits of fair and measured criticism, allowing the book to be the work of a man of power, thinking independently, feeling strongly, and with " a mortal aversion to be in a crowd." Meanwhile Fraser, in its article on the second edition, declares that " the Ox- ford graduate has sought a reputation even in the cannon's mouth, has scaled the wall of the Castle of Prejudice, and from its embattled parapet waves us to follow." The grad- uate's volume " prompts us to leave the conventional for the true, and quitting the cant of gallery connoisseurship, to find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." From the Ethics of the Dust to the Stones of Ve?iice, from the Springs of Wandel to Deucalion, there is nothing which has once attracted him which he does not study with love and intuition, nothing he does not use with admiration. This applies most especially to his love for Nature. For the more human part in art his feeling is different altogether, and there his instinct for de- struction is often as fierce as his gift for construction is ex- quisite when he treats of Nature and her silent belongings. IX The writer of this little essay certainly cannot pretend either to the knowledge or to the infallibility of an art critic, and she has therefore ventured to take Ruskin from her own point of view only, as a "Light-bearer," as a writer of the English language, as a poet in his own measure. How is it possible to a man writing, as he says, "with passion," with all the vibrating chords of a thousand interests and revelations, to be the temperate and dispassionate awarder of that bare justice which is all an orthodox critic should bestow? Many things, indeed, leave him altogether silent and apparently irresponsive ; he does not always contradict the verdict of generations, but he accepts it without enthusiasm. The in- stinctive form which beauty takes for him is that of Nature and her direct influence upon himself. His attitude towards Greek art is curiously cliaracteristic of this ; so were his first impressions of Rome. Very long afterwards Ruskin said of his mother's house- keeping arrangements : " I don't think the reader has yet been informed that I inherited to the full my mother's love of tidiness and cleanliness, and that in Switzerland, next to her eternal snows, what I most admired was her white sleeves." Was it Ruskin's love of order, then, which caused him to suffer so much in Rome, where he waywardly painted the rags fluttering in a by-street, and would not give a thought to the ancient churches and statues and pictures and ruins ? Was it his love of tidiness or his sincerity which made him at first write almost cruelly of Italy, of Florence, and of the Uffizi, of Siena and its cathedral, "costly confectionery, faithless vanity?" The first sight of St. Peter's, he tells us, was to him little more than a gray milestone, announcing twenty miles yet of stony road. He ascertained that the Stanze could not give him any pleasure. " What the Fo- rum or Capitol had been he did not in the least care. Raph- ael's ' Transfiguration ' and Domenichino's ' St. Jerome " he pronounced, without the smallest hesitation — Domenichi- no's a bad picture, and Raphael's an ugly one " (which ver- dict I can remember my own father indorsing, as far as the Raphael was concerned). I ought also in fairness to add that, later on, many of Ruskin's unqualified early criticisms are entirely modified and swept away. For the second volume of Modem Painters, " not meant to be in the least like what it is," Ruskin wanted " more Chamouni ;" and further on, feeling that he must know more of Italy, see Pau and Florence again, before writing another word, he tells his indulgent parents of his wish. Turner, of all people, strongly opposed the journey, the Continent being then in an angry and disturbed condition; but papa and mamma seem to have agreed. And so the new life began for him as we read in the chapters headed Campo Santo and Macugnaga. " Serious, enthusiastic, worship and wonder and work ; up at six, drawing, study- ing, thinking; breaking bread and drinking wine at inter- vals: homeward the moment the sun went down." "The days that began in the cloister of the Campo Santo at Pisa ended by my getting upon the roof of Santa Maria della Spnia, and sitting in the sunlight that tranfused the warm marble of its pinnacles till the unabated brightness went down beyond the arches of the Ponte a Mare, the few foot- steps and voices of the twilight silent in the streets, and the city and her mountains stood mute as a dream beyond the soft eddying of Arno." We may judge by these illus- trations to his life what sort of material it was that Ruskin himself put into his noble books. It was between the publication of the first and second volumes of Modern Painters- that Ruskin came under Car- lyle's influence. Long years afterwards Carlyle himself, writing to Emerson, says: "There is nothing going on among us as notable to me as those fierce lightning-bolts Ruskin is copiously and desperately pouring into the black world of Anarchy all around him. No other man in Eng- land that I meet has in him the divine rage against iniquity, falsity, and baseness that Ruskin has, and that every man ought to have. Unhappily he is not a strong man — one might say a weak man rather — and has not the least pru- dence of management, though if he can hold out for anoth- er fifteen years or so. he miy produce, even in this way, a great effect or so. God grant it. say I." 1 heard a pretty account once from Mr. Alfred Lyttel- ton of a visit paid by Ruskin to Carlyle in the familiar room in Cheyne Walk, with the old picture of Cromwell on the wall, and Mrs. Carlyle's little tables and pretty knick- knacks still in their quiet order. Mr. Ruskin had been ill 103 not long before, and as he talked on of something he cared about, Mr. Lyttelton said his eyes lighted up, and he seem- ed agitated and moved. Carlyle stopped him short, saying the subject was too interesting. "You must take care," he said, with that infinite kindness which Carlyle could show ; " you will be making yourself ill once more." And Ruskin, quite simply, like a child, stopped short. " You are right," he said, calling Carlyle "master," and then went on to talk of something else, as dull, no doubt, as anything could be that Ruskin and Carlyle could talk about together. In the first volume of Frictcrita there is one particular passage about Carlyle to which many of us will demur. Ruskin himself this time is now quoting from the Emer- son correspondence, and he says: "I find at page i8 this to me entirely disputable, and to my thought, so far as un- disputed, niuch blamable and pitiable exclamation of my master's :" *Not till we can think that here and there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste earth become a peopled garden.' My training, as the reader has perhaps enough perceived, produced in me the precisely opposite sentiment. My times of happiness had always been when nobody was thinking of me. . . . The garden at home was no waste place to me because I did not suppose myself an object of interest either to the ants or the but- terflies, and the only qualification of the delight of my even- ing walk at Champagnole was the sense that my father and mother wete thinking of me, and would be frightened if 1 was ten minutes late for tea. . . . " I don't mean in the least that I could have done with- out them. They were to me much more than Carlyle's wife to him. . . . But that the rest of the world was waste to him unless he had admirers in it is a sorry state of sentiment enough, and I am somewhat tempted for once to admire the exactly opposite temper of my own solitude. My en- 104 tire delight was in observing without leing observed ; if I could have been invisible, all the bettei I was absolutely interested in men and in their ways as 1 was interested in marmots and chamois and in trouts. . . . The living habita- tion of the world, the grazing and nesting in it, the spirit- ual power of the air, the rocks, the waters — to be in the midst of it, and rejoice, and wonder at ; . . . this was the essential love of nature in me, this the root of all that I have usefully become." As I have already said, this peculiar sense of solemn responsibility to nature and to mankind, and irresponsibil- ity to individuals, is most specially to be noted in Ruskin ; more specially in the young Ruskin, who writes as people of strong imaginations write when the impulse is on them, realizing at the moment but one aspect of a feeling. But though he writes in this detached and lofty fashion, every page of his memoir vibrates with the warm light of a united home, where exist mutual love, confidence, sympathy, with- out which half the charm of the whole picture would be gone. X At Macugnaga, Ruskin, maturing his second volume, seems to have lived in good company, with a couple of Shakespeare's plays and his own thoughts, but not to have enjoyed his solitude so much as might have been expected from his theories. Mr. Boxall and Mr. Hardinge presently joined him for a time, and then came another serious ill- ness, after which the second volume of Modern Painters was published, in 1846. This second volume concerns the schools of Italy and its histories of art, and raised as much indignation as the I OS first had done, thcaigh less irritation. Critics thanked Heaven openly th?t they were publicans and still able to admire, not Phar'^ees rejecting right and left. Then fol- lowed another beautiful sermon and more parables. " The book I called The Seven Lamps was to show that certain right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture, without exception, had been produced." The Stones of Venice appeared be- tween the years 1851 and 1853, and had from beginning to end no other aim than to show that the Gothic archi- tecture 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 indicated in all its features, a state of concealed national infidelity and of domestic corruption. Again and again, as we read our Ruskin, the truth of his father's saying occurs to one, " He should have been a bishop !" Everything has a moral to him and a meaning. " In these books of mine, their distinctive character as es- says on art is their bringing everything to a root in human passion or in human hope," he says in Modern Painters (vol. v.). The law of perfectness is one of his favorite texts, one that he would have us all pursue. He culls and he chooses at will, dwelling upon each detail which illus- trates his own vast and lovely conception of things as they should be — as they might be for us if we were all Ruskins ; and the chief danger for his disciples is that of seeing de- tails too vividly, and missing the whole. There is also all the extraordinary influence of his personality in his teach- ing. Oracles such as Mill and Spencer veil their faces when they utter. Poets and orators like Ruskin uncover their heads as they address their congregations. Ruskin has not only words at his command, but deli- cate hands. Look at the sketches and drawings in the 106 latter volumes of Modern Painters. How eloquent and graceful they are, whether it is indicated motion or shad- ow, whether clouds or spiral leaf and upspringing branch ! When Raskin records his past, it is as often as not by the sketches he has taken along the way that he marks his progress. And how true the saying is that nothing else — no descriptions — ever bring back a former state of mind and be- ins: as an old sketch will do ! Sometimes one's old self actual- ly seems to come up and take it out of one's hand. ( )nly last night, apropos of these sketches of Ruskin's, and of a new portfolio of them lately published, I heard no less an author- ity than the Slade Professor at Cambridge saying that, with all the credit Professor Ruskin has justly won as a master of English diction, ke has scarcely gained as much as he de- served for the exquisite character of his actual drawing. As one looks down the list of Ruskin's writings* one can * It may be convenient to give the following list of Mr. Ruskin's works, taken from Me7i of the Time, and from the fly-leaves of Mr. George Allen : Poems. Friendship's Offering. 1835 t° Unto this Last. Cornhill Magazine. 1843. 1S60-1S62. Modem Painters. Vol. I., 1843. Munera Pulveris. Frazer''s Magazine. Modern Painters. Vol. II., 1846. 1S62-1863. Art. Quarterly Review, June, 1847, Lord Notes on the Alps. Lindsay's Christian Art March, 1848, Cestus of Aglaia. 1865. Eastlake on the History of Painting. Sesame and Lilies. 1865. Seven Lamps of Architecture. Ethics of the Dust. 1865. King of the Golden River. 1849. Illus- Crown of Wild Olive. 1866. trated by R. Doyle. Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne. Stones of Venice. Vol. III., '5i-'53. 1851. Queen of the Air. i86g. Lectures on Architecture and Painting. Lectures on Art. 1871 to 1878. 1853. Fors Clavigera. Giotto and his Works in Padua, 1854, for Aratra Pentelice. 1872. the Arundel Society. The Relation between Michael Angelo Notes on the Royal Academy. Five parts. and Tintoret. 1872. 1855 to 1859. The Eagle's Nest. 1872. Modern Painters. Vol. III., 1856. Ariadne Florentina. 1873-1876. Modern Painters, Vol. IV., 1S56. Love's Meinie. 1873. Notes on the Turner Collection. 1857. Val d' Arno. 1874. Political Economy of Art. 1857. Two Proserpina. 1875-1876. Lectures. 1859-1860. Deucalion. 1875-1878. The Two Paths. (Lectures on Art.) Mornings in Florence. 1875-1877. Modern Painters. Vol. V., 1S60. Bibliotheca Pastorum. 1877. Sir Joshua Holbein. Cornhill Magazine. Prajterita. (Still publishing.) 1888. i860. 107 roughly read the story of his life. In the early numbers of the Conihill ATagazine his papers on political economy ap- peared, and it must have been about that time that he en- tered into his partnership with Miss Octavia Hill, resulting in one of the most important and interesting movements of the day. There is a short article by Miss Hill in a by-gone Fort- 7iighily jRe7'iew, describing the beginning of what has led to so much. The article is called " Cottage Property in Lon- don." The said cottages, begrimed, and overcrowded by the dreary London peasantry, were whitewashed and drain- ed with the help of Mr. Ruskin's ;^7oo, and relet again by Miss Hill to the poor people themselves, of whom she al- ways writes with admirable discernment and sympathy. As she tells of her tenants, of their fortitude, their power of hope, their simple, entire confidence, their extraordinary patience. Miss Hill speaks with the knowledge that people bring whose genius is in the work into which they throw their hearts, and Mr. Ruskin was the first to recognize her gift. " I had not great ideas of what must be done," she says. " My strongest endeavors were to be used to rouse habits of industry and effort. The plan was one which depended on just governing more than on helping. The first point was to secure such power as would enable me to insist on some essential sanitary arrangements. I laid the scheme before Mr. Ruskin, who entered into it most warmly. He at once came forward with all the money necessary, and took the whole risk of the undertaking upon himself. He showed me, however, that it would be far more useful if it could be made to pay — that a workingman ought to be able to pay for his own house." . . . I found a letter among my father's papers the other day which must have been written by Mr. Ruskin about this io8 time, and as it bears upon one of his many theories, and is interesting and characteristic, I will insert it here. It con- cerned an old friend of my father's, Monsieur Louis Marvy, who spent one winter in Young Street. He was an engrav- er by profession; he had, as I believe, been mixed up in some of the revolutionary episodes of 1848. He was a very charming and gentle person, in delicate health. He used to work hour after hour at his plates. He lived quietly in our house, chiefly absorbed by his work. He died quite young, not long after his return to France. Mr. Ruskin's letter refers in a measure to this by -gone episode, and I have his permission to transcribe it : " Denmark Hill, 2isi Decemher, i860. "Dear Mr. Thackeray, — I think (or should think if I did not know) that you are quite right in this general law about lecturing, though, until I knew it, I did not feel able to refuse the letter of request asked of me. " The mode in which you direct your charity puts me in mind of a matter that has lain long on my mind, though I never have had the time or face to talk to you of it. " In somebody's drawing-room ages ago you were speaking accident- ally of M. de Marvy. I expressed my great obligation to him, on which you said that I could now prove my gratitude, if I chose, to his widow, which choice I then not accepting, have ever since remembered the cir- cumstance as one peculiarly likely to add, so far as it went, to the gen- eral impression on your mind of the hollowness of people's sayings and hardness of their hearts. " The fact is, I give what I give almost in an opposite way to yours. I think there are many people who will relieve hopeless distress for one who will help at a hopeful pinch, and when I have choice I nearly al- ways give where I think the money will be fruitful rather than merely helpful. I would lecture for a school when I would not for a distressed author, and would have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but not — unless I had no other object — his widow after he was gone. In a word, 1 like to prop the falling more than to feed the fallen. This, if you ever find out anything of my private life, you will know to be true; 109 but 1 bhall never feel cointortable, nevertheless, about that Marvy busi- ness unless you send to me for ten pounds for the next author, or artist, or widow of either, whom you want to help. " And with this weight at last off my mind, I pray you to believe me always faithfully, respectfully yours, J. Ruskin. " All best wishes of the season to you and your daughters." And my father's daughter may be perhaps forgiven for adding that there are few among us who will not sympa- thize as much witli Mr. Ruskin when he breaks his theories as when he keeps to them. I don't know if it is fair to quote the story I heard at Coniston, long after, of the man who had grossly lied and cheated at Brantwood for years, and whose wages Mr. Ruskin went on paying, be- cause he could not give him a character, and could not let him and his children starve. XI It may be here as well to say a few words of Mr. Rus- kin's public work. In the statement of the purposes of St. George's Guild published by him he explains the two chief objects of the society : — Firstly, agricultural work, reclaim- ing waste lands, and the encouragement of manual labor without the help of steam (*' a cruel and furious waste of fuel to do what every stream and breeze are ready to do"); Secondly, the building of museums and schools of art and study. " I continually see subscriptions of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand pounds for new churches. Now a good clergyman never wants a church. He can say all his pa- rishioners essentially need to hear in any of his parishion- ers' best parlors or upper chambers, or, if these are not large enough, in the market-place or harvest-field. What does he want with altars — was the Lord's Supper eaten on one ? — what with pews — useless rents for the pride of them; what with font and pulpit that the next way -side brook or mossy bank cannot give him ?". . . In order to form wholesome habits they (the young) must be placed under wholesome conditions. For the pursuit of any intellectual inquiry to advantage not only leisure must be granted them but quiet. . . . The words "school," "college," "univer- sity," rightly understood, imply the leisure necessary for learning, the companionship necessary for sympathy, and wilfulness restrained by the daily vigilance and firmness of tutors and masters. The writer has not seen the museum at Sheffield, but happening to admire the work of a young water-color paint- er only a day ago, and to ask where he had studied, she was told that he had studied with nature for a teacher ; but that besides working in this great academy he had also greatly profited by Mr. Ruskin's museum at Sheffield, where the most interesting and valuable art treasures are to be found in a couple of rooms opening on each side of the door of a road- side cottage. At one time Mr. Ruskin intended to build an art museum for Sheffield, and commissioned Mr. William Marshall to prepare the plans. I do not know why this scheme was never carried beyond the designs. Oxford first elected him to the Slade Professorship. Cambridge also made signals of respect and admiration, and he was elected Rede Lecturer in 1867. But it is difficult to imag- ine Ruskin at Cambridge ; Oxford seems to belong far more to his genius, to his emotional gifts, his playful mediaeval and romantic views of life. I have heard of him entertain- ing his guests as iiospilably in his rooms at Corpus as at Brantwood by the waters of the lake. A friend de- scribed to us the well -served breakfast, ample beyond all appetite of host or guest, and Ruskin, fearing to dis- appoint the cook, sending friendly and appreciative mes- sages. " A very nice relish for breakfast, sir," says the scout, offering some particular dish. "A very nice relish at any time," says Ruskin, kindly, refusing, " and tell the cook I said so." The following note of welcome shows what trouble Brant- wood takes for its friends : " King's Arms, Lancaster, Saturday. " Dear Mr. , — I have left orders to make you comfortable ; it is just possible, after these two days of darkness, you may even have a gleam of sun on Monday morning. " Eleven train to Carnforth Junction, where change carriages for Ul- verstone, where getting out, you will, I doubt not, see a dark post- chaise, into which getting, an hour and a half's pleasant drive brings you to Brantwood, where I hope you may be not uncomfortable what- ever the weather. " Yours faithfully, J. RUSKIN." Not the least among Ruskin's gifts to his fellow-men are the beautiful copies of beautiful pictures which he has had executed for the students at Sheffield and elsewhere : the best copies that the best talent art and knowledge could produce, bestowed with like liberality and sympathy upon those who have no means of reaching the originals. The following letters relating to this work will be found interest- ing. One is struck by the care for the work and the interest in the worker, to whose great kindness I owe this record : "Oxford, 2ot/i A/ay, 1873. " My dear , — I have your interesting letter, with the (to me very charming) little sketch of ' The Peace.' By the Virtues o>i the left I meant what perhaps my memory fails in placing there — on the left- hand wall, standing with your back to the window. 'The Peace' is opposite window, isn't it ? I can only say, do any face that strikes you. In this composition I care more for completeness of record than for ac- curate copying. There is nothing in it that I esteem exquisite as paint- ing ; but all is invaluable as design and emotion. Do it as thoroughly as you can pleasantly to yourself. For me, the Justice and Concord are the importanlest. As you have got to work comfortably on it, don't hurry. Do it satisfactorily ; and then to Assisi, where quite possibly I may join you, though not for a month or six weeks. " Keep me well in knowledge of your health and movements (writing now to Coniston), and believe me " Very faithfully yours, J. Ruskin. ..." I shall soon be writing to the good monks at Assisi; give them my love always. " Do not spare fees to custodes, and put them down separately to me. " People talk so absurdly about bribing. An Italian cannot know at first anything about an Englishman but that he is either stingy or gen- erous. The money gift really opens his heart, if he has one. You can do it in that case without money, indeed, eventually, but it is amazing how many people can have good (as well as bad) brought out of them by gifts, and no otherwise." "London, i^thjune, 1873. " My dear , — I am very glad to have your letters, and to see that you are on the whole well, and happy in your work. One's friends never do write to one when one's at Siena ; somehow it is impossible to suppose a letter ever gets there. "You may stay at your work there as long as you find necessary for easy completion. It will be long before I get to Assisi. " I don't care about anything in the Villa Spanocchi. All my pleas- ant thoughts of it — or any other place nearly — are gone. Do ' The Peace ' as thoroughly as possible, now you are at it. " I have intense sympathy with you about Sunday, but fancy my con- science was unusually morbid. I am never comfortable on the day. Of course the general shop-shutting and dismalness in England adds to the efiect of it. "Your day is admirably laid out, except that in your walk after four you go to look at pictures. You ought to rest in changed thoughts as much as possible, to get out on the green banks and brows, and think of nothing but what the leaves and winds say. " I have nothing to tell you of myself that is pleasant ; not much that H IIS is specially otherwise. The weather has been frightful in London. It was better at Coniston, but it appalls me ; it is a plague of darkness such as I never believed nature could inflict or suffer. " Always afTectionately yours, J. Ruskin." "Herne Hill, 22,d April, 1882. ..." That is a good passage of Leonardo's, but if you had read my Oxford lectures you would find their whole initiatory line and shade practice is (with distinct announcement of his authority) based on his book. I had read every word of it with care before I finished iMod. P." XII Sir Charles Newton writes on one occasion : " I spent last night with Ruskin, and very delightful it was. He is now taking that larger view of art which I always expected he would, and begins to regard Greek art from the point of view in which it ought to be looked at, and was regarded by the Greeks themselves." This letter was shown me by the kindest of friends, whose own noble inspiration is a blessing and a light to the age. Watts has often described his discussions with Ruskin during their long and intimate companionship. That Ruskin is remorseless all his friends must allow, but he is remorseless to himself as soon as a conviction is borne in upon him. Here is a charming example of a recantation in a letter to Mr. Burne-Jones : "Venice, 13^/2 May, 1869. " My dearest Ned,— There's nothing here like Carpaccio! There's a little bit of humble-pie for you ! " Well, the fact was, I had never once looked at him, having classed him in glance and thought with Gentile Bellini and other men of the more or less incipient and hard schools, and Tintoret went better with clouds and hills. But this Carpaccio is a new world to me. . . . I've only seen the Academy ones yet, and am going this morning ( cloudless light) to your St. George of the Schiavoni ; but I must send this word first to catch post. " From your loving J. R. "I don't give up my 'imtorei, nut his dissoluteness of expression into drapery and shadow is too licentious for me now." It is to Watts I also owe the following letters, which are so interesting in themselves, and do such honor to the candor and love of truth of the recipients, that I will set them down without comment. The letters recall that past vision of Little Holland House and its gardens, where for many years Watts, "the Signor," as his friends all call him, dwelt on, recording the generation of noble people passing by, as well as the beautiful ideals of his own mind, working day after day quietly from dawn of light to afternoon in that home of so much vivid life and original color, which has left the remembrance of kind deeds and happy, gracious ways shining like a track on the waters. " Saturday Evening, icjth Septettiher, i860. " Dear Watts, — I am very glad to have your letter to-night, having been downhearted lately and unable to write to my friends, yet glad of being remembered by them. I have kept a kind letter of Mrs. Prinsep's by me ever so long. It came too late to be answered before the birth- day of which it told me. " I will come and sit whenever and wherever and as long as you like. I have nothing whatever to do, and don't mean to have. I hope to be at National (lallery on Tuesday [erased], Wednesday [erased ; see end of note], and Thursday afternoons, two to four, not exactly working, but wondering. I entirely feel with you that there is no dodge in Titian. It is simply right doing with a care and dexterity alike unpractised among us nowadays. It is drawing with paint as tenderly as you do with chalk. ... I suspect that Titian depended on states and times in coloring more "5 than we do — tliat he left such and such colors for such and such times always before retouching, and so on ; but this you would not call dodge — would you? — but merely perfect knowledge of means. It struck me in looking at your group with child in the Academy that you depended too much on blending and too little on handling color ; that you were not simple enough nor quick enough to do all you felt ; nevertheless it was very beautiful. I should think you were tormented a little by hav- ing too much feeling. " If it is tine to-morrow I have promised to take a drive, but the second fine day, whatever that may be this week, I shall be at Trafalgar Square." "February 5, 1861. " My dear Watts, — Kind thanks for writing to ask for me. I am not unwell materially, but furiously sulky and very quiet over my work, and mean to be so, and having been hitherto a rather voluble and dem- onstrative person, people think I'm ill. I'm not cheerful, certainly, and don't see how anybody in their senses can be. " I did not say — did I ? — that you were not to aim at all qualities ; but not all at o)ice. Titian was born of strong race, and with every con- ceivable human advantage, and probably before he was twelve years old knew all that could be done with oil-painting. We are under every conceivable human disadvantage, and we must be content to go slowly. If you try at present to get all Titian's qualities, you will assuredly get none. You not only ha7