The Life of John Ruskin

by W. G. Collingwood · English · Gutenberg #13076 · 603,901 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Life of John Ruskin

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Life of John Ruskin

Author: W. G. Collingwood

Release date: August 1, 2004 [eBook #13076]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13076

Credits: E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Wilelmina Mallière, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF JOHN RUSKIN ***

THE LIFE OF JOHN RUSKIN

W. G. COLLINGWOOD
M.A., F.S.A., Late Professor of Fine Art, University College, Reading

1911

PREFACE TO THE SEVENTH EDITION

This book in its first form was written nearly twenty years ago with the
intention of contributing a volume to a series of University Extension
Manuals. For that purpose it included a sketch of Ruskin's "Work," with
some attempt to describe the continuous development of his thought. It
had the advantage--and the disadvantage--of being written under his eye;
that is to say, he saw as much of it as his health allowed; and it
received his general approval.

To explain my venturing upon the subject at all, I may perhaps be
allowed to state that I became his pupil in 1872 (having seen him
earlier), and continued to be in some relation to him--as visitor,
resident assistant, or near neighbour--until his death.

After his death the biographical part of my book was enlarged at the
expense of the description of his writings; and in revising once more I
have thrown out much relating to his works, chiefly because they are now
accessible as they were not formerly.

W.G.C.

CONISTON, May 1911

CONTENTS

BOOK I

THE BOY POET (1819-1842)

CHAPTER
I. HIS ANCESTORS
II. THE FATHER OF THE MAN (1819-1825)
III. PERFERVIDUM INGENIUM (1826-1830)
IV. MOUNTAIN-WORSHIP (1830-1835)
V. THE GERM OF "MODERN PAINTERS" (1836)
VI. A LOVE-STORY (1836-1839)
VII. "KATA PHUSIN" (1837-1838)
VIII. SIR ROGER NEWDIGATE'S PRIZE (1837-1839)
IX. "THE BROKEN CHAIN" (1840-1841)
X. THE GRADUATE OF OXFORD (1841-1842)

BOOK II

THE ART CRITIC (1842-1860)

I. "TURNER AND THE ANCIENTS" (1842-1844)
II. CHRISTIAN ART (1845-1847)
III. "THE SEVEN LAMPS" (1847-1849)
IV. "STONES OF VENICE" (1849-1851)
V. PRE-RAPHAELITISM (1851-1853)
VI. THE EDINBURGH LECTURES (1853-1854)
VII. THE WORKING MEN'S COLLEGE (1854-1855)
VIII. "MODERN PAINTERS" CONTINUED (1855-1856)
IX. "THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART" (1857-1858)
X. "MODERN PAINTERS" CONCLUDED (1858-1860)

BOOK III

HERMIT AND HERETIC (1860-1870)

CHAPTER

I. "UNTO THIS LAST" (1860-1861)
II. "MUNERA PULVERIS" (1862)
III. THE LIMESTONE ALPS (1863)
IV. "SESAME AND LILIES" (1864)
V. "ETHICS OF THE DUST" (1865)
VI. "THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE" (1865-1866)
VII. "TIME AND TIDE" (1867)
VIII. AGATES, AND ABBEVILLE (1868)
IX. "THE QUEEN OF THE AIR" (1869)
X. VERONA AND OXFORD (1869-1870)

BOOK IV

PROFESSOR AND PROPHET (1870-1900)

I. FIRST OXFORD LECTURES (1870-1871)
II. "FORS" BEGUN (1871-1872)
III. OXFORD TEACHING (1872-1875)
IV. ST. GEORGE AND ST. MARK (1875-1877)
V. "DEUCALION" AND "PROSERPINA" (1877-1879)
VI. THE DIVERSIONS OF BRANTWOOD (1879-1881)
VII. "FORS" RESUMED (1880-1881)
VIII. THE RECALL TO OXFORD (1882-1883)
IX. THE STORM-CLOUD (1884-1888)
X. DATUR HORA QUIETI (1889-1900)

THE LIFE OF JOHN RUSKIN

BOOK I

THE BOY POET (1819-1842)

THE LIFE OF JOHN RUSKIN

CHAPTER I

HIS ANCESTORS

If origin, if early training and habits of life, if tastes, and
character, and associations, fix a man's nationality, then John Ruskin
must be reckoned a Scotsman. He was born in London, but his family was
from Scotland. He was brought up in England, but the friends and
teachers, the standards and influences of his early life, were chiefly
Scottish. The writers who directed him into the main lines of his
thought and work were Scotsmen--from Sir Walter and Lord Lindsay and
Principal Forbes to the master of his later studies of men and the means
of life, Thomas Carlyle. The religious instinct so conspicuous in him
was a heritage from Scotland; thence the combination of shrewd
common-sense and romantic sentiment; the oscillation between levity and
dignity, from caustic jest to tender earnest; the restlessness, the
fervour, the impetuosity--all these are the tokens of a Scotsman of
parts, and were highly developed in John Ruskin.

In the days of auld lang syne the Rhynns of Galloway--that
hammer-headed promontory of Scotland which looks towards Belfast
Lough--was the home of two great families, the Agnews and the Adairs.
The Agnews, of Norman race, occupied the northern half, centring about
their island-fortress of Lochnaw, where they became celebrated for a
long line of hereditary sheriffs and baronets who have played no
inconsiderable part in public affairs. The southern half, from
Portpatrick to the Mull of Galloway, was held by the Adairs (or, as
formerly spelt, Edzears) who took their name from Edgar, son of
Dovenald, one of the two Galloway leaders at the Battle of the Standard.
Three hundred years later Robert Edzear--who does not know his
descendant and namesake, Robin Adair?--settled at Gainoch, near the head
of Luce Bay; and for another space of 300 years his children kept the
same estate, in spite of private feud, and civil war, and religious
persecution, of which they had more than their share.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, John Adair, the laird of
Little Genoch, was married to Mary Agnew, a near kinswoman of the
celebrated Sir Andrew, colonel of the Scots Fusiliers at Dettingen. The
exact relationship of Mary Agnew to "the bravest man in the British
army" remains undecided, but letters still extant from the Lady Agnew of
the day address her as "Dear Molly," and end, "Your affectionate cousin"
or "kinswoman." Her son Thomas succeeded his father in 1721, and,
retiring with his captaincy, settled on the estate. He married Jean,
daughter of Andrew Ross of Balsarroch and Balkail, a lady noted for her
beauty, her wit, and her Latin scholarship, and a member of a family
which has given many distinguished men to the army and navy. Among them
Admiral Sir John Ross, the Arctic explorer, Sir Hew Dalrymple, and
Field-Marshal Sir Hew Dalrymple Ross, were all her great-nephews, and
her son, Dr. John Adair, was the man in whose arms Wolfe died at the
taking of Quebec; it is he who is shown in Benjamin West's picture
supporting the General.

Dr. Adair's sister Catherine, the daughter of Thomas Adair and Jean
Ross, married the Rev. James Tweddale, minister of Glenluce from 1758 to
1778, representative of an old Covenanting family, and holder of the
original Covenant, which had been confided to the care of his great-aunt
Catherine by Baillie of Jarviswood on his way to execution in the
"killing time." The document was sold with his library at his death, his
children being then under age, and is now in the Glasgow Museum. One of
these children, Catherine, married a John Ruskin.

The origin of the name of Ruskin is English, dating from the middle
ages. Soon after the dissolution of Furness Abbey, Richerde Ruskyn and
his family were land-owners at Dalton-in-Furness. One branch, and that
with which we are especially concerned, settled in Edinburgh.

John Ruskin--our subject's grandfather--when he ran away with Catherine
Tweddale in 1781, was a handsome lad of twenty. His portrait as a child
proves his looks, and he evidently had some charm of character or
promise of power, for the escapade did not lose him the friendship of
the lady's family. Major Ross, her uncle and guardian, remained a good
friend to the young couple. She herself was only sixteen at her
marriage--a bright and animated brunette, as her miniature shows, in
later years ripening to a woman of uncommon strength, with old-fashioned
piety of a robust, practical type, and a spirit which the trials of her
after-life--and they were many--could not subdue. Her husband set up in
the wine trade in Edinburgh. For many years they lived in the Old Town,
then a respectable neighbourhood, among a cultivated and well-bred
society, in which they moved as equals, entertaining, with others, such
a man as Dr. Thomas Brown, the professor of philosophy, a great light in
his own day, and still conspicuous in the constellation of Scotch
metaphysicians.

Their son, John James Ruskin (born May 10, 1785), was sent to the
famous High School of Edinburgh, under Dr. Adam, the most renowned of
Scottish head-masters, and there he received the sound old-fashioned
classical education. Before he was sixteen, his sister Jessie was
already married at Perth to Peter Richardson, a tanner living at Bridge
End, by the Tay; and so his cousin, Margaret Cox, was sent for to fill
the vacant place.

She was a daughter of old Mr. Ruskin's sister, who had married a Captain
Cox, sailing from Yarmouth for the herring fishery. He had died in 1789,
or thereabouts, from the results of an accident while riding homewards
to his family after one of his voyages, and his widow maintained herself
in comfort by keeping the old King's Head Inn at Croydon Market-place.
Of her two daughters the younger married another Mr. Richardson, a baker
at Croydon, so that, by an odd coincidence, there were two families of
Richardsons, unconnected with one another except through their
relationship to the Ruskins.

Margaret, the elder daughter, who came to keep house for her uncle in
Edinburgh, was then nearly twenty years of age. She had been the model
pupil at her Croydon day-school; tall and handsome, pious and practical,
she was just the girl to become the confidante and adviser of her
dark-eyed, active, and romantic young cousin.

Some time before the beginning of 1807, John James, having finished his
education at the High School, went to London, where a place had been
found for him by his uncle's brother-in-law, Mr. MacTaggart. He was
followed by a kind letter from Dr. Thomas Brown, who advised him to keep
up his Latin, and to study political economy, for the Professor looked
upon him as a young man of unusual promise and power. During some two
years, he worked as a clerk in the house of Sir William Gordon, Murphy
and Co., where he made friends, and laid the foundation of his
prosperity; for along with him at the office there was a Mr. Peter
Domecq, owner of the Spanish vineyards of Macharnudo, learning the
commercial part of his business in London, the headquarters of the
sherry trade. He admired his fellow-clerk's capacity so much as to offer
him the London agency of his family business. Mr. MacTaggart found the
capital in consideration of their taking his relative, Mr. Telford, into
the concern. And so they entered into partnership, about 1809, as
Ruskin, Telford and Domecq: Domecq contributing the sherry, Mr. Henry
Telford the capital, and Ruskin the brains.

How he came by his business capacity may be understood--and in some
measure, perhaps, how his son came by his flexible and forcible
style--from a letter of Mrs. Catherine Ruskin, written about this time;
in which, moreover, there are a few details of family circumstances and
character, not without interest. John James Ruskin had been protesting
that he was never going to marry, but meant to devote himself to his
mother; she replied:

"... But my son an old Batchelor--believe me my beloved Child I
feel the full force and value of that affection that could prompt
to such a plan--dear as your society is to me it would then become
the misery of my existence--could I see my Child so formed for
domestick happiness deprived of every blessing on my account. No my
Dr John I do not know a more unhappy being than an old Batchelor
... may God preserve my Child from realizing the dreary picture--as
soon as you can keep a Wife you must Marry with all possible
speed--that is as soon as you find a very Amiable woman. She must
be a good daughter and fond of Domestick life--and pious, without
ostentation, for remember no Woman without the fear of God, can
either make a good Wife or a good Mother--freethinking Men are
shocking to nature, but from an Infidel Woman Good Lord deliver us.
I have thought more of it than you have done--for I have two or
three presents carefully [laid] by for her, and I have also been so
foresightly as to purchase two Dutch toys for your Children in case
you might marry before we had free intercourse with that
country.... Who can say what I can say 'here is my Son--a hansome
accomplished young man of three and twenty--he will not Marry that
he may take care of his Mother--here is my Dr Margaret, hansome,
Amiable and good and she would not leave her _Ant_ (I mean Aunt)
for any Man on Earth.' Ah My Dear and valuable children, dear is
your affection to my heart, but I will never make so base a use of
it. I entreat my Dr John that you will not give yourself one
moment's uneasiness about me--I will at all events have £86 a year
for life that your Father cannot deprive me of, and tho' I could
not live very splendidly in a Town on this, yet with a neat little
House and Garden in the country, it would afford all the means of
life in fullness to Meggy myself and our servant. You forget, my Dr
how much a woman can do without in domestick affairs to save
Money--a Woman that has any management at all can live with more
comfort on £50 a year than a Man could do on two hundred. There was
a year of my life that I maintained myself and two children on
twenty pound, the bread too was 1/2 the loave that year: we did not
indeed live very sumptuously nor shall I say our strength improved
much but I did not contract one farthing of debt and that to me
supplyed the want of luxuries. Now my Dr John let me never hear a
fear expressed on my account; there is no fear of me; make yourself
happy and all will be well, and for God sake my beloved Boy take
care of your health, take a good drink of porter to dinner and
supper and a little Wine now and then, and tell me particularly
about yr new Lodgings," etc.

He returned home to Edinburgh on a visit and arranged a marriage with
his cousin Margaret, if she would wait for him until he was safely
established; and then he set to work at the responsibilities of creating
a new business. It was a severer task than he had anticipated, for his
father's brain and business, as the above letter hints, had both gone
wrong; he left Edinburgh and settled at Bower's Well, Perth, ended
tragically, and left a load of debt behind him, which the son, sensitive
to the family honour, undertook to pay before laying by a penny for
himself. It took nine years of assiduous labour and economy. He worked
the business entirely by himself. The various departments that most men
entrust to others he filled in person. He managed the correspondence,
he travelled for orders, he arranged the importation, he directed the
growers out in Spain, and gradually built up a great business, paid off
his father's creditors, and secured his own competence.

This was not done without sacrifice of health, which he never recovered,
nor without forming habits of over-anxiety and toilsome minuteness which
lasted his life long. But his business cares were relieved by cultured
tastes. He loved art, painted in water-colours in the old style, and
knew a good picture when he saw it. He loved literature, and read aloud
finely all the old standard authors, though he was not too old-fashioned
to admire "Pickwick" and the "Noctes Ambrosianæ" when they appeared. He
loved the scenery and architecture among which he had travelled in
Scotland and Spain; but he could find interest in almost any place and
any subject; an alert man, in whom practical judgment was joined to a
romantic temperament, strong feelings and opinions to extended
sympathies. His letters, of which there are many preserved, bear witness
to his character, taste, and intellect, curiously anticipating, on some
points, those of his son. His portraits give the idea of an expressive
face, sensitive, refined, every feature a gentleman's.

So, after those nine years of work and waiting, he went to Perth to
claim his cousin's hand. She was for further delay; but with the
minister's help he persuaded her one evening into a prompt marriage in
the Scotch fashion, drove off with her next morning to Edinburgh, and on
to the home he had prepared in London at 54, Hunter Street, Brunswick
Square (February 27, 1818).

The heroine of this little drama was no ordinary bride. At Edinburgh she
had found herself, though well brought up for Croydon, inferior to the
society of the Modern Athens. As the affianced of a man of ability, she
felt it her duty to make herself his match in mental culture, as she was
already in her own department of practical matters. Under Dr. Brown's
direction, and stimulated by his notice, she soon became--not a
blue-stocking--but well-read, well-informed above the average. She was
one of those persons who set themselves a very high standard, and
resolve to drag both themselves and their neighbours up to it. But, as
the process is difficult, so it is disappointing. People became rather
shy of Mrs. Ruskin, and she of them, so that her life was solitary and
her household quiet. It was not merely from narrow Puritanism that she
made so few friends; her morality and her piety, strict as they were
within their own lines, permitted her most of the enjoyments and
amusements of life; still less was there any cynicism or misanthropy.
But she devoted herself to her husband and son. She was too proud to
court those above her in worldly rank, and she was not easily approached
except by people fully equal to her in strength of character, of whom
there could never be many. The few who made their way to her friendship
found her a true and valuable friend.

CHAPTER II

THE FATHER OF THE MAN (1819-1825)

Into this family John Ruskin was born on February 8, 1819, at half-past
seven in the morning. He was baptised on the twentieth by the Rev. Mr.
Boyd.

The first account of him in writing is in a letter from his mother when
he was six weeks old. She chronicles--not without a touch of
superstition--the breaking of a looking-glass, and continues: "John
grows finely; he is just now on my knees sleeping and looking so
sweetly; I hope I shall not get proud of him." He was a fine healthy
baby, and at four months was "beginning to give more decided proofs that
he knows what he wants, and will have it if crying and passion will get
it." At a year his mother resolves that "this will be cured by a good
whipping when he can understand what it is," and we know that she
carried out her Spartan resolve.

This, and the story in "Arachne," how she let him touch the tea-kettle;
and the reminiscences in "Præterita" of playthings locked up, and a lone
little boy staring at the water-cart and the pattern on the carpet--all
these give a gloomy impression of his mother, against which we must set
the proofs of affection and kindliness shown in her letters. In these we
can see her anxiously nursing him through childish ailments, taking him
out for his daily walk to Duppas Hill with a captain's biscuit in her
muff, for fear he should be hungry by the way; we hear her teaching him
his first lessons, with astonishment at his wonderful memory, and
glorying with Nurse Anne over his behaviour in church; and all these
things she retails in gossiping letters to her husband, while Mr.
Richard Gray gives two-year-old John "his first lesson on the flute,
both sitting on the drawing-room floor, very deeply engaged." "I am
sure," she says, "there is no other love, no other feeling, like a
mother's towards her first boy when she loves his father;" and her pride
in his looks, and precocity, and docility--"I never met with a child of
his age so sensible to praise or blame"--found a justification in his
passionate devotion to the man who was so dear to them both.

Though he was born in the thick of London, he was not City-bred. His
first three summers were spent in lodgings in Hampstead or Dulwich, then
"the country." So early as his fourth summer he was taken to Scotland by
sea to stay with his aunt Jessie, Mrs. Richardson of Perth. There he
found cousins to play with, especially one, little Jessie, of nearly his
own age; he found a river with deep swirling pools, that impressed him
more than the sea, and he found the mountains. Coming home in the
autumn, he sat for his full-length portrait to James Northcote, R.A.,
and being asked what he would choose for background, he replied, "Blue
hills."

Northcote had painted Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin, and, as they were fond of
artistic company, remained their friend. A certain friendship too, was
struck up between the old Academician, then in his seventy-seventh year,
the acknowledged cynic and satirist, and the little wise boy who asked
shrewd questions, and could sit still to be painted; who, moreover, had
a face worth painting, not unlike the model from whom Northcote's
master, the great Sir Joshua, had painted his famous cherubs. The
painter asked him to come again, and sit as the hero of a fancy picture,
bought at the Academy by the flattered parents. There is a grove, a
flock of toy sheep, drapery in the grand style, a mahogany Satyr taking
a thorn out of the little pink foot of a conventional nudity--poor
survivals of the Titianesque. But the head is an obvious portrait, and a
happy one; far more like the real boy, so tradition says, than the
generalized chubbiness of the commissioned picture.

In the next year (1823) they quitted the town for a suburban home. The
spot they chose was in rural Dulwich, on Herne Hill, a long offshoot of
the Surrey downs; low, and yet commanding green fields and scattered
houses in the foreground, with rich undulating country to the south, and
looking across London toward Windsor and Harrow. It is all built up now;
but their house (later No. 28) must have been as secluded as any in a
country village. There were ample gardens front and rear, well stocked
with fruit and flowers--quite an Eden for a little boy, and all the more
that the fruit of it was forbidden. It was here that all his years of
youth were spent. Here, under his parents' roof, he wrote his earlier
works, as far as vol. i. of "Modern Painters." To the adjoining house,
as his own separate home, he returned for a period of his middle life;
and in the old home, handed over to his adopted daughter, he still used
to find his own rooms ready when he cared to visit London.

So he was brought up almost as a country boy, though near enough to town
to get the benefit of it, and far enough from the more exciting scenes
of landscape nature to find them ever fresh, when summer after summer he
revisited the river scenery of the West or the mountains of the North.
For by a neat arrangement, and one fortunate for his education, the
summer tours were continued yearly. Mr. John James Ruskin still
travelled for the business, then greatly extending. "Strange," he writes
on one occasion, "that Watson [his right-hand man] went this journey
without getting one order, and everyone gives me an order directly." In
return for these services to the firm, Mr. Telford, the capitalist
partner, took the vacant chair at the office, and even lent his carriage
for the journeys. There was room for two, so Mrs. Ruskin accompanied her
husband, whose indifferent health gave her and his friends constant
anxiety during long separations. And the boy could easily be packed in,
sitting on his little portmanteau, and playing horses with his father's
knees; the nurse riding on the dickey behind.

They started usually after the great family anniversary, the father's
birthday, on May 10, and journeyed by easy stages through the South of
England, working up the west to the north, and then home by the
east-central route, zigzagging from one provincial town to another,
calling at the great country seats, to leave no customer or possible
customer unvisited; and in the intervals of business seeing all the
sights of the places they passed through--colleges and churches,
galleries and parks, ruins, castles, caves, lakes, and mountains--and
seeing them all, not listlessly, but with keen interest, noting
everything, inquiring for local information, looking up books of
reference, setting down the results, as if they had been meaning to
write a guide-book and gazetteer of Great Britain. _They_, I say, did
all this, for as soon as the boy could write, he was only imitating his
father in keeping his little journal of the tours, so that all he
learned stayed by him, and the habit of descriptive writing was formed.

In 1823 they seem to have travelled only through the south and
south-west; in 1824 they pushed north to the lakes, stayed awhile at
Keswick, and while the father went about his business, the child was
rambling with his nurse on Friar's Crag, among the steep rocks and
gnarled roots, which suggested, even at that age, the feelings expressed
in one of the notable passages in "Modern Painters." Thence they went on
to Scotland, and revisited their relatives at Perth. In 1825 they took a
more extended tour, and spent a few weeks in Paris, partly for the
festivities at the coronation of Charles X., partly for business
conference with Mr. Domecq, who had just been appointed wine-merchant to
the King of Spain. Thence they went to Brussels and the field of
Waterloo, of greater interest than the sights of Paris to six-year-old
John, who often during his boyhood celebrated the battle, and the heroes
of the battle, in verse.

Before he was quite three he used to climb into a chair and preach.
There is nothing so uncommon in that. Of Robert Browning, his neighbour
and seven-years-older contemporary, the same tale is told. But while the
incident that marks the baby Browning is the aside, _à propos_ of a
whimpering sister, "Pew-opener, remove that child," the baby Ruskin is
seen in his sermon: "People, be dood. If you are dood, Dod will love
you; if you are not dood, Dod will not love you. People, be dood."

At the age of four he had begun to read and write, refusing to be taught
in the orthodox way--this is so accurately characteristic--by syllabic
spelling and copy-book pothooks. He preferred to find a method out for
himself, and he found out how to read whole words at a time by the look
of them, and to write in vertical characters like book-print, just as
the latest improved theories of education suggest. His first letter may
be quoted as illustrating his own account of his childhood, and as
proving how entirely Scotch was the atmosphere in which he was brought
up. The postmark gives the date March 15, 1823. Mrs. Ruskin premises
that John was scribbling on a paper from which he proceeded to read what
she writes down (I omit certain details about the whip):

"MY DEAR PAPA,

"I love you. I have got new things. Waterloo Bridge--Aunt Bridget
brought me it. John and Aunt helped to put it up, but the pillars
they did not put right, upside down. Instead of a book bring me a
whip, coloured red and black.... To-morrow is Sabbath. Tuesday I go
to Croydon. I am going to take my boats and my ship to Croydon.
I'll sail them on the pond near the burn which the bridge is over.
I will be very glad to see my cousins. I was very happy when I saw
Aunt come from Croydon. I love Mrs. Gray and I love Mr. Gray. I
would like you to come home, and my kiss and my love."

[First autograph in straggling capitals]

"JOHN RUSKIN"

When once he could read, thenceforward his mother gave him regular
morning lessons in Bible-reading and in reciting the Scotch paraphrases
of the Psalms and other verse, which for his good memory was an easy
task. He made rhymes before he could write them, of course.

At five he was a bookworm, and the books he read fixed him in certain
grooves of thought, or, rather, say they were chosen as favourites from
an especial interest in their subjects--an interest which arose from his
character of mind, and displayed it. But with all this precocity, he was
no milksop or weakling; he was a bright, active lad, full of fun and
pranks, not without companions, though solitary when at home, and kept
precisely, in the hope of guarding him from every danger. He was so
little afraid of animals--a great test of a child's nerves--that about
this time he must needs meddle with their fierce Newfoundland dog,
Lion, which bit him in the mouth, and spoiled his looks. Another time he
showed some address in extricating himself from the water-butt--a common
child-trap. He did not fear ghosts or thunder; instead of that, his
early-developed landscape feeling showed itself in dread of foxglove
dells and dark pools of water, in coiling roots of trees--things that to
the average English fancy have no significance whatever.

At seven he began to imitate the books he was reading, to write books
himself. He had found out how to _print_, as children do; and it was his
ambition to make real books, with title-pages and illustrations, not
only books, indeed, but sets of volumes, a complete library of his whole
works. But in a letter of March 4, 1829, his mother says to his father:
"If you think of writing John, would you impress on him the propriety of
not beginning too eagerly and becoming careless towards the end of his
_works_, as he calls them? I think in a letter from you it would have
great weight. He is never idle, and he is even uncommonly persevering
for a child of his age; but he often spoils a good beginning by not
taking the trouble to think, and concluding in a hurry."

The first of these sets was imitated in style from Miss Edgeworth; he
called it, "Harry and Lucy Concluded; or, Early Lessons." Didactic he
was from the beginning. It was to be in four volumes, uniform in red
leather, with proper title, frontispiece, and "copper-plates," "printed
and composed by a little boy, and also drawn." It was begun in 1826, and
continued at intervals until 1829. It was all done laboriously in
imitation of print, and, to complete the illusion, contained a page of
errata. This great work was, of course, never completed, though he
laboured through three volumes; but when he tired of it, he would turn
his book upside down, and begin at the other end with other matters; so
that the red books contain all sorts of notes on his minerals and
travels, reports of sermons, and miscellaneous information, besides
their professed contents; in this respect also being very like his later
works.

There you have our author ready made, with his ever-fresh interest in
everything, and all-attempting eagerness, out of which the first thing
that crystallizes into any definite shape is the verse-writing.

CHAPTER III

PERFERVIDUM INGENIUM (1826-1830)

The first dated "poem" was written a month before little John Ruskin
reached the age of seven. It is a tale of a mouse, in seven octosyllabic
couplets, "The Needless Alarm," remarkable only for an unexpected
correctness in rhyme, rhythm, and reason.

His early verse owes much to the summer tours, which were prolific in
notes; everything was observed and turned into verse. The other
inspiring source was his father--the household deity of both wife and
child, whose chief delight was in his daily return from the city, and in
his reading to them in the drawing-room at Herne Hill. John was packed
into a recess, where he was out of the way and the draught; he was
barricaded by a little table that held his own materials for amusement,
and if he liked to listen to the reading, he had the chance of hearing
good literature, the chance sometimes of hearing passages from Byron and
Christopher North and Cervantes, rather beyond his comprehension, for
his parents were not of the shockable sort: with all their religion and
strict Scotch morality, they could laugh at a broad jest, as
old-fashioned people could.

So he associated his father and his father's readings with the poetry
of reflection, as he associated the regular summer round with the poetry
of description. As every summer brought its crop of description, so
against the New Year (for, being Scotch, they did not then keep our
Christmas) and against his father's birthday in May he used always to
prepare some little drama or story or "address" of a reflective nature,
beginning with the verses on "Time," written for New Year's Day, 1827.

That year they were again at Perth, and on their way home some early
morning frost suggested the not ungraceful verses on the icicles at
Glenfarg. By a childish misconception, the little boy seems to have
confused the real valley that interested him so with Scott's ideal
Glendearg, and, partly for this reason, to have found a greater pleasure
in "The Monastery," which he thereupon undertook to paraphrase in verse.
There remain some hundreds of doggerel rhymes; but his affection for
that particular novel survived the fatal facility of his octosyllabics,
and reappears time after time in his later writings.

Next year, 1828, their tour was stopped at Plymouth by the painful news
of the death of his aunt Jessie, to whom they were on their way. It was
hardly a year since the bright little cousin, Jessie of Perth, had died
of water on the brain. She had been John's especial pet and playfellow,
clever, like him, and precocious; and her death must have come to his
parents as a warning, if they needed it, to keep their own child's brain
from over-pressure. It is evident that they did their best to "keep him
back"; they did not send him to school for fear of the excitement of
competitive study. His mother put him through the Latin grammar herself,
using the old Adam's manual which his father had used at Edinburgh High
School. Even this old grammar became a sort of sacred book to him; and
when at last he went to school, and his English master threw the book
back to him, saying, "that's a Scotch thing," the boy was shocked and
affronted, as which of us would be at a criticism on _our_ first
instrument of torture? He remembered the incident all his life, and
pilloried the want of tact with acerbity in his reminiscences.

They could keep him from school, but they did not keep him from study.
The year 1828 saw the beginning of another great work, "Eudosia, a Poem
on the Universe"; it was "printed" with even greater neatness and
labour; but this, too, after being toiled at during the winter months,
was dropped in the middle of its second "book." It was not idleness that
made him break off such plans, but just the reverse--a too great
activity of brain. His parents seem to have thought that there was no
harm in this apparently quiet reading and writing. They were extremely
energetic themselves, and hated idleness. They appear to have held a
theory that their little boy was safe so long as he was not obviously
excited; and to have thought that the proper way of giving children
pocket-money was to let them earn it. So they used to pay him for his
literary labours; "Homer" was one shilling a page; "Composition," one
penny for twenty lines; "Mineralogy," one penny an article.

The death of his aunt Jessie left a large family of boys and one girl to
the care of their widowed father, and the Ruskins felt it their duty to
help. They fetched Mary Richardson away, and brought her up as a sister
to their solitary son. She was not so beloved as Jessie had been, but a
good girl and a nice girl, four years older than John, and able to be a
companion to him in his lessons and travels. There was no sentimentality
about his attachment to her, but a steady fraternal relationship, he, of
course, being the little lord and master; but she was not without
spirit, which enabled her to hold her own, and perseverance, which
sometimes helped her to eclipse, for the moment, his brilliancy. They
learnt together, wrote their journals together, and shared alike with
the scrupulous fairness which Mrs. Ruskin's sensible nature felt called
on to show. And so she remained his sister, and not quite his sister,
until she married, and after a very short married life died.

Another accession to the family took place in the same year (1828); the
Croydon aunt, too, had died, and left a dear dog, Dash, a brown and
white spaniel, which at first refused to leave her coffin, but was
coaxed away, and found a happy home at Herne Hill, and frequent
celebration in his young master's verses. So the family was now
complete--papa and mamma, Mary and John and Dash. One other figure must
not be forgotten, Nurse Anne, who had come from the Edinburgh home, and
remained always with them, John's nurse and then Mrs. Ruskin's
attendant, as devoted and as censorious as any old-style Scotch servant
in a story-book.

The year 1829 marked an advance in poetical composition. For his
father's birthday he made a book more elaborate than any, sixteen pages
in a red cover, with a title-page quite like print: "Battle of Waterloo
| a play | in two acts | with other small | Poems dedicated to his
father | by John Ruskin | 1829 Hernhill _(sic)_ Dulwich."

To this are appended, among other pieces, fair copies of "Skiddaw," and
"Derwentwater." A recast of these, touched up by some older hand, and
printed in _The Spiritual Times_ for February, 1830, may be called his
first appearance in type.

An illness of his postponed their tour for 1829, until it was too late
for more than a little journey in Kent. He has referred his earliest
sketching to this occasion, but it seems likely that the drawings
attributed to this year were done in 1831. He was, however, busy writing
poetry. At Tunbridge, for example, he wrote that fragment "On Happiness"
which catches so cleverly the tones of Young--a writer whose orthodox
moralizing suited with the creed in which John Ruskin was brought up,
alternating, be it remembered, with "Don Quixote."

Coming home, he began a new edition of his verses, on a more
pretentious scale than the old red books, in a fine bound volume,
exquisitely "printed," with the poems dated. This new energy seems to
have been roused by the gift from his Croydon cousin Charles, a clerk in
the publishing house of Smith, Elder, and Co., of their annual
"Friendship's Offering." Mrs. Ruskin, in a letter of October 31, 1829,
finds "the poetry very so-so"; but John evidently made the book his
model.

He was now growing out of his mother's tutorship, and during this autumn
he was put under the care of Dr. Andrews for his Latin. He relates the
introduction in "Præterita," and, more circumstantially, in a letter of
the time, to Mrs. Monro, the mother of his charming Mrs. Richard Gray,
the indulgent neighbour who used to pamper the little gourmand with
delicacies unknown in severe Mrs. Ruskin's dining-room. He says in the
letter--this is at ten years old: "Well, papa, seeing how fond I was of
the doctor, and knowing him to be an excellent Latin scholar, got him
for me as a tutor, and every lesson I get I like him better and better,
for he makes me laugh 'almost, if not quite'--to use one of his own
expressions--the whole time. He is so funny, comparing Neptune's lifting
up the wrecked ships of Æneas with his trident to my lifting up a potato
with a fork, or taking a piece of bread out of a bowl of milk with a
spoon! And as he is always saying [things] of that kind, or relating
some droll anecdote, or explaining the part of Virgil (the book which I
am in) very nicely, I am always delighted when Mondays, Wednesdays, and
Fridays are come."

Dr. Andrews was no doubt a genial teacher, and had been a scholar of
some distinction in his University of Glasgow; but Mrs. Ruskin thought
him "flighty," as well she might, when, after six months' Greek, he
proposed (in March, 1831) to begin Hebrew with John. It was a great
misfortune for the young genius that he was not more sternly drilled at
the outset, and he suffered for it through many a long year of
struggles with deficient scholarship.

The Doctor had a large family and pretty daughters. One, who wrote
verses in John's note-book, and sang "Tambourgi," Mrs. Orme, lived until
1892 in Bedford Park; the other lives in Coventry Patmore's "Angel in
the House." When Ruskin, thirty years later, wrote of that
doubtfully-received poem, that it was the "sweetest analysis we possess
of quiet, modern, domestic feeling," few of his readers could have known
all the grounds of his appreciation, or suspected the weight of meaning
in the words.

CHAPTER IV

MOUNTAIN-WORSHIP (1830-1835)

Critics who are least disposed to give Ruskin credit for his artistic
doctrines or economical theories unite in allowing that he taught his
generation to look at Nature, and especially at the sublime in
Nature--at storms and sunrises, and the forests and snows of the Alps.
This mission of mountain-worship was the outcome of a passion beside
which the other interests and occupations of his youth were only toys.
He could take up his mineralogy and his moralizing and lay them down,
but the love of mountain scenery was something beyond his control. We
have seen him leave his heart in the Highlands at three years old; we
have now to follow his passionate pilgrimages to Skiddaw and Snowdon, to
the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc.

They had planned a great tour through the Lakes and the North two years
before, but were stopped at Plymouth by the news of Mrs. Richardson's
death. At last the plan was carried out. A prose diary was written
alternately by John and Mary, one carrying it on when the other tired,
with rather curious effect of unequally-yoked collaboration. We read how
they "set off from London at seven o'clock on Tuesday morning, the 18th
May," and thenceforward we are spared no detail: the furniture of the
inns; the bills of fare; when they got out of the carriage and walked;
how they lost their luggage; what they thought of colleges and chapels,
music and May races at Oxford, of Shakespeare's tomb, and the
pin-factory at Birmingham; we have a complete guide-book to Blenheim and
Warwick Castle, to Haddon and Chatsworth, and the full itinerary of
Derbyshire. "Matlock Bath," we read, "is a most delightful place"; but
after an enthusiastic description of High Tor, John reacts into bathos
with a minute description of wetting their shoes in a puddle. The cavern
with a Bengal light was fairyland to him, and among the minerals he was
quite at home.

Then they hurried north to Windermere. Once at Lowwood, the excitement
thickens, with storms and rainbows, mountains and waterfalls, boats on
the lake and coaching on the steep roads. This journey through Lakeland
is described in the galloping anapæsts of the "Iteriad," which was
simply the prose journal versified on his return, one of the few
enterprises of the sort which were really completed.

To readers who know the country it is interesting as giving a detailed
account in the days when this "nook of English ground" was "secure from
rash assault." One learns that, even then, there were jarring sights at
Bowness Bay and along Derwentwater shore, elements unkind and bills
exorbitant. Coniston especially was dreary with rain, and its inn--the
old Waterhead, now destroyed--extravagantly dear; "_but_," says John,
with his eye for mineral specimens, "it contains several rich
coppermines." An interesting touch is the hero-worship with which they
went reverently to peep at Southey and Wordsworth in church; too humble
to dream of an introduction, and too polite to besiege the poets in
their homes, but independent enough to form their own opinions on the
personality of the heroes. They did not like the look of Wordsworth at
all; Southey they adored. The dominant note of the tour is, however, an
ecstatic delight in the mountain scenery; on Skiddaw and Helvellyn all
the gamut of admiration is lavished.

On returning home, John began Greek under Dr. Andrews, and was soon
versifying Anacreontics in his notebooks. He began to read Byron for
himself, with what result we shall see before long; but the most
important new departure was the attempt to copy Cruikshank's etchings to
Grimm's fairy tales, his real beginning at art. From this practice he
learnt the value of the pure, clean line that expresses form. It is a
good instance of the authority of these early years over Ruskin's whole
life and teaching that in his "Elements of Drawing" he advised young
artists to begin with Cruikshank, as he began, and that he wrote
appreciatively both of the stories and the etchings so many decades
afterwards in the preface to a reprint by J.C. Hotten.

His cousin-sister Mary had been sent to a day-school when Mrs. Ruskin's
lessons were superseded by Dr. Andrews, and she had learnt enough
drawing to attempt a view of the hotel at Matlock, a thing which John
could not do. So, now that he too showed some power of neat
draughtsmanship, it was felt that he ought to have her advantages. They
got Mr. Runciman the drawing-master, chosen, it may be, as a relative of
the well-known Edinburgh artist of the same name, to give him lessons,
in the early part of 1831. His teaching was of the kind which preceded
the Hardingesque: it aimed at a bold use of the soft pencil, with a
certain roundness of composition and richness of texture, a conventional
"right way" of drawing anything. This was hardly what John wanted; but,
not to be beaten, he facsimiled the master's freehand in a sort of
engraver's stipple, which his habitual neatness helped him to do in
perfection. Runciman soon put a stop to that, and took pains with a
pupil who took such pains with himself--taught him, at any rate, the
principles of perspective, and remained his only drawing-master for
several years.

A sample of John Ruskin's early lessons in drawing, described by him in
letters to his father, may be not without interest. On February 20,
1832, he writes:

"... You saw the two models that were last sent, before you went
away. Well, I took my paper, and I fixed my points, and I drew my
perspective, and then, as Mr. Runciman told me, I began to invent a
scene. You remember the cottage that we saw as we went to Rhaidyr
Dhu (_sic_), near Maentwrog, where the old woman lived whose
grandson went with us to the fall, so very silently? I thought my
model resembled that; so I drew a tree--such a tree, such an
enormous fellow--and I sketched the waterfall, with its dark rocks,
and its luxuriant wood, and its high mountains; and then I examined
one of Mary's pictures to see how the rocks were done, and another
to see how the woods were done, and another to see how the
mountains were done, and another to see how the cottages were done,
and I patched them all together, and I made such a lovely
scene--oh, I should get such a scold from Mr. Runciman (that is, if
he ever scolded)!"

After the next lesson he wrote, February 27, 1832:

"You know the beautiful model drawing that I gave you an account of
in my last. I showed it to Mr. Runciman. He contemplated it for a
moment in silence, and then, turning, asked me if I had copied. I
told him how I had patched it up; but he said that that was not
copying, and although he was not satisfied with the picture, he
said there was something in it that would make him totally change
the method he had hitherto pursued with me. He then asked Mary for
some gray paper, which was produced; then inquired if I had a
colour-box; I produced the one you gave me, and he then told me he
should begin with a few of the simplest colours, in order to teach
me better the effects of light and shade. He should then proceed
to teach me water-colour painting, but the latter only as a basis
for oil; this last, however, to use his own words, all in due
time.... Oh, if I could paint well before we went to Dover! I
should have such sea-pieces...."

In March 1834, Runciman was encouraging him in his oil-painting; but a
year later he wrote to his father:

"I cannot bear to paint in oil,
C. Fielding's tints alone for me!
The other costs me double toil,
And wants some fifty coats to be
Splashed on each spot successively.
Faugh, wie es stinckt! I can't bring out,
With all, a picture fit to see.
My bladders burst; my oils are out--
And then, what's all the work about?"

After a few lessons he could rival Mary when they went for their summer
excursion. He set to work at once at Sevenoaks to draw cottages; at
Dover and Battle he attempted castles. It may be that these first
sketches are of the pre-Runciman period; but the Ruskins made the round
of Kent in 1831, and though the drawings are by no means in the master's
style, they show some practice in using the pencil.

The journey was extended by the old route, conditioned by business as
before, round the South Coast to the West of England, and then into
Wales. There his powers of drawing failed him; moonlight on Snowdon was
too vague a subject for the blacklead point but a hint of it could be
conveyed in rhyme:

"Folding like an airy vest,
The very clouds had sunk to rest;
Light gilds the rugged mountain's breast,
Calmly as they lay below;
Every hill seemed topped with snow,
As the flowing tide of light
Broke the slumbers of the night."

Harlech Castle was too sublime for a sketch, but it was painted with
the pen:

"So mighty, so majestic, and so lone;
And all thy music, now, the ocean's murmuring."

And the enthusiasm of mountain glory, a sort of ecstacy of
uncontrollable passion, strives for articulate deliverance in the
climbing song, "I love ye, ye eternal hills."

It was hard to come back to the daily round, the common task, especially
when, in this autumn of 1831, to Dr. Andrews' Latin and Greek, the
French grammar and Euclid were added, under Mr. Rowbotham. And the new
tutor had no funny stories to tell; he was not so engaging a man as the
"dear Doctor," and his memory was not sweet to his wayward pupil. But
the parents had chosen for the work one who was favourably known by his
manuals, and capable of interesting even a budding poet in the
mathematics; for our author tells that at Oxford, and ever after, he
knew his Euclid without the figures, and that he spent all his spare
time in trying to trisect an angle. An old letter from Rowbotham informs
Mr. J.J. Ruskin that an eminent mathematician had seen John's attempt,
and had said that it was the cleverest he knew. In French, too, he
progressed enough to be able to find his way alone in Paris two years
later. And however the saucy boy may have satirized his tutor in the
droll verses on "Bedtime," Mr. Rowbotham always remembered him with
affection, and spoke of him with respect.

In spite of these tedious tutorships, he managed to scribble
energetically all this winter, writing with amazing rapidity, as his
mother notes: attempts at Waverley novels, which never got beyond the
first chapter, imitations of "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan" and scraps
in the style of everybody in turn. No wonder his mother sent him to bed
at nine punctually, and kept him from school, in vain efforts to quiet
his brain. The lack of companions was made up to him in the friendship
of Richard Fall, son of a neighbour on "the Hill," a boy without
affectation or morbidity of disposition whose complementary character
suited him well. An affectionate comradeship sprang up between the two
lads, and lasted, until in middle life they drifted apart, in no
ill-will, but each going on his own course to his own destiny.

Some real advance was made this winter (1831-32) with his Shelleyan
"Sonnet to a Cloud" and his imitations of Byron's "Hebrew Melodies,"
from which he learnt how to concentrate expression, and to use rich
vowel-sounds and liquid consonants with rolling effect. A deeper and
more serious turn of thought, that gradually usurped the place of the
first boyish effervescence, has been traced by him to the influence of
Byron, in whom, while others saw nothing more than wit and passion,
Ruskin perceived an earnest mind and a sound judgment.

But the most sincere poem--if sincerity be marked by unstudied phrase
and neglected rhyme--the most genuine "lyrical cry" of this period, is
that song in which our boy-poet poured forth his longing for the "blue
hills" he had loved as a baby, and for those Coniston crags over which,
when he became old and sorely stricken, he was still to see the morning
break. When he wrote these verses he was nearly fourteen, or just past
his birthday. It had been eighteen months since he had been in Wales,
and all the weary while he had seen no mountains; but in his regrets he
goes back a year farther still, to fix upon the Lakeland hills, less
majestic than Snowdon, but more endeared, and he describes his
sensations on approaching the beloved objects in the very terms that
Dante uses for his first sight of Beatrice:

"I weary for the fountain foaming,
For shady holm and hill;
My mind is on the mountain roaming,
My spirit's voice is still.

"The crags are lone on Coniston
And Glaramara's dell;
And dreary on the mighty one,
The cloud-enwreathed Sea-fell...."

"There is a thrill of strange delight
That passes quivering o'er me,
When blue hills rise upon the sight,
Like summer clouds before me."

Judge, then, of the delight with which he turned over the pages of a new
book, given him this birthday by the kind Mr. Telford, in whose carriage
he had first seen those blue hills--a book in which all his mountain
ideals, and more, were caught and kept enshrined--visions still, and of
mightier peaks and ampler valleys, romantically "tost" and sublimely
"lost," as he had so often written in his favourite rhymes. In the
vignettes to Rogers' "Italy," Turner had touched the chord for which
John Ruskin had been feeling all these years. No wonder that he took
Turner for his leader and master, and fondly tried to copy the wonderful
"Alps at Daybreak" to begin with, and then to imitate this new-found
magic art with his own subjects and finally to come boldly before the
world in passionate defence of a man who had done such great things for
him.

This mountain-worship was not inherited from his father, who never was
enthusiastic about peaks and clouds and glaciers, though he was
interested in all travelling in a general way. So that it was not
Rogers' "Italy" that sent the family off to the Alps that summer; but,
fortunately for John, his father's eye was caught by the romantic
architecture of Prout's "Sketches in Flanders and Germany," when it came
out in April, 1853, and his mother proposed to make both of them happy
in a tour on the Continent. The business-round was abandoned, but they
could see Mr. Domecq on their way back through Paris, and not wholly
lose the time.

They waited to keep papa's birthday on May 10, and early next morning
drove off--father and mother, John and Mary, Nurse Anne, and the
courier Salvador. They crossed to Calais, and posted, as people did in
the old times, slowly from point to point; starting betimes, halting at
the roadside inns, where John tried to snatch a sketch, reaching their
destination early enough to investigate the cathedral or the citadel,
monuments of antiquity or achievements of modern civilisation, with
impartial eagerness; and before bedtime John would write up his journal
and work up his sketches just as if he were at home.

So they went through Flanders and Germany, following Prout's lead by the
castles of the Rhine; but at last, at Schaffhausen one Sunday
evening--"suddenly--behold--beyond!"--they had seen the Alps.
Thenceforward Turner was their guide as they crossed the Splügen, sailed
the Italian lakes, wondered at Milan Cathedral, and the Mediterranean at
Genoa, and then roamed through the Oberland and back to Chamouni. All
this while a great plan shaped itself in the boy's head, no less than to
make a Rogers' "Italy" for himself, just as he tried to make a "Harry
and Lucy" or a "Dictionary of Minerals." On every place they passed he
would write verses and prose sketches, to give respectively the romance
and the reality or ridicule; for he saw the comic side of it all,
keenly; and he would illustrate the series with Turneresque vignettes,
drawn with the finest crowquill pen, to imitate the delicate engravings.
By this he learnt more drawing in two or three years than most amateur
students do in seven. For the first year he had the "Watchtower of
Andernach" and the "Jungfrau from Interlaken" to show, with others of
similar style, and thenceforward alternated between Turner and Prout,
until he settled into something different from either.

But Turner and Prout were not the only artists he knew; at Paris he
found his way into the Louvre, and got leave from the directors, though
he was under the age required, to copy. The picture he chose was a
Rembrandt.

Between this foreign tour and the next, his amusement was to draw these
vignettes, and to write the poems suggested by the scenes he had
visited. He had outgrown the evening lessons with Dr. Andrews, and as he
was fifteen, it was time to think more seriously of preparing him for
Oxford, where his name was put down at Christ Church. His father hoped
he would go into the Church, and eventually turn out a combination of a
Byron and a bishop--something like Dean Milman, only better. For this,
college was a necessary preliminary; for college, some little schooling.
So they picked the best day-school in the neighbourhood, that of the
Rev. Thomas Dale (afterwards Dean of Rochester), in Grove Lane, Peckham.
John Ruskin worked there rather less than two years. In 1835 he was
taken from school in consequence of an attack of pleurisy, and lost the
rest of that year from regular studies.

More interesting to him than school was the British Museum collection of
minerals, where he worked occasionally with his Jamieson's Dictionary.
By this time he had a fair student's collection of his own, and he
increased it by picking up specimens at Matlock, or Clifton, or in the
Alps, wherever he went, for he was not short of pocket-money. He took
the greatest pains over his catalogues, and wrote elaborate accounts of
the various minerals in a shorthand he invented out of Greek letters and
crystal forms.

Grafted on this mineralogy, and stimulated by the Swiss tour, was a new
interest in physical geology, which his father so far approved as to
give him Saussure's "Voyages dans les Alpes" for his birthday in 1834.
In this book he found the complement of Turner's vignettes, something
like a key to the "reason why" of all the wonderful forms and marvellous
mountain-architecture of the Alps. He soon wrote a short essay on the
subject, and had the pleasure of seeing it in print, in Loudon's
_Magazine of Natural History_ for March, 1834, along with another bit
of his writing, asking for information on the cause of the colour of the
Rhine-water.

He had already some acquaintance with J.C. Loudon, F.L.S., H.S., etc.,
and he was on the staff of that versatile editor not long afterwards,
and took a lion's share of the writing in the _Magazine of
Architecture_. Meanwhile he had been introduced to another editor, and
to the publishers with whom he did business for many a year to come. The
acquaintance was made in a curious, accidental manner. His cousin
Charles Richardson, clerk to Smith, Elder, and Co., had the opportunity
of mentioning the young poet's name to Thomas Pringle, editor of the
"Friendship's Offering" which John had admired and imitated. Mr. Pringle
came out to Herne Hill, and was hospitably entertained as a brother
Scot, as not only an editor, but a poet himself--not _only_ a poet, but
a man of respectability and piety, who had been a missionary in South
Africa. In return for this hospitality he gave a good report of John's
verses, and, after getting him to re-write two of the best passages in
the last tour, carried them off for insertion in his forthcoming number.
He did more: he carried John to see the actual Samuel Rogers, whose
verses had been adorned by the great Turner's vignettes.

After the pleurisy of April, 1835, his parents took him abroad again,
and he made great preparations to use the opportunity to the utmost. He
would study geology in the field, and took Saussure in his trunk he
would note meteorology: he made a cyanometer--a scale of blue to measure
the depth of tone, the colour whether of Rhine-water or of Alpine skies.
He would sketch. By now he had abandoned the desire to make MS. albums,
after seeing himself in print, and so chose rather to imitate the
imitable, and to follow Prout, this time with careful outlines on the
spot, than to idealize his notes in mimic Turnerism. He kept a prose
journal, chiefly of geology and scenery, as well as a versified
description, written in a metre imitated from "Don Juan," but more
elaborate, and somewhat of a _tour de force_ in rhyming. But that
poetical journal was dropped after he had carried it through France,
across the Jura, and to Chamouni. The drawing crowded it out, and for
the first time he found himself as ready with his pencil as he had been
with his pen.

His route is marked by the drawings of that year, from Chamouni to the
St. Bernard and Aosta, back to the Oberland and up the St. Gothard; then
back again to Lucerne and round by the Stelvio to Venice and Verona, and
finally through the Tyrol and Germany homewards. The ascent of the St.
Bernard was told in a dramatic sketch of great humour and power of
characterization, and a letter to Richard Fall records the night on the
Rigi, when he saw the splendid sequence of storm, sunset, moonlight, and
daybreak, which forms the subject of one of the most impressive passages
of "Modern Painters."

It happened that Pringle had a plate of Salzburg which he wanted to
print in order to make up the volume of "Friendship's Offering" for the
next Christmas. He seems to have asked John Ruskin to furnish a copy of
verses for the picture, and at Salzburg, accordingly, a bit of rhymed
description was written and re-written, and sent home to the editor.
Early in December the Ruskins returned, and at Christmas there came to
Herne Hill a gorgeous gilt morocco volume, "To John Ruskin, from the
Publishers." On opening it there were his "Andernach" and "St. Goar,"
and his "Salzburg" opposite a beautifully-engraved plate, all hills,
towers, boats, and figures moving picturesquely under the sunset, in
Turner's manner more or less, "Engraved by E. Goodall from a drawing by
W. Purser." It was almost like being Mr. Rogers himself.

CHAPTER V

THE GERM OF "MODERN PAINTERS" (1836)

He was now close upon seventeen, and it was time to think seriously of
his future. His father went to Oxford early in the year to consult the
authorities about matriculation. Meantime they sent him to Mr. Dale for
some private lessons, and for the lectures on logic, English literature,
and translation, which were given on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays at
King's College, London. John enjoyed his new circumstances heartily.
From voluminous letters, it is evident that he was in high spirits and
in pleasant company. He was a thorough boy among boys--Matson,
Willoughby, Tom Dale and the rest. He joined in their pranks, and
contributed to their amusement with his ready good-humour and unflagging
drollery.

Mr. Dale told him there was plenty of time before October, and no fear
about his passing, if he worked hard. He found the work easy, except
epigram-writing, which he thought "excessively stupid and laborious,"
but helped himself out, when scholarship failed, with native wit. Some
of his exercises remain, not very brilliant Latinity; some he saucily
evaded, thus:

"Subject: _Non sapere maximum est malum._

"Non sapere est grave; sed, cum dura epigrammata oportet
Scribere, tunc sentis præcipue esse malum."

In Switzerland and Italy, during the autumn of 1835, he had made a great
many drawings, carefully outlined in pencil or pen on gray paper, and
sparsely touched with body colour, in direct imitation of the Prout
lithographs. Prout's original coloured sketches he had seen, no doubt,
in the exhibition; but he does not seem to have thought of imitating
them, for his work in this kind was all intended to be for illustration
and not for framing. The "Italy" vignettes likewise, with all their
inspiration, suggested to him only pen-etching; he was hardly conscious
that somewhere there existed the tiny, coloured pictures that Turner had
made for the engraver. Still, now that he could draw really well, his
father, who painted in water-colours himself, complied with the demand
for better teaching than Runciman's, went straight to the President of
the Old Water-Colour Society, and engaged him for the usual course of
half a dozen lessons at a guinea a piece. Copley Fielding could draw
mountains as nobody else but Turner could, in water-colour; he had
enough mystery and poetry to interest the younger Ruskin, and enough
resemblance to ordinary views of Nature to please the elder. So they
both went to Newman Street to his painting-room, and John worked through
the course, and a few extra lessons, but, after all, found Fielding's
art was not what he wanted. Some sketches exist, showing the influence
of the spongy style; but his characteristic way of work remained for him
to devise for himself.

At the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1836 Turner showed the first striking
examples of his later style in "Juliet and her Nurse," "Mercury and
Argus," and "Rome from Mount Aventine." The strange idealism, the
unusualness, the mystery, of these pictures, united with evidence of
intense significance and subtle observation, appealed to young Ruskin as
it appealed to few other spectators. Public opinion regretted this
change in its old favourite, the draughtsman of Oxford colleges, the
painter of shipwrecks and castles. And _Blackwood's Magazine_, which the
Ruskins, as Edinburgh people and admirers of Christopher North, read
with respect, spoke about Turner, in a review of the picture-season,
with that freedom of speech which Scotch reviewers claim as a heritage
from the days of Jeffrey. Young Ruskin at once dashed off an answer.

The critic had found that Turner was "out of nature"; Ruskin tried to
show that the pictures were full of facts, but treated with poetical
license. The critic pronounced Turner's colour bad, his execution
neglected, and his chiaroscuro childish; in answer to which Ruskin
explained that Turner's reasoned system was to represent light and shade
by the contrast of warm and cold colour, rather than by the opposition
of white and black which other painters used. He denied that his
execution was other than his aims necessitated, and maintained that the
critic had no right to force his cut-and-dried academic rules of
composition on a great genius; at the same time admitting that:

"The faults of Turner are numerous, and perhaps more egregious than
those of any other great existing artist; but if he has greater
faults, he has also greater beauties.

"His imagination is Shakespearian in its mightiness. Had the scene
of 'Juliet and her Nurse' risen up before the mind of a poet, and
been described in 'words that burn,' it had been the admiration of
the world.... Many-coloured mists are floating above the distant
city, but such mists as you might imagine to be ethereal spirits,
souls of the mighty dead breathed out of the tombs of Italy into
the blue of her bright heaven, and wandering in vague and infinite
glory around the earth that they have loved. Instinct with the
beauty of uncertain light, they move and mingle among the pale
stars, and rise up into the brightness of the illimitable heaven,
whose soft, sad blue eye gazes down into the deep waters of the sea
for ever--that sea whose motionless and silent transparency is
beaming with phosphor light, that emanates out of its sapphire
serenity like bright dreams breathed into the spirit of a deep
sleep. And the spires of the glorious city rise indistinctly bright
into those living mists, like pyramids of pale fire from some vast
altar; and amidst the glory of the dream there is, as it were, the
voice of a multitude entering by the eye, arising from the
stillness of the city like the summer wind passing over the leaves
of the forest, when a murmur is heard amidst their multitudes.

"This, O Maga, is the picture which your critic has pronounced to
be 'like models of different parts of Venice, streaked blue and
white, and thrown into a flour-tub'!"

Before sending his reply to the editor of _Blackwood_, as had been
intended, it was thought only right that Turner should be consulted. The
MS. was enclosed to his address in London, with a courteous note from
Mr. John James Ruskin, asking his permission to publish. Turner replied,
expressing the scorn he felt for anonymous attacks, and jestingly
hinting that the art-critics of the old Scotch school found their
"meal-tub" in danger from his "flour-tub"; but "he never moved in such
matters," so he sent on the MS. to Mr. Munro of Novar, who had bought
the picture.

Ten days or so after this episode John Ruskin was matriculated at Oxford
(October 18, 1836). He told the story of his first appearance as a
gownsman in one of his gossiping letters in verse:

"A night, a day past o'er--the time drew near--
The morning came--I felt a little queer;
Came to the push; paid some tremendous fees;
Past; and was capped and gowned with marvellous ease.
Then went to the Vice-Chancellor to swear
Not to wear boots, nor cut or comb my hair
Fantastically--to shun all such sins
As playing marbles or frequenting inns;
Always to walk with breeches black or brown on;
When I go out, to put my cap and gown on;
With other regulations of the sort, meant
For the just ordering of my comportment.
Which done, in less time than I can rehearse it, I
Found myself member of the University!"

In pursuance of his plan for getting the best of everything, his father
had chosen the best college, as far as he knew, that in which social and
scholastic advantages were believed to be found in pre-eminent
combination, and he had chosen what was thought to be the best position
in the college; so that it was as gentleman-commoner of Christ Church
that John Ruskin made his entrance into the academic world.

After matriculation, the Ruskins made a fortnight's tour to Southampton
and the coast, and returned to Herne Hill. John went back to King's
College, and in December was examined in the subjects of his lectures.
He wrote to his father on Christmas Eve about the examination in English
literature:

"The students were numerous, and so were the questions; the room
was hot, the papers long, the pens bad, the ink pale, and the
interrogations difficult. It lasted only three hours. I wrote
answers in very magnificent style to all the questions except three
or four; gave in my paper and heard no more of the matter: _sic
transeunt bore-ia mundi_."

He went on to mention his "very longitudinal essay," which, since no
other essays are reported in his letters about King's College, must be
the paper published in 1893, in answer to the question. "Does the
perusal of works of fiction act favourably or unfavourably on the moral
character?"

At his farewell interview with Mr. Dale he was asked, as he writes to
his father, what books he had read, and replied with a pretty long list,
including Quintilian and Grotius. Mr. Dale inquired what "light books"
he was taking to Oxford: "Saussure, Humboldt, and other works on natural
philosophy and geology," he answered. "Then he asked if I ever read any
of the modern fashionable novels; on this point I thought he began to
look positive, so I gave him a negative, with the exception of Bulwer's,
and now and then a laughable one of the Theodore Hook's or Captain
Marryat's." And so, with much excellent advice about exercise and sleep,
and the way to win the Newdigate, he parted from Mr. Dale.

This Christmas was marked by his first introduction to the scientific
world. Mr. Charlesworth, of the British Museum, invited him to a meeting
of the Geological Society (January 4, 1837), with promise of
introduction to Buckland and Lyell. The meeting, as he wrote, was
"amusing and interesting, and very comfortable for frosty weather, as
Mr. Murchison got warm and Mr. Greenau _(sic)_ witty. The warmth,
however, got the better of the wit."

The Meteorological Society also claimed his attention, and in this month
he contributed a paper which "Richard [Fall] says will frighten them out
of their meteorological wits, containing six close-written folio pages,
and having, at its conclusion, a sting in its tail, the very agreeable
announcement that it only commences the subject."

CHAPTER VI

A LOVE-STORY (1836-1839)

Early in 1836 the quiet of Herne Hill was fluttered by a long-promised,
long-postponed visit. Mr. Domecq at last brought his four younger
daughters to make the acquaintance of their English friends. The eldest
sister had lately been married to a Count Maison, heir to a peer of
France; for Mr. Domecq, thanks in great measure to his partner's energy
and talents, was prosperous and wealthy, and moved in the enchanted
circles of Parisian society.

To a romantic schoolboy in a London suburb the apparition was dazzling.
Any of the sisters would have charmed him, but the eldest of the four,
Adèle Clotilde, bewitched him at once with her graceful figure and that
oval face which was so admired in those times. She was fair,
too--another recommendation. He was on the brink of seventeen, at the
ripe moment, and he fell passionately in love with her. She was only
fifteen, and did not understand this adoration, unspoken and unexpressed
except by intensified shyness; for he was a very shy boy in the
drawing-room, though brimming over with life and fun among his
schoolfellows. His mother's ideals of education did not include French
gallantry; he felt at a loss before these Paris-bred, Paris-dressed
young ladies, and encumbered by the very strength of his new-found
passion.

And yet he possessed advantages, if he had known how to use them. He was
tall and active, light and lithe in gesture, not a clumsy hobbledehoy.
He had the face that caught the eye, in Rome a few years later, of
Keats' Severn, no mean judge, surely, of faces and poet's faces. He was
undeniably clever; he knew all about minerals and mountains; he was
quite an artist, and a printed poet. But these things weigh little with
a girl of fifteen who wants to be amused; and so she only laughed at
John.

He tried to amuse her, but he tried too seriously. He wrote a story to
read her, "Leoni, a Legend of Italy," for of course she understood
enough English to be read to, no doubt to be wooed in, seeing her mother
was English. The story was of brigands and true lovers, the thing that
was popular in the romantic period. The costumery and mannerisms of the
little romance are out of date now, and seem ridiculous, though Mr.
Pringle and the public were pleased with it then, when it was printed in
"Friendship's Offering." But the girl of fifteen only laughed the more.

When they left, he had no interest in his tour-book; even the mountains,
for the time, had lost their power, and all his plans of great works
were dropped for a new style of verse--the love-poems of 1836.

His father, from whom he kept nothing, approved the verses, and did not
disapprove his views on the young lady. Indeed, it is quite plain, from
the correspondence of the two gentlemen, that Mr. Domecq intended his
friend and partner's son to become his own son-in-law. He had the
greatest respect for the Ruskins, and every reason for desiring to link
their fortunes still more closely with those of his own family. But to
Mrs. Ruskin, with her religious feelings, it was intolerable,
unbelievable, that the son whom she had brought up in the nurture and
admonition of the strictest Protestantism should fix his heart on an
alien in race and creed. The wonder is that their relations were not
more strained; there are few young men who would have kept unbroken
allegiance to a mother whose sympathy failed them at such a crisis.

As the year went on his passion seemed to grow in the absence of the
beloved object. His only plan of winning her was to win his spurs first;
but as what? Clearly his forte, it seemed, was in writing. If he could
be a successful writer of romances, of songs, of plays, surely she would
not refuse him. And so he began another romantic story, "Velasquez, the
Novice," opening with the Monks of St. Bernard, among whom had been, so
the tale ran, a mysterious member, whose papers, when discovered, made
him out the hero of adventures in Venice. He began a play, which was to
be another great work, "Marcolini." He had no playwright's eye for
situations, but the conversation is animated, and the characters finely
drawn, with more discrimination than one would expect from so young an
author.

This work was interrupted at the end of Act III. by pressing calls to
other studies. But it was not that he had forgotten Adèle. From time to
time he wrote verses to her or about her; and as in 1838 she was sent to
school with her sisters at Newhall, near Chelmsford, to "finish" her in
English, in that August he saw her again. She had lost some of her first
girlish prettiness, but that made no difference. And when the Domecqs
came to Herne Hill at Christmas, he was as deeply in love as ever. But
she still laughed at him.

His father was fond of her, liked all the sisters, and thought much of
them as girls of fine character, but he liked Adèle best. He seems to
have been fond of his partner, too, worked very hard in his interests,
and behaved very well to his heirs afterwards through many years of
responsible and difficult management of their business. And at this
time, when he went down to the convent school in Essex, as he often did,
he must have had opportunities for seeing how hopeless the case was. Mr.
Domecq recognised it, too, but thought, it seems (they manage these
things differently in France), that any of his daughters would do as
well, and early in 1839 entertained an offer from Baron Duquesne, a rich
and handsome young Frenchman. They kept this from John, fearing he would
break down at the news, so fully did they recognise the importance of
the affair. They even threw other girls in his way. It was not
difficult, for by now he had made some mark in magazine literature, and
was a steady, rising young man, with considerable expectations. But he
could not think of any other girl.

In February or March, 1839, Mr. Domecq died. The Maisons came to
England, and the marriage was proposed. Adèle stayed at Chelmsford until
September, when he wrote the long poem of "Farewell," dated the eve of
their last meeting and parting.

At twenty young men do not die of love; but I find that a fortnight
after writing this he was taken seriously ill. During the winter of
1839-40 the negotiations for the marriage in Paris went on. It took
place in March. They kept the news from him as long as they could, for
he was in the schools next Easter term, and Mr. Brown (his college
tutor) had seemed to hope he would get a First, so his mother wrote to
her husband. In May he was pronounced consumptive, and had to give up
Oxford, and all hope of the distinction for which he had laboured, and
with that any plans that might have been entertained for his distinction
in the Church. And his parents' letters of the period put it beyond a
doubt that this first great calamity of his life was the direct
consequence of that unfortunate matchmaking.

For nearly two years he was dragged about from place to place, and from
doctor to doctor, in search of health. Thanks partly to wise treatment,
more to new faces, and most to a plucky determination to employ himself
usefully with his pen and his pencil, he gradually freed himself from
the spell, and fifty years afterwards could look back upon the story as
a pretty comedy of his youthful days.

CHAPTER VII

"KATA PHUSIN" (1837-1838)

Devoted as she was to her husband, Mrs. Ruskin felt bound to watch over
her son at Oxford. It was his health she was always anxious about;
doctoring was her forte. He had suffered from pleurisy; caught cold
easily; was feared to be weak in the lungs; and nobody but his mother
understood him. So taking Mary Richardson, she went up with him
(January, 1837), and settled in lodgings at Adams' in the High. Her plan
was to make no intrusion on his college life, but to require him to
report himself every day to her. She would not be dull; she could drive
about and see the country, and to that end took her own carriage to
Oxford, the "fly" which had been set up two years before. John had been
rather sarcastic about its genteel appearance. "No one," he said, "would
sit down to draw the form of it." However, she and Mary drove to Oxford,
and reckoned that it would only mean fifteen months' absence from home
altogether, great part of which deserted papa would spend in travelling.

John went into residence in Peckwater. At first he spent every evening
with his mother and went to bed, as Mr. Dale had told him, at ten. After
a few days Professor Powell asked him to a musical evening; he excused
himself, and explained why. The Professor asked to be introduced,
whereupon says his mother, "I shall return the call, but make no
visiting acquaintances."

The "early-to-bed" plan was also impracticable. It was not long before
somebody came hammering at his "oak" just as he was getting to sleep,
and next morning he told his mother that he really ought to have a glass
of wine to give. So she sent him a couple of bottles over, and that very
night "Mr. Liddell and Mr. Gaisford" (junior) turned up. "John was glad
he had wine to offer, but they would not take any; they had come to see
sketches. John says Mr. Liddell looked at them with the eye of a judge
and the delight of an artist, and swore they were the best sketches he
had ever seen. John accused him of quizzing, but he answered that he
really thought them excellent." John said that it was the scenes which
made the pictures; Mr. Liddell knew better, and spread the fame of them
over the college. Next morning "Lord Emlyn and Lord Ward called to look
at the sketches," and when the undergraduates had dropped in one after
another, the Dean himself, even the terrible Gaisford, sent for the
portfolio, and returned it with august approval.

Liddell, afterwards Dean of Christ Church; Newton, afterwards Sir
Charles, of the British Museum; Acland, afterwards Sir Henry, the
Professor of Medicine, thus became John Ruskin's friends: the first
disputing with him on the burning question of Raphael's art, but from
the outset an admirer of "Modern Painters," and always an advocate of
its author; the second differing from him on the claims of Greek
archæology, but nevertheless a close acquaintance through many long
years; and the third for half a century the best of friends and
counsellors.

The dons of his college he was less likely to attract. Dr. Buckland, the
famous geologist, and still more famous lecturer and talker, took notice
of him and employed him in drawing diagrams for lectures. The Rev.
Walter Brown, his college tutor, afterwards Rector of Wendlebury, won
his good-will and remained his friend. His private tutor, the Rev.
Osborne Gordon, was always regarded with affectionate respect. But the
rest seem to have looked upon him as a somewhat desultory and erratic
young genius, who might or might not turn out well. For their immediate
purpose, the Schools, and Church or State preferment, he seemed hardly
the fittest man.

The gentlemen-commoners of Christ Church were a puzzle to Mrs. Ruskin;
noblemen of sporting tastes, who rode and betted and drank, and got
their impositions written "by men attached to the University for the
purpose, at 1s.6d. to 2s.6d., so you have only to reckon how much you
will give to avoid chapel." And yet they were very nice fellows. If they
began by riding on John's back round the quad, they did not give him the
cold shoulder--quite the reverse. He was asked everywhere to wine; he
beat them all at chess; and they invaded him at all hours. "It does
little good sporting _his_ oak," wrote his mother, describing how Lord
Desart and Grimston climbed in through his window while he was hard at
work. "They say midshipmen and Oxonians have more lives than a cat, and
they have need of them if they run such risks."

Once, but once only, he was guilty, as an innocent freshman, of a breach
of the laws of his order. He wrote too good an essay. He tells his
father:

"OXFORD, _February_, 1837.

"Yesterday (Saturday) forenoon the Sub-dean sent for me, took me up
into his study, sat down with me, and read over my essay, pointing
out a few verbal alterations and suggesting improvements; I, of
course, expressed myself highly grateful for his condescension.
Going out, I met Strangeways. 'So you're going to read out to-day,
Ruskin. _Do_ go it at a good rate, my good fellow. Why do you write
such devilish good ones?' Went a little farther and met March.
'Mind you stand on the top of the desk, Ruskin; gentlemen-commoners
never stand on the steps.' I asked him whether it would look more
dignified to stand head or heels uppermost. He advised heels. Then
met Desart. 'We must have a grand supper after this, Ruskin;
gentlemen-commoners always have a flare-up after reading their
themes.' I told him I supposed he wanted to 'pison my
rum-and-water.'"

And though they teased him unmercifully, he seems to have given as good
as he got. At a big wine after the event, they asked him whether his
essay cost 2s.6d. or 5s. What he answered is not reported; but they
proceeded to make a bonfire in Peckwater, while he judiciously escaped
to bed.

So for a home-bred boy, thrown into rather difficult surroundings, his
first appearance at Christ Church was distinctly a success.
"Collections" in March, 1837, went off creditably for him. Hussey,
Kynaston and the Dean said he had taken great pains with his work, and
had been a pattern of regularity; and he ended his first term very well
pleased with his college and with himself.

In his second term he had the honour of being elected to the Christ
Church Club, a very small and very exclusive society of the best men in
the college: "Simeon, Acland, and Mr. Denison proposed him; Lord Carew
and Broadhurst supported." And he had the opportunity of meeting men of
mark, as the following letter recounts. He writes on April 22, 1837:

"My Dearest Father,

"When I returned from hall yesterday--where a servitor read, or
pretended to read, and Decanus growled at him, 'Speak out!'--I
found a note on my table from Dr. Buckland, requesting the pleasure
of my company to dinner, at six, to meet two celebrated geologists,
Lord Cole and Sir Philip Egerton. I immediately sent a note of
thanks and acceptance, dressed, and was there a minute after the
last stroke of Tom. Alone for five minutes in Dr. B.'s
drawing-room, who soon afterwards came in with Lord Cole,
introduced me, and said that as we were both geologists he did not
hesitate to leave us together while he did what he certainly very
much required--brushed up a little. Lord Cole and I were talking
about some fossils newly arrived from India. He remarked in the
course of conversation that his friend Dr. B.'s room was cleaner
and in better order than he remembered ever to have seen it. There
was not a chair fit to sit upon, all covered with dust, broken
alabaster candlesticks, withered flower-leaves, frogs cut out of
serpentine, broken models of fallen temples, torn papers, old
manuscripts, stuffed reptiles, deal boxes, brown paper, wool, tow
and cotton, and a considerable variety of other articles. In came
Mrs. Buckland, then Sir Philip Egerton and his brother, whom I had
seen at Dr. B.'s lecture, though he is not an undergraduate. I was
talking to him till dinner-time. While we were sitting over our
wine after dinner, in came Dr. Daubeny, one of the most celebrated
geologists of the day--a curious little animal, looking through its
spectacles with an air very _distinguée_--and Mr. Darwin, whom I
had heard read a paper at the Geological Society. He and I got
together, and talked all the evening."

The long vacation of 1837 was passed in a tour through the North, during
which his advanced knowledge of art was shown in a series of admirable
drawings. Their subjects are chiefly architectural, though a few
mountain drawings are found in his sketch-book for that summer.

The interest in ancient and picturesque buildings was no new thing, and
it seems to have been the branch of art-study which was chiefly
encouraged by his father. During this tour among Cumberland cottages and
Yorkshire abbeys, a plan was formed for a series of papers on
architecture, perhaps in answer to an invitation from his friend Mr.
Loudon, who had started an architectural magazine. In the summer he
began to write "The Poetry of Architecture; or, The Architecture of the
Nations of Europe considered in its Association with Natural Scenery and
National Character," and the papers were worked off month by month from
Oxford, or wherever he might be, only terminating with the termination
of the magazine in January, 1839. They parade a good deal of classical
learning and travelled experience; readers of the magazine took their
author for some dilettante Don at Oxford. The editor did not wish the
illusion to be dispelled, so John Ruskin had to choose a _nom de
plume_. He called himself "Kata Phusin" ("according to nature"), for he
had begun to read some Aristotle. No phrase would have better expressed
his point of view, that of commonsense extended by experience, and
confirmed by the appeal to matters of fact, rather than to any
authority, or tradition, or committee of taste, or abstract principles.

While these papers were in process of publication "Kata Phusin" plunged
into his first controversy, as an opponent of "Parsey's Convergence of
Perpendiculars," according to which vertical lines should have a
vanishing point, even though they are assumed to be parallel to the
plane of the picture.

During this controversy, and just before the summer tour of 1838 to
Scotland, John Ruskin was introduced to Miss Charlotte Withers, a young
lady who was as fond of music as he was of drawing. They discussed their
favourite studies with eagerness, and, to settle the matter, he wrote a
long essay on "The Comparative Advantages of the Studies of Music and
Painting," in which he set painting as a means of recreation and of
education far above music.

Already at nineteen, then, we see him a writer on art, not full-fledged,
but attracting some notice. Towards the end of 1838 a question arose as
to the best site for the proposed Scott memorial at Edinburgh, and a
writer in the _Architectural Magazine_ quoted "Kata Phusin" as the
authority in such matters, saying that it was obvious, after those
papers of his, that design and site should be simultaneously considered;
on which the editor "begs the favour of 'Kata Phusin' to let our readers
have his opinion on the subject, which we certainly think of
considerable importance."

So he discussed the question of monuments in general, and of this one in
particular, in a long paper, coming to no very decided opinion, but
preferring, on the whole, a statue group with a colossal Scott on a
rough pedestal, to be placed on Salisbury Crags, "where the range gets
low and broken towards the north at about the height of St. Anthony's
Chapel." His paper did not influence the Edinburgh Committee, but it was
not without effect, as the following extract shows.

"BAYSWATER, _November_ 30, 1838.

"DEAR SIR,--... Your son is certainly the greatest natural genius
that ever it has been my fortune to become acquainted with, and I
cannot but feel proud to think that at some future period, when
both you and I are under the turf, it will be stated in the
literary history of your son's life that the first article of his
which was published was in _London's Magazine of Natural
History._--Yours very sincerely,

"J.C. LOUDON"

CHAPTER VIII

SIR ROGER NEWDIGATE'S PRIZE (1837-1839)

Of all the prizes which Oxford could bestow, the Newdigate used to be
the most popular. Its fortunate winner was an admitted poet in an age
when poetry was read, and he appeared in his glory at Commemoration,
speaking what the ladies could understand and admire. The honour was
attainable without skill in Greek particles or in logarithms; and yet it
had a real value to an intending preacher, for the successful reciter
might be felt to have put his foot on the pulpit stairs. John Ruskin was
definitely meant for the Church, and he went to Oxford in the avowed
hope of getting the Newdigate, if nothing else. His last talk with Mr.
Dale was chiefly about ways and means to this end; and before he went up
he had begun "The Gipsies" for March, 1837.

The prize was won that year by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, afterwards Dean
of Westminster. Our candidate and his old schoolfellow, Henry Dart, of
Exeter College, set to work on the next subject, "The Exile of St.
Helena," and after the long vacation read their work to each other,
accepting the hints and corrections of a friendly rivalry.

Meantime his old nurse Anne (it is trivial, but a touch of nature),
being at Oxford in attendance on the ladies, and keen, as she always
was, for Master John's success, heard from the keeper of the
Reading-room of criticisms on his published verses. She brought the news
to his delighted mother. "He was pleased," she writes, "but says that he
forms his own estimate of his poems, and reviews don't alter it; but
'How my father will be delighted! How he will crow!'" Which historiette
repeated itself many a time in the family annals.

In Lent term, 1838, he was hard at work on the new poem. He wrote:

"I must give an immense time every day to the Newdigate, which I
must have, if study will get it. I have much to revise. You find
many faults, but there are hundreds which have escaped your notice,
and many lines must go out altogether which you and I should wish
to stay in. The thing must be remodelled, and I must finish it
while it has a freshness on it, otherwise it will not be written
well. The old lines are hackneyed in my ears, even as a very soft
Orleans plum, which your Jewess has wiped and re-wiped with the
corner of her apron, till its polish is perfect, and its
temperature elevated."

In this March he got through his "Smalls."

"Nice thing to get over; quite a joke, as everybody says when
they've got through with the feathers on. It's a kind of
emancipation from freshness--a thing unpleasant in an egg, but
dignified in an Oxonian--very. Lowe very kind; Kynaston ditto--nice
fellows--urbane. How they _do_ frighten people! There was one man
all but crying with mere fear. Kynaston had to coax him like a
child. Poor fellow! he had some reason to be afraid; did his logic
shockingly. People always take up logic because they fancy it
doesn't require a good memory, and there is nothing half so
productive of pluck; they _never_ know it. I was very cool when I
got into it; found the degree of excitement agreeable; nibbled the
end of my pen and grinned at Kynaston over the table as if _I_ had
been going to pluck _him_. They always smile when they mean pluck."

The Newdigate for 1838, for all his care and pains, was won by Dart. He
was, at any rate, beaten by a friend, and with a poem which his own
honourable sympathy and assistance had helped to perfect.

Another trifling incident lets us get a glimpse of the family life of
our young poet. The Queen's coronation in June, 1838, was a great event
to all the world, and Mr. Ruskin was anxious for his son to see it. Much
correspondence ensued between the parents, arranging everything for him,
as they always did--which of the available tickets should be accepted,
and whether he could stand the fatigue of the long waiting, and so
forth. Mrs. Ruskin did not like the notion of her boy sitting perched on
rickety scaffolding at dizzy altitudes in the Abbey. Mr. Ruskin,
evidently determined to carry his point, went to Westminster, bribed the
carpenters, climbed the structure, and reported all safe to stand a
century, "though," said he, "the gold and scarlet of the decorations
appeared very paltry compared with the Wengern Alp." But he could not
find No. 447, and wrote to the Heralds' Office to know if it was a place
from which a good view could be got. Blue-mantle replied that it was a
very good place, and Lord Brownlow had just taken tickets for his sons
close by. Then there was the great question of dress. He went to Owen's
and ordered a white satin waistcoat with gold sprigs, and a high
dress-coat with bright buttons, and asked his wife to see about white
gloves at Oxford--a Court white neck-cloth or a black satin would do.

Picture, then, the young Ruskin in those dressy days. A portrait was
once sent to Brantwood of a dandy in a green coat of wonderful cut,
supposed to represent him in his youth, but suggesting Lord Lytton's
"Pelham" rather than the homespun-suited seer of Coniston. "Did you ever
wear a coat like that?" I asked. "I'm not so sure that I didn't," said
he.

After that, they went to Scotland and the North of England for the
summer, and more fine sketches were made, some of which hang now in his
drawing-room, and compare not unfavourably with the Prouts beside them.
In firmness of line and fulness of insight they are masterly, and mark a
rapid progress, all the more astonishing when it is recollected how
little time could have been spared for practice. The subjects are
chiefly architectural--castles and churches and Gothic details--and one
is not surprised to find him soon concerned with the Oxford Society for
Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture. "They were all reverends,"
says a letter of the time, "and wanted somebody to rouse them."

Science, too, progressed this year. We read of geological excursions to
Shotover with Lord Carew and Lord Kildare--one carrying the hammer and
another the umbrella--and actual discoveries of saurian remains; and
many a merry meeting at Dr. Buckland's, in which, at intervals of
scientific talk, John romped with the youngsters of the family. After a
while the Dean took the opportunity of a walk through Oxford to the
Clarendon to warn him not to spend too much time on science. It did not
pay in the Schools nor in the Church, and he had too many irons in the
fire.

Drawing, and science, and the prose essays mentioned in the last
chapter, and poetry, all these were his by-play. Of the poetry, the
Newdigate was but a little part. In "Friendship's Offering" this autumn
he published "Remembrance," one of many poems to Adèle, "Christ Church,"
and the "Scythian Grave." In this last he gave free rein to the morbid
imaginations to which his unhappy _affaire de coeur_ and the mental
excitement of the period predisposed him. Harrison, his literary
Mentor, approved these poems, and inserted them in "Friendship's
Offering," along with love-songs and other exercises in verse. One had a
great success and was freely copied--the sincerest flattery--and the
preface to the annual for 1840 publicly thanked the "gifted writer" for
his "valuable aid."

At the beginning of 1839 he went into new rooms vacated by Mr. Meux, and
set to work finally on "Salsette and Elephanta." He ransacked all
sources of information, coached himself in Eastern scenery and
mythology, threw in the Aristotelian ingredients of terror and pity, and
wound up with an appeal to the orthodoxy of the examiners, of whom Keble
was the chief, by prophesying the prompt extermination of Brahminism
under the teaching of the missionaries.

This third try won the prize. Keble sent for him, to make the usual
emendations before the great work could be given to the world with the
seal of Oxford upon it. John Ruskin seems to have been somewhat
refractory under Keble's hands, though he would let his fellow-students,
or his father, or Harrison, work their will on his MSS. or proofs; being
always easier to lead than to drive. Somehow he came to terms with the
Professor, and then the Dean, taking an unexpected interest, was at
pains to see that his printed copy was flawless, and to coach him for
the recitation of it at the great day in the Sheldonian (June 12, 1839).

And now that friends and strangers, publishers in London and professors
in Oxford, concurred in their applause, it surely seemed that he had
found his vocation, and was well on the high-road to fame as a poet.

CHAPTER IX

THE BROKEN CHAIN (1840-1841)

That 8th of February, 1840, when John Ruskin came of age, it seemed as
though all the gifts of fortune had been poured into his lap. What his
father's wealth and influence could do for him had been supplemented by
a personal charm, which found him friends among the best men of the best
ranks. What his mother's care had done in fortifying his health and
forming his character, native energy had turned to advantage. He had won
a reputation already much wider and more appreciable, as an artist and
student of science, and as a writer of prose and verse, than
undergraduates are entitled to expect; and, for crowning mercy, his head
was not turned. He was reading extremely hard--"in" for his degree
examination next Easter term. His college tutor hoped he would get a
First. From that it was an easy step to Holy Orders, and with his
opportunities preferment was certain.

On his twenty-first birthday, his father, who had sympathized with his
admiration for Turner enough to buy two pictures--the "Richmond Bridge"
and the "Gosport"--for their Herne Hill drawing-room, now gave him a
picture all to himself for his new rooms in St. Aldate's--the
"Winchelsea," and settled on him a handsome allowance of pocket-money.
The first use he made of his wealth was to buy another Turner. In the
Easter vacation he met Mr. Griffith, the dealer, at the private view of
the old Water-colour Society, and hearing that the "Harlech Castle" was
for sale, he bought it there and then, with the characteristic disregard
for money which has always made the vendors of pictures and books and
minerals find him extremely pleasant to deal with. But as his
love-affair had shown his mother how little he had taken to heart her
chiefest care for him, so this first business transaction was a painful
awakening to his father, the canny Scotch merchant, who had heaped up
riches hoping that his son would gather them.

This "Harlech Castle" transaction, however, was not altogether unlucky.
It brought him an introduction to the painter, whom he met when he was
next in town, at Mr. Griffith's house. He knew well enough the popular
idea of Turner as a morose and niggardly, inexplicable man. As he had
seen faults in Turner's painting, so he was ready to acknowledge the
faults in his character. But while the rest of the world, with a very
few exceptions, dwelt upon the faults, Ruskin had penetration to discern
the virtues which they hid. Few passages in his autobiography are more
striking than the transcript from his journal of the same evening,
recording his first impression:

"'I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered,
matter-of-fact, English-minded--gentleman; good-natured evidently,
bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, perhaps
a little selfish, highly intellectual, the powers of the mind not
brought out with any delight in their manifestation, or intention
of display, but flashing out occasionally in a word or a look.'
Pretty close that," he adds later, "and full, to be set down at the
first glimpse, and set down the same evening."

Turner was not a man to make an intimate of, all at once; the
acquaintanceship continued, and it ripened into as close a confidence as
the eccentric painter's habits of life permitted. He seems to have been
more at home with the father than with the son; but even when the young
man took to writing books about him, he did not, as Carlyle is reported
to have done in a parallel case, show his exponent to the door.

The occasion of John Ruskin's coming to town this time was not a
pleasant one--nothing less than the complete breakdown of his health. It
is true that he was working very hard during this spring; but hard
reading does not of itself kill people, only when it is combined with
real and prolonged mental distress, acting upon a sensitive temperament.
The case was thought serious; reading was stopped, and the patient was
ordered abroad for the winter.

For that summer there was no hurry to be gone; rest was more needed than
change, at first. Late in September the same family-party crossed the
sea to Calais. How different a voyage for them all from the merry
departures of bygone Maytides! Which way should they turn? Not to Paris,
for _there_ was the cause of all these ills; so they went straight
southwards, through Normandy to the Loire, and saw the châteaux and
churches from Orleans to Tours, famous for their Renaissance
architecture and for the romance of their chivalric history. Amboise
especially made a strong impression upon the languid and unwilling
invalid. It stirred him up to write, in easy verse, the tale of love and
death that his own situation too readily suggested. In "The Broken
Chain" he indulged his gloomy fancy, turning, as it was sure to do, into
a morbid nightmare of mysterious horror, not without reminiscence of
Coleridge's "Christabel." But through it all he preserved, so to speak,
his dramatic incognito; his own disappointment and his own anticipated
death were the motives of the tale, but treated in such a manner as not
to betray his secret, nor even to wound the feelings of the lady who now
was beyond appeal from an honourable lover--taking his punishment like a
man.

This poem lasted him, for private writing, all through that journey--a
fit emblem of the broken life which it records. A healthier source of
distraction was his drawing, in which he had received a fresh impetus
from the exhibition of David Roberts' sketches in the East. More
delicate than Prout's work, entering into the detail of architectural
form more thoroughly, and yet suggesting chiaroscuro with broad washes
of quiet tone and touches of light, cleverly introduced--"that
marvellous _pop_ of light across the foreground," Harding said of the
picture of the Great Pyramid--these drawings were a mean between the
limited manner of Prout and the inimitable fulness of Turner Ruskin took
up the fine pencil and the broad brush, and, with that blessed habit of
industry which has helped so many a one through times of trial, made
sketch after sketch on the half-imperial board, finished just so far as
his strength and time allowed, as they passed from the Loire to the
mountains of Auvergne; and to the valley of the Rhone, and thence
slowly round the Riviera to Pisa and Florence and Rome.

He was not in a mood to sympathize readily with the enthusiasms of other
people. They expected him to be delighted with the scenery, the
buildings, the picture-galleries of Italy, and to forget himself in
admiration. He did admire Michelangelo; and he was interested in the
back-streets and slums of the cities. Something piquant was needed to
arouse him; the mild ecstasies of common connoisseurship hardly appeal
to a young man between life and death. He met the friends to whom he had
brought introductions--Mr. Joseph Severn, who had been Keats' companion,
and was afterwards to be the genial Consul at Rome, and the two Messrs.
Richmond, then studying art in the regular professional way; one of them
to become a celebrated portrait-painter, and the father of men of mark.
But his views on art were not theirs; he was already too independent and
outspoken in praise of his own heroes, and too sick in mind and body to
be patient and to learn.

They had not been a month in Rome before he took the fever. As soon as
he was recovered, they went still farther South, and loitered for a
couple of months in the neighbourhood of Naples, visiting the various
scenes of interest--Sorrento, Amalfi, Salerno. The adventures of this
journey are partly told in letters to Mr. Dale, and in the "Letters
addressed to a College Friend."

On the way to Naples he had noted and sketched the winter scene at La
Riccia, which he afterwards used for a glowing passage in "Modern
Painters"; and he had ventured into a village of brigands to draw such a
castle as he had once imagined in his "Leoni." From Naples he wrote an
account of a landslip near Giagnano, and sent it home to the Ashmolean
Society. He seemed better; they turned homewards, when suddenly he was
seized with all the old symptoms worse than ever. After another month at
Rome, they travelled slowly northwards from town to town; spent ten
days of May at Venice, and passed through Milan and Turin, and over the
Mont Cenis to Geneva.

At last he was among the mountains again--the Alps that he loved. It was
not only that the air of the Alps braced him, but the spirit of
mountain-worship stirred him as nothing else could. At last he seemed
himself, after more than a year of intense depression; and he records
that one day, in church at Geneva, he resolved to _do_ something, to
_be_ something useful. That he could make such a resolve was a sign of
returning health; but if, as I find, he had just been reading Carlyle's
lately-published lectures on "Heroes," though he did not then accept
Carlyle's conclusions nor admire his style, might he not, in spite of
his criticism, have been spurred the more into energy by that
enthusiastic gospel of action?

They travelled home by Basle and Laon; but London in August, and the
premature attempt to be energetic, brought on a recurrence of the
symptoms of consumption, as it was called. He wished to try the
mountain-cure again, and set out with his friend Richard Fall for a tour
in Wales. But his father recalled him to Leamington to try iron and
dieting under Dr. Jephson, who, if he was called a quack, was a sensible
one, and successful in subduing for several years to come the more
serious phases of the disease. The patient was not cured; he suffered
from time to time from his chest, and still more from a weakness of the
spine, which during all the period of his early manhood gave him
trouble, and finished by bending his tall and lithe figure into
something that, were it not for his face, would be deformity. In 1847 he
was again at Leamington under Jephson, in consequence of a relapse into
the consumptive symptoms, after which we hear no more of it. He outgrew
the tendency, as so many do. But nevertheless the alarm had been
justifiable, and the malady had left traces which, in one way and
another, haunted him ever after; for one of the worst effects of
illness is to be marked down as an invalid.

At Leamington, then, in September, 1841, he was finding a new life under
the doctor's dieting, and new aims in life, which were eventually to
resolder for a while the broken chain. Among the Scotch friends of the
Ruskins there was a family at Perth whose daughter came to visit at
Herne Hill--the Effie Gray whom afterwards he married. She challenged
the melancholy John, engrossed in his drawing and geology, to write a
fairytale, as the least likely task for him to fulfil. Upon which he
produced, at a couple of sittings, "The King of the Golden River," a
pretty medley of Grimm's grotesque and Dickens' kindliness and the true
Ruskinian ecstasy of the Alps.

CHAPTER X

THE GRADUATE OF OXFORD (1841-1842)

Ready for work again, and in reasonable health of mind and body, John
Ruskin sat down in his little study at Herne Hill in November, 1841,
with his private tutor, Osborne Gordon. There was eighteen months'
leeway to make up, and the dates of ancient history, the details of
schematized Aristotelianism, soon slip out of mind when one is sketching
in Italy. But he was more serious now about his work, and aware of his
deficiencies. To be useful in the world, is it not necessary first to
understand all possible Greek constructions? So said the voice of
Oxford; but our undergraduate was saved, both now and afterwards, from
this vain ambition. "I think it would hardly be worth your while," said
Gordon.

He could not now go in for honours, for the lost year had superannuated
him. So in April he went up for a pass. In those times, when a pass-man
showed unusual powers, they could give him an honorary class; not a high
class, because the range of the examination was less than in the
honour-school. This candidate wrote a poor Latin prose, it seems; but
his divinity, philosophy, and mathematics were so good that they gave
him the best they could--an honorary double fourth--upon which he took
his B.A. degree, and could describe himself as "A Graduate of Oxford."

The continued weakness of his health kept him from taking steps to enter
the Church; and his real interest in art was not crowded out even by the
last studies for his examination. While he was working with Gordon, in
the autumn of 1841, he was also taking lessons from J.D. Harding; and
the famous study of ivy, his first naturalistic sketching, to which we
must revert, must have been done a week or two before going up for his
examination.

The lessons from Harding were a useful counter-stroke to the excessive
and exaggerated Turnerism in which he had been indulging through his
illness. The drawings of Amboise, the coast of Genoa, and the Glacier
des Bois, though published later, were made before he had exchanged
fancy for fact; and they bear, on the face of them, the obvious marks of
an unhealthy state of mind. Harding, whose robust common-sense and
breezy mannerism endeared him to the British amateur of his generation,
was just the man to correct any morbid tendency. He had religious views
in sympathy with his pupil, and he soon inoculated Ruskin with his
contempt for the minor Dutch school--those bituminous landscapes, so
unlike the sparkling freshness that Harding's own water-colour
illustrated, and those vulgar tavern scenes, painted, he declared, by
sots who disgraced art alike in their works and in their lives.

Until this epoch, John Ruskin had found much that interested him in the
Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century. He had classed
them all together as the school of which Rubens, Vandyck and Rembrandt
were the chief masters, and those as names to rank with Raphael and
Michelangelo and Velasquez. He was a humorist, not without boyish
delight in a good Sam-Wellerism, and so could be amused with the
"drolls," until Harding appealed to his religion and morality against
them. He was a chiaroscurist, and not naturally offended by their
violent light and shade, until George Richmond showed him the more
excellent way in colour, the glow of Venice, first hinting it at Rome in
1840, and then proving it in London in the spring of 1842 from Samuel
Rogers' treasures, of which the chief (now in the National Gallery) was
the "Christ appearing to the Magdalen."

Much as the author of "Modern Painters" owed to these friends and
teachers, and to the advantages of his varied training, he would never
have written his great work without a further inspiration. Harding's
especial forte was his method of drawing trees. He looked at Nature with
an eye which, for his period, was singularly fresh and unprejudiced; he
had a strong feeling for truth of structure as well as for picturesque
effect, and he taught his pupils to observe as well as to draw. But in
his own practice he rested too much on _having observed_; formed a
style, and copied himself if he did not copy the old masters; Hence he
held to rules of composition and conscious graces of arrangement; and
while he taught naturalism in study, he followed it up with teaching
artifice in practice.

Turner, who was not a drawing-master, lay under no necessity to
formulate his principles and stick to them. On the contrary, his style
developed like a kaleidoscope. He had been in Switzerland and on the
Rhine in 1841, "painting his impressions," making water-colour notes
from memory of effects that had struck him. From one of these,
"Splügen," he had made a finished picture, and now wished to get
commissions for more of the same class. Ruskin was greatly interested in
this series, because they were not landscapes of the ordinary type,
scenes from Nature squeezed into the mould of recognised artistic
composition, nor, on the other hand, mere photographic transcripts; but
dreams, as it were, of the mountains and sunsets, in which Turner's
wealth of detail was suggested, and his knowledge of form expressed,
together with the unity which comes of the faithful record of a single
impression.

The lesson was soon enforced upon Ruskin's mind by example. One day,
while taking his student's constitutional, he noticed a tree-stem with
ivy upon it, which seemed not ungraceful, and invited a sketch. As he
drew he fell into the spirit of its natural arrangement, and soon
perceived how much finer it was as a piece of design than any
conventional rearrangement would be. Harding had tried to show him how
to generalize foliage; but in this example he saw that not
generalization was needed to get its beauty, but truth.

At Fontainebleau soon after, in much the same circumstances, a study of
an aspen-tree, idly begun, but carried out with interest and patience,
confirmed the principle. At Geneva, once more in the church where he had
formed such resolutions the year before, the desire came over him with
renewed force; now not only to be definitely employed, but to be
employed in the service of a definite mission, which was, in art,
exactly what Carlyle had preached in every other sphere of life in that
book of "Heroes": the gospel of sincerity.

The design took shape. At Chamouni he studied plants and rocks and
clouds, not as an artist to make pictures out of them, nor as a
scientist to class them and analyze them; but to learn their aspects and
enter into the spirit of their growth and structure. And though on his
way home through Switzerland and down the Rhine he made a few drawings
in his old style for admiring friends, they were the last of the kind
that he attempted. Thenceforward his path was marked out; he had found a
new vocation. He was not to be a poet--that was too definitely bound up
with the past which he wanted to forget, and with conventionalities
which he wished to shake off; not to be an artist, strugging with the
rest to please a public which he felt himself called upon to teach; not
a man of science, for his botany and geology were to be the means, and
not the ends, of his teaching; but the mission was laid upon him to tell
the world that Art, no less than other spheres of life, had its Heroes;
that the mainspring of their energy was Sincerity, and the burden of
their utterance, Truth.

BOOK II

THE ART CRITIC

(1842-1860)

CHAPTER I

"TURNER AND THE ANCIENTS" (1842-1844)

The neighbour, or the Oxonian friend, who climbed the steps of the Herne
Hill house and called upon Mrs. Ruskin, in the autumn and winter of
1842, would learn that Mr. John was hard at work in his own study
overhead. Those were its windows, on the second-floor, looking out upon
the front-garden; the big dormer-window above was his bedroom, from
which he had his grand view of lowland, and far horizon, and unconfined
sky, comparatively clear of London smoke. In the study itself, screened
from the road by russet foliage and thick evergreens, great things were
going on. But Mr. John could be interrupted, would come running lightly
downstairs, with both hands out to greet the visitor; would show the
pictures, eagerly demonstrating the beauties of the last new Turners,
"Ehrenbreitstein" and "Lucerne," just acquired, and anticipating the
sunset glories and mountain gloom of the "Goldau" and "Dazio Grande,"
which the great artist was "realizing" for him from sketches he had
chosen at Queen Anne Street. He was very busy--but never too busy to see
his friends--writing a book. And, the visitor gone, he would run up to
his room and his writing.

In the afternoon his careful mother would turn him out for a tramp round
the Norwood lanes; he might look in at the Poussins and Claudes of the
Dulwich Gallery, or, for a longer excursion, go over to Mr. Windus, and
his roomful of Turner drawings, or sit to George Richmond for the
portrait at full length with desk and portfolio, and Mont Blanc in the
background. Dinner over, another hour or two's writing, and early to
bed, after finishing his chapter with a flourish of eloquence, to be
read next morning at breakfast to father and mother and Mary. The vivid
descriptions of scenes yet fresh in their memory, or of pictures they
treasured, the "thoughts" as they used to be called, allusions to
sincere beliefs and cherished hopes, never failed to win the praise that
pleased the young writer most, in happy tears of unrestrained emotion.
These old-fashioned folk had not learnt the trick of _nil admirari._
Quite honestly they would say, with the German musician, "When I hear
good music, then must I always weep."

We can look into the little study and see what this writing was that
went on so busily and steadily. It was the long-meditated defence of
Turner, provoked by _Blackwood's Magazine_ six years before, encouraged
by Carlyle's "Heroes," and necessitated by the silence, on this topic,
of the more enlightened leaders of thought in an age of connoisseurship
and cant.

And as the winter ran out, he was ending his work, happy in the applause
of his little domestic circle, and conscious that he was preaching the
crusade of Sincerity, the cause of justice for the greatest landscape
artist of any age, and justice, at the hands of a heedless public, for
the glorious works of the supreme Artist of the universe. Let our young
painters, he concluded, go humbly to Nature, "rejecting nothing,
selecting nothing, and scorning nothing," in spite of Academic
theorists, and in time we should have a school of landscape worthy of
the inspiration they would find.

There was his book; the title of it, "Turner and the Ancients." Before
publishing, to get more experienced criticism than that of the
breakfast-table, he submitted it to his friend, W.H. Harrison. The
title, it seemed, was not explicit enough, and after debate they
substituted "Modern Painters: their Superiority in the Art of Landscape
Painting to all the Ancient Masters proved by Examples of the True, the
Beautiful, and the Intellectual, from the Works of Modern Artists,
especially from those of J.M.W. Turner, Esq., R.A." And as the severe
tone of many remarks was felt to be hardly supported by the age and
standing of so young an author, he was content to sign himself "A
Graduate of Oxford." The book was spoken of, but no part of the copy
shown, to John Murray, who said he would prefer something about German
art. It found immediate acceptance with Messrs. Smith and Elder. Young
Ruskin had been doing business for seven years past with that firm; he
was well known to them as one of the most "rising" youths of the time,
and their own literary editor, Mr. Harrison, was his private Mentor, who
revised his proofs and inserted the punctuation, which he usually
indicated only by dashes. His dealings with the publishers were
generally conducted through his father, who made very fair terms for
him, as things went then.

In May, 1843, "Modern Painters," vol. i., was published, and it was soon
the talk of the art-world. It was meant to be audacious, and naturally
created a storm. The free criticisms of public favourites made an
impression, not because they were put into strong language, for the tone
of the press was stronger then than it is now, as a whole, but because
they were backed up by illustration and argument. It was evident that
the author knew something of his subject, even if he were all wrong in
his conclusions. He could not be neglected, though he might be protested
against, decried, controverted. Artists especially, who do not usually
see their works as others see them, and are not accustomed to think of
themselves and their school as mere dots and spangles in a perspective
of history, could not be entirely content to be classed as Turner's
satellites. And while the book contained something that promised to suit
every kind of reader everyone found something to shock him. Critics were
scandalized at the depreciation of Claude; the religious were outraged
at the comparison of Turner, in a passage omitted from later editions,
to the Angel of the Sun in the Apocalypse.

But the descriptive passages were such as had never appeared before in
prose; and the obvious usefulness of the analyses of natural form and
effect made many an artist read on, while he shook his head. Some
readily owned their obligation to the new teacher. Holland, for one,
wrote to Harrison that he meant to paint the better for the snubbing he
had got. Of such as reviewed the book adversely in _Blackwood_ and the
_Athenæum_, not one undertook to refute it seriously. They merely
attacked a detail here and there, which the author discussed in two or
three replies, with a patience that showed how confident he was in his
position.

He had the good word of some of the best judges of literature. "Modern
Painters" lay on Rogers' table; and Tennyson, who a few years before had
beaten young Ruskin out of the field of poetry, was so taken with it
that he wrote to his publisher to borrow it for him, "as he longed very
much to see it," but could not afford to buy it. Sir Henry Taylor wrote
to Aubrey de Vere, the poet, begging him to read:

"A book which seems to me to be far more deeply founded in its
criticism of art than any other that I have met with ... written
with great power and eloquence, and a spirit of the most diligent
investigation.... I am told that the author's name is Ruskin, and
that he was considered at college as an odd sort of man who would
never do anything."

A second edition appeared within 12 months. When the secret of the
"Oxford Graduate" leaked out, as it did very soon, through the proud
father, Mr. John was lionized. During the winter of 1843 he met
celebrities at fashionable dinner-tables; and now that his parents were
established in their grander house on Denmark Hill,[1] they could duly
return the hospitalities of the great world.

[Footnote 1: To which they removed in October, 1842.]

It was one very satisfactory result of the success that the father was
more or less converted to Turnerism, and lined his walls with Turner
drawings, which became the great attraction of the house, far outshining
its seven acres of garden and orchard and shrubbery, and the ampler air
of cultured ease. For a gift to his son he bought "The Slave Ship," one
of Turner's latest and most disputed works; and he was all eagerness to
see the next volume in preparation.

It was intended to carry on the discussion of "Truth," with further
illustrations of mountain-form, trees and skies. And so in May, 1844,
they all went away again, that the artist-author might prepare drawings
for his plates. He was going to begin with the geology and botany of
Chamouni, and work through the Alps, eastward.

At Chamouni they had the good fortune to meet with Joseph Coutet, a
superannuated guide, whom they engaged to accompany the eager but
inexperienced mountaineer. Coutet was one of those men of natural
ability and kindliness whose friendship is worth more than much
intercourse with worldly celebrities, and for many years afterwards
Ruskin had the advantage of his care--of something more than mere
attendance. At any rate, under such guidance, he could climb where he
pleased, free from the feeling that people at home were anxious about
him.

He was not unadventurous in his scramblings, but with no ambition to get
to the top of everything. He wanted to observe the aspects of
mountain-form; and his careful outlines, slightly coloured, as his
manner then was, and never aiming at picturesque treatment, record the
structure of the rocks and the state of the snow with more than
photographic accuracy. A photograph often confuses the eye with
unnecessary detail; these drawings seized the leading lines, the
important features, the interesting points. For example, in his
Matterhorn (a drawing of 1849), as Whymper remarks in "Scrambles among
the Alps," there are particulars noted which the mere sketcher neglects,
but the climber finds out, on closer intercourse, to be the essential
facts of the mountain's anatomy. All this is not picture-making, but it
is a valuable contribution and preliminary to criticism.

From Chamouni this year they went to Simplon, and met J.D. Forbes, the
geologist, whose "viscous theory" of glaciers Ruskin adopted and
defended with warmth later on, and to the Bell' Alp, long before it had
been made a place of popular resort by Professor Tyndall's notice. The
"Panorama of the Simplon from the Bell' Alp" is to be found in the St.
George's (Ruskin) Museum at Sheffield, as a record of his
draughtsmanship in this period. Thence to Zermatt with Osborne Gordon;
Zermatt, too, unknown to the fashionable tourist, and innocent of hotel
luxuries. It is curious that, at first sight, he did not care for the
Matterhorn. It was entirely unlike his ideal of mountains. It was not at
all like Cumberland. But in a very few years he had come to love the
Alps for their own sake, and we find him regretting at Ambleside the
colour and light of Switzerland, the mountain glory which our humbler
scenery cannot match. And yet he came back to it for a home, not
ill-content.

After another visit to Chamouni, he crossed France to Paris, where
something awaited him that upset all his plans, and turned his energies
into an unexpected channel.

CHAPTER II

CHRISTIAN ART (1845-1847)

At Paris, on the way heme in 1844, he had spent some days in studying
Titian and Bellini and Perugino. They were not new to him; but now that
he was an art-critic, it behoved him to improve his acquaintance with
the old masters. "To admire the works of Pietro Perugino" was one thing;
but to understand them was another, a thing which was hardly attempted
by "the Landscape Artists of England" to whom the author of "Modern
Painters" had so far dedicated his services. He had been extolling
modernism, and depreciating "the Ancients" because they could not draw
rocks and clouds and trees; and he was fresh from his scientific
sketching in the happy hunting-ground of the modern world. A few days in
the Louvre made him the devotee of ancient art, and taught him to lay
aside his geology for history.

In one way the development was easy. The patient attempt to copy
mountain-form had made him sensitive to harmony of line; and in the
great composers of Florence and Venice he found a quality of abstract
design which tallied with his experience of what was beautiful in
Nature. Aiguilles and glaciers, drawn as he drew them, and the
figure-subjects of severe Italian draughtsmen, are beautiful by the same
laws of composition, however different the associations they suggest.

But _he_ had been learning these laws of beauty from Turner and from the
Alps; how did the ancients come by them? This could be found only in a
thorough study of their lives and times, to begin with, to which he
devoted his winter, with Rio and Lord Lindsay and Mrs. Jameson for his
authorities. He found that his foes, Caspar Poussin and Canaletto, and
the Dutch landscapists, were not the real old masters; that there had
been a great age of art before the era of Vandyck and Rubens--even before
Michelangelo and Raphael; and that, towards setting up as a critic of
the present, he must understand the past out of which it had grown. So
he determined to go to Florence and Venice, and to study the religious
painters at first hand.

Mountain-study and Turner were not to be dropped. For example, to
explain the obvious and notorious licences which Turner took with
topography, it was necessary to see in what these licences consisted. Of
the later Swiss drawings, one of the wildest and most impressive was the
"St. Gothard"; Ruskin wanted to find Turner's point of view, and to see
what alterations he had made. He told Turner so, and the artist, who
knew that his picture had been realized from a very slight sketch, was
naturally rather opposed to this test, as being, from his point of view,
merely a waste of time and trouble. He tried to persuade the Ruskins
that the Swiss Sonderbund war, then going on, made travelling unsafe,
and so forth. But in vain. Mr. John was allowed to go, for the first
time alone, without his parents, taking only a servant, and meeting the
trustworthy Coutet at Geneva.

With seven months at his own disposal, he did a vast amount of work,
especially in drawing. The studies of mountain-form and Italian design,
in the year before, had given him a greater interest in the "Liber
Studiorum," Turner's early book of Essays in Composition. He found there
that use of the pure line, about which he has since said so much,
together with a thoughtfully devised scheme of light-and-shade in
mezzotint, devoted to the treatment of landscape in the same spirit as
that in which the Italian masters treated figure-subjects in their
pen-and-bistre studies. And just as he had imitated the Rogers vignettes
in his boyhood, now in his youth he tried to emulate the fine abstract
flow and searching expressiveness of the etched line, and the studied
breadth of shade, by using the quill-pen with washes. At first he kept
pretty closely to monochrome. His object was form, and his special
talent was for draughtsmanship rather than for colour. But it was this
winter's study of the "Liber Studiorum" that started him on his own
characteristic course; and while we have no pen-and-wash work of his
before 1845 (except a few experiments after Prout), we find him now
using the pen continually during the "Modern Painters" period.

On reaching the Lake of Geneva he wrote, or sketched, one of his
best-known pieces of verse, "Mont Blanc Revisited," and a few other
poems followed, the last of the long series which had once been his
chief interest and aim in life. With this lonely journey there came new
and deeper feelings; with his increased literary power, fresh resources
of diction; and he was never so near being a poet as when he gave up
writing verse. Too condensed to be easily understood, too solemn in
their movement to be trippingly read, the lines on "The Arve at Cluse,"
on "Mont Blanc," and "The Glacier," should not be passed over as merely
rhetorical. And the reflections on the loungers at Conflans ("Why Stand
ye here all the Day Idle?") are full of the spirit in which he was
gradually approaching the great problems of his life, to pass through
art into the earnest study of human conduct and its final cause.

He was still deeply religious--more deeply so than before, and found the
echo of his own thoughts in George Herbert, with whom he "communed in
spirit" while he travelled through the Alps. But the forms of outward
religion were losing their hold over him in proportion as his inward
religion became more real and intense. It was only a few days after
writing these lines that he "broke the Sabbath" for the first time in
his life, by climbing a hill after church. That was the first shot fired
in a war, in one of the strangest and saddest wars between conscience
and reason that biography records; strange because the opposing forces
were so nearly matched, and sad because the struggle lasted until their
field of battle was desolated before either won a victory.

Later on we have to tell how he dwelt in Doubting Castle, and how he
escaped. But the pilgrim had not yet met Giant Despair; and his progress
was very pleasant in that spring of 1845, the year of fine weather, as
he drove round the Riviera, and the cities of Tuscany opened out their
treasures to him. There was Lucca, with San Frediano and the glories of
Romanesque architecture; Fra Bartolommeo's picture of the Madonna with
the Magdalen and St. Catherine of Siena, his initiation into the
significance of early religious painting: and, taking hold of his
imagination, in her marble sleep, more powerfully than any flesh and
blood, the dead lady of St. Martin's Church, Ilaria di Caretto. There
was Pisa, with the Campo Santo and the jewel shrine of Sta. Maria della
Spina, then undestroyed; the excitement of street sketching among a
sympathetic crowd of fraternizing Italians; the Abbé Rosini, Professor
of Fine Arts, whom he made friends with, endured as lecturer, and
persuaded into scaffold-building in the Campo Santo for study of the
frescoes. And there was Florence, with Giotto's campanile and Santa
Maria Novella, where the young Protestant frequented monasteries, made
hay with monks, sketched with his new-found friends Rudolf Durheim of
Berne and Dieudonné the French purist; and spent long days copying
Angelico and annotating Ghirlandajo, fevered with the sun of Italy at
its strongest, and with the rapture of discovery, "which turns the
unaccustomed head like Chianti wine."

Coutet got him away, at last, to the Alps; worn out and in despondent
reaction after all this excitement. He spent a month at Macugnaga,
reading Shakespeare and trying to draw boulders; drifting gradually back
into strength enough to attack the next piece of work, the study of
Turner sites on the St. Gothard, where he made the drawings afterwards
engraved in "Modern Painters." In August, J.D. Harding was going to
Venice, and arranged for a meeting at Baveno, on the Lago Maggiore.
Gossip had credited him with a share in "Modern Painters"; now the
tables were turned, and Griffith, the picture-dealer, wanted to know if
it was true that John Ruskin had helped Harding with his new book, just
out. They sketched together, Ruskin perhaps emulating his friend's
slap-dash style in the "Sunset" reproduced in his "Poems," and
illustrating his own in the "Water-mill." And so they drove together to
Verona and thence to Venice.

At Venice they stayed in Danieli's Hotel, on the Riva dei Schiavoni, and
began by studying picturesque canal-life. Mr. Boxall, R.A., and Mrs.
Jameson, the historian of Sacred and Legendary Art, were their
companions. Another old friend, Joseph Severn, had in 1843 gained one of
the prizes at the Westminster Hall Cartoons Competition; and a letter
from Ruskin, referring to the work there, shows how he still pondered on
the subject that had been haunting him in the Alps:

"With your hopes for the elevation of English art by means of
fresco I cannot sympathize.... It is not the material nor the space
that can give us thoughts, passions, or power. I see on our Academy
walls nothing but what is ignoble in small pictures, and would be
disgusting in large ones.... It is not the love of fresco that we
want; it is the love of God and His creatures; it is humility, and
charity, and self-denial, and fasting, and prayer; it is a total
change of character. We want more faith and less reasoning, less
strength and more trust. You want neither walls, nor plaster, nor
colours--_ça ne fait rien à l'affaire_; it is Giotto, and
Ghirlandajo, and Angelico that you want, and that you will and must
want until this disgusting nineteenth century has--I can't say
breathed, but steamed its last."

So early he had taken up and wrapped round him the mantle of Cassandra.

But he was suddenly to find the sincerity of Ghirlandajo and the
religious significance of Angelico united with the matured power of art.
Without knowing what they were to meet, Harding and he found themselves
one day in the Scuola di S. Rocco, and face to face with Tintoret.

It was the fashion earlier, and it has been the fashion since, to
undervalue Tintoret. He is not pious enough for the purists, nor
decorative enough for the Pre-Raphaelites. The ruin or the restoration
of almost all his pictures makes it impossible for the ordinary amateur
to judge them; they need reconstruction in the mind's eye, and that is a
dangerous process. Ruskin himself, as he grew older, found more interest
in the playful industry of Carpaccio than in the laborious games, the
stupendous Titan feats of Tintoret. But at this moment, solemnized
before the problems of life, he found these problems hinted in the
mystic symbolism of the School of S. Rocco; with eyes now opened to
pre-Reformation Christianity, he found its completed outcome in
Tintoret's interpretation of the life of Christ and the types of the Old
Testament; fresh from the stormy grandeur of the St. Gothard, he found
the lurid skies and looming giants of the Visitation, or the Baptism, or
the Crucifixion, re-echoing the subjects of Turner as "deep answering to
deep"; and, with Harding of the Broad Brush, he recognised the mastery
of landscape execution in the Flight into Egypt, and the St. Mary in the
Desert.

He devoted the rest of his time chiefly to cataloguing and copying
Tintoret. The catalogue appeared in "Stones of Venice," which was
suggested by this visit, and begun by some sketches of architectural
detail, and the acquisition of daguerreotypes--a new invention which
delighted him immensely, as it had delighted Turner, with trustworthy
records of detail which sometimes eluded even his industry and accuracy.

At last his friends were gone; and, left alone, he overworked himself,
as usual, before leaving Venice with crammed portfolios and
closely-written notebooks. At Padua he was stopped by a fever; all
through France he was pursued by what, from his account, appears to have
been some form of diphtheria, averted only, as he believed, in direct
answer to earnest prayer. At last his eventful pilgrimage was ended, and
he was restored to his home and his parents. It was not long before he
was at work again in his new study, looking out upon the quiet meadow
and grazing cows of Denmark Hill, and rapidly throwing into form the
fresh impressions of the summer. He was strongly influenced by the
sermons of Canon Melvill--the same preacher whom Browning in his youth
admired--a good orator and sound analytic expositor, though not a great
or independent thinker. Osborne Gordon had recommended him to read
Hooker, and he caught the tone and style of the "Ecclesiastical Polity"
only too readily, so that much of his work of that winter, the more
philosophical part of vol. ii., was damaged by inversions, and
Elizabethan quaintness as of ruff and train, long epexegetical
sentences, and far-sought pomposity of diction. It was only when he had
waded through the chaos which he set himself to survey, that he could
lay aside his borrowed stilts, and stand on his own feet in the Tintoret
descriptions--rather stiff, yet, from foregone efforts.

This volume, like the first, was completed in the winter, in one long
spell of hard work, broken only by a visit to Oxford in January as the
guest of Dr. Greswell, Head of Worcester, at a conference for the
promotion of art. Smith and Elder accepted the book on Mr. J.J. Ruskin's
terms (so his wife wrote), for they had already reported it as called
for by the public. The first volume was going into a third edition.

When his book came out he was away again in Italy, trying to show his
father all that he had seen in the Campo Santo and Giotto's Tower, and
to explain "why it more than startled him." The good man hardly felt the
force of it all at once. And there were little passages of arms and some
heart-quaking and head-shaking, until Mr. Dale, the old schoolmaster,
wrote that he had heard no less a man than Sydney Smith mention the new
book in public, in the presence of "distinguished literary characters,"
as a work of "transcendent talent, presenting the most original views,
in the most elegant and powerful language, which would work a complete
revolution in the world of taste." When he returned home it was to find
a respectful welcome. His word on matters of Art was now really worth
something, and before long it was called for. The National Gallery was
comparatively in its infancy. It had been established less than
twenty-five years, and its manager, Mr. Eastlake (afterwards Sir
Charles), had his hands full, what with rascally dealers in forged old
masters, and incompetent picture-cleaners; and an economical Government,
and a public that neither knew its own mind nor trusted his judgment. A
great outcry was set up against him for buying bad works, and spoiling
the best by restoration. Ruskin wrote very temperately to _The Times_,
pointing out that the damage had been slight compared with what was
being done everywhere else, and suggesting that, prevention being better
than cure, the pictures should be put under glass, for then they would
not need the recurring attentions of the restorer. But he blamed the
management for spending large sums on added examples of Guido and
Rubens, while they had no Angelico, no Ghirlandajo, no good Perugino,
only one Bellini, and, in a word, left his new friends, the early
Christian artists, unrepresented. He suggested that pictures might be
picked up for next to nothing in Italy; and he begged that the
collection might be made historical and educational by being fully
representative, and chronologically arranged.

CHAPTER III

"THE SEVEN LAMPS"

"Have you read an Oxford Graduate's letters on art?" wrote Miss Mitford,
of "Our Village," on January 27, 1847. "The author, Mr. Ruskin, was here
last week, and is certainly the most charming person that I have ever
known." The friendship thus begun lasted until her death. She encouraged
him in his work; she delighted in his success; and, in the grave
reverses which were to befall him, he found her his most faithful
supporter and most sympathetic consoler. In return, "his kindness
cheered her closing days; he sent her every book that would interest and
every delicacy that would strengthen her, attentions which will not
surprise those who have heard of his large and thoughtful
generosity."[2]

[Footnote 2: "The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford," edited by the
Rev. A.G. L'Estrange.]

It was natural that a rising man, so closely connected with Scotland,
should be welcomed by the leaders of the Scottish school of literature.
Sydney Smith, a former Edinburgh professor, had praised the new volume.
John Murray, as it seems from letters of the period, made overtures to
secure the author as a contributor to his Italian guide-books. Lockhart
employed him to write for the _Quarterly Review_.

Lockhart was a person of great interest for young Ruskin, who worshipped
Scott; and Lockhart's daughter, even without her personal charm, would
have attracted him as the actual grandchild of the great Sir Walter. It
was for her sake, he says, rather than for the honour of writing in the
famous _Quarterly_, that he undertook to review Lord Lindsay's
"Christian Art."

He was known to be a suitor for Miss Lockhart's hand. His father, in
view of the success he desired, had been in February looking out for a
house in the Lake District; hoping, no doubt, to see him settled there
as a sort of successor to Wordsworth and Christopher North. In March,
John Ruskin betook himself to the Salutation at Ambleside, with his
constant attendant and amanuensis George, for quiet after a tiring
winter in London society, and for his new labour of reviewing. But he
did not find himself so fond of the Lakes as of old. He wrote to his
mother (Sunday, March 28, 1847):

"I finished--and sealed up--and addressed--my last bit of work,
last night by ten o'clock--ready to send by to-day's post--so that
my father should receive it with this. I could not at all have done
it had I stayed at home: for even with all the quiet here, I have
had no more time than was necessary. For exercise, I find the
rowing very useful, though it makes me melancholy with thinking of
1838,--and the lake, when it is quite calm, is wonderfully sad and
quiet:--no bright colours--no snowy peaks. Black water--as still as
death;--lonely, rocky islets--leafless woods,--or worse than
leafless--the brown oak foliage hanging dead upon them; gray
sky;--far-off, wild, dark, dismal moorlands; no sound except the
rustling of the boat among the reeds.

"_One o'clock._--I have your kind note and my father's, and am very
thankful that you like what I have written, for I did not at all
know myself whether it were good or bad."

In the early summer he went to Oxford, for a meeting of the British
Association. He said (June 27, 1847):

"I am not able to write a full account of all I see, to amuse you,
for I find it necessary to keep as quiet as I can, and I fear it
would only annoy you to be told of all the invitations I refuse,
and all the interesting matters in which I take no part. There is
nothing for it but throwing one's self into the stream, and going
down with one's arms under water, ready to be carried anywhere, or
do anything. My friends are all busy, and tired to death. All the
members of my section, but especially (Edward) Forbes, Sedgwick,
Murchison, and Lord Northampton--and of course Buckland, are as
kind to me as men can be; but I am tormented by the perpetual sense
of my unmitigated ignorance, for I know no more now than I did when
a boy, and I have only one perpetual feeling of being in
everybody's way. The recollections of the place, too, and the being
in my old rooms, make me very miserable. I have not one moment of
profitably spent time to look back to while I was here, and much
useless labour and disappointed hope; and I can neither bear the
excitement of being in the society where the play of mind is
constant, and rolls _over_ me like heavy wheels, nor the pain of
being alone. I get away in the evenings into the hayfields about
Cumnor, and rest; but then my failing sight plagues me. I cannot
look at anything as I used to do, and the evening sky is covered
with swimming strings and eels. My best time is while I am in the
Section room, for though it is hot, and sometimes wearisome, yet I
have nothing to _say_,--little to do,--nothing to look at, and as
much as I like to hear."

He had to undergo a second disappointment in love; his health broke down
again, and he was sent to Leamington to his former doctor, Jephson, once
more a "consumptive" patient. Dieted into health, he went to Scotland
with a new-found friend, William Macdonald Macdonald of Crossmount. But
he had no taste for sport, and could make little use of his
opportunities for distraction and relaxation. One battue was enough for
him, and the rest of the visit was spent in morbid despondency, digging
thistles, and brooding over the significance of the curse of Eden, so
strangely now interwoven with his own life--"Thorns a also and
Thistles."

At Bower's Well, Perth, where his grandparents had spent their later
years, and where his parents had been married, lived Mr. George Gray, a
lawyer, and an old acquaintance of the Ruskin family. His daughter
Euphemia used to visit at Denmark Hill. It was for her that, some years
earlier, "The King of the Golden River" had been written. She had grown
up into a perfect Scotch beauty, with every gift of health and spirits
which would compensate--the old folk thought--for his retiring and
morbid nature. They were anxious, now more than ever, to see him
settled. They pressed him, in letters still extant, to propose. We have
seen how he was situated, and can understand how he persuaded himself
that fortune, after all, was about to smile upon him. Her family had
their own reasons for promoting the match, and all united in hastening
on the event.

In the Notes to Exhibitions added to a new edition of "Modern Painters,"
then in the Press, the author mentions a "hurried visit to Scotland in
the spring" of 1848. This was the occasion of his marriage at Perth, on
April 10. The young couple spent rather more than a fortnight on the way
South, among Scotch and English lakes, intending to make a more extended
tour in the summer to the cathedrals and abbeys.

The pilgrimage began with Salisbury, where a few days' sketching in the
damp and draughts of the cathedral laid the bridegroom low, and brought
the tour to an untimely end. In August, the young people were seen
safely off to Normandy, where they went by easy stages from town to
town, studying the remains of Gothic building. In October they returned
and settled in a house of their own, at 31, Park Street, where during
the winter he wrote "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," and, as a bit of
by-work, a notice of Samuel Prout for the _Art Journal._

This was Ruskin's first illustrated volume. The plates were engraved by
himself in soft-ground etching, such as Prout had used, from drawings he
had made in 1846 and 1848. Some are scrappy combinations of various
detail, but others, such as the Byzantine capital, the window in
Giotto's Campanile, the arches from St. Lo in Normandy, from St. Michele
at Lucca, and from the Ca' Foscari at Venice, are effective studies of
the actual look of old buildings, seen as they are shown us in Nature,
with her light and the shade added to all the facts of form, and her own
last touches in the way of weather-softening, and settling-faults, and
tufted, nestling plants.

Revisiting the Hôtel de la Cloche at Dijon in later years, Ruskin showed
me the room where he had "bitten" the last plate in his wash-hand basin,
as a careless makeshift for the regular etcher's bath. He was not
dissatisfied with his work himself; the public of the day wanted
something more finished. So the second edition appeared with the
subjects elaborately popularized in fashionable engraving. More recently
they have undergone reduction for a cheap issue. But any book lover
knows the value of the original "Seven Lamps" with its San Miniato cover
and autograph plates.

As to its reception, or at least the anticipation of it. Charlotte
Bronte bears witness in a letter to the publishers.

"I congratulate you on the approaching publication of Mr. Ruskin's new
work. If 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture' resemble their predecessor,
'Modern Painters,' they will be no lamps at all, but a new
constellation,--seven bright stars, for whose rising the reading world
ought to be anxiously agape."

The book was announced for his father's birthday, May 10, 1849, and it
appeared while they were among the Alps. The earlier part of this tour
is pretty fully described in "Præterita," II. xi., and "Fors," letter
xc., and so the visit of Richard Fall, the meeting with Sibylla Dowie,
and the death of cousin Mary need not be dwelt on here. From the letters
that passed between father and son we find that Mr. John had been given
a month's leave from July 26 to explore the Higher Alps, with Coutet his
guide and George his valet. The old people stayed at the Hôtel des
Bergues, and thought of little else but their son and his affairs,
looking eagerly from day to day for the last news, both of him and of
his book.

Mr. Ruskin, senior, writes from Geneva on July 29:

"Miss Tweddale says your book _has made a great sensation._" On
August 4: "The _Spectator_, which Smith sets great value on, has an
elaborate favourable notice on 'Seven Lamps,' only ascribing an
_infirmity_ of temper, quoting railroad passage in proof. Anne was
told by American family servant that you were in American Paper,
and got it for us, the _New York Tribune_ of July 13; first article
is your book. They say they are willing to be learners from, rather
than critics of, such a book, etc. The _Daily News_ (some of the
_Punch_ people's paper) has a capital notice. It begins: 'This is a
masked battery of seven pieces, which blaze away to the total
extinction of the small architectural lights we may boast of, etc.,
etc.'" On August 5: "I have, at a shameful charge of ten francs,
got August magazine and Dickens, quite a prohibition for parcels
from England. In _British Quarterly_, under æsthetics of Gothic
architecture they take four works, you first.... As a critic they
almost rank you with Goethe and Coleridge, and in style with Jeremy
Taylor."

The qualified encouragement of these remarks was further qualified with
detailed advice about health; and warnings against the perils of the
way, to which Mr. John used to answer on this wise:

"CORMAYEUR, _Sunday afternoon (July_ 29, 1849).

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"(Put the three sheets in order first, 1, 2, 3, then read this,
front and _back_, and then 2, and then 3, front and back.) You and
my mother were doubtless very happy when you saw the day clear up
as you left St. Martin's. Truly it was impossible that any day
could be more perfect towards its close. We reached Nant Bourant at
twelve o'clock, or a little before, and Coutet having given his
sanction to my wish to get on, we started again soon after one--and
reached the top of the Col de Bonhomme about five. You would have
been delighted with that view--it is one upon those lovely seas of
blue mountain, one behind the other, of which one never
tires--this, fortunately, westward--so that all the blue ridges and
ranges above Conflans and Beaufort were dark against the afternoon
sky, though misty with its light; while eastward a range of snowy
crests, of which the most important was the Mont Iseran, caught the
sunlight full upon them. The sun was as warm, and the air as mild,
on the place where the English travellers sank and perished, as in
our garden at Denmark Hill on the summer evenings. There is,
however, no small excuse for a man's losing courage on that pass,
if the weather were foul. I never saw one so literally pathless--so
void of all guide and help from the lie of the ground--so
embarrassing from the distance which one has to wind round mere
brows of craggy precipice without knowing the direction in which
one is moving, while the path is perpetually lost in heaps of
shale or among clusters of crags, even when it is free of snow.
All, however, when I passed was serene, and even beautiful--owing
to the glow which the red rocks had in the sun. We got down to
Chapiu about seven--itself one of the most desolately-placed
villages I ever saw in the Alps. Scotland is in no place that I
have seen, so barren or so lonely. Ever since I passed Shapfells,
when a child, I have had an excessive love for this kind of
desolation, and I enjoyed my little square chalet window and my
chalet supper exceedingly (mutton with garlic)."

He then confesses that he woke in the night with a sore throat, but
struggled on next day down the Allée Blanche to Cormayeur.

"I never saw such a mighty heap of stones and dust. The glacier
itself is quite invisible from the road (and I had no mind for
extra work or scrambling), except just at the bottom, where the ice
appears in one or two places, being exactly of the colour of the
heaps of waste coal at the Newcastle pits, and admirably adapted
therefore to realize one's brightest anticipations of the character
and style of the Allée _Blanche_.

"The heap of its moraine conceals, for the two miles of its extent,
the entire range of Mont Blanc from the eye. At last you weather
the mighty promontory, cross the torrent which issues from its
base, and find yourself suddenly at the very foot of the vast slope
of torn granite, which from a point not 200 feet lower than the
summit of Mont Blanc, sweeps down into the valley of Cormayeur.

"I am quite unable to speak with justice--or think with
clearness--of this marvellous view. One is so unused to see a mass
like that of Mont Blanc without any snow that all my ideas and
modes of estimating size were at fault. I only felt overpowered by
it, and that--as with the porch of Rouen Cathedral--look as I
would, I could not _see_ it. I had not mind enough to grasp it or
meet it. I tried in vain to fix some of its main features on my
memory; then set the mules to graze again, and took my sketch-book,
and marked the outlines--but where is the use of marking contours
of a mass of endless--countless--fantastic rock--12,000 feet sheer
above the valley? Besides, one cannot have sharp sore-throat for
twelve hours without its bringing on some slight feverishness; and
the scorching Alpine sun to which we had been exposed without an
instant's cessation from the height of the col till now--i.e., from
half-past ten to three--had not mended the matter; my pulse was now
beginning slightly to quicken and my head slightly to ache--and my
impression of the scene is feverish and somewhat painful; I should
think like yours of the valley of Sixt."

So he finished his drawing, tramped down the valley after his mule, in
dutiful fear of increasing his cold, and found Cormayeur crowded, only
an attic _au quatrième_ to be had. After trying to doctor himself with
gray pill, kali, and senna, Coutet cured his throat with an alum gargle,
and they went over the Col Ferret.

The courier Pfister had been sent to meet him at Martigny, and bring
latest news and personal report, on the strength of which several days
passed without letters, but not without a remonstrance from
headquarters. On August 8 he writes from Zermatt:

"I have your three letters, with pleasant accounts of critiques,
etc., and painful accounts of your anxieties. I certainly never
thought of putting in a letter at Sion, as I arrived there about
three hours after Fister left me, it being only two stages from
Martigny; and besides, I had enough to do that morning in thinking
what I should want at Zermatt, and was engaged at Sion, while we
changed horses, in buying wax candles and rice. It was unlucky that
I lost post at Visp," etc.

A few days later he says:

"On Friday I had such a day as I have only once or twice had the
like of among the Alps. I got up to a promontory projecting from
the foot of the Matterhorn, and lay on the rocks and drew it at my
ease. I was about three hours at work as quietly as if in my study
at Denmark Hill, though on a peak of barren crag above a glacier,
and at least 9,000 feet above sea. But the Matterhorn, after all,
is not so fine a thing as the aiguille Dru, nor as any one of the
aiguilles of Chamouni: for one thing, it is all of secondary rock
in horizontal beds, quite rotten and shaly; but there are other
causes of difference in impressiveness which I am endeavouring to
analyze, but find considerable embarrassment in doing so. There
seems no sufficient reason why an isolated obelisk, one-fourth
higher than any of them, should not be at least as sublime as they
in their dependent grouping; but it assuredly is not. For this
reason, as well as because I have not found here the near studies
of primitive rock I expected,--for to my great surprise, I find the
whole group of mountains, mighty as they are, except the
inaccessible Monte Rosa, of secondary limestones or slates,--I
should like, if it were possible, to spend a couple of days more on
the Montanvert, and at the bases of the Chamouni aiguilles,
sleeping at the Montanvert."

And so on, apologetically begging (as other sons beg money) for _time_,
to gather the material of "Modern Painters," volume iv.

"I hope you will think whether the objects you are after are worth risks
of sore throats or lungs," replied his father, for he had "personified a
perpetual influenza" until they got him to Switzerland, and they were
very anxious; indeed, Pfister's news from Martigny had scared his
mother--not very well herself--into wild plans for recapturing him.
However, Osborne Gordon was going to Chamouni with Mr. Pritchard, and so
they gave him a little longer; and he made the best use of his time:

"_Monday evening (August_ 20, 1849).

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"I have to-night a packet of back letters from Viège ... but I have
really hardly time to read them to-night, I had so many notes to
secure when I came from the hills. I walk up every day to the base
of the aiguilles without the slightest sense of fatigue; work there
all day hammering and sketching; and down in the evening. As far as
days by myself can be happy they are so, for I love the place with
all my heart. I have no over-fatigue or labour, and plenty of time.
By-the-by, though in most respects they are incapable of
improvement, I recollect that I thought to-day, as I was breaking
last night's ice away from the rocks of which I wanted a specimen,
with a sharpish wind and small pepper and salt-like sleet beating
in my face, that a hot chop and a glass of sherry, if they were to
be had round the corner, would make the thing more perfect. There
was however nothing to be had round the corner but some Iceland
moss, which belonged to the chamois, and an extra allowance of
north wind."

This next is scribbled on a tiny scrap of paper:

"GLACIER or GREPPOND, _August_ 21.

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"I am sitting on a gray stone in the middle of the glacier, waiting
till the fog goes away. I believe I _may_ wait. I write this line
in my pocket-book to thank my mother for hers which I did not
acknowledge last night. I am glad and sorry that she depends so
much on my letters for her comfort. I am sending them now every day
by the people who go down, for the diligence is stopped. You may
run the chance of missing one or two therefore. I am quite well,
and very comfortable--sitting on Joseph's knapsack laid on the
stone. The fog is about as thick as that of London in
November,--only white; and I see nothing near me but fields of
dampish snow with black stones in it."

And then:

"MONTANVERT, _August_ 22.

"I cannot say that on the whole the aiguilles have treated me well.
I went up Saturday, Monday and Tuesday to their feet, and never
obtained audience until to-day, and then they retired at twelve
o'clock; but I have got a most valuable memorandum."

The parental view was put thus:

GENEVA, _Monday, August_ 20, 1849.

"MY DEAREST JOHN,

"I do not know if you have got all my letters, fully explaining to
you in what way the want of a _single_ letter, on two occasions,
did _so_ much mischief--made such havoc in our peace. I think my
last Thursday's letter entered on it. We are grateful for many
letters--that have come. It was merely the accident of the moment
when first by illness and then by precipices we were most
anxious--being exactly the moment the letters took it into their
heads to be not forthcoming. Not writing so often would only keep
us more in the dark, with little less anxiety. Please say if you
get a letter every day...."

Space can hardly be afforded for more than samples of this voluminous
correspondence, or interesting quotations might be given about the
"ghost-hunt yesterday and a crystal-hunt to-day," and life at the
Montanvert, until at last (August 28):

"I have taken my place in diligence for Thursday, and hope to be
with you in good time. But I quite feel as if I were leaving home
to go on a journey. I shall not be melancholy, however, for I have
really had a good spell of it.... Dearest love to my mother. I
don't intend to write again.

"Ever, my dearest father,

"Your most affectionate son,

"J. RUSKIN."

CHAPTER IV

"STONES OF VENICE" (1849-1851)

A book about Venice had been planned in 1845, during Ruskin's first long
working visit. He had made so many notes and sketches both of
architecture and painting that the material seemed ready to hand;
another visit would fill up the gaps in his information; and two or
three months' hard writing would work the subject off, and set him free
to continue "Modern Painters." So before leaving home in 1849, he had
made up his mind that the next work would be "The Stones of Venice,"
which, on the appearance of "The Seven Lamps," was announced by the
publishers as in preparation.

He left home again early in October; by the end of November he was
settled with his wife at Hôtel Danieli, Venice, for the winter. He
expected to find without much trouble all the information he wanted as
to the dates, styles and history of Venetian buildings; but after
consulting and comparing all the native writers, it appeared that the
questions he asked of them were just the questions they were unprepared
to answer, and that he must go into the whole matter afresh. So he laid
himself out that winter for a thorough examination of St. Mark's and the
Ducal Palace and the other remains--drawing, and measuring, and
comparing their details.

His father had gone back to England in September out of health, and the
letters from home did not report improvement. His mother, too, was
beginning to fear the loss of her sight; and he could not stay away from
them any longer. In February, 1850, he broke off his work in the middle
of it, and returned to London. The rest of the year he spent in writing
the first volume of "Stones of Venice," and in preparing the
illustrations, together with "Examples of the Architecture of Venice," a
portfolio of large lithographs and engravings in mezzotint and line, to
accompany the work. It was most fortunate for Ruskin that his drawings
could be interpreted by such men as Armytage and Cousen, Cuff and Le
Keux, Boys and Lupton, and not without advantage to them that their
masterpieces should be preserved in his works, and praised as they
deserved in his prefaces. But these plates for "Stones of Venice" were
in advance of the times. The publisher thought them "caviare to the
general," so Mr. J.J. Ruskin told his son; but gave it as his own belief
that "some dealers in Ruskins and Turners in 1890 will get great prices
for what at present will not sell."

Early in 1850, his father, at his mother's desire, and with the help of
W.H. Harrison, collected and printed his poems, with a number of pieces
that still remained in MS., the author taking no part in this revival of
bygones, which, for the sake of their associations, he was not anxious
to recall--though his father still believed that he _might_ have been a
poet, and _ought_ to have been one. This is the volume of "Poems J.R.,
1850," so highly valued by collectors.

Another resurrection was "The King of the Golden River," which had lain
hidden for the nine years of the Ars Poetica. He allowed it to be
published, with woodcuts by the famous "Dicky" Doyle. The little book
ran through three editions that year. The first issue must have been
torn to rags in the nurseries of the last generation, since copies are
so rare as to have brought ten guineas apiece instead of the six
shillings at which they were advertised in 1850.

A couple of extracts from letters of 1850 will give some idea of
Ruskin's impressions of London society and the Drawing Room:

"MY DEAREST MOTHER,

"Horrible party last night--stiff--large--dull--fidgety--strange,
--run-against-everybody-know-nobody sort of party. Naval people.
Young lady claims acquaintance with me--I know as much of her as
of Queen Pomare--Talk: get away as soon as I can--ask who she
is--Lady (----);--as wise as I was before. Introduced to a black
man with chin in collar. Black man condescending--I abuse
different things to black man: chiefly the House of Lords. Black
man says he lives in it--asks where I live--don't want to tell
him--obliged--go away and ask who he is--(----); as wise as I was
before. Introduced to a young lady--young lady asks if I like
drawing--so away and ask who she is--Lady(----). Keep away, with
back to wall and look at watch. Get away at last. Very sulky this
morning--hope my father better--dearest love to you both."

"PARK STREET, _4 o'clock, (May, 1850)_.

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"We got through gloriously, though at one place there was the most
awkward crush I ever saw in my life--the pit at the Surrey, which I
never saw, may perhaps show the like--nothing else. The floor was
covered with the ruins of ladies' dresses, torn lace and fallen
flowers. But Effie was luckily out of it, and got through
unscathed--and heard people saying 'What a beautiful dress!' just
as she got up to the Queen. It was fatiguing enough but not so
_awkward_ as I expected....

"The Queen looked much younger and prettier than I expected--very
like her pictures, even like those which are thought to flatter
most--but I only saw the profile--I could not see the front face as
I knelt to her, at least without an upturning of the eyes which I
thought would be unseemly--and there were but some two or three
seconds allowed for the whole affair....

"The Queen gave her hand very graciously: but looked bored; poor
thing, well she might be, with about a quarter of a mile square of
people to bow to.

"I met two people whom I have not seen for many a day, Kildare and
Scott Murray--had a chat with the former and a word with Murray,
but nothing of interest...."

As one of the chief literary figures of the day, Ruskin could not avoid
society, and, as he tells in "Præterita," he was rewarded for the
reluctant performance of his duties by meeting with several who became
his lifelong friends. Chief among these he mentions Mr. and Mrs.
Cowper-Temple, afterwards Lord and Lady Mount Temple. The acquaintance
with Samuel Rogers, inauspiciously begun many years before, now ripened
into something like friendship; Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton) and
other men of letters were met at Rogers' breakfasts. A little later a
visit to the Master of Trinity, Whewell, at Cambridge, brought him into
contact with Professer Willis, the authority on Gothic architecture, and
other notabilities of the sister University. There also he met Mr. and
Mrs. Marshall of Leeds (and Coniston); and he pursued his journey to
Lincoln, with Mr. Simpson, whom he had met at Lady Davy's, and to
Farnley for a visit to Mr. F.H. Fawkes, the owner of the celebrated
collection of Turners (April, 1851).

In London he was acquainted with many of the leading artists and persons
interested in art. Of the "teachers" of the day he was known to men so
diverse as Carlyle--and Maurice, with whom he corresponded in 1815 about
his "Notes on Sheepfolds"--and C.H. Spurgeon, to whom his mother was
devoted. He was as yet neither a hermit, nor a heretic: but mixed freely
with all sorts and conditions, with one exception, for Puseyites and
Romanists were yet as heathen men and publicans to him; and he noted
with interest, while writing his review of Venetian history, that the
strength of Venice was distinctly Anti-Papal, and her virtues Christian
but not Roman. Reflections on this subject were to have formed part of
his great work, but the first volume was taken up with the _à priori_
development of architectural forms; and the treatment in especial of
Venetian matters had to be indefinitely postponed, until another visit
had given him the opportunity of gathering his material.

Meanwhile, his wide sympathy had turned his mind toward a subject which
then had received little attention, though since then loudly
discussed--the reunion of (Protestant) Christians.

He put together his thoughts in a pamphlet on the text "There shall be
one fold and one Shepherd," calling it, in allusion to his architectural
studies, "Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds." He proposed a
compromise, trying to prove that the pretensions to priesthood on the
high Anglican side, and the objections to episcopacy on the
Presbyterian, were alike untenable; and hoped that, when once these
differences--such little things he thought them--were arranged, a united
Church of England might become the nucleus of a world-wide federation of
Protestants, a _civitas Dei_, a New Jerusalem.

There were many who agreed with his aspirations: he received shoals of
letters from sympathizing readers, most of them praising his aims and
criticising his means. Others objected rather to his manner than to his
matter; the title savoured of levity, and an art-critic writing on
theology was supposed to be wandering out of his province. Tradition
says that the "Notes" were freely bought by Border farmers under a
rather laughable mistake; but surely it was no new thing for a Scotch
reader to find a religious tract under a catching title. There were a
few replies; one by Mr. Dyce, who defended the Anglican view with mild
persiflage and the usual commonplaces. And there the matter ended, for
the public. For Ruskin, it was the beginning of a train of thought
which led him far. He gradually learnt that his error was not in asking
too much, but in asking too little. He wished for a union of
Protestants, forgetting the sheep that are not of _that_ fold, and
little dreaming of the answer he got, after many days, in "Christ's Folk
in the Apennine."

Meanwhile the first volume of "Stones of Venice" had appeared, March,
1851. Its reception was indirectly described in a pamphlet entitled
"Something on Ruskinism, with a 'Vestibule' in Rhyme, by an Architect"
complaining bitterly of the "ecstasies of rapture" into which the
newspapers had been thrown by the new work:

"Your book--since reviewers so swear--may be rational,
Still, 'tis certainly not either loyal or national;"

for it did not join in the chorus of congratulation to Prince Albert and
the British public on the Great Exhibition of 1851, the apotheosis of
trade and machinery. The "Architect" finds also--what may surprise the
modern reader who has not noticed that many an able work has been
thought unreadable on its first appearance--that he cannot understand
the language and ideas:

"Your style is so soaring--and some it makes sore--
That plain folks can't make out your strange mystical lore."

He will allow the author to be quite right, when he finds something to
agree upon; but the moment a sore point is touched, then Ruskin is
"insane." In one respect the "Architect" hit the nail on the head:
"Readers who are not reviewers by profession can hardly fail to perceive
that Ruskinism is violently inimical to _sundry existing interests_."

The best men, we said, were the first to recognise Ruskin's genius. Let
us throw into the opposite scale an opinion of more weight than the
"Architect's," in a transcript of the original letter from Carlyle.

"CHELSEA, _March_ 9, 1851.

"DEAR RUSKIN,

"I did not know yesterday till your servant was gone that there was
any note in the parcel; nor at all what a feat you had done! A loan
of the gallant young man's Memoirs was what I expected; and here,
in the most chivalrous style, comes a gift of them. This, I think,
must be in the style _prior_ to the Renaissance! What can I do but
accept your kindness with pleasure and gratitude, though it is far
beyond my deserts? Perhaps the next man I meet will use me as much
below them; and so bring matters straight again! Truly I am much
obliged, and return you many hearty thanks.

"I was already deep in the 'Stones'; and clearly purpose to hold on
there. A strange, unexpected, and I believe, most true and
excellent _Sermon_ in Stones--as well as the best piece of
schoolmastering in Architectonics; from which I hope to learn much
in a great many ways. The spirit and purport of these critical
studies of yours are a singular sign of the times to me, and a very
gratifying one. Right good speed to you, and victorious arrival on
the farther shore! It is a quite new 'Renaissance,' I believe, we
are getting into just now: either towards new, _wider_ manhood,
high again as the eternal stars; or else into final death, and the
(marsh?) of Gehenna for evermore! A dreadful process, but a needful
and inevitable one; nor do I doubt at all which way the issue will
be, though which of the extant nations are to get included in it,
and which is to be trampled out and abolished in the process, may
be very doubtful. God is great: and sure enough, the changes in the
'Construction of Sheepfolds' as well as in other things, will
require to be very considerable.

"We are still labouring under the foul kind of influenza here, I
not far from emancipated, my poor wife still deep in the business,
though I hope past the deepest. Am I to understand that you too are
seized? In a day or two I hope to ascertain that you are well
again. Adieu; here is an interruption, here also is the end of the
paper.

"With many thanks and regards."

[Signature cut away.]

As soon as the first volume of "Stones of Venice" and the "Notes on the
Construction of Sheepfolds" were published, Ruskin took a short Easter
holiday at Matlock, and set to work at a new edition of "Modern
Painters." This was the fifth reprint of the first volume, and the third
of vol. ii. They were carefully and conscientiously revised, and the
Postscript indulged in a little triumph at the changed tone of public
criticism upon Turner.

But it was too late to have been much service to the great artist
himself. In 1845--after saying good-bye and "Why _will_ you go to
Switzerland? there will be such a _fidge_ about you when you're
gone"--Turner lost his health, and was never himself again. The last
drawings he did for Ruskin (January, 1848), the "Brünig" and the
"Descent from the St. Gothard to Airolo," showed his condition
unmistakably; and the lonely restlessness of the last, disappointing
years were, for all his friends, a melancholy ending to a brilliant
career. Ruskin wrote:

"This year (1851) he has no picture on the walls of the Academy;
and the _Times_ of May 3 says: 'We miss those works of
INSPIRATION'!"

"_We_ miss! Who misses? The populace of England
rolls by to weary itself in the great bazaar of Kensington,[3]
little thinking that a day will come when those veiled vestals and
prancing amazons, and goodly merchandise of precious stones and
gold, will all be forgotten as though they had not been; but that
the light which has faded from the walls of the Academy is one
which a million Koh-i-noors could not rekindle; and that the year
1851 will, in the far future, be remembered less for what it has
displayed, than for what it has withdrawn."

[Footnote 3: The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.]

CHAPTER V

PRE-RAPHAELITISM (1851-1853)

The _Times_, in May 1851, missed "those works of inspiration," as Ruskin
had at last taught people to call Turner's pictures. But the
acknowledged mouthpiece of public opinion found consolation in
castigating a school of young artists who had "unfortunately become
notorious by addicting themselves to an antiquated style and an affected
simplicity in painting.... We can extend no toleration to a mere servile
imitation of the cramped style, false perspective, and crude colour of
remote antiquity. We want not to see what Fuseli termed drapery 'snapped
instead of folded'; faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated into
skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist's shop, and
expression forced into caricature.... That morbid infatuation which
sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity
deserves no quarter at the hands of the public."

Ruskin knew nothing personally of these young innovators, and had not at
first sight wholly approved of the apparently Puseyite tendency of
Rossetti's "Ecce Ancilla Domini," Millais' "Carpenter's Shop," and
Holman Hunt's "Early Christian Missionary," exhibited the year before.
All these months he had been closely kept to his "Sheepfolds" and
"Stones of Venice"; but now he was correcting the proofs of "Modern
Painters," vol. i., as thus:

"Chapter the last, section 21: _The duty and after privileges of
all students_.... Go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk
with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but
how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction;
rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing;
believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in
the truth."

And at Coventry Patmore's request he went to the Academy to look at the
pictures in question. Yes; the faces were ugly: Millais' "Mariana" was a
piece of idolatrous Papistry, and there was a mistake in the
perspective. Collins' "Convent Thoughts"--more Popery; but very
careful--"the tadpole too small for its age"; but what studies of
plants! And there was his own "Alisma Plantago," which he had been
drawing for "Stones of Venice" (vol. i., plate 7) and describing: "The
lines through its body, which are of peculiar beauty, mark the different
expansions of its fibres, and are, I think, exactly the same as those
which would be traced by the currents of a river entering a lake of the
shape of the leaf, at the end where the stalk is, and passing out at its
point." Curvature was one of the special subjects of Ruskin, the one he
found most neglected by ordinary artists. The "Alisma" was a test of
observation and draughtsmanship. He had never seen it so thoroughly or
so well drawn, and heartily wished the study were his.

Looking again at the other works of the school, he found that the one
mistake in the "Mariana" was the only error in perspective in the whole
series of pictures; which could not be said of any twelve works,
containing architecture, by popular artists in the exhibition; and that,
as studies both of drapery and of every other minor detail, there had
been nothing in art so earnest or so complete as these pictures since
the days of Albert Dürer.

He went home, and wrote his verdict in a letter to _The Times_ (May 9,
1851). Next day he asked the price of Hunt's "Two Gentlemen of Verona,"
and Millais' "Return of the Dove." On the 13th his letter appeared in
_The Times_, and on the 26th he wrote again, pointing out beauties, and
indications of power in conception, and observation of Nature, and
handling, where at first he, like the rest of the public, had been
repelled by the wilful ugliness of the faces. Meanwhile the
Pre-Raphaelites wrote to tell him that they were neither Papists nor
Puseyites. The day after his second letter was published he received an
ill-spelt missive, anonymously abusing them. This was the sort of thing
to interest his love of poetical justice. He made the acquaintance of
several of the Brethren. "Charley" Collins, as his friends
affectionately called him, was the son of a respected R.A., and the
brother of Wilkie Collins; himself afterwards the author of a delightful
book of travel in France, "A Cruise upon Wheels." Millais turned out to
be the most gifted, charming and handsome of young artists. Holman Hunt
was already a Ruskin-reader, and a seeker after truth, serious and
earnest in his religious nature as in his painting.

The Pre-Raphaelites were not, originally, Ruskin's pupils, nor was their
movement, directly, of his creation. But it was the outcome of a general
tendency which he, more than any man, had helped to set in motion; and
it was the fulfilment, though in a way he had not expected, of his
wishes.

His attraction to Pre-Raphaelitism was none the less real because it was
sudden, and brought about partly by personal influence. And in
re-arranging his art-theory to take them in, he had before his mind
rather what he hoped they would become than what they were. For a time,
his influence over them was great; their first three years were their
own; their next three years were practically his; and some of them, the
weaker brethren, leaned upon him until they lost the command of their
own powers. No artist can afford to use another man's eyes; still less,
another man's brain and heart. Ruskin, great as an exponent, was in no
sense a master of artists; and if he cheered on the men, who, he
believed, were the best of the time, it did not follow that he should be
saddled with the responsibility of directing them.

The famous pamphlet on "Pre-Raphaelitism" of August, 1851, showed that
the same motives of Sincerity impelled both the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren
and Turner and, in a degree, men so different as Prout, old Hunt, and
Lewis. All these were opposed to the Academical School who worked by
rule of thumb; and they differed among one another only in differences
of physical power and moral aim. Which was all perfectly true, and much
truer than the cheap criticism which could not see beyond superficial
differences, or the fossil theories of the old school. But
Pre-Raphaelitism was an unstable compound, liable to explode upon the
experimenter, and its component parts to return to their old antithesis
of crude naturalism on the one hand, and affectation of piety or poetry
or antiquarianism, on the other. And _that_ their new champion did not
then foresee. All he knew was that, just when he was sadly leaving the
scene, Turner gone and night coming on, new lights arose. It was really
far more noteworthy that Millais and Rossetti and Hunt were _men of
genius_, than that the "principles" they tried to illustrate were sound,
and that Ruskin divined their power, and generously applauded them.

Immediately after finishing the pamphlet on "Pre-Raphaelitism," he left
for the Continent with his wife and friends, the Rev. and Mrs. Daniel
Moore; spent a fortnight in his beloved Savoy, with the Pritchards; and
then crossed the Alps with Charles Newton. On the 1st of September he
was at Venice, for a final spell of labour on the palaces and churches.
After spending a week with Rawdon Brown he settled at Casa Wetzler,
Campo Sta. Maria Zobenigo, and during the autumn and winter not only
worked extremely hard at his architecture, but went with his wife into
Austrian and Italian society and saw many distinguished visitors. One of
them, whom he lectured on the shortcomings of the Renaissance, was Dean
Milman. "I am amused at your mode of ciceronizing the Dean of St.
Paul's," wrote his father, who kept up the usual close correspondence,
and made himself useful in looking up books of reference and consulting
authorities like Mr. James Fergusson--for these chapters of easy
eloquence were not written without a world of pains. The engravers and
the business department of the new publications also required his
co-operation, for they were now becoming large ventures. During the
three and a half years preceding the summer of 1851 Ruskin seems to have
spent £1,680 of profits from his books, making by his writings at this
period only about a third of his annual outlay; so that the estimated
cost of these great illustrated volumes, some £1,200, was a matter of
anxiety to his father, who, together with the publisher, deprecated
large plates and technical details, and expressed some impatience to
see results from this visit to Venice. He looked eagerly for every new
chapter or drawing as it was sent home for criticism. Some passages,
such as the description of the Calle San Moise ("Stones of Venice," II.
iv,) were unfavourably received by him. Another time he says, "You have
a very great difficulty now in writing any more, which is to write up to
yourself": or again,--"Smith reports slow sale of 'Stones of Venice'
(vol. I.) and 'Pre-Raphaelitism.' The times are sorely against you. The
Exhibition has impoverished the country, and literature of a saleable
character seems chiefly confined to shilling books in green paper, to be
had at railway stations. Smith will have an account against us." He
always sent adverse press-notices, on the principle that it was good for
John: and every little discouragement or annoyance was discussed in
full.

The most serious news, threatening complete interruption of the work
rapidly progressing in spite of all, was of Turner's death (December 19,
1851). Old Mr. Ruskin heard of it on the 21st, a "dismal day" to him,
spent in sad contemplation of the pictures his son had taught him to
love. Soon it came out that John Ruskin was one of the executors named
in the will, with a legacy of _£20_ for a mourning ring:--"Nobody can
say you were paid to praise," says his father. It was gossipped that he
was expected to write Turner's biography--"five years' work for you,"
says the old man, full of plans for gathering material. But when one
scandal after another reached his ears, he changed his tone, and
suggested dropping personal details, and giving a "Life of his Art," in
the intended third and final volume of "Modern Painters." Something of
the sort was done in the Edinburgh Lectures and at the close of vol. v.
of "Modern Painters": and the official life was left to Walter
Thornbury, with which Mr. Ruskin perhaps did not wish to interfere. But
he collected a mass of then unpublished material about Turner, which
goes far to prove that the kindly view he took of the strange man's
morbid and unhappy life was not without justification. At the time, so
many legal complications developed that Ruskin was advised to resign his
executorship; later on he was able to fulfil its duties as he conceived
them, in arranging Turner's sketches for the National Gallery.

Others of his old artist-friends were now passing away. Early in January
Mr. J.J. Ruskin called on William Hunt and found him feeble: "I like the
little Elshie," he says, nicknaming him after the Black Dwarf, for Hunt
was somewhat deformed:

"He is softened and humanized. There is a gentleness and a greater
_bonhomie_--less reserve. I

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/13076