CHAPTER V

"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 tosundry 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,March9, 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 stylepriorto 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 excellentSermonin 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,widermanhood, 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.]

"CHELSEA,March9, 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 stylepriorto 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 excellentSermonin 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,widermanhood, 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 "Whywillyou go to Switzerland? there will be such afidgeabout 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 theTimesof May 3 says: 'We miss those works of INSPIRATION'!""Wemiss! Who misses? The populace of England rolls by to weary itself in the great bazaar of Kensington,3little 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."

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

"Wemiss! Who misses? The populace of England rolls by to weary itself in the great bazaar of Kensington,3little 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."

NOTE:

The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.

TheTimes, in May 1851, missed "those works of inspiration," as Ruskin had at last taught people to call Turner's pictures. But the acknowledgedmouthpiece 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," whichhe 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 toThe 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 inThe 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 componentparts to return to their old antithesis of crude naturalism on the one hand, and affectation of piety or poetry or antiquarianism, on the other. Andthattheir 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 weremen 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 platesand 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£20for 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 goesfar 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 greaterbonhomie—less reserve. I had sent him 'Pre-Raphaelitism.' He had marked it very much with pencil. He greatly likes your notice of people not keeping to their last. So many clever artists, he says, have been ruined by not acting on your principles. I got a piece of advice from Hunt,—never to commission a picture. He could not have done my pigeon so well had he felt he was doing it for anybody."

The pigeon was a drawing he had just bought; in later years at Brantwood.

In February 1852 a dinner-party was given to celebrate in his absence John Ruskin's thirty-third birthday.

"On Monday, 9th, we had Oldfield (Newton was in Wales), Harrison, George Richmond, Tom, Dr. Grant, and Samuel Prout. The latter I never saw in such spirits, and he went away much satisfied. Yesterday at church we were told that he came home very happy, ascended to his painting-room, and in a quarter of an hour from his leaving our cheerful house was a corpse, from apoplexy. He never spoke after the fit came on. He had always wished for a sudden death."

Next year, in November, 1853, he tells of a visit paid, by John's request, to W.H. Deverell, the young Pre-Raphaelite, whom he found "in squalor and sickness—with his Bible open—and not long to live—while Howard abuses his picture at Liverpool."

Early in 1852 Charles Newton was going to Greece on a voyage of discovery, and wanted John Ruskin to go with him. But the parents would not hear of his adventuring himself at sea "in those engine-vessels." So Newton went alone, and "dug up loads of Phoenician antiquities." One cannot help regretting that Ruskin lost this opportunity of familiarizing himself with the early Greek art which, twenty years later he tried to expound. For the time he was well enough employed on the "Stones of Venice." He tells the story of this ten months' stay in a letter to his venerable friend Rogers the poet, dated June 23 (1852).

"I was out of health and out of heart when I first got here. There came much painful news from home, and then such a determined course of bad weather, and every other kind of annoyance, that I never was in a temper fit to write to anyone: the worst of it was that I lost allfeelingof Venice, and this was the reason both of my not writing to you and of my thinking of you so often. For whenever I found myself getting utterly hard and indifferent I used to read over a little bit of the 'Venice' in the 'Italy' and it put me always into the right tone of thought again, and for this I cannot be enough grateful to you. For though I believe that in the summer, when Venice is indeed lovely, when pomegranate blossoms hang over every garden-wall, and green sunlight shoots through every wave, custom will not destroy, or even weaken, the impression conveyed at first; it is far otherwise in the length and bitterness of the Venetian winters. Fighting with frosty winds at every turn of the canals takes away all the old feelings of peace and stillness; the protracted cold makes the dash of the water on the walls a sound of simple discomfort, and some wild and dark day in February one starts to find oneself actually balancing in one's mind the relative advantages of land and water carriage, comparing the Canal with Piccadilly, and even hesitating whether for the rest of one's life one would rather have a gondola within call or a hansom."

He then goes on to lament the decay of Venice, the idleness and dissipation of the populace, the lottery gambling; and to forebode the "destruction of old buildings and erection of new" changing the place "into a modern town—a bad imitation of Paris." Better than that he thinks would be utter neglect; St. Mark's Place would again be, what it was in the early ages, a green field, and the front of the Ducal Palace and the marble shafts of St. Mark's would be rooted in wild violets and wreathed with vines:

"She will be beautiful again then, and I could almost wish that the time might come quickly, were it not that so many noble pictures must be destroyed first.... I love Venetian pictures more and more, and wonder at them every day with greater wonder; compared with all other paintings they are so easy, so instinctive, so natural; everything that the men of other schools did by rule and called composition, done here by instinct and only called truth."I don't know when I have envied anybody more than I did the other day the directors and clerks of the Zecca. There they sit at inky deal desks, counting out rolls of money, and curiously weighing the irregular and battered coinage of which Venice boasts; and just over their heads, occupying the place which in a London countinghouse would be occupied by a commercial almanack, a glorious Bonifazio—'Solomon and the Queen of Sheba'; and in a less honourable corner threeolddirectors of the Zecca, very mercantile-looking men indeed, counting money also, like the living ones, only a littlemoreliving, painted by Tintoret; not to speak of the scattered Palma Vecchios, and a lovely Benedetto Diana which no one ever looks at. I wonder when the European mind will again awake to the great fact that a noble picture was not painted to behung, but to beseen? I only saw these by accident, having been detained in Venice by soma obliging person who abstracted some [of his wife's jewels] and brought me thereby into various relations with the respectable body of people who live at the wrong end of the Bridge of Sighs—the police, whom, in spite of traditions of terror, I would very willingly have changed for some of those their predecessors whom you have honoured by a note in the 'Italy.' The present police appear to act on exactly contrary principles; yours found the purse and banished the loser; thesedon'tfind the jewels, and won't let me go away. I am afraid no punishment is appointed in Venetian law for people who stealtime."

"I don't know when I have envied anybody more than I did the other day the directors and clerks of the Zecca. There they sit at inky deal desks, counting out rolls of money, and curiously weighing the irregular and battered coinage of which Venice boasts; and just over their heads, occupying the place which in a London countinghouse would be occupied by a commercial almanack, a glorious Bonifazio—'Solomon and the Queen of Sheba'; and in a less honourable corner threeolddirectors of the Zecca, very mercantile-looking men indeed, counting money also, like the living ones, only a littlemoreliving, painted by Tintoret; not to speak of the scattered Palma Vecchios, and a lovely Benedetto Diana which no one ever looks at. I wonder when the European mind will again awake to the great fact that a noble picture was not painted to behung, but to beseen? I only saw these by accident, having been detained in Venice by soma obliging person who abstracted some [of his wife's jewels] and brought me thereby into various relations with the respectable body of people who live at the wrong end of the Bridge of Sighs—the police, whom, in spite of traditions of terror, I would very willingly have changed for some of those their predecessors whom you have honoured by a note in the 'Italy.' The present police appear to act on exactly contrary principles; yours found the purse and banished the loser; thesedon'tfind the jewels, and won't let me go away. I am afraid no punishment is appointed in Venetian law for people who stealtime."

Mr. Ruskin returned to England in July, 1852, and settled next door to his old home on Herne Hill. He said he could not live any more in Park Street, with a dead brick wall opposite his windows. And so, under the roof where he wrote the first volume of "Modern Painters," he finished "Stones of Venice." These latter volumes give an account of St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace and other ancient buildings; a complete catalogue of Tintoret's pictures—the list he had begun in 1845; and a history of the successive styles of architecture, Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance, interweaving illustrations of the human life and character that made the art what it was.

The kernel of the work was the chapter on the Nature of Gothic; in which he showed, more distinctly than in the "Seven Lamps," and connected with a wider range of thought, suggested by Pre-Raphaelitism, the doctrine that art cannot be produced except by artists; that architecture, in so far as it is an art, does not mean mechanical execution, by unintelligent workmen, from the vapid working-drawings of an architect's office; and, just as Socrates postponed the day of justice until philosophers should be kings and kings philosophers, so Ruskin postponed the reign of art until workmen should be artists, and artists workmen.

By the end of June, 1853, "Stones of Venice" was finished, as well as a description of Giotto's works at Padua, written for the Arundel Society. The social duties of the season were over; Ruskinand his wife went north to spend a well-earned holiday. At Wallington in Northumberland, staying with Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan, he met Dr. John Brown at Edinburgh, author of "Pet Marjorie" and other well-known works, who became his lifelong friend. Ruskin invited Millais, by this time an intimate and heartily-admired friend,4to join them at Glenfinlas. Ruskin devoted himself first to foreground studies, and made careful drawings of rock-detail; and then, being asked to give a course of lectures before the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, he was soon busy writing once more, and preparing the cartoon-sketches, "diagrams" as he called them, to illustrate his subjects. Dr. Acland had joined the party; and he asked Millais to sketch their host as he stood contemplatively on the rocks with the torrent thundering beside him. The picture with additional work in the following winter, became the well-known portrait in the possession of Sir Henry Acland, much the best likeness of this early period.

Another portrait was painted—in words—by one of his audience at Edinburgh on November 1, when he gave the opening lecture of his course, his first appearance on the platform. The account is extracted from theEdinburgh Guardianof November 19, 1853:

"Before you can see the lecturer, however, you must get into the hall, and that is not an easy matter, for, long before the doors are opened, the fortunate holders of season tickets begin to assemble, so that the crowd not only fills the passage, but occupies the pavement in front of the entrance and overflows into the road. At length the doors open, and you are carried through the passage intothe hall, where you take up, of course, the best available position for seeing and hearing.... After waiting a weary time ... the door by the side of the platform opens, and a thin gentleman with light hair, a stiff white cravat, dark overcoat with velvet collar, walking, too with a slight stoop, goes up to the desk, and looking round with a self-possessed and somewhat formal air, proceeds to take off his great-coat, revealing thereby, in addition to the orthodox white cravat, the most orthodox of white waistcoats.... 'Dark hair, pale face, and massive marble brow—that is my ideal of Mr. Ruskin,' said a young lady near us. This proved to be quite a fancy portrait, as unlike the reality as could well be imagined, Mr. Ruskin has light sand-coloured hair; his face is more red than pale; the mouth well-cut, with a good deal of decision in its curve, though somewhat wanting in sustained dignity and strength; an aquiline nose; his forehead by no means broad or massive, but the brows full and well bound together; the eye we could not see, in consequence of the shadows that fell upon his countenance from the lights overhead, but we are sure it must be soft and luminous, and that the poetry and passion we looked for almost in vain in other features must be concentrated there.5After sitting for a moment or two, and glancing round at the sheets on the wall as he takes off his gloves, he rises, and leaning slightly over the desk, with his hands folded across, begins at once,—'You are proud of your good city of Edinburgh,' etc."And now for the style of the lecture.... Properly speaking, there were two styles essentially distinct, and not well blended,—a speaking and a writing style; the former colloquial and spoken off-hand; the latter rhetoricaland carefully read in quite a different voice,—we had almost said intoned.... He has a difficulty in sounding the letter 'r'; [and there is a] peculiar tone in the rising and falling of his voice at measured intervals, in a way scarcely ever heard except in the public lection of the service appointed to be read in churches. These are the two things with which, perhaps you are most surprised,—his dress and manner of speaking—both of which (the white waistcoat notwithstanding) are eminently clerical. You naturally expect, in one so independent, a manner free from conventional restraint, and an utterance, whatever may be the power of voice, at least expressive of a strong individuality; and you find instead a Christ Church man of ten years' standing, who has not yet taken orders; his dress and manner derived from his college tutor, and his elocution from the chapel-reader."

"And now for the style of the lecture.... Properly speaking, there were two styles essentially distinct, and not well blended,—a speaking and a writing style; the former colloquial and spoken off-hand; the latter rhetoricaland carefully read in quite a different voice,—we had almost said intoned.... He has a difficulty in sounding the letter 'r'; [and there is a] peculiar tone in the rising and falling of his voice at measured intervals, in a way scarcely ever heard except in the public lection of the service appointed to be read in churches. These are the two things with which, perhaps you are most surprised,—his dress and manner of speaking—both of which (the white waistcoat notwithstanding) are eminently clerical. You naturally expect, in one so independent, a manner free from conventional restraint, and an utterance, whatever may be the power of voice, at least expressive of a strong individuality; and you find instead a Christ Church man of ten years' standing, who has not yet taken orders; his dress and manner derived from his college tutor, and his elocution from the chapel-reader."

The lectures were a summing up, in popular form, of the chief topics of Ruskin's thought during the last two years. The first (November 1) stated, with more decision and warmth than part of his audience approved, his plea for the Gothic Revival, for the use of Gothic as a domestic style. The next lecture, given three days later, went on to contrast the wealth of ornament in mediæval buildings with the poor survivals of conventionalized patterns which did duty for decoration in nineteenth-century "Greek" architecture; and he raised a laugh by comparing a typical stonemason's lion with a real tiger's head, drawn in the Edinburgh zoological gardens by Mr. Millais.

The last two lectures, on November 15 and 18, were on Painting; briefly reviewing the history of landscape and the life and aims of Turner; and finally, Christian art and Sincerity in imagination, which was now put forth as the guiding principle of Pre-Raphaelitism.

Public opinion was violently divided over these lectures; and they were the cause of much trouble at home. The fact of his lecturing at all aroused strong opposition from his friends and remonstrances from his parents. Before the event his motherwrote: "I cannot reconcile myself to the thought of your bringing yourself personally before the world till you are somewhat older and stronger." Afterwards, his father, while apologizing for the word "degrading," is disgusted at his exposing himself to such an interruption as occurred, and to newspaper comments and personal references. The notion of an "itinerant lecturer" scandalizes him. He hears from Harrison and Holding that John is to lecture even at their very doors—in Camberwell. "I see small bills up," he writes, "with the lecturers' names; among them Mr. —— who gets your old clothes!" And he bids him write to the committee that his parents object to his fulfilling the engagement. He postponed his lecture—for ten years; but accepted the Presidency of the Camberwell Institute, which enabled him to appear at their meetings without offence to any.

While staying at Edinburgh, Mr. Ruskin met the various celebrities of modern Athens, some of them at the table of his former fellow-traveller in Venice, Mrs. Jameson. He then returned home to prepare the lectures for printing.

These lectures as published in April, 1854 were fiercely assailed by the old school; but a more serious blow fell on him before that month was out. His wife returned to her parents and instituted a suit against him, to which he made no answer. The marriage was annulled in July. A year later she married Millais.

In May (1854) the Pre-Raphaelites again needed his defence. Mr. Holman Hunt exhibited the "Light of the World" and the "Awakening Conscience." Ruskin made them the theme of two more letters toThe Times; mentioning, by the way, the "spurious imitations of Pre-Raphaelite work" which were already becoming common. Starting for his summer tour on the Continent, in the Simmenthal he wrote a pamphlet on the opening of the Crystal Palace. There had been much rejoicing over the "new styleof architecture" in glass and iron, and its purpose as a palace of art. Ruskin who had declined, in the last chapter of the "Seven Lamps," to join in the cry for a new style, was not at all ready to accept this as any real artistic advance; and took the opportunity to plead again for the great buildings of the past, which were being destroyed or neglected, while the British public was glorifying its gigantic greenhouse. The pamphlet practically suggested the establishment of the Society for the preservation of ancient buildings, which has since come into operation.

This summer of 1854 he projected a study of Swiss history: to tell the tale of six chief towns—Geneva, Fribourg, Basle, Thun, Baden and Schaffhausen, to which in 1858 he added Rheinfelden and Bellinzona. He intended to illustrate the work with pictures of the places described. He began with his drawing of Thun, a large bird's-eye view of the town with its river and bridges, roofs and towers, all exquisitely defined with the pen, and broadly coloured in fluctuating tints that seem to melt always into the same aerial blue; the blue, high up the picture, beyond the plain, deepening into distant mountains.

But his father wanted to see "Modern Painters" completed, and so he began his third volume at Vevey, with the discussion of the grand style, in which he at last broke loose from Reynolds, as was inevitable, after his study of Pre-Raphaelitism, and all the varied experiences of the last ten years. The lesson of the Tulse Hill ivy had been brought home to him in many ways: he had found it to be more and more true that Nature is, after all, the criterion of art, and that the greatest painters were always those whose aim, so far as they were conscious of an aim, was to take fact for their starting-point. Idealism, beauty, imagination, and the rest, though necessary to art, could not, he felt, be made the object of study; they were the gift of heredity, of circumstances, of national aspirations and virtues; not to be produced by the best of rules, or achieved by the best of intentions.

What his own view of his own work was can be gathered from a letter to an Edinburgh student, written on August 6, 1854:

"I am sure I never said anything to dissuade you from trying to excel or to do great things. I only wanted you to be sure that your efforts were made with a substantial basis, so that just in the moment of push your footing might not give way beneath you; and also I wanted you to feel that long and steady effort made in a contented way does more than violent effort made from some strong motive and under some enthusiastic impulse. And I repeat—for of this I am perfectly sure—that the best things are only to be done in this way. It is very difficult thoroughly to understand the difference between indolence and reserve of strength, between apathy and severity, between palsy and patience; but there is all the difference in the world; and nearly as many men are ruined by inconsiderate exertions as by idleness itself. To do as much as you can heartily and happily do each day in a well-determined direction, with a view to far-off results, with present enjoyment of one's work, is the only proper, the only essentially profitable way."

NOTES:

"What a beauty of a man he is!" wrote old Mr. Ruskin, "and high in intellect.... Millais' sketches are 'prodigious'! Millais is the painter of the age." "Capable, it seems to me, of almost everything, if his life and strength be spared," said the younger Ruskin to Miss Mitford.

"Mary Russell Mitford found him as a young man 'very eloquent and distinguished-looking, tall, fair, and slender, with a gentle playfulness, and a sort of pretty waywardness that was quite charming.' Sydney Dobell, again, in 1852, discovered an earnestness pervading every feature, giving power to a face that otherwise would be merely lovable for its gentleness. And, finally, one who visited him at Denmark Hill characterized him as emotional and nervous, with a soft, genial eye, a mouth 'thin and severe,' and a voice that, though rich and sweet, yet had a tendency to sink into a plaintive and hopeless tone,"—Literary World, May 19, 1893.

Philanthropic instincts, and a growing sense of the necessity for social reform, had led Ruskin for some years past towards a group of liberal thinkers with whom he had little otherwise in common. At Venice, in 1852, he had written several articles on education, taxation, and so forth, with which he intended to plunge into active politics. His father, like a cautious man of business who knew his son's powers and thought he knew their limitations, wasstrongly opposed to this attempt, and used every argument against it. He appealed to his son's sensitiveness, and assured him that he would be "flayed" unless he wrapped himself in the hide of a rhinoceros. He assured him that, without being on the spot to follow the discussions of politicians, it was useless to offer them any opinions whatsoever. And he ended by declaring that it would be the ruin of his business and of his peace of mind if the name of Ruskin were mixed up with Radical electioneering: not that he was unwilling to suffer martyrdom for a cause in which he believed, but he did not believe in the movements afoot—neither the Tailors' Cooperative Society, in which their friend F.J. Furnivall was interested, nor in any outcome of Chartism or Chartist principles. And so for a time the matter dropped.

In 1854, the Rev. F.D. Maurice founded the Working Men's College. Mr. Furnivall sent the circulars to John Ruskin; who thereupon wrote to Maurice, and offered his services. At the opening lecture on October 31, 1854, at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, Furnivall distributed to all comers a reprint of the chapter "On the Nature of Gothic," which we have already noticed as a statement of the conclusions drawn from the study of art respecting the conditions under which the life of the workman should be regulated. Ruskin thus appeared as contributing, so to say, the manifesto of the movement.

He took charge from the commencement of the drawing-classes—first at 31 Red Lion Square, and afterwards at Great Ormond Street; also super-intending classes taught by Messrs. Jeffery and E. Cooke at the Working Women's (afterwards the Working Men and Women's) College, Queen Square.

In this labour he had two allies; one a friend of Maurice's, Lowes Dickinson, the well-known artist, whose portrait of Maurice was mentioned with honour in the "Notes on the Academy"; his portrait of Kingsley hangs in the hall of the novelist-professor'scollege at Cambridge. The other helper was new friend.

To people who know him only as the elegant theorist of art, sentimental and egotistic, as they will have it, there must be something strange, almost irreconcilable, in his devotion, week after week and year after year, to these night-classes. Still more must it astonish them to find the mystic author of the "Blessed Damozel," the passionate painter of the "Venus Verticordia," working by Ruskin's side in this rough navvy-labour of philanthropy.

It was early in 1854 that a drawing of D.G. Rossetti was sent to Ruskin by a friend of the painter's. The critic already knew Millais and Hunt personally, but not Rossetti. He wrote kindly, signing himself "yours respectfully," which amused the young painter. He made acquaintance, and in the appendix to his Edinburgh Lectures placed Rossetti's name with those of Millais and Hunt, especially praising their imaginative power, as rivalling that of the greatest of the old masters.

He did more than this. He agreed to buy, up to a certain sum every year, any drawings that Rossetti brought him, at their market price; and his standard of money-value for works of art has never been niggardly. This sort of help, the encouragement to work, is exactly what makes progress possible to a young and independent artist; it is better for him than fortuitous exhibition triumphs—much better than the hack-work which many have to undertake, to eke out their livelihood. And the mere fact of being bought by the eminent art-critic was enough to encourage other patrons.

"He seems in a mood to make my fortune," said Rossetti in the spring of 1854; and early in 1855 Ruskin wrote:

"It seems to me that, of all the painters I know, you on the whole have the greatest genius; and you appear to me also to be—as far as I can make out—a very good sort of person, I see that you are unhappy, and that youcan't bring out your genius as you should. It seems to me then the proper andnecessarything, if I can, to make you more happy; and that I shall be more really useful in enabling you to paint properly, and keep your room in order, than in any other way."

He did his best to keep that room in order in every sense. Anxious to promote the painter's marriage with Miss Siddal—"Princess Ida," as Ruskin called her—he offered a similar arrangement to that which he had made with Rossetti; and began in 1855 to give her £150 a year in exchange for drawings up to that value. Rossetti's poems also found a warm admirer and advocate. In 1856, "The Burden of Nineveh" was published anonymously in theOxford and Cambridge Magazine; Ruskin wrote to Rossetti that it was "glorious" and that he wanted to know who was the author,—perhaps not without a suspicion that he was addressing the man who could tell. In 1861 he guaranteed, or advanced, the cost of "The Early Italian Poets," up to £100, with Smith and Elder; and endeavoured, but unsuccessfully, to induce Thackeray to find a place for other poems inThe Cornhill Magazine.

Mr. W.M. Rossetti, in his book on his brother "as Designer and Writer" and in his "Family Letters," draws a pleasant picture of the intimacy between the artist and the critic. "At one time," he says, "I am sure they even loved one another." But in 1865 Rossetti, never very tolerant of criticism and patronage, took in bad part his friend's remonstrances about the details of "Venus Verticordia." Eighteen months later, Ruskin tried to renew the old acquaintance. Rossetti did not return his call; and further efforts on Ruskin's part, up to 1870, met with little response. But the lecture on Rossetti in "The Art of England" shows that on one side at least "their parting," as Mr. W.M. Rossetti says, "was not in anger;" and the portrait of 1861, now in the Oxford University Galleries, will remain as a memorial of the ten years' friendship of the two famous men.

At Red Lion Square, during Lent term, 1855, the three teachers worked together every Thursday evening. With the beginning of the third term, March 29, the increase of the class made it more convenient to divide their forces. Rossetti thenceforward taught the figure on another night of the week; while the elementary and landscape class continued to meet on Thursdays under Ruskin and Lowes Dickinson. In 1856 the elementary and landscape class was further divided, Mr. Dickinson taking Tuesday evenings, and Ruskin continuing the Thursday class, with the help of William Ward as under-master. Later on, G. Allen, J. Bunney, and W. Jeffrey were teachers. Burne-Jones, met in 1856 at Rossetti's studio, was also pressed into the service for a time.

There were four terms in the Working Men's College year, the only vacation, except for the fortnight at Christmas, being from the beginning of August to the end of October. Ruskin did not always attend throughout the summer term, though sometimes his class came down to him into the country to sketch. He kept up the work without other intermission until May, 1858, after which the completion of "Modern Painters" and many lecture-engagements took him away for a time. In the spring of 1860 he was back at his old post for a term; but after that he discontinued regular attendance, and went to the Working Men's College only at intervals, to give addresses or informal lectures to students and friends. On such occasions the "drawing-room" or first floor of the house in which the College was held would be always crowded, with an audience who heard the lecturer at his best; speaking freely among friends out of a full treasure-house "things new and old"—accounts of recent travel, lately-discovered glories of art, and the growing burden of the prophecy that in those years was beginning to take more definite shape in his mind.

As a teacher, Ruskin spared no pains to make thework interesting. He provided—Mr. E. Cooke informs me that he was the first to provide—casts from natural leaves and fruit in place of the ordinary conventional ornament; and he sent a tree to be fixed in a corner of the class-room for light and shade studies. Mr. W. Ward in the preface to the volume of letters already quoted says that he used to bring his minerals and shells, and rare engravings and drawings, to show them.

"His delightful way of talking about these things afforded us most valuable lessons. To give an example: he one evening took for his subject a cap, and with pen and ink showed us how Rembrandt would have etched, and Albert Dürer engraved it. This at once explained to us the different ideas and methods of the two masters. On another evening he would take a subject from Turner's 'Liber Studiorum,' and with a large sheet of paper and some charcoal, gradually block in the subject, explaining at the same time the value and effect of the lines and masses."

And for sketching from nature he would take his class out into the country, and wind up with tea and talk. "It was a treat to hear and see him with his men," writes Dr. Furnivall.

His object in the work, as he said before the Royal Commission on National Institutions, wasnot to make artists, but to make the workmen better men, to develop their powers and feelings,—to educate them, in short. He always has urged young people intending to study art as a profession to enter the Academy Schools, as Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites did, or to take up whatever other serious course of practical discipline was open to them. But he held very strongly that everybody could learn drawing, that their eyes could be brightened and their hands steadied, and that they could be taught to appreciate the great works of nature and of art, without wanting to make pictures or to exhibit and sell them.

It was with this intention that he wrote the "Elements of Drawing" in 1856, supplemented by the "Elements of Perspective" in 1859; the illustrations for the book were characteristic sketches by the author, beautifully cut by his pupil, W.H. Hooper, who was one of a band of engravers and copyists formed by these classes at the Working Men's College. In spite of the intention not to make artists by his teaching, Ruskin could not prevent some of his pupils from taking up art as a profession; and those who did so became, in their way, first-rate men. George Allen as a mezzotint engraver, Arthur Burgess as a draughtsman and wood-cutter, John Bunney as a painter of architectural detail, W. Jeffery as an artistic photographer, E. Cooke as a teacher, William Ward as a facsimile copyist, have all done work whose value deserves acknowledgment, all the more because it was not aimed at popular effect, but at the severe standard of the greater schools. But these men were only the side issue of the Working Men's College enterprise. Its real result was in the proof that the labouring classes could be interested in Art; and that the capacity shown by the Gothic workman had not entirely died out of the nation, in spite of the interregnum, for a full century, of manufacture. And the experience led Ruskin forward to wider views on the nature of the arts, and on the duties of philanthropic effort and social economy.

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