The Life of John Ruskin Part 14

"CHELSEA, 22 _Feby_, 1865

"DEAR RUSKIN,

"You have sent me a munificent Box of Cigars; for wh'h what can I say in ans'r? It makes me both sad and glad. _Ay de mi._

"We are such stuff, Gone with a puff--Then think, and smoke Tobacco!'

"The Wife also has had her Flowers; and a letter wh'h has charmed the female mind. You forgot only the first chapter of 'Aglaia';--don't forget; and be a good boy for the future.

"The Geology Book wasn't _Jukes_; I found it again in the Magazine,--reviewed there: 'Phillips,'[9] is there such a name? It has ag'n escaped me. I have a notion to come out actually some day soon; and take a serious Lecture from you on what you really know, and can give me some intelligible outline of, ab't the Rocks,--_bones_ of our poor old Mother; wh'h have always been venerable and strange to me. Next to nothing of rational could I ever learn of the subject....

[Footnote 9: "Jukes,"--Mr. J.B. Jukes, F.R.S., with whom Ruskin had been discussing in _The Reader_. "Phillips," the Oxford Professor of Geology, and a friend of Ruskin's.]

"Yours ever,

"T. CARLYLE."

CHAPTER IV

"SESAME AND LILIES" (1864)

Wider aims and weaker health had not put an end to Ruskin's connection with the Working Men's College, though he did not now teach a drawing-cla.s.s regularly. He had, as he said, "the satisfaction of knowing that they had very good masters in Messrs. Lowes d.i.c.kinson, Jeffery and Cave Thomas," and his work was elsewhere. He was to have lectured there on December 19th, 1863; but he did not reach home until about Christmas; better than he had been; and ready to give the promised address on January 30th, 1864. Beside which he used to visit the place occasionally of an evening to take note of progress, and some of his pupils were now more directly under his care.

It was from one of these visits to the College, on February 27th, that he returned, past midnight, and found his father waiting up for him, to read some letters he had written. Next morning the old man, close upon seventy-nine years of age, was struck with his last illness; and died on March 3rd. He was buried at s.h.i.+rley Church, near Addington, in Surrey, not far from Croydon; and the legend on his tomb records: "He was an entirely honest merchant, and his memory is, to all who keep it, dear and helpful. His son, whom he loved to the uttermost, and taught to speak truth, says this of him."

Mr. John James Ruskin, like many other of our successful merchants, had been an open-handed patron of art, and a cheerful giver, not only to needy friends and relatives, but also to various charities. For example, as a kind of personal tribute to Osborne Gordon, his son's tutor, he gave 5,000 toward the augmentation of poor Christ-Church livings. His son's open-handed way with dependants and servants was learned from the old merchant, who, unlike many hard-working money-makers, was always ready to give, though he could not bear to lose. In spite of which he left a considerable fortune behind him,--considerable when it is understood to be the earnings of his single-handed industry and steady sagacity in legitimate business, without indulgence in speculation. He left 120,000 with various other property, to his son. To his wife he left his house and 37,000, and a void which it seemed at first nothing could fill. For of late years the son had drifted out of their horizon, with ideas on religion and the ordering of life so very different from theirs; and had been much away from home--he sometimes said, selfishly, but not without the greatest of all excuses, necessity. And so the two old people had been brought closer than ever together; and she had lived entirely for her husband. But, as Browning said,--"Put a stick in anywhere, and she will run up it"--so the brave old lady did not faint under the blow, and fade away, but transferred her affections and interests to her son. Before his father's death the difference of feeling between them, arising out of the heretical economy, had been healed. Old Mr. Ruskin's will treated his son with all confidence in spite of his unorthodox views and unbusiness-like ways. And for nearly eight years longer his mother lived on, to see him pa.s.s through his probation-period into such recognition as an Oxford Professors.h.i.+p implied, and to find in her last years his later books "becoming more and more what they always ought to have been" to her.

At the same time, her failing sight and strength needed a constant household companion. Her son, though he did not leave home yet awhile for any long journeys, could not be always with her. Only six weeks after the funeral he was called away for a time to fulfil a lecture-engagement at Bradford. Before going he brought his pretty young Scotch cousin. Miss Joanna Ruskin Agnew, to Denmark Hill for a week's visit. She recommended herself at once to the old lady, and to Carlyle, who happened to call, by her frank good-nature and unquenchable spirits; and her visit lasted seven years, until she was married to Arthur Severn, son of the Ruskins' old friend, Joseph Severn, British Consul at Rome. Even then she was not allowed far out of their sight, but settled in the old house at Herne Hill: "nor virtually," said Ruskin in the last chapter of "Praeterita," "have she and I ever parted since."

All through that year he remained at home, except for short necessary visits, and frequent evenings with Carlyle. And when, in December, he gave those lectures in Manchester which afterwards, as "Sesame and Lilies," became his most popular work, we can trace his better health of mind and body in the brighter tone of his thought. We can hear the echo of Carlyle's talk in the heroic, aristocratic, Stoic ideals, and in the insistence on the value of books and free public libraries,[10]--Carlyle being the founder of the London Library. And we may suspect that his thoughts on women's influence and education had been not a little directed by those months in the company of "the dear old lady and ditto young" to whom Carlyle used to send his love.

[Footnote 10: The first lecture, "Of Kings' Treasuries," was given, December 6th, 1864, at Rusholme Town Hall, Manchester, in aid of a library fund for the Rusholme Inst.i.tute. The second, "Queens' Gardens,"

was given December 14th, at the Town Hall, King Street, now the Free Reference Library, Manchester, in aid of schools for Ancoats.]

In 1864 a new series of papers on Art was begun, the only published work upon Art of all these ten years. The papers ran in _The Art Journal_ from January to July, 1865, and from January to April. 1866, under the t.i.tle of "The Cestus of Aglaia," by which was meant the Girdle, or restraining law, of Beauty, as personified in the wife of Hephaestus, "the Lord of Labour." Their intention was to suggest, and to evoke by correspondence, "some laws for present practice of art in our schools, which may be admitted, if not with absolute, at least with a sufficient consent, by leading artists." As a first step the author asked for the elementary rules of drawing. For his own contribution he showed the value of the "pure line," such as he had used in his own early drawings. Later on, he had adopted a looser and more picturesque style of handling the point; and in the "Elements of Drawing" he had taught his readers to take Rembrandt's etchings as exemplary. But now he felt that this "evasive" manner, as he called it, had its dangers. And so these papers attempted to supersede the amateurish object lesson of the earlier work by stricter rules for a severer style; prematurely, as it proved, for the chapters came to an end before the promised code was formulated. The same work was taken up again in "The Laws of Fesole"; but the use of the pure line, which Ruskin's precepts failed to enforce, was, in the end, taught to the public by the charming practice of Mr.

Walter Crane and Miss Greenaway.

A lecture at the Camberwell Working Men's Inst.i.tute on "Work and Play"

was given on January 24th, 1865; which, as it was printed in "The Crown of Wild Olive," we will notice further on. Various letters and papers on political and social economy and other subjects hardly call for separate notice: with the exception of one very important address to the Royal Inst.i.tution of British Architects, given May 15th, "On the Study of Architecture in our Schools."

CHAPTER V

"ETHICS OF THE DUST" (1865)

Writing to his father from Manchester about the lecture of February 22, 1859--"The Unity of Art"--Ruskin mentions, among various people of interest whom he was meeting, such as Sir Elkanah Armitage and Mrs.

Gaskell, how "Miss Bell and four young ladies came from Chester to hear me, and I promised to pay them a visit on my way home, to their apparent great contentment."

The visit was paid on his way back from Yorks.h.i.+re. He wrote:

"WINNINGTON, NORTHWICH, CHEs.h.i.+RE.

"12 _March_, 1859.

"This is such a nice place that I am going to stay till Monday: an enormous old-fas.h.i.+oned house--full of galleries and up and down stairs--but with magnificently large rooms where wanted: the drawing-room is a huge octagon--I suppose at least forty feet high--like the tower of a castle (hung half way up all round with large and beautiful Turner and Raphael engravings) and with a baronial fireplace:--and in the evening, brightly lighted, with the groups of girls scattered round it, it is a quite beautiful scene in its way. Their morning chapel, too, is very interesting:--though only a large room, it is nicely fitted with reading desk and seats like a college chapel, and two pretty and rich stained-gla.s.s windows--and well-toned organ. They have morning prayers with only one of the lessons--and without the psalms: but singing the Te Deum or the other hymn--and other choral parts: and as out of the thirty-five or forty girls perhaps twenty-five or thirty have really available voices, well trained and divided, it was infinitely more beautiful than any ordinary church service--like the Trinita di Monte Convent service more than anything else, and must be very good for them, quite different in its effect on their minds from our wretched penance of college chapel.

"The house stands in a superb park, full of old trees and sloping down to the river; with a steep bank of trees on the other side; just the kind of thing Mrs. Sherwood likes to describe;--and the girls look all healthy and happy as can be, down to the little six-years-old ones, who I find know me by the fairy tale as the others do by my large books:--so I am quite at home.

"They have my portrait in the library with three others--Maurice, the Bp. of Oxford, and Archdeacon Hare,--so that I can't but stay with them over the Sunday."

The principles of Winnington were advanced; the theology--Bishop Colenso's daughter was among the pupils; the Bishop of Oxford had introduced Ruskin to the managers, who were pleased to invite the celebrated art-critic to visit whenever he travelled that way, whether to lecture at provincial towns, or to see his friends in the north, as he often used. And so between March 1859 and May 1868, after which the school was removed, he was a frequent visitor; and not only he, but other lions whom the ladies entrapped:--mention has been made in print (in "The Queen of the Air") of Charles Halle, whom Ruskin met there in 1863, and greatly admired.

"I like Mr. and Mrs. Halle so very much," he wrote home, "and am entirely glad to know so great a musician and evidently so good and wise a man. He was very happy yesterday evening, and actually sat down and played quadrilles for us to dance to--which is, in its way, something like t.i.tian sketching patterns for ball-dresses. But afterwards he played Home, sweet Home, with three variations--_quite_ the most wonderful thing I have ever heard in music. Though I was close to the piano, the motion of the fingers was entirely invisible--a mere _mist_ of rapidity; the _hands_ moving slowly and softly, and the variation, in the ear, like a murmur of a light fountain, far away. It was beautiful too to see the girls' faces round, the eyes all wet with feeling, and the little coral mouths fixed into little half open gaps with utter intensity of astonishment."

Ruskin could not be idle on his visits; and as he was never so happy as when he was teaching somebody, he improved the opportunity by experiments in education permitted there for his sake. Among other things, he devised singing dances for a select dozen of the girls, with verses of his own writing; one, a maze to the theme of "Twist ye, twine ye," based upon the song in "Guy Mannering," but going far beyond the original motive in its variations weighted with allegoric thought. Deep as the feeling of this little poem is, there is a n.o.bler chord struck in the Song of Peace, the battle-cry of the good time coming; in the faith--who else has found it?--that looks forward to no selfish victory of narrow aims, but to the full reconciliation of hostile interests and the blind internecine struggle of this perverse world, in the clearer light of the millennial morning.

Ruskin's method of teaching, as ill.u.s.trated in "Ethics of the Dust," has been variously pooh-poohed by his critics. It has seemed to some absurd to mix up Theology, and Crystallography, and Political Economy, and Mythology, and Moral Philosophy, with the chatter of school-girls and the romps of the playground. But it should be understood, before reading this book, which is practically the report of these Wilmington talks, that it is printed as an ill.u.s.tration of a method. It showed that play-lessons need not want either depth or accuracy; and that the requirement was simply capacity on the part of the teacher.

The following letter from Carlyle was written in acknowledgment of an early copy of the book, of which the preface is dated Christmas, 1865.

"CHELSEA,

"_20 Decr, 1865._

"The 'Ethics of the Dust,' wh'h I devoured with't pause, and intend to look at ag'n, is a most s.h.i.+ning Performance! Not for a long while have I read anything tenth-part so radiant with talent, ingenuity, lambent fire (sheet--and _other_ lightnings) of all commendable kinds! Never was such a lecture on _Crystallography_ before, had there been nothing else in it,--and there are all manner of things. In power of _expression_ I p.r.o.nounce it to be supreme; never did anybody who had _such_ things to explain explain them better. And the bit of Egypt'n mythology, the cunning _Dreams_ ab't Pthah, Neith, etc., apart from their elucidative quality, wh'h is exquisite, have in them a _poetry_ that might fill any Tennyson with despair. You are very dramatic too; nothing wanting in the stage-direct'ns, in the pretty little indicat'ns: a very pretty stage and _dramatis personae_ altogeth'r. Such is my first feeling ab't y'r Book, dear R.--Come soon, and I will tell you all the _faults_ of it, if I gradually discover a great many. In fact, _come_ at any rate!

"Y'rs ever,

"T. CARLYLE."

The Real Little Housewives, to whom the book was dedicated, were not quite delighted--at least, they said they were not--at the portraits drawn of them, in their pinafores, so to speak, with some little hints at failings and faults which they recognised through the mask of _dramatis personae._ Miss "Kathleen" disclaimed the singing of "Vilikins and his Dinah," and so on. It is difficult to please everybody. The public did not care about the book; the publisher hoped Mr. Ruskin would write no more dialogues: and so it remained, little noticed, for twelve years. In 1877 it was republished and found to be interesting, and in 1905 the 31st thousand (authorised English edition) had been issued. At that time, however, Sesame and Lilies had run to 160,000 copies.

Winnington Hall, the scene of these pastimes, is now, I understand, used by Messrs. Brunner, Mond & Co. as a commonroom or clubhouse for the staff in their great scientific industry.

CHAPTER VI