Read Ebook: The Life of John Ruskin by Collingwood W G William Gershom

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Another accession to the family took place in the same year ; 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.

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 "Praeterita," 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 AEneas 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 of that kind, or relating some droll anecdote, or explaining the part of Virgil 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 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.

MOUNTAIN-WORSHIP

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 anapaests 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.

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 , 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 !"

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 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.

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 , 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.

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."

THE GERM OF "MODERN PAINTERS"

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:

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

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'!"

Ten days or so after this episode John Ruskin was matriculated at Oxford . 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:

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?"

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