If ever there was an active, powerful brain, it was Ruskin’s. No doubt he worked very hard, but I doubt whether hard work by itself can ever upset a healthy brain. I believe it rather strengthens than weakens it, as exercise strengthens the muscles of our body. His was, no doubt, a very sensitive nature, and an overwrought sensitiveness is much more likely to cause mischief than steady intellectual effort. And what a beautiful mind his was, and what lessons of beauty he has taught us all. At the same time, he could not bear anything unbeautiful; and anything low or ignoble in men revolted him and made him thoroughly unhappy. I remember once taking Emerson to lunch with him, in his rooms in Corpus Christi College. Emerson was an old friend of his, and in many respects a cognate soul. But some quite indifferent subject turned up, a heated discussion ensued, and Ruskin was so upset that he had to quit the room and leave us alone. Emerson was most unhappy, and did all he could to make peace, but he had to leave without a reconciliation.
It is very difficult to make allowance for these gradual failures of brain power.
Again and again I have seen such cases at Oxford, where men were clearly no longer themselves, and yet had to be treated as if they were; nay, continue to exercise their old influence till at last the crash came, and one began to understand what had seemed so strange, and more than strange, in their behaviour. I believe there are as many degrees of insanity as there are of shortsightedness and deafness, and the line that divides sanity from insanity is often very small. I have had to watch the waverings of this line in several cases, and it is enough to upset one’s own equilibrium to have to deal with a friend who to-day is quite like himself and quite like ourselves, and the next day a raving lunatic. My predecessor at Oxford, Dr. Trithen, half Russian, half Swiss by birth, and a man of extraordinary gifts and wonderfully attractive, went slowly out of his mind and had at last to be sent to an asylum. But even then he wrote the most reasonable and touching letters to me on all sorts of subjects, though when I went to see him he was quite unapproachable. Fortunately he died soon after from brain disease, but who could say what was the cause of it? Nothing remains of him but the edition of a Sanskrit play, the Vîracharitra.
But his knowledge of Sanskrit and all sorts of languages, his peculiar power of mimicry in imitating the exact pronunciation of different dialects, and his knack of copying Oriental MSS. so that one could hardly tell the difference between the original and the copy were quite amazing. He might have grown to be another Mezzofanti if the fates had not been against him. He was the very type of a fascinating Russian, full of kindness and courtesy, sparkling in conversation, always ready to help others and most careless about himself; but there always was an expression in his coruscating eyes which spoke of danger, and foreboded the tragedy which finished his young and promising life.
Painful as these intellectual breakdowns are, they are not half so painful as when we see in our friends what is at first called mere wrongheadedness, but is apt to lead to a complete deterioration of moral fibre, and in the end to an apparent inability to distinguish between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood. In the former case we know that a slight lesion in one of the ganglion cells or nerve-fibres of the brain is sufficient to account for any disturbance in the intellectual clock-work. The man himself remains the same, though at times hidden from us, as it were, by a veil, and we feel towards him the same sorrowful sympathy which we feel towards a man who has lost the use of his eyes or his legs, who cannot see or cannot walk. We know that the instruments are at fault, not the operator. But it is very difficult to make the same allowance in cases of moral deterioration. Here instruments and operator seem to be the same, though, for all we know, here too the brain may be more at fault than the heart. A well-known oculist maintained that the peculiarities, or what he called the distortions, in Turner’s latest pictures were due to a malformation in the muscles of his eyes. He actually invented some spectacles by which everything that seemed ill-proportioned in Turner’s latest productions came right if looked at through these corrective lenses. May not what we call shortsightedness, conceit, vanity, envy, hatred and malice—all, as it seems, without rhyme or reason—be due in the beginning to some weakness or dimness of sight that might have been corrected, if treated in time, by those who are nearest and dearest to the sufferer? This may seem a dangerous view of moral responsibility; but, if so, it can be dangerous to the sufferer only, not to those who ought to sympathise, i.e. to feel and suffer, with him. To me it has proved a solution of many difficulties during a long and varied intercourse with men and women; the only difficulty is how to make these invalids harmless to themselves.
Ruskin’s influence among the undergraduates at Oxford was most extraordinary. He could persuade the young Christ Church men to take spade and wheelbarrow and help him to make a road which he thought would prove useful to a village near Oxford. No other professor could have achieved that. The road was made, but was also soon washed away, and, of course, Ruskin was laughed at, though the labour undergone by his pupils did them no doubt a great deal of good, even though it did not benefit the inhabitants of the village for any length of time. It was sad to see Ruskin leave Oxford estranged from many of his friends, dissatisfied with his work, which nevertheless was most valuable and highly appreciated by young and old, perhaps by the young even more than by the old. His spirit still dwells in the body, and if any one may look back with pride and satisfaction upon the work which he has achieved it is surely Ruskin.
Another though less frequent visitor to Oxford was Tennyson. His first visit to our house was rather alarming. We lived in a small house in High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen College, and our establishment was not calculated to receive sudden guests, particularly a Poet Laureate. He stepped in one day during the long vacation, when Oxford was almost empty. Wishing to show the great man all civility, we asked him to dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. At that time almost all the shops were in the market, which closed at one o’clock. My wife, a young housekeeper, did her best for our honoured guest. He was known to be a gourmand, and at dinner he was evidently put out when he found the sauce with the salmon was not the one he preferred. He was pleased, however, with the wing of a chicken, and said it was the only advantage he got from being Poet Laureate, that he generally received the liver-wing of a chicken. The next morning at breakfast we had rather plumed ourselves on having been able to get a dish of cutlets, and were not a little surprised when our guest arrived to see him whip off the cover of the hot dish, and to hear the exclamation: “Mutton chops! the staple of every bad inn in England.” However, these were but minor matters, though not without importance at the time in the eyes of a young wife to whom Tennyson had been like one of the Immortals. He was simply delightful and full of inquiries about the East, more particularly about Indian poetry, and I believe that it was then that I told him that there was no rhyme in Sanskrit poetry, and ventured to ask him why there should be in English. He was not so offended as Samuel Johnson seems to have been when asked the same question. The old bear would probably have answered my question by, “You are a great fool, sir; use your own judgment,” while Tennyson gave the very sensible answer that rhyme assisted the memory.
It is difficult to define the difference between an Oxford man and a Cambridge man; but if Ruskin was decidedly a representative of Oxford, Tennyson was a true son of the sister University. I had been taught to admire Tennyson by my young friends at Oxford, many of whom were enthusiastic worshippers of the poet. My friends often forgot that I had been brought up on German poetry, and that though I knew Heine, Rückert, Eichendorff, Chamisso, and Geibel, to say nothing of Goethe, Schiller, Bürger, and even Klopstock, their allusions to Tennyson, Browning, nay, to Shelley and Keats, often fell by the wayside and were entirely lost on me.
However, I soon learnt to enjoy Tennyson’s poetry, its finish, its delicacy, its moderation—I mean, the absence of all extravagance; yet there is but one of his books which has remained with me a treasure for life, his “In Memoriam.” To have expressed such deep, true, and original thought as is contained in each of these short poems in such perfect language, to say nothing of rhyme, was indeed a triumph. Tennyson was very kind to me, and took a warm interest in my work, particularly in my mythological studies. I well remember his being struck by a metaphor in my first Essay on Comparative Mythology, published in 1856, and his telling me so. I had said that the sun in his daily passage across the sky had ploughed a golden furrow through the human brain, whence sprang in ancient times the first germs of mythology, and afterwards the rich harvest of religious thought.
“I don’t know,” he said, “whether the simile is quite correct, but I like it.” I was of course very proud that the great poet should have pondered on any sentence of mine, and still more that he should have approved of my theory of seeing in mythology a poetical interpretation of the great phenomena of nature. But it was difficult to have a long discussion with him. He was fond of uttering short and decisive sentences: his yes was yes indeed, and his no was no indeed.