I.—THE MAN
'Alas! there was in John Ruskin a strain of the Knight of La Mancha, and he, too, had to learn that in this world and in our age Knight-errantry, however chivalrous in spirit, medieval romance, however beautiful as poetry, will not avail to reform the world with nothing but a rusty lance and a spavined charger. It is magnificent, it may be war, but it is not a real social philosophy, nor is it a possible religion.'—Frederic Harrison.
TO write of the Lake celebrities without including the greatest of them all would be like mapping our mountains and omitting Scawfell, or the waters and forgetting Windermere. Yet to add anything to the countless essays and biographies seems presumptuous. For the filling in of this merest outline of one aspect of a noble life readers must become diligent students of John Ruskin, and his books, and his exponents. There are lives of him, appreciations of him and of his teachings, monographs on his personality, on his relation to the Lake District, on his views about Art, on his social politics and religion, on his Bible references, and on every other light-reflecting facet of this many-sided soul. In fact, no other man has lived in recent years whose innermost being has been so extensively and so deeply probed, so exposed to the universal gaze, or who has been so worshipfully followed, and, at the same time, by another set, so resolutely opposed. When we turn to a bibliography we stand amazed, not only that any author should be so prolific, or even that he should possess so much first-hand knowledge of so many matters, but that he should have done so much about such a variety of things so marvellously well. A juvenile verse-maker of promise developing into an unrivalled prose-poet and word-painter; a draftsman of capacity from his youth up, if not naturally a colourist, and an insistent teacher of style, yet an art critic with sympathetic feelings, who knew what he was talking about (which, it is to be feared, the majority do not); a mineralogist who wrote about stones and dust and ores, both scientifically and poetically, as if he were in love with their intrinsic and extrinsic beauties, and no less so with the unseen rythmic dances of their molecules during crystallization; a geologist who sought to explain by ice-gougings and water-chisellings, and by the crushings and infoldings of volcanic pressure, the outlines of the vales and hills whose forms and many-hued draperies his cultured eye delighted in; the champion of a great artist who had been attacked without insight by Blackwood, and in his championship evolving a classic—the classic for ages to come—on 'Modern Painters'; an investigator of the ultimate principles of architecture and sculpture, whose steps being led to Venice, is impelled to write about her stones, thus to become nothing less than a historian of that wonderful oligarchy; an observer of all winged creatures about him, who sees in the swallow's circling flight, and in the robin's cheery presence, eternal laws of art and mechanism from which he can teach great truths to half-fledged undergraduates of Oxford; a lover of the independent peasantry of Lakeland, who for their sakes learns road-making, and sets them to cultivate home-industries, and who writes strange, and frequently unpractical, suggestions for the betterment of their condition, and for making the whole world sweeter; how can such a man, intellectual giant and gladiator though he be, remain always victor over so wide an area? He is often spoken of as 'The Master.' Doubtless most of us have so styled him in relation to one excursus of his or another that has specially captivated us. But it seems to me that Mr. Frederic Harrison, his latest biographer and personal intimate, is right when he says: 'The author of more than eighty distinct works upon so miscellaneous a field, of masses of poetry, lectures, letters, as well as substantial treatises, was of necessity rather a stimulus than an authority, an influence rather than a master.' Any claim on his behalf to speak the mot d'ordre on any given topic challenges the thoughtful reader, and lays upon him the duty of closely looking at every emphatic statement, every unsupported opinion, every clever aphorism put forth as an axiom. The recognition that he is merely a force, though a mighty one, an impulsion and an inspiration rather than a revealer and spokesman of the final word, allows the mind to be swept along by the impetuous current of his eloquence, rejoicing and untrammelled, and suffers it to be braced and helped by him. The danger in this case may be, however, that the young and inexperienced, lost in admiration at the marvellous beauty of his language, and the obvious truth of so much that he says—intoxicated by the wine of the kingdom which he so unrestrainedly pours forth—are unable to notice how often the elixir tastes of the earthen amphora containing it. The dogmatism of his precocious boyhood never left him in afterlife. Indeed, disappointment at the non-acceptance of so many of his views by the world at large accentuated it. His delighted outlook on Nature, his abiding joy in all things pure and lovely, his intense hatred of moral ugliness and deformity, caused him too often to forget that others had high and holy aspirations, and abhorrences of wrong, who did not see through glasses made after the pattern that suited his own peculiar vision. His complete, almost child-like, absorption in the humour of the passing moment sometimes made him mistake a swift impulse for the discovery of a new philosophic or scientific law, and placed him in inconsistent and contradictory positions, and made his arguments so full of inconsequences as to provoke no little amusement among logicians. So, then, let us be content to take him for just what he is, and no more—an erratic genius, but a genius of the very first order; a discursive preacher, but a preacher who arouses, and thrills, and sends you back into the world to live a better life; a prophet who exaggerates, and is often incoherent with needless fury, but exhibiting in his mission and messages to England a veritable commingling of Carmel's Prophet of Fire, with Jerusalem's 'Evangelical' poet-prophet; a Reformer who fails to see the standpoint of many whom he denounces in social politics and economics, but a reformer, nevertheless, who foreknows a bright to-morrow for the peoples, and who labours to hasten its coming. Take him for all this, and you will accompany him a long way, cautiously, yet reverently and lovingly, and find in him a rare comrade, an unfailing and candid interpreter of your own soul, as well as of many old enigmas that confront it.
John Ruskin's connection with the Lakes dates from his childhood, when he visited the locality with his parents. 'I remember Friar's Crag at Derwentwater when I was four years old.' He received an inspiration for his muse from Skiddaw when only nine:
'Skiddaw, upon thy heights the sun shines bright,
But only for a moment; then gives place
Unto a playful cloud, which on thy brow
Sports wantonly.'
And again, a year later, he contrasts it with the Egyptian Pyramids:
'The touch of man,
Raised pigmy mountains, but gigantic tombs,
The touch of Nature raised the mountain's brow.'
At twelve he saw Scawfell
'So haughty and proud,
While its battlements lofty looked down on the cloud.'
Frequent visits at later periods kept his heart aglow with the romance of these three counties vying so earnestly with each other for supremacy in the glory of mountain-fell, and garrulous beck, dale and dingle, and thunderous force. It was in 1871, when he was nearly fifty-three years old, that he bought from W. J. Linton, the engraver-poet, that Coniston cottage, as it then was, so closely associated with his name for some thirty years thereafter. He gave £1,500 for the property, without seeing it, while lying ill at Matlock. To everybody who knows English literature Brantwood is a household name. On the steep slope of the eastern hills, wood-embowered, with moorland above, and a green field below the highroad, washed by the ripples of the lake on which his boats rocked—one of which, The Jumping Jenny, he had designed, painted 'a bright blue with a Greek scroll pattern round the gunwale'—it is in all respects a true poet's paradise. The opinion of Wordsworth was that it commanded the finest view of Coniston 'Old Man' that was to be had anywhere. Linton was not a very practical man, choosing his gardener, not for his skill, but for his shining blue eyes, and letting his demesne go wild, and his abode to rack and ruin. Ruskin created order and beauty out of the wilderness, with a rose-garden and a garden for wild flowers, greatly enlarged the house, made a little harbour on the shore, and a water-works on the fell, all at considerable outlay, evidencing by the construction of his reservoir and conduits that hydraulics and engineering are not best done by untrained enthusiastic amateurs. In this exquisite retreat began what Mr. Harrison speaks of as the second period of his career—the period when, except for his Slade Professorship, he gave himself up, not to the study, for he never can be said to have studied them—the promulgation of theories about social economics. The Slade Professorship was an epoch in University life, and in the history of British art. His classes were crowded. 'That singular voice of his,' writes a pupil long afterwards, 'which would often hold all the theatre breathless, haunts me still.' His Oxford lectures were reprinted as books by Mr. George Allen, formerly a scholar of his at the Working Man's College, and now become manager of his publishing business (which, by-the-by, Mr. Allen managed so well as to bring Mr. Ruskin in some £4,000 a year at a time it was greatly needed). During the intervals of his professorial duties, and especially after ill-health compelled their relinquishment, he wrote those invaluable autobiographic reminiscences contained in 'Præterita' and 'Fors Clavigera'—books the world will never spare, albeit they are so full of petulant denunciations, and quaint extravagances, and inconsequent satires. We forgive all these for the value of the self-revelations of a unique soul, and for the literary gold-mine they present to the commonwealth of the English-speaking races. When retired altogether to this Arcadia he would ramble along the lakeside path, and up the mountain, to the happy valley of Tarn Hows, or round the water-head to Yewdale, 'my little nested dale of the Yew,' with its streamlets wandering through the fern, and its deep water-pockets over which he would stand musing and questioning them—'How came you to be?' or perchance up Tilberthwaite Ghyll, with its zigzagging wooden bridges after the fashion of a Swiss river-gorge. As he strolled, he would stop to pet some children who, seeing him coming, would await his kindly greeting, or to chat with some ancient shepherd, or some housewife at her cottage door, or possibly he would enter a wayside school-house to puzzle the youngsters with a division sum respecting the sovereign he would leave for them in the schoolmaster's hand. The old 'Professor,' as they called him, was beloved by all, and in his broken years was devotedly cared for and tended by his cousin and adopted daughter, Mrs. Arthur Severn, who lived at Brantwood, and who now with her husband owns the estate. We must remember what he had suffered during his long life, as well as what he had accomplished. 'As we pass beneath the hills,' says he in 'Modern Painters,' 'which have been shaken by earthquake and torn by convulsion, we find periods of perfect repose succeed those of destruction.' He had married unsuitably to satisfy his parents, and the marriage had been nullified. Thrice he was passionately in love, and each disappointment left him sick and despondent, however tenderly remembered and naïvely talked of in old age. His generous money gifts to relatives, and to causes like the Guild of St. George, which lay deep in his affections, as well as, doubtless, some serious lack of lawful 'world-wisdom,' had virtually dissipated the large fortune left him by his father. He was at bay, too, with the rest of the world as to his schemes for its reformation. He had had many serious illnesses, brain fevers included.