In any strange house, while you wait for your host or hostess, how much you gather of their tastes and ways from the books on the table and in the shelves! You cannot help noticing either the presence or the absence of literature, and you do not need to open the volumes to guess what sort of reading the good people like. Well-known bindings and styles of binding betray them at once; and unless they are abnormally tidy their pet books are sure to be somewhere in the room they use. Of course, one must discount the evidence of a cover which too obviously matches the furniture; and if you are an author, and expected to call, be not too lifted up on spying your own book gracefully displayed. You may assume that working books, professional tools, are in the workshop; and there are few houses without a certain litter of ephemeral printing, magazines and library volumes, necessary for intelligent conversation. But if the people read, you will soon know it, and learn at a glance much about their tastes and characters.
When you know your friends well enough to browse among their books you learn still more. The way they cut their pages, skipping or plodding; and if they ever do scribble on the margins, what they have marked; and which books are much used, and which are exiled to top shelves; and how they are kept—unbound, or perhaps all too beautifully bound; these things tell you more than an autobiography would, more than many years of ordinary acquaintance.
Ruskin's library was scattered all over his house—and though he has been dead these three years, and for many years earlier made little use of his books, the bulk of them still remain pretty much as he left them. At one time, when he was busy upon literary work, he was continually buying, and every corner was heaped with new purchases and old lots weeded out to be given away or sold; but the net result of his choice and taste, what he personally cared for and kept, can be seen by a visitor at Brantwood—the books for constant use in the study, and favourite reading in his bedroom, and the rest dispersed about the place. Most of these books I remember in just these same places twenty-five years ago, or more; so that in taking you into his study I am showing you the workshop where he wrote "Oxford Lectures" and "Fors Clavigera," and handling the tools he used.
Art and Political Economy were the main subjects of those lectures and letters, and I suppose the public assumes that these were the subjects most interesting to him. Whether you are of those who think him great on Art but astray on Economics, or of the later school who have resolved that he never knew anything of Art, but had real insight and foresight in matters social and political, you would expect to find evidences of both—rows of reference volumes, and all the standard works. But they are not here; Art and Political Economy are conspicuous by their absence.
Perhaps you will query my sweeping statement as you take down a volume of Crowe and Cavalcaselle from the "history bookcase" to the right of the fireplace: but see, it is only a stray volume!—and open it; only a few pages are cut, and those considerably bescribbled with dissent. Ought he to have known by heart these authorities on Italian painting? It might have saved him from an error or two, and from some useless discussions; but he knew the pictures themselves, and his business was not to write handbooks, but to bring his readers directly into touch with the generalised human view he took of painting. There is, however, the "Dictionnaire de l'Architecture" of Viollet-le-Duc, much used in parts, for he alternately admired the research and quarrelled with the conclusions of the great French architect, whose name he persisted in spelling "Violet." There are some very successful artists whose perspective is always wrong; and others whose drawing can always be corrected by an art student; but they can paint pictures! Ruskin's work is full of little faults; de minimis non curat; but he got at the root of the matter, mostly, and he could make you see it. All the tinkering criticism about his mistakes only shows that he thought "first-hand," so to say, and wrote with a full pen.
This bookcase is chiefly made up of Carlyle, Gibbon, Alison, Milman, and the old standards, of course thickly annotated. There are also some volumes of Mr. W. S. Lilly, but you may open them and find no sign of life; Ruskin may have read but he has not marked. There is his old copy of Lord Lindsay's "Christian Art" (1847), reviewed by him in the June Quarterly of that year. It is stamped with "Mr. Murray's compliments," but that must refer to the previous owner. You see his name in queer cramped pencil "Burgon: Oriel," with Greek e—Burgon of the Greek vase, the High Churchman, whose dark thin face and bright eyes, and humorous contempt for all "doxies" but his own, make him so well remembered by Oxford men of the passing generation. There is something odd in Ruskin's early excursion into primitive Italian art being, as it were, "vice Burgon, resigned." Then there is "Roman Antiquities," by Alexander Adam, LL.D., 1819, doubly ear-marked by "John J. Ruskin," and kept for his father's sake, and for the sake of his father's old school-master. Ruskin, at all times, was open to the appeal of associations; all his judgments about men, women and things must be corrected by the personal equation, and without his biography one can never quite rightly appraise his works.
The "Bible of Amiens" and some passages in the latest lectures hint that he was really interested in Anglo-Saxons and Irish Saints. There is the Venerable Bede, evidently studied, and the life of St. Patrick—you know he was always respectful to the patron of Ireland—but not a leaf cut! There is J. R. Green's "Making of England," appreciatively annotated, and Sharon Turner, much marked and cut down in a reckless way to fit the shelf. A much worse example of this chopping of books is Westwood's "Miniatures and Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS.," a most valuable folio, from which Ruskin has sawn the top edge and ripped out all the best plates. As in the case of his mediæval missals, scribbled on the margin by his irreverent pen, he would say that his books were for use and not for curiosities. These plates were ripped out, not for wanton mischief or in vulgar carelessness, but to show to his classes at lectures. The margins were cut, so that the books might be put away in shelves or cabinets, clearing the workshop of a busy man, instead of leaving them about to be mishandled and dog-eared; for the best of housemaids cannot be expected always to treat the master's litter as if they loved it. None of these volumes are so damaged that a little vamping would not set them right; though of course they would not be the tall copies prized by bibliomaniacs. But how many of these tall copies are read by their buyers?
