The Life of John Ruskin

by W. G. Collingwood

But he was not to be quit so easily this time of the results of overwork and worry.

He had been passing through the unpleasant experience of a misunderstanding with one of his most trusted friends and helpers. His work on behalf of the St. George's Guild had been energetic and sincere: and he had received the support of a number of strangers, among whom were people of responsible station and position. But he was surprised to find that many of his personal friends held aloof. He was still more surprised to learn, on returning from Venice, full of new hope and stronger convictions in his mission, that the caution of one upon whom he had counted as a firm ally had dissuaded an intending adherent from joining in the work. A man of the world, accustomed to overreach and to be overreached, would have taken the discovery coolly, and accepted an explanation. But Ruskin was never a man of the world; and now, much less than ever. He took it as treason to the great work of which he felt himself to be the missionary. Throughout the autumn and winter the discovery rankled, and preyed on his mind. As for the sake of absolute candour he had published in "Fors" everything that related to the Guild work,—even his own private affairs and confessions, whatever they risked,—he felt that this too must out; in order that his supporters might judge of his conduct and that nothing affecting the enterprise might be kept back. And so, at Christmas, he sent the correspondence to his printers.

Years afterwards, by the intervention of friends, this breach was healed: but what suffering it cost can be learnt from the sequel. To Ruskin it was the beginning of the end. His Aberdeen correspondent asked just then for the usual Christmas message to the Bible class: and instead of the cheery words of bygone years, received the couplet from Horace:

"Inter spem curamque, timores inter et iras,
Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum."

"Amid hope and sorrow, amid fear and wrath, believe
every day that has dawned on thee to be thy last."

From Oxford, early in January, 1878, he went on a visit to Windsor Castle, whence he wrote: "I came to see Prince Leopold, who has been a prisoner to his sofa lately, but I trust he is better; he is very bright and gentle under severe and almost continual pain." No less gentle, in spite of the severe justice he was inflicting upon himself even more than upon his friend, was the author of "Fors," as the letters of the time to his invalid neighbour in "Hortus Inclusus" show. How ready to own himself in the wrong,—at that very moment when he was being pointed at as the most obstinate and egotistic of men—how placable he really was and open to rebuke, he showed, when, from Windsor, he went to Hawarden. Nearly three years before he had written roughly of Mr. Gladstone; as a Conservative, he was not predisposed in favour of the leader of the party to whom he attributed most of the evils he was combating. Mr. Gladstone and he had often met, and by no means agreed together in conversation. But this visit convinced him that he had misjudged Mr. Gladstone; and he promptly made the fullest apology in the current number of "Fors," saying that he had written under a complete misconception of his character. In reprinting the old pages he not only cancelled the offending passage, but he left the place blank, with a note in the middle of it, as "a memorial of rash judgment."

He went slowly northward, seeking rest at Ingleton; whence he wrote, January 17:—"I've got nothing done all the time I've been away but a few mathematical figures [crystallography, no doubt, for 'Deucalion,'] and the less I do the less I find I can do it; and yesterday, for the first time these twenty years, I hadn't so much as a 'plan' in my head all day." Arrived at Brantwood, as rest was useless, he tried work. Mr. Willett had asked him to reprint "The Two Paths," and he got that ready for press, and wrote a short preface. At Venice, Mr. J.R. Anderson had been working out for him the myths illustrated by Carpaccio in the Chapel of S. Giorgio de' Schiavoni; and the book had been waiting for Ruskin's introduction until he was surprised by the publication of an almost identical inquiry by M. Clermont-Ganneau. He tried to fulfil his duty to his pupil by writing the preface immediately; most sorrowfully feeling the inadequacy of his strength for the tasks he had laid upon it. He wrote:

"My own feeling, now, is that everything which has hitherto happened to me, and been done by me, whether well or ill, has been fitting me to take greater fortune more prudently, and to do better work more thoroughly. And just when I seem to be coming out of school,—very sorry to have been such a foolish boy, yet having taken a prize or two, and expecting now to enter upon some more serious business than cricket,—I am dismissed by the Master I hoped to serve, with a—'That's all I want of you, sir.'"

In such times he found relief by reverting to the past. He wrote in the beginning of February a paper for the University Magazine on "My First Editor," W.H. Harrison, and forgot himself—almost—in bright reminiscences of youthful days and early associations. Next, as Mr. Marcus Huish, who had shown great friendliness and generosity in providing prints for the Sheffield museum, was now proposing to hold an Exhibition of Mr. Ruskin's "Turners" at the Fine Art Galleries in New Bond Street, it was necessary to arrange the exhibits and to prepare the catalogue. For the next fortnight he struggled on with this labour, and with his last "Fors"—the last he was to write in the long series of more than seven years.[⁴⁰] How little the thousands who read the preface to his catalogue, with its sad sketch of Turner's fate, and what they supposed to be its "customary burst of terminal eloquence," understood that it was indeed the cry of one who had been wounded in the house of his friends, and was now believing every day that dawned on him to be his last. He told of Turner's youthful picture of the Coniston Fells and its invocation to the mists of morning, bidding them "in honour to the world's great Author, rise,"—and then how Turner's "health, and with it in great degree his mind, failed suddenly with a snap of some vital chord," after the sunset splendours of his last, dazzling efforts....

"Morning breaks, as I write, along those Coniston Fells, and the level mists, motionless and grey beneath the rose of the moorlands, veil the lower woods, and the sleeping village, and the long lawns by the lake-shore. Oh that some one had but told me, in my youth, when all my heart seemed to be set on these colours and clouds, that appear for a little while and then vanish away, how little my love of them would serve me, when the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of morning should be completed; and all my thoughts should be of those whom, by neither, I was to meet more!"