THE DIVERSIONS OF BRANTWOOD (1879-1881)
Sixty years of one of the busiest lives on record were beginning to tell upon Ruskin. He would not confess to old age, but his recent illness had shaken him severely. The next three years were spent chiefly at Coniston, in comparative retirement; but neither in despair, nor idleness, nor loneliness. He had always lived a sort of dual life, solitary in his thoughts, but social in his habits; liking company, especially of young people; ready, in the intervals of work, to enter into their employments and amusements, and curiously able to forget his cares in hours of relaxation. Sometimes, when earnest admirers made the pilgrimage to their Mecca—"holy Brantwood" as a scoffing poet called it—they were surprised and even shocked, to find the prophet of "Fors" at the head of a merry dinner-table, and the Professor of Art among surroundings which a London or a Boston "æsthete" would have ruled to be in very poor taste.
Shall I take you for a visit there,—to Brantwood as it was in those old times?
It is a weary way to Coniston, whatever road you choose. The inconvenience of the railway route was perhaps one reason of Ruskin's preference for driving on so many occasions. After changing and changing trains, and stopping at many a roadside station, at last you see, suddenly, over the wild undulating country, the Coniston Old Man and its crags, abrupt on the left, and the lake, long and narrow, on the right. Across the water, tiny in the distance and quite alone amongst forests and moors, there is Brantwood; and beyond it everything seems uncultivated, uninhabited, except for one grey farmhouse high on the fell, where gaps in the ragged larches show how bleak and storm-swept a spot it is.
To come out of the station after long travel is to find yourself face to face with magnificent rocks, and white cottages among the fir-trees. As you are whirled down through the straggling village, and along the shore round the head of the lake, the panorama, though not Alpine in magnitude, is almost Alpine in character. The valley, too, is not yet built up; it is still the old-fashioned lake country, almost as it was in the days of the "Iteriad." You drive up and down a narrow, hilly lane, catching peeps of mountains and sunset, through thick, overhanging trees; you turn sharp up through a gate under dark firs and larches, and the carriage stops in what seems in the twilight a sort of court,—a gravelled space, one side formed by a rough stone wall crowned with laurels and almost precipitous coppice, the brant (or steep) wood above, and the rest is Brantwood, with a capital B.[41]
You expect that Gothic porch you have read of in "Lectures on Architecture and Painting," and you are surprised to find a stucco classic portico in the corner, painted and grained, and heaped around with lucky horseshoes, brightly blackleaded, and mysterious rows of large blocks of slate and basalt and trap—a complete museum of local geology, if only you knew it—very unlike an ideal entrance; still more unlike an ordinary one. While you wait you can see through the glass door a roomy hall, lit with candles, and hung with large drawings by Burne-Jones and by the master of the house. His soft hat, and thick gloves, and chopper, lying on the marble table, show that he has come in from his afternoon's woodcutting.
But if you are expected you will hardly have time to look round, for Brantwood is nothing if not hospitable. The honoured guest—and all guests are honoured there—after welcome, is ushered up a narrow stair, which betrays the original cottage, into the "turret room." It had been "the Professor's" until after his illness, and he papered it with naturalistic pansies, to his own taste, and built out at one corner a projecting turret to command the view on all sides, with windows strongly latticed to resist the storms. There is old-fashioned solid comfort in the way of furniture; and pictures,—a Dürer engraving, some Prouts and Turners, a couple of old Venetian heads, and Meissonier's "Napoleon," over the fireplace—a picture which Ruskin bought for one thousand guineas, showed for a time at Oxford, and hung up here in a shabby little frame to be out of the way.[42]
If you are a man, you are told not to dress; if you are a lady, you may put on your prettiest gown. They dine in the new room, for the old dining-room was so small that the waitress could not get round the table. The new room is spacious and lofty compared with the rest of the house; it has a long window with thick red sandstone mullions—there at last is a touch of Gothicism—to look down the lake, and a bay window open on the narrow lawn sloping steeply down to the road in front, and the view of the Old Man. The walls, painted "duck egg," are hung with old pictures; the Doge Gritti, a bit saved from the great Titian that was burnt in the fire at the Ducal Palace in 1574; a couple of Tintorets; Turner and Reynolds, each painted by himself in youth; Raphael by a pupil, so it is said; portraits of old Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin, and little John and his "boo hills." There he sits, no longer little, opposite: and you can trace the same curve and droop of the eyebrows prefigured in the young face and preserved in the old, and a certain family likeness to his handsome young father.
Since Mr. Ruskin's illness his cousin, Mrs. Arthur Severn, has become more and more indispensable to him: she sits at the head of the table and calls him "the coz." An eminent visitor was once put greatly out of countenance by this apparent irreverence. After obvious embarrassment, light dawned upon him towards the close of the meal. "Oh!" said he, "it's 'the coz' you call Mr. Ruskin. I thought you were saying' the cuss!'"
There are generally two or three young people staying in the house, salaried assistants[43] or amateur, occasional helpers; but though there is a succession of visitors from a distance, there is not very frequent entertainment of neighbours.