CHAPTER VI
THE EDINBURGH LECTURES (1853-1854)
By the end of June, 1853, "Stones of Venice" was finished, as well as a description of Giotto's works at Padua, written for the Arundel Society. The social duties of the season were over; Ruskin and his wife went north to spend a well-earned holiday. At Wallington in Northumberland, staying with Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan, he met Dr. John Brown at Edinburgh, author of "Pet Marjorie" and other well-known works, who became his lifelong friend. Ruskin invited Millais, by this time an intimate and heartily-admired friend,[4] to join them at Glenfinlas. Ruskin devoted himself first to foreground studies, and made careful drawings of rock-detail; and then, being asked to give a course of lectures before the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, he was soon busy writing once more, and preparing the cartoon-sketches, "diagrams" as he called them, to illustrate his subjects. Dr. Acland had joined the party; and he asked Millais to sketch their host as he stood contemplatively on the rocks with the torrent thundering beside him. The picture with additional work in the following winter, became the well-known portrait in the possession of Sir Henry Acland, much the best likeness of this early period.
Another portrait was painted—in words—by one of his audience at Edinburgh on November 1, when he gave the opening lecture of his course, his first appearance on the platform. The account is extracted from the Edinburgh Guardian of November 19, 1853:
"Before you can see the lecturer, however, you must get into the hall, and that is not an easy matter, for, long before the doors are opened, the fortunate holders of season tickets begin to assemble, so that the crowd not only fills the passage, but occupies the pavement in front of the entrance and overflows into the road. At length the doors open, and you are carried through the passage into the hall, where you take up, of course, the best available position for seeing and hearing.... After waiting a weary time ... the door by the side of the platform opens, and a thin gentleman with light hair, a stiff white cravat, dark overcoat with velvet collar, walking, too with a slight stoop, goes up to the desk, and looking round with a self-possessed and somewhat formal air, proceeds to take off his great-coat, revealing thereby, in addition to the orthodox white cravat, the most orthodox of white waistcoats.... 'Dark hair, pale face, and massive marble brow—that is my ideal of Mr. Ruskin,' said a young lady near us. This proved to be quite a fancy portrait, as unlike the reality as could well be imagined, Mr. Ruskin has light sand-coloured hair; his face is more red than pale; the mouth well-cut, with a good deal of decision in its curve, though somewhat wanting in sustained dignity and strength; an aquiline nose; his forehead by no means broad or massive, but the brows full and well bound together; the eye we could not see, in consequence of the shadows that fell upon his countenance from the lights overhead, but we are sure it must be soft and luminous, and that the poetry and passion we looked for almost in vain in other features must be concentrated there.[5] After sitting for a moment or two, and glancing round at the sheets on the wall as he takes off his gloves, he rises, and leaning slightly over the desk, with his hands folded across, begins at once,—'You are proud of your good city of Edinburgh,' etc.
"And now for the style of the lecture.... Properly speaking, there were two styles essentially distinct, and not well blended,—a speaking and a writing style; the former colloquial and spoken off-hand; the latter rhetorical and carefully read in quite a different voice,—we had almost said intoned.... He has a difficulty in sounding the letter 'r'; [and there is a] peculiar tone in the rising and falling of his voice at measured intervals, in a way scarcely ever heard except in the public lection of the service appointed to be read in churches. These are the two things with which, perhaps you are most surprised,—his dress and manner of speaking—both of which (the white waistcoat notwithstanding) are eminently clerical. You naturally expect, in one so independent, a manner free from conventional restraint, and an utterance, whatever may be the power of voice, at least expressive of a strong individuality; and you find instead a Christ Church man of ten years' standing, who has not yet taken orders; his dress and manner derived from his college tutor, and his elocution from the chapel-reader."
The lectures were a summing up, in popular form, of the chief topics of Ruskin's thought during the last two years. The first (November 1) stated, with more decision and warmth than part of his audience approved, his plea for the Gothic Revival, for the use of Gothic as a domestic style. The next lecture, given three days later, went on to contrast the wealth of ornament in mediæval buildings with the poor survivals of conventionalized patterns which did duty for decoration in nineteenth-century "Greek" architecture; and he raised a laugh by comparing a typical stonemason's lion with a real tiger's head, drawn in the Edinburgh zoological gardens by Mr. Millais.
The last two lectures, on November 15 and 18, were on Painting; briefly reviewing the history of landscape and the life and aims of Turner; and finally, Christian art and Sincerity in imagination, which was now put forth as the guiding principle of Pre-Raphaelitism.