The Life of John Ruskin

by W. G. Collingwood

Public opinion was violently divided over these lectures; and they were the cause of much trouble at home. The fact of his lecturing at all aroused strong opposition from his friends and remonstrances from his parents. Before the event his mother wrote: "I cannot reconcile myself to the thought of your bringing yourself personally before the world till you are somewhat older and stronger." Afterwards, his father, while apologizing for the word "degrading," is disgusted at his exposing himself to such an interruption as occurred, and to newspaper comments and personal references. The notion of an "itinerant lecturer" scandalizes him. He hears from Harrison and Holding that John is to lecture even at their very doors—in Camberwell. "I see small bills up," he writes, "with the lecturers' names; among them Mr. —— who gets your old clothes!" And he bids him write to the committee that his parents object to his fulfilling the engagement. He postponed his lecture—for ten years; but accepted the Presidency of the Camberwell Institute, which enabled him to appear at their meetings without offence to any.

While staying at Edinburgh, Mr. Ruskin met the various celebrities of modern Athens, some of them at the table of his former fellow-traveller in Venice, Mrs. Jameson. He then returned home to prepare the lectures for printing.

These lectures as published in April, 1854 were fiercely assailed by the old school; but a more serious blow fell on him before that month was out. His wife returned to her parents and instituted a suit against him, to which he made no answer. The marriage was annulled in July. A year later she married Millais.

In May (1854) the Pre-Raphaelites again needed his defence. Mr. Holman Hunt exhibited the "Light of the World" and the "Awakening Conscience." Ruskin made them the theme of two more letters to The Times; mentioning, by the way, the "spurious imitations of Pre-Raphaelite work" which were already becoming common. Starting for his summer tour on the Continent, in the Simmenthal he wrote a pamphlet on the opening of the Crystal Palace. There had been much rejoicing over the "new style of architecture" in glass and iron, and its purpose as a palace of art. Ruskin who had declined, in the last chapter of the "Seven Lamps," to join in the cry for a new style, was not at all ready to accept this as any real artistic advance; and took the opportunity to plead again for the great buildings of the past, which were being destroyed or neglected, while the British public was glorifying its gigantic greenhouse. The pamphlet practically suggested the establishment of the Society for the preservation of ancient buildings, which has since come into operation.

This summer of 1854 he projected a study of Swiss history: to tell the tale of six chief towns—Geneva, Fribourg, Basle, Thun, Baden and Schaffhausen, to which in 1858 he added Rheinfelden and Bellinzona. He intended to illustrate the work with pictures of the places described. He began with his drawing of Thun, a large bird's-eye view of the town with its river and bridges, roofs and towers, all exquisitely defined with the pen, and broadly coloured in fluctuating tints that seem to melt always into the same aerial blue; the blue, high up the picture, beyond the plain, deepening into distant mountains.

But his father wanted to see "Modern Painters" completed, and so he began his third volume at Vevey, with the discussion of the grand style, in which he at last broke loose from Reynolds, as was inevitable, after his study of Pre-Raphaelitism, and all the varied experiences of the last ten years. The lesson of the Tulse Hill ivy had been brought home to him in many ways: he had found it to be more and more true that Nature is, after all, the criterion of art, and that the greatest painters were always those whose aim, so far as they were conscious of an aim, was to take fact for their starting-point. Idealism, beauty, imagination, and the rest, though necessary to art, could not, he felt, be made the object of study; they were the gift of heredity, of circumstances, of national aspirations and virtues; not to be produced by the best of rules, or achieved by the best of intentions.

What his own view of his own work was can be gathered from a letter to an Edinburgh student, written on August 6, 1854:

"I am sure I never said anything to dissuade you from trying to excel or to do great things. I only wanted you to be sure that your efforts were made with a substantial basis, so that just in the moment of push your footing might not give way beneath you; and also I wanted you to feel that long and steady effort made in a contented way does more than violent effort made from some strong motive and under some enthusiastic impulse. And I repeat—for of this I am perfectly sure—that the best things are only to be done in this way. It is very difficult thoroughly to understand the difference between indolence and reserve of strength, between apathy and severity, between palsy and patience; but there is all the difference in the world; and nearly as many men are ruined by inconsiderate exertions as by idleness itself. To do as much as you can heartily and happily do each day in a well-determined direction, with a view to far-off results, with present enjoyment of one's work, is the only proper, the only essentially profitable way."

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