The Life of John Ruskin

by W. G. Collingwood

In 1854, the Rev. F.D. Maurice founded the Working Men's College. Mr. Furnivall sent the circulars to John Ruskin; who thereupon wrote to Maurice, and offered his services. At the opening lecture on October 31, 1854, at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, Furnivall distributed to all comers a reprint of the chapter "On the Nature of Gothic," which we have already noticed as a statement of the conclusions drawn from the study of art respecting the conditions under which the life of the workman should be regulated. Ruskin thus appeared as contributing, so to say, the manifesto of the movement.

He took charge from the commencement of the drawing-classes—first at 31 Red Lion Square, and afterwards at Great Ormond Street; also super-intending classes taught by Messrs. Jeffery and E. Cooke at the Working Women's (afterwards the Working Men and Women's) College, Queen Square.

In this labour he had two allies; one a friend of Maurice's, Lowes Dickinson, the well-known artist, whose portrait of Maurice was mentioned with honour in the "Notes on the Academy"; his portrait of Kingsley hangs in the hall of the novelist-professor's college at Cambridge. The other helper was new friend.

To people who know him only as the elegant theorist of art, sentimental and egotistic, as they will have it, there must be something strange, almost irreconcilable, in his devotion, week after week and year after year, to these night-classes. Still more must it astonish them to find the mystic author of the "Blessed Damozel," the passionate painter of the "Venus Verticordia," working by Ruskin's side in this rough navvy-labour of philanthropy.

It was early in 1854 that a drawing of D.G. Rossetti was sent to Ruskin by a friend of the painter's. The critic already knew Millais and Hunt personally, but not Rossetti. He wrote kindly, signing himself "yours respectfully," which amused the young painter. He made acquaintance, and in the appendix to his Edinburgh Lectures placed Rossetti's name with those of Millais and Hunt, especially praising their imaginative power, as rivalling that of the greatest of the old masters.

He did more than this. He agreed to buy, up to a certain sum every year, any drawings that Rossetti brought him, at their market price; and his standard of money-value for works of art has never been niggardly. This sort of help, the encouragement to work, is exactly what makes progress possible to a young and independent artist; it is better for him than fortuitous exhibition triumphs—much better than the hack-work which many have to undertake, to eke out their livelihood. And the mere fact of being bought by the eminent art-critic was enough to encourage other patrons.

"He seems in a mood to make my fortune," said Rossetti in the spring of 1854; and early in 1855 Ruskin wrote:

"It seems to me that, of all the painters I know, you on the whole have the greatest genius; and you appear to me also to be—as far as I can make out—a very good sort of person, I see that you are unhappy, and that you can't bring out your genius as you should. It seems to me then the proper and necessary thing, if I can, to make you more happy; and that I shall be more really useful in enabling you to paint properly, and keep your room in order, than in any other way."

He did his best to keep that room in order in every sense. Anxious to promote the painter's marriage with Miss Siddal—"Princess Ida," as Ruskin called her—he offered a similar arrangement to that which he had made with Rossetti; and began in 1855 to give her £150 a year in exchange for drawings up to that value. Rossetti's poems also found a warm admirer and advocate. In 1856, "The Burden of Nineveh" was published anonymously in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine; Ruskin wrote to Rossetti that it was "glorious" and that he wanted to know who was the author,—perhaps not without a suspicion that he was addressing the man who could tell. In 1861 he guaranteed, or advanced, the cost of "The Early Italian Poets," up to £100, with Smith and Elder; and endeavoured, but unsuccessfully, to induce Thackeray to find a place for other poems in The Cornhill Magazine.

Mr. W.M. Rossetti, in his book on his brother "as Designer and Writer" and in his "Family Letters," draws a pleasant picture of the intimacy between the artist and the critic. "At one time," he says, "I am sure they even loved one another." But in 1865 Rossetti, never very tolerant of criticism and patronage, took in bad part his friend's remonstrances about the details of "Venus Verticordia." Eighteen months later, Ruskin tried to renew the old acquaintance. Rossetti did not return his call; and further efforts on Ruskin's part, up to 1870, met with little response. But the lecture on Rossetti in "The Art of England" shows that on one side at least "their parting," as Mr. W.M. Rossetti says, "was not in anger;" and the portrait of 1861, now in the Oxford University Galleries, will remain as a memorial of the ten years' friendship of the two famous men.