Ruskin Relics

IX

RUSKIN'S HAND

IX
RUSKIN'S HAND

It was only the other day that a friend showed me a bundle of old papers, saying, "Some of these are in his writing, but I don't know what to make of the rest." I turned them over and said, "Second volume of 'Modern Painters'; original manuscript!" He had just found them, rolled up in brown paper, in a cupboard, where they had been for years. My friend, who was intimate with Ruskin from his childhood, and of course knew the Professor's later handwriting well, hardly believed me; the difference between the early and later styles is so great.

There may be other letters and papers of Ruskin's in existence and unrecognised; not, perhaps, unprinted, but still of great value, even in hard cash. Correspondents who beg for a Ruskin autograph and a bit of his writing from those whom they suppose to have plenty, are often surprised to hear that others have been before them, and that now the only way is through the dealers at a guinea a page or more. He told me that he thought the manuscripts of his best-known works had been destroyed, and no doubt had forgotten that many of them had been given away to those who treasured them. Since his death a considerable part has been brought to light, but of the vast quantity of writing—notes, rough copies, fair copies, and letters, done in a busy life of sixty working years—there may be much more to find scattered through the world: for Ruskin's hand, like Nuremberg's, goes through every land.

In 1881 a Mr. Atkinson was sent to Coniston to make a bust of Ruskin. With his usual good nature to every one who came personally into contact with him—the roughness was only that of his sharp pen—the Professor treated the unknown as his visitor, found him lodgings and a workshop, and a place at his table for a great while, during which the bust made but slow progress. One reason, perhaps, for Mr. Atkinson's difficulty was that Ruskin had just grown a beard, and the well-known face was no longer there to mould. "Can't you treat the beard early Greek fashion; I should like to be a Bearded Bacchus!" he said. In spite of the admitted failure, he gave further work to the sculptor in casting leaves and other detail "for St. George's Schools"—that visionary object on which so much labour and thought were spent; and this use of casts from natural leaves, I am told by Mr. E. Cooke, was really originated by Ruskin in the Working Men's College days, though now pretty widely known. Some of Mr. Atkinson's casts, I may add, are on view in the Coniston Museum. But the sculptor's chief personal wish was to get a mould of Ruskin's hand. He used to say that there was more in it than in his face; at least, it was the most characteristic feature, and representable in solid form, while the face, depending on the bright blue eye and changeful expression, evaded him as it evaded more celebrated sculptors. But Ruskin did not like being oiled and moulded, and though Mr. Atkinson made enticing demonstrations on less worthy fingers, till we were all up to our elbows in plaster of Paris, he never to my knowledge won his point.

"Such a funny hand," says Browning's lover, "it was like a claw!" Ruskin's was all finger-grip; long, strong talons, curiously delicate-skinned and refined in form, though not academically beautiful. Those whose personal acquaintance with him dated only from the later years never knew his hand, for then it had lost its nervous strength; and in cold weather—the greatest half of the year in the North—the hand suffered more than the head. But his palm, and especially the back of the hand, was tiny. When he rowed his boat he held the oars entirely in his fingers; when he shook hands you felt the pressure of the fingers, not of the palm. In writing, he held the pen as we are taught to hold a drawing-pencil, and the long fingers gave much more play to the point than is usual in formed penmanship. Knowing that, it is not surprising to find that his writing varies, not only from one period to another, but with passing moods. Everybody shows some of this variety, but Ruskin's hand was as flexible and as impressionable as his whole being.

He had an odd way, down to the last, of "printing" an inscription on the fly-leaf of a book or on the mount of a drawing, in neat, square Roman type, inked between double lines ruled in pencil. Sometimes giving a present to a favoured visitor he would say, "Stay, I must write your name in it"; and you expected the well-known autograph cheque-signature, scribbled with a flourish. But no! Spectacles, and ruler, and pencil first; two carefully ruled lines, an eighth of an inch apart; then the cork-handled, fine steel pen, and laborious regularity of inscription; till the onlooking recipient laughed outright at all this time and trouble spent on a trifle. But Ruskin was quite grave about it.

This was a reversion to early habits. His juvenile MSS., of which many were kept by his parents and still remain at Brantwood, contain many pages of similar calligraphy. His first Latin and French declensions are printed in pencil; at the age of seven he wrote the first copies of his "Harry and Lucy" in this way, pencilled first and penned over, thinking he was an author making a book. Many children do, but not with his tenacity and taste. In 1828 (age nine) he had brought this self-imposed education to something like perfection with the tiny "print" of "Eudosia," page after page showing wonderful steadiness of hand and eye; and at the end of that year he executed the masterpiece of childish ingenuity which he described in the autobiographical "Harry and Lucy"—the poem in "double print," all the down-strokes doubled: "And it was most beautifully done, you may be sure," says the saucy infant, not untruly. Some of his early mineral catalogues, begun at this time, appear to have been continued later, though the difference can hardly be told from any improvement in the penmanship.

Meanwhile his ordinary running hand was a shocking scribble, but in the middle of it he seems to have pulled himself up continually, or he was pulled up by an overlooking mother, and the wild scrawl becomes tidy and neat. I suspect that his earlier home lessons did not include much copybook work. He developed his own writing like other precocious boys and girls, though there is some trace of teaching at the very start. But after 1830 he exchanged, perhaps at the instance of superior orders, his "print" for copperplate; the "Iteriad" (1831) is fair-copied in a large, regular round-hand, and the Tour poems of 1833 are in a smaller, less anxious, but more formed business style. One sees the father's influence coming in, and all his letters to the old-fashioned business man show the obvious desire to please. "My dear papa" is flourished around in the most approved writing-master's manner, and "John Ruskin" at the end is in black letter, finishing a sheet of impeccable commercial-hand, in which the free-and-easy wording contrasts quite ludicrously with the formal writing.

Those flourishes of the pen for his father's pleasure never appear in his own private scribble. His ideas came too quickly to leave him time for ornament, and he had no need to idle in dots and circles between the phrases. His spelling was always good, but he never stopped to punctuate; a dash was enough for most kinds of stops. Letters of 1845 and 1852 are curious for the underlining or interlining of long passages, not, apparently, for emphasis; possibly to mark sections of these general epistles home for copying. In all this early writing there is an effort to keep pace with the flow of thoughts, even in the verse; he wrote so much that mere economy of time must have driven him at speed to the shortest way of getting the matter down. In diaries of the period are some shorthand notes which I take to be his; but if he ever tried shorthand he dropped it soon.

The model upon which Ruskin's usual handwriting was at last formed was his mother's. It is perhaps a commonplace to say that we all betray in our writing the greatest personal influence of our earlier years. While penning this very page, a letter has just been brought to me which at first glance put me in mind of a friend long since dead: it is from his school-master. Not Ruskin's father nor any of his teachers appear to have influenced him like his mother. Her more deliberate writing was extremely elegant; rather small, moderately sloping, with a pretty combination of curve and angle, and capitals carefully formed. In the note-book in which he composed verses from 1831 to 1838 you can see the development of his hand from a spiky and cramped boyish scribble to the more open and slightly more upright style of 1835 and 1836, the year of his matriculation at Oxford; a neat and educated penmanship, easy to read and regular, though differing slightly from day to day in size and slope. The backward switch of his y and forward toss of the tail to his angular t are already there; and the dainty shaping of capitals, based on Italic or Elzevir print, like his mother's, with suggestion of the sérif in a little elegant curl to H and F. Instead of spasmodic reform, as earlier, there is perfect steadiness for page after page.

At Oxford his writing became rather larger and looser, perhaps from Latin exercises, in which indubitable distinctness is required. The "Poetry of Architecture" fair copy can be seen in a facsimile in the new Library Edition; the draft scribbled in a sketch-book during Oxford vacation is reproduced (p. 141); you note the tendency to round the foot of the down-stroke and the length of the greater limbs of the letters. He used to tell his secretary to take no notice of a letter in which h and l looked like n and e.

Leaving Oxford and writing hard at "Modern Painters" earlier volumes, which cost a great deal of pen-work, he went back to the smaller hand of voluminous authors, and the constant attention to one subject gave it regularity. But the letters of the time are naturally more impulsive; indeed, in 1849 there are bits which prefigure his latest style in its upright and loose sketchiness. From 1849 or 1850 for some years the chief work was "Stones of Venice," and the note-books and studies for this are fairly represented by the page on "Sta. Maria dell' Orto." This is the earlier "Modern Painters" manner. You see the growing freedom, but it is not yet wild and whirling.

There have been authors and journalists whose printed work, no doubt, exceeds his in quantity; but in reckoning the sum total of his penmanship we must not forget that every printed page meant, for him, several written pages, especially in earlier books; also, that he was a conscientious correspondent, and every day wrote many letters. It may be set off against this that he sometimes used the help of an amanuensis, though he rarely dictated, and it was only when he had hammered his subject into shape that he had it copied for the printer. Occasionally in late years he let it be type-written, but most of his work was done before the age of type-writers. He would use the most unlikely copyists, as when he got the little girls of his Brantwood class to write out his notes. All he asked was a distinct hand and a docile scribe. His secretary, like the secretary in "Gil Blas," did everything but write, and sometimes was packing parcels or sweeping leaves while the valet was copying lectures on Greek art. Some early MSS. are in the hand of George Hobbs; many of the later were written by Crawley; none by Baxter. At other times he requisitioned the young ladies; it was for this that Mrs. Severn formed her large, round, upright hand, and Miss Anderson had many a copying task, as well as others whose work will be valued by collectors for its corrections from the master's pen, like the quartz which holds the sparkle of gold.

But he taught them to write distinctly—that was his great requirement. Once, on a sleepless night, he called me, with many apologies, to write from dictation. Naturally I wrote fast to get my job done and return to my slumbers; but he continually pulled me up with, "I'm sure you're scribbling. Let me see if I can read it." Out on the fells, taking the dip and strike of strata, or among the cathedrals making notes and measurements, he would often warn his assistant of the folly of hasty scrawling. "I've lost so much time and trouble by my now bad writing," he used to say.

It has been told already how he was struck at first by Miss Francesca Alexander's handwriting before he had seen her drawing, which afterwards he praised so highly. The distinct neatness of her beautiful calligraphy appealed to his love for missals and the lost art, as he feared, of the true scribe. But of queer and quaint writing he was impatient. Words were to be read, not played with in decorative affectations. The baser sort of business-hand roused him to scorn, and he had a sharp eye for the characteristics of a cranky or insincere correspondent. When postcards came in, like many others he did not approve of them and never used them. One of his household sometimes got postcards written in Runes, and, seeing the mystic inscriptions, he wanted to know why. "So that people may not read it," was the answer. "What's the use of that?" replied Ruskin. "Isn't language given you to conceal your thoughts?"

[For further illustrations of his handwriting, see his earliest "printing" at seven or eight, with his latest current style, actual size, on page 108; a pencil scribble at ten or eleven, page 171; his neater writing of the same period, on page 199; his ordinary careful penmanship about 1835, on page 109; and his looser final hand, pages 163 and 174.]

X

RUSKIN'S MUSIC

X
RUSKIN'S MUSIC

"It is well known," says a recent newspaper writer, "that Ruskin's ear was as deaf to musical sound as his eye was sensitive to natural beauty." On the other hand, Miss Wakefield, the celebrated singer and the originator of country Musical Competitions, has put together a volume of 158 pages—most of them, certainly, in rather big type—under the title of "Ruskin on Music." The inference, of course, to an unbelieving world is that he wrote about what he did not understand. But Miss Wakefield understands; and she says, "what is to be admired in what he has said of the art is the beautiful way in which its spiritual meaning and teaching have been expressed by him, in the short passages which he has devoted to it, and in which no one has ever excelled him."

For his thoughts on music there is that book to read; but for Ruskin's quest of music, for his lifelong attempts to qualify as a musician, there is nothing to show. The story has not yet been told, because it has little bearing on his life's main work, and—to put it roughly—it is the story of a failure. Perhaps there are admirers who would rather not know about the failure; and yet—you shall judge when you have heard it!

There are still in existence the bound volumes of piano-pieces and operatic songs which he learnt when he was an undergraduate at Oxford. One of these volumes is open on the piano, in our photograph of the Brantwood drawing-room, arranged as it used to be when he strummed a little before dinner and read at the four candles after dinner. Each piece is inscribed by the Oxford music-master with the usual vague respect of Town to Gown in the formula, "— Ruskin, Esq., Ch.Ch." The master does not seem to have known his Christian name, but he evidently dragged him through a great deal of Bellini, and Donizetti, and Mozart; and "forty years on—shorter in wind, though in memory long" Ruskin had a keen recollection of these pieces, and liked to go over them with any young friend, showing how they used to sing "Non più andrai" or "Prendero quel brunettino," with all the flourishes. There are his fingering exercises, as elaborately annotated as all his old books are; he must have spent much time and taken great pains, in those early days, over his music. It was not for want of opportunity, nor for lack of intention, that he did not become a musician.

When he left Oxford he still continued his lessons, especially the singing. I have never heard of his singing in company, but I can hardly doubt that the lessons did much for his voice. Any one who has heard him lecture, or read, or even talk, knows how resonant and flexible it was, and how thoroughly under his command. He had naturally a weak chest; he caught cold easily, and his throat was often affected; but he always, I think, was able to lecture, and his voice was the first thing that attracted an audience. The singing lessons were not without result.

In later years his music-master was George Frederick West, who taught him—or tried to teach him—something of composition. I can remember Mr. West coming to give him a lesson at Herne Hill, but I don't think I was ever present at the ordeal. You can imagine that "Dr. Ruskin," as Mr. West always called him, was a most difficult pupil, wanting at every turn to know why; incredulous of the best authority; impatient of the compromises and conventions, the "wohl-temperirtes Klavier"; and eager to upset everything and start afresh. It is Mrs. Severn who can describe these droll interviews and Mr. West's despairing appeal, "But you wouldn't be ungrammatical, Doctor Ruskin?"

I am not so sure about that; but Mr. Ruskin learnt what he wanted. One thing he could do to perfection. He could easily and readily transpose and copy a song that was too high or too low, and he liked doing so. It does not imply great scholarship, but it is wonderful, as Dr. Johnson said of the performing dog, that he should do it at all. He might have been spending his time to better purpose, you think?

Music lessons went on, at all available intervals, down to the close of his active life. At Sandgate in 1887-88 he was learning from Mr. Roberts. In his lodgings, besides the cottage piano already there, he got a grand piano and a harmonium (the last was afterwards given to a chapel in Coniston), and because he had few chances of hearing music in that retirement, he engaged a young lady professional to play of evenings to himself and the friends who were staying with him.

In his books there are several hard hits at concerts and concert-goers; but just as he wrote against railways and yet, he said, "used them himself, few people more," so he was an energetic concert-goer. On arriving at Paris or any great foreign town his first question was, "What about the opera?" With classical Italian opera he was familiar from his youth up. He loved it, indignant when pestilent modernism hurried the tempo or took liberties with the well-known score. In London he usually had a season ticket for the Crystal Palace concerts—you remember how he abused the Crystal Palace!—and when he was driven away by the "autumn cleaning," a great business in old Mrs. Ruskin's scrupulous housekeeping at Denmark Hill, he would stay at the Queen's Hotel in Norwood, "to be near the Manns concerts."

He has just mentioned Charles Hallé in "Ethics of the Dust," but in private letters comes out his real admiration of the great pianist. John Hullah was one of his friends; his copy of Hullah's "Manual" is scribbled with devices for simplifying the teaching of the keyboard. Indeed, being as he was a born teacher, and counting as he did music an essential to education, he even taught—or tried to teach—what he knew of it whenever there was a chance. That class of little country girls at Brantwood had to learn music too; it was in his time of failing strength, and the story is tragi-comic; but in such times the real heart reveals itself through all weaknesses, and it was a very kindly and earnest nature that made him write out neat cards of music-lore reduced to its lowest terms for the cottage lasses whose lives he tried to raise and brighten.

It was only on evenings of actual illness or serious trouble that he passed the time without music, and he generally managed to have somebody in the house who could play and sing. One of his admirations was "Claribel" (Mrs. Barnard), whom he met at Jean Ingelow's; she sang her own songs to his great delight. Later, among many, there were the Misses Bateman and Miss Wakefield; in "Joanna's Care" he has told his readers about the charm of Mrs. Severn's singing. And it was not only comic songs and nigger ballads that he would listen to; he liked fun, as his readers ought to know by now, and a good funny song, if the tune was sound, made him clap his hands in a quaint gesture and laugh all over—the more that there was much sadness in his thoughts. I remember Sir Edward Burne-Jones's account of a visit to the Christy Minstrels; how the Professor dragged him there, to a front seat, and those burnt-corked people anticked and shouted, and Burne-Jones wanted to go, and Ruskin wouldn't, but sat laughing through the whole performance as if he loved it. An afternoon, to him, of oblivion to the cares of life; an odd experience; but he would not call it music. "Now let us have something different," he used to say when he had laughed enough.

The old songs were his delight, old English and French and Scotch. German songs, German music, and everything German, except Dürer and Holbein, he could not abide; German love-songs especially, "songs of seduction," he called them. He would just endure a bit of Swiss carolling, with its breezy reminder of the Alps; but the unlucky individual who tried him with Fesca has cause to remember the event. Haydn and Mozart he classed with the Italians, and Handel with the good old standards; but Mendelssohn was not to be named. Worst of all he misliked execution without feeling: the brilliant young lady pianist had no welcome from Ruskin. Gaiety, or else tenderness, appealed; even among the old songs there were those he cast out of the programme. Of "Charmante Gabrielle" he said once, "it might do when a king sang it."

Corelli was one of his favourite composers; that was another link with "Redgauntlet" and Wandering Willie; and though he was never a collector of rarities as such, he bought all the Corelli he could meet with, as well as various old editions of early music at Chappell's sales.

From about 1880 for some years he took to making little compositions of his own; curious experiments. It need hardly be said, and it need never be regretted, that these were not workmanlike performances. The mere fact of his trying to compose is curious; and though it is not part of his life's work, it explains some passages and turns of his thought. It would be really more wonderful if he had succeeded in learning to be a musician, along with all the other things he attempted. But look at his face, in the truthful if not sentimental portrait by Mr. Creswick. I do not much believe in physiognomy, and yet in the faces of those who have the gift of execution—quite a separate power from intellectual or emotional appreciation, or even from composition—I think you notice that the groove which marks off the wing of the nose, ala nasi, at the top is strongly developed; sometimes it is so sharp as to be almost a deformity. There is none in Ruskin's face. That trait may mean nothing; but the fact remains that so able a man spent time and labour in vain over an art which many learn easily, without a hundredth part of his general power. In a word, he had a great love for music, and within certain limits a true taste, but no talent.

There were, however, friends of his who could find his little tunes interesting and enjoyable, and even pay him pretty compliments about them. Without attaching too much importance to it, I venture to quote part of a letter from Ernest Chesneau (author of "The English School of Painting") to John Ruskin, dated "Oxford, 12 juin, 1884, 8^h. ½ a.m."

"Hier à 5 heures, nous sommes allés réclamer à miss Macdonald junior la chanson de notre John. L'aimable enfant n'a pas eu le temps encore de l'écrire et me l'a promise pour demain; mais pour me consoler de ma déception, que son fin regard de fillette a bien lue sur mon visage, elle m'en a chanté une autre; et je lui ai fait redire la première. En écoutant ces doux petits airs simples, naïfs et touchants, ma mémoire évoquait—sans que ma volonté y eût part—le souvenir d'une grande fugue du vieux Bach que l'orgue de New College avait fort bien joué la veille. Et ma pensée inconsciement associait, rapprochait la magnificence du Bach et la timide délicatesse du Ruskin. Et la douce petite chanson m'apparaissait comme ces exquises graminées dont la graine, apportie par les oiseaux du ciel, fleurit aux frontons de marbre des palais ou aux corniches de pierre des cathédrales. Et la fleurette apportée des champs voisins se perpétuera à travers les âges, quand les somptuosités créées de main d'homme ne seront plus que des ruines où s'arrêtera le regard curieux de l'artiste. C'est que la petite fleur des champs et la naïve chanson expriment l'âme des simples; et que la fugue comme le temple ou le palais expriment les raffinements des scholastiques, c'est à dire l'éphémère de l'art."

In "Elements of English Prosody," written 1880, there is a good deal about his views on music, made sadly unreadable, not by the error of his ideas, but by his perverse neglect of recognised technicalities. Among the rest is an attempt at a setting of "Ye Mariners of England," with bars inserted as if to mark the feet of the prosody instead of the beat of the melody, which was part of his scheme, though it naturally offends a musician.

His little output of musical composition need never see the light. Once he had "Blow, blow thou winter wind" set up in type, but it was discreetly blotted. The manuscript page of "On Old Ægina's Rocks" is in the Coniston Museum for the curious to behold. Others were little rhymes for children—the words printed in his "Poems," or fragments from Scott and Shakespeare, "How should I thy truelove know," "From Wigton to the foot of Ayr," "Come unto these yellow sands," "From the east to western Ind," and so forth, with a couple of odes of Horace, "Faune, Nympharum" and "Tu ne quæsieris." Here, as specimens, it is enough to give a little scrap from "Marmion," to which he set the air and sketched the accompaniment; and his own rough draft of a songlet, of which the words, at any rate, are lovely, and intimately Ruskin. They might be the motto to the Queen's Gardens of "Sesame":

XI

RUSKIN'S JEWELS

XI
RUSKIN'S JEWELS

A standing treat for Ruskin's visitors was to look at minerals. Some people, it was known, did not appreciate Turners, but everybody was sure to show emotion over the diamonds and nuggets. It was not an ordinary collection, with a bit of this and a bit of that, samples of all the ores in the handbook; there were only certain sorts, but each specimen was the pick of the market and of many years' selection, and every sort was a type of beauty.

Ruskin was not a "scientific" mineralogist, though he was an F.G.S. from an early age, and used the word "science" pretty freely in his writings. He really knew a great deal about minerals, too; but his knowledge was that of the artist and collector, taking little notice of the mathematics and chemistry which you read about, yet finding deep and keen interest in the forms and colours, the development, the "Life of Stones," "Ethics of the Dust," as he put it, about which science, up to his time, had nothing to say. And yet, as he showed his collection, you could not but feel that this was a kind of Nature-study not only fascinating, but of real importance.

A standard work, under the heading, "Native Gold," tells us: "The octahedron and dodecahedron are the most common forms. Crystals sometimes acicular ... also passing into filiform, reticulated, and arborescent shapes; and occasionally spongiform," &c. But it does not show you, as Ruskin could—pulling out drawer after drawer of his plush-lined cabinets, and letting you handle and peer into the dainty things with a lens—what gold, as Nature makes it, actually is. The scientific book never asks why some gold is born in the shape of tiny, solid, squarish crystals, as truly crystals as the uncut diamonds lying beside them, or the quartz in which they nestle; or why other samples are spun into hair, or woven into wisps, or ravelled into knots of natural gold lace; or again, why these have grown into the shape of exquisitely finished moss, and those into seaweed leaves, flat and curly, and powdered with dust of gold crystals, springing from the rough brown stone, or semi-transparent spar, inside of which you can see them like flower-stalks in water. Here is quite a new world of wonder and mystery, and that is the kind of "science" he puzzled over. Some more solid masses, not water-worn nuggets, are like a tiny netsuke; he had a miniature cobra, chased with its scales—all by the art of Nature; and others so like early Greek coins that one might fancy they had given suggestions to primitive mint-masters, who like all good artists modelled their work on Nature. What a happy world, he used to say, if all the gold were in its native fronds; and even for jewellery how much prettier these leaves of gold as it grew, than anything the manufacturing goldsmith sells you. I have drawn a group of eight such fronds, arranged as a cross, the centre piece with two tiny crystals of quartz naturally set into it, a gift from his collection to a friend, as an instance of what Ruskin called a jewel: and from his own rapid sketch in colour (over leaf) is a knot of natural silver wire, for silver, too, has its "arborescent filiform" shapes.

After gold and silver and diamonds you might think the interest of the mineral-drawers would begin to wane. But no! we come to richer colours and still more striking forms. This big pebble, rosy pink, with hazy streaks inside which catch the light as you turn it about, and reveal mysterious inner architecture—that is a ruby; and this also, a bit of frozen raspberry jam engraved with mystic triangles, one inside another like a dwarf-wrought seal of a fairy king. Then hold up this slab of talc to the light; the dark patch in it glows like a red lamp with the intense colour of the garnet. Lower down the cabinet there are bunches of beryls, angelica stalks Queen Thyri would not have scorned; or trimmed by Nature into quaint likeness to those six-sided Austrian pencils, point and all: emeralds in short and snapped-off sticks of mossy green; pale pink rods of tourmaline; clippings of a baby's hair, but crimson, and so fragile you must not breathe on them—that is ruby copper, chalcotrichite; black needles of rutile piercing through and through the solid, glassy quartz-crystals; amianthus, plush on a stone, tow on a distaff, waving seaweed in a motionless aquarium of hard spar. Why were these dainty things created, or how did they grow, hidden away from all possible light for their colours to develop or sight of man to enjoy them, until mining folk dug them up from their lurking-places? And then there are those which even when found show little of their beauty until they are polished; agates, and Labrador spar, and malachites, and fire opals; what theory of Nature accounts for this latent loveliness? he would say; how little this kind of beauty is known and enjoyed by people who are satisfied with jewellery from the price-list! One of his plans was to form a jewel-museum in which the curator should exhibit, with lens and leisurely explanations, such treasures to admiring groups of visitors. The place, indeed, was fixed, at Keswick; the curator named. But the curator designate shirked the too responsible honour.

Less for pure beauty but still wonderful were all the many forms of chalcedony and kindred minerals toward the end of his entertainment. One is a specimen of hyalite—a sort of ropy, waxy glass-bubble holding water inside. He would tell how he wanted to know why the water was in it, and what sort of mysterious liquid was so sealed up and treasured by the powers that be; so he had it carefully sawn asunder and the sacred ichor collected and analysed. It turned out to be just like Thames water.

The page photographed from one of his earliest writings—the mineral dictionary he made at ten or eleven in a shorthand which, later on, he could not read himself—is now in the Coniston Museum. It shows his very early interest and diligence, at the time when he cared nothing for pictures or political economy, but loved Nature in all her ways. This page begins his juvenile account of Galena, a word which in later days often brought out a smile and a story. For years, he said, he was wretched because his great and glorious specimen of this same Lead Glance had a flaw in it, an angular notch, breaking the dainty exactitude of the big, black, shining crystal, otherwise as regular as the most consummate art could plane and polish it. One day, with the lens, he noticed that the form of the notch corresponded with the shape of a crystal of calcite embedded in another specimen. His galena had not been damaged; it was Nature's work, all the more wonderful now; and life was still worth living.

Few Ruskin readers know his papers on Agates in back numbers of the Geological Magazine, with their fine coloured plates illustrating some of the best in his grand series; but this was one of his pet studies, and it was a great regret of his declining age that he had never carried it through. By careful drawing he learned, as any one must, far more of the secrets of agate-structure than can be found by merely looking and talking, and he thought that the usual explanation was quite insufficient; agates were not made in layers poured one after another into the hollows of the rock, but by some kind of "segregation," the withdrawal of different materials from a mixed mass. This is not the place to discuss his theory; but only to note that duplicates of his own set, in illustration of his papers, are now in the Coniston Museum, which indeed was founded by his gift of a general mineral collection in 1887.

His "Catalogue of a series of specimens in the British Museum (Natural History) illustrative of the more common forms of Native Silica" (George Allen, 1884) to a certain extent suggests his agate theory. This is well worth looking through when a visit to the Museum gives the reader an opportunity of comparing these beautiful stones, many of them presented by Ruskin, who also gave the great jewels he called the Colenso diamond and the Edwardes ruby (after his friend Sir Herbert Edwardes, whose life he wrote in "A Knight's Faith").

After the illness of 1878 which set him aside from Oxford work, he took to stones of all sorts with ardour. Even at Oxford he had not quite forgotten them: the lecture called "The Iris of the Earth" (given in London, February 1876) is a poetical miscellany of jewel-lore. While he was at work on this at Oxford he sent the college messenger round with a pressing note for one of his pupils to come at once. "I want to know what gules means. Run to Professor —— and Professor —— and find out. The books say it means gueule, the red of a wild beast's throat, but that is too nasty." "Why not gul? I think that is Persian for rose," said the pupil. "Wonderful!" said he; "In the gardens of Gul! Of course!" And down it went in the lecture.

At Brantwood in the early 'eighties there was a busy time with minerals. He was trying to get deeper into the secret, and to look up the more scientific side of the question. He even got a microscope, and his secretary had to make drawings of diamond anatomy, which I am afraid only confirmed him in his distrust of microscopes. He pored over crystallography, and tried to rub up his mathematics, only to find that nothing of the sort explained why gold made itself into fronds, and snow into stars, and diamonds into marvellous domes built up of shield within shield, round-sided triangles—not round-sided after all, but mysteriously straight lines, simulating curves, and so blended and harmonised and perfected that a good uncut diamond is perhaps the most bewilderingly beautiful thing in Nature. Here is one of his sketches giving a diagram of the big "St. George's" diamond he bought for £1000, and studied, and made his secretary study, for weeks together. It ought perhaps to be said that the diagram represents only one facet, and that this is magnified fully two diameters; the diamond is large, but not so large as all that. I cannot reproduce the best drawing made at the time, too elaborate in its attempt at transparency and detail; "That style of drawing was too utter by far," he said; but his diagram may give some hint of the reason why he preached "uncut diamonds" as well as the jewellery of native gold.

He put his theory into practice more than once; especially in a fine pendant he gave to Mrs. Severn, who designed the setting. It is about two and three-quarter inches long, not including the clasp. Two large moonstones en cabochon but irregular in outline are set in an arrangement of gold leaves and twigs; among them are nine spikes of uncut sapphire each about half an inch long, radiating from the moonstones, which are joined by two uncut diamonds, one round and one triangular; a quantity of small rubies are dotted about the group to give contrast of colour. The effect is most picturesque, but of course it has not the glitter—the vulgar glitter, Ruskin called it—of ordinary jewellery. To see the special charm you have to look close.

A much more entertaining and to him satisfactory line of research was in finding illustrations of crystal form and banded structure among the stones of the neighbourhood, with which his porch became encumbered, or in sugar and salt and coloured pastry, or tracing the diffusion of cream in fruit-juice, which makes a temporary agate. It was more fun for the secretary too, than working problems in the kitchen after bedtime, the only chance for a smoke; and who can tackle geometry of three dimensions without a pipe? If Ruskin had smoked he might have mastered his Miller and Cloiseaux; but it was better that he should satisfy himself that their ways were not his ways. The poetry of jewel-lore can't be stated in terms of h. k. l.

Those pie-crust experiments were everybody's delight. They are partly told in "Deucalion," illustrated with drawings by Laurence Hilliard, who became expert at bogus mineralogy on his own account. After displays of nature's wonders and Ruskin's eloquence, the visitor at luncheon or tea (tea was at the dining-room table) often did not know whether to laugh or look shocked when Laurie made minerals of bread and jam, or anything handy, irresistibly like; and described them gravely in the very accents of the Professor, who found it "entirely lovely," and sometimes even suggestive. He was always looking out for analogies, and could make bogus minerals too. One day, showing his jewels to a very young lady, he brought out of its purple plush nook in the glittering drawer a wonderful specimen, ropy, arborescent, semi-transparent, lustrous; descanting the while on stalactitic growth, chalcedony, chrysoprase, hyalite. "And what is this called?" she asked. "Wax, my dear; I got it at the candle myself."