Ruskin Relics

XII

RUSKIN'S LIBRARY

XII
RUSKIN'S LIBRARY

In any strange house, while you wait for your host or hostess, how much you gather of their tastes and ways from the books on the table and in the shelves! You cannot help noticing either the presence or the absence of literature, and you do not need to open the volumes to guess what sort of reading the good people like. Well-known bindings and styles of binding betray them at once; and unless they are abnormally tidy their pet books are sure to be somewhere in the room they use. Of course, one must discount the evidence of a cover which too obviously matches the furniture; and if you are an author, and expected to call, be not too lifted up on spying your own book gracefully displayed. You may assume that working books, professional tools, are in the workshop; and there are few houses without a certain litter of ephemeral printing, magazines and library volumes, necessary for intelligent conversation. But if the people read, you will soon know it, and learn at a glance much about their tastes and characters.

When you know your friends well enough to browse among their books you learn still more. The way they cut their pages, skipping or plodding; and if they ever do scribble on the margins, what they have marked; and which books are much used, and which are exiled to top shelves; and how they are kept—unbound, or perhaps all too beautifully bound; these things tell you more than an autobiography would, more than many years of ordinary acquaintance.

Ruskin's library was scattered all over his house—and though he has been dead these three years, and for many years earlier made little use of his books, the bulk of them still remain pretty much as he left them. At one time, when he was busy upon literary work, he was continually buying, and every corner was heaped with new purchases and old lots weeded out to be given away or sold; but the net result of his choice and taste, what he personally cared for and kept, can be seen by a visitor at Brantwood—the books for constant use in the study, and favourite reading in his bedroom, and the rest dispersed about the place. Most of these books I remember in just these same places twenty-five years ago, or more; so that in taking you into his study I am showing you the workshop where he wrote "Oxford Lectures" and "Fors Clavigera," and handling the tools he used.

Art and Political Economy were the main subjects of those lectures and letters, and I suppose the public assumes that these were the subjects most interesting to him. Whether you are of those who think him great on Art but astray on Economics, or of the later school who have resolved that he never knew anything of Art, but had real insight and foresight in matters social and political, you would expect to find evidences of both—rows of reference volumes, and all the standard works. But they are not here; Art and Political Economy are conspicuous by their absence.

Perhaps you will query my sweeping statement as you take down a volume of Crowe and Cavalcaselle from the "history bookcase" to the right of the fireplace: but see, it is only a stray volume!—and open it; only a few pages are cut, and those considerably bescribbled with dissent. Ought he to have known by heart these authorities on Italian painting? It might have saved him from an error or two, and from some useless discussions; but he knew the pictures themselves, and his business was not to write handbooks, but to bring his readers directly into touch with the generalised human view he took of painting. There is, however, the "Dictionnaire de l'Architecture" of Viollet-le-Duc, much used in parts, for he alternately admired the research and quarrelled with the conclusions of the great French architect, whose name he persisted in spelling "Violet." There are some very successful artists whose perspective is always wrong; and others whose drawing can always be corrected by an art student; but they can paint pictures! Ruskin's work is full of little faults; de minimis non curat; but he got at the root of the matter, mostly, and he could make you see it. All the tinkering criticism about his mistakes only shows that he thought "first-hand," so to say, and wrote with a full pen.

This bookcase is chiefly made up of Carlyle, Gibbon, Alison, Milman, and the old standards, of course thickly annotated. There are also some volumes of Mr. W. S. Lilly, but you may open them and find no sign of life; Ruskin may have read but he has not marked. There is his old copy of Lord Lindsay's "Christian Art" (1847), reviewed by him in the June Quarterly of that year. It is stamped with "Mr. Murray's compliments," but that must refer to the previous owner. You see his name in queer cramped pencil "Burgon: Oriel," with Greek e—Burgon of the Greek vase, the High Churchman, whose dark thin face and bright eyes, and humorous contempt for all "doxies" but his own, make him so well remembered by Oxford men of the passing generation. There is something odd in Ruskin's early excursion into primitive Italian art being, as it were, "vice Burgon, resigned." Then there is "Roman Antiquities," by Alexander Adam, LL.D., 1819, doubly ear-marked by "John J. Ruskin," and kept for his father's sake, and for the sake of his father's old school-master. Ruskin, at all times, was open to the appeal of associations; all his judgments about men, women and things must be corrected by the personal equation, and without his biography one can never quite rightly appraise his works.

The "Bible of Amiens" and some passages in the latest lectures hint that he was really interested in Anglo-Saxons and Irish Saints. There is the Venerable Bede, evidently studied, and the life of St. Patrick—you know he was always respectful to the patron of Ireland—but not a leaf cut! There is J. R. Green's "Making of England," appreciatively annotated, and Sharon Turner, much marked and cut down in a reckless way to fit the shelf. A much worse example of this chopping of books is Westwood's "Miniatures and Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS.," a most valuable folio, from which Ruskin has sawn the top edge and ripped out all the best plates. As in the case of his mediæval missals, scribbled on the margin by his irreverent pen, he would say that his books were for use and not for curiosities. These plates were ripped out, not for wanton mischief or in vulgar carelessness, but to show to his classes at lectures. The margins were cut, so that the books might be put away in shelves or cabinets, clearing the workshop of a busy man, instead of leaving them about to be mishandled and dog-eared; for the best of housemaids cannot be expected always to treat the master's litter as if they loved it. None of these volumes are so damaged that a little vamping would not set them right; though of course they would not be the tall copies prized by bibliomaniacs. But how many of these tall copies are read by their buyers?

On the other hand he bound some volumes much more sumptuously than they deserved. On this shelf there is a very splendid tome, lettered on the back "Swisse Histor.," evidently bound abroad, which on opening you find to be Gaullieur's "La Suisse Historique," much used for intended work on Swiss towns; and another grand, thick, bevelled, gilded, crushed-morocco series lettered "Hephaestus," which turns out to be "Les Ouvriers des Deux Mondes" (Paris, 1857)—the only sample we can find of the Political Economy we were looking for. Nor is there anything of the sort elsewhere in the room.

On the other side of the fireplace is a nest of shelves filling the corner; you see it in the picture of Ruskin's study, above his armchair. These shelves are full of maps and scraps, presented poems at the top and other gleanings awaiting removal when he should next put his room in order; old Baedekers and chess-books lower down, with the set of chessmen and the little travelling board handy for a game after tea; and boxes filled with the British Museum reproductions of those bonny Greek coins, thick, rich and bossy, like nuggets come to life or fossils in metal.

Over the fire are no books, but, as many pictures of the Brantwood study have shown, a della Robbia relief, replacing the Turner which once hung there; and the stuffed kingfisher, Cyprus pottery and figurines, a bit or two of colour in Japanese enamel and Broseley lustre, and in the middle of the mantelpiece the Swiss girl which we have photographed. It is a brown old wood-carving, nearly a foot high, with the vineyard pruning-hook (now broken away) and the hotte or creel full of vine-leaves (they use the word hot for a pannier or creel in the Cumberland dialect also); and though the drapery is commonplace—kerchief, corset and skirt—there is something of the fine school of sculpture about the lines, not unworthy of a good Nuremberg bronze. I do not know how or whence this figure came to the family, but it was old Mrs. Ruskin's before it was brought to Brantwood, and here it is, so to say, the very centrepiece of the house. When he sat writing at his usual place and looked up, his eye would light on it first of all, before rising to the Florentine Madonna above or wandering to the Turners on the wall to the right, or out of window to the lake and mountains and Coniston Old Hall opposite. What has he not said about the beauty of the peasant-girl in the fields as compared with the proud ideals of classic art?—that the painting we most need is to paint cheeks red with health, and so on? Here was always the reminder of that bedrock principle of his thought. You know how George Borrow describes a writer who used to find his inspiration in a queer portrait over the fireplace? This, I think—though I never heard Ruskin say so, and perhaps it is rather the symbol than the cause—gives us the keynote of his study and the work that went on in it.

The rest of his library represents not so much his professed occupation as what you might call his hobbies. To the left, within reach of the writing-table, all is Botany, and not very modern botany either. Beyond the cases full of Turners in sliding frames, and drawers of business papers, all is Geology and Natural History, mostly out of date, or shall we call it "classical"? There is Mineralogy, old Jameson, and Cloiseaux, gorgeously bound, and Miller, and perhaps a larger number of the handbook class, in French and English, and of more modern date, than in any other department. There are his old friends Forbes and Phillips on glaciers and geology, and some more recent three-volume treatises with uncomplimentary scribblings on their margins. There is Yarrell's "Birds"—he never could endure the cuts; and three sets of Bewick. One of the most used is Donovan's "British Insects," eight volumes, with coloured plates.

Opposite you find more botany; the nineteen massive folios of "Floræ Danicæ Descriptio," the twenty-seven volumes of the old, old Botanical Magazine, with the beautiful plates of Sowerby, the three dozen volumes and index of Sowerby's "English Botany," the six volumes of Baxter's "Island Plants," the nine volumes of Lecoq's "Géographie Botanique," and so forth; all showing his purely artistic and "unscientific" interest in natural history. Modern anatomy and evolution were nothing to him; what he cared about was the beauty of the creatures and the sentiments that clustered round them in mythology and poetry.

Of poetry and belles-lettres he had a great assortment, as might be expected, and mostly in volumes interesting for their history, though not chosen as rare editions. He kept his grandfather's "Burns," his father's "Byron," his own college "Aristophanes," with copious lecture-notes and sketches of the Poetry of Architecture in blank spaces. He had Morris's "Earthly Paradise," "from his friend the author"; a "Linnæus" that had belonged to Ray, the great Cumbrian botanist; "A Dyaloge of Syr Thomas More Knyghte" (1530), with the neat autograph, "ffrancis Bacons booke," apparently that of the famous Lord Bacon; and, of course, his Scott manuscripts have been often described by visitors to Brantwood. One little token of unexpected reverence for a name which hasty readers might think was not to be spoken in Ruskin's study, is a tiny duodecimo in yellow silk—"Dialogo di Antonio Manetti," about the size, form, and measurements of Dante's Hell—inscribed apparently by the great artist "di Michelagnol Buonarroti."

Greek authors, and a few translations like Jowett's "Plato"; Missals and Bibles in mediæval Greek and Latin; a few old printed books—"Danthe" (1491), and a couple more "fourteeners"—but only on subjects in which he was interested, such as heraldry—Randle Holmes (1688), and Guillim (1638), coloured by Ruskin and much marked; Douglas's "Virgil" (1553), Chapman's "Homer," the original "Cowley" of 1668, various copies of "Poliphilo," together with standard poets, complete what may be called the bric-à-brac of the shelves above the mineral collection. Some readers of Omar Khayyam may be interested in his dissent to stanza 34, and energetic assent to 21, 25, 45 and 46, scored on the margins in the edition of 1879; and some of his artistic readers, will they be sympathetic or scandalised at his collection of Rodolph Toepffer's Genevese caricatures? There is very little about Art in all these lines of books: Millingen's "Greek Vases," and the still greater work of Lenormant and De Witte are there indeed, but the only other art books are those of two old friends, Prout's "Sketches at Home and Abroad," and Harding's "Elementary Art."

Some of the books he used for special work are in other parts of the house, and many must have been sold or given away when they were done with. A number of those he gave away are in a case at the Coniston Museum, from which we photograph a fine Nuremberg Chronicle side by side with the tiny "Horace" he used to carry in his pocket on journeys abroad. In his bedroom he kept a great deal of favourite reading for wakeful nights—Carlyle and Helps, Scott and Byron, Shakespeare and Spenser, Miss Edgeworth and Madame de Genlis, and the books of his youth, a most curious collection of dingy antiquity, with not a few French novels: and elsewhere are the ponderous tomes from which he gleaned. His work was not done without much reference to books; but, after all, it was never compilation. Perhaps it is a truism, but this look round Ruskin's library gives it some freshness and force—that the writing which makes its mark in the world is not the second-hand, patchwork sort, however laborious and however learned. He looked at Nature, and wrote down what he saw; he felt deeply, and wrote what he felt.

XIII

RUSKIN'S BIBLES

XIII
RUSKIN'S BIBLES

"Ruskin et la bible"—who would have expected it?—is the title of a French book, written by a science professor, and published in Paris.

We all know that his works, from "Modern Painters" to "Præterita," are full of the Bible. Sometimes his allusions and quotations are merely ornamental, and sometimes his remarks are sharp enough to pain the reader; for Ruskin went through many phases of faith, or, rather, through a long period of doubt, from which he came, in his later years, into a new and very simple acceptance of the Christian hope. But at all times he took the Bible seriously, and in many a passage he has made its thoughts and stories live for us with marvellous reality. Hear him tell the Death of Moses or the Call of Peter in those well-known pages of his masterpiece, or follow him in "Fors" through unpalatable deductions from neglected commands, and you cannot but feel that he was a great preacher, "a man of one book," and that book was the Bible.

How he was brought up upon it he tells us in his autobiography. In Coniston Museum not the least interesting of the Ruskin relics is the Bible from which, as he noted on the fly-leaf, his mother taught him the paraphrases. Turning it over one sees how the parts he has named as especially studied, Psalm cxix. above all, have been soiled; for even little John Ruskin, model of home-bred boys, was like Tommy Grimes the scamp—he couldn't always be good—and continual thumbing embrowns the page.

It was his mother to whom he owed this youthful training in a close knowledge of the text, "without note or comment." This was her Bible in the earlier days. Later in life she laid the somewhat worn volume aside for a new one, a nonpareil Oxford Bible with references, 1852, with inscription in her husband's handwriting—

—and a bearded thistle-head is fastened for a memento on the fly-leaf. To the end of her life she read in it every day, and every day learned two verses by heart; she has pencilled on the margins the dates in her last two years, 1870 and 1871; and after the daily reading she always put the volume away in its yellow silk bag with purple strings. This curious habit of dating came out also in her son's old age; perhaps the modern psychologist will diagnose in it some form of degeneracy, but in old times dates were important from a lingering respect for astrology, which is betrayed—most likely unintended—in the precision with which John Ruskin's father noted the exact hour of his birth. It is in a Baskett Bible of 1741, with engraved title-page, and a pencil drawing, probably by John in his boyhood, stuck in as a sort of frontispiece—a copy from a picture of Jesus Mocked. Opposite to it is written: "John Ruskin, son of John James Ruskin and Margaret Ruskin, Born 8 February 1819 at ¼ past 7 o'clock Morning. Babtized (sic) 20 Feby 1819 by the Rev^d Mr. Boyd"—the father, I understand, of "A.K.H.B." To emphasise the Scottish character of the family one may note that this volume has bound up with it at the end "The Psalms of David in Meeter," printed at Edinburgh, 1738. It is most curious that Mr. J. J. Ruskin, a distinctly well-educated man, should have made the mistake in spelling, and carried on the old tradition of providing material for the horoscope.

Another Baskett Bible of 1749, nicely rebound in old red morocco, handsomely tooled, bears the family's earliest register. It is written in a big, unscholarly hand in the blank space of the last page of Maccabees; for this volume contained an Apocrypha, and the page becoming worn, it was stuck down on the cover. "John Ruskin, Baptized Aprill 9th, 1732 O.S." (i.e., 1733 new style), and then follow the children of this John, with dates and hours of birth, between 1756 and 1772—Margaret, Mary, William, John Thomas, Elizabeth, Robert, and James. John Thomas, born October 22, 1761, was the father of John James, the father of John. Like many other remarkable men who owed their fame to their powers rather than to their circumstances, Ruskin came of a line of decent, respectable, bourgeois folk, who read their Bibles, "feared God, and took their own part when required."

His earliest literary training, so to say, was closely connected with Bible study: for every Sunday he had to take notes of the sermon and write out a report of the discourse. One of his childish sermon-books is preserved in the Coniston Museum, and a page is reproduced here to show the care of writing and choice of wording insisted upon. In the stories and verses with which he amused himself, he learned a good deal of freedom and ease: in these he learned dignity of style, a corrective to boyish flippancy. Also he got the habit of thinking with his pen, so that he nearly always scribbled when most people would only meditate. His father's Bible (a small pica 8vo, Oxford edition of 1846, on the fly-leaf "Margaret Ruskin to her husband John James Ruskin, 1850," finely rebound in tawny leather, gilt) was used by him in later times, and side-lined vigorously; all the blank spaces are scribbled over with the thoughts that came as he read.

There is a grand Old Testament in Greek MS. The back is lettered "tenth century," but Dr. Caspar René Gregory, who spent some time in examining the books at Brantwood, pointed out that the Greek date for 1463 could be dimly seen printed off from the lost final leaf. It was bound in vellum in or after 1817, to judge from the water-mark in the fly-leaves; the binding alone is worm-eaten, leaving the body of the book untouched. The pages, a little waterstained, are written large and quaint with the reed pen, and adorned with strips of painted pattern and Byzantine portraits of the authors of the books—Solomon as a young king, Isaiah and the prophets in varying phases of grey-bearded dignity and elaborate robes of many colours, rather coarsely but very richly painted. Such a book to most would be quite too sacred for anything but occasional turning with careful finger-tips, or a paper-knife delicately inserted at the outer margin of the leaves; not to say too crabbed in its contractions and old style calligraphy to be read with ease. But Ruskin read it, and annotated as he read. He did the same with the Greek Psalter in the Coniston Museum, shown in the illustration on p. 197; he did it still more copiously, and in ink, not merely in erasable pencil, in his most valuable tenth-century Greek Gospels, or rather Book of Lessons, from which we have a page photographed. I am very far from saying that this is a practice to be imitated; but any one who wishes to follow Ruskin in his more intimate thoughts on the Bible, at the time of crisis in 1875 when he was busy on this book, and when he was beginning to turn from the agnostic attitude of his middle life to the old-fashioned piety of his age—any one who wants to get at his mind would find it here.

He used to read his Latin Bibles too, but most of these were collected rather for their artistic value than otherwise. Of printed bibles there were few in his library; one, a Latin version in three volumes, purple morocco, printed by Fran. Gryphius, 1541, and adorned, as the title puts it, with images suitable no less for their beauty than for their truth, has the cuts resembling Holbein's work in "Icones Historiarum Veteris Testamenti" (Lyons, apud Joannem Frellonium, 1547). But he loved mediæval illumination, and owned too many thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Bibles, Psalters, and Missals to be described in this chapter.

Mention may be made of a few, such as the big fourteenth-century Latin Bible, splendidly written in double columns with stiff Gothic patterns in red and blue, and dainty little decorative initials, each a picture. Some of these he used to set his pupils and assistants to enlarge; and a very difficult job it was to get the curves to Ruskin's mind. If you made them too circular he would expound the spring of the lines until you felt that you had been guilty of all the vices of the vulgarest architect's draughtsman, an awful character in the true Ruskinian's eyes. If you insisted on the "infinite" and hyperbolic sweep of the contour—and you can't magnify a sixpence into a dinner-plate without some parti pris—then you had the lecture on Moderation and Restraint. But Ruskin was always very good-humoured and patient in these lessons; in the end a happy mean was found between Licence and Formality, and such works as the "Noah's Ark"—now, I believe, in the Sheffield museum—were elaborated. Perhaps photography would have been a shorter cut; but it should have been capital training, if one had known what use to make of it.

Then there is a Versio Vulgata MS. of the thirteenth century, poorly half bound in shabby boards, with a pencil note—not by Ruskin, of course—"bo^t at Naples 1826 for 21/-." Twice or thrice as many pounds would be cheap for it now, I suppose. A pleasant story is told by Bishop Nicolson in his diary of the year when Queen Anne came to the throne, of his meeting the famous Dr. Bentley on the Queen's birthday (February 8, 1702), and how the great Cambridge scholar laughed at the mania for possessing rare editions—a fancy by no means exclusively of these latter days. "He ridicul'd ye Expensive humour of purchaseing old Editions of Books at extravagant Rates; a Vanity to wch ye present E. of Sunderland and B(ishop) of N(orwich) much subject. The former bought a piece of Cicero's works out of Dr. Fr. Bernard's Auction, printed about 1480, at ye Rate of 3lb. 2s. 6d. which Dr. Bentley himself had presented to yt physitian, and wch cost him no more than the odd half Crown." The Bishop of Barrow-in-Furness in editing the diary has tried to trace the subsequent fortune of the book for which Bentley thought £3 2s. 6d. too high a price. There seem to have been two volumes, each of which might answer to the description, sold at the dispersal of the Blenheim library in 1881; and of these one fetched £54, and the other £38, both prices greatly below their market value at the present time.

Very like the last mentioned in Ruskin's collection is his small thirteenth-century Bible, with minute double-columned writing, as tiny as newspaper print, but perfectly readable, and lovely to look at. This is an English-written book, with a glossary of names at the end; it came from the library of the Hon. Archibald Fraser, son of the celebrated Lord Lovat. Another small thirteenth-century Bible is Italian work; a German MS. Latin prayer-book and psalter dating from about 1220, with rich bold pictures and ornament in broad bands of blue and burnished masses of gold, bound in grey-green velvet, was a great treasure. His so-called St. Louis Psalter and the prayer-book of Yolande of Navarre have been often mentioned by him, but to go into these would take us away from our subject—his Bibles.

The one he prized most is known as King Hakon's Bible, from a reference on the fly-leaf to King Hakon V. of Norway. It is a small volume (shown in our illustration as standing in front of the embroidered cover in which his Birthday Addresses are kept) with 613 leaves of the thinnest vellum, measuring no more than 4¼ by 6¼ inches, and written in tiny black-letter, double columned, every page ornamented; there are more than eighty delicately painted pictures, and hundreds of daintily coloured initials, a perfect treasury of decorative art. The binding is of the sixteenth century, and thought to be English; boards covered with brown leather, brass bosses and clasps, and stamped with panels of griffins in relief, and the motto repeated between them of "Jhesus help." The book is French work of the middle of the thirteenth century, and the black-letter inscription reads, "Anno dni. M^o. CCC^o. X^o. istum librum emit fr. hanricus prior provīcialis a conventu hathersleu. de dono dnī. regis Norwegie," which is to say: "In 1310 brother Henry, provincial prior, bought this book from the Conventus (whatever that means) at Haderslev (in Sleswig) out of the gift of my lord the king of Norway." It hardly seems as though the king had owned the book, as Ruskin believed when he bought it, but it is not surprising that the keepers of the National Library at Christiania were disappointed in finding that it had gone into his hands from Quaritch's catalogue, just too soon for them; and that the Norwegians sent a scholar to report upon it, Herr Kristian Koren, and on Ruskin's death again tried to become possessors, though Ruskin's heirs have, so far, not seen their way to part with the treasure he so much valued. To Herr Koren I owe the photograph of one of its pages, here reproduced.

These were all library Bibles, kept in his study, and used there; but in travelling he had various little testaments which he carried with him, such as the set shown in the Ruskin Exhibition at Coniston in 1900. In his bedroom, for reading on wakeful nights, he had the "Stereotype Clarendon Press Bible, Printed by Samuel Collingwood and Co." in six volumes, one being the Apocrypha, and this, like others, bears marks of much use in notes and pencillings. He had more respect for the Apocrypha than most Protestant Bible-readers. At one time (1881) he presented several copies of this Clarendon Press edition, bound just like his own, to a few friends whom he hoped to interest in "St. George's work," with the inscription, "From the Master." To the same he gave little squares of the pure gold, beaten thin, out of which he meant to strike his "St. George's coinage," saying, "Now you have taken St. George's money; and whether you call yourself one or no, you are a member of my Guild. I have caught you with guile!"

It is rather curious, and characteristic of his old-fashioned ways, that he used a bookmarker in his Bible—a dark blue ribbon, an inch wide, sewn to a card, on which was the text, "Day by day we magnify Thee," written and painted with a fifteenth-century style of ornament.

Quite at the end, his eyesight failed him for smaller type, and Mrs. Severn bought him a larger-typed Bible, which he read, or had read to him, constantly, up to his death. The only bit of his writing in it is a note of his sadder moods, "The burden of London, Isaiah xxiv."; I suppose he refers to the words, "Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty ... From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, even glory to the righteous. But I said, My leanness, my leanness, woe unto me!..." Those who read "Fors" know how little he trusted our imperialistic optimism.

Such a Bible-reader, one might think, would have collected something in the way of a theological library, what are called helps to Bible-reading. But no! he read neither commentators nor modern critics, and I believe he had no interest in anybody's views about exegesis or analysis. He kept by him a few volumes of reference: Smith's "Bible Dictionary," Cruden, the "Englishman's Greek Concordance," Sharpe's "Translation of the Hebrew Scriptures" (he knew no Hebrew), and there were two copies of Finden's "Landscape Illustrations of the Bible," one for his study and one for his bedroom. But even these few were little used; to him the plain old text was the book he studied all through his eighty years, and knew as not many in this generation know it. Once in his rooms at Oxford I remember getting into a difficulty about the correct quotation of some passage. "Haven't you a concordance?" I asked. "I'm ashamed to say I have," he said. I did not quite understand him. "Well," he explained, "you and I oughtn't to need Cruden!"

XIV

RUSKIN'S "ISOLA"

XIV
RUSKIN'S "ISOLA"

"I gave her that name," he said once, "because she is so unapproachable."

When he was a very young man he saw her first in Rome. He had been sent there for the winter because it was supposed he was going into a consumption. He had certainly been working very hard at Oxford—not only doing the necessary reading for honours, which need kill nobody, but all manner of literature, art, antiquities and science into the bargain, as his manner was; and he had taken terribly to heart the loss of the pretty French girl, on whom his boyish affections had been set for years. So he was in Rome as an invalid, restless and discontented; and he didn't like Raphael, and he didn't like the other things people ought to like. It must have been a difficult time for his parents; but then one can't expect to bring up a genius without a certain amount of trouble.

In a while he took a turn, and condescended to go with them to musical services. They were energetic anti-Romanists; but they went to St. Peter's to see the show, and to hear the singing. They thought he was beginning to develop an interest in music. But it was just the old story.

There was a beautiful Miss Tollemache in Rome that winter; "a fair English girl," he says, "who was not only the admitted Queen of beauty in the English circle of that winter in Rome, but was so, in the kind of beauty which I had only hitherto dreamed of as possible, but never yet seen living; statuesque severity with womanly sweetness joined. I don't think I ever succeeded in getting nearer than within fifty yards of her; but she was the light and solace of all the Roman winter to me, in the mere chance glimpses of her far away, and the hope of them."

It was very like Ruskin, and it says very much for the reality of the romantic ideal he preached, that a few glimpses of a far-away beauty, whom he had neither the chance nor the intention of approaching, should have made a man of him, out of a pining, love-sick boy. Open-air sketching helped him out of his consumption, or whatever the disease was; but the moral stimulus and reawakening of healthy imagination and power to work were given him by this pure enthusiasm for a beautiful face, fifty yards away.

He never saw her again for about ten years, not until she was a wedded wife. She had married a younger son of Earl Cowper and his wife, daughter of Lord and Lady Melbourne, and by second marriage wife of Lord Palmerston. The Hon. William Cowper was one of the most shining examples of the type—one does not see much about it in newspapers or histories, but private memoirs describe it in all ages, and no doubt it exists even in this—the type of good men in great positions, men who are in the world and very actively engaged in it, but quite unspotted. He began life as aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in 1830, and went into Parliament in 1835; he was a Lord of the Treasury in 1845, then a Lord of the Admiralty, then President of the Board of Health, Vice-President of the Board of Trade, Paymaster-General, Chief Commissioner of Works, Vice-President of the Education Department of the Privy Council, Chairman of Mr. Fawcett's Committee on the Enclosure Acts; it was he who saved Epping Forest in 1871, and was prime mover in the preservation of open spaces and in granting allotments to the poor; he passed the Medical Bill in 1858, the Thames Embankment Bill in 1862-3, and the Courts of Justice Building Bill in 1863; the "Cowper-Temple Clause," to secure the reading of the Bible in Board Schools, was his; he was the great reconstructor of the London Parks and inventor of the scheme for distributing the Park flowers to hospitals, work-houses and schools. It would be long to tell how he made politics philanthropic and brought art into the public service. After 45 years in Parliament he was raised to the peerage as Lord Mount Temple, and died in 1888.

All these things are known, or knowable, to the public; but what is more to the point, Histories of Our Own Times don't tell us: how the lively Eton boy, always in scrapes, occasionally flogged, had according to Gladstone's reminiscence "the stamp of purity, modesty, gentleness upon him in a peculiar degree": how the dandy officer in the Blues wanted to go into the Church "as a means of escaping," he wrote, "the imminent dominion of the sins which it seemed so difficult to avoid": how the busy M.P. and official, Palmerston's step-son and favourite, kept through all distractions a perfectly holy and saintly life, a sense of nearness to God and devotion to His will, that should put much professional piety to shame.

For instance, in his diary he noted Queen Victoria's coronation, which, of course, he had attended—he had dined with the Queen a couple of days before—and continued, "The main object to be pursued in life is communion with God. It is a good method of testing any way of spending my time to ask, does it render me more ready for communion with God?" At twenty-seven he had long known all that evangelical piety at its best can teach; and he always kept the faith. Ten years later, his young wife—the Miss Tollemache of Ruskin's admiration, and the Lady Mount Temple laid in 1901 to rest by her husband's side—asked him, at a large party at the Palmerston's, what interested him most. "Oh, nothing," he answered, "compares in interest with communion with my Master, and work for Him." "This," she added, in her privately printed volume of Memorials, "this was the spirit of his life, through all the blessed years I lived with him."

So after a long interval during which Ruskin had become a famous writer, and the girl at Rome had become the true helpmate of such a man, they met once more. It is rather curious to compare their two separate accounts of the meeting. The lady says, referring to the earlier part of her married life, in the 'fifties and 'sixties, "Another great delight to us at this time was going up occasionally to Denmark Hill for a happy day with Mr. Ruskin. It seems that, quite unknown to myself, he had noticed me when we were in Rome together in 1840! I was then eighteen. It was rather humiliating that when we met again, after about ten years, he did not recognise me. We became great friends: I was fond of his cousin Joan"—Mrs. Arthur Severn. Ruskin's way of putting it was rather different, and the mere man doesn't quite see where the humiliation comes in. He hated going to parties, he says; but one evening was introduced to a lady who was "too pretty to be looked at and yet keep one's wits about one"—that is very characteristic of him: so he talked a little with his eyes on the ground. "Presently, in some reference to Raphael or Michael Angelo, or the musical glasses, the word 'Rome' occurred; and a minute afterwards, something about Christmas in 1840. I looked up with a start; and saw that the face was oval—fair—the hair, light brown. After a pause I was rude enough to repeat her words, 'Christmas in 1840!—were you in Rome then?' 'Yes,' she said, a little surprised, and now meeting my eyes with hers, inquiringly. Another tenth of a minute passed before I spoke again. 'Why, I lost all that winter in Rome in hunting you!' It was Egeria herself! then Mrs. Cowper-Temple. She was not angry; and became from that time forward a tutelary power, of the brightest and happiest. Egeria always had her own way everywhere, thought that I also should have mine, and generally got it for me."

By the kindness of Mrs. Arthur Severn I have by me the long series of Ruskin's letters to Lord and Lady Mount Temple. To any one who knew the people and circumstances touched upon, they would be most interesting; delightfully amusing for the most part, but sometimes intensely painful, where the fiery genius poured out his woes and disappointments, public and private, into their kindly ears. She was his confidant in all that unhappy love-story which ended so tragically for his later life: she was his sympathetic adviser in much of his work. Mr. Cowper-Temple, too, was a kindly and helpful friend. In the early days he introduced Ruskin to Palmerston, and smoothed the way for various plans connected with the National Gallery and public art-works, many of which owed their promotion to Ruskin in the first instance. I cannot trace his direct influence in the philanthropic labours of Mr. Cowper-Temple and the politicians of his circle; but Ruskin was personally admired and loved by many of them, and certainly had an indirect share in much that was done for the help of the people. When he attempted to found his Guild of St. George, Mr. Cowper-Temple was one of the Trustees; not with great faith in the scheme, but with much affection for the schemer.

After some years of "Mr. and Mrs. Cowper" the acquaintance warmed into a closer friendship. They became Ruskin's "φίλος" and "φίλη", for he always nicknamed his intimates, and often so whimsically that his letters are quite ludicrously unprintable. To them he was "St. C."—Saint Chrysostom, the "golden-mouthed"; and sometimes, he liked to think, St. Christopher. When he was very ill at Matlock in 1871 Mrs. Cowper-Temple came to nurse him, and from that time he was her "Loving little boy," and his friends were his "Dearest Mama" and "Dear Papa." His view of life was that he grew younger as the years went on—and so from being "Dearest Mama" she became "Darling Grannie," and he signed "Ever your poor, grateful little boy." It is perhaps all very absurd; but one certainly does not understand Ruskin without knowing this queer side of his character, part sentimental, part grotesque, which creeps out even in his most serious writing, and makes it so impossible to take his every word for gospel message. But very often he wrote to her and of her as Isola—the island—"Isola Bella" standing alone and unapproachable by all ordinary roads, and yet open on all sides to the waifs of the waves, claiming haven and rest in her sympathy. Here is the whole of a little note written in a dark time in his later years: "Is there no Isola indeed, where we can find refuge—and give it? I have never yet been so hopeless of doing anything more in this wide-wasting and wasted earth, unless—we seize and fortify with love—a new Atlantis. Ever your devoted St. C."

There are very few bits in the letters of general interest. Of somebody's sketches sent for him to look at he wrote: "Alas, there's no genius in these drawings. Genius never exists without intense industry. Industry is not genius, but is the vital element of it." In Bible reading—"I noticed, curiously for the first time, two most important mistranslations. Fancy never having noticed before that 'Sufficient unto the day is its evil,' ought to be 'Let the day's evil suffice for it.' And 'chasteneth' ought in several cases to be merely 'bringeth up, teacheth!'" Here is what he urged upon his friends in all seriousness, and most strangely if you think who the friends were: "You are compromising somehow between God and Satan, and therefore don't see your way. Satan appears to you as an angel of the most exquisite light—I can see that well enough; but how many real angels he has got himself mixed up with I don't know. However, for the three and fortieth time—in Ireland or England or France, or under the Ara cœli perhaps best of all, take an acre of ground, make it lovely, give what food comes of it to people who need it—and take no rent of it yourselves. 'But that strikes at the very foundations of Society?' It does; and therefore, do it. For the Foundations of Society are rotten with every imaginable plague, and must be struck at and swept away, and others built in Christ, instead of on the back of the Leviathan of the Northern Foam. Ever your affectionate St. C.—not the Professor." It was to Lady Mount Temple he wrote the pretty letter telling her to arrange her party just as if Christ were coming to dinner—it is printed in "Fors Clavigera"—"I suppose Him to have just sent Gabriel to tell you He's coming, but that you're not to make any alterations in your company on His account."

Perhaps she hardly needed a Ruskin to tell her that: but she kept the letter, and did what it bade. Those who know anything about the Broadlands Conferences, those remarkable meetings of men and women in all ranks and of every shade of religious belief, come together "for the deepening of spiritual life," know what singular influence was wielded by Lady Mount Temple, and how far-reaching that influence has become.

Ruskin used sometimes to visit at Broadlands. One winter he spent several weeks there, and Lady Mount Temple says in the volume already quoted: "We found him, as always, most delightful and instructive company; his talk full and brilliant, and his kindness increasing to all the house, giving a halo to life. He set us all to manual work! He himself undertook to clean out the fountain in the garden, and made us all, from Juliet (Madame Deschamps, Lady Mount Temple's adopted daughter) to Mr. Russell Gurney, pick up the fallen wood and make it up into bundles of faggots for the poor!"

His friends also came to see him at Brantwood. Mrs. Arthur Severn has a lively story of an excursion with them to the Monk Coniston Tarn, a pretty bit of water on the hills, with a fine panorama of mountains all round, the show-place of Coniston. It was a foggy morning, but he hoped it would clear; and they drove up through the woods in expectation, but it was still foggy. They got out of the carriage and walked to the finest point of view; still the fog would not lift. Then Ruskin waved his hand and pointed to the scene they ought to see; and in his best eloquence, and with growing warmth described the lakelet embosomed in its woods and moors, Helvellyn and the Pikes, Bow Fell and Wetherlam, and the Coniston Old Man. For a moment it seemed as if the whole was before their eyes; and then they burst out laughing. "After all," said Lady Mount Temple, "is not this the best treat we could have?" "And to me," said Ruskin, with his old-fashioned courtliness, "what view could be so entirely delightful?"