Ruskin Relics

VI

RUSKIN'S ILARIA

VI
RUSKIN'S ILARIA

On Friday, September 22, 1882, we were at Turin. "Filthy city," Ruskin wrote in his diary. "One pestilence now of noise and smoke; and I got fearfully sad and discouraged, not only by this, but by not caring the least any more for my old pets of pictures, and not being able to see the minerals in close, dark rooms." But he adds, "Note the unique white amianth," and so forth, and he seemed to know the collection by heart. As to the pictures, the way he pointed out how Vandyck enjoyed the laying on of his colour, in a portrait of King Charles, gloating over the horse's mane and the delicate dexterity of the armour, makes me hope that even the steam tramways of Turin had not utterly darkened his life.

Once out of the town his spirits rose. "Alps clear, within twenty or thirty miles of Monte Viso; then through sandhills of Brà to Montenotte, down among the strange mounds and dells of the Apennine gneiss, to Savona walled down to the sea, beside a dismantled fortress which is certainly one of Turner's late subjects. Then among the olives and palms, and by the green serpentines, under darkening clouds, with constant boom and sigh of waves, to Cogoleto." But at Genoa the Sunday was "a day of disgust at all things. Proud palaces, foolish little St. Georges over their doors. Duomo in my pet style, not doing it credit; and a long climb over rocks, and road of black limestone veined with white, commanding all the heaps, rather than hills, of the mouldering earth, looking almost barren in its dull grass, on which the suburbs of Genoa, hamlet and villa, are scattered far and wide; the vast new cemetery, their principal object of view and glorification, seen by the winding of the waterless river-bed."

To most of us there is nothing more exhilarating than the platform-shout when the south express starts—"Parrr—tenza per Spezia—Pisa—Livorno—Firenze—Civitavecchia—Roooma!" and the clattering dash through tunnel after tunnel, among the rocks and green breakers of that wonderful coast. But it only worried and unnerved him. It was not his old road.

It was dull weather at Pisa after the first dewy morning for the Campo Santo; and there were "entirely diabolical" trams and chimneys in the town since his last visit. The streets, every reach of them loved of old for some jewel of mellowed architecture, were changing with modern progress. The town was noisier and dirtier than in days of yore. He had come to meet Nicola Pisano and company; but the ghosts wouldn't rise. "Penny whistles from the railroad perpetual, and view of town from river totally destroyed by iron pedestrian bridge. Lay awake very sad from one to half-past four, but when I sleep my dreams are now almost always pleasant, often very rational. A really rather beautiful one of consoling an idiot youth who had been driven fierce, and making him gentle, might be a lesson about Italy. But what is Italy without her sky—or her religion?" So he broke off work in the Baptistery on Michaelmas Day at noon, and ordered the carriage for Lucca.

Every one knows the route; over the Maremma, between the sea and the mountains. Peaks of Carrara clouded to the north; ruins of Ripafratta frowning over the crags; "vines, olives, precipices." At last you see a neat little town, boxed up in four neat walls, with rows of trees on the ramparts and towers looking over the trees; it is just like the mediæval town in the background of a triptych. Silk-mills there are, but not in evidence—at least, so it was twenty years ago.

As we drove up to the gate that afternoon the Customs officers turned out, and we laughed when the coachman shouted: "English family! Nothing to declare!" and the officers bowed, unquestioning. "So much nicer, isn't it?" said Ruskin, "than being bundled about among trucks and all the hideous things they heap round railway stations"; and in a few minutes we were in front of the Hotel Royal of the Universe. Signor Ruskino was expected; family and servants were at the door; everybody shook hands. The cook was busy with the dinner, I think; for when we had seen our rooms—he took the plainest of the tall, partitioned suite with rococo decorations, palatial but tarnished—"First," he said, "I must go and see the cook"; and so away to the kitchen.

He was patient of life's little worries; but he liked a good dinner when it was there. I remember the serviette full of crumbly chestnuts, and the Hermitage—afternoon sun meanwhile beating through half-shut persianes in dusty air, and a peep of greeny-blue hills over the square—Ruskin lifting his glass for a birthday toast. There was a certain damsel, whose own folk called her the Michaelmas goose; he put it more prettily: "Here's to St. Michael, and Dorrie, and All Angels!"

Then he went out to see Ilaria.

She was an early flame of his. He must have seen Ilaria before 1845, but it was in that eventful year he fell in love. Ilaria was, of course, the marble Lady of Lucca; but falling in love is not too strong a word.

The Forty-five in the nineteenth century had its Rebellion almost as full of consequences as the Forty-five of the century before. The raid of Prince Charlie opened up the Highlands, and gave us Ossian and Scott and Romanticism; little else. The raid of John Ruskin, in 1845, for the first time wandering free and working out his own thoughts among the Old Masters and mediæval ruins of Italy, started the whole movement which made British art decorative and philanthropic. There were others helping, but he led the way; and it was in that Forty-five that he "went up the Three Steps and in at the Door."

The passage in which he first described Ilaria is almost hackneyed. "She is lying on a simple couch with a hound at her feet.... The hair is bound in a flat braid over the fair brow, the sweet and arched eyes are closed, the tenderness of the loving lips is set and quiet; there is that about them which forbids breath; something which is not death nor sleep, but the pure image of both."

Who or what the lady might have been in the flesh he hardly seems to have cared; at least he never dwelt on the story. She was daughter of a Marquis of Carretto, and wife of Paolo Guinigi, chief of a powerful family in Lucca. In 1405 she died. In 1413 Paolo was building that palace with the tower, now a poor-house, from which he ruled his fellow townsmen with a rod of iron. She never saw the arcaded palace, and the frowning, machicolated tower; she could never have had part or lot in the tyranny of his later rule. We often read in history of a woman keeping within bounds the nascent fierceness of a man who—losing her—let himself go and became the scourge of his world. But in all his pride Paolo remembered the pretty wife, untimely lost.

The very year he built his castle he tempted away the greatest sculptor of the age from his native town and thronging engagements to carve her a tomb. Jacopo della Quercia came to Lucca in 1413, and six years later left after finishing this and other sculptures there. He could hardly have known Ilaria; he must have worked from very insufficient materials in getting her portrait, and it must have been a tiresome and delicate business to satisfy his patron, his tyrant. But then Quercia was "a most amiable and modest man," and he had the secret of noble portraiture, "Truth lovingly told." The sort of critics who do not gush say of this work that it is the first masterpiece of the Early Renaissance. It has all the best qualities of mediæval art—its severe symbolism and decorative effect, with all the best of the later classicism—its reality, softness and sweetness.

Paolo's enemies before long drove him out of Lucca, and the city wreaked vengeance on the tyrant by shattering his wife's tomb, this masterpiece. Somehow the effigy itself was spared, and set up again with bits of the wreck against the bare church wall. It was this dead lady, this marble lady, with browned, translucent cheeks, and little nose just bruised away at the tip, that took Ruskin's imagination in his youth. In his age he wrote, "It is forty years since I first saw it, and I have never found its like."

For a month, with an interval at Florence, he kept me pretty closely at work drawing Ilaria—side-face, full-face, three-quarters, every way; together with bits of detail from the early thirteenth-century porch of St. Martin's and other churches, and some copies in the picture gallery. He painted hard himself, and never did better work in his life. Two studies, "half-imperial," of the façade of St. Martin's are especially well known; one was at the Academy (winter 1901) and one at the same time at the Royal Water-colour Society's Exhibition. He used to sit in quaint attitudes on his camp-stool in the square, manipulating his drawing-board with one hand and his paint-brush with the other; Baxter, his valet, holding the colour-box up for him to dip into, and a little crowd of chatterers looking on. He rather enjoyed an audience, and sometimes used to bring back odd gleanings of their remarks when he came in to luncheon. One ragged boy, personally conducting a friend from the country, was overheard enumerating the strangers' meals at the hotel: "They eat much, much, these English!" Of course, most in the crowd knew him, or about him. The dean and chapter came to approve, the choir to grin, and the gendarmes to patronise; a few French tourists hovered round, but no English that I remember.

After these long mornings of work—inside when it rained, outside when it shone—we always went for a ramble or a drive. One venturesome start in a thunderstorm I recollect, for Ruskin was not the least timid, as you might expect from his highly-strung temperament. He used to walk planks and look down precipices, too, like a regular steeple-jack, and handle all sorts of animals fearlessly. This thunderstorm gave us grand Turneresque effects, of which I have a sketch, but no description; but I have borrowed an old letter of the time which gives a fair sample of an afternoon with Ruskin. It is dated October 28, 1882.

"A biting scirocco was blowing, but we started in the usual carriage driven by the boy with the red tie. As we left the hotel an army of beggars hailed the Professor, who solemnly distributed pence, to lighten his pocket and his mind. Then we scampered through the streets, which are all pavement, and none broader than Hanway Street; but everybody drives furiously in them as a point of Lucchese and Tuscan honour, and nobody seems to be run over.

"Out through the city walls you are in the country at once. Indeed, I can't help thinking of the town as a garden where houses are bedded out instead of flowers; they are so close packed, so varied and pretty. But out at the gate it is a wide stretch of plain with mountains all round, and bright cottages, cadmium-yellow in the stubble-fields and cane-brakes, for they thatch the maize-heads over the roofs by way of storage. Out of one quite decent-looking farm-house a decent-looking woman came rushing and gesticulating after the carriage. The Professor called on the driver to stop; and the woman, out of breath, declared she was the mother of five and wanted charity. He gave her a note; notes, you know, can be a good deal less than five pounds in Italy.

"At the foot of the hills, south of Lucca, we left the carriage and walked up the road; Baxter, too, with the umbrella, coat, camp-stool and geological hammer as usual. The road goes up through chestnuts and under vines, till you get to some farms and a church on the top of the buttress-hills, with a splendid view of Lucca and the valley, behind rich slopes of autumn colours, and a monastery with its cypresses in the middle distance. Then we dived into a valley and crossed a marble quarry, for all the stones here are marble; the road is mended with marble, and the pigstyes are built of marble; and then we scrambled up the main hill. There is a sort of track through chestnut and myrtle and arbutus with scarlet fruit against the sky. Girls were gathering chestnuts and arbutus berries—such a picture!

"So with an hour's scrambling we came out through a wood of stone pines to the top, a sort of marble platform. The scirocco had blown us up fine weather; the Carrara hills were clear, and the Apennines for miles; fantastic peaks, all sorts of gables, pyramids, cones, and domes. The sea was ridged and beating hard on the shore of the Maremma; the bay of Spezia in the distance, and little Lucca, tidy and square below, tucked into its four walls like a baby in a cot with a patchwork quilt. I stayed ten minutes to get a sketch, while the Professor and Baxter howked out a particularly contorted bit of marble, and then we plunged through the pines on the back of the ridge to get a view southward. This, you know, is the wood where Ugolino in Dante dreamed he was hunting when they had shut him up to starve in the Famine Tower at Pisa, and it deserves its fame. It is quite another world from the hot rich valleys below; among the trees there are fresh, English-looking meadows with daisies very big and very pink, and beyond—the wonderful Mediterranean coast, rose colour in the sunset. Pisa far down there showed every detail distinct, cathedral and leaning tower like toys; even at Leghorn we could see the ships in port. It was like looking on the world from the angels' point of view; a glimpse through the centuries.

"But the sun was half-way below the sea, and we turned and raced the darkness down to the valley, along a path some six inches wide, with a marble precipice below and a clay bank above. Then the moon rose; a regular conventional Italian moon, chequering the path like sunshine, lamping the cypresses and campaniles. Our driver was asleep; we stirred him out and drove through misty by-roads to the town gates. Out came the Customs officer. 'Have you anything to declare, gentlemen?' 'Nothing, sir!' 'Felice sera, signori!' 'A happy evening, sir!'

"The streets were very quiet though it was not late. By the Dominican convent, in the moonlight, there was a woman kissing the great crucifix; few other folk about; and we made the square ring again when we chased the moon into the plane-trees and rattled up to the hotel door."

One morning toward the end of October, soon before we left Lucca, I went to work on a last drawing of Ilaria (since honoured by Ruskin with a place in his Sheffield museum) and found the marble wet and fouled. Somebody had been taking a cast. After long days in the quiet cathedral, among so many haunting thoughts, studying the face, it had grown almost as alive to me as it always was to him. Even I felt a little shock. It was a liberty, somebody taking a cast! At breakfast entered a not very prepossessing fellow carrying a plaster mask. Signor Ruskin had asked at the shop; one was now made.

I never saw him more moved. In a storm of anger he left the room, crying out, "Send him away." Fortunately we had with us Henry R. Newman, the American artist, then working for Ruskin at Florence. He could do the talking to the disappointed, enraged Italian, and got rid of him—and a Napoleon of mine—after awhile. I was thankful to Newman for getting rid of the cast as well; and when the coast was clear Ruskin looked in, rather apologetic after his outburst. "I hope you didn't give the fellow anything," he said, and, of course, I was much too weak-minded to fight the case.

But I still think the object-lesson was well worth a Napoleon. That ghastly thing was not our Ilaria; any cast is a hard, dead caricature if once you have really known the living, ancient marble. And the wrath of Ruskin laid his secret bare. Do you think he could have stirred the world with mere flourishes from the pen? Falling in love was not too strong a word for the feeling that dictated, over Ilaria's marble portrait, his plea for sincerity in art: "If any of us, after staying for a time beside this tomb, could see, through his tears, one of the vain and unkind encumbrances of the grave, which, in these hollow and heartless days, feigned sorrow builds to foolish pride, he would, I believe, receive such a lesson of love as no coldness could refuse, no fatuity forget, and no insolence disobey."

To gather up the threads it may be worth while noting briefly the chief incidents in this Italian tour, with a few comments from Ruskin's unpublished diary, showing how rapidly pleasure and pain alternated in his moods.

On arrival, walking round the town, first to Ilaria and last to San Romano, he notes: "Found all. D. G." The next day he heard of the death of J. W. Bunney, who had done so much work for him at Venice, notably the large picture of St. Mark's now in the Sheffield museum. We often thought Ruskin did not feel these losses, and was a little hard when news came that old friends were gone. But under the apparent stoicism there was much real emotion; indeed, some of his later attacks of mental illness followed such events. I do not say they were the only causes, but they contributed. In April 1887, the sudden death of Laurence Hilliard, on board ship in the Ægean, undoubtedly turned the balance, and intensified weakness and worry into illness of many months' duration. In this case he wrote: "A heavy warning to me, were warning needed. But I fear death too constantly, and feel it too fatally, as it is." I think his fear of death was purely the dread of leaving his work undone, with some shrinking of the possible pain; his sense of death was in the growing limitation of his powers, which he could only forget in the presence of beautiful landscape. Thus next day, on the Lucca mountains, he "sat long watching the soft sunlighted classic hills, plumed and downy with wood, the burning russet of fallen chestnuts for foreground, thinking how lovely the world was in its light, when given."

At Florence on Oct. 4: "Hotel Gran Bretagna once more; good dinner and flask of Aleatico. Nothing hurt of Ponte Vecchio or the rest." Next morning the pendulum swung the other way, partly, I am afraid, because he could not get me to be ecstatic about the Duomo, and I almost argued him into a good word for Bronzino's "Judith." Then, again, a drive to Bellosguardo and a beautiful walk made it all right again, and a visit to Fiesole in sunshine redeemed the character of the neighbourhood. But the great event was his introduction to Mrs. and Miss Francesca Alexander, brought about through Mr. Newman, and followed by a friendship which had a great and happy influence on his later life. Miss Alexander's beautiful handwriting, and the pathos of her manuscript "Story of Ida," and her pen-drawings to the "Roadside Songs of Tuscany," which he then and there bought for "St. George" and the world, were a great discovery, to him as if he had found "the famous stone which turneth all to gold."

Returning to Lucca on the 11th he worked with zeal and power on his drawings of the Duomo, and wrote his diary with animation. Here is a vignette from it: "Sat. 14th. Wet afternoon; bought cheese and hunted for honey. Found the only view from ramparts in the evening. Tanneries and cotton-mills spoil the north-west side. Girls singing in a milly, cicadesque, incomprehensible manner. An old priest standing to hear them—thinking—I would give much to know what!"

During this October at Lucca he was visited by Mr. and Mrs. E. R. Robson; Mr. Robson was then preparing (or intended by the authorities to prepare) plans for a museum at Sheffield, which should hold the collection belonging to the St. George's Guild. Mr. Charles Fairfax Murray also came to see him; he, like Randal, Newman, Rooke, Alessandri and one or two others, was employed by Ruskin on drawings for this museum. From the 27th to the 29th he went alone to Florence, on a farewell visit to the Alexanders, returning to Lucca for a couple of days' work before going to Pisa, where he had asked Angelo Alessandri, the Venetian painter, and Giacomo Boni, the Venetian architect, to meet him. Signor Boni is now world-famous by his antiquarian work at Rome; one sees his name in the papers, expounding the Forum to our king in the King's English, with a strange legend of his Oxford pupilship to Ruskin.

He and Signor Alessandri, however, were not strictly pupils of Ruskin, who had met them during the winter of 1876-77 at Venice, and, so to say, adopted them. At this second meeting he liked them and their work more than ever. His character of them is given in the first of his lectures on returning next year to Oxford: "Clever ones, yes; but not cleverer than a great many of you; eminent only, among the young people of the present day whom I chance to know, in being extremely old-fashioned; and—don't be spiteful when I say so—but really they are, all the four of them—two lads and two lassies—quite provokingly good." The two lads were Boni and Alessandri, one of the lady artists was Miss Alexander. But it was a compliment to his audience to call them cleverer than Boni, whose great power already showed itself in his keen eye and square shoulders. Napoleon Bonaparte must have looked something like him, I thought, when he began to charm the fierce Republic; but there the comparison ends. Ruskin set him to measure Pisa cathedral all over, to see why it was so irregular; and for a little holiday one heavenly morning before breakfast, Boni took me up the Baptistery, outside, even to the skirts of the great St. John on the top of the dome—all Pisa beneath, and the Maremma in sheaves of mist as if angels were haymaking, and the sea and the mountains bathed in blue atmosphere around.

These days of busy work and evenings of bright talk were too soon ended, and on November 10 we took our first stage northward and homeward.

VII

RUSKIN'S MAPS

VII
RUSKIN'S MAPS

Reading the map is as great a pleasure to some people as reading a story-book. You will see them pore over the atlas for an hour together, going on dream-journeys. It is a cheap way of globe-trotting, and gets rid of the discomforts; only one must have imagination to turn the wriggling hair-lines into vistas of river scenery, and the woolly-bear shading into forested crests and peaks against the sunset. It needs a good deal of imagination to get over the ugliness of most modern maps; but why should maps be ugly?

That is a question which Ruskin often asked, and he gave a great deal of trouble and time to the subject: not enough to carry out such a reformation as his energetic preaching and teaching did effect in some other things, but perhaps we have not quite come to the end of the story yet.

Anyway, the map-readers, and all who have known the bliss of owning a Bible with a "Palestine" for solace during sermon-time in childhood, or have realised the privileges of even Bradshaw's ugly chart on a long journey—all these will not think it strange to be told that Ruskin was a map-lover too, and that he was nearly as fond of plans as of pictures. Indeed, the old complaint against his art criticism was that he wanted pictures to be maps, decoratively coloured diagrams of nature, in which you could find your way about, know the points of the compass, latitude, altitude, geology, botany, fauna, flora, and the universal gazetteer.

He says in the Notes on his Turner Exhibition that he began to learn drawing by copying maps, and only came to pictures later. It is a biographical fact that his first use of a paint-box was to tint seas blue—not skies; and to ornament his outline with a good full red and green and yellow. Here is his first map of Italy, facsimiled from the coloured original. You see how he tried to be neat, and how he knew, without having to amend his lettering, to put one D and two R's in "MEDITERRANEAN." About Germany he was always antagonistic or inattentive; here, you see, he thinks it is in Austria! It is hardly possible that he was really copying when he made that characteristic blunder.

Why do we refer to these childishnesses? Because he—the art critic and art teacher—began his art career not by sketching people or cottages or flowers, but by copying maps; and because he ended his career in bidding his hearers do likewise. Of course the value of advice entirely depends upon what you mean to do with it. If you want to make colourable imitations of fashionable pictures, don't take Ruskin's word for anything. If you want to be a scholar in the school of the Old Masters, then you might do worse than listen to him. They "leant on a firm and determined outline"—that is Sir Joshua Reynolds; they started with painstaking draughtmanship, and added colour tint by tint; and so he says, "I place map-making first among the elementary exercises," and so forth, and made his young pupils begin with simple facsimile—"If you can draw Italy you know something about form"—and then paint the globe with its conflicting shade and local colour. Afterwards, in setting one at Turner, he would say, "I want you to make a map of the subject. Get the masses outlined, and fill in the spaces with the main colours; and that will do."

The next photograph is from a coloured drawing of the same size; the pale spaces are pink and yellow and green, and the Lake of Geneva, which looks rather blotchy in the print, is more pleasant in ultramarine. This is one of a set of geological maps made to illustrate the course of the usual tour through France and the Alps, perhaps, to judge by the handwriting, for the journey of 1835, when he made special preparations to study geology. He could hardly carry a bulky sheet or atlas, and so extracted just what he required, in a series of neat little pages, put together into a home-made case, ready for use at any moment. Youngsters who take this kind of trouble are likely to become men of weight; at least, they get to know how interesting the world is. Ruskin on a journey was never bored, unless he was ill; he looked out of window and poked you up: "Now, put away that book; we are just coming to the chalk"; or, "Are you looking out for the great twist in the limestone?" And the changes in the face of the country, with new flowers and varying crops, were a continual entertainment.

Another use of maps to Ruskin was in writing the descriptive eloquence for which most readers chiefly admire him. I remember a very good judge of pictures and books once choosing the best passage of Ruskin—not that such "bests" come to much—and fixing on the bird's-eye-view passage in which he takes you with the stork and the swallow on their northward flight over the varying scenery of Europe ("Stones of Venice," II., vi., § 8; "Selections," I., § 20). Now this has all the imaginative charm of Hans Christian Andersen's "Snow Queen," or George Macdonald's "At the Back of the North Wind"; but it is nothing more nor less than notes on the map of Europe—of course, by a map-lover.

To help in such work he collected maps wherever he went. He kept them in a special set of drawers in his study, some mounted on spent diagram-cards from his lectures, and some dropping to pieces with wear and tear. Among these are still his first map of the Lakes, from Jonathan Otley's or Wordsworth's Guide, and his old Keller's "Switzerland" of 1844, which he used forty years later, saying that he did not want the railways, and no new map showed the roads better. Of favourite towns, such as Venice and Amiens, there are large scale plans, the best that could be bought; and of some Swiss districts, like Neuchâtel, there is quite a library of cartology. A highly detailed map of Médoc, from a wine advertisement, was found useful; likewise Britain with the centres of Trinity College, London, which he kept for its clearness. Philip's "Authentic Map of England" is endorsed "good common use," and he even kept close at hand a set of children's dissecting maps. The Ordnance Survey is fully represented, but because too much was put into these beautiful six-inch sheets, he has coloured them fancifully and vigorously, to get clear divisions of important parts. Clearness and distinctness, every one must feel, are not the strong points of modern cartography, hence the use of sketch-maps: such as this of Spain, scribbled on a sheet of foolscap to keep him in mind of the graceful, swinging coastline and the proportions of the provinces.

The overloaded modern map is a work of reference—it is a dictionary, not a book. Ruskin felt that it was useless for educational or literary purposes, and he was continually trying to improve away the detail and to substitute graphic statistics. One line of this attempt was in the direction of models. Beck's raised map of Switzerland (1853) was often in use, but it was spoilt for him by the shining surface, which catches high lights and distracts the eye: all models ought to be painted in dead colours, except the water, which needs the shine for the sake of transparency.

So, in 1881, when he was working at the physical geology of the Coniston neighbourhood, he tried to make a model of the hills and dales, to see how the strike and dip of strata and the faults and dykes in the rock came out in relation to ups and downs, lake-basins and crags, and so forth. He found modelling too tedious to carry out himself, and, with characteristic oddness in his employment of means to ends, he set his gardener, the late Dawson Herdson, on the job. Herdson made a very fair general sketch in clay of the Old Man, and the main features as seen from the Coniston side; but he had not pegged out his distances, and when Dow Crag was built up into emphatic gloom, and Leverswater hollowed into depth, the smaller heights had no space left for them, and the effect was altogether too willow-patterned. Then Ruskin put another of his employés to work, and after much labour the model now in the Coniston Museum was evolved.

This was intended to be photographed or engraved in a side-light, as one of a series of physical maps. Another was to have been Savoy, for which Ruskin made the sketch here shown. The black Lake of Geneva is dark blue in his drawing; the valleys are green, and the mountains roughly knocked in with lamp-black and Chinese white, tinted over with yellow for limestone, pink for Mont Blanc protogine, and red for gneiss. Rough as the sketch is, you see the structure of the Alps, the lie of the land, at a glance. Towns, roads, and all the rest should be shown, he said, on separate plans.

Towards this purpose he collected bird's-eye views in great variety, from Maclure and Macdonald's lithograph of the Soudan, to quaint old panoramas, of which one—the mountains seen from the Buet—is quite like a William Blake design of Heaven and Hell, and fit to serve as a background to all the mythologies. Also, for their pleasant picturesqueness, he liked the queer productions of ancient cartographers, such as Edmund Squib's funny map of China (1655), and a seventeenth-century production called "The New Map of Muscovy," and "The Course of the Great River Wolga," by A. Olearius; with pictures of Russian peasants along the banks, and the camels of "the Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet." Such maps have the charm of graphic expression; they don't pretend to be gazetteers, but they take you about the country with the entertainment of a traveller's tale.

They are decorative also; that was another appeal to Ruskin. William Morris has shown in the illustrations to the Saga Library how maps can become picturesque designs, and this was much on the lines that Ruskin would have followed. He might not have inserted dragons of the deep, nor, as in Drayton's "Polyolbion," nymphs and shepherds on the hills and lakes, out of all proportion and possibility; but he thought a map could be far more explanatory and ornamental than the usual school atlas.

His attempt at a diagrammatic history of France, sketched on a page of note-paper, was engraved for "Our Fathers have Told Us"—his projected school history of the "Nice Things that have Happened." You see—and for lack of space I must leave it for your further insight—how he designed to show the roses of Provence and the lilies of France in this garden of Gaul, at one time feebly struggling, then blowing fully and freely spreading, then broken in upon by the wild beast of war; the lily bed trampled and ruined; Aquitaine wasted to blankness, and so forth. Worked out completely, an atlas of history on this plan might be as pretty as any picture-book. A child accustomed to such maps would have little trouble in remembering the outlines of national growth, and the whole tedious business of dates and uncouth names would be infinitely lightened. Perhaps, some day, Ruskin's hint will be taken, and his suggestions will bear fruit.

He never cared for worship and admiration, when they did not mean the understanding of his aims, and the carrying out of his work. He knew his gift was to irrigate, as he said—to suggest and stimulate. People called him an egoist; but how wise in its humility was the close of his preface to "Loves Meinie!"—"It has been throughout my trust, that if Death should write on these, 'What this man began to build, he was not able to finish,' God may also write on them, not in anger but in aid, 'A stronger than he cometh.'" And for much that he has left to do, no greater strength is needed, but only the glory of going on.

VIII

RUSKIN'S DRAWINGS

VIII
RUSKIN'S DRAWINGS

In his introduction to the Catalogue of a Ruskin Exhibition at Boston, U.S.A., in 1879, Professor Charles Eliot Norton wrote a paragraph which, as the verdict of a severely discriminating—though friendly—critic, is worth reading more than once again. He said: "The character of this collection is unique. These drawings are not the work of an artist by profession; there is not a 'picture' among them. They are the studies of one who, by patience and industry, by single-minded devotion to each special task, and by concentrated attention upon it, has trained an eye of exceptional keenness and penetration, and a hand of equally exceptional delicacy and firmness of touch, to be the responsive instruments of faculties of observation and perception such as have seldom been bestowed on artist or on poet. Few of these drawings were undertaken as an end in themselves, but most of them as means by which to acquire exact knowledge of the facts of nature, or to obtain the data from which to deduce a principle in art, or to preserve a record of the work of periods in which art gave better expression to the higher interests and motives of life than at the present day. These studies may consequently afford lessons to the proficients in art not less than to the fresh beginners. The beauty of some of them will be obvious to an untrained eye; but no one may hope to appreciate them at their worth who will not, in a respectful and modest spirit, give time and patience to their study."

In his childhood, long before he thought of drawing from Nature, he had learnt great neatness of hand by amusing himself with copying out his juvenile verses to look like print, by drawing maps and by making facsimiles of George Cruikshank's etchings in his "Grimm's Goblins." His father used to sketch a little in the pre-historic style, and was fond of pictures; but they never dreamed of making John an artist. At last, when he was thirteen, and his adopted sister, Mary, was taking drawing lessons at school with much satisfaction to the family, he, too, was allowed to "learn drawing." Mr. Runciman, his master, gave him "copies"—the old, bold pencil copies—which he tried to imitate in a kind of stipple, at first, but soon picked up the manner, and in a year, as we find from old letters, was talking like a book about perspective and composition, and going to begin painting "on grey paper, with a few of the simplest colours, in order to learn the effects of light and shade." Mr. Runciman must have been a good teacher, for this method of his, on grey paper with a few simple colours, to get light and shade, is exactly what John Ruskin learnt thoroughly after awhile, and taught energetically in his turn all his life. But Mr. Runciman could not bring him to paint in oil, and does not seem to have had much of a system; for one of John Ruskin's letters in verse to his father, written early in 1834, says:

In his later years he used to say that the practical reason why he never went on with oil painting was that he had to draw—and to keep his drawings—among books and papers, and oils were messy, and did not smell nice. But no doubt the real fact was that his drawings were mainly meant for book-illustration, done for the engraver, and intended, on a small scale, to get as much form as possible. All his experiments in oil seem to have been suppressed; though his water-colour practice, especially in later times, was to use Chinese white, and often a good deal of it, very nearly as if it had been flake white.

After some feeble attempts by himself at sketching from Nature, in 1831 and 1832, he went abroad with his parents for the summer of 1833, and drew diligently. He had received for a birthday present the volume of Rogers's "Italy," with Turner's vignettes, and intended to make something like it, in a book of verses neatly copied out, with vignettes reproduced in fine pen-work from his sketches on the spot. Whenever the carriage stopped he would snatch a sketch, and whenever they put up for the night he would write up his poetical diary. Coming home, he began his great work, but school lessons interfered; not before he had half filled the blank book, and pasted in a number of neat and pretty vignettes, of which the best is The Jungfrau from Lauterbrunnen, reproduced in "The Poems of John Ruskin," on the same scale.

Meanwhile, he had come under the influence of Samuel Prout, whose work his father admired; and on the next tour, in 1835, Turner was forgotten in the attempt to be Prout. The drawings of this "great year," as he called it, when they are put in order, show a wonderful progress from the first stiff and timid studies, fresh from the attempt to copy Prout's lithographs, to a free and quite masterly adaptation of Prout's "line and dot" manner. By the time he reached the Oberland and Venice, he had "got his hand in," and the subject went down upon the paper with ease and decision, always abstracted and mannered, but with a feeling after style which was entirely Ruskin. Both in drawing and in writing, much as he talked of truth and simplicity, he was, first and foremost, the stylist: and through half his life the conscious imitator of other men's styles—Hooker or Carlyle, Prout or Turner. But there was always more of Ruskin than of his model; and even in those juvenile essays, when style so completely overwhelms fact, as in some sketches at Venice or Innsbruck, there is a precocious completeness and charm, as in the art of youthful nations, early Greeks, pre-Norman English, or pre-Renaissance Italians.

The pen-drawings of this year have less interest, for they were made from the originals to illustrate another intended manuscript, and the life, of course, went out of them. Some of these pen-drawings, as well as some of the original and superior pencil-drawings, are published in facsimile in the "Poems" and "Poetry of Architecture" (large editions of 1891 and 1893). Other facsimiles are given in "Studies in Both Arts" and "Verona." The plates in these volumes very fairly represent Ruskin's handiwork at different periods, and are indispensable to any one who wishes to study it. Plates in "Modern Painters" and "Stones of Venice," nearly all by engravers after his work, do not represent it in the same authentic manner.

Before he had completed his new book he wanted more skill in colour, and took lessons from Copley Fielding, with no great result, except that the style which he had gained by practice abroad was lost in trying after new models. The sketches of his period as an Oxford undergraduate are comparatively tame and commonplace (1836-1839), though he did some neat bits for Mr. Loudon's wood engraver to spoil in the papers on "The Poetry of Architecture," in the Architectural Magazine, which were his first published writings on art.

In 1840 he broke down in health, after winning the Newdigate prize for poetry at Oxford, and before taking his degree. His parents went with him in the autumn to spend the winter abroad, as a cure for consumption. He did the best for himself, according to new lights on the subject of hygiene, by spending nearly all his time sketching in the open air. Through France to the Loire and Auvergne, round the Riviera to Pisa and Florence and Rome, we can trace him by his drawings, made now on a new method. David Roberts had been showing his Syrian sketches, hard pencil on grey paper, with yellow lights in body colour, and the new style caught young Ruskin's attention before he started for his journey, so that he set out with the resolve of being Roberts now. The same decision of line shows itself on this much larger scale; he always seems to know what he wants, and to get it without trouble; though when one remembers that these half-imperial drawings were done by an ailing lad, supposed to be within danger of death, it is not a little remarkable to see in them such evidences of tenacity and pluck.

At the beginning of 1841 they moved on to Naples, and made excursions to Salerno, Amalfi and the neighbourhood, always with a drawing to bring back; and when he was on his way home, through North Italy, he wrote triumphantly to a friend that he had "got forty-seven large and thirty-four small sketches."

But what he could do with the stimulus of travel he could not do again in the reaction after it was over. He was not quite well yet, and went to Leamington to be under a doctor, in dull lodgings, and without any mountains. Still he drew. By this time he had dropped David Roberts, and taken up Turner, whose art he had already thought of defending against the magazine critics. It was in these circumstances that he made the Amboise, from a sketch of the year before, and certain vignettes for engraving, which were published in "Friendship's Offering," with his poems. In the new Library edition, vol. ii., photographs from the original Amboise, and from the old engraving after it, are given, well worth comparing.

He was not naturally a colourist. In later life he found out for himself the ways and means of producing bits of very sweet opalescent colour, but at any time was capable of relapsing into gaudiness, in hours of fatigue or ill-health; and throughout his earlier life he was much more at home in light and shade, or in work with the point. It was not that he did not see and enjoy colour. To judge by his writings, one would think that he lived for it, almost: and the splendid passage in the first volume of "Modern Painters," so often quoted for its word-painting of colour, was written from his diary-notes on the way back from Naples in 1841. He made a drawing of the scene he described; one would expect at least an attempt at "purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle"; but it is merely washed with faint tints over an elaborate outline of the architecture.

So the passing mood in sickness, which had led him to try after Turnerian colour, left him in health, for the more attainable method of Turner's "Liber Studiorum," and he began, in 1842, to make this his own. A slight pencil blocking out, firm and emphatic quill-pen to represent the etched line, and brushwork in brown, rarely in black, sometimes with a little colour, over paper usually grey—this was after all the manner that suited him best, and very nearly what Mr. Runciman had talked about, ten years before. By degrees, year after year, the pen work became finer, and the colour more predominant; the solid white, used at first for high lights, invaded the tints and gave a mystery to the outline, and in ten years more he had found out his central style, a manner quite his own, producing beautiful results but inimitable by engraving, whether the old style of steel-plate or the new style of photographic process. That style in turn developed into the delicate and often dainty water-colour painting of his later years—passing by the way through a phase in which the pencil took the place of the pen, useful for getting notes of architectural detail and mountain form—and never quite abandoned, though the pencil drawings of the later period became a distinct series, free and emphatic and suggestive, apart from the more laborious elaboration of his last paintings.

In 1845 he went alone, unaccompanied by parents and family, to Italy, and found adventures. He made the acquaintance of the primitive masters at Lucca and Florence, and copied a little; then to the Alps to look for Turner's subjects in the Alpine sketches of 1842, which had so taken his heart. Turner did not like it; it was dangerous to have a writing young man looking behind the scenes of imaginative picture production; but Ruskin found out Turner, and was all the more enthusiastic for the discovery. He drew the Pass of Faido, and saw what Turner had seen, and what he had invented, more wonderful than any transcript from Nature; and afterwards filled half a volume with the endeavour to expound the same. Then, with his versatility of sympathy, he met J. D. Harding, who was not so much his teacher as a valued friend, and together they went to Venice. One sketch-book leaf of this time is particularly interesting—with a pen and tint drawing of a mill at Baveno on one side, and a slapdash sunset on the other, almost Harding. These are photogravured in the "Poems."

The drawings of 1846 were the first serious mountain studies, afterwards used for "Modern Painters," though many things intervened. Sickness at first, and the visit to Crossmount in the Highlands, recorded in some drawings, not his best; and then "Seven Lamps of Architecture," for which he studied in Normandy in 1848, and etched the plates himself in soft ground—strong, sketchy plates which were thought a failure at the time, and re-engraved in a queer imitation of the originals by a professional engraver for the next edition. Then he set to work upon "Stones of Venice."

He had already some material, but most of the drawings were made in two winters, November 1849 to March 1850, and September 1851 to June 1852. Many of the best have been dispersed, some are in America, but enough remain to show what a busy time it was, and how much downright drawing went to the making of that book: how much more drawing, and of how much finer quality than one can guess at from reading the book. The large plates in "Examples of the Architecture of Venice" were not only from his sketches, but from carefully prepared working drawings. For a mezzotint, like the St. Mark's Portico or the Arch of Ca' Contarini Porta di Ferro, he drew the outline separately for etching, and made another drawing with the tint for the completed engraving. To do a subject over again seemed no grievance with him, and there are many examples of his patience in trying the identical view in different aspects or lights, or even redrawing it from Nature without alteration, merely to get a result more to his mind. That the result was worth while in the end we need not stop to declare. "Stones of Venice" was a revelation to architects and the public, and for a long while exerted an enormous influence upon English taste. Suppose, for a moment, such a book had been written, with all the enthusiasm and learning in the world, by a man who could not draw!

The later volumes of "Modern Painters," which followed this, owed their success in great measure to the same cause. The engravings, beautiful as they are, hardly show the originals; though from the book one knows that its author had dwelt upon the aspects of Nature with more than a tourist's glance, and that he had struggled with the problems of art with more than an amateur's attention. His Aiguilles and Matterhorns, his Aspen and his mossy stones, his repeated studies from Turner and the Old Masters, down to the enlargements from illuminated missals, all tell the same tale of passionate interest in the subject and penetrative insight into the situation. They are not, as Professor Norton says, pictures; but incomplete as they are, there is in them an appeal to which most of those who love pictures will respond.

During the progress of "Modern Painters," Mr. Ruskin planned a "History of Swiss Towns," for which he spent several summers in gathering material. His drawings for this series were more full of detail, handled with extremest fineness in some parts and with great breadth, often carelessness, in others; intended for completion and engraving when time should serve. But this time never came. He was led into the interests in political and social economy which, in these later years, with a public tired of hearing about Ruskin and art, have given him a place among the prophets. He was led into further studies of the geology of scenery, lightly touched in "Modern Painters," and, during long residence in Savoy and Switzerland, drew Alps chiefly for their cleavages, and threw the drawings aside. He was led into botanical and mineral researches, and Egyptology and Greek coins, and other by-ways, always, however, drawing as he went, but drawing subjects less interesting to the general onlooker. But from this backwater he emerged into a new and more developed style which began to show results in 1866, on a long summer tour in the Oberland, when he made the sketch On the Reuss below Lucerne, in "Poetry of Architecture"—a combination of such breadth and delicacy as he had hardly attained before, and much fine work with the point.

Next year but one, 1868, his ancient love for French Gothic took him to Abbeville. There the new style had full scope in the delicate drawings of that date, a long way in advance of old "Seven Lamps" period: and the same kind of work was continued in the next year at Verona (May to September), a summer of very busy painting in the company of his two assistants, Mr. William Ward and the late Mr. J. W. Bunney.

The Abbeville drawings were shown in a semi-public manner at a little exhibition to illustrate his lecture on the "Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme," at the Royal Institution, January 29, 1869; and the Verona drawings at a similar lecture at the same place on February 4, 1870. The catalogue of the latter is printed in "On the Old Road," vol. i., part 2, with twenty pieces marked as his own.

In this year he entered on his duties as Slade Professor at Oxford, and before long had established a drawing-school there, which took up a great part of his attention. Of this period is a sketch "Done with my pupils afield," and he used sometimes to draw in the school, and often to draw for the school. A Candle, finely shaded, and various botanical studies, were meant as "copies" or as examples of the treatment he proposed to his students; and the catalogue of the Ruskin Drawing School at Oxford contains a very large number of items by himself, from the great St. Catherine, after Luini, to little memoranda of plant forms. Several of these examples of his hand have been engraved in Mr. E. T. Cook's "Studies in Ruskin."

In 1870 and 1872 he was again drawing at Venice. The elaborate beginning of the "Riva de' Schiavoni," and the effective Rialto (in the possession of Miss Hilliard, Coniston), done one morning before breakfast, are of the former year. In 1874, after a breakdown in health, he visited Assisi, Rome, and Sicily, and beside the notes of Mount Etna and Scylla he brought home a series of careful copies from parts of the Botticelli frescoes at the Sistine Chapel, and the fully realised, though not completed, Glacier des Bossons, a remarkable piece of landscape work. In 1876 he went again to Venice, this time chiefly to copy Carpaccio, though some of his best later views of canals and palaces bear that date, or the early part of 1877, for he stayed on until May of that year. Casa Foscari (in the possession of Mrs. Cunliffe, Ambleside) may be named as a characteristic example of his daring point of view, and success in giving the mass of building in steep perspective.

In 1878 an exhibition of his drawings by Turner was held at the Fine Art Society's Galleries in New Bond Street. During the show he was taken seriously ill, and while convalescent he amused himself by arranging a small collection of his own sketches to add to the exhibition. His catalogue and remarks are given in the later editions of "Notes on his Drawings by Turner," &c., 1878. Next year a number of his studies were shown in Boston, U.S.A., under the management of Professor Charles Eliot Norton, whose appreciative paragraph we have quoted.

It seemed as though his working life had come to an end at the time, with that crisis of illness. A visit to Amiens in 1880, with Mr. Arthur Severn and Mr. Brabazon, gave him the subject for writing the "Bible of Amiens," but his sketches were less vigorous and full. But in 1882 he was ordered away again for rest; and, as forty years before, he took his rest—the best rest for a tired brain—in sketching. He gradually warmed to work; at Avallon, in Central France, he began with a few sketches of detail, but in Italy the ancient love of architecture took hold of him, and he drew the Porch at Lucca assiduously. His two chief drawings of this subject were shown in the next exhibition of the R.W.S., and one of them at the R.A. in 1901. He exhibited on many occasions at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, having been elected an honorary member in 1873. He said at the time to a visitor—"Nothing ever pleased me more. I have always been abusing the artists, and now they have complimented me. They always said I couldn't draw, and it's very nice to think they give me credit for knowing something about art."

Later than this there is little to chronicle. Ill-health came down upon him, and his last drawings were done to amuse his friend of "Hortus Inclusus" in 1886, though he made a few pencil notes of Langdale Pikes and Calder Abbey in 1889.

After his death an exhibition of his sketches, with some personal relics and added examples of the art about which he had written, was held at Coniston in the summer of 1900. It attracted over 10,000 visitors to the village, and to many was a revelation of Ruskin in a new character, and of a kind of art which charmed in spite of all they had been accustomed to look for in pictures.

In January and February 1901, a similar exhibition was held at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, London. Many of the drawings then shown, with a large series of engravings after his work, are on view in the Ruskin Museum at the Institute, Coniston; where, in 1903, the Fourth Annual Exhibition contained a further instalment of Ruskin sketches not previously shown in public, giving examples of his great variety in subject and treatment, ranging from an early outline of Dover (1831), to sketches at Avallon and Cîteaux (1882; see above, pages 48-51); from geological studies of Alps to notes of lions and tigers at the Zoo, and the head of the Venus de' Medici, elaborately shaded; and from the carefully finished and daintily detailed pen and tint Valley of Lauterbrunnen, in which the lens is needed to make out tiny châlets, smaller than a letter of this type, to large splashes of water-colour, one of which (on a sheet 42 by 23 inches in size) is identical in subject with the view by Laurence Hilliard given at page 33 of this volume.

One pair of sketches among these has a curious biographical interest. When Turner's Sun of Venice Going out to Sea was exhibited at the Academy (1843), Ruskin was greatly impressed with its wonderful colour and truth, but especially with the reflections and eddies of the calm water, on which he wrote a well-known page in "Modern Painters" (vol. i. p. 357). Accustomed to write from notes with pen and pencil, he forgot, or ignored, the rule forbidding visitors at the Exhibition to copy the pictures. These are the sketches he made, and for making them was expelled from the Exhibition.