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III

RUSKIN'S GARDENING

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III
RUSKIN'S GARDENING

There are two quite different sorts of garden lovers—those who raise flowers, and those who look for the landscape effect. I shall be scolded for saying so, but the first often make their gardens into museums; very interesting, no doubt, but not so pleasant to live with as the half-wild bit of ground—lawn, trees and shrubbery, without a pane of glass in evidence—where there are just enough flowers, hardy perennials perhaps, to give a touch of colour in their season, but in the main a sense of green repose. I think the garden which the Lord planted eastward in Eden was like that; a pleasance, where He could walk in the cool of the evening with Adam, and Adam had no need to run away, every minute, to look for slugs.

Ruskin, though he wrote about botany, and tried to be his own Linnæus, and though he loved well enough to see flowers (especially wild ones) on his table and outside his window, yet in his practical gardening was quite the landscapist. He liked making paths and contriving pretty nooks, building steps and bridges, laying out beds, woodcutting and so forth; but I never remember him potting and grafting and layering and budding; and as to the rarity of any plants in his garden, I believe he took far more pleasure in the wood-anemone—Silvia, he called it—than in anything buyable from the nurseryman's catalogue.

The Brantwood gardens as they now are, enlarged and tended by a mistress who loves and understands flowers, and glorified by their charming position on the shore of a mountain lake, are as near the perfect blend of detailed interest and picturesque beauty as anything can be in this northern climate. But they are not Ruskin's gardens. When the first glass-house went up, he used to apologise for it to his visitors; it was to please Mrs. Severn; it was to grow a few grapes for his friends; he did not believe in hot-houses: and he would take you up the steps he had contrived at the back of the house and point out the tiny wild growths in their crannies, as he led the way to his own private plot.

Sir Edwin Arnold, in a pleasant essay on Japanese rock-gardens, quoting Ruskin on the beauty of stones, wonders whether he would not have sympathised in these quaint tastes of the Far East. Ruskin had little to say in praise of Japanese art as he knew it, because they could not draw pretty figures, and he had no admiration for dwarfs or monsters; but one cannot help thinking that if he had seen Japan, and if it is all that travellers tell us, he might have written some enthusiastic passages on a people who love stones for their own sake and tub themselves daily. To him, his rock gardens were a joy for ever; and in his working years he set an example of Lake-district landscape-gardening which still, for all I know, remains unfollowed, and is worth a few paragraphs of record. You can see little of it now. During that last decade, when he wandered about his small domain like the ghost of his former self, no one could carry on his work. The paths he made and tended gradually became overgrown, the rocky watercourses were choked with stones, his private plot filled with weeds, for he could no longer dig in it; and now you can only trace what it has been in the little solitude left sacred to memory.

It was in the heart of the wood, approached by the steps and winding path—not gravelled, but true woodland track. About as large as a cottager's kitchen-garden, it was fenced on two sides with a wooden paling, and an old stone wall, mossy and ivied, kept off the trees and their undergrowth on the higher side, up the hill. The trees, when he came, were the coppice of the country, oak and hazel, periodically cut down to the stubs, and used for turning bobbins and burning charcoal. This clearance is always a sad thing for the moment, when the leafy thicket is rased away, leaving bare earth and hacked stumps and the toppings strewn about to rot into soil; but next spring there are sure to be galaxies of primroses, if not daffodils and bluebells to follow, and foxgloves as the summer goes on; and so the kindness of nature heals the wound. Next year there are shoots from the stubs, a miniature forest which might even attract a Japanese; and as the saplings grow the flowers thin out, until in two or three seasons the children wonder why there are no primroses in the primrose-wood, and cannot believe they are gone to sleep for ten years. In the plantations of larch and timber trees the great bracken takes the place of this aftergrowth of flowerets, shooting up six or eight feet high where a clearing gives it a chance, and then again dwindles as the trees regain their strength, until under a well-grown larchwood there is nothing but a soft, deep, tressy grass, not rank and full tinted like the sward of the meadows, but grey-green and delicate and dry, though so thick and rich that there is no easier couch for a woodland dreamer.

When Ruskin came to Brantwood he would have his coppice cut no more. He let it grow, only taking off the weaker shoots and dead wood. It spindled up to great tall stems, slender and sinuous, promising no timber, and past the age for all commercial use or time-honoured wont. Neighbours shook their heads, but they did not know the pictures of Botticelli, and Ruskin had made his coppice into an early Italian altar-piece. Among those slender-pillared aisles you would not be surprised to see goddesses appear out of the green depths; and looking westward, the sun-dazzle of the lake and the dark blue of the mountains gazed in between the leaves. It was what the old Venetians had seen in landward holidays and tried to remember for their backgrounds. That in itself was one form of Ruskin's gardening. To keep his forest at this delightful point of mystery, his billhook and gloves were always lying on the hall table, and after the morning's writing he would go up to the Brant (steep) Wood and chop for half an hour before luncheon. It was not the heroic axe-work of Mr. Gladstone, but such pruning as a Garden of Eden required to dress it and to keep it.

Then in that private plot he had his espalier of apples and a little gooseberry patch and a few standard fruit-trees and some strawberries, mixed with flowers. In one corner there were beehives in the old-fashioned penthouse, trailed over with creepers. The fourth side was unfenced, but parted from the wood by a deep and steep watercourse, a succession of cascades (unless the weather were dry, which is not often the case at Coniston) over hard slate rock. He used sometimes humorously to complain of the trouble it cost him to keep the beck clear of stones, and he could deduce you many a lesson in geology on the way his rivulet filled, rather than deepened, its bed.

It was crossed by a rough wooden bridge. I remember at the building of this bridge he was considerably annoyed because the workman, thinking to please him with unusually rude lines, had made the planks so flimsy that it was hardly safe. He insisted on solidity and security, though his stone steps were so irregular as to contradict all the rules which bid you make stairs in a flight equal, for fear of tripping your passenger.

Over the bridge and within the wood there were frequent hummocks and bosses of rock pushing through the soil, and each with its special interest of fern or flower. Many a visitor must have recalled or repeated—

while Ruskin led the way, pointing out each trail of ivy (convolvulus not allowed for fear of strangling the stems) and nest of moss, as a gardener of the other species might point out his orchids. Then suddenly forth of the wood you came upon the tennis-lawn—another concession to youthful visitors, for he played no athletic games. But in the creation of this glade he took the keenest delight, believing, as he said, in diggings of all sorts. He was the engineer, and the work was done in great part by the young people who were to play tennis on the ground when it was levelled—a rather distant hope, but eventually fulfilled. The tall, thin saplings have run up higher and higher all round the green: on one side you look through their veil to the long expanse of lake; on the other, up the dark, wooded hill; and on a sunny afternoon it has a curious touch of poetry. There is no statue on a pedestal or fountain playing in a basin, but on the mossy bank, beneath the graceful lines of virginal forestry, Decamerons might have been told. It is an oasis in the North-country farmer's neighbourhood, this Lake district which the tripper thinks just "country" as God made it, quoting Cowper, and not dreaming of the "native's" view that the land is an unroofed mutton-factory, with every inch of it "proputty, proputty, proputty."

I do not mean to imply that Ruskin's gardening was wilfully anti-utilitarian. The charm of it was that it brought the natural advantages and local usages into a new light, with just the refinement of feeling which made a flight of steps into a rock-garden and a tennis-ground into a Purist painter's glade. Who but he would have planted his field with narcissus, scattered thinly among the grass, to surprise you with a reminiscence of Vevey? And in the old garden below, though he did not create it, you can trace his feeling in the terraced zigzag of paths, hedged with apple and the cotoneaster which flourishes at Coniston, and filled in with sloping patches of strawberry and gooseberry. The average proprietor would have levelled his walks and capped his dwarf walls with flat slabs. This irregularity and cottage-garden business would have offended those new-comers who buy a bit of nature at the Lakes and improve away all its beauties.

It was in the late 'seventies, when the first illness had forced him to spend most of his time at Brantwood, and in the early 'eighties, before final illness put an end to his activity, that Ruskin, having completed his woodland paths and gardens, and all the "diggings" at his harbour, went higher up the hill for new worlds to conquer. His bit of moor above the wood was opened out into a new sort of garden, quite as charming in its way as any other. It was a steep patch of hillside grandly overlooking the lake, with a foreground of foliage below and a background of mountains above; but as Nature left it—or rather as Nature made it after the original wild growth of oak and birch and holly had been cleared away by the charcoal-burners and sheep-farmers of past centuries. Strongly marked ridges of slate-rock cropped out slantwise, across and across the slope, their backs tufted over with heather and juniper, and their hollows holding water in sodden quagmires. Down the slope, from the bogs of the great moor behind, rising to a thousand feet above the sea in some places, there were two little streamlets which leapt the ridges and pooled in the hollows among ferns and mosses. All the green fields and farms of the dalesmen were once made out of such ground, and many of them at quite as great a height; indeed the actual elevation of this plot nowhere reaches five hundred feet. The problem was to take advantage of whatever useful features the site afforded without destroying its native charm. To drain and clear an intake and put it under grass, or to plant it outright, had been done before; but that was to do away with the moorland character altogether. Just as a portrait-painter studies to pose his sitter in such a light and in such an attitude as to bring out the most individual points and get the revelation of a personality, so Ruskin studied his moor, to develop its resources.

First, there were the streams; and his old theory of saving the water suggested impounding the trickle in a series of reservoirs; it might be useful in case of drought or fire. So we were marshalled with pick and spade every fair afternoon to the "Board of Works," as we called it; and the old game of the Hinksey diggings was played over again. For what reason I never clearly understood, juniper was condemned on the moor as convolvulus in the wood: and every savin-bush, as it is called in the district, was to be uprooted, while the heather was treasured, in spite of the farmers' rule to burn the heather off, now and then, for the sake of the grass which grows, for a while, in its place. Ruskin always regretted these heather fires, for they do not really make good grass-land, while they ruin the natural garden of ling and bell-heather.

When the basins were formed he found to his regret that no mere earthen bank would hold the water; and skilled labour had to be called in to build dams of stone and cement, less pretty than the concealed dyke he had intended. But there was some consolation in devising sluices and clever gates with long lever handles, artistically curved, to shut and open the slit. One would have thought, sometimes, to see his eagerness over these inventions, that he had missed his vocation; and he had indeed a keen admiration for the civil engineer, wherever the road and bridge, mine and harbour, did not come into open conflict with natural beauties which he thought just as essential to human life as the material advantages of business. And when his reservoirs were made, it was a favourite entertainment to send up somebody to turn the water on and produce a roaring cascade among the laurels opposite the front door.

Next, to illustrate his theory of reclaiming wastes, he set about his moorland garden. At the upper corner of this beck-course there was one ragged bit of ground against the fence wall. From the more rocky parts we were set to carry the soil to make terraces, which we walled up with the rough stones found in plenty under the surface. One wetter patch was planted with cranberries, and some apple- and cherry-trees were put in, where the soil was deep and drainage provided. No wall or wire parted this little space of tillage from the wilder moor and its rabbits, for the design was to enlarge the cultivated area and make the moor a paradise of terraces like the top of the purgatorial mount in Dante; and since this fragment of an experiment was completed, when strength no longer allowed him to stride up to this once favourite height, the whole has been left to Nature again. The apple-trees grew, but untended; they still blossom. The cherries have run wild and are left to the birds. The rough steps from the rock-platform to the orchard terrace are disjointed, and fern is creeping through the grass.

as it did in those old Brantwood days when we picked and shovelled together, first unearthing its miniature ravine; and as perhaps it may—for no one can foretell the fate of any sacred spot—when the pilgrim of the future tries to identify by its help alone the whereabouts of Ruskin's deserted garden.

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IV

RUSKIN'S OLD ROAD

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IV
RUSKIN'S OLD ROAD

In the Life of Ruskin three pages are given to his tour abroad in 1882, a journey of importance to him, because at a critical moment it gave him a new lease of life, and of unusual interest to his biographer, who accompanied him as secretary, which is to say "man-jack-of-all-trades." In such companionship much personality comes out; and the gossip of this period, at greater length than the proportions of a biography allowed, may help to fill in some of the details of his portrait.

Very much broken down in health, despairing of himself and his mission, he left London on Thursday, August 10, 1882. Calais Tower roused none of the old enthusiasm; he said rather bitterly, "I wonder how I came to write about it." But even in his depression the habit of work made him sketch once more the tracery of the Hôtel de Ville. He found out the trick of its geometrical pattern, and explained it, delighted. Then the old chef at the Hôtel Dessein was still in the flesh, and remembered former visits and sent up a capital dinner; so the first day on foreign soil augured hopefully.

On the Saturday he woke up to sunshine at Laon, and took me round the town, setting me to work on various points. He began a drawing of the cathedral front, which he finished on the Monday before leaving. It was always rather wonderful how he would make use of every moment, even when ill-health and the fatigue of travelling might seem a good reason for idling. At once on arriving anywhere he was ready to sketch, and up to the minute of departure he went on with his drawing unperturbed. In the afternoons he usually dropped the harder work of the morning, and went for a ramble out into the country; at Laon the hayfields and pear orchards south of the town gave him, it seemed, just as much pleasure as Chamouni.

Reims bored him; the cathedral he called confectioner's Gothic, and he could not get rid of the idea of champagne and all the vanities and vulgarities which hang on to the very word. There was an ugly prison, too, put up next the cathedral; and even St. Remi did not make amends. So he hastened on to Troyes, spending a few hours between trains at Châlons, where we "did" the town in the regular tourist fashion, finding, however, beautiful features of early Gothic at Nôtre Dame and the Madeleine.

At Troyes he spent the 17th, sketching hard at St. Urbain and the cathedral, and next morning reached Sens, a place loved of old for associations with parents and friends, and not less for its little gutter-brooks in the streets, which he pointed out with a sort of boyish glee. The afternoon walk in the valley of the Yonne and up the chalk hills brought much talk of the geology of flints and the especial charm of coteau scenery, which he said had never been cared for until Turner saw it and glorified this comparatively humble aspect of mountains in the "Rivers of France." He set me to draw the defaced statues on the porch of the cathedral, the "finest north of Alps" he declared; but we were getting on rather too fast, and he began to feel the reaction of fatigue. The weather was sultry, and on the 19th our journey to Avallon was followed by distant thunder-storms.

At Avallon he stayed till the end of the month. The place was new to him, but I think he was attracted to it by one of those obscure associations which so often ran in his mind—it must be interesting because it was named Avallon—Avalon he called it always, dominated by the idea of the island-valley of repose where King Arthur found the immortality of fairyland. The first morning's work at the early church of St. Ladre, and the first afternoon's walk down the valley of the Cousin, with brilliant ling in blossom among bold red granite rocks, fully justified his choice. The town, on its Durham-like hill, swept round by the deep river-course, and unspoilt by modernisms, and the wooded, flowery, rocky neighbourhood, full of all that is most charming in French scenery—there are Roman remains, too, but of these he took less note—and the curious details of the twelfth-century church all attracted him mightily. The only drawback was the weather, which broke down with the thunder and gave us cold east winds and dark haze, in which sketching was a penance. This told upon him at once; he even dined alone, wearied out of evenings, and still trying to fix his mind on the writing work he always took with him—in this instance the new edition of "Sesame and Lilies" and the "Bible of Amiens." He burned the candle at both ends; out early to draw elusive detail of battered sculptures, walking far in the afternoon, and writing hard at night, impatient of remonstrance even from those who were much better qualified to order him about than a secretary.

To meet him here came Mr. Frank Randal, who was employed on drawings for "St. George's Work," and making bright, sunny sketches in which the neatest of outline was reconciled with the freshest of colouring. Also came his friend, Mr. Maundrell, to whom I take this chance of offering an apology which makes me blush to record. Among Ruskin's drawings was one, much in his Proutesque style, of a chapel at Rue, near Abbeville. It had been passed as his, when Mrs. Severn went through the portfolios with him, noting the subjects on the back of the mounts; and—with some hesitation, I confess, and neglect of the good rule "When in doubt, don't"—it was shown at both Ruskin Exhibitions as a work by the master, and greatly admired. Too late for correction, it was found to be Mr. Maundrell's. Others have nearly caught Ruskin's style at times—"Bunney's, not mine," he has written on sketches by an assistant, for this very reason; but for all the more important drawings there is a good pedigree, and most of the smaller bits which have been shown or published have come from his sketch-books.

One good excursion from Avallon was to the church of Vézelay, the twelfth-century place elaborately restored by Viollet-le-Duc, and interesting for the meeting of Richard Cœur-de-Lion with the other leaders of the Crusade famous in "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." To Ruskin any restoration meant ruin; but as he went round the aisles, disdainful at first but gradually warming to the intelligence and skill of the great modern architect, he confessed that if restoration might be done at all it could not be better done. What pleased him much more was a hunt, on the way back, for the exact spot where the Avallon granite joined the limestone; he found the two rocks side by side in a hummock near the road, and was triumphant.

Montréal was another place of pilgrimage, and there the church with quaint wood-carvings and the picturesque village gave him a happy day. In his diary (on which see the next chapter) he scolded himself, after this excursion, for forgetting the good times; of a walk in the rain to the little oratory of St. Jean des Bons Hommes he said: "I ought to vignette it for a title to my books!" and of the Avallon neighbourhood he notes: "Altogether lovely, and like Dovedale and the Meuse and the glens of Fribourg in all that each has of best, and like Chamouni in granite cleavage, and like—itself, in sweet French looks and ways.... The miraculous fairy valley ... one of the sweetest ever made by heaven. The Cyclopean walls, of blocks seven and eight feet long, and three feet thick—the largest—all averaging two and a half (feet) cube, at a guess, laid with their smooth cleavages to the outside, fitted like mosaic—the chinks filled with smaller stones, altogether peculiar to this district of cleaving, and little twisting, granite." It was not only the scenery that he cared for, but the evidences of happy pastoral life, adapting Nature's gifts to human needs. But when, off the kindly granite and on the cold, grey limestone country, we passed a forlorn homestead, ruinous and dirty, he shrank back in the carriage, as if some one had thrown a stone at him.

On the last day of August he left Avallon, and with a short stay at Sémur reached his old quarters at the Hôtel de la Cloche, Dijon. He was already contemplating "Præterita," picking up the memories of early days, and planning a drive by the old road through Jura as his parents used to do it in the pre-railway period. He began by showing me where he bit his "Seven Lamps" plate in the wash-hand basin, and where Nurse Anne used to wake him of mornings. Meanwhile, for the book to be called "Our Fathers have told us," continuing "The Bible of Amiens," he would spend two days with the monks. Cîteaux, the home of the Cistercians, was the first day's trip, marred by the heat and dust, and by finding all vestiges of the monks replaced by an industrial school of the ugliest, which, nevertheless, he inspected with nicely restrained impatience. A moated grange on the wayside homeward caught his eye, and as he sketched it he tried to make me believe that this must at least be a bit of the monks' work, and the journey not in vain. But next day there were far more interesting experiences in a visit to St. Bernard's birthplace. He has described this fully in his lecture called "Mending the Sieve," in the volume of "Verona, &c.," and I need only recall the surprise of a bystander not wholly unsympathetic, when Ruskin knelt down on the spot of the great saint's nativity, and stayed long in prayer. He was little given to outward show of piety, and his talk, though enthusiastic, had been no preparation for this burst of intense feeling.

Later on the same day (Saturday, September 2) he left Dijon for the Jura drive. We passed Poligny, a usual resting-place in bygone journeys, by train, and stayed at Champagnole, where the old Hôtel de la Poste used to be one of his "homes." It had been splendid weather for the last few days, after a cold August in Central France; and the first Jura walk was across the hill to the gorge of the Ain. I had often been through the Jura, as a blind, benighted modern, but never before loitered from slab to slab of its fissured limestone summits, looking for the foreground loveliness of nestling flowers which contrast so delicately with the quaint, crannied rock; there is nothing which gives the same lyrical feeling except some of Nature's gardens in wild Icelandic lava-fields. How eager he was, and delighted with this open upland! You know there is only one place where he speaks of "liberty" as a good thing, and there it means the liberty of this Jura walk, enjoyed that afternoon.

By-and-by we came to a wood. He cast about a little for the way through the trees, then bade me notice that the flowers of spring were gone: "You ought to have seen the wood-anemones, and oxalis, and violets"; and then, picking his steps to find the exact spot by a twisted larch-tree, and gripping my arm to hold me back on the brink of the abyss, "That's where the hawk sailed off the crag, in one of my old books; do you remember?"

There were thunder clouds over the plain-country that evening, and we made no stop to sketch. On our drive next day up to the flat, high country of St. Laurent, with its pine forests and scattered cottages, and down into Morez, the weather worsened. Thence the road climbs by the side of the valley to the highest back of Jura at Les Rousses; the road, he says, "walked most of the way, was mere enchantment." At a halt I sketched, when a break in the clouds gave sunbeams darting into the valley beneath, and wisps of white wreathed the steep forests. You see where he got that beautiful cadence to a fine passage, after comparing the Jura upland with a Yorkshire moor, and contrasting the becks of our fells with the enchanted silence of open Jura. "The raincloud clasps her cliffs, and floats along her fields; it passes, and in an hour the rocks are dry, and only beads of dew left in the Alchemilla leaves—but of rivulet or brook, no vestige, yesterday or to-day or to-morrow. Through unseen fissures and filmy crannies the waters of cliff and plain have alike vanished; only far down in the depth of the main valley glides the strong river, unconscious of change."

Up at Les Rousses he pointed out the fort, then in building or newly built, with scorn—as if the Swiss on the one side or the French on the other could be kept in their bounds by stone walls, when real war comes; and then crossing the frontier there was the elation of getting into Switzerland. "Why do you like it better than France?" he asked. I was just trying to say why, that it is a free country and some more innocent gush, when the Swiss Customs officers ran up, and insisted on overhauling us, for they don't often see travellers as in the old days at Les Rousses. I was mightily crestfallen and he not a little delighted at this exemplification of "liberty"; but he did not make the incident a horrid example in "Præterita."

Here we diverged a little from the old road of his youth, by going east a few miles to St. Cergues instead of making for the Col de la Faucille at once. The clean inn delighted him; pine boards on the floor, scrubbed white, and no needless furniture. Here he said we should stay a week and rest; he had much to write—first ideas for "Præterita," you understand. But the next days were wet, and he sat in his bedroom writing diligently at first, while I caught some bright intervals for a sketch, though we never saw the line of the Alps quite clear.

In the lecture on "the Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century," one of his least convincing though most sincerely meant utterances, there are references to the strange weather of those days. All the way up from Morez he wanted me to come into the carriage and shut the window because of a treacherous east wind, and in my sketch you can see a certain smoky, not only thundery, look in the clouds. At St. Cergues this east wind haze was still more pronounced, the Lake of Geneva ruffled and white, with patches of shadow from small "sailor-boy" clouds, while the whole range opposite was not exactly shrouded but veiled in a persistent thickness of air. Above, the sky was bright, with blue and streaky cirrus, and between the showers the sun glittered on the trees. That fitful wind with the brownish-grey haze he called the plague-wind, and in all his lecture there is no very definite explanation of it, but much declamation against it as the ruin of landscape, and some vague hints of portent, almost as if he had been a prophet of old seeing the burden of modern Babylon in the darkened sun.

It is smoke. Any one who haunts our Lake district hills knows it well. On coronation night I saw it trailing from Barrow and Carnforth up the Lune valley as far as Tebay, always low and level, leaving the upper hills clear, perfectly continuous and distinct from the mist of water. This winter, from the top of Wetherlam on a brilliant frosty day, I saw it gradually invade the Lake district from the south-east; the horizontal, clean-cut, upper surface at about 2000 feet; the body of it dun and semi-transparent; its thick veil fouling the little cotton-woolly clouds that nestled in the coves of the Kirkstone group, quite separate from the smoke-pall; and by sunset it had reached to Dungeon Gill, leaving the Bow Fell valleys clear. Coming down by moonlight I found the dales in a dry, cold fog, and heard that there had been no sunshine at Coniston that afternoon. This is Ruskin's plague-cloud, and the real enemy of the weather not only in England but in the Alps. You will see it, according to the wind, on either side of Zurich most notably, and the distance this blight will travel is more than the casual reader might believe. A strong wind carries it away, but only to deposit it somewhere else, cutting off the sun's rays, and breeding rain and storm. This was not understood twenty years ago, but Ruskin's observations of the weather were perfectly accurate and his regrets at the changed aspect of Alpine landscape were only too justifiable.

On Thursday, September 7, he had tired of dull weather at St. Cergues, and written up his notes for "Præterita"; he proposed to climb the Dôle and get onward to Geneva. It is a very easy walk of about a couple of hours up the gently sloping backs of the Helvellyn-like Jura range; and from its top one should get a grand view of the lake and the Alps to Mont Blanc. He walked up as briskly as ever; there was a cold wind but sun overhead, though the mountains to the south and east were still in the "plague-cloud." There was no sketching to be done, and we followed the ridge down to the Col de la Faucille. If you look at his map of the Jura, facsimiled at page 109 of this volume, the Col is where the road suddenly turns round into zigzags after going straight south-west behind the Dôle; and you remember how he names the whole chapter from this one spot, as a chief landmark in his memories, for there he always used to get his first full view of the "Mount Beloved." Few travellers know it, he says; but it is far from unknown to all who have lived in la Suisse Romande. There, they take school-children up mountains. Far better than Helvellyn is known to the English school child, the "dear Dôle" is known to every youngster who has learnt to sing (to the tune of "Life let us cherish") the song of

We were not quite without our view. For a moment, too short for a sketch, Mont Blanc loomed through the dull haze, red in the sunset, brick red, not Alpine rose; and then all was grey. We found our carriage and drove down. I was waked in the darkness by Ruskin saying, "This is where Voltaire lived." "Oh, indeed!" said I.

Next morning, from his old front rooms at the Hôtel des Bergues, where he had already begun a sketch of the houses opposite, merely for love of them, we went out in the heat to see the Rhône. All the haze had gone, at least from the nearer view, and he seemed never tired of looking at the water from the footbridge and wherever it was visible. I wondered why he would not come on; but now I know. "Fifteen feet thick—of not flowing but flying water"—I will not quote the wonderful pages which every lover of Ruskin, of landscape, and of English undefiled, must know—the "one mighty wave that was always itself, and every fluted swirl of it constant as the wreathing of a shell"; and then the bit about its blue, and "the innocent way" of it, and its dancing and rippling and glittering, "and the dear old decrepit town as safe in the embracing sweep of it as if it were set in a brooch of sapphire"—that was what he was thinking, and storing up in his mind the famous description which showed that even so late, in shattered health and, as people said, impaired powers, he could talk and write as brilliantly as ever.

That afternoon in the glaring sunshine we drove out of Geneva through suburban villadom—he much amused at the modern fashion of house-names, "Mon Repos," "Chez Nous," and so forth—towards Monnetier. He was at the moment healthily interested in Alpine structure, the geology of scenery, and could forget "St. George" in his eagerness to expound his views on the cleavage of the Salève. I made a slight note of the lines, the cathedral-like buttresses which flank the level-bedded masonry of the great mountain-wall with masses of a different rock, vertically cloven; and the gorge of Monnetier which cuts the range across with an unexpected breach; and we went over his old debate with the Genevese geologists. Then we climbed the Echelle, and from the top found the Annecy Alps fairly clear, but I think the same heaviness over the greater snow-peaks. At last we reached Mornex, his old home in the 'sixties, when he was writing "Munera Pulveris" and first seriously grappling with the social problems which afterwards became his chief theme in so many lectures and books.

A letter he wrote that evening, to describe the visit, has recently been published; how he found his old house a restaurant, with people drinking on the terrace. He was, though he did not say so, rather cast down by the change—he who always deplored changes; but brightened when the landlord guessed who he must be, and quite cheered up—with that last infirmity of noble minds—on hearing that the English sometimes came to see Ruskin's house. Indeed, it was more his home than many a house in England where he spent longer years, for it was of choice, not of necessity, that he lived there, and would have continued there to his own great advantage but for his father's death, which recalled him to the care of his widowed mother.

One phrase in that letter as now printed seems to have pained and alarmed some of his friends; but surely without cause. He says to account for beginning his letter on the wrong side of the paper—as most people seem to do nowadays—that he had taken a glass too much Burgundy. The son of the sherry-merchant, with old-fashioned notions on the fitness of things, always took a glass or two of wine at dinner; one of his sayings was, "A glass of good wine never hurt anybody." But I am sure all his personal friends will bear me out that it never went beyond the glass or two. He was no drinker, and his very strong anti-teetotal attitude was simply the expression of his own habitual and easy temperance. That evening's dinner I remember well. After our walk from Veyrier to Pont d'Etrembières, and more sauntering by the Rhône in a beautiful red sunset, we came in late. At table we had some debate about the pictures on the walls of the hotel sitting-room, and he would not have it that Madame Vigée Lebrun's portrait of herself and her daughter was charming. "No decent woman," he said, "would paint herself with bare arms, like that!"—which was quite his usual way of thinking about a much-discussed question of art. And then we settled to a little after-dinner writing, and you will not be surprised if we both nodded over our pens after that long hot day—and, of course, the Burgundy.

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V

RUSKIN'S "CASHBOOK"

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V
RUSKIN'S "CASHBOOK"

So it is lettered on the back; but his titles, as every one knows, are far-fetched. There are some accounts in this volume, but most of it is filled with a diary of the tour abroad in 1882, and subsequent entries, very neatly written; the red lines for £ s. d. serving to keep the manuscript within margins, just like print.

Ruskin's journals, I understand, are not to be published. The bulk of their contents—landscape descriptions and various notes on natural history, architecture, and many different subjects—have been worked into his books. The remainder consists of daily jottings about the weather, always important to one whose chief pleasure was in scenery, with fragmentary hints of his occupations or travels, and still more fragmentary mention of persons. They are not exactly memoranda; still less the memoirs of a literary man, written with one eye on the public. They are mere soliloquies of the moment, gossip of himself to himself before breakfast.

While he lived, though I had often occasion to refer to these journals, I never felt quite at liberty to open this "Cashbook," with its private notes on a period when I was practically alone with him; his valet, Baxter, was also of the party, but at meals and at work, on walks and drives, he had usually to put up with my company. He was exceedingly and unfailingly kind, but exacting; it would have needed great self-confidence to be sure of his good opinion. But now that these papers require it, to paint his portrait as he was at that time, I have taken advantage of Mrs. Severn's kind leave; and in continuing the story of the tour I can sometimes add to my reminiscences Ruskin's impressions on the spot as recorded by himself.

From Geneva we went up to Sallenches (September 9, 1882), hoping to see the Alps, in spite of the smoke-cloud. He was at the moment thinking and talking chiefly of "artistic geology," if one may coin a parallel to "artistic anatomy"—the old subject of his "Modern Painters," vol. iv. In the chapter on the Old Road I said healthily interested, for any work on Nature was good for him personally, and this tour was for the sake of health after long and recurrent attacks of illness.

In those days, and to the few who cared much more for himself than his mission, St. George and St. Benedict were the enemies; his Guild and all the worries connected with it, and his ethico-socio-political meditations, mixed with much wandering into Greek and mediæval mythology, always meant mischief to him. So after the visit to Cîteaux and the birthplace of St. Bernard, it was good to see him eager for the mountains, and looking out for well-known twists in the limestone strata, and clefts and cascades, points of view and distant glimpses, all the way up the valley. If only the smoke-cloud would lift, and a spell of fair weather would tempt him to linger among the Alps, hammering rocks and sketching cottages, the object of the journey would be gained.

There was a horrid new road being made high up on the flank of his favourite mountain, the Brezon, whose top he had wanted to possess. At Cluses, what were those sticks in the meadow? I asked; and learnt that they marked out the long-intended railway. A railway in the valley of the Arve! It meant to him simply the end of all that made the glory and grandeur of this classic ground. But he was partly comforted by the thought that after all it might not be, or, at least, not in his time. Maglans and the Nant d'Arpenaz were still as Turner painted them; and though his old familiar resting-place at St. Martin was no longer open as an inn, we could stay across the valley at Sallenches, within easy walks of many favourite haunts.

The next day was Sunday, which he usually spent more quietly than other days. We took the walk his father and he used to take on many Sundays passed in that neighbourhood, up a glen to the south of the village. In his diary that day he began an analysis of the Psalms—he had been taking them for his morning Bible-readings; and I find that at St. Cergues, on the 5th, he had thankfully noted the arrival of a telegram with good news from home, just as he was reading me the 104th Psalm. He did not hold "family prayers" as a habit, but sometimes when he was delighted with a nice chapter he couldn't keep it to himself.

Early next morning Mont Blanc was clear, though soon clouded (the diary is quoted in the "Storm-cloud" lecture); and then, in pursuance of the geology study he had begun he set to work "to do a little Deucalion," but opened Job instead, at xi. 16, and read on "with comfort" the "glorious natural history" of the old book. Next day he noted the second speech of Zophar as "the leading piece of political economy" which he ought to have quoted in "Fors."

In spite of the dull weather we had a good ramble up the valley he called "Norton's Glen," from the remembrance of walks there with Professor Charles Eliot Norton; and though sketching was little use, he was happy in the contemplation of boulders. It was in coming down from that walk (if I remember right; the diary does not mention it) that I got such a scolding for proposing to extract a fossil from a stone in a vineyard terrace-wall: "You bad boy! Have you no respect for property?" or words to that effect; and I had to leave the specimen in situ. But next day I "scored" with a careful drawing of the Nant d'Arpenaz, disentangling the contorted beds of limestone; and in the diary is a copy from my sketch, a subject, he said, he had often tried in vain. On the way back to Sallenches we looked at the old Hôtel du Mont Blanc at St. Martin, which gives a title to one of the chapters of "Præterita," and need not be described here; but he was so taken with it and its memories that he asked whether it was for sale, and really formed a plan of buying it, and coming to live there. The diary gives various reasons, ending with one of the oddest; I had made some verses about the place, rather on the lines his talk had suggested, but ending with more optimism, and these, too, he notes, contributed to the "leadings" which pointed him to a new home in Savoy. A little later there came a letter addressed to "MM. Ruskin et Collingwood"—"Quite like a firm," he said; "I wonder what they think we're travelling in; but I hope we'll always be partners"—the terms of the offer I forget, but they did not seem practicable, or Coniston might have known him no more.

At least, it was possible, and it would have been good in many ways for him; but there were ties to think of. Next day, after rain in the valley and snow on the Varens, and swallows gathering in crowds along the eaves and cornices of the square, there was a grand clearance at sunset, and he wrote to Miss Beever the note printed in "Hortus Inclusus" about seeing Mont Blanc—"a sight which always redeems me to what I am capable of at my poor little best, and to what loves and memories are most precious to me. So I write to you, one of the few true loves left. The snow has fallen fresh on the hills, and it makes me feel that I must soon be seeking shelter at Brantwood and the Thwaite." And yet he was greatly tempted to stay. On the splendid morning which followed he wrote in his journal, "Perfect light on the Dorons, and the Varens a miracle of aerial majesty. I—happy in a more solemn way than of old. Read a bit of Ezra and referred to Haggai ii. 9—'In this place will I give peace.'"

Letters, however, were expected at Geneva, and with many plans for Sixt and Chamouni he turned his back on Sallenches for the time and had a "marvellous drive through the valley of Cluse; C—— sectionising (making notes of limestone strata) all the way. Divine walk to old spring under Brezon." Then he reproves himself for his annoyance at the "plague-wind" and tiresome letters at Geneva, "for I shall try to remember the Aiguille de Bionassay of the 13th at evening and the Nant d'Arpenaz looked back at yesterday morning—with my morning walk once more among the dew above Sallenches—for ever and a day."

Without keeping constantly before one's mind his passionate love of scenery it is impossible to put a right estimate on much that he has written. There are comparatively few people whose chief pleasure is in taking a walk and looking at the country, without any notion of sport or games to eke out the interest. It is true that he sketched and wrote, but his pleasure was in seeing. It was his admiration of Nature that had brought him to admire Art in his youth, and I think it is not too much to say that Art was always a secondary thing to him personally. The desire to see Art healthily and nobly practised made him study the life of the craftsman and the craftsman's surroundings, spiritual and material. The material needs of Victorian society pressed upon him "Unto this Last" and "St. George"; the spiritual needs drove him back upon ancient religious ideals, "The Queen of the Air" and "St. Benedict." All these various strands of thought were closely woven together in his life, but from the beginning to the end the love for natural scenery was the core of the cable. You gather already from this "Cashbook" that a few days among the Alps had quite restored him to physical strength, and given him hopes and happiness.

On Saturday, September 16, we left Geneva for Annecy, intending more limestone geology, and thenceforward had many days' driving with the "Mephistopheles coachman and the Black Dog," as he put it at first. Later on he became enthusiastic over the same coachman for his capital driving and care of his horses, and because of the story of the dog Tom, whom, the man said, he had rescued from death at the hands of an American owner at Nice. Tom, with his spiked fur collar, was usually absent at the start. The driver said he was shut up so that he might not annoy Messieurs; but he always appeared, was scolded, and forgiven, and petted for the rest of the way. Affection for animals appealed to Ruskin, and in France one sees much of it. On one of these drives we stopped for lunch out of doors before a wayside inn. To this lunch there came a little dog, two cats, and a pet sheep, and shared our wine, bread, and Savoy sponge-cakes. The sheep at last got to putting its feet on the table, and the landlady rushed out and carried him off in her arms into the house; but Ruskin, I think, would quite as soon have let the creature stay. At Annecy the landlord told me stories of his big St. Bernard dog, how he was defended from other dogs by the cat, and how sometimes they quarrelled, and then the dog had to go and sit on the mat out of doors until the cat had forgiven him; how the cat also was in the habit of catching swallows on the wing, and bringing them in to show—as, certainly, cats do with the mice they catch—and then she would let them go uninjured. This delighted Ruskin at dinner, and may have suggested the dream which I see he records in his "Cashbook"—"dreamt of a fine old lion who was quite good if he wasn't kept prisoner; but when I had got him out, I didn't know what to do with him." The parting with Tom and his master I have mentioned elsewhere—how he gave the man twenty francs for a bonne main and two francs over for a bonne patte, he said, to the dog!

At Annecy, in the pleasant Hôtel Verdun, he confessed himself already stronger, and fit for anything but proofs and business letters; but the "plague-cloud" still hung over the view. He noted that the smoke from the factory chimneys could not be told from the clouds except by its density, and mixed with the mist so as to throw a pall over the lake from the town to the Tournette—the great mountain of the neighbourhood above Talloires. But still he did not see that the black, ragged, dirty weather was caused by the smoke, though he compared it with a London November. The nearer scenery was visible and beautiful. The blue lake, always blue, with a light of its own, and Talloires, with pleasant associations and unspoiled surroundings of most romantic character, charmed him as of old. We drove there the first Sunday; he took me up to Eugène Sue's house and then on to the cascade, two and a half hours' walk, and then sauntered among the vineyards and along the bay, under the plane-tree avenues, driving home in an open carriage, and said he had not spent such an idle day for ten years. Next day we "did" the Gorge of the Fier, and discussed the possible causes of this great ravine, through which the river plunges so unexpectedly and, one would think, unnecessarily. Then to Talloires again, and planned return for work.

Meanwhile he had made appointments in Italy. He talked of a rush to Rome and hasty visits to Lucca and Florence, coming back soon to the Alps. But this turned out to be a longer journey than he had meant. His seal-motto was "To-day," and the business of the moment was always the most important with him; and so the Italian tour was prolonged to nearly two months. It ended in his catching a thorough cold at Pisa through sketching in November winds, and in his longing for the clear air of the Alps again, before returning to London for the lecture he had promised to give in December. This was the lecture announced as "Crystallography," but delivered as "Cistercian Architecture," about which he said, joking at his own expense, that it would probably have come to much the same thing whatever the title had been. I did not quite see why he should lecture on either; but he declared himself quite well, and as we had dropped crystallography—the chief subject before the tour—for cathedrals and abbeys in Italy, he shut himself up at Pisa, cold and all, to write his lecture. Then having, as he thought, mastered it, we ran north. He wanted to stay at St. Michel, a favourite place on the Mont Cenis line, but high, and likely to be bleak in November for a man with a bad cold, I thought—very possibly mistaken. I took tickets for Aix-les-Bains, and we had our only quarrel on that trip. I felt particularly guilty as he recounted to me, in an injured tone, the horrors of Aix, the one place he abominated, and the beauties of St. Michel, while the train climbed the Dora valley to Bardonecchia in fairly fine weather.

On the French side it was deep snow and bitter weather as we ran down to Aix. The next day was delightful, but I always shirked the recollection of my misdemeanour until I found how his diary-entries ignored it. "The cold's quite gone! Friday in glowing sunshine, Pisa to Turin; Saturday in frightful damp and cold, Turin to Aix; but quite easy days both. Sun coming out now. Dent de Bourget over mist and low cloud, very lovely, as I dressed."

The next entry I copy because it shows that he was not as entirely hostile to railways as the casual reader imagines. Writing of the ride to Annecy he says in the "Cashbook": "An entirely divine railway-coupé drive from Aix by the river gorges; one enchantment of golden trees and ruby hills." But it was a splendid day. In clumsier phrasing I wrote home of "all the prettiest autumn colours that ever were made out of remnants of old rainbows patched up into a gala dress for the world."

At Annecy we delayed only long enough for me to get rooms in the Hôtel de l'Abbaye at Talloires, where we stayed from the 14th to the 22nd in stormy, snowy weather. He was quite well at first, and proud of leading the way down the steep mountain-tracks—well known to him—in the dark after long walks; but some days we could not get out at all. I sat writing by the log fire in the dining-room; he preferring his bedroom, with what glimpses could be got of the lake through snowstorms; and in the night the wind howled through deserted corridors—for the place was once a real monastery—until it became quite uncanny. His bad dreams had gone, but he could not get exercise enough to sleep well. The lecture was variously rewritten, monks and myths chasing one another through his brain, instead of the crystal-cleavages and rock-forms he had set out to study. St. Benedict had been too strong for us, and the ghost of St. Bernard of Talloires (or of Menthon, not the St. Bernard of his former pilgrimage, but a tenth-century hermit, whose cave is still shown) who saw "not the Lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and Aosta," and founded the hospice that bears his name—as Ruskin would fain have founded, in another way, a refuge for those who fall in the nineteenth-century struggle for life; but fell himself in attempting it.

I did not know at the time that he was meditating a return to his Professorship at Oxford. He kept that a secret, and sent me off on a special mission to draw Alps in snow. Rejoining him at Geneva I found him in the depths of misery, with the weather bad and his work going too slowly forward, and the glamour all gone out of his "mother town" of Geneva, "or what was once Geneva," he said, ruined by touristry and luxury into a mere suburb of Paris, which was a suburb of hell. So through cold and flooded France he took his way homeward. At Paris, Hôtel Meurice was no longer what it had been; the pneumatic clock in his room, with its minute-gun of a tick and a jerk, got on his nerves, and he demanded of the bewildered waiter that it should be stopped. The Tuileries were in ruins, placarded for sale as building material. In the bookshops he could not buy the books he sought, but, as it seemed, only photographs of actresses. The Louvre, even, in such surroundings gave him only suggestions of irritation. And it was a thankful secretary who saw him safely over the Channel and back to Herne Hill on the first Saturday in December.

But the journey was not a failure. At Lucca he made some of his best drawings, and the descriptive passages in "Præterita" and elsewhere, written on that tour, or from notes then made, are among his finest; and he was able to write in his "Cashbook" on December 3: "Slept well, and hope to be fit for lecture to-morrow; very happy in showing our drawings and complete sense of rest after three months' tossing." Early in the next year he found himself able to take up his old work at Oxford, and for awhile—but only for awhile—it seemed that the storm-cloud of his life had cleared away.