Home Life of Great Authors Part 30

[Ill.u.s.tration]

JOHN RUSKIN.

In the very heart of the great city of London, shut in by dingy brick walls that closed upon him to such an extent that it was only by going into the middle of the street and looking up that he could ever see the sky, in the early part of the century, was born the man who has the finest eye for the beauties of the natural world, and the most eloquent pen in describing them, that the century has produced.

We will make no exception of poet or painter in this statement; for John Ruskin sees more and better than any poet of the day, and can give in words a more vivid picture of a scene he loves than any painter can produce. Indeed, few men have lived at any time who could color a landscape as Ruskin colors it, or who have so delicate an eye for the shyest and most sequestered beauties, as has this poet-painter. Probably Wordsworth comes nearer to Ruskin than any other modern writer in his love of the natural world, and he has given us the finest descriptions we have of some phases of Nature; but there is a glow and a depth of feeling about Ruskin's descriptions which even Wordsworth lacks. A real worship of Nature runs through all that he has written. Think of a child with such a nature as this brought up in a crowded city,--a city unlike many others, especially in this country and on the Continent, where lovely glimpses of Nature may be had from open squares, or streets leading out into lovely country roads. In New York one can hardly walk anywhere without catching glimpses of the water and the sh.o.r.es of New Jersey or Long Island. Most boys, we fancy, penetrate to the Battery and enjoy its superb outlook; or they have the run of Central Park, where they make a sort of acquaintance with Nature, which, if somewhat artificial, is much better than no knowledge at all. In Edinburgh the inhabitants live under the shadow of its two fantastic mountains, and from their windows can trace the windings of its glittering frith. Not even the lofty houses of the Canongate or the battlements of the castle afford the eye an equal pleasure. In Venice not even the Palace of the Doge, the most beautiful building in the world, or the matchless walls of fair St. Mark's, can keep the eye from seeking the blue waters of the Adriatic or the purple outlines of the Alps. Beautiful Verona has a broad and rushing river of deep blue sweeping through the heart of it; it has an environment of cliffs, where grow the cypress and the olive, and a far-away view of the St. Gothard Alps. Rome, from its amphitheatre of hills, has views of unrivalled loveliness, and its broad Campagna is a picture in itself. Paris even has its charms of external nature, as have all the cities of the New World; but London is grim and gray, and bare and desolate, wrapped in eternal fog. To be sure, it has the Thames, and there are lovely suburbs; but we mean that vast, densely crowded part of the city proper which we think of when we say London.

The father of John Ruskin was a London wine-merchant, who made and bequeathed to him a large fortune. But they were very plain people, and the youth knew nothing of ostentation or luxury. He says of his childhood:--

"Nor did I painfully wish what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toy-shops. I had a bunch of keys to play with as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older I had a cart and a ball, and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pa.s.s my days contentedly in tracing the square and comparing the colors of my carpet, examining the knots in the wood of the floors, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses, with rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water-cart through its leathern pipe from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge, or the still more admirable proceedings of the turnc.o.c.k, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed-covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources; and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet."

He was once taken when a child to the brow of the crags overlooking Derwent.w.a.ter, and he tells of the "intense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in looking through the hollows in the mossy roots over the crag into the dark lake, and which has a.s.sociated itself more or less with all twining roots of trees ever since." He also speaks of his joy in first treading on the gra.s.s; and, indeed, each fresh bit of acquaintance which he made with Nature gave him unbounded delight. He says in his late "Recollections:"--

"To my further great benefit, as I grew older I saw nearly all the n.o.blemen's houses in England, in reverent and healthy delight of uncovetous admiration,--perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live in a small house and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at; but that, at all events, it would not make Brunswick Square in the least more pleasantly habitable to pull Warwick Castle down. And at this day, though I have kind invitations enough to visit America, I could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles."

Again he says:--

"For the best and truest beginning of all blessings, I had been taught the perfect meaning of Peace, in thought, act, and word.

Angry words, hurry, and disorder I never knew in the stillness of my childhood's home. Next to this quite priceless gift of Peace, I had received the perfect understanding of the natures of Obedience and Faith. I obeyed word or lifted finger of father or mother, simply as a ship her helm; not only without idea of resistance, but receiving the direction as a part of my own life and force,--a helpful law, as necessary to me in every moral action as the law of gravity in leaping. And my practice in Faith was soon complete; nothing was ever promised me that was not given, nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever told me that was not true."

Ruskin's father began to read Byron to him soon after he entered his teens, the first pa.s.sage being the shipwreck in "Don Juan."

"I recollect that he and my mother looked across the table at each other with something of alarm, when on asking me a few _festas_ afterwards what we should have for after-dinner reading, I instantly answered, 'Juan and Haidee.' My selection was not adopted, and feeling there was something wrong somewhere, I did not press it, attempting even some stutter of apology, which made matters worse. Perhaps I was given a bit of 'Childe Harold'

instead, which I liked at that time nearly as well; and, indeed, the story of Haidee soon became too sad for me. But very certainly by the end of this year, 1834, I knew my Byron pretty well all through. . . . I never got the slightest harm from Byron; what harm came to me was from the facts of life and from books of a baser kind, including a wide range of the works of authors popularly considered extremely instructive,--from Victor Hugo down to Dr.

Watts."

Byron became a great favorite with the young student, as will be seen from the following pa.s.sage:--

"I rejoiced in all the sarcasm of 'Don Juan.' But my firm decision, as soon as I got well into the later cantos of it, that Byron was to be my master in verse, as Turner in color, was made, of course, in that gosling, or say cygnet, epoch of existence, without consciousness of the deeper instincts that prompted it. Only two things I consciously recognized,--that his truth of observation was the most exact and his chosen expression the most concentrated that I had yet found in literature. By that time my father had himself put me through the first two books of Livy, and I knew, therefore, what close-set language was; but I saw then that Livy, as afterward that Horace and Tacitus, were studiously, often laboriously, and sometimes obscurely concentrated; while Byron wrote, as easily as a hawk flies and as clearly as a lake reflects, the exact truth in the precisely narrowest terms,--not only the exact truth, but the most central and useful one. Of course I could no more measure Byron's greater powers at that time than I could Turner's; but I saw that both were right, in all things that I knew right from wrong in, and that they must henceforth be my masters, each in his own domain. But neither the force and precision nor the rhythm of Byron's language was at all the central reason for my taking him for master. Knowing the Song of Moses and the Sermon on the Mount by heart, and half the Apocalypse besides, I was in no need of tutorship either in the majesty or simplicity of English words; and for their logical arrangement I had had Byron's own master, Pope, since I could lisp. But the thing wholly new and precious to me in Byron was his measured and living truth,--measured as compared with Homer, and living as compared with everybody else."

He began to be an observer of beauty at a very early age, and then, as afterwards, placed beauty first, utility second. He says:--

"So that very early, indeed, in my thoughts of trees I had got at the principle, given fifty years afterwards in Proserpina, that the seeds and fruits of them were for the sake of the flowers, not the flowers for the fruit. The first joy of the year being in its snowdrops, the second and cardinal one was in the almond-blossom, every other garden and woodland gladness following from that in an unbroken order of kindling flower and shadowy leaf; and for many and many a year to come--until, indeed, the whole of life became autumn to me--my chief prayer for the kindness of Heaven, in its flowerful seasons, was that the frost might not touch the almond-blossom."

His mother, who was a very religious woman, used to oblige him to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart at a very early age, and his favorite chapters were always from the Psalms, where there is so much of grand and glowing poetry. It was a fine diet for such a child as he, or, indeed, for any child; and he attributes his taste for the grand things in literature to his early knowledge of the matchless poetry of the Bible. Doubtless it gave also that devotional bent to his mind which has been one of his many striking characteristics through life. He is as essentially religious as one of the old Hebrew prophets, and has brought forward his religious precepts in season and out of season ever since he began to write.

He was taken on his travels when but a boy, and saw many of the beauties of Europe before he went to Oxford. He made acquaintance at that early age with most of the beautiful buildings about which he has since written so eloquently. The old Gothic buildings pleased him most of all,--even the rugged Gothic of the North. He spent much time in Italy and in Switzerland, which he says is a country to be visited and not lived in. He thinks that such sublimity of scenery should only be looked upon reverently, and that those who view it habitually lose their reverence, and, indeed, do not appreciate it at any time.

At Oxford he produced a prize poem; but he has never been heard of as a poet since, although there is more of poetry in his prose than in the verse of many of his contemporary poetical brethren, and if any man of his time has been endowed with the true poetic temperament, it is surely he.

His const.i.tution has always been feeble, and he can bear no excitement, and has been known to sink into such exhaustion from a little over-tension of the nerves that it has been very difficult to bring him back to consciousness.

A person of this nature was probably very romantic in his youth, and he fell very violently in love with a Scottish lady when quite young. He says that never having been indulged with much affection in youth, or been allowed to bestow a great deal even upon his parents, when in later life love did come, "it came with violence, utterly rampant and unmanageable, at least to me, who never before had anything to manage."

He lived in a world of his own dreams for a long time, endowing the object of his affections with every grace and charm. He was an exacting as well as a pa.s.sionate lover, and the lady was of far cooler blood than he. But after a variety of experiences, such as fall to the lot of most lovers, the lady became his wife. Of course the world knows little of the inner secrets of that married life, for John Ruskin is not a man to cry his sorrows in the market-place; but the world does know that the marriage proved very unhappy, and that it was finally followed by a separation. Of course there was a world of scandal at the time, which is now happily forgotten; for all this was very, very long ago, and the first scandal was as nothing compared to that which followed the lady's marriage with Millais, the artist of whom London is so proud. There was no moral blame imputed to either party at the time of the separation; and it was understood to have been only one of the numerous cases of incompatibility, of which the world is so full.

This most deplorable event in Ruskin's life was followed by long years of seclusion. He had never gone much into society, but after this he lived in almost utter solitude for years, writing his wonderful books, and making long stays in Venice and other distant cities. He was born to wealth, and never had to trouble himself about the more prosaic affairs of the world. In this country we have had until recently no large leisure cla.s.s, and those who are now taking that place are few in number, and seem utterly at a loss how to pa.s.s their time amid the business and bustle of our hurrying life. More and more are they going to Europe, as is natural; for there they find people like themselves, and mult.i.tudes of them, who have nothing to do, and who therefore seek to enjoy their leisure. With such a man as Ruskin this was not difficult, and he became a hard worker, not from necessity, but from the pressure from within. He never made or sought to make any money from his books, but they gave him great delight in the writing, and brought him fame, which he did not disdain. One of the cardinal principles of his morality has always been that poverty is no bar to happiness, but that all that is best in life is open to poor as well as rich. This he proclaimed loudly in lectures to workingmen, which he inaugurated in London, Edinburgh, and other cities. If men can only be taught to see, and to think, and to worship, according to Ruskin they have always sources of happiness at hand, of which no outward force of circ.u.mstances can deprive them. This is a great and a true gospel, and would there were more such eloquent proclaimers of it as Ruskin! what could be better doctrine for the men and women of this generation than this:--

"In order to teach men how to be satisfied, it is necessary fully to understand the art and joy of humble life; this at present, of all arts and sciences, being the one most needing study. Humble life,--that is to say, proposing to itself no future exaltation, but only a sweet continuance; not excluding the idea of forethought, but only of fore-sorrow, and taking no troublous thought for coming days. The life of domestic affection and domestic peace, full of sensitiveness to all elements of costless and kind pleasure, therefore chiefly to the loveliness of the natural world."

Again he sums up these costless pleasures in sentences weighty with meaning:--

"To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over plough, hoe, and spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray,--these are the things which make men happy; they have always had the power to do this, and they always will. The world's prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things, but upon iron or gla.s.s, or electricity or steam, in nowise."

Ruskin has always had a quarrel with the railroads, and says that all travelling becomes dull in proportion to its rapidity. "Going by railroad," he affirms, "I do not call travelling at all; but it is merely 'being sent' to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel. A man who really loves travelling would as soon consent to pack a day of such happiness into an hour of railroad as one who loved eating would agree, if it were possible, to concentrate his dinner into a pill." Walking he commends most heartily to young men, and considers it one of the rarest pleasures of life. In this country walking-parties are as yet almost unknown, but in Europe they are extremely common, especially among students. What could be better for the youth of our land than such a pastime as this for their vacations?

He has also a great contempt for some of the feats of modern science, and exclaims somewhere:--

"The scientific men are as busy as ants examining the sun and the moon and the seven stars; and can tell me all about them, I believe, by this time, and how they move, and what they are made of. And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they move or of what they are made. I can't move them any other way than they go, nor make them of anything else better than they are made."

It is over forty years ago that Ruskin startled the literary and artistic world with that marvellous book ent.i.tled "Modern Painters; Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All the Ancient Masters." The t.i.tle contained the argument of the book, and it was a monumental heresy to utter at that time. Not that there was the least doubt as to its truth, but no voice had then been raised to proclaim it.

The English people at that time were blind worshippers of Claude and one or two other old masters; and here was a daring youth--reminding one of David with his sling--going forth to do battle against all the received art opinions of his day, and boldly proclaiming Turner a better painter than Claude, Salvator Rosa, Gaspar Poussin, and the various Van-Somethings who had until that time held undisputed sway in conventional art circles. The young Oxford graduate was greeted with a perfect tempest of ridicule and denunciation. Every critic in the land hurled his lance at him, and every artist looked upon him with sovereign contempt. The young Oxford man, however, valiantly held his ground. He possessed genius, profound conviction, and a magnificent self-conceit; and he hurled back defiance to the whole art-clan, and rode forward.

Criticism beat upon the book in vain. Everybody read it, and everybody talked about it, and it conquered criticism at last. No such sensation in the art line has been made in Ruskin's day. His teachings in the course of a few years well-nigh revolutionized art opinion in England.

The sum and substance of it was Nature against conventionality. People must look at Nature with their own eyes and judge art by the help of Nature. This seems simple enough to-day, but it was a new doctrine in Ruskin's youth.

Ruskin has always been an extremest in everything, and he went so far as to denounce Raphael's "Charge to Peter" on the grounds that the Apostles are not dressed as men of that time and place would have been when going out fishing. He held to an almost brutal realism in everything, and preached his doctrine whether men would hear or whether they would forbear. He soon rallied a little coterie of artists about him, and formed a school styled the Pre-Raphaelites. The princ.i.p.al founder of the school was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, since better known as a poet than an artist. He held his little court in London for many years, and a great number of young men sat at his feet. His chief supporters at first were Holman Hunt and Millais. These latter soon left Rossetti far behind in execution; but Rossetti was the soul of the movement. He had received his inspiration directly from Ruskin. Among the reminiscences of this art movement are Oscar Wilde and the esthetes of London to-day, with their "symphonies" in blue and their "arrangements" in yellow, and the hideous females who go about London drawing-rooms in limp dresses of sulphur color and sage green loosely hanging from their shoulders, after the manner of ancient Greece. But they have had real artists among them,--these apostles of the sunflower and knights of the lily,--and although some of the better cla.s.s have repudiated the antics of their followers, the movement known as Pre-Raphaelitism has really been an artistic success.

Ruskin followed the "Modern Painters" in due time with his "Seven Lamps of Architecture" and his "Stones of Venice." They were masterpieces of eloquent description and rhetoric. No such vivid writing had been seen for many a day, and no such zeal and earnestness. The wealth of gorgeous imagery was dazzling; the declamation imparted to it the eloquence of an earlier day, and the lofty thought and moral purpose were peculiarly the author's own. The books exerted a remarkable influence. He has written much since, but he has never reached the height he attained in those earlier books.

As he grew older, he grew dogmatic and crotchety in the extreme. He imitated Carlyle in his scoldings, and indeed was much influenced by Carlyle in many ways. He has always been an impracticable theorist, and in these latter years he has put forth a thousand foolish and subversive vagaries. People have not taken him quite seriously for some time. They laugh at his follies, ridicule his philanthropic schemes,--of which he has an infinite number, for he is a man of the kindest heart,--they tell excruciating stories of his colossal self-conceit, and they go home and read his books because no such books can be found written by any other man, search they never so widely. He has always been a wrong-headed man, entirely out of accord with the world around him, and consequently almost sure to be on the wrong side of every practical political question. He and Carlyle had much in common in all this, and it would have been a rich treat to have heard Ruskin proclaiming his political creed, "I am a King's man, and no mob's man;" and to have heard Carlyle answer with denunciations of his millions of fellow-countrymen, "mostly fools."

Ruskin lives in one of the most beautiful of London suburbs,--on Denmark Hill, at the south side of the river, near Dulwich and the exquisite Sydenham slopes, where the Crystal Palace stands. His home is beautiful, filled with wonderful art treasures and numberless books, with many rare and costly editions. He has lectured much at Oxford; and of late years his lectures have been so crowded that tickets had to be procured to attend them. This, when the lectures of the most learned professors of the university are often given to a beggarly array of empty boxes.

He has given away during his lifetime the greater part of his large fortune,--not always wisely, but always in a manner characteristic of the man. He has acted upon the belief that it is wrong to take interest in excess of the princ.i.p.al, and has made the property over to his debtors whenever he has had interest to this extent. He gave seventeen thousand pounds to his poor relations as soon as he came into his fortune; and fifteen thousand pounds more to a cousin, tossing it to him as one would a sugar-plum; fourteen thousand pounds to Sheffield and Oxford; and numberless other gifts to different charities, mostly of an eccentric nature. He retained for himself three hundred and sixty pounds a year, upon which he says "a bachelor gentleman ought to live, or if he cannot, deserves speedily to die." Of course such a royal giver has been besieged during his whole life by an innumerable company of beggars for every conceivable object; but he has always chosen to select for himself his beneficiaries, and has often sent sharp answers to appeals; like the following to the secretary of a Protestant Blind Pension Society: "To my mind, the prefix of 'Protestant' to your society's name indicates far stonier blindness than any it will relieve." And in reply to a letter asking aid in paying off a church debt he replies:--

"I am sorrowfully amused at your appeal to me, of all people in the world the precisely least likely to give you a farthing. My first word to all men and boys who care to hear me is, 'Don't get into debt. Starve, and go to heaven; but don't borrow. Try, first, begging. I don't mind, if it's really needful, stealing. But don't buy things you can't pay for.' And of all manner of debtors, pious people building churches they can't pay for are the most detestable nonsense to me. Can't you preach and pray behind the hedges, or in a sandpit, or in a coal-hole, first? And of all manner of churches thus idiotically built, iron churches are the d.a.m.nablest to me. And of all the sects and believers in any ruling spirit--Hindoos, Turks, Feather Idolaters, and Mumbo Jumbo Log and Fire Worshippers--who want churches, your modern English Evangelical sect is the most absurd and objectionable and unendurable to me.

All of which you might very easily have found out from my books.

Any other sort of sect would, before bothering me to write it to them."

Ruskin is the poet and the high-priest of Nature. To him she reveals her mysteries, and he interprets them to a dull and commonplace world in language as glowing and impa.s.sioned as that of the prophets and priests of the olden time. No man, apparently, has seen the sea as Ruskin has seen it,--not even Byron, who wrote so majestic a hymn to it; no man has so seen the mountains, with his very soul transfixed in solemn awe; no one has felt as he the holy stillness of the forest aisles, or so described even the tiny wild flowers of the fields. And he has not only seen their outward glories, but he has interpreted their hidden meanings. He has carried the symbolism of Nature on into the moral world. There is no greater moralist than he. He is stern in his demands for right, and truth, and sincerity in life and in work. This has been the keynote of his teachings throughout life. He hates a falsehood or a sham as much as Browning or Carlyle. He has taught his countrymen many things. No people love Nature better than the English of the present day, and John Ruskin has opened the eyes of many of them to the beauties that lie everywhere about them. Then his long agitation for a better architecture has not been wholly in vain. Though the architects all laughed at him when his lectures were given, many of his ideas slowly made their way, and the new demand for strength and solidity and sincerity in building has been largely due to him.

But much greater than all his art influence has been the weight of his moral teachings. No preacher of the day has preached to such an audience as he, and he has always held men to the best that is in them. Long after his idiosyncrasies shall have been forgotten, and his faults and foibles given over to oblivion, his precepts will remain to influence the life and thought of the coming time.

[Ill.u.s.tration]