The Life of John Ruskin Part 13

"The mode in which you direct your charity puts me in mind of a matter that has lain long on my mind, though I never have had the time or face to talk to you of it. In somebody's drawing-room, ages ago, you were speaking accidentally of M. de Marvy.[8] I expressed my great obligation to him; on which you said that I could prove my grat.i.tude, if I chose, to his widow,--which choice I then not accepting, have ever since remembered the circ.u.mstance as one peculiarly likely to add, so far as it went, to the general impression on your mind of the hollowness of people's sayings and hardness of their hearts. The fact is, I give what I give almost in an opposite way to yours. I think there are many people who will relieve hopeless distress for one who will help at a hopeful pinch; and when I have the choice I nearly always give where I think the money will be fruitful rather than merely helpful. I would lecture for a school when I would _not_ for a distressed author; and would have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but not--unless I had no other object--his widow after he was gone. In a word, I like to prop the falling more than to feed the fallen."

[Footnote 8: Louis Marvy, an engraver, and political refugee after the French Revolution of 1848. He produced the plates, and Thackeray the text, of "Landscape Painters of England, in a series of steel engravings, with short Notices."]

The winter pa.s.sed without any great undertaking. G.F. Watts proposed to add Ruskin's portrait to his gallery of celebrities; but he was in no mood to sit. Rossetti did, however, sketch him this year. In March he presented eighty-three Turner drawings to Oxford, and twenty-five to Cambridge. The address of thanks with the great seal of Oxford University is dated March 23rd, 1861; the Catalogue of the Cambridge collection is dated May 28th.

On April 2nd he addressed the St. George's Mission Working Men's Inst.i.tute, and shortly afterwards, though at this time in a much enfeebled state of health, gave a lecture before "a most brilliant audience," as the _London Review_ reported, at the Royal Inst.i.tution (April 19th, 1861). Carlyle wrote to his brother John:

"Friday last I was persuaded--in fact had inwardly compelled myself as it were--to a lecture of Ruskin's at the Inst.i.tution, Albemarle Street, Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. A crammed house, but tolerable even to me in the gallery. The lecture was thought to 'break down,' and indeed it quite did '_as a lecture_'; but only did from _embarras de richesses_--a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which were manifold, curious, genial; and in fact, I do not recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one."

Papers on "Illuminated Ma.n.u.scripts" (read before the Society of Antiquaries on June 6th) and on "The Preservation of Ancient Buildings"

(read to the Ecclesiological Society a fortnight later) show that old interests were not wholly forgotten, even in the stress of new pursuits, by this man of many-sided activity.

During May, 1861, he paid a visit to the school girls at Winnington, in June and July he took a holiday at Boulogne with the fisher folk, in August he went to Ireland as guest of the Latouches of Harristown, County Kildare, and in September he returned to the Alps, spending the rest of the year at Bonneville and Lucerne.

CHAPTER II

"MUNERA PULVERIS" (1862)

After an autumn among the Alps, hearing that the Turner drawings in the National Gallery had been mildewed, he ran home to see about them in January 1862; and was kept until the end of May. He found that his political economy work was not such a total failure as it had seemed.

Froude, then editor of _Fraser's Magazine_, thought there was something in it, and would give him another chance. So, by way of a fresh start, he had his four _Cornhill_ articles published in book form; and almost simultaneously, in June 1862 the first of the new series appeared.

The author had then returned to Lucerne with Mr. and Mrs. Burne-Jones, with whom he crossed the St. Gothard to Milan, where he tried to forget the harrowing of h.e.l.l in a close study of Luini, and in copying the "St.

Catherine" now at Oxford. Ruskin has never said so much about Luini as, perhaps, he intended. A short notice in the "Cestus of Aglaia," and occasional references scattered up and down his later works, hardly give the prominence in his writings that the painter held in his thoughts. It was about this time that he was made an Hon. Member of the Florentine Academy.

He re-crossed the Alps, and settled to his work on political economy at Mornex, where he spent the winter except for a short run home, which gave him the opportunity of addressing the Working Men's College on November 29.

His retreat is described in one of his letters home:

"MORNEX, _August_ 31 (1862).

"MY DEAREST MOTHER,

"This ought to arrive on the evening before your birthday: it is not possible to reach you in the morning, not even by telegraph as I once did from Mont Cenis, for--(may Heaven be devoutly thanked therefore)--there are yet on Mont Saleve neither rails nor wires....

"The place I have got to is at the end of all carriage-roads, and I am not yet strong enough to get farther, on foot, than a five or six miles' circle, within which is a.s.suredly no house to my mind. I cast, at first, somewhat longing eyes on a true Savoyard chateau--notable for its lovely garden and orchard--and its unspoiled, unrestored, arched gateway between two round turrets, and Gothic-windowed keep. But on examination of the interior--finding the walls, though six feet thick, rent to the foundation--and as cold as rocks, and the floors all sodden through with walnut oil and rotten-apple juice--heaps of the farm stores having been left to decay in the ci-devant drawing room, I gave up all medieval ideas, for which the long-legged black pigs who lived like gentlemen at ease in the pa.s.sage, and the bats and spiders who divided between them the corners of the turret-stair, have reason--if they knew it--to be thankful.

"The worst of it is that I never had the gift, nor have I now the energy, to _make_ anything of a place; so that I shall have to put up with almost anything I can find that is healthily habitable in a good situation. Meantime, the air here being delicious and the rooms good enough for use and comfort, I am not troubling myself much, but trying to put myself into better health and humour; in which I have already a little succeeded."

After describing the flowers of the Saleve he continues:

"My Father would be quite wild at the 'view' from the garden terrace--but he would be disgusted at the shut in feeling of the house, which is in fact as much shut in as our old Herne Hill one; only to get the 'view' I have but to go as far down the garden as to our old 'mulberry tree.' By the way there's a magnificent mulberry tree, as big as a common walnut, covered with black and red fruit on the other side of the road. Coutet and Allen are very anxious to do all they can now that Crawley is away; and I don't think I shall manage very badly," etc.

A little later he took in addition a cottage in which the Empress of Russia had once stayed: it commanded a finer view than the larger house, which has since been turned into a hotel (Hotel et Pension des Glycines). This place was for some time the hermitage in which he wrote his political economy. Of his lonely rambles he wrote later on:

"If I have a definite point to reach, and common work to do at it--I take people--anybody--with me; but all my best _mental_ work is necessarily done alone; whenever I wanted to think, in Savoy, I used to leave Coutet at home. Constantly I have been alone on the Glacier des Bois--and far among the loneliest aiguille recesses. I found the path up the Brezon above Bonneville in a lonely walk one Sunday; I saw the grandest view of the Alps of Savoy I ever gained, on the 2nd of January, 1862, alone among the snow wreaths on the summit of the Saleve. You need not fear for me on 'Langdale Pikes' after that."

In September the second article appeared in _Fraser._ "Only a genius like Mr. Ruskin could have produced such hopeless rubbish," says a newspaper of the period. Far worse than any newspaper criticism was the condemnation of Denmark Hill. His father, whose eyes had glistened over early poems and prose eloquence, strongly disapproved of this heretical economy. It was a bitter thing that his son should become prodigal of a hardly earned reputation, and be pointed at for a fool. And it was intensely painful for a son "who had never given his father a pang that could be avoided," as old Mr. Ruskin had once written, to find his father, with one foot in the grave, turning against him. In December the third paper appeared. History repeated itself, and with the fourth paper the heretic was gagged. A year after, his father died; and these _Fraser_ articles were laid aside until the end of 1871, when they were taken up again, and published on New Year's Day 1872, as "Munera Pulveris."

From the outset, however, he was not without supporters. Carlyle wrote on June 30, 1862:

"I have read, a month ago, your _First_ in _Fraser_, and ever since have had a wish to say to it and you, _Euge macte nova virtute._ I approved in every particular; calm, definite, clear; rising into the sphere of _Plato_ (our almost best), wh'h in exchange for the sphere of _Macculloch, Mill and Co._ is a mighty improvement! Since that, I have seen the little _green_ book, too; reprint of your _Cornhill_ operations,--about 2/3 of wh'h was read to me (_known_ only from what the contradict'n of sinners had told me of it);--in every part of wh'h I find a high and n.o.ble sort of truth, not one doctrine that I can intrinsically dissent from, or count other than salutary in the extreme, and pressingly needed in Engl'd above all."

Erskine of Linlathen wrote to Carlyle, August 7th, 1862:

"I am thankful for any unveiling of the so-called science of political economy, according to which, avowed selfishness is the Rule of the World. It is indeed most important preaching--to preach that there is not one G.o.d for religion and another G.o.d for human fellowship--and another G.o.d for buying and selling--that pestilent polytheism has been largely and confidently preached in our time, and blessed are those who can detect its mendacities, and help to disenchant the brethren of their power...."

J.A. Froude, then editor of _Fraser_, and to his dying day Mr. Ruskin's intimate and affectionate friend, wrote to him on October 24 (1862?):

"The world talks of the article in its usual way. I was at Carlyle's last night.... He said that in writing to your father as to subject he had told him that when Solomon's temple was building it was credibly reported that at least 10,000 sparrows sitting on the trees round declared that it was entirely wrong--quite contrary to received opinion--hopelessly condemned by public opinion, etc.

Nevertheless it got finished and the sparrows flew away and began to chirp in the same note about something else."

CHAPTER III

THE LIMESTONE ALPS (1863)

Our hermit among the Alps of Savoy differed in one respect from his predecessors. They, for the most part, saw nothing in the rocks and stones around them except the prison walls of their seclusion; he could not be within constant sight of the mountains without thinking over the wonders of their scenery and structure. And it was well for him that it could be so. The terrible depression of mind which his social and philanthropic work had brought on, found a relief in the renewal of his old mountain-worship. After sending off the last of his _Fraser_ papers, in which, when the verdict had twice gone against him, he tried to show cause why sentence should not be pa.s.sed, the strain was at its severest.

He felt, as few others not directly interested felt, the sufferings of the outcast in English slums and Savoyard hovels; and heard the cry of the oppressed in Poland and in Italy: and he had been silenced. What could he do but, as he said in the letters to Norton, "lay his head to the very ground," and try to forget it all among the stones and the snows?

He wandered about geologizing, and spent a while at Talloires on the Lake of Annecy, where the old Abbey had been turned into an inn, and one slept in a monk's cell and meditated in the cloister of the monastery, St. Bernard of Menthon's memory haunting the place, and St. Germain's cave close by in the rocks above. At the end of May he came back to England, and was invited to lecture again at the Royal Inst.i.tution. The subject he chose was "The Stratified Alps of Savoy."

At that time many distinguished foreign geologists were working at the Alps; but little of conclusive importance had been published, except in papers embedded in Transactions of various societies. Professor Alphonse Favre's great work did not appear until 1867, and the "Mechanismus der Gebirgsbildung" of Professor Heim not till 1878; so that for an English public the subject was a fresh one. To Ruskin it was familiar: he had been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 1840, at the age of twenty-one; he had worked through Savoy with his Saussure in hand nearly thirty years before, and, many a time since that, had spent the intervals of literary business in rambling and climbing with the hammer and note-book. In the field he had compared Studer's meagre sections, and consulted the available authorities on physical geology, though he had never entered upon the more popular sister-science of palaeontology.

He left the determination of strata to specialists: his interest was fixed on the structure of mountains--the relation of geology to scenery; a question upon which he had some right to be heard, as knowing more about scenery than most geologists, and more about geology than most artists.

As examples of Savoy mountains this lecture described in detail the Saleve, on which he had been living for two winters, and the Brezon, the top of which he had tried to buy from the commune of Bonneville--one of his many plans for settling among the Alps. The commune thought he had found a gold-mine up there, and raised the price out of all reason.

Other attempts to make a home in the chateaux or chalets of Savoy were foiled, or abandoned, like his earlier idea to live in Venice. But his scrambles on the Saleve led him to hesitate in accepting the explanation given by Alphonse Favre of the curious north-west face of steeply inclined vertical slabs, which he suspected to be created by cleavage, on the a.n.a.logy of other Jura.s.sic precipices. The Brezon--_brisant_, breaking wave--he took as type of the billowy form of limestone Alps in general, and his a.n.a.lysis of it was serviceable and substantially correct.

This lecture was followed in 1864 by desultory correspondence with Mr.

Jukes and others in _The Reader_, in which he merely restated his conclusions, too slightly to convince. Had he devoted himself to a thorough examination of the subject--but this is in the region of what might have been. He was more seriously engaged in other pursuits, of more immediate importance. Three days after his lecture he was being examined before the Royal Academy Commission, and after a short summer visit to various friends in the north of England, he set out again for the Alps, partly to study the geology of Chamouni and North Switzerland, partly to continue his drawings of Swiss towns at Baden and Lauffenburg, with his pupil John Bunney. But even there the burden of his real mission could not be shaken off, and though again seeking health and a quiet mind, he could not quite keep silence, but wrote letters to English newspapers on the depreciation of gold (repeating his theory of currency), and on the wrongs of Poland and Italy; and he put together more papers, not then published, in continuation of his "Munera Pulveris."

Since about 1850, Carlyle had been gradually becoming more and more friendly with John Ruskin; and now that this social and economical work had been taken up, he began to have a real esteem for him, though always with a patronizing tone, which the younger man's open and confessed discipleship accepted and encouraged. This letter especially shows both men in an unaccustomed light: Ruskin, hating tobacco, sends his "master"

cigars; Carlyle, hating cant, replies rather in the tone of the temperance advocate, taking a little wine for his stomach's sake: