The Life of John Ruskin Part 18

"As I was drawing in the square this morning, in a lovely, quiet, Italian, light, there came up the poet Longfellow with his little daughter--a girl of 12, or 13, with _springy_-curled flaxen hair,--curls, or waves, that wouldn't come out in damp, I mean. They stayed talking beside me some time. I don't think it was a very vain thought that came over me, that if a photograph could have been taken of the beautiful square of Verona, in that soft light, with Longfellow and his daughter talking to me at my work--some people both in England and America would have liked copies of it."

Readers of "Fors" will recognise an incident noted on the 18th of June.

"Yesterday, it being quite cool, I went for a walk; and as I came down from a rather quiet hillside, a mile or two out of town, I past a house where the women were at work spinning the silk off the coc.o.o.ns. There was a sort of whirring sound as in an English mill; but at intervals they sang a long sweet chant, all together, lasting about two minutes--then pausing a minute and then beginning again. It was good and tender music, and the mult.i.tude of voices prevented any sense of failure, so that it was very lovely and sweet, and like the things that I mean to try to bring to pa.s.s."

For he was already meditating on the thoughts that issued in the proposals of St. George's Guild, and the daily letters of this summer are full of allusions to a scheme for a great social movement, as well as to his plans for the control of Alpine torrents and the better irrigation of their valleys. On the 2nd of June he wrote:--"I see more and more clearly every day my power of showing how the Alpine torrents may be--not subdued--but 'educated.' A torrent is just like a human creature. Left to gain full strength in wantonness and rage, no power can any more redeem it: but watch the channels of every early impulse, and fence _them_, and your torrent becomes the gentlest and most blessing of servants."

His mother was anxious for him to come home, being persuaded that he was overworking himself in the continued heat which his letters reported.

But he was loath to leave Italy, in which, he said, his work for the future lay. He made two more visits to Venice, to draw some of the sculptured details, now quickly perishing, and to make studies of Tintoret and Carpaccio. Among other friends who met him there was Mr.

Holman Hunt, with whom he went round his favourite Scuola di San Rocco (1st July). Two days later he wrote:

"You will never believe it; but I have actually been trying to draw--a baby. _The_ baby which the priest is holding in the little copy of Tintoret by Edward Jones which my father liked so much, over the basin stand in his bedroom.[19] All the knowledge I have gained in these 17 years only makes me more full of awe and wonder at Tintoret. But it _is_ so sad--so sad;--no one to care for him but me, and all going so fast to ruin. He has done that infant Christ in about five minutes--and I worked for two hours in vain, and could not tell _why_ in vain--the mystery of his touch is so great."

[Footnote 19: Mr. and Mrs Burne-Jones had been in Venice in June, 1862; the artist, then young and comparatively unknown, with a commission to copy for Ruskin.]

Final farewell was said to Verona on the 10th August, for the homeward journey by the St. Gothard, and Giessbach, where he found the young friend of 1866 now near her end--and Thun, where he met Professor C.E.

Norton. On the way he wrote:

"Lugano, _Sat.u.r.day, 14th August_, 1869.

"My Dearest Mother,

"Yesterday--exactly three months from the day on which I entered Verona to begin work, I made a concluding sketch of the old Broletto of Como, which I drew first for the 7 lamps[20]--I know not how many years ago,--and left Italy, for this time--having been entirely well and strong every day of my quarter of a year's sojourn there.

[Footnote 20: "Stones of Venice," Vol. I., plate 5.]

"This morning, before breakfast, I was sitting for the first time before Luini's Crucifixion: for all religious-art qualities the greatest picture south of the Alps--or rather, in Europe.

"And just after breakfast I got a telegram from my cousin George announcing that I am Professor of Art--the first--at the University of Oxford.

"Which will give me as much power as I can well use--and would have given pleasure to my poor father--and therefore to me--once.... It will make no difference in my general plans, about travel, etc. I shall think quietly of it as I drive up towards St. Gothard to-day.

"Ever, my dearest mother, ever your loving son,

"J. Ruskin."

Six years earlier, while being examined before the Royal Academy commission, he had been asked: "Has it ever struck you that it would be advantageous to art if there were at the universities professors of art who might give lectures and give instruction to young men who might desire to avail themselves of it, as you have lectures on geology and botany?" To which he had replied: "Yes, a.s.suredly. The want of interest on the part of the upper cla.s.ses in art has been very much at the bottom of the abuses which have crept into all systems of education connected with it. If the upper cla.s.ses could only be interested in it by being led into it when young, a great improvement might be looked for, therefore I feel the expediency of such an addition to the education of our universities." His interest in the first phase of University Extension, and his gifts of Turners to Oxford and Cambridge, had shown that he was ready to go out of his way to help in the cause he had promoted. His former works on art, and reputation as a critic, pointed to him as the best qualified man in the country for such a post. He had been asked by his Oxford friends, who were many and influential, to stand for the Professorship of Poetry, three years earlier. There was no doubt that the election would be a popular one, and creditable to the University. On the other hand, Ruskin as Professor would have a certain sanction for his teaching, he believed; the t.i.tle and the salary of 358 a year were hardly an object to him; but the position, as accredited lecturer and authorised instructor of youth, opened up new vistas of usefulness, new worlds of work to conquer; and he accepted the invitation. On August 10th he was elected Slade Professor.

He returned home by the end of August to prepare himself for his new duties. During the last period he had been giving, on an average, half a dozen lectures a year, which amply filled his annual volume. Twelve lectures were required of the professor. Many another man would have read his twelve lectures and gone his way; but he was not going to work in that perfunctory manner. He undertook to revise his whole teaching; to write for his hearers a completely new series of treatises on art, beginning with first principles and broad generalisations, and proceeding to the different departments of sculpture, engraving, landscape-painting and so on; then taking up the history of art:--an encyclopaedic scheme. He took this Oxford work not as a subst.i.tute for other occupation, exonerating him from further claims upon his energy and time; nor as a bye-play that could be slurred. He tried to do it thoroughly, and to do it in addition to the various work already in hand, under which, as it was, he used to break down, yearly, after each climax of effort.

This autumn and winter, with his first and most important course in preparation, he was still writing letters to the _Daily Telegraph_; being begged by Carlyle to come--"the sight of your face will be a comfort," says the poor old man--and undertaking lectures at the Royal Artillery Inst.i.tution, Woolwich, and at the Royal Inst.i.tution, London.

The Woolwich lecture, given on December 14th, was that added to later editions of the "Crown of Wild Olive," under the t.i.tle of "The Future of England." The other, February 4th, 1870, on "Verona and its Rivers,"

involved not only a lecture on art and history and contemporary political economy, but an exhibition of the drawings which he and his a.s.sistants had made during the preceding summer.

Four days later he opened a new period in his career with his inaugural Lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford.

BOOK IV

PROFESSOR AND PROPHET (1870-1900)

CHAPTER I

FIRST OXFORD LECTURES (1870-1871)

On Tuesday, 8th February, 1870, the Slade Professor's lecture-room was crowded to over-flowing with members of the University, old and young, and their friends, who flocked to hear, and to see, the author of "Modern Painters." The place was densely packed long before the time; the ante-rooms were filled with personal friends, hoping for some corner to be found them at the eleventh hour; the doors were blocked open, and besieged outside by a disappointed mult.i.tude.

Professorial lectures are not usually matters of great excitement: it does not often happen that the accommodation is found inadequate. After some hasty arrangements Sir Henry Acland pushed his way to the table, announced that it was impossible for the lecture to be held in that place, and begged the audience to adjourn to the Sheldonian Theatre. At last, welcomed by all Oxford, the Slade Professor appeared, to deliver his inaugural address.[21]

[Footnote 21: The inaugural course was given Feb. 8, 16, 23; March 3, 9, 16 and 23, 1870.]

It was not strictly academic, the way he used to come in, with a little following of familiars and a.s.sistants,--exchange recognition with friends in the audience, arrange the objects he had brought to show,--fling off his long sleeved Master's gown, and plunge into his discourse. His manner of delivery had not altered much since the time of the Edinburgh Lectures. He used to begin by reading, in his curious intonation, the carefully-written pa.s.sages of rhetoric, which usually occupied only about the half of his hour. By-and-by he would break off, and with quite another air extemporise the liveliest interpolations, describing his diagrams or specimens, restating his arguments, re-enforcing his appeal. His voice, till then artificially cadenced, suddenly became vivacious; his gestures, at first constrained, became dramatic. He used to act his subject, apparently without premeditated art, in the liveliest pantomime. He had no power of voice-mimicry, and none of the ordinary gifts of the actor. A tall and slim figure, not yet shortened from its five feet ten or eleven by the habitual stoop, which ten years later brought him down to less than middle height; a stiff, blue frock-coat; prominent, half-starched wristbands, and tall collars of the Gladstonian type; and the bright blue stock which every one knows for his heraldic bearing: no rings or gewgaws, but a long thin gold chain to his watch:--plain old-English gentleman, neither fashionable bourgeois nor artistic mountebank.

But he gave himself over to his subject with such unreserved intensity of imaginative power, he felt so vividly and spoke so from the heart, that he became whatever he talked about, never heeding his professorial dignity, and never doubting the sympathy of his audience. Lecturing on birds, he strutted like the chough, made himself wings like the swallow; he was for the moment a cat, when he explained (not "in scorn") that engraving was the "art of scratch." If it had been an affectation of theatric display, we "emanc.i.p.ated school-boys," as the Master of University used to call us, would have seen through it at once, and scorned him. But it was so evidently the expression of his intense eagerness for his subject, so palpably true to his purpose, and he so carried his hearers with him, that one saw in the grotesque of the performance only the guarantee of sincerity.

If one wanted more proof of that, there was his face, still young-looking and beardless; made for expression, and sensitive to every change of emotion. A long head, with enormous capacity of brain, veiled by thick wavy hair, not affectedly lengthy but as abundant as ever, and darkened into a deep brown, without a trace of grey; and short, light whiskers growing high over his cheeks. A forehead not on the model of the heroic type, but as if the sculptor had heaped his clay in handfuls over the eyebrows, and then heaped more. A big nose, aquiline, and broad at the base, with great thoroughbred nostrils and the "septum" between them thin and deeply depressed; and there was a turn down at the corners of the mouth, and a breadth of lower lip, that reminded one of his Verona griffin, half eagle, half lion; Scotch in original type, and suggesting a side to his character not all milk and roses. And under s.h.a.ggy eyebrows, ever so far behind, the fieriest blue eyes, that changed with changing expression, from grave to gay, from lively to severe; that riveted you, magnetised you, seemed to look through you and read your soul; and indeed, when they lighted on you, you felt you had a soul of a sort. What they really saw is a mystery. Some who had not persuaded them to see as others see, maintained that they only saw what they looked for; others, who had successfully deceived them, that they saw nothing. No doubt they might be deceived; but I know now that they often took far shrewder measurements of men--I do not say of women--than anybody suspected.

For the Inaugural Course, he was, so to speak, on his best behaviour, guarding against too hasty expression of individuality. He read careful orations, stating his maturest views on the general theory of art, in picked language, suited to the academic position. The little volume is not discursive or entertaining, like "Modern Painters," and contains no pictures either with pen or pencil; but it is crammed full of thought, and of the results of thought.

The Slade Professor was also expected to organise and superintend the teaching of drawing; and his first words in the first lecture expressed the hope that he would be able to introduce some serious study of Art into the University, which, he thought, would be a step towards realising some of his ideals of education. He had long felt that mere talking about Art was a makeshift, and that no real insight could be got into the subject without actual and practical dealing with it. He found a South Kensington School in existence at Oxford, with an able master, Mr. Alexander Macdonald; and though he did not entirely approve of the methods in use, tried to make the best of the materials to his hand, accepting but enlarging the scope of the system. The South Kensington method had been devised for industrial designing, primarily; Ruskin's desire was to get undergraduates to take up a wider subject, to familiarise themselves with the technical excellences of the great masters, to study nature, and the different processes of art,--drawing, painting and some forms of decorative work, such as, in especial, goldsmiths' work, out of which the Florentine school had sprung. He did not wish to train artists, but, as before in the Working Men's College, to cultivate the habit of mind that looks at nature and life, not a.n.a.lytically, as science does, but for the sake of external aspect and expression. By these means he hoped to breed a race of judicious patrons and critics, the best service any man can render to the cause of art.

And so he got together a ma.s.s of examples in addition to the Turners which he had already given to the University galleries. He placed in the school a few pictures by Tintoret, some drawings by Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Burne-Jones, and a great number of fine casts and engravings.

He arranged a series of studies by himself and others, as "copies,"

fitted, like the Turners in the National Gallery, with sliding frames in cabinets for convenient reference and removal. After spending most of his first Lent Term in this work, he went home for a month to prepare a catalogue, which was published the same year: the school not being finally opened until October, 1871. During these first visits to Oxford he was the guest of Sir Henry Acland; on April 29, 1871, Professor Ruskin, already honorary student of Christ Church, was elected to an honorary fellowship at Corpus, and enabled to occupy rooms, vacated by the Rev. Henry Furneaux, who gave up his fellowship on marrying Mr.

Arthur Severn's twin-sister.[22]

[Footnote 22: His rooms were in Fellows' buildings, No. 2 staircase, first floor right.]

After this work well begun, he went abroad for a vacation tour with a party of friends--as in 1866; Lady Trevelyan's sister, Mrs. Hilliard, to chaperone the same young ladies, and three servants with them. They started on April 27th; stayed awhile at Meurice's to see Paris; and at Geneva, to go up the Saleve, twice, in bitter black east wind. Then across the Simplon to Milan. After a month at Venice and Verona, where he recurred to his scheme against inundation, then ridiculed by _Punch_, but afterwards taken up seriously by the Italians, they went to Florence, and met Professor Norton. In the end of June they turned homewards, by Pisa and Lucca, Milan and Como, and went to visit their friend Marie of the Giessbach.

At the Giessbach they spent a fortnight, enjoying the July weather and glorious walks, in the middle of which war was suddenly declared between Germany and France. The summons of their German waiter to join his regiment brought the news home to them, as such personal examples do, more than columns of newspaper print; and as hostilities were rapidly beginning, Ruskin, with the gloomiest forebodings for the beautiful country he loved, took his party home straight across France, before the ways should be closed.

August was a month of feverish suspense to everybody; to no one more than to Ruskin, who watched the progress of the armies while he worked day by day at the British Museum preparing lectures for next term.

This was the course on Greek relief-sculpture, published as "Aratra Pentelici."[23] It was a happy thought to ill.u.s.trate his subject from coins, rather than from disputed and mutilated fragments; and he worked into it his revised theory of the origin of art--not Schiller's nor Herbert Spencer's, and yet akin to theirs of the "Spieltrieb,"--involving the notion of doll-play;--man as a child, re-creating himself, in a double sense; imitating the creation of the world and really creating a sort of secondary life in his art, to play with, or to worship. In the last lecture of the series (published separately) the Professor compared--as the outcome of cla.s.sic art in Renaissance times--Michelangelo and Tintoret, greatly to the disadvantage of Michelangelo. This heresy against a popular creed served as text for some severe criticism; but as he said in a prefatory note to the pamphlet, readers "must observe that its business is only to point out what is to be blamed in Michael Angelo, and that it a.s.sumes the fact of his power to be generally known," and he referred to Mr. Tyrwhitt's "Lectures on Christian Art" for the opposite side of the question.

[Footnote 23: Delivered Nov. 24, 26, Dec. 1, 3, 8 and 10, 1870.]

Meanwhile the war was raging. Ruskin was asked by his friends to raise his voice against the ravage of France; but he replied that it was inevitable. At last, in October, he read how Rosa Bonheur and Edouard Frere had been permitted to pa.s.s through the German lines, and next day came the news of the bombardment of Strasburg, with antic.i.p.ations of the destruction of the Cathedral, library, and picture galleries, foretelling, as it seemed, the more terrible and irreparable ruin of the treasure-houses of art in Paris. His heart was with the French, and he broke silence in the bitterness of his spirit, upbraiding their disorder and showing how the German success was the victory of "one of the truest monarchies and schools of honour and obedience yet organised under heaven." He hoped that Germany, now that she had shown her power, would withdraw, and demand no indemnity. But that was too much to ask.

Before long Paris itself became the scene of action, and in January 1871 was besieged and bombarded. So much of Ruskin's work and affection had been given to French Gothic that he could not endure to think of his beloved Sainte Chapelle as being actually under fire--to say nothing of the horror of human suffering in a siege. He joined Cardinal (then Archbishop) Manning, Professor Huxley, Sir John Lubbock and James Knowles in forming a "Paris Food Fund," which shortly united with the Lord Mayor's committee for the general relief of the besieged. The day after writing on the Sainte Chapelle he attended the meeting of the Mansion House, and gave a subscription of 50. He followed events anxiously through the storm of the Commune and its fearful ending, angered at the fratricide and anarchy which no Mansion House help could avert or repair.