Ruskin and the English lakes

Front matter

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

THE GIFT OF

II ^1^ t

^^^3

H^^H

I^J

1^

1^1

From Photo, by Barraud.

JOHN RUSKIN, AETAT 63.

By the Rev.

H. D. Rawnsley

Author of "Literary Associations of the English Lakes"

"Life and Nature at the English Lakes"

"Memories of the Tennysons"

etc., etc.

Glasgow James MacLehose and Sons

Publishers to the University I 90 I

A' I ^HHt.G>

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRBSS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO.

MARION TWELVES

A DEVOTED FRIEND AND DISCIPLE OF

JOHN RUSKIN, WHO HAS EARNESTLY TRIED TO

CARRY INTO DAILY PRACTICE THE

SPIRIT AND PRINCIPLES OF

HIS TEACHING

Prefatory Note

I WISH to thank Mr. W. S. Collingwood for the great help his Biography and his Notes in the Catalogue of the Coniston Exhibition afforded me, and Mr. George Allen for his courtesy in allowing me to quote sundry passages in the works of John Ruskin. The hymns sung at Raskin's funeral and the poems written on the occasion of his death will be found in the Appendix.

H. D. R.

Crosthwaite Vicarage, September, igoi.

CHAPTER X. The Memorial Cross at Coniston, . . . 219

Memorial Poems, 231

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Professor John Ruskin, Frontispiece

Brantwood, 32

Ruskin's Wayside Resting Place, 64

Ruskin's Bedroom at Brantwood, 96

Ruskin's Study, Brantwood, 112

Miss Twelves' Cottage at Crosthwaite, Keswick, 136

The Keswick School of Industrial Arts, 144

In Coniston Church before the Funeral, 200

The Ruskin Memorial at Friars' Crag,

Keswick, 208

The Graves of John Ruskin and the Ladies

OF THE ThwaITE, - 224

Chapter I. Ruskin And The English Lakes

RusKiN first saw the English Lakes in 1824, when as a child of five and a half years old he journeyed in Mr. Telford's comfortable travelling coach with his mother and father and the Scotch nurse Anne from London to the north.

What wine business the firm of Ruskin, Telford & Domecq hoped to do at Keswick I know not, but if it was to start the son of the younger partner in his own business in life, the visit was eventful and well rewarded. For it was on this visit that the little lad, scrambling about at Friars' Crag in charge of his nurse, felt the scene so appeal to him as to make him from that hour ' a dedicated spirit ' to the beauty and the wonders of Nature.

Writing of that visit long years after, Ruskin said : " The first thing that I remember as an event in Hfe was being taken by my nurse to the brow of Friars' Crag, Derwentwater. 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 has associated itself more or less with all twining roots of trees ever since." How deep was the impression made upon his child mind by that visit to Friars' Crag we know from a passage in Praeterita, where speaking of another lad he says, "With their son five years old, just at the age when I look back to the creation of the world for me in Friars' Crag, Derwentwater."

Two years later, in 1826, the seven-year-old boy-poet, — for in this year he composed his first poem,— found himself again sitting on his clothes- box between his mother and father, driving for his summer tour to Perth, and for the second time he visited the English Lakes.

What he saw we know not, though it is pretty certain that he would make some notes in childish fashion in his diary. In 1830, at eleven years old, observer now of men and Nature, he again comes to Windermere, Keswick, Ullswater, and Coniston. The careful record of that journey which he and his sister-cousin Mary kept between them is preserved, and a poem in four books, begun the 28th of November, 1830, and finished nth January, 1832, entitled the Iteriad, gives us in rhyme the facts of the diary.

That journey to the Lakes, so far as its strength of impression went, was perhaps the most remarkable of any he ever took. He had already felt the added pleasure that human association gives to scenery. His parents seem to have called out his early passion for romance in localities, by judiciously putting into his hands the books or tales embodying the spirit of the scenes. Readers of Praeterita will remember how Ruskin more than half a century after, writing of that Iteriad journey, says, — " There was one district however — that of the Cumberland lakes, which needed no charm of association to deepen the appeal to realities. I have said somewhere that my first memory in life was Friars' Crag on Derwentwater : meaning I suppose my first memory of things afterwards chiefly precious to me : at all events I knew Keswick before I knew Perth, and after the Perth days were ended my mother and I stayed either there at the Roval Oak, or at Low- wood Inn, or at

Coniston, Waterhead, while my father went on his business journeys to Whitehaven, Lancaster, Newcastle, and other northern towns."

" The inn at Coniston was then actually at the upper end of the lake, the road from Ambleside to the village passing just between it and the water, and the view of the long reach of lake with its softly wooded lateral hills had for my father a tender charm with which he afterwards regarded the lakes of Italy. Low- wood Inn also was then little more than a country cottage, and Ambleside a rural village : and the absolute peace and bliss which anyone who cared for grassy hills and for sweet waters might find at every footstep, and every turn of the crag or bend of bay was totally unlike anything I ever saw or read of elsewhere."

The more one reads the boy's poem the more one is struck with the way in which that little lad of eleven saw and noted what was really best worth seeing in the district. The main features of the scene of Derwentwater and its isles from Latrigg, the summit of Skiddaw, with its loose shales and its bitter wind-blown ridge, are faithfully described, though he was in error in taking a buzzard for an eagle. We almost feel the boy's delight when at the descent to Troutbeck Bridge in

a thrice happy moment,

" Windermere's sheet In its bright sylvan beauty lay stretched at his feet."

He did not know it, but the same little stream that crosses the road and sings its way to the lake shore near Low-wood, by which Wordsworth and his sister rested and rejoiced when they first made their walking tour to the lakes at the beginning of the century, attracted his eyes and charmed his heart :

"So fair was the wood on which now we did gaze, Admiring the flowery moss-carpeted maze. And there a small streamlet with verdant banks sung."

He notes the poplars — alas, long since fallen — at Low-wood, the blue of the Langdale Pikes and Scafell, the glory of the sunset as seen from Low-wood. At Grasmere, Butterlip How as a vantage ground attracts him. He sees the rills innumerable that are such a feature of the western side of the vale. This same fellside jewelry of streams he notes on Helvellyn : " Helvellyn, Helvellyn that mountain of might." He speaks of these streamlets on the flanks of Helvellyn like "threads of pure silver which hung from the sky." The "heathy swells," which afterwards Matthew Arnold immortalised on the Armboth fells, do not escape him. The famous view of Derwentwater from the hill below the moor, which made Gray the poet almost wish to turn back and stay a little longer at Keswick, impresses him deeply. Friars' Crag he revisits without his nurse, and notices the way the boats, as they swing at their anchorage, divide the ripples. He observes the net-like weaving of the fir, oak, and elm roots above the rocks at Friars' Crag. He is indignant that the washerwomen of Keswick should disfigure the scene by turning Friars' Crag and its trees and their boughs into a drying ground for their linen. He loses his way in Cockshott, but climbs Castle Head. Its sun- wasted turf, its wind-blown knotted oak trees, its wild flowers, all these are remembered. He makes a point of seeing Southey, and does this by going to church at Crosthwaite, " as much for the poet as the preaching" :

" His hair was no colour at all by the way, But half oft was black slightly scattered with grey, His eyes were as black as a coal, but in turning They flashed — ay, as much as a coal does in burning ; His nose in the midst took a small outward bend. Rather hooked like an eagle's and sharp at the end."

The boy's eyes miss nothing. Up Borrodale he sees the great Bowder, or " Bauta " stone, and at once compares its poised mass to a ship's keel. The sternness of Honister Crag strikes him ; the swift goings on of a thunderstorm at Buttermere, where

" The plunge of foam On the lake's swelling bosom was dazzlingly thrown,"

are chronicled. He returns by Patterdale and Kirkstone to Low-wood, evidently impressed by the beauty of the houses at Clappersgate and the Croft. Already his mind is busy with the question of how far houses add to or take away from wild mountain scenes, which he worked out afterwards in Tke Poetry of Architecture, by his essay on the Westmoreland cottage. He goes from Low-wood for an excusion to Coniston. He describes with curious accuracy the hobblety, clumsy, huge-oared boat at the Windermere ferry ; thinks they charged too much for toll there, as they charged too much for the hotel bill at Coniston. But the rain comes on, a veritable " laker," the fells are lost in storm, still the young journal-maker cannot help noting how the ghylls foam down over the fell face up by Tilberthwaite, and what a sound of brooks is in the valley. As the carriage climbs back out of the vale for home and Low-wood, he gazes back upon the Coniston lake, is struck by the beauty of rain-cloud and mist-hidden shores, and notes the way in which

" The mountains all mistily softened away Appeared like thin clouds at the dawn of the day,"

while

" Darker and deeper in bolder relief, As nearer approaching and rising the chief, The mighty Old Man with his dark summit reft. Closing the prospect arose on the left."

It is not great poetry truly, but it shows accuracy in observation, and the boy's heart is full to overflowing, for " among these mountains he has felt the strength of his desire," and he concludes his long Iteriad with the lines :

" Farewell to the lake, and farewell to the mountain. The tarn and the torrent, the fell and the fountain. To the deeps of the dell and the wood-shaded shore, Thou land of the mountain I see thee no more,"

The Lakeland scenery ' haunted him like a passion' for the next seven years of his life. The streams he loved to track to their source, the hills he loved to climb to their utmost heights in Westmoreland and Cumberland, were a perpetual presence that disturbed him as it had disturbed Wordsworth's boyhood before him with sense of something far more deeply interfused :

" Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man."

We find the boy-poet, after a two years' absence from the mountains, pouring forth the yearnings of his heart for mountain glory, and turning not to the ' blue hills ' that his baby ears had heard sung, and his young eyes had seen beyond the Tweed, nor to the nobler heights and vaster solitudes of Wales, but to the hills of Cumberland and Westmoreland that should be his companions unto the end. He writes :

" I weary for the fountain foaming, For shady holme and hill, My mind is on the mountain roaming. My spirit's voice is still.

I weary for the woodland brook

That wanders thro' the vale, I weary for the heights that look

Adown upon the dale.

The crags are lone on Coniston

And Glaramara's dell.

And dreary on the mighty one.

The cloud-enwreathed Sea-fell.

Oh, what although the crags are stern,

Their mighty peaks that sever, Fresh iiies the breeze on mountain fern,

And free on mountain heather.

I long to tread the mountain head

Above the valley swelling, I long to feel the breezes sped

From grey and gaunt Helvellyn.

There is a thrill of strange delight

That passes quivering o'er me, When blue hills rise upon the sight

Like summer clouds before me."

That desire to see the hills rise in the distance remained with him into later life, and no matter how beautiful the wide-spread plain of sun and shadow might be, if it failed at its horizon line to give promise of blue hills, he could not feel the scene had an enduring interest for him.

The boy of fourteen who from the neighbourhood of mighty London with all its attraction for boy life could ' weary ' for the lake and lakeland hills and streams was no ordinary boy. A gift of Rogers' Italy illustrated by Turner in the same year sent him wild with desire to see grander heights and deeper vales and more majestic rivers, but though with Turner's sketches and De Saussure's Ascent of Mont

RUSKIN AND THE ENGLISH LAKES. n

Blanc in hand he went twice to the continent before he became a Christ Church undergraduate, his love of the English lakes remained unshaken, and we find him in 1837, in his first long-vacation, bound for the North with his father, and back again at Keswick.

Speaking of this period of his life in Praeterita, Ruskin tells us that in that northern tour and at Catterick Bridge, he felt for the last time that pure childish love of Nature which Wordsworth so idly takes for an intimation of Immortality. "It is," he says, "a feeling only possible in youth, for all care, regret, or knowledge of evil destroys it, and it requires also the full sensibility, sensibility of nerve and blood, the conscious strength of heart and hope."

"In myself," he continues, "it has always been quite exclusively confined to wild, that is to say, wholly natural places, and especially to scenery animated by streams or by the sea."

Ruskin, after assuring us that in 1837 he finds himself, in his primal passion for wild nature, unchanged from that day when in his northern tour he stood by the stream side at Catterick Bridge, and saw east and west the rising of the hills that foretold the presence of the Yorkshire moors, goes on to insist on the curious joy he felt in returning to the scenes of his boyhood. "No boy could possibly have been more excited than I was by seeing Italy and the Alps, neither boy nor man ever knew better the difference between a Cumberland cottage and Venetian palace, or a Cumberland stream and the Rhone. My very knowledge of this difference will be found next year expressing itself in the first bit of promising literary work I ever did, but after all the furious excitement and wild joy of the contrast, the coming back to a Yorkshire streamside felt like returning to Heaven." He adds, "We went on into well-known Cumberland, my father took me up Scafell and Helvellyn with a clever Keswick guide, who knew mineralogy, Mr. Wright, and the summer passed beneficently and peacefully."

I never pass Wright's grave beside the resting-place of Jonathan Otley in the Crosthwaite Churchyard, without a kind of sense that I owe him thanks I cannot pay for all he did for his young undergraduate pupil on the slopes of Scafell in 1837, and through him to those of us who have listened to the Master discourse on the wonders of crystal growth and the beauty of agate and spar.

It was very well that Ruskin had seen Italy before he came to Yorkshire and the English Lakes in 1837. For the contrast between the cottages of Westmoreland and Italy set him thinking upon a subject which half of his future life was to be spent in discoursing of, " The Architecture of the Nations of Europe considered in its Association with Natural Scenery and National Character."

I have sometimes thought that it was fortunate that on the woody promontories of Derwentwater there were at that time what he describes as " staring square-windowed fiatroofed gentlemen's seats of the lath and plaster mock-magnificent Regent's Park description," and that on the shores of Coniston Lake there stood in its old-world beauty the solid-chimneyed substantial hall and farmhouse in one, to which tradition has it Sir Philip Sidney came in days of yore. For the former made him think seriously of what kind of country house ought not to be builded at the English Lakes, and the latter as he sketched it gave him thoughts about chimney building in general as expressive of a nation's life, and of the extraordinary fitness and beauty of the chimneys of our Westmoreland and Cumberland farms and cottages.

Little enough did the young draughtsman, as he sketched Coniston Hall with a view to illustrating 'A Chapter on Chimneys,' think that that old building by the lake side should be one day a principal feature in the view from his study window at Brantwood.

It was a happy chance that he determined to put down his notes of lakeland travel in the form of a series of articles for Loudon's Architectural Magazine. It obliged him to use his pencil.

One of the many sketches made in this summer, ' A Ruin at Ambleside,' has been reproduced in the Poems, and we can see the influence of his teacher Prout in every line of it.

If one turns to the first serious piece of Art criticism he attempted, in ' The Poetry of Architecture,' one is much struck by the precocity of his right judgment, as well as by the originality of his treatment of the subject, but one is more struck by the beauty of his English. He had read his Bible and his Johnson to some purpose ; and it was a happy thing that writing under the nom de plume of ' Kata Phusin ' he should in so short a phrase have foreshadowed his whole life's work.

His happiest hunting ground for the ideal and idyllic mountain cottage appears to have been Troutbeck and Scandale, and very fortunate it was that he came into the country before the hand of modern improvement and the cottage - built- by- contract business had superseded such efforts of the dalesmen to meet the needs of generation after generation by alteration and addition to their farms and cottages, as they themselves with the help of village joiner and waller could effect. The charm of the cottage of Westmoreland and Cumberland was that it was lowly in its own eyes, a natural product, a thing that had grown up in perfect harmony with its surroundings, strong to withstand the wear and tear of mountain storms, and glad to emphasise by the curl of its living smoke-wreath the loneliness of its solitude.

But I expect its chief charm in Ruskin's eyes was that in all its characteristics it told the nature of the men who dwelt therein. Men of sturdy, enduring, self-dependent mind, who cared little for show and hated all sham. " The uncultivated mountaineer of Cumberland," says Ruskin, at the end of his chapter on 'The Mountain Cottage,' "has no taste and no idea of what architecture means. He never thinks of what is right and what is beautiful, but he builds what is most adapted to his purpose and most easily erected ; by suiting the building to the use of his own life he gives it humility, and by raising it with the nearest material adapts it to its situation."

The prophet of the 'beauty of use, and use of beauty ' found at the age of eighteen in our lakeland hills texts which he could preach from all his life ; and certainly laid here in the summer tours of 1837 and the following year, the foundation-stone of much of his Art criticism.

Ruskin had seen, but he had not at this date ■ spoken with Wordsworth. One can easily imagine after perusing Wordsworth's guide to the scenery of the Lakes, and notably his chapter on the cottages of the Lake country, with what gladness the old Rydalian bard would have welcomed in this younger poet and prophet of the English Lakes so staunch a supporter of his own views.

" These humble dwellings," says Wordsworth, " remind the contemplative spectator of a production of Nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected ; the houses rise by an instinct of their own out of the natural rock."

And again, "These dwellings, mostly built of rough unhewn stone, are roofed with slates which were rudely taken from the quarrybefore the present art of splitting them was understood, and are therefore rough and uneven in their surface, so that both the coverings and sides of the houses have furnished places of rest for the seeds of lichens, mosses, ferns, and flowers. Hence buildings which in their very form call to mind the processes of Nature, do thus, clothed in part with vegetable garb, appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields, and by their colour and shape effectively direct the thought to that tranquil course of Nature and simplicity along which the humble-minded inhabitants have through so many generations been led." On one matter, however, young Ruskin and the old poet would have agreed to disagree. Wordsworth loved the peculiar build of chimneys that came in with the Flemings, "square up hauf waay and round th' tother." He took care that the chimneys of Foxhow should be so builded. He saw "a pleasing harmony between a tall chimney of this circular form and the living column of smoke ascending through the still air." But, though Ruskin rejoiced in the serviceableness and solidity of the broad-based Lake country chimneys, and the quaint way in which they were built out on stone corbels at the end of the cottage rooftrees, he disliked cylindrical chimneys, because they put him in mind of ' glass-houses and manufactories,' yet even he was won to admit that when the cylindrical chimney was broadly based, and the base carried right down to the ground as in Coniston Hall, there was a lightness and . picturesqueness given to the distant outline of the mass, which was fit and pleasing.

He set seriously to work upon his notes on The Poetry of Architecture as soon as he returned in the October term to Oxford. It was probably for the sake of these essays he came again to the Lakes in the following summer of 1838. How well in these tours he got to know the heart of our hills and dales, may be gathered from a letter written to a friend from Oxford under date July 31, 1840. "In Cumberland everybody climbs Skiddaw, so of course you will if you can. Ascend the following mountains also, Helvellyn, Causey Pike, Scawfell, Langdale Pikes, Coniston Man, and the Pillar of Ennerdale. Do not miss Helvellyn on any account, and go up the Thirlmere side, descending to Patterdale if you like, but on no account ascending

RUSKIN AND THE ENGLISH LAKES.

from Patterdale. I could tell you why if I had room which I have not, so trust me.

" The other peaks are named in the order of their claims to ascent. I think very highly of the view from Causey Pike. The Pillar I have not myself ascended, but I know so many places from which it is seen that the view must be very fine. Take care and don't break your legs or your nose on Scawfell, he is an awkward fellow and you may stick between his loose rocks like Gulliver in the narrow bone." He probably did not know as he penned this letter that Robert Southey always praised the view from Causey Pike, but it is to be hoped that his friend, instead of climbing the Pillar, took the advice of some one who had so done and contented himself with ' Green Gable ' instead.

" When you are at Keswick," he continues, "and inclined for a long walk, go up the meadows behind Walla Crag till you get near the top. Keep straight on the top of the crags towards the head of the lake, catching the view of Derwentwater down the ravines — which if it be not cloudy are the finest things in the neighbourhood. When you have passed the top of the crag, keep to your right, a little as if you wanted to get down to the shore ; and don't slip, for it is very smooth and steep and once off you would either roll into the lake or get a most disagreeable bruising on a debris of crag at the bottom. In a little while you will come to a cart-road, follow it up to your left till you come to a stone bridge. Sit down on the rocks above it, or in the water if you like it better, and eat your lunch, and when you have done it, look about you, for of all the landscapes I ever saw in my life, I think the view of Derwentwater and Skiddaw from that spot with the bridge for a front object is the best piece of composition. When you have rested go up further still. The cart-road will take you over the crags above Lodore, on which you may sit and kick your heels a little longer, and mind the ants, for they are very big. When you have got down to the stream of Lodore, you will get the view of the lake through the chasm, a favourite bit of Southey's, and very tolerable indeed.

"Then walk up to Watendlath and, when you have seen the tarn, back to Lodore, and boat it up to Keswick. I shall not tell you any more because I know travellers always take their own way whatever advice they get."

Ruskin's accurate remembrance of localities and their features is seen in this letter. In a later letter he speaks of Catchedecam and Styhead and shews he had not then gained scientific knowledge of our hill names. H e makes one very curious mistake, which Sir Walter Scott in his poem The Bridal of Triermain had made before him, in miscalling Blencathra, Glaramara. He half recovers himself, for he says, " There is another name which I forget, but it is a noble hill, a glorious hill, an Olympian mountain, but deuced boggy."

His love of mineralogy comes out in this letter. He asks if his friend as he came over Styhead looked for garnets? "There are plenty of them by the side of the road. Wastwater," he says, " unless on a very fine day, is a very black hole, nothing of a lake ; but I have seen more beautiful atmospheric effects on the Screes above, than on any hills in the country."

As postscript to the former letter he speaks very highly of his old guide, the geologist Wright, and he shews that he knew his man, for Wright, so tradition has it, was given "to stretch it a laal bit," as Cumbrians say. " Wright at Keswick knows more about the country than any other guide ; but don't believe all he tells you about anything but rocks."

Nine years went by before Ruskin's next visit to the Lakes. In the interval his father had removed from Heme to Denmark Hill. He had travelled and studied much, and had become famous as the writer of Modern Painters, the first volume of which appeared in the spring of 1 84 1, and the second in 1846.

Worn out by the labour of this second volume, he returned from a tour to the Continent with his parents in October of that year, refreshed in body but not in mind, but was soon busy upon work for the Quarterly. He had been placed by Lockhart upon the staff of that periodical, and there is reason to believe that immensely attracted to Lockhart by reason of Lockhart's love for Sir Walter Scott, he was more attracted by reason of his own admiration for Lockhart's daughter.

The little, high foreheaded Charlotte Lockhart, so he tells us in Praeterita, had become to him a Scottish fairy, a White Lady and witch of the fatallest sort, but though he used to see her sometimes at Lady Davy's he never could contrive to come to any serious speech with her, and at last with his usual wisdom in such matters, went away into Cumberland to recommend himself to her by writing for The Quarterly Review. The book he undertook to review was Lord Lindsay's Christian Art; the place where he determined to write his review was Ambleside.

" I went," says he, " in the early Spring to the Salutation at Ambleside then (this was in 1847) yet a country village, and its inn a country inn. But there, whether it was the grilled salmon for breakfast or too prolonged reflection on the Celestial Hierarchies, I fell into a state of despondency till then unknown to me, of which I knew not the like till fourteen years afterwards. The whole morning was painfully spent in balancing phrases, and from my boat in the afternoons on Wipdermere it appeared to me that the water was leaden and the hills low."