Ruskin and the religion of beauty

Front matter

RUSKIN

AND THE

RELIGION OF BEAUTY

Introduction

SOME years ago I was at Florence on the 7th 01 March, which is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella, greatest of all Dominican churches, are certain frescoes by Taddeo Gaddi and Simone Memmi, representing St. Thomas in triumph surrounded by his consistory of the seven celestial and the seven terrestrial sciences. What better day then, said I, to try and attain a sense of his contribution towards the schooling of human thought? Moreover the sun chanced to be shining brilliantly that morning on the domes of the "city of lilies," and sun is the one thing needful if all the several faces in the frescoes are to be distinguished, whether of apostles or of allegorical animals, — the Lord's hounds tearing the wolves of heresy, — or of wise men from Boethius, who resembles a leper, back even to Tubalcain, like nothing so much as an ourang-outang.

Wishing to be alone, I went as early as nine o'clock, and found the cloister deserted. The freshness of the morning and the monastic calm of the place made it a delicious resort. The grass, ever fading yet ever springing, gleamed green through x INTRODUCTION

the old fourteenth-century arches. The sacristan, intent equally on my peace and his own pocket, had closed the door with a wealth of bolts. Long silences followed the occasional clashing of the bells. . . .

For some little time I had been sauntering along that pavement of tombstones, which fringes the Chiostri Verdi, and I was approaching the Spanish Chapel, when a soft sound, rising and flowing, fell upon my ear, a murmur of words — speaking, reading — as in prayer. Had I been forestalled ? Suddenly in the luminous shadow I perceived outlines of girlish forms, youthful with Giottesque profiles, wearing sailor hats and little white veils, and all carrying bunches of mimosa in their hands. They were clustering together before the Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas y and one of them was reading:

Then the voice resumed the English text :

" I prayed and the Spirit of Wisdom came upon me. . . . The personal power of Wisdom ; the ao^la or Santa Sophia, to whom the first great Christian temple was dedicated. The higher wisdom, governing by her presence, all earthly conduct, and by her teaching, all earthly art, Florence tells you, she obtained only by prayer."

She read on for some time, passing from eloquent generalisations on the necessity of discipline in human

INTRODUCTION xi

thought to minutest observations on the fingers or the hair of this or that personage in the fresco, noting where they were retouched, studying the attitudes and the draperies, contrasting the calm air and dignity of the figure of Rhetoric with the extravagant gestures of the common people of Florence — "They try to make lips of their fingers," insanely hoping to " drag by vociferation whatever they would have out of man and God."

The audience listened intently, forming face with the precision of a Prussian platoon towards this figure or that, as the small red and gold book directed them. At times the voice rose even to invocation ; the muffled strains of an organ sounded from afar, the faint perfumes of flowers were wafted by like incense, and, touched with shafts of sunlight, the golden-tipped mimosas shone like tapers in their midst. I observed that the pilgrims had stationed themselves on the very sepulchral slab of those Spanish Ambassadors who give the chapel its name ; and the words they were reading seemed like a tuft of flowers springing from the dust of the past. What then was this book ? What this unknown liturgy ? Who the priest of this Religion of Beauty? The sacristan, returning a moment, muttered a name — Ruskin.

Another year, in London, after attending a Congress of Economists, I was resting in one of those Gothic drawing-rooms where sobriety is wed to comfort, and the claims of taste are satisfied without sacrifice of ease. The conversation turned on the xii INTRODUCTION

transformation wrought in everything by machinery, and especially in textures and embroideries which were formerly products of art, the work of thoughtful minds, and much more enduring in olden times when linen descended as patrimony from generation to generation. The machine-made textures of to-day, it was observed, do not last, — " for example, such as these little napkins," said one of the guests (needless to explain we were at tea.) — " But," answered our hostess, "you forget that this is Langdale linen." — "And my coat," said the master of the house, "is cloth made by the St. George's Guild." This was accepted as conclusive.

It was then that I first heard of a pretty little cottage in Westmoreland where the thread is spun on the old wheels of our grandmothers, and with the old looms woven by men into cloth. This hand-made fabric costs from two to six shillings a yard, and the money produced by its sale is paid into a bank, and the profits are divided among the workers at the end of the year. The household linen was all made there; while the coat of my host, the economist, was made of cloth carded, spun, and woven at the St. George's Mill at Laxey in the Isle of Man. Only the natural agency of water, working the mill, assists the human hand. Moreover the colour does not fade, for it is und}^ed, being natural to the black sheep of the island. Many English ladies have their stuffs made there, for they are very durable, and they have been manufactured without the smoke, noise,

INTRODUCTION xiii

or ugliness of machinery, among trees and green fields, in defiance of progress and of all the social and industrial movements of the age. And when I asked who was the founder of this guild, who the Titan or madman who had undertaken thus to turn the century back upon itself, I received in answer the name that I had heard in the Chios tri Verdi at Florence — RUSKIN. Here then was a man, at our very doors, just across the Channel, who held such empire in the British mind that he could attune it to the ecstatic visions of the Early Masters, and impose on life, style, economy, and even dress, ideas that were frankly retrograde. Fifty-four years ago he burst upon the world, armed with a book, and dashed into a conflict which speedily made him famous ; and since that epoch, in the threefold guise of writer, orator, and patron of village industries, he has stood forward preaching a threefold doctrine of aesthetics, morales, and social reform, or, rather let us say, talking at random over every subject under the sun, while his words have been collected with pious care, like drops of a martyr's blood, by admirers, male and female. His books, printed in large numbers notwithstanding their high price, diffused his ideas on nature, art, and life throughout Great Britain, and pirated editions sowed the seed away in the far West. The author's profits on this aesthetic venture amounted to .£4000 a year, and that profit was dedicated to promote the social venture of which he dreamed. There were founded Ruskin Reading xiv INTRODUCTION

Societies in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, to discuss his views, a journal to announce them, a special press, a Ruskin House in London to spread them abroad. At the same time artists occupied themselves in engraving his drawings, and writers in writing his life though he was yet alive, in expounding his doctrines though he had not done writing them, and in making selection from his works of Ruskiniana, of Birthday-books, of Guides to Museums, as well as of books for prize-givings. Already the railway time-tables for the Lake District advertised the hotels from which "the residence of Professor Ruskin" could be seen in the distance among the trees ; while, during strikes, passages from the works of the great aestheticist were thrown into the discussion. Mr. Frederick Harrison described him only the other day as "the brightest living genius, the most inspiring soul still extant among us " ; and not long ago the Principal of a college for girls declared at a school function that it was the writings of Ruskin that would make the nineteenth century famous to posterity.

Who is this man ? What is his work ? Apart from the merely curious interest that one cannot but feel, answers to these questions will be imperative to the future history of art. I set myself, therefore, to probe them more deeply than was possible by the perusal of the excellent study published by M. Milsand thirty-five years ago, at a time when Ruskin had written only one third of his works, lived only

INTRODUCTION xv

one half of his life and revealed only one aspect ot his thought. It seemed to me that for my purpose I ought not only to read and study those, who knew him best, and above all his most chosen disciple Mr. W. G. Collingwood, but more than that I must retrace through Europe and through the history of "^Esthetic" the path the master had trod. In Switzerland, at Florence, at Venice, at Amiens, on the banks of the Rhine or of the Arno, everywhere where he had worked I too worked after him, sometimes sketching over again the sketches whence he had drawn his theories and his examples, waiting for the same light he had waited for, always seeking, as it were, on the eternal monuments the fugitive shadows of his thought. Then for several years I delayed to write until his system dawned upon me no longer as a delicious medley but as a harmony of great lines, like those Alpine mountains which he loved so well. In their midst all is but chaos ; gradually, as we recede, they blend and unite till they stand on the horizon, only a " little blue film " yet "itself a world."

RUSKIN

PART I HIS PERSONALITY

Chapter I Contemplation

The guardian of the gates of Schaffhausen was awakened one summer night in 1833 by tne noise of a postchaise. He sulkily opened or half opened the barriers at the entreaty of the belated travellers, and the carriage passed through in such haste that it smashed one of its lamps, and at once disappeared into the town. When it reached the hotel a courier alighted, and with him an English gentleman with his wife, a little girl, a boy of fourteen, and a maid ; and all quickly sought their rooms. The following day was Sunday, and they would have to be up in the morning for Church.

The names which the hotel-keeper wrote the next day on his list would have revealed nothing to any one, and the information he obtained about the new arrivals from the courier, Salvador, was quite commonplace. If he had been told that the gentleman in question was Mr. John James Ruskin, who had his name writ fair on a brass plate in Billiter Street as the head of the firm Ruskin, Telford & Domecq, that he was one of the largest sherry importers of his day and among the most scrupulous merchants of his country, that the lady accompanying him was his wife nee Miss Margaret Cox, the boy his only son John, and the little girl, Mary, an orphan niece, and that they all were Tory and Jacobite in politics and Presbyterian in religion, this bare statement of facts would have seemed fraught with little interest for the history of Art. It might have been added also that the family was somewhat unsociable, giving itself up entirely to the contemplation of the beauties of Nature, while aesthetical enthusiasm was its principal characteristic.

The city merchants would assuredly have been vastly astonished had they been made aware that Mr. John James Ruskin, so exact in his counting-house, so punctual in his payments, and so good a judge of sherry, cherished the aspirations of an artist. But the fact is, that within his own doors he was at once transformed into an enthusiastic and imaginative being. He would rapidly wash in a water-colour, or, taking up some new writing of Walter Scott's, or some old piece of Shakespeare, would read it aloud to his wife and son in a rhythmic and impassioned voice. In bygone years night had often found him stooping over engravings of Prout or Turner, or with maps of Switzerland or Italy open under the lamp, dreaming of journeys not at that time to be accomplished, to the lands where mountains gleam so white and waves sleep so blue.

When Mrs. Ruskin came on the scene her persuasive eloquence recalled him to that preoccupation of moneymaking, which Englishmen are so fain to call their duty. Mrs. Ruskin was a first cousin of her husband, and by four years his senior. Having known her from childhood, it was borne in on him one day that she was exactly the kind of wife he needed. He told her so, and arranged with her that they should postpone their marriage until the family debts were paid, the business well established, and the horizon free from clouds. They waited nine years. At last came an evening when, perceiving that he had a credit balance to his account, Mr. John James Ruskin listened to the dictates of his heart. The young people were married after their supper, and so secretly that the servants discovered it only the next day when they left together for Edinburgh. Such a strange blend of phlegm and sensibility — of romantic fidelity and practical common sense — gave Mr. Ruskin his distinct individuality among his fellow-merchants, and enabled him to save the honour of his family by paying all his father's debts, and to bequeath to his son at the same time two hundred thousand pounds and that worship of Nature which was to become the most marked characteristic of the great writer.

To the child that Nature was revealed only on rare occasions, as a queen appearing on high days and holidays. He used to see her either when visiting his aunts at Croydon, where the view was so beautiful that he cried out to his astonished mother it seemed as if his eyes were coming out of his head, — or at Perth, where the gardens stretching down to the river Tay first enchanted his view. Then the black curtain of London fog fell again upon these visions. But later, when his parents left the town for the suburbs and settled on the edge of the Surrey slopes at Heme Hill, the beauty of inanimate things became more familiar to him. From his father's windows on one side he could see a rich undulating country of green meadows and trees, with houses sprinkled here and there in the foreground, and on the other side his eye could range over London and beyond it towards Windsor and Harrow. The simple comfortable house was surrounded by a garden with well-trimmed lawns sloping to an orchard full of cherries and mulberries, " decked with magical splendour of abundant fruit; fresh green, soft amber, and rough bristled crimson bending the spinous branches; clustered pearl and pendent ruby joyfully discoverable under the large leaves that looked like vine," altogether a delicious garden which seemed a terrestrial paradise to the child. "All the fruit was forbidden, and there were no companionable beasts." His instinctive taste for form and colour was no longer restricted to tapestry designs and constructions in brick. " In the garden when the weather was fine, my time there was chiefly passed in the same kind of close watching of the ways of plants. I had not the smallest taste lor growing them, or taking care of them, any more than for taking care of the birds, or the trees, or the sky, or the sea. My whole time was passed in staring at them, or into them. In no morbid curiosity, but in admiring wonder, I pulled every flower to pieces till I knew all that could be seen of it with a child's eye."

As shy and retiring in society as successful in business, Mr. John James Ruskin lived much alone, happy in the companionship of the romantic and legendary creations of his favourite authors. His wife, who had been brought up amongst people inferior to the Ruskins, was not at home amongst her new connections. Too intelligent to ignore the fact and too proud to submit to it, she determined to renounce the world, — a religious and devoted mother who kept the Christian Treasury on her table and the hatred of the Pope in her heart, abhorring the theatre and adoring flowers, uniting the spirit of Martha to that of Mary, indefatigable, well regulated, living only for her husband and her son. To avoid separation from the latter during his university career, she brought herself to live a stranger in Oxford, watching continually to save him from all pain, even should she unman him, and from all danger, at risk of taking from him the power to avoid it. Each day with order and regularity she gave him a Bible lesson, and revealed to him by degrees that light of the Old and New Testament which has ever shone on the summits of his achievement. The child had not a conception of what care was. The Ruskins never spent more than the half of their income, and were free from all money troubles. Finding all their joy in admiration, they were ignorant of the pangs of jealousy and ambition. To live in a cottage and to taste the " healthy delight of uncovetous admiration " in visiting Warwick Castle was a greater happiness to them than "to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at." Their even temperaments were warmed to enthusiasm only by ideas or by the contemplation of Nature. "Never," says their son, "had I heard my father's or mother's voice once raised in any question with each other. I had never heard a servant scolded." " Under such gentle discipline there reigned in this house peace, obedience, and faith."

Shielded from all external trouble, the artistic taste of the boy was refined into a sort of ecstatic habit which was encouraged by the perpetual novelty of travel. Every year Mr. J. J. Ruskin started in the month of May on a business tour. His wife, who never allowed him to encounter fatigue alone, went with him ; little John was seated between them on the portmanteau, with the maid in the dickey behind ; and the whole family posted off. Every evening, when his commercial business was over, Mr. J. J. Ruskin took his son out to see the ruins, the castles or the

I. CONTEMPLATION g

cathedrals on their route. They read poetry, they made drawings. At five years old, John visited the Scottish lakes ; at six years he went to France, and at Paris was present at the fetes of the coronation of Charles X. ; he saw the field of Waterloo ; and then he returned to England, taking notes and sketches. He described the colleges and chapels and music at Oxford, the tomb of Shakespeare, and a pin manufactory at Birmingham, drew sketches of Blenheim or of Warwick Castle; and thus explored the world in all its attractive and picturesque variety, at an age when little French boys worry their heads over the dead names on their maps. Not long after we find him writing verses comparing Skiddaw and the Pyramids, which certainly would not be attributed to an ordinary child of ten years.

" The touch of man Raised pigmy mountains, but gigantic tombs. The touch of Nature raised the mountain's brow But made no tombs at all."

At Heme Hill he passed the long winter months dreaming over Turner's illustrations to Rogers' Italy, and a violent desire took possession of him to know in what aliquas partes materia the great seer had seen his vision. In the valleys of Clifton or of Matlock in Derbyshire he made collections of minerals, calculated heights, and watched reflections. And all that he perceived with a mind so precocious and overflowing, he loved with a heart strangely virgin and void ; for he had little sentiment for his family. " My io HIS PERSONALITY

mother herself, finding her chief personal pleasure in her flowers, was often planting or pruning beside me, at least if I chose to stay beside her. . . . Her presence was no restraint to me, but also no particular pleasure, for, from having always been left so much alone, I had generally my own affairs to see after." Sixty years afterwards he sadly exclaims, " I had nothing to love. My parents were in a sort visible powers of nature to me, no more loved than the sun and the moon." And as a child he knew no one else. Even when travelling the Ruskins lived apart from their fellows and preferred watching the great poet Wordsworth from behind the pillar of a church, to asking for an introduction. " We did not travel for adventures, nor for company, but to see with our eyes, and to measure with our hearts." Their mode of travelling enabled them to see everything thoroughly, and their ignorance of foreign languages prevented them from regarding the people from any other than the picturesque point of view. They found a peculiar charm in the very fact of being unable to understand the speech of those around them. For so they noted each gesture but for its beauty, each voice but for its music, and neither one nor the other for its significance.

Trained in this special manner, all the child's faculties tended to one result — an acute sensibility, a power of minute analysis of landscape and figures. He could not love his little cousin because she had ringlets, which are not in accordance with true taste.

I. CONTEMPLATION n

Should he be taken to pay a visit, he would give no attention to the guests, but think of nothing but the pictures which decorated the room. Presently at Oxford he could not bear the sight of certain of his tutors and comrades, because their features were not strongly enough marked, and he listened only to such professors as were endowed with some resemblance to the " Erasmus " of Holbein or the " Melancthon " of Diirer. With a talent for geometry, that science of dimensions that can be seen and touched, he stopped short on the threshold of algebra, for it only deals with the relations of abstract terms. His estimate of things depended entirely on their relation to his idea of beauty and the pain or pleasure communicated by them to the eye ; and it is easy to understand how any strong aesthetical impression received at this period of his youth, would determine his whole life. If the full glory of Nature should once open out before him, — not in her grey northern raiment but in the blue blazonry of the south, not with painted face and tired head as in the vicinity of large towns, but in all the naked majesty of her first savageness, — then hers he would be mind and heart and soul, and theirs who, like Turner, should have revealed her to him.

This ardour without an assured object, this hope for one knows not what, this flame that burns without giving light, — have we not all had experience of these when at twenty we have begun to ask what shall be done with our years ? This was the state of young John Ruskin's mind at fourteen, when he arrived that summer's night at Schaffhausen, with his father, his mother, and his cousin Mary. He had longed eagerly for this journey. At Strasburg it had been a question between Basle and Schaffhausen. " Schaffhausen," he cried. " My impassioned petition at last carried it, and the earliest morning saw us trolling over the bridge of boats to Kehl, and in the eastern light I well remember watching the line of the Black Forest hills enlarge and rise, as we crossed the plain of the Rhine. 1 Gates of the Hills/ opening for me a new life to cease no more, except at the Gates of the Hills whence one returns not." Let us now hear how he relates his impressions of Eternal Beauty. It seems as though we hear the tremor in his voice even after fifty years.

" It was past midnight when we reached the closed gates. None of us seemed to have thought the Alps would have been visible without profane exertion in climbing hills. We dined at four as usual, and the evening being entirely fine, went out to walk, all of us — my father and mother and Mary and I. We must have still spent some time in town-seeing, for it was drawing towards sunset when we got up to some sort of garden promenade — west of the town I believe, and high above the Rhine, so as to command the open country across it to the south and west. At which open country of low undulation, far into blue, gazing as at one of our own distances from Malvern of Worcestershire, or Dorking of Kent — suddenly — behold — beyond ! There was no thought in any of us for a moment of their being clouds. They were clear as crystal, sharp on the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by the sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought or dreamed — the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful to us; not more awful, round heaven, the sacred walls of Death. Thus in perfect health of life and fire of heart, not wanting to be anything but the boy I was, not wanting to have anything more than I had; knowing of sorrow only just so much as to make life serious to me, not enough to slacken in the least its sinews ; and with so much of science mixed with feeling as to make the sight 01 the Alps not only the revelation of the beauty of the earth, but the opening of the first page of its volume, I went down that evening from the garden-terrace of Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed in all of it that was to be sacred and useful. To that terrace, and the shore of the lake of Geneva, my heart and faith return to this day, in every impulse that is yet nobly alive in them, and every thought that has in it help or peace."

From that moment the contemplation of Nature was to absorb his whole life. It would be no longer a distraction, a flirtation with the vague and marvellous, but a vocation, a progress towards the attainment of the ideal. All his first essays, written between the ages of fifteen and twenty, in the scientific journal of the time, the Magazine of Natural History, on the causes of the colour of the Rhine water, on the stratification of Mont Blanc, on the convergence of perpendicular lines, or on meteorology, are signed Rata Phusin (according to Nature). The history of Ruskin's career is the history of his relations with Nature, and of the journeys which year by year he undertook in the company of his parents during twothirds of his lifetime, and, when they were dead, alone. He does not have recourse to Nature as a refuge from weariness and disenchantment, or as a distraction for weary hours, but he goes in the full force of his age as to a goddess who gives joy to youth. She is not only the consoler in love, she is his love itself.

" I had a pleasure, as early as I can remember, and continuing till I was eighteen or twenty, infinitely greater than any which has since been possible to me in anything; comparable for intensity only to the joy of a lover in being near a noble and kind mistress, but no more explicable or definable than that feeling of love itself. I never thought of Nature as God's work, but as a separate fact of existence. This sentiment was, according to its strength, inconsistent with every evil feeling, with spite, anger, covetousness, discontent, and every other hateful passion, but would associate itself deeply with every just and noble sorrow, joy, or affection.

" Although there was no definite religious sentiment mingled with it, there was a continual perception of sanctity in the whole of Nature from the slightest thing to the vastest ; an instinctive awe, mingled with delight; an indefinable thrill, such as we sometimes imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit. I could only feel this perfectly when I was alone ; and then it would often make me shiver from head to foot with the joy and fear of it, when after being some time away from the hills, I first got to the shore of a mountain river, where the brown water circled among the pebbles, or when I saw the first swell of distant land against the sunset, or the first low broken wall, covered with mountain moss. I cannot in the least describe the feeling; but I do not think this is my fault, nor that of the English language, for I am afraid no feeling is describable. If we had to explain even the sense of bodily hunger to a person who had never felt it, we should be hard put to it for words ; and this joy in nature seemed to me to come of a sort of hearthunger, satisfied with the presence of a great and holy Spirit. . . . The feeling cannot be described by any of us that have it. Wordsworth's ' haunted me like a passion' is no description of it, for it is not like, but zs, a passion ; the point is to define how it differs from other passions, what sort of human, pre-eminently human feeling it is that loves a stone for a stone's sake and a cloud for a cloud's. A monkey loves a monkey for a monkey's sake, and a nut for the kernel's, but not a stone for a stone's. I took stones for bread."