Ruskin's Sesame and lilies; three lectures: 1. Of kings' treasuries, 2. Of queens' gardens, 3. The mystery of life

Contents

T PAGE

Chronological Summary 19

Bibliography 20

Introduction

JOHN RUSKIN

Few tasks are more difficult than to present an account of John Ruskin that is at once fair and brief. It is difficult to be fair to him, because his life, while one of steadfast integrity of purpose, chastity of conduct, clear, high endeavor, and unselfish love for humanity, was narrowed by many limitations, — almost weaknesses. They were not of the surface but were grained in his nature; they led him into inevitable inconsistencies and anomalous situations, and brought down upon him ridicule and abuse, which, though utterly without justification, were not without cause.

Yet these same weaknesses were necessary to the carrying out of his life work! That is the tragedy of it. It is the thing that is hardest to explain; it is particularly hard to explain briefly. To understand it one must know something of the years of labor, the tragedies of love, the illnesses and the griefs that left their marks upon this man's highly sensitized soul.

John Ruskin was born in London, on the 8th of February, 1 8 19. He had no childhood, as we know the term, and almost no young manhood. He was an only child, with a busy merchant for a father, and for a mother a Spartan woman of Scotch ancestry, whose rigorous discipline over her son never relaxed to the day of her death, — when the "boy" was over sixty.

The story of his almost toyless infancy, which he tells so freely and charmingly in Prceteriia, has often been related. For some time his only plaything was a bunch of keys. Later he was given a ball, a cart, and a box of wooden bricks. He spent much time studying the patterns in the carpet and the lines of brick in the neighboring houses, and in watching the filling of a water cart near by. An aunt, pitying his "monastic poverty," gave him a Punch and Judy. "My mother was obliged to accept them," he says, "but afterwards quietlytold me it was not right that I should have them; and I never saw them again." His diet was quite as strictly censored. "I was permitted to crack other people's nuts for them * * * but never to have any myself. * * * I recollect my mother giving me three raisins. * * * My father * * * did not finish his custard; and my mother brought me the bottom of it into the back room." Perhaps the most significant thing is the man's attitude towards this boyhood, as he looks back upon it from old age: ''With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion. * * *"

Yes, too serene and too secure. For John Ruskin, sheltered in his home life, forbidden to swim for fear he "would drown,'* to play ball for fear he "would get hurt," to box because "it was vulgar," came to his teens, as he says, a "conceited little monkey," too sure of himself, with none of the saving wisdom and modesty that experience brings to most boys.

Every summer Mr. Ruskin set off, accompanied by his wife and son, on long carriage tours through England or Scotland. Although business was primarily the object of these journeys, the Ruskins made a point of visiting each year some picturesque or historical section of the country. The boy always made records of the places he saw, both by written accounts and by drawings. During this period he acquired his love for nature, and cultivated accurateness of observation. On his thirteenth birthday he was given a book, Rogers's Italy, illustrated by Turner, and he speaks of this later as one of the incidents that determined the course of his whole life. He had never before heard of Turner, but he was now so dazzled by the master's art that he spent hours in copying the sketches. Not only did these tours and this early fascination for Turner greatly influence Ruskin's own Hfe; they indirectly resulted, as we shall see, in a profound change in the attitude of England and of the world, towards art and art criticism.

When he entered Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1836, his mother went with him and took lodgings near by. He won a Newdigate prize for a poem. He made a few friends. But there was still no dependence upon his own resources, — no advance in the wisdom of the world.

In 1842, he was graduated from the university with a welltrained mind, but with almost no knowledge of what we consider the practical side of life. However, though his training had been narrow, it had been deep; if it had failed to give him the wisdom of experience, it had also spared him the doubts and fears that are too frequently the by-products of experience. It had given him clear conceptions of work to be done, of wrongs to be righted, and of good to be established. Above all it had imparted to him boundless confidence in his own powers and ability.

Ruskin was not happy in his love and marriage. When but seventeen years old, he fell in love with Adele Domecq, the charming daughter of his father's partner; and, as he says: "I was reduced to a heap of white ashes in four days." He sought to woo her by talking of '*the Spanish Armada, Waterloo, and transubstantiation," but utterly failed to impress this sophisticated French miss. Two years later, when at Oxford, he was prostrated on hearing of her marriage. In 1847 he met Charlotte Lockhart, granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott — "Scottish fairy, white lady" — and, as he says, ''with my customary wisdom in such matters, I wooed her by writing an article for the Quarterly Review.'^ Again his suit was unsuccessful. Then in 1848 he was married to Euphemia Chalmers Gray, a young lady for whom, upon her challenge to write a fairy story, he had, some six years earlier, written The King of the Golden River. She was beautiful, fond of society, and not interested in her husband's labor. He was absorbed in his plans of authorship, cared nothing for society, and abominated dinners and like functions. After five years of this anomalous life, the marriage was annulled.

In 1858, when Ruskin experienced his great revulsion from the evangelical faith in which he had been brought up — "was converted inside out," as he says — he began an acquaintance which later grew into the consuming passion of his life. In this year he was invited to give drawing lessons to three children, two girls and a boy, whose mother was an Irish lady, Mrs. La Touche. Rose, the youngest of the three, was less than twelve when the lessons began. She was a precocious child, with odd, oldish ways, and with a deeply sympathetic, artistic temper in her soul; and though he was twenty-eight years her senior, through the years of their acquaintance he came to love her. But she was of the evangelical sect, and would not give her heart to an "unbeliever." Ruskin would not profess what he did not believe. The two were estranged. Her health was frail, and she died in her twenty-fourth year, Ruskin being with her at the last. *'I live in the outside of me," he wrote. "The death numbed me for some days so that I couldn't work, but am none the worse, so far as I know, only there's no blood in my hands or feet." He wrote to his friend Miss Beever: "I wanted my Rosie here. In heaven I mean to go and talk to Pythagoras and Socrates and Valerius Publicola. I shan't care a bit for Rosie there, she needn't think it. What will gray eyes and rosy cheeks be good for there.?" And later he says: "I wonder mightily what sort of creature I should have turned out, if instead of the distracting and useless pain, I had had the joy of approved love, and the untellable, incalculable motive of its sympathy and praise. It seems to me such things are not allowed in this world. The men capable of the highest imaginative passion are tossed on fiery waves by it."

By Englishmen, Ruskin is closely associated, in the various phases of his activity, with his different homes. The little house in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, in the heart of London, the place of his birth, recalls the humble beginnings of his father, who inherited a vast debt from his father, and who waited nine years before marrying Margaret Cox, so that this debt might be wholly paid. When their boy John was four years old, they moved out to Heme Hill, then a country village, where they had a yard and garden. Here they lived through John Ruskin's childhood and early manhood. Here his first books were written, including The Stones of Venice in 1851-53. Then, the elder Ruskin having become very prosperous, the family moved to Denmark Hill, a more pretentious estate. The young man does not seem to have wholly loved this home, nor the display connected with it. On his mother's death in 1871, he purchased Brantwood, a beautiful country home on Lake Coniston, opposite the mountain called "The Old Man." It is with this home that the dearest, most intimate recollections of Ruskin by his friends are associated. Here he lived with his well-loved cousin, "Joannie" Agnew, at this time married to Arthur Severn. Here Prcsterita and all his more intimate "letters" were written. And it was here that he spent the final years of illness alternating with feeble health, until death came, on January 20, 1900.

The strongest impulse of his whole life was to teach. At the ridiculous age of four, this owlish baby had preached a sermon, which he spent most of his later life in amplifying: "People, be dood. If you are dood, Dod will love you; if you are not dood, Dod will not love you. People, be dood." At seven he was keeping a diary, in which, by drawings and notes, he recorded his observations; and at fifteen he had contributed an article to Lowden*s Magazine of Natural History. Now came into play the habit of close observation, of utter concentration. Now were brought to bear upon his judgment of art and nature, all the experience of the boy on the long carriage trips through England and the Continent. Most important of all, as far as his style is concerned, was the intensive reading of the Bible, which, with his mother, he had gone through about once every year, and the reading of Pilgrim s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Pope's Iliad, and Sir Walter Scott, with his father.

Ruskin's teaching took three forms, writing, lecturing (in schools and public), and doing. He was one of the most voluminous writers England has produced. His first great work was Volume I of Modern Painters, which appeared in 1843, a year after his graduation from Oxford. We have spoken of his early love for Turner; in this book his prime purpose was to defend and praise the work of this artist as the truest, most faithful to nature, most wholesome, and in all ways most inspiring and beautiful, not only of his own day, but of any since the time of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The book was a startling departure from the usual type of art criticism. It was addressed not so much to trained artists as to common people. It appealed to them to see and appreciate and love the beauty all about them — beauty of open sky, of field, of cloud, of sunset, of dawn, of dusk, of sea; and to adjudge those pictures best, which, like Turner's, depicted these beauties as they really are, and not after some worn-out lO INTRODUCTION

conventional pattern. Its eloquence was compelling. While at first contemporary artists either held aloof, or joined the orthodox technical reviewers in open scorn and derision, and while Turner himself seems to have been overwhelmed, and surprised into a modest silence, there was no mistaking the general feeling that a new voice had made itself heard in the evaluation and criticism of art, and that a new teacher was seeking to lead his country to more general love of true beauty in art and nature.

Four other volumes of Modern Painters followed, the fifth appearing in i860, and marking his last formal writing on art. These subsequent volumes, while they maintained the attitude of deep admiration for Turner, showed marked progress and growth in Ruskin's own judgment and appreciation. In these years he traveled and studied widely and deeply. Hence these volumes reflect a fuller and fairer appreciation of the art of earlier peoples, particularly of Italian artists, and of other men of his own day.

His Seven Lamps of Architecture was completed in 1849, during his first year of married life. The "Lamps" were Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience. The book heaped criticism upon the prevailing modes of building in England. It deplored the use of cheap ornament and gewgaws, and any false splendor or pretense, and pleaded for structures built soundly, beautifully, and suitably. It exerted a very real influence upon Enghsh architectural style.

The Stones of Venice (1851-53) was more than a criticism of Venetian architecture; it was a stirring appeal to modern nations to build wisely and honestly, not merely in material matters, but in laws and customs.

The Political Economy of Art (1857) and The Two Paths (1859), first given as public lectures, mark the definite interest of Ruskin in economics and sociology, an interest that had been showing itself in his work for some time. He sensed the fact that while thousands were reading his books and were being measurably influenced by his teaching, millions were left all untouched by what he said; and these millions were the very ones he most desired to reach. More and more he saw why he was not reaching them: They were too poor, too tired to see or know beauty; they had been too little

INTRODUCTION II

considered in the scheme of things; they had been denied much in England's new age of industriahsm and materialism. And his soul cried out against the injustice that was forgetting the toilers. His protest took the form of a series of essays on political economy in CornhiWs Magazine. In them he attacked that science as taught by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, and scored their treatment of it on a cold, materialistic basis. **There is no wealth but life," he thundered. ''Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality."

The result was an angry protest from the readers of the magazine. "Had Ruskin gone crazy? What had got into this art critic (honored now in this field) that he should speak so wildly of things utterly beyond his knowledge.? How could a man write such puerile twaddle.?" The publisher, and his editor, Thackeray, became frightened at the storm, and notified Ruskin that the series must stop with the fourth essay. The four were soon published under the name Unto this Last, but they had almost no sale for ten years. Ruskin stoutly maintained that they were the ''truest, rightest-worded " of all his works. Not only were they not read; they weakened his influence for a time in all directions; and in his later work we can frequently detect a note of bitterness and a feeling of defeat. To-day his economic teachings, though not carried out in all details, are almost universally accepted as sound and just.

As early as 1853 Ruskin, at first against the wishes of his parents, had given public lectures; and most of his works published after i860, except Prceterita (1885-9), his autobiography, were produced first as lectures, or sometimes as letters. Thus: Munera Pulveris (1863), Time and Tide (1867), and Fors Clavigera (1871-84) were letters to workingmen; Ethics of the Dust was a collection of letters and talks on geology, crystals, and conduct, addressed to the girls of the Winnington School; Sesame and Lilies (1864) contains three lectures, the first two of which were given at or near Manchester, the third at Dublin; The Crown of Wild Olive is a group of three eloquent discussions on work, traffic, and war; Lectures on Art, The Art of England, and Pleasures of England were collections of his Oxford lectures. Less familiar, but scarcely less important, are: The Queen of the Air (1869),

Ruskin was very popular and much sought for as a lecturer. Indeed, he complained that people were too much interested in listening to him, and not enough concerned with doing what he bade. For Ruskin was, above all, concerned with conduct. His teaching never had mere instruction for its aim; he wanted to get things done. We have seen this in his books and in his lectures; we now shall see what he himself did when opportunity came his way.

In 1864 his father died, leaving him the estate at Denmark Hill and a fortune of nearly a miUion dollars. In less than twenty years he had given away practically all of this in various philanthropies: in endowing an art collection at Oxford; in improving housing conditions in London, in which work he was associated with Octavia Hill; in scattered charities, pensions, and the like, the extent of which will never be known; and in endowing and supporting St. George's Guild.

This guild was a group of families organized into a community by Ruskin for the purpose of carrying out his theories of sociology. There were specific rules of conduct for young and old, reaching down into the smallest detail. Each member had to subscribe to certain theological beliefs and formulas. Schools and the form and nature of education for the children were prescribed. The plan of the day's work for men and women was fixed, to the hour; so was the manner of dress. In fact, on becoming a member, one virtually gave up his individuality.

The project failed. It did not fit in with English temperament and tradition. While Ruskin no doubt succeeded in giving these members infinitely better working conditions than they would otherwise have had, and more comforts and pleasures, yet the Anglo-Saxon does not enjoy merging himself into such a closely welded group. He is essentially individualistic.

But Ruskin took much personal pride in seeing his theories in operation. He gave to them lavishly of time, energy, and money, and they showed that he had a valiant belief in his own teachings as set forth in his books and his lectures: that joy, beauty, love, and truth were meant for all, not for the few.

There remains to be said something of his friendships: with Carlyle, for instance, who said of him— "There is a ray of real heaven in Ruskin, a celestial brightness" (Ruskin said of Carlyle that " he was born in the clouds and struck by lightning ") ; with Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. Brown, Sir Henry Acland, Tennyson, the Brownings, D. G. Rossetti, and others. We have neglected the beautiful influence of women in his life — of Lady Trevelyan, Mrs. Cowper-Temple, Mrs. Carlyle, and his charming cousin " Joannie" Severn, who with her husband and children took care of him through all the years after his mother's death. The friendly, intimate, family aspects of his Hfe, particularly at Brantwood, show how gentle, modest, and devoted to his home circle was this world-teacher in his private Hfe; how he caused this epitaph to be placed upon his father's tomb: "He was an entirely honest merchant. * * * His son, who knew him, says this of him." We have only hinted at the close supervision his parents exercised over him to the day of their death, — except that he did have to cross his father in Unto this Last, the persistence of the son causing, for some time, a real estrangement. It was this of which he wrote in Prceterita: "I have to pray my readers to note that this continually increasing arrogance was not founded on vanity in me, but on sorrow. There is a vast difference — there is all the difference — between the vanity of displaying one's own faculties, and the grief that other people do not use their own."

The essentially sweet and tolerant side of the man in his chastened later years is well shown in the following extract from a letter to Rossetti: "My pleasures are in seeing, thinking, reading, and making people happy (if I can, consistently with my own comfort) . And I take these pleasures. And I suppose, if my pleasures were in smoking, betting, dicing, and giving pain, I should take those pleasures. It seems to me that one man is made one way, and one another — the measure of effort and self-denial can never be known, except by each conscience to itself. Mine is small enough."

As we read him, then, let us remember the limitations of his life; let us read with gentle patience and care; let us be carried on to high thoughts by his eloquence; but let us, above all, remember that he wants us to jeel and ^0, and not merely to listen and admire. For his message stirred to action; and he stands to-day, in his influence for the love of beauty, truth, and gentleness, the most potent figure of the Victorian era.

RUSKIN'S STYLE

The reader of Ruskin will do well to remember that this writer always speaks intimately, personally, directly. He never views a subject in a cool, impersonal, dispassionate manner. His own beliefs, feelings, desires, and — it must be admitted — sometimes his prejudices, color his work throughout. Any writer of this type becomes strongly self-assertive and frequently dogmatic.

We can readily understand, further, that Ruskin's dogmatism was partly an outgrowth of his training. His education had been too irregular to afford thorough scholastic discipline. Though he had an uncanny way of being right on most things, he did not reach the truth by scholarly methods, and he did not always defend the truth by fair arguments. Though ready to take infinite pains in copying a Turner landscape, or studying the architecture of a Venetian ruin, when it came to setting down his conclusions, he was prone to make sweeping assertions about things of which he could have but slight knowledge. And he had a way of tossing oflF these generalizations as though they had all been settled, and there was nothing to be said on the other side. Indeed, he frequently refused to try to see what there was on this ''other side." He never feared to set forth an opinion on a subject; and that opinion was, at the time, final. Of course, this made enemies. **It is,'' thinks Mr. A. C. Benson, "the most dangerous quality in the world."

Much of this feeling of dogmatism in Ruskin, however, comes from a peculiarity of his style. If you will notice a railway curve of extensive radius, you will see that instead of being a real arc it is made up of short straight lines. Yet the result of the whole is a curve, around which the train goes successfully and arrives at its destination. This illustrates Ruskin's style. He rarely qualifies his thoughts; there is no **if" or **I think," or "it seems to me." The sentence stands apparently as a statement which is to be understood as being always and absolutely true. This may be irritating to the reader, who feels inclined to challenge many of these statements. The thoughtful reader of the following lectures will frequently find sentences with which he flatly disagrees. Often it will be hard for him to keep his temper as he reads; but he will find it most profitable to read the paragraph or the section through to the end so as to get Ruskin's whole thought. Then he will probably find that the particular statements which he challenges are really short straight lines in a large curve of thought, and that he is brought to a conclusion with which he finds himself in entire accord.

Closely connected with this quality of Ruskin's style is another which amounts at times to a serious fault. It is his lack of perspective. One has a feeling always in these essays, of tensity, of almost feverish strain. There is little or no relaxation; everything is presented as of utmost importance. The result of this is, first, to tire the reader. He has a sense of being pressed and even scolded too much of the time. There is a feeling that he should have a resting place and relaxation. The second result is that the great points of the essay fail to stand out as they should. In essays as long as these are, when every statement is made to seem of such imminent importance, the central truth is sometimes obscured.

This fault also can be referred to Ruskin's life. His ill health had much to do with it. He lived intensely. The present moment was always important with him. The particular ill or injustice that he happened to be attacking was to him the most important, most despicable, most unnecessary evil in the world. When he saw a young lady injure her life by holding to a peculiar and particular religious doctrine, it seemed to him that the most important thing in the world for all girls to do was to keep away from theology. When he saw beautiful valleys spoiled by railways, it seemed to him that the worst thing a capitalist could do was to mar the beauty of scenery with his engines and their soot. He could see just one thing at a time and just one side of that thing. This, of course, constantly subjected him to criticism for narrowness, for ignorance, and even for misrepresentation. One of the first things, therefore, that anybody must learn who is to enjoy Ruskin, is to read his passages through and read portions of l6 INTRODUCTION

various parts of his work written at different periods of his life, to see how really broad and tolerant were the interests of this apparently narrow and intolerant man.

Then, too, Ruskin's purpose in his lectures, and the conditions under which he had to work in accomplishing that purpose should be kept in mind. He was very much in the public eye and he knew that what he said would have wide circulation. He knew, too, that there were no more smug, selfcomplacent people in the world at that time than the English. The introduction of machinery had lent a marked impetus to industry. England was fairly prosperous and very well satisfied with herself. Ruskin reckoned, and probably rightly, that the only way he could get his countrymen to attend to him and "mind" him, was to hit them, stir them, jolt them. No doubt much of his teasing dogmatism has its source in this purpose. He wanted to bother — one might almost say "irritate" — his hearers. At any rate, the last thing in the world he wanted to do, was to please them. He spoke with glee in writing to Carlyle in anticipation of the fourth of the Unto this Last essays, of the "smasher" that paper would be. He was still smarting from the reception of his economic teachings. He knew the temper of his audiences — their lethargy and indifference. One should think of these essays, then, as lectures meant to awaken spiritual ideals and appreciation in a people that were in a stupor of materialistic self-satisfaction.

We have been considering, almost exclusively, our author's limitations. What, then, were the sources of his strength ? It is the belief of many that no English prose excels his in beauty, force, and potency. His sentence cadence, his diction, shot through as it is with scriptural and classical references, his rich imagery and alert sense of subtle relationships, all delight and entrance the sympathetic reader. By his apparent failure, he gained in force. No man, with full knowledge, in his youth, of the almost sure failure that would attend his work, could have attacked his task with the zeal of Ruskin. No scholar, waiting to verify everj^thing he said, could have said so much. No thoroughly fair mind could have said so unequivocally the one thing needful.

But it would be unfortunate indeed to leave the impression that his work failed. The ridicule, even of his economic teachings, lasted scarcely through his life; then the slow world saw that he was right, and began to follow his teaching. We are told by Mr. E. T. Cook in his biography, that in 1906 when there was a strong labor element represented in Parliament, the members were asked to indicate what man had most influenced them in their sympathy with reform; the name that appeared most frequently in the replies was John Ruskin. His teachings in art and architecture profoundly affected the thought of the world and its attitude towards the beautiful and its judgment of what was beautiful. Nothing better illustrates this than a verse from Punch (Ruskin's family crest — at which he himself always poked fun — was a boar's head; hence the *'tusk"):

And sells before I'm dry; Till savage Ruskin Sticks his tusk in,

Then nobody will buy!

Apparently never physically strong; always highly sensitive to the criticism that was heaped upon him, particularly when his Unto this Last essays were discontinued in CornhilVs; feeling keenly the ridicule his guild plans were meeting; the last twenty years of his life more or less darkened by serious mental breakdown and delirium — it is small wonder that he produced writing that seems at times disproportionate, irnpatient, and dogmatic. When we consider the tremendous volume of work he turned out, the thousands of drawings he made (for he was an indefatigable copyist, working frequently with a microscope to secure absolute accuracy, — though he could not, as he says, "compose a picture") the lectures he delivered, the visits he made to schools, the studies he made of rocks, the teaching he eflPected, the good he did; — and when we remember that his life was frequently broken by prostrating illnesses, we must marvel at the accomplishments of this miraculous man.