Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14: The New Era — John Ruskin, Part 2

We have said that Pre-Raphaelitism, as a movement in art, was contemporaneously jeered at; while to-day, among superficial or inappreciative students of the period, seriously to mention it or any of its cultured brotherhood is to provoke a smile.

Nevertheless, there was not a little high merit in the movement, which Ruskin was keen-eyed and friendly enough to recognize, while much that is worthy afterwards came out of it in the later work of the more notable of its members as well as in that of their unenrolled associates and the admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite method.

What the movement owed to Ruskin is now frankly conceded, in the lesson the brotherhood took to heart from his counsellings,--to divest art of conventionality, and to work with scrupulous fidelity and sincerity of purpose.

Nor was contemporary art alone the gainer by the movement; it also had its influence on poetry, though this has been obscured--so far as any beneficial influence can be traced at all--by the tendency manifested in some of the more amorous poetic swains of the period, who professed to derive their inspiration from the Brotherhood, to identify themselves with what has been styled the "Fleshly School" of verse.

Of the latter number, Swinburne, in his early "Poems and Ballads," was perhaps the greatest sinner, though atoned for in part by the lyrical art and ardor of his verse, and much more by the higher qualities and scholarly characteristics of his later dramatic Work.

Nor is Dante Rossetti himself, in some of his poems, free from the same taint, despite the fact of his interesting individuality as the chief inspirer and laborer among the Brotherhood.

Yet the movement owed much to both his brush and his pen of other and nobler, because reverential, work, as those will admit who know "The Blessed Damozel," "Sister Helen," and his fine collection of sonnets, "The House of Life," as well as his famous paintings, "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," and his Annunciation picture, "Ecce Ancilla Domini."

Of the product of other Pre-Raphaelites of note,--such as Ford Madox Brown, Millais, Morris, Woolner the sculptor, Coventry Patmore, and Holman Hunt,--much that is commendable as well as finely imaginative came from their hands, and justified Ruskin in his gallant advocacy of the movement, its founders, and their work.

By this time, of which we have been writing, Ruskin had reached the early meridian of his powers, and, as we have hinted, had wrested from the unwilling many a juster recognition of his amazing industry and genius.

To his fond and indulgent parents this was a great source of pride and satisfaction, and the practical evidence of it was the throng of visitors to the family seats of Herne Hill and Denmark Hill, in the then London suburbs, where Ruskin long had his home, and by the attentions and honor paid to their son by universities, academies, and public bodies, as well as by many eminent personages and the intellectual _élite_ of the nation.

Among those with whom the young celebrity was then ultimate and reckoned among his admiring correspondents were, besides Turner (who died in 1851) and the chief artists of the time, the Carlyles and the Brownings, Mary Russell Mitford, Charlotte Bronté, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), Charles Eliot Norton, Lady Trevelyan (Macaulay's sister), Whewell, Maurice, Kingsley, Dr. John Brown (author of "Rab and his Friends"), Tennyson, and Dean Milman.

To these might be added many notable foreigners whom he either met with in his continental travels or who were attracted to him by a lively interest in his writings.

In his home, thanks to a wealthy and indulgent father, he was surrounded with every comfort, short of luxury, if we except under the latter the large sums expended on the purchase of "Turners" and many famous foreign pictures, and a vast and increasing collection of favorite books and other treasures and curios.

Of the author's home-life we get many delightful reminiscences in "Praeterita," with entertaining talks of his childhood days, his youthful companions, his toys and animate pets, his early playful adventures in authorship, and other garrulities with which, late in life when the work, as it remains, was incompletely put together, he beguiled the weariness and feebleness of old age.

But we are anticipating, for we are writing of Ruskin when his hand was yet on the plough, and the plough was still in the furrow, and half a long life's arduous work was yet before him.

At this era, no brain could well have been more active or fuller of philanthropies than his, for we approach the second period of his life's grand activities,--the era of a new departure in the interests that occupied him and the herculean tasks he set himself to do.

Before recording some of the achievements of this time and glancing at the inciting causes of the transition which marks the era we have now reached, let us note the demands made upon Mr. Ruskin's thought and labor by universities and public institutions, whose audiences desired to have him appear before them in person and address them upon topics in which he and they were interested.

These appearances on the lecture platform were now numerous, since many throughout the kingdom were eager to see and know the man whose art criticisms, principles that govern the beautiful, and stimulating thought on all subjects, had made so deep an impression on the reflecting minds of the age.

His earliest appearance on the rostrum was at Edinburgh, where he delivered four lectures before the Philosophical Institution, chiefly on landscape-painters and on Christian art, with a plea for the use of Gothic in domestic architecture.

Subsequent appearances were at Manchester, where he spoke on the Political Economy of Art and the relation of art to manufactures;

at the South Kensington Museum, London, which had just been opened; and later at Oxford, where further on in his career he became Slade Professor of Art in his own University.

From the accounts of these public lectures we get opinions as to the personal appearance of Ruskin at the period which add to our knowledge of him from paintings, drawings, and photographs, though not a few of these accounts vary from those given us in books, chiefly sketched by his lady friends and correspondents.

The more trusty of the contemporary pictures speak of him as having "light, sand-colored hair; his face more red than pale;

the mouth well cut, with a good deal of decision in its curve, though somewhat wanting in sustained dignity and strength; an aquiline nose;

his forehead by no means broad or massive, but the brows full and well bound together; the eye [says the observer from whom we are quoting] we could not see, in consequence of the shadows that fell upon his [Ruskin's] countenance from the lights overhead, but we are sure that the poetry and passion we looked for almost in vain in other features must be concentrated here."

Miss Mitford speaks of him at this time as "eloquent and distinguished-looking, fair and slender, with a gentle playfulness, and a sort of pretty waywardness that was quite charming."

Another, a visitor at his London home, characterizes him as "emotional and nervous, with a soft, genial eye, a mouth thin and severe, and a voice that, though rich and sweet, yet had a tendency to sink into a plaintive and hopeless tone."

Later on in years we have this verbal portrait from a disciple of the great art-teacher, occurring in an inaugural address delivered before the Ruskin Society of Glasgow: "That spare, stooping figure, the rough-hewn, kindly face, with its mobile, sensitive mouth, and clear deep eyes, so sweet and honest in repose, so keen and earnest and eloquent in debate!"

When the fifth and last volume of "Modern Painters" was finally off his hands, Mr. Ruskin not only engaged, as we have seen, in occasional lecturing, but began (1861) to add a prolific series of _brochures_--many of them with quaint but significant titles--to his already stupendous mass of writing.

Their subjects were not alone aesthetics, but now treated of ethical, social, and political questions, the prophetic declarations and earnest appeals of a man of wide and varied culture, deep thought, and large experience.

The attempted alliance of political economy with art was a novel undertaking in that sixth lustrum of the past century, even by a man of Mr. Ruskin's eminence and fame in the world of letters.

But Mr. Ruskin was a bold and earnest man, as well as a genius; and he had too much to tell his heedless, _laissez-faire_ age to keep silent on themes, remote as they were from those he had hitherto taught, and of which he desired to deliver his soul, whatever ridicule it might provoke and however adverse the criticism levelled against him.

His humanity and moral sense were outraged by the manner in which the mass of his countrymen lived, and trenchant was his castigation of this and eager as well as righteous his desire to amend their condition and elevate and inspire their minds.

As an economist, it is true, there was not a little that was false as well as eccentric in what he preached; moreover, much of his counsel was directly socialistic in its trend, repugnant in large degree to his English readers and hearers; but all this was atoned for by the honesty and philanthropy of his motives, by his phenomenal fervor and eloquence, and by the literary beauty and charm of every page he wrote.

Nevertheless, as in Carlyle--for in these depreciations the style of the seer of Chelsea was deeply upon him--the note of calamity and the wail of despair are too much in evidence in Ruskin's writings at this period, while, like Carlyle also, he was equally precipitate and impulsive in his attacks on things as they were.

Yet in the economic condition just then of England, and in the circumstances environing the labor world, there was, possibly, justification for the rebukes and objurgations of onlookers of the type of both of these men, and very humanitarian as well as practically helpful were Ruskin's counsel and aid to labor and to all who sought to raise and expand their outlook and better their condition in life.

Towards politics Ruskin was never drawn, but had he been more prosaic and less given to anathematizing, most valuable would have been his aid in legislation at this era of political and moral reform.

But if political science, or science in any other of its branches or departments, did not come within his purview, great was the revolution he wrought in the working-man's surroundings, and immense the illumination he shed upon industry and on the spirit in which the laborer should think and work.

Referring to Ruskin at this period of his career, and to his influence as a social and moral exhorter, Frederic Harrison, from whom we have already quoted, has an admirable passage on "Ruskin as Prophet," [2] which, as it is presumably too little known, we take pleasure in embodying in these pages.

[Footnote 2: "Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and other Literary Estimates," by Frederic Harrison; London and New York: Macmillan & Co. 1900. ] "The influence of Ruskin," says Mr. Harrison, "has been part of the great romantic, historical, catholic, and poetic revival of which Scott, Carlyle, Coleridge, Freeman, Newman, and Tennyson in our own country have been leading spirits within the last two generations in England.

There is no need to compare him with any one of these as a source of original intellectual force.

He owns Scott and Carlyle as his masters, and he might vehemently repudiate certain of the others altogether.

His work has been to put this romantic, historical, and genuine sympathy inspired by Scott, Wordsworth, and Carlyle into a new understanding of the arts of form.

The philosophic impulse assuredly was not his own.

It is a compound of Scott, Carlyle, Dante, and the Bible.

The compound is strange, for it makes him talk sometimes like a Puritan father, and sometimes like a Cistercian monk.

At times he talks as Flora MacIvor talked to young Waverley; at other times like Thomas Carlyle inditing a Latter-day Pamphlet.

But to transfuse into this modern generation of Englishmen this romantic, catholic, historical, and social sympathy as applied to the arts of form, needed gifts that neither Scott, nor Carlyle, nor Newman, nor Tennyson possessed--the eye, if not the hand, of a consummate landscape painter, a torrent of ready eloquence on every imaginable topic, a fierce and desperate courage that feared neither man nor devil, neither failure nor ridicule, and above all things an exquisite tenderness that is akin to St. Francis or St. Vincent de Paul....

"Here is a man who, laboring for fifty years, has scattered broadcast a thousand fine ideas to all who practise the arts, and all who care for art.

He has roused in the cultured world an interest in things of art such as a legion of painters and ten royal academies could never have done.

He has poured out a torrent of words, some right, some wrong, but such as have raised the level of art into a new world, which have adorned English literature for centuries, and have inspired the English race for generations; he has cast his bread upon the waste and muddy waters with a lavish hand, and has not waited to find it again, though it has been the seed of abundant harvest to others."

Again, speaking of what Ruskin sought to accomplish in the regeneration of modern society, and the reformation of our social ideals, and of that "heroic piece of Quixotism" he founded, "the Guild of St. George," Mr. Harrison remarks:-- "The first life of John Ruskin was the life of a consummate teacher of art and master of style; the second life was the life of priest and evangelist....

Here is the greatest living master [the passage was written while Mr. Ruskin was yet alive] of the English tongue, one of the most splendid lights of our noble literature, one to whom a dozen paths of ambition and power lay open, who had everything that could be offered by genius, fame, wealth, social popularity, and intense sensitiveness to all lovely things--and this man, after thirty years of untiring labor, devotes himself to train, teach, delight, and inspire a band of young men, girls, workmen, children,--all who choose to come around him.

He lavishes the whole of his fortune on them; he brings to their door his treasures of art, science, literature, and poetry; he founds and endows museums; he offers these costly and precious collections to the people; he wears out his life in teaching them the elements of art, the elements of manufacture, the elements of science;

he shows workmen how to work, girls how to draw, to sing, to play; he gives up to them his wealth, his genius, his peace, his whole life.

He is not content with writing books in his study, with enjoying art at home or abroad; he must carry his message into the streets.

He gives himself up--not to write beautiful thoughts: he seeks to build up a beautiful world....

When I see this author of 'Modern Painters' and the 'Stones of Venice,' the man who has exhausted almost all that Europe contains of the beautiful, who has thought and spoken of almost every phase of human life, and has entered so deeply into the highest mysteries of the greatest poets--when I see him surrounding himself in his old age with lads and lasses, schoolgirls and workmen, teaching them the elements of science and art, reading to them poems and tales, arranging for them games and holidays, ornaments and dresses, lavishing on these young people his genius and his wealth, his fame and his future--I confess my memory goes back instinctively to a fresco I saw in Italy years ago--was it Luini's?

--wherein the Master sat in a crowd of children and forbade them to be removed, saying that 'of such is the kingdom of heaven.'

" With this generous tribute to and appreciation of Ruskin, despite the economic vagaries into which the great critic and teacher of his time fell, we may more confidently approach the busy era of his later and self-sacrificing labors, and with less apology take space to deal--as compactly and intelligently as we can--with some of the more notable of the many books and _brochures_ of the period.

Difficult as would be the task, fortunately there is little need to epitomize these works, as many of them are better known, and perhaps more attentively read, than his earlier, bulkier, and more ambitious writings.

A few of them lie outside the economic gospel of their apostolic author, and these we will first and briefly deal with.

A number of them are instructive and inspiring lay sermons on the mystical union between nature and art, beauty and utility, and their reflex in the reverential homage for the beautiful and the worthy in the mind and character of the English-speaking race.

The whole form a great body of fine and thoughtful work, which is as enchaining as its meaning is often profound.

The best-known of these lay sermons is: "The Queen of the Air" (1869), a splendid blending of his fancy with the Greek nature-myths of cloud and storm, represented by Athena, goddess of the heavens, of the earth, and of the heart.

The parable drawn is that "the air is given us for our life, the rain for our thirst and baptism, the fire for our warmth, the sun for our light, and the earth for our meat and rest."

Related to the work is "Ethics of the Dust" (1865), lectures to little housewives on mineralogy and crystallography, nature's work in crystallization being the text for a diatribe against sordid living.

"Sesame and Lilies," which belongs also to this period of the writer's work, consists of three addresses, delivered at Manchester and at Dublin, designed specially for young girls, and treating in the main of good and improving literature.

The first of them, "Of Kings' Treasuries," deals with the treasures hidden in books, the writings of the world's great men; its sequel, "Of Queens' Gardens," deals with the function and sphere of woman, and, by way of application, with the how and the what to read; the third lecture, on "The Mystery of Life and its Arts," is a discursive but inspiring consideration of what life is and how most successfully to battle with it in the way of our work and of our appointed duty.

All three lectures, observes a commentator, "tell men and women of the ideals they should set before them; how to read and to build character under the inspiration of the nobility of the past, fitting one's self for such great society; how to develop noble womanhood; how to bear one's self toward the wonder of life, toward one's work in the world, and toward one's duty to others."

Other lectures and _brochures_ of or about this period are "Hortus Inclusus" (The Enclosed Garden), being "Messages from the Wood to the Garden sent in happy days to two sister ladies," residing at Coniston, and collected in 1887; "Arrows of the Chace," letters on various subjects to newspapers, gathered and edited in 1880; "The Two Paths," lectures on art and its application to Decoration and Manufacture (1859); "Ariadne Florentina" (1873), a monograph on Italian wood and metal engraving; "Aratra Pentelici" (1872), on the elements and principles of sculpture; and "The Eagle's Nest" (1872), on the relation of natural science to art.

Still pursuing his delightful methods of interpreting nature and teaching the world instructive lessons, even from the common things of mother earth, we have a series of three eloquent discourses, entitled (1) "Proserpina," studies of Alpine and other wayside flowers, dwelling on the mystery of growth in plants and the tender beauty of their form; (2) "Deucalion," a sort of glorified geological text-book, treating of stones and their life-history, and showing the wearing effect upon them of waves and the action of water;

and (3) "Love's Meinie" (1873), a rapture about birds and their feathered plumage, delivered at Eton and at Oxford.

This trilogy, dealing with botany, geology, and ornithology, was presented to his audiences with illustrative drawings, representing the flora met with in his travels or found in the neighborhood of his new home in the Lancashire lakes, with sketches of regions, including the characteristics of the soil, in which he had been reared, and talks of the note and habit of all birds that were wont to warble over him their morning song.

"The Pleasures of England," the "Harbours of England," and the "Art of England" further treat of his loved native land, the first of these being talks on the pleasures of learning, of faith, and of deed, illustrated by examples drawn from early English history, and the last treating of representative modern English artists, chiefly of the Pre-Raphaelite school.

"The Laws of Fésole" (1878) deals with the principles of Florentine draughtsmanship; "St. Mark's Rest," with the art and architecture of Venice; and "Val d'Arno," with early Tuscan art, interspersed with the author's accustomed ethical reflections.

"Mornings in Florence," intended for the use of visitors to the art galleries of the beautiful city on the Arno, deals in the true artist-spirit with its famous examples of Christian art, giving prominence here also to the ethical side of the city's history.

"In Montibus Sanctis," and "Coeli Enarrant," the one comprising studies of mountain form, and the other of cloud form and their visible causes, though separately published, are only reprints of the author's larger and nobler embodiment of his views on art, in "Modern Painters."

"The King of the Golden River," of which we have previously spoken, is a fairy tale of much beauty, which he wrote for the "Fair Maid of Perth" whom he married, and who separated herself from him on the plea of "incompatibility."

Playful as is the style of the story, it is not without a moral, on what constitutes true wealth and happiness.

"The Crown of Wild Olive" (1866) consists of lectures on work, traffic, and war; the latter lecture, delivered at the Royal Artillery Institution at Woolwich, was also separately published under the title of "The Future of England."

The two former, being addressed to working-men, laborers, and traders, discuss economic problems, and set forth tentatively their author's antagonized political ethics, with which, in drawing this essay to a close, we now venture to deal.