Part 12

One might make large quotations from the Oratory sermons full of descriptions, graphic even to gruesomeness, of the bodily agony of Jesus on the Cross, powerful enough to stir emotional women into hysterical weeping, and to bring them into a profound, if temporary and unreal, sentiment of fellowship with His sufferings, leaving Him still afar off as a risen and personal Friend, and leaving them unmoved by the bleeding figure on the crucifix in the silent recess till the next cerebral excitement. The whole of my articles might be taken up with extracts from his hymns that are simply astounding to the unprejudiced mind in their luscious sentimentality towards Mary and the saints. Of these it may be said the expressions do not necessarily mean all to a Catholic that they seem to a Protestant to imply. But is that so? Who that has watched and heard Italian or Irish worship, or studied the biographies and writings of the Romanist mystics of Italy or Spain, can possibly doubt their perfect sincerity? Is it not an entirely natural transfer of ardent love from the Redeemer to His mother happening concurrently with the priestly transfer of worship, of 'adoration,' from Him to her? Her images are bedecked with flowers and gorgeous attire, and her shrines are brilliantly lighted and are perfumed with incense. His image stands in a dark, neglected, railed-off side-chapel, in all the great cathedrals and rural churches of Romanist Europe.

Some of Faber's best prose is curiously reserved for lamentations over the decay of Paganism!--the 'beautiful births of Greek faith, most radiant legends, springing from every hard and barren spot, like unnumbered springs out of the Parnassian caverns, or the leafy sides of Citheron, or the bee-haunted slope of pale Hymettus.' 'The decline of Paganism was mournful and undignified. Faith after faith went out, like the extinguishing of lamps in a temple, or the paling of the marsh-fires before the rising sun.' Yet were the old creeds full of symbols, and the 'whole of external nature an assemblage of forms and vases capable of, and actually filled with, the Spirit,' and so Greek Paganism was the expression of a wish to 'write God's name on all things beautiful and true.' We can re-echo his dirge and acknowledge the saner, more cheerful side of the 'Paganism' that feels after God, 'if haply it may find Him'; but what a contrast between his attitude towards the non-Christian world and the fellow-Christians--not lacking in as holy teaching or living as his own--whom he had left, for an approachment towards image-worship!

Let us see, now, however, what he can do in description of places and scenery, in both prose and poetry. Here is his first impression of Venice: 'How is it to be described? What words can I use to express that vision, that thing of magic that lay before us?... Never was so wan a sunlight, never was there so pale a blue, as stood round about Venice that day. And there it was, a most visionary city, rising as if by enchantment out of the gentle-mannered Adriatic, the waveless Adriatic. One by one rose steeple, tower, and dome, street, and marble palace; they rose to our eyes slowly, as from the weedy deeps; and then they and their images wavered and floated, like a dream, upon the pale, sunny sea. As we glided onward from Fusina in our gondola, the beautiful buildings, with their strange Eastern architecture, seemed like fairy ships, to totter, to steady themselves, to come to anchor one by one, and where the shadow was, and where the palace was, you scarce could tell. And there was San Marco, and there the Ducal Palace, and there the Bridge of Sighs, and the very shades of the Balbi, Foscari, Pisani, Bembi, seemed to hover about the winged Lion of St. Mark. And all this, all, to the right and left, all was Venice; and it needed the sharp grating of the gondola against the stairs to bid us be sure it was not all a dream.'

He says of Milan Cathedral that 'In the moonlight it disarms criticism. When the moon's full splendour streams on Milan roofs, and overflows upon its lofty buttresses; when the liquid radiance trickles down the glory-cinctured heads of the marble saints, like the oil from Aaron's beard, and every fretted pinnacle, and every sculptured spout ran with light as they might have run with rain in a thunder-shower, who would dare to say there was a fault in that affecting miracle of Christian Art?' Of Corfu, the most perfect earthly Elysium I myself have seen, though I first saw it when returning from the Far East, he writes: 'What traveller does not know the delight of getting among foliage whose shape and hues are not like those of his native land? The interior of the island of Corfu was to us a sweet foretaste of Oriental foliage. We rode among strange hedges of huge cactus, fields of a blue-flowering grain, occasional palms, clouds of blue and white gum cistus, myrtle-shoots smelling in the sun, little forests of the many-branched arbutus, marshy nooks of blossoming oleander, venerable dull olives and lemon groves jewelled with pale yellow fruit. It was a dream of childhood realized, and brought with it some dreary remembrances barbed with poignant sorrows. Dreams, alas! are never realized till the freshness of the heart is gone, and their beauty has lost all that wildness which made it in imagination so desirable.'

'Sir Lancelot,' his longest and most ambitious poem, though finished at Ambleside in 1847, was issued from his Elton Vicarage two years later, and is under the guise of 'an attempt to embody and illustrate the social and ecclesiastical spirit of the thirteenth century,' avowedly an allegory of the soul seeking for that which it is represented as finding only when brought 'back to the foot of Peter's sovran chair.' To us its chief interest lies in his portraiture of our Westmorland surroundings. The hermitage to which the returned Crusader wends his way lies

'Within the Vale of Troutbeck, where towards the head There is a single woody hill, enclosed Within the mountains, yet apart and low. Amid the underwood around, it seems Like a huge animal recumbent there, Not without grace; and sweetly apt it is To catch all wandering sunbeams as they pass, Or volatile lights in transit o'er the vale.'

Who among us does not recognise it? Who does not know 'the bell-shaped mountain which the wild winds ring full mournfully'? And the beck, too, where the ouzel flits even in winter on the 'ice-rimmed stones,' and the banks, whereon Sir Lancelot might lie and watch 'the flowery troops in pageant movable'--the snowdrops 'like a flock of children purely white,' the 'deep Lent-lilies, like constellations girt with lesser orbs.' When he crosses to the western sea 'angry and purple, far and wide outspread in stormy grandeur,' we go with him, and as we wander thitherward see Scawfell 'palpitating in the haze,' feel 'the tingling of the woodlands' at night-time down the valley of the Duddon, and learn how Esk is 'suckled in sylvan places' by 'clusters of wild tarns.'

Among his minor local poems 'English Hedges'--the Saxon hedgerows--are apostrophized:

'The hedges still survive, shelters for flowers, An habitation for the singing birds, Cool banks of shadow, grateful to the herds, A charm scarce known in any land but ours.'

And in 'Mountain Tarns' he sings:

'There is a power to bless In hillside loneliness-- In tarns and dreary places-- A virtue in the brook, A freshness in the look Of mountains' joyless faces-- And so when life is dull, Or when my heart is full Because my dreams have frowned, I wander up the rills To stones and tarns, and hills-- I go there to be crowned.'

If we turn to Faber's purely devotional writings, such as 'All for Jesus,' and can forget, or slide over, the subtle insinuations of Romish doctrines, and the curious blending of saints and sacraments, popes and priests, confessions and penances, with earnest appeals on behalf of Jesus, at one time as though the soul's salvation depended solely on ceremonials and priestly absolutions, and at another time as if on 'Jesus only,' one may find much help and light in many beautiful passages--as, for example: 'Who can look into the world and not see how God's glory is lost upon the earth? It is the interests of Jesus that we should seek and find it. Apart from clear acts of great and grievous sin, how is God forgotten, clean forgotten, by the greatest part of mankind! They live as if there were no God. It is not as if they openly rebelled against Him. They pass over and ignore Him. He is an inconvenience in His own world, an impertinence in His own creation. So He has been quietly set on one side, as if He were an idol out of fashion, and in the way. Men of science, and politicians, have agreed on this, and men of business and wealth think it altogether the most decent thing to be silent about God, for it is difficult to speak of Him, or have a view of Him, without allowing too much to Him.... Half a dozen men, going about God's world, seeking nothing but God's glory--they would remove mountains. This was promised to faith--why should not we be the men to do it?'

Similarly burning words, apart from his descriptions of Calvary, might be quoted from his sermons, but, alas! these would lack the passionate personality behind them, with the flashing eye, the expressive emphasizing hands, and, above all, the voice rising like the swelling of bells in the steeple, or tender as a silver chord trembling into silence. Without the spirit to make them live, let us not try to reproduce them.

THE BLACK ANT

This fly is an inhabitant of woods and coppices, and is very abundant in the neighbourhood of the English Lakes. The nest is often of enormous size, sometimes containing more than a cart-load of sticks and small twigs. The Vale of Duddon swarms with wood ants, and is the only place where I have seen the wryneck, which is said to feed principally on these insects. Like other ants, they have the enjoyment of wings for a few weeks in each year, and often, as the proverb says, "to their sorrow," as by them they are conveyed to places where they suffer greatly from birds, as well as from fishes. They generally make their appearance in August and September. Body, a strand of peacock's herl, and one of black ostrich's herl laid on together; silk, dark brown; wing, the lightest part of a starling's quill; hackle from a black cock.'--JOHN BEEVER: _Practical Fly-Fishing_.

XVII

JOHN RUSKIN'S FRIENDS

THE SISTERS OF THE THWAITE, AND THEIR BROTHER

'Nature takes the hue of a man's own feeling, and he finds in it what he brings to it. In proportion as he becomes more intelligent and holy, so does it become more beautiful and significant to him.'--HUGH MACMILLAN.

John Ruskin's later years were gladdened by the friendship of the Miss Beevers, especially that of Miss Susie, the younger of the two. To her, though so near a neighbour that a short boat-row to the water-head of Coniston Lake would take him across, he wrote no fewer than 2,000 letters. The best of these, or at any rate those most suitable for the public, form the book called 'Hortus Inclusus,' arranged by the professor's 'Master of Industries at Loughrigg,' Mr. Albert Fleming, and prefaced by Ruskin himself. The very title-page of the little collection shows the love he bore his friends: 'Messages from the Wood to the Garden, sent in happy days to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston, by their thankful friend, John Ruskin, LL.D., D.C.L.' The introductory words of this 'thankful friend' tell us much about the ladies: 'Sources they have been of good, like one of the mountain springs of the English shepherd land, ever to be found at need. They did not travel; they did not go up to London in its season; they did not receive idle visitors to jar or waste their leisure in the waning year. The poor and the sick could find them always; or, rather, they watched for and prevented all poverty and pain that care or tenderness could relieve or heal. Loadstones they were, as steadily bringing the light of gentle and wise souls about them as the crest of the mountain gives pause to the moving clouds; in themselves they were types of perfect womanhood in its constant happiness, queens alike of their own hearts and of a Paradise in which they knew the names and sympathized with the spirits of every living creature that God had made to play therein, or to blossom in its sunshine or shade.' A beautiful description is this of the cultured English gentlewoman, fortunately for our peasantry by no means rare. But it is on their literary and intellectual sides, rather than their philanthropic, that we have to speak of them here. It might be sufficient guarantee of Miss Susie's high level, at any rate, that Ruskin wrote to her letters as carefully composed in full mastery of language, and on as great a variety of topics, as if he had been consciously inditing another volume of his 'Modern Painters' for publication. 'The Lost Church in the Campagna' is written to one whom he knows will understand and appreciate his historical and artistic allusions. She loved flowers, and studied them enthusiastically. She and her sister are named in more than one botanical work as authorities on our mountain plants, and discoverers of rare species and their localities. Therefore he continually sets down little bits of blossom-news for his friend--though it be no more than such as this from Perugia--'the chief flowers here are only broom and bindweed, and I begin to weary for my heather and for my Susie; but oh, dear! the ways are long and the days few'; or those scraps from Ingleton, where he playfully gives all his pretty flowers names of girls, changing the harsh botanical names into sweet-sounding ones, and consulting his correspondent as to how far he may venture to separate and rechristen certain pinks and pearlworts and saxifrages from their ordained family groups. From Brantwood he discourses to her on his blue and purple agates and groups of crystals, dwelling on the perfection of some stone--'its exquisite colour and superb weight, flawless clearness, and delicate cutting, which makes the light flash from it like a wave of the lake.' The last letter written by him was to his 'Dearest Susie.' And her letters to him are treasures of poetic appreciation of Nature and of book-lore rare in women. 'Did you think of your own quotation from Homer,' she asks, 'when you told me that field of yours was full of violets? But where are the four fountains of white water? How delicious Calypso's fire of finely-chopped cedar!' 'When I was a girl (I was once) I used to delight in Pope's Homer.... When a schoolgirl going with my bag of books into Manchester, I used to like Don Quixote and Sir Charles Grandison with my milk porridge.' 'Coniston would go into your heart if you could see it now--so very lovely; the oak-trees so early, nearly in leaf already (May 1). Your beloved blue hyacinths will soon be out, and the cuckoo has come.... The breezes will bring fern seeds and plant them, or rather sow them in such fashion as no human being can do. When time and the showers brought by the west wind have mellowed it a little, the tiny beginnings of mosses will be there. The sooner this can be done the better.' She writes to him, too, about wrens and blackbirds, and her pet squirrel, and other of her pensioners. There is one extract, somewhat pathetic, yet sweetly patient, that must not be omitted: 'You are so candid about your age that I shall tell you mine! I am astonished to find myself sixty-eight--very near the Psalmist's three-score-and-ten. Much illness and much sorrow, and then I woke to find myself old, and as if I had lost a great part of my life. Let us hope it was not all lost.' It was she who made the charming series of extracts from 'Modern Painters,' published as 'Frondes Agrestes,' respecting which he writes that they are 'chosen at her pleasure, by the author's friend, the younger lady of the Thwaite, Coniston,' and adds his absolute submission to her judgment, and his appreciation of the grace she did him in writing out every word with her own hands. Over and above her natural history pursuits and her association with John Ruskin, she wrote, I am told, many short poems and leaflets on kindness to animals. She died in 1893, and her grave adjoins her friend's.

The Beevers were a Manchester family whose father, on his retirement from business, settled, in 1831, at the Thwaite House. After his death one of his sons, John, and three of his daughters, Mary, Margaret, and Susanna, lived on there, unmarried, and contented, it is said of them, with 'the harvest of a quiet eye.' Miss Margaret died before Ruskin knew the circle. John Beever, like his sisters, was a naturalist. He was especially fond of fly-fishing, and on the art of it he wrote a book, of which a new edition has recently been issued, with a biographical sketch by W. G. Collingwood, and notes and an extra chapter on char-fishing by A. and A. R. Severn. Fishing has not directly added much of value to English literature. The notable exception is, of course, Isaac Walton's ever-living little book. Great statesmen and tired public men of all kinds have found rest and change in handling rod and line, and many pleasant little brochures exist of smaller men's experiences and enjoyment of the gentle craft. To this order belongs Mr. Beever's book. It is necessarily too technical for the general reader. There is nothing in it so good as Walton's well-known remark about the nightingale--a bird never heard, alas! in these northern regions, and therefore much missed by a southerner like myself--but which 'airy creature breathes such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think miracles had not ceased. He that at midnight, when the very labourer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have often done, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, Lord, what music hast Thou provided for the saints in heaven, when Thou affordest bad men such music on earth!' Nor will you find anything so racy as the 'Compleat Angler's' picture of an otter-hunt, or as the other of the young milkmaid singing 'that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago.' He has, however, some excellent passages of a literary savour, as, for example, of the two gentlemen fishing the streams of the pastoral Yarrow, and convincing the local piscator that 'grouse' was the proper fly to catch with, and of Frank, the Matlock chaise-driver, who became to him the revealer of Nature's demand for obedience to her laws--in other words, he taught him the imitation and use of the actual living flies on which the trout fed each consecutive day. The list of possible flies to copy is a formidable one, but the way to make the copies is fully explained--say, with a feather from the top of a woodcock's wing, fur from a squirrel's cheek, and orange-silk, or perhaps a feather from a sea-swallow or a seagull, pale-blue rabbit's fur, and primrose-coloured silk, or some wool from beneath an old sheep. Then there follows the method of making rods, the suitable wood, the dimensions, and the art of securing temporary repairs. There are appendices on the antiquity of fly-fishing, and on a day's angling in France. To those of us for whom the mysteries of spring-backs, spring-duns, March-browns, green-tails, ruddy-flies, and black-headed reds, and iron-blues, have slight allurements, the more interesting portions of his life are those spent in making himself acquainted with the growth and habits of fish, and in constructing a pond behind his house that he could stock with finny people from the tarns and becks--a water colony wherein once each year he could handle and examine each member to see how it progressed. The pond was also a reservoir for a water-wheel that drove the machinery in his private workshop, where he turned wooden articles for carving, and made elaborate inlaid mosaics. There also he printed his sister's little books, and texts for the walls of Sunday-schools. Children he was fond of, and for their sakes he made himself--or was his talent innate--a wonderful story-teller, of 'quaint imagination and humour.' He had seven years of illness, which laid him aside from his active pursuits, and died no fewer than thirty-four years before his youngest sister 'Susie.' He does not lie at Coniston, but in the churchyard at Hawkshead, hard by the old sun-dial on the north side. In the same graveyard lies another Lake celebrity, of whom something may be said shortly.

If fishermen deign to read these articles, let me inform them they can get Mr. Beever's 'Practical Fly-fishing' through any local bookseller, from Methuen, of London; and that another book for their perusal is Mr. John Watson's 'Lake District Fisheries.' I cannot praise or dispraise either, but competent and knowing men tell me both are the practical experiences of practical fishermen, and are therefore of real value.

Some readers may think that Miss Mary Beever has been slighted in favour of her brother and her younger sister. 'She was,' says Ruskin, 'chiefly interested in the course of immediate English business, policy, and progressive science; while Susie lived an aerial and enchanted life, possessing all the highest joys of imagination.' They were the Martha and the Mary of the Coniston Bethany, its 'House of Dates,'--its place of rest and refreshment, not for the incarnate Son of God, the Saviour of mankind, but for a wearied reformer of human life and lover of all good things that God has made in the perfection of beauty. They each contributed their share to his comfort and renovation, and if he was more attached to the one who could enter into his life-thoughts the most thoroughly, there is nothing to wonder at in its being so.

FROM JONAH'S PRAYER

'I will call on Jehovah from my prison, And He will hear me; From the womb of the grave I cry. Thou hearest my voice. Thou hast cast me into wide waters in the depths of the sea; And the floods surround me; All Thy dashing and Thy rolling waves Pass over me.'

FROM HABAKKUK'S 'SONG IN PARTS'

'Though the fig-tree did not blossom, And there be no fruit on the vine; Though the produce of the olive fail, Though the parched field yield no food, Though the flock be cut off from the fold, And there be no cattle in the stalls; Yet will I rejoice in Jehovah, I will exult in God my Saviour. Jehovah my Lord is my strength. He will set my feet as the deer's, He will make me walk in high places.' ELIZABETH SMITH: _Hebrew Translations_.

XVIII

A LEARNED YOUNG LADY

ELIZABETH SMITH

'What the vast multitudes of women are doing in the world's activities, and what share their mothers and grandmothers, to the remotest generations backward, have had in originating culture, is a question which concerns the whole race.'--PROFESSOR MASON'S _Woman's Share in Primitive Culture_.