Part 10
THE GREEK GOSPELS, WITH ANNOTATIONS BY RUSKIN]
Some of the remarks merely comment on the grammatical forms, or the contractions, or the style of writing. Where a page is written with a free hand, evidently to the scribe's enjoyment, he notes the fact; and likewise where the scribe found it dull, and penned perfunctorily. That is quite like him, to ask how the man felt at his work! But there are many curious hints of questioning, and then confessions of his doubts about the doubts, that go to one's heart to read. "I have always profound sympathy for Thomas," he scribbles. "Well questioned, Jude!" "This reads like a piece of truth (John xviii. 16). How little one thinks of John's being by, in that scene!" "The hour being unknown, as well as unlooked for (Matt. xxiv. 42), the Lord comes, and the servant does not know that He has--(and has his portion, unknowingly?)." To the cry for Barabbas (Matt. xxvii. 20) he adds, "Remember! it was not the mob's fault, except for acting as a mob"; and to verse 24 (Pilate washing his hands)--"How any popular electionist or yielding governor can read these passages of Matthew and not shrivel!" On the parable of the vine, the earlier note to the verse about the withered branch cast into the fire and burned is--"How useless! and how weak and vain the whole over-fatigued metaphor!" But then--"I do not remember when I wrote this note, but the 'over-fatigued metaphor' comes to me to-day, 8th Nov. 1877, in connection with the [Greek: kathos egapese], as the most precious and direct help and life." You remember John xv. 9: "As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you; continue ye in my love." That word was the help and life he found.
He used to read his Latin Bibles too, but most of these were collected rather for their artistic value than otherwise. Of printed bibles there were few in his library; one, a Latin version in three volumes, purple morocco, printed by Fran. Gryphius, 1541, and adorned, as the title puts it, with images suitable no less for their beauty than for their truth, has the cuts resembling Holbein's work in "Icones Historiarum Veteris Testamenti" (Lyons, apud Joannem Frellonium, 1547). But he loved mediaeval illumination, and owned too many thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Bibles, Psalters, and Missals to be described in this chapter.
Mention may be made of a few, such as the big fourteenth-century Latin Bible, splendidly written in double columns with stiff Gothic patterns in red and blue, and dainty little decorative initials, each a picture. Some of these he used to set his pupils and assistants to enlarge; and a very difficult job it was to get the curves to Ruskin's mind. If you made them too circular he would expound the spring of the lines until you felt that you had been guilty of all the vices of the vulgarest architect's draughtsman, an awful character in the true Ruskinian's eyes. If you insisted on the "infinite" and hyperbolic sweep of the contour--and you can't magnify a sixpence into a dinner-plate without some _parti pris_--then you had the lecture on Moderation and Restraint. But Ruskin was always very good-humoured and patient in these lessons; in the end a happy mean was found between Licence and Formality, and such works as the "Noah's Ark"--now, I believe, in the Sheffield museum--were elaborated. Perhaps photography would have been a shorter cut; but it should have been capital training, if one had known what use to make of it.
Then there is a Versio Vulgata MS. of the thirteenth century, poorly half bound in shabby boards, with a pencil note--not by Ruskin, of course--"bo^t at Naples 1826 for 21/-." Twice or thrice as many pounds would be cheap for it now, I suppose. A pleasant story is told by Bishop Nicolson in his diary of the year when Queen Anne came to the throne, of his meeting the famous Dr. Bentley on the Queen's birthday (February 8, 1702), and how the great Cambridge scholar laughed at the mania for possessing rare editions--a fancy by no means exclusively of these latter days. "He ridicul'd ye Expensive humour of purchaseing old Editions of Books at extravagant Rates; a Vanity to wch ye present E. of Sunderland and B(ishop) of N(orwich) much subject. The former bought a piece of Cicero's works out of Dr. Fr. Bernard's Auction, printed about 1480, at ye Rate of 3lb. 2s. 6d. which Dr. Bentley himself had presented to yt physitian, and wch cost him no more than the odd half Crown." The Bishop of Barrow-in-Furness in editing the diary has tried to trace the subsequent fortune of the book for which Bentley thought L3 2s. 6d. too high a price. There seem to have been two volumes, each of which might answer to the description, sold at the dispersal of the Blenheim library in 1881; and of these one fetched L54, and the other L38, both prices greatly below their market value at the present time.
Very like the last mentioned in Ruskin's collection is his small thirteenth-century Bible, with minute double-columned writing, as tiny as newspaper print, but perfectly readable, and lovely to look at. This is an English-written book, with a glossary of names at the end; it came from the library of the Hon. Archibald Fraser, son of the celebrated Lord Lovat. Another small thirteenth-century Bible is Italian work; a German MS. Latin prayer-book and psalter dating from about 1220, with rich bold pictures and ornament in broad bands of blue and burnished masses of gold, bound in grey-green velvet, was a great treasure. His so-called St. Louis Psalter and the prayer-book of Yolande of Navarre have been often mentioned by him, but to go into these would take us away from our subject--his Bibles.
The one he prized most is known as King Hakon's Bible, from a reference on the fly-leaf to King Hakon V. of Norway. It is a small volume (shown in our illustration as standing in front of the embroidered cover in which his Birthday Addresses are kept) with 613 leaves of the thinnest vellum, measuring no more than 41/4 by 61/4 inches, and written in tiny black-letter, double columned, every page ornamented; there are more than eighty delicately painted pictures, and hundreds of daintily coloured initials, a perfect treasury of decorative art. The binding is of the sixteenth century, and thought to be English; boards covered with brown leather, brass bosses and clasps, and stamped with panels of griffins in relief, and the motto repeated between them of "Jhesus help." The book is French work of the middle of the thirteenth century, and the black-letter inscription reads, "Anno dni. M^o. CCC^o. X^o. istum librum emit fr. hanricus prior provicialis a conventu hathersleu. de dono dni. regis Norwegie," which is to say: "In 1310 brother Henry, provincial prior, bought this book from the Conventus (whatever that means) at Haderslev (in Sleswig) out of the gift of my lord the king of Norway." It hardly seems as though the king had owned the book, as Ruskin believed when he bought it, but it is not surprising that the keepers of the National Library at Christiania were disappointed in finding that it had gone into his hands from Quaritch's catalogue, just too soon for them; and that the Norwegians sent a scholar to report upon it, Herr Kristian Koren, and on Ruskin's death again tried to become possessors, though Ruskin's heirs have, so far, not seen their way to part with the treasure he so much valued. To Herr Koren I owe the photograph of one of its pages, here reproduced.
These were all library Bibles, kept in his study, and used there; but in travelling he had various little testaments which he carried with him, such as the set shown in the Ruskin Exhibition at Coniston in 1900. In his bedroom, for reading on wakeful nights, he had the "Stereotype Clarendon Press Bible, Printed by Samuel Collingwood and Co." in six volumes, one being the Apocrypha, and this, like others, bears marks of much use in notes and pencillings. He had more respect for the Apocrypha than most Protestant Bible-readers. At one time (1881) he presented several copies of this Clarendon Press edition, bound just like his own, to a few friends whom he hoped to interest in "St. George's work," with the inscription, "From the Master." To the same he gave little squares of the pure gold, beaten thin, out of which he meant to strike his "St. George's coinage," saying, "Now you have taken St. George's money; and whether you call yourself one or no, you are a member of my Guild. I have caught you with guile!"
It is rather curious, and characteristic of his old-fashioned ways, that he used a bookmarker in his Bible--a dark blue ribbon, an inch wide, sewn to a card, on which was the text, "Day by day we magnify Thee," written and painted with a fifteenth-century style of ornament.
Quite at the end, his eyesight failed him for smaller type, and Mrs. Severn bought him a larger-typed Bible, which he read, or had read to him, constantly, up to his death. The only bit of his writing in it is a note of his sadder moods, "The burden of London, Isaiah xxiv."; I suppose he refers to the words, "Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty ... From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, even glory to the righteous. But I said, My leanness, my leanness, woe unto me!..." Those who read "Fors" know how little he trusted our imperialistic optimism.
Such a Bible-reader, one might think, would have collected something in the way of a theological library, what are called helps to Bible-reading. But no! he read neither commentators nor modern critics, and I believe he had no interest in anybody's views about exegesis or analysis. He kept by him a few volumes of reference: Smith's "Bible Dictionary," Cruden, the "Englishman's Greek Concordance," Sharpe's "Translation of the Hebrew Scriptures" (he knew no Hebrew), and there were two copies of Finden's "Landscape Illustrations of the Bible," one for his study and one for his bedroom. But even these few were little used; to him the plain old text was the book he studied all through his eighty years, and knew as not many in this generation know it. Once in his rooms at Oxford I remember getting into a difficulty about the correct quotation of some passage. "Haven't you a concordance?" I asked. "I'm ashamed to say I have," he said. I did not quite understand him. "Well," he explained, "you and I oughtn't to need Cruden!"
XIV
RUSKIN'S "ISOLA"
XIV
RUSKIN'S "ISOLA"
"I gave her that name," he said once, "because she is so unapproachable."
When he was a very young man he saw her first in Rome. He had been sent there for the winter because it was supposed he was going into a consumption. He had certainly been working very hard at Oxford--not only doing the necessary reading for honours, which need kill nobody, but all manner of literature, art, antiquities and science into the bargain, as his manner was; and he had taken terribly to heart the loss of the pretty French girl, on whom his boyish affections had been set for years. So he was in Rome as an invalid, restless and discontented; and he didn't like Raphael, and he didn't like the other things people ought to like. It must have been a difficult time for his parents; but then one can't expect to bring up a genius without a certain amount of trouble.
In a while he took a turn, and condescended to go with them to musical services. They were energetic anti-Romanists; but they went to St. Peter's to see the show, and to hear the singing. They thought he was beginning to develop an interest in music. But it was just the old story.
There was a beautiful Miss Tollemache in Rome that winter; "a fair English girl," he says, "who was not only the admitted Queen of beauty in the English circle of that winter in Rome, but was so, in the kind of beauty which I had only hitherto dreamed of as possible, but never yet seen living; statuesque severity with womanly sweetness joined. I don't think I ever succeeded in getting nearer than within fifty yards of her; but she was the light and solace of all the Roman winter to me, in the mere chance glimpses of her far away, and the hope of them."
It was very like Ruskin, and it says very much for the reality of the romantic ideal he preached, that a few glimpses of a far-away beauty, whom he had neither the chance nor the intention of approaching, should have made a man of him, out of a pining, love-sick boy. Open-air sketching helped him out of his consumption, or whatever the disease was; but the moral stimulus and reawakening of healthy imagination and power to work were given him by this pure enthusiasm for a beautiful face, fifty yards away.
He never saw her again for about ten years, not until she was a wedded wife. She had married a younger son of Earl Cowper and his wife, daughter of Lord and Lady Melbourne, and by second marriage wife of Lord Palmerston. The Hon. William Cowper was one of the most shining examples of the type--one does not see much about it in newspapers or histories, but private memoirs describe it in all ages, and no doubt it exists even in this--the type of good men in great positions, men who are in the world and very actively engaged in it, but quite unspotted. He began life as aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland in 1830, and went into Parliament in 1835; he was a Lord of the Treasury in 1845, then a Lord of the Admiralty, then President of the Board of Health, Vice-President of the Board of Trade, Paymaster-General, Chief Commissioner of Works, Vice-President of the Education Department of the Privy Council, Chairman of Mr. Fawcett's Committee on the Enclosure Acts; it was he who saved Epping Forest in 1871, and was prime mover in the preservation of open spaces and in granting allotments to the poor; he passed the Medical Bill in 1858, the Thames Embankment Bill in 1862-3, and the Courts of Justice Building Bill in 1863; the "Cowper-Temple Clause," to secure the reading of the Bible in Board Schools, was his; he was the great reconstructor of the London Parks and inventor of the scheme for distributing the Park flowers to hospitals, work-houses and schools. It would be long to tell how he made politics philanthropic and brought art into the public service. After 45 years in Parliament he was raised to the peerage as Lord Mount Temple, and died in 1888.
All these things are known, or knowable, to the public; but what is more to the point, Histories of Our Own Times don't tell us: how the lively Eton boy, always in scrapes, occasionally flogged, had according to Gladstone's reminiscence "the stamp of purity, modesty, gentleness upon him in a peculiar degree": how the dandy officer in the Blues wanted to go into the Church "as a means of escaping," he wrote, "the imminent dominion of the sins which it seemed so difficult to avoid": how the busy M.P. and official, Palmerston's step-son and favourite, kept through all distractions a perfectly holy and saintly life, a sense of nearness to God and devotion to His will, that should put much professional piety to shame.
For instance, in his diary he noted Queen Victoria's coronation, which, of course, he had attended--he had dined with the Queen a couple of days before--and continued, "The main object to be pursued in life is communion with God. It is a good method of testing any way of spending my time to ask, does it render me more ready for communion with God?" At twenty-seven he had long known all that evangelical piety at its best can teach; and he always kept the faith. Ten years later, his young wife--the Miss Tollemache of Ruskin's admiration, and the Lady Mount Temple laid in 1901 to rest by her husband's side--asked him, at a large party at the Palmerston's, what interested him most. "Oh, nothing," he answered, "compares in interest with communion with my Master, and work for Him." "This," she added, in her privately printed volume of _Memorials_, "this was the spirit of his life, through all the blessed years I lived with him."
So after a long interval during which Ruskin had become a famous writer, and the girl at Rome had become the true helpmate of such a man, they met once more. It is rather curious to compare their two separate accounts of the meeting. The lady says, referring to the earlier part of her married life, in the 'fifties and 'sixties, "Another great delight to us at this time was going up occasionally to Denmark Hill for a happy day with Mr. Ruskin. It seems that, quite unknown to myself, he had noticed me when we were in Rome together in 1840! I was then eighteen. It was rather humiliating that when we met again, after about ten years, he did not recognise me. We became great friends: I was fond of his cousin Joan"--Mrs. Arthur Severn. Ruskin's way of putting it was rather different, and the mere man doesn't quite see where the humiliation comes in. He hated going to parties, he says; but one evening was introduced to a lady who was "too pretty to be looked at and yet keep one's wits about one"--that is very characteristic of him: so he talked a little with his eyes on the ground. "Presently, in some reference to Raphael or Michael Angelo, or the musical glasses, the word 'Rome' occurred; and a minute afterwards, something about Christmas in 1840. I looked up with a start; and saw that the face was oval--fair--the hair, light brown. After a pause I was rude enough to repeat her words, 'Christmas in 1840!--were you in Rome then?' 'Yes,' she said, a little surprised, and now meeting my eyes with hers, inquiringly. Another tenth of a minute passed before I spoke again. 'Why, I lost all that winter in Rome in hunting _you_!' It was Egeria herself! then Mrs. Cowper-Temple. She was not angry; and became from that time forward a tutelary power, of the brightest and happiest. Egeria always had her own way everywhere, thought that I also should have mine, and generally got it for me."
By the kindness of Mrs. Arthur Severn I have by me the long series of Ruskin's letters to Lord and Lady Mount Temple. To any one who knew the people and circumstances touched upon, they would be most interesting; delightfully amusing for the most part, but sometimes intensely painful, where the fiery genius poured out his woes and disappointments, public and private, into their kindly ears. She was his confidant in all that unhappy love-story which ended so tragically for his later life: she was his sympathetic adviser in much of his work. Mr. Cowper-Temple, too, was a kindly and helpful friend. In the early days he introduced Ruskin to Palmerston, and smoothed the way for various plans connected with the National Gallery and public art-works, many of which owed their promotion to Ruskin in the first instance. I cannot trace his direct influence in the philanthropic labours of Mr. Cowper-Temple and the politicians of his circle; but Ruskin was personally admired and loved by many of them, and certainly had an indirect share in much that was done for the help of the people. When he attempted to found his Guild of St. George, Mr. Cowper-Temple was one of the Trustees; not with great faith in the scheme, but with much affection for the schemer.
After some years of "Mr. and Mrs. Cowper" the acquaintance warmed into a closer friendship. They became Ruskin's [Greek: "phile"], for he always nicknamed his intimates, and often so whimsically that his letters are quite ludicrously unprintable. To them he was "St. C."--Saint Chrysostom, the "golden-mouthed"; and sometimes, he liked to think, St. Christopher. When he was very ill at Matlock in 1871 Mrs. Cowper-Temple came to nurse him, and from that time he was her "Loving little boy," and his friends were his "Dearest Mama" and "Dear Papa." His view of life was that he grew younger as the years went on--and so from being "Dearest Mama" she became "Darling Grannie," and he signed "Ever your poor, grateful little boy." It is perhaps all very absurd; but one certainly does not understand Ruskin without knowing this queer side of his character, part sentimental, part grotesque, which creeps out even in his most serious writing, and makes it so impossible to take his every word for gospel message. But very often he wrote to her and of her as Isola--the island--"Isola Bella" standing alone and unapproachable by all ordinary roads, and yet open on all sides to the waifs of the waves, claiming haven and rest in her sympathy. Here is the whole of a little note written in a dark time in his later years: "Is there no Isola indeed, where we can find refuge--and give it? I have never yet been so hopeless of doing anything more in this wide-wasting and wasted earth, unless--we seize and fortify with love--a new Atlantis. Ever your devoted St. C."
There are very few bits in the letters of general interest. Of somebody's sketches sent for him to look at he wrote: "Alas, there's no genius in these drawings. Genius never exists without intense industry. Industry is not genius, but is the vital element of it." In Bible reading--"I noticed, curiously for the first time, two most important mistranslations. Fancy never having noticed before that 'Sufficient unto the day is its evil,' ought to be 'Let the day's evil suffice for it.' And 'chasteneth' ought in several cases to be merely 'bringeth up, teacheth!'" Here is what he urged upon his friends in all seriousness, and most strangely if you think who the friends were: "You are compromising somehow between God and Satan, and therefore don't see your way. Satan appears to you as an angel of the most exquisite light--I can see that well enough; but how many real angels he has got himself mixed up with I don't know. However, for the three and fortieth time--in Ireland or England or France, or under the _Ara coeli_ perhaps best of all, take an acre of ground, make it lovely, give what food comes of it to people who need it--and take no rent of it yourselves. 'But that strikes at the very foundations of Society?' It does; and therefore, do it. For the Foundations of Society are rotten with every imaginable plague, and must be struck at and swept away, and others built in Christ, instead of on the back of the Leviathan of the Northern Foam. Ever your affectionate St. C.--not the Professor." It was to Lady Mount Temple he wrote the pretty letter telling her to arrange her party just as if Christ were coming to dinner--it is printed in "Fors Clavigera"--"I suppose Him to have just sent Gabriel to tell you He's coming, but that you're not to make any alterations in your company on His account."
Perhaps she hardly needed a Ruskin to tell her that: but she kept the letter, and did what it bade. Those who know anything about the Broadlands Conferences, those remarkable meetings of men and women in all ranks and of every shade of religious belief, come together "for the deepening of spiritual life," know what singular influence was wielded by Lady Mount Temple, and how far-reaching that influence has become.