Part 8
When he left Oxford he still continued his lessons, especially the singing. I have never heard of his singing in company, but I can hardly doubt that the lessons did much for his voice. Any one who has heard him lecture, or read, or even talk, knows how resonant and flexible it was, and how thoroughly under his command. He had naturally a weak chest; he caught cold easily, and his throat was often affected; but he always, I think, was able to lecture, and his voice was the first thing that attracted an audience. The singing lessons were not without result.
In later years his music-master was George Frederick West, who taught him--or tried to teach him--something of composition. I can remember Mr. West coming to give him a lesson at Herne Hill, but I don't think I was ever present at the ordeal. You can imagine that "Dr. Ruskin," as Mr. West always called him, was a most difficult pupil, wanting at every turn to know why; incredulous of the best authority; impatient of the compromises and conventions, the "wohl-temperirtes Klavier"; and eager to upset everything and start afresh. It is Mrs. Severn who can describe these droll interviews and Mr. West's despairing appeal, "But you wouldn't be ungrammatical, Doctor Ruskin?"
I am not so sure about that; but Mr. Ruskin learnt what he wanted. One thing he could do to perfection. He could easily and readily transpose and copy a song that was too high or too low, and he liked doing so. It does not imply great scholarship, but it is wonderful, as Dr. Johnson said of the performing dog, that he should do it at all. He might have been spending his time to better purpose, you think?
Music lessons went on, at all available intervals, down to the close of his active life. At Sandgate in 1887-88 he was learning from Mr. Roberts. In his lodgings, besides the cottage piano already there, he got a grand piano and a harmonium (the last was afterwards given to a chapel in Coniston), and because he had few chances of hearing music in that retirement, he engaged a young lady professional to play of evenings to himself and the friends who were staying with him.
In his books there are several hard hits at concerts and concert-goers; but just as he wrote against railways and yet, he said, "used them himself, few people more," so he was an energetic concert-goer. On arriving at Paris or any great foreign town his first question was, "What about the opera?" With classical Italian opera he was familiar from his youth up. He loved it, indignant when pestilent modernism hurried the tempo or took liberties with the well-known score. In London he usually had a season ticket for the Crystal Palace concerts--you remember how he abused the Crystal Palace!--and when he was driven away by the "autumn cleaning," a great business in old Mrs. Ruskin's scrupulous housekeeping at Denmark Hill, he would stay at the Queen's Hotel in Norwood, "to be near the Manns concerts."
He has just mentioned Charles Halle in "Ethics of the Dust," but in private letters comes out his real admiration of the great pianist. John Hullah was one of his friends; his copy of Hullah's "Manual" is scribbled with devices for simplifying the teaching of the keyboard. Indeed, being as he was a born teacher, and counting as he did music an essential to education, he even taught--or tried to teach--what he knew of it whenever there was a chance. That class of little country girls at Brantwood had to learn music too; it was in his time of failing strength, and the story is tragi-comic; but in such times the real heart reveals itself through all weaknesses, and it was a very kindly and earnest nature that made him write out neat cards of music-lore reduced to its lowest terms for the cottage lasses whose lives he tried to raise and brighten.
It was only on evenings of actual illness or serious trouble that he passed the time without music, and he generally managed to have somebody in the house who could play and sing. One of his admirations was "Claribel" (Mrs. Barnard), whom he met at Jean Ingelow's; she sang her own songs to his great delight. Later, among many, there were the Misses Bateman and Miss Wakefield; in "Joanna's Care" he has told his readers about the charm of Mrs. Severn's singing. And it was not only comic songs and nigger ballads that he would listen to; he liked fun, as his readers ought to know by now, and a good funny song, if the tune was sound, made him clap his hands in a quaint gesture and laugh all over--the more that there was much sadness in his thoughts. I remember Sir Edward Burne-Jones's account of a visit to the Christy Minstrels; how the Professor dragged him there, to a front seat, and those burnt-corked people anticked and shouted, and Burne-Jones wanted to go, and Ruskin wouldn't, but sat laughing through the whole performance as if he loved it. An afternoon, to him, of oblivion to the cares of life; an odd experience; but he would not call it music. "Now let us have something different," he used to say when he had laughed enough.
The old songs were his delight, old English and French and Scotch. German songs, German music, and everything German, except Duerer and Holbein, he could not abide; German love-songs especially, "songs of seduction," he called them. He would just endure a bit of Swiss carolling, with its breezy reminder of the Alps; but the unlucky individual who tried him with Fesca has cause to remember the event. Haydn and Mozart he classed with the Italians, and Handel with the good old standards; but Mendelssohn was not to be named. Worst of all he misliked execution without feeling: the brilliant young lady pianist had no welcome from Ruskin. Gaiety, or else tenderness, appealed; even among the old songs there were those he cast out of the programme. Of "Charmante Gabrielle" he said once, "it might do when a king sang it."
Corelli was one of his favourite composers; that was another link with "Redgauntlet" and Wandering Willie; and though he was never a collector of rarities as such, he bought all the Corelli he could meet with, as well as various old editions of early music at Chappell's sales.
[Music illustration: AT MARMION'S GRAVE
WORDS BY SIR WALTER SCOTT
AIR BY JOHN RUSKIN, 1881
But yet from out the lit-tle hill Ooz-es the slen-der spring-let still, And shep-herd boys re-pair To seek the wat-er- flag and rush, And plait their gar-lands fair; When thou shalt find the lit-tle hill With thy heart com-mune, and be still.]
From about 1880 for some years he took to making little compositions of his own; curious experiments. It need hardly be said, and it need never be regretted, that these were not workmanlike performances. The mere fact of his trying to compose is curious; and though it is not part of his life's work, it explains some passages and turns of his thought. It would be really more wonderful if he had succeeded in learning to be a musician, along with all the other things he attempted. But look at his face, in the truthful if not sentimental portrait by Mr. Creswick. I do not much believe in physiognomy, and yet in the faces of those who have the gift of execution--quite a separate power from intellectual or emotional appreciation, or even from composition--I think you notice that the groove which marks off the wing of the nose, _ala nasi_, at the top is strongly developed; sometimes it is so sharp as to be almost a deformity. There is none in Ruskin's face. That trait may mean nothing; but the fact remains that so able a man spent time and labour in vain over an art which many learn easily, without a hundredth part of his general power. In a word, he had a great love for music, and within certain limits a true taste, but no talent.
There were, however, friends of his who could find his little tunes interesting and enjoyable, and even pay him pretty compliments about them. Without attaching too much importance to it, I venture to quote part of a letter from Ernest Chesneau (author of "The English School of Painting") to John Ruskin, dated "Oxford, 12 juin, 1884, 8^{h.} 1/2 a.m."
"Hier a 5 heures, nous sommes alles reclamer a miss Macdonald junior la chanson de notre John. L'aimable enfant n'a pas eu le temps encore de l'ecrire et me l'a promise pour demain; mais pour me consoler de ma deception, que son fin regard de fillette a bien lue sur mon visage, elle m'en a chante une autre; et je lui ai fait redire la premiere. En ecoutant ces doux petits airs simples, naifs et touchants, ma memoire evoquait--sans que ma volonte y eut part--le souvenir d'une grande fugue du vieux Bach que l'orgue de New College avait fort bien joue la veille. Et ma pensee inconsciement associait, rapprochait la magnificence du Bach et la timide delicatesse du Ruskin. Et la douce petite chanson m'apparaissait comme ces exquises graminees dont la graine, apportie par les oiseaux du ciel, fleurit aux frontons de marbre des palais ou aux corniches de pierre des cathedrales. Et la fleurette apportee des champs voisins se perpetuera a travers les ages, quand les somptuosites creees de main d'homme ne seront plus que des ruines ou s'arretera le regard curieux de l'artiste. C'est que la petite fleur des champs et la naive chanson expriment l'ame des simples; et que la fugue comme le temple ou le palais expriment les raffinements des scholastiques, c'est a dire l'ephemere de l'art."
In "Elements of English Prosody," written 1880, there is a good deal about his views on music, made sadly unreadable, not by the error of his ideas, but by his perverse neglect of recognised technicalities. Among the rest is an attempt at a setting of "Ye Mariners of England," with bars inserted as if to mark the feet of the prosody instead of the beat of the melody, which was part of his scheme, though it naturally offends a musician.
[Music illustration: "TRUST THOU THY LOVE"
FACSIMILE OF MUSIC BY JOHN RUSKIN]
His little output of musical composition need never see the light. Once he had "Blow, blow thou winter wind" set up in type, but it was discreetly blotted. The manuscript page of "On Old AEgina's Rocks" is in the Coniston Museum for the curious to behold. Others were little rhymes for children--the words printed in his "Poems," or fragments from Scott and Shakespeare, "How should I thy truelove know," "From Wigton to the foot of Ayr," "Come unto these yellow sands," "From the east to western Ind," and so forth, with a couple of odes of Horace, "Faune, Nympharum" and "Tu ne quaesieris." Here, as specimens, it is enough to give a little scrap from "Marmion," to which he set the air and sketched the accompaniment; and his own rough draft of a songlet, of which the words, at any rate, are lovely, and intimately Ruskin. They might be the motto to the Queen's Gardens of "Sesame":
Trust thou thy Love; if she be proud, is she not sweet? Trust thou thy Love; if she be mute, is she not pure? Lay thou thy soul full in her hands, low at her feet; Fail, Sun and Breath;--yet, for thy peace, she shall endure!
XI
RUSKIN'S JEWELS
XI
RUSKIN'S JEWELS
A standing treat for Ruskin's visitors was to look at minerals. Some people, it was known, did not appreciate Turners, but everybody was sure to show emotion over the diamonds and nuggets. It was not an ordinary collection, with a bit of this and a bit of that, samples of all the ores in the handbook; there were only certain sorts, but each specimen was the pick of the market and of many years' selection, and every sort was a type of beauty.
Ruskin was not a "scientific" mineralogist, though he was an F.G.S. from an early age, and used the word "science" pretty freely in his writings. He really knew a great deal about minerals, too; but his knowledge was that of the artist and collector, taking little notice of the mathematics and chemistry which you read about, yet finding deep and keen interest in the forms and colours, the development, the "Life of Stones," "Ethics of the Dust," as he put it, about which science, up to his time, had nothing to say. And yet, as he showed his collection, you could not but feel that this was a kind of Nature-study not only fascinating, but of real importance.
A standard work, under the heading, "Native Gold," tells us: "The octahedron and dodecahedron are the most common forms. Crystals sometimes acicular ... also passing into filiform, reticulated, and arborescent shapes; and occasionally spongiform," &c. But it does not show you, as Ruskin could--pulling out drawer after drawer of his plush-lined cabinets, and letting you handle and peer into the dainty things with a lens--what gold, as Nature makes it, actually is. The scientific book never asks why some gold is born in the shape of tiny, solid, squarish crystals, as truly crystals as the uncut diamonds lying beside them, or the quartz in which they nestle; or why other samples are spun into hair, or woven into wisps, or ravelled into knots of natural gold lace; or again, why these have grown into the shape of exquisitely finished moss, and those into seaweed leaves, flat and curly, and powdered with dust of gold crystals, springing from the rough brown stone, or semi-transparent spar, inside of which you can see them like flower-stalks in water. Here is quite a new world of wonder and mystery, and that is the kind of "science" he puzzled over. Some more solid masses, not water-worn nuggets, are like a tiny _netsuke_; he had a miniature cobra, chased with its scales--all by the art of Nature; and others so like early Greek coins that one might fancy they had given suggestions to primitive mint-masters, who like all good artists modelled their work on Nature. What a happy world, he used to say, if all the gold were in its native fronds; and even for jewellery how much prettier these leaves of gold as it grew, than anything the manufacturing goldsmith sells you. I have drawn a group of eight such fronds, arranged as a cross, the centre piece with two tiny crystals of quartz naturally set into it, a gift from his collection to a friend, as an instance of what Ruskin called a jewel: and from his own rapid sketch in colour (over leaf) is a knot of natural silver wire, for silver, too, has its "arborescent filiform" shapes.
After gold and silver and diamonds you might think the interest of the mineral-drawers would begin to wane. But no! we come to richer colours and still more striking forms. This big pebble, rosy pink, with hazy streaks inside which catch the light as you turn it about, and reveal mysterious inner architecture--that is a ruby; and this also, a bit of frozen raspberry jam engraved with mystic triangles, one inside another like a dwarf-wrought seal of a fairy king. Then hold up this slab of talc to the light; the dark patch in it glows like a red lamp with the intense colour of the garnet. Lower down the cabinet there are bunches of beryls, angelica stalks Queen Thyri would not have scorned; or trimmed by Nature into quaint likeness to those six-sided Austrian pencils, point and all: emeralds in short and snapped-off sticks of mossy green; pale pink rods of tourmaline; clippings of a baby's hair, but crimson, and so fragile you must not breathe on them--that is ruby copper, chalcotrichite; black needles of rutile piercing through and through the solid, glassy quartz-crystals; amianthus, plush on a stone, tow on a distaff, waving seaweed in a motionless aquarium of hard spar. Why were these dainty things created, or how did they grow, hidden away from all possible light for their colours to develop or sight of man to enjoy them, until mining folk dug them up from their lurking-places? And then there are those which even when found show little of their beauty until they are polished; agates, and Labrador spar, and malachites, and fire opals; what theory of Nature accounts for this latent loveliness? he would say; how little this kind of beauty is known and enjoyed by people who are satisfied with jewellery from the price-list! One of his plans was to form a jewel-museum in which the curator should exhibit, with lens and leisurely explanations, such treasures to admiring groups of visitors. The place, indeed, was fixed, at Keswick; the curator named. But the curator designate shirked the too responsible honour.
Less for pure beauty but still wonderful were all the many forms of chalcedony and kindred minerals toward the end of his entertainment. One is a specimen of hyalite--a sort of ropy, waxy glass-bubble holding water inside. He would tell how he wanted to know why the water was in it, and what sort of mysterious liquid was so sealed up and treasured by the powers that be; so he had it carefully sawn asunder and the sacred ichor collected and analysed. It turned out to be just like Thames water.
The page photographed from one of his earliest writings--the mineral dictionary he made at ten or eleven in a shorthand which, later on, he could not read himself--is now in the Coniston Museum. It shows his very early interest and diligence, at the time when he cared nothing for pictures or political economy, but loved Nature in all her ways. This page begins his juvenile account of Galena, a word which in later days often brought out a smile and a story. For years, he said, he was wretched because his great and glorious specimen of this same Lead Glance had a flaw in it, an angular notch, breaking the dainty exactitude of the big, black, shining crystal, otherwise as regular as the most consummate art could plane and polish it. One day, with the lens, he noticed that the form of the notch corresponded with the shape of a crystal of calcite embedded in another specimen. His galena had not been damaged; it was Nature's work, all the more wonderful now; and life was still worth living.
Few Ruskin readers know his papers on Agates in back numbers of the _Geological Magazine_, with their fine coloured plates illustrating some of the best in his grand series; but this was one of his pet studies, and it was a great regret of his declining age that he had never carried it through. By careful drawing he learned, as any one must, far more of the secrets of agate-structure than can be found by merely looking and talking, and he thought that the usual explanation was quite insufficient; agates were not made in layers poured one after another into the hollows of the rock, but by some kind of "segregation," the withdrawal of different materials from a mixed mass. This is not the place to discuss his theory; but only to note that duplicates of his own set, in illustration of his papers, are now in the Coniston Museum, which indeed was founded by his gift of a general mineral collection in 1887.
His "Catalogue of a series of specimens in the British Museum (Natural History) illustrative of the more common forms of Native Silica" (George Allen, 1884) to a certain extent suggests his agate theory. This is well worth looking through when a visit to the Museum gives the reader an opportunity of comparing these beautiful stones, many of them presented by Ruskin, who also gave the great jewels he called the Colenso diamond and the Edwardes ruby (after his friend Sir Herbert Edwardes, whose life he wrote in "A Knight's Faith").
Another printed catalogue, running to fifty pages, was written to expound a collection given to St. David's School, Reigate (the Rev. W. H. Churchill's, now at Stonehouse, Broadstairs) in 1883. A third collection, similarly catalogued, was given to Kirkcudbright Museum, and others to Whitelands College, Chelsea, and the St. George's (now called the Ruskin) Museum, Sheffield. These do not exhaust the list of his gifts, but serve to show how eager he was to share his interests with boys and girls, working men and the big public, who must surely, he thought, love these phases of Nature's beauty when they had opportunity of seeing them.
After the illness of 1878 which set him aside from Oxford work, he took to stones of all sorts with ardour. Even at Oxford he had not quite forgotten them: the lecture called "The Iris of the Earth" (given in London, February 1876) is a poetical miscellany of jewel-lore. While he was at work on this at Oxford he sent the college messenger round with a pressing note for one of his pupils to come at once. "I want to know what _gules_ means. Run to Professor ---- and Professor ---- and find out. The books say it means _gueule_, the red of a wild beast's throat, but that is too nasty." "Why not _gul_? I think that is Persian for _rose_," said the pupil. "Wonderful!" said he; "_In the gardens of Gul!_ Of course!" And down it went in the lecture.
At Brantwood in the early 'eighties there was a busy time with minerals. He was trying to get deeper into the secret, and to look up the more scientific side of the question. He even got a microscope, and his secretary had to make drawings of diamond anatomy, which I am afraid only confirmed him in his distrust of microscopes. He pored over crystallography, and tried to rub up his mathematics, only to find that nothing of the sort explained why gold made itself into fronds, and snow into stars, and diamonds into marvellous domes built up of shield within shield, round-sided triangles--not round-sided after all, but mysteriously straight lines, simulating curves, and so blended and harmonised and perfected that a good uncut diamond is perhaps the most bewilderingly beautiful thing in Nature. Here is one of his sketches giving a diagram of the big "St. George's" diamond he bought for L1000, and studied, and made his secretary study, for weeks together. It ought perhaps to be said that the diagram represents only one facet, and that this is magnified fully two diameters; the diamond is large, but not so large as all that. I cannot reproduce the best drawing made at the time, too elaborate in its attempt at transparency and detail; "That style of drawing was too utter by far," he said; but his diagram may give some hint of the reason why he preached "uncut diamonds" as well as the jewellery of native gold.
He put his theory into practice more than once; especially in a fine pendant he gave to Mrs. Severn, who designed the setting. It is about two and three-quarter inches long, not including the clasp. Two large moonstones _en cabochon_ but irregular in outline are set in an arrangement of gold leaves and twigs; among them are nine spikes of uncut sapphire each about half an inch long, radiating from the moonstones, which are joined by two uncut diamonds, one round and one triangular; a quantity of small rubies are dotted about the group to give contrast of colour. The effect is most picturesque, but of course it has not the glitter--the vulgar glitter, Ruskin called it--of ordinary jewellery. To see the special charm you have to look close.