Chapter 17

"THE SEVEN LAMPS"

"Have you read an Oxford Graduate's letters on art?" wrote Miss Mitford, of "Our Village," on January 27, 1847. "The author, Mr. Ruskin, was here last week, and is certainly the most charming person that I have ever known." The friendship thus begun lasted until her death. She encouraged him in his work; she delighted in his success; and, in the grave reverses which were to befall him, he found her his most faithful supporter and most sympathetic consoler. In return, "his kindness cheered her closing days; he sent her every book that would interest and every delicacy that would strengthen her, attentions which will not surprise those who have heard of his large and thoughtful generosity."[2]

[Footnote 2: "The Friendships of Mary Russell Mitford," edited by the Rev. A.G. L'Estrange.]

It was natural that a rising man, so closely connected with Scotland, should be welcomed by the leaders of the Scottish school of literature. Sydney Smith, a former Edinburgh professor, had praised the new volume. John Murray, as it seems from letters of the period, made overtures to secure the author as a contributor to his Italian guide-books. Lockhart employed him to write for the _Quarterly Review_.

Lockhart was a person of great interest for young Ruskin, who worshipped Scott; and Lockhart's daughter, even without her personal charm, would have attracted him as the actual grandchild of the great Sir Walter. It was for her sake, he says, rather than for the honour of writing in the famous _Quarterly_, that he undertook to review Lord Lindsay's "Christian Art."

He was known to be a suitor for Miss Lockhart's hand. His father, in view of the success he desired, had been in February looking out for a house in the Lake District; hoping, no doubt, to see him settled there as a sort of successor to Wordsworth and Christopher North. In March, John Ruskin betook himself to the Salutation at Ambleside, with his constant attendant and amanuensis George, for quiet after a tiring winter in London society, and for his new labour of reviewing. But he did not find himself so fond of the Lakes as of old. He wrote to his mother (Sunday, March 28, 1847):

"I finished--and sealed up--and addressed--my last bit of work, last night by ten o'clock--ready to send by to-day's post--so that my father should receive it with this. I could not at all have done it had I stayed at home: for even with all the quiet here, I have had no more time than was necessary. For exercise, I find the rowing very useful, though it makes me melancholy with thinking of 1838,--and the lake, when it is quite calm, is wonderfully sad and quiet:--no bright colours--no snowy peaks. Black water--as still as death;--lonely, rocky islets--leafless woods,--or worse than leafless--the brown oak foliage hanging dead upon them; gray sky;--far-off, wild, dark, dismal moorlands; no sound except the rustling of the boat among the reeds.

"_One o'clock._--I have your kind note and my father's, and am very thankful that you like what I have written, for I did not at all know myself whether it were good or bad."

In the early summer he went to Oxford, for a meeting of the British Association. He said (June 27, 1847):

"I am not able to write a full account of all I see, to amuse you, for I find it necessary to keep as quiet as I can, and I fear it would only annoy you to be told of all the invitations I refuse, and all the interesting matters in which I take no part. There is nothing for it but throwing one's self into the stream, and going down with one's arms under water, ready to be carried anywhere, or do anything. My friends are all busy, and tired to death. All the members of my section, but especially (Edward) Forbes, Sedgwick, Murchison, and Lord Northampton--and of course Buckland, are as kind to me as men can be; but I am tormented by the perpetual sense of my unmitigated ignorance, for I know no more now than I did when a boy, and I have only one perpetual feeling of being in everybody's way. The recollections of the place, too, and the being in my old rooms, make me very miserable. I have not one moment of profitably spent time to look back to while I was here, and much useless labour and disappointed hope; and I can neither bear the excitement of being in the society where the play of mind is constant, and rolls _over_ me like heavy wheels, nor the pain of being alone. I get away in the evenings into the hayfields about Cumnor, and rest; but then my failing sight plagues me. I cannot look at anything as I used to do, and the evening sky is covered with swimming strings and eels. My best time is while I am in the Section room, for though it is hot, and sometimes wearisome, yet I have nothing to _say_,--little to do,--nothing to look at, and as much as I like to hear."

He had to undergo a second disappointment in love; his health broke down again, and he was sent to Leamington to his former doctor, Jephson, once more a "consumptive" patient. Dieted into health, he went to Scotland with a new-found friend, William Macdonald Macdonald of Crossmount. But he had no taste for sport, and could make little use of his opportunities for distraction and relaxation. One battue was enough for him, and the rest of the visit was spent in morbid despondency, digging thistles, and brooding over the significance of the curse of Eden, so strangely now interwoven with his own life--"Thorns a also and Thistles."

At Bower's Well, Perth, where his grandparents had spent their later years, and where his parents had been married, lived Mr. George Gray, a lawyer, and an old acquaintance of the Ruskin family. His daughter Euphemia used to visit at Denmark Hill. It was for her that, some years earlier, "The King of the Golden River" had been written. She had grown up into a perfect Scotch beauty, with every gift of health and spirits which would compensate--the old folk thought--for his retiring and morbid nature. They were anxious, now more than ever, to see him settled. They pressed him, in letters still extant, to propose. We have seen how he was situated, and can understand how he persuaded himself that fortune, after all, was about to smile upon him. Her family had their own reasons for promoting the match, and all united in hastening on the event.

In the Notes to Exhibitions added to a new edition of "Modern Painters," then in the Press, the author mentions a "hurried visit to Scotland in the spring" of 1848. This was the occasion of his marriage at Perth, on April 10. The young couple spent rather more than a fortnight on the way South, among Scotch and English lakes, intending to make a more extended tour in the summer to the cathedrals and abbeys.

The pilgrimage began with Salisbury, where a few days' sketching in the damp and draughts of the cathedral laid the bridegroom low, and brought the tour to an untimely end. In August, the young people were seen safely off to Normandy, where they went by easy stages from town to town, studying the remains of Gothic building. In October they returned and settled in a house of their own, at 31, Park Street, where during the winter he wrote "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," and, as a bit of by-work, a notice of Samuel Prout for the _Art Journal._

This was Ruskin's first illustrated volume. The plates were engraved by himself in soft-ground etching, such as Prout had used, from drawings he had made in 1846 and 1848. Some are scrappy combinations of various detail, but others, such as the Byzantine capital, the window in Giotto's Campanile, the arches from St. Lo in Normandy, from St. Michele at Lucca, and from the Ca' Foscari at Venice, are effective studies of the actual look of old buildings, seen as they are shown us in Nature, with her light and the shade added to all the facts of form, and her own last touches in the way of weather-softening, and settling-faults, and tufted, nestling plants.

Revisiting the Hôtel de la Cloche at Dijon in later years, Ruskin showed me the room where he had "bitten" the last plate in his wash-hand basin, as a careless makeshift for the regular etcher's bath. He was not dissatisfied with his work himself; the public of the day wanted something more finished. So the second edition appeared with the subjects elaborately popularized in fashionable engraving. More recently they have undergone reduction for a cheap issue. But any book lover knows the value of the original "Seven Lamps" with its San Miniato cover and autograph plates.

As to its reception, or at least the anticipation of it. Charlotte Bronte bears witness in a letter to the publishers.

"I congratulate you on the approaching publication of Mr. Ruskin's new work. If 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture' resemble their predecessor, 'Modern Painters,' they will be no lamps at all, but a new constellation,--seven bright stars, for whose rising the reading world ought to be anxiously agape."

The book was announced for his father's birthday, May 10, 1849, and it appeared while they were among the Alps. The earlier part of this tour is pretty fully described in "Præterita," II. xi., and "Fors," letter xc., and so the visit of Richard Fall, the meeting with Sibylla Dowie, and the death of cousin Mary need not be dwelt on here. From the letters that passed between father and son we find that Mr. John had been given a month's leave from July 26 to explore the Higher Alps, with Coutet his guide and George his valet. The old people stayed at the Hôtel des Bergues, and thought of little else but their son and his affairs, looking eagerly from day to day for the last news, both of him and of his book.

Mr. Ruskin, senior, writes from Geneva on July 29:

"Miss Tweddale says your book _has made a great sensation._" On August 4: "The _Spectator_, which Smith sets great value on, has an elaborate favourable notice on 'Seven Lamps,' only ascribing an _infirmity_ of temper, quoting railroad passage in proof. Anne was told by American family servant that you were in American Paper, and got it for us, the _New York Tribune_ of July 13; first article is your book. They say they are willing to be learners from, rather than critics of, such a book, etc. The _Daily News_ (some of the _Punch_ people's paper) has a capital notice. It begins: 'This is a masked battery of seven pieces, which blaze away to the total extinction of the small architectural lights we may boast of, etc., etc.'" On August 5: "I have, at a shameful charge of ten francs, got August magazine and Dickens, quite a prohibition for parcels from England. In _British Quarterly_, under æsthetics of Gothic architecture they take four works, you first.... As a critic they almost rank you with Goethe and Coleridge, and in style with Jeremy Taylor."

The qualified encouragement of these remarks was further qualified with detailed advice about health; and warnings against the perils of the way, to which Mr. John used to answer on this wise:

"CORMAYEUR, _Sunday afternoon (July_ 29, 1849).

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"(Put the three sheets in order first, 1, 2, 3, then read this, front and _back_, and then 2, and then 3, front and back.) You and my mother were doubtless very happy when you saw the day clear up as you left St. Martin's. Truly it was impossible that any day could be more perfect towards its close. We reached Nant Bourant at twelve o'clock, or a little before, and Coutet having given his sanction to my wish to get on, we started again soon after one--and reached the top of the Col de Bonhomme about five. You would have been delighted with that view--it is one upon those lovely seas of blue mountain, one behind the other, of which one never tires--this, fortunately, westward--so that all the blue ridges and ranges above Conflans and Beaufort were dark against the afternoon sky, though misty with its light; while eastward a range of snowy crests, of which the most important was the Mont Iseran, caught the sunlight full upon them. The sun was as warm, and the air as mild, on the place where the English travellers sank and perished, as in our garden at Denmark Hill on the summer evenings. There is, however, no small excuse for a man's losing courage on that pass, if the weather were foul. I never saw one so literally pathless--so void of all guide and help from the lie of the ground--so embarrassing from the distance which one has to wind round mere brows of craggy precipice without knowing the direction in which one is moving, while the path is perpetually lost in heaps of shale or among clusters of crags, even when it is free of snow. All, however, when I passed was serene, and even beautiful--owing to the glow which the red rocks had in the sun. We got down to Chapiu about seven--itself one of the most desolately-placed villages I ever saw in the Alps. Scotland is in no place that I have seen, so barren or so lonely. Ever since I passed Shapfells, when a child, I have had an excessive love for this kind of desolation, and I enjoyed my little square chalet window and my chalet supper exceedingly (mutton with garlic)."

He then confesses that he woke in the night with a sore throat, but struggled on next day down the Allée Blanche to Cormayeur.

"I never saw such a mighty heap of stones and dust. The glacier itself is quite invisible from the road (and I had no mind for extra work or scrambling), except just at the bottom, where the ice appears in one or two places, being exactly of the colour of the heaps of waste coal at the Newcastle pits, and admirably adapted therefore to realize one's brightest anticipations of the character and style of the Allée _Blanche_.

"The heap of its moraine conceals, for the two miles of its extent, the entire range of Mont Blanc from the eye. At last you weather the mighty promontory, cross the torrent which issues from its base, and find yourself suddenly at the very foot of the vast slope of torn granite, which from a point not 200 feet lower than the summit of Mont Blanc, sweeps down into the valley of Cormayeur.

"I am quite unable to speak with justice--or think with clearness--of this marvellous view. One is so unused to see a mass like that of Mont Blanc without any snow that all my ideas and modes of estimating size were at fault. I only felt overpowered by it, and that--as with the porch of Rouen Cathedral--look as I would, I could not _see_ it. I had not mind enough to grasp it or meet it. I tried in vain to fix some of its main features on my memory; then set the mules to graze again, and took my sketch-book, and marked the outlines--but where is the use of marking contours of a mass of endless--countless--fantastic rock--12,000 feet sheer above the valley? Besides, one cannot have sharp sore-throat for twelve hours without its bringing on some slight feverishness; and the scorching Alpine sun to which we had been exposed without an instant's cessation from the height of the col till now--i.e., from half-past ten to three--had not mended the matter; my pulse was now beginning slightly to quicken and my head slightly to ache--and my impression of the scene is feverish and somewhat painful; I should think like yours of the valley of Sixt."

So he finished his drawing, tramped down the valley after his mule, in dutiful fear of increasing his cold, and found Cormayeur crowded, only an attic _au quatrième_ to be had. After trying to doctor himself with gray pill, kali, and senna, Coutet cured his throat with an alum gargle, and they went over the Col Ferret.

The courier Pfister had been sent to meet him at Martigny, and bring latest news and personal report, on the strength of which several days passed without letters, but not without a remonstrance from headquarters. On August 8 he writes from Zermatt:

"I have your three letters, with pleasant accounts of critiques, etc., and painful accounts of your anxieties. I certainly never thought of putting in a letter at Sion, as I arrived there about three hours after Fister left me, it being only two stages from Martigny; and besides, I had enough to do that morning in thinking what I should want at Zermatt, and was engaged at Sion, while we changed horses, in buying wax candles and rice. It was unlucky that I lost post at Visp," etc.

A few days later he says:

"On Friday I had such a day as I have only once or twice had the like of among the Alps. I got up to a promontory projecting from the foot of the Matterhorn, and lay on the rocks and drew it at my ease. I was about three hours at work as quietly as if in my study at Denmark Hill, though on a peak of barren crag above a glacier, and at least 9,000 feet above sea. But the Matterhorn, after all, is not so fine a thing as the aiguille Dru, nor as any one of the aiguilles of Chamouni: for one thing, it is all of secondary rock in horizontal beds, quite rotten and shaly; but there are other causes of difference in impressiveness which I am endeavouring to analyze, but find considerable embarrassment in doing so. There seems no sufficient reason why an isolated obelisk, one-fourth higher than any of them, should not be at least as sublime as they in their dependent grouping; but it assuredly is not. For this reason, as well as because I have not found here the near studies of primitive rock I expected,--for to my great surprise, I find the whole group of mountains, mighty as they are, except the inaccessible Monte Rosa, of secondary limestones or slates,--I should like, if it were possible, to spend a couple of days more on the Montanvert, and at the bases of the Chamouni aiguilles, sleeping at the Montanvert."

And so on, apologetically begging (as other sons beg money) for _time_, to gather the material of "Modern Painters," volume iv.

"I hope you will think whether the objects you are after are worth risks of sore throats or lungs," replied his father, for he had "personified a perpetual influenza" until they got him to Switzerland, and they were very anxious; indeed, Pfister's news from Martigny had scared his mother--not very well herself--into wild plans for recapturing him. However, Osborne Gordon was going to Chamouni with Mr. Pritchard, and so they gave him a little longer; and he made the best use of his time:

"_Monday evening (August_ 20, 1849).

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"I have to-night a packet of back letters from Viège ... but I have really hardly time to read them to-night, I had so many notes to secure when I came from the hills. I walk up every day to the base of the aiguilles without the slightest sense of fatigue; work there all day hammering and sketching; and down in the evening. As far as days by myself can be happy they are so, for I love the place with all my heart. I have no over-fatigue or labour, and plenty of time. By-the-by, though in most respects they are incapable of improvement, I recollect that I thought to-day, as I was breaking last night's ice away from the rocks of which I wanted a specimen, with a sharpish wind and small pepper and salt-like sleet beating in my face, that a hot chop and a glass of sherry, if they were to be had round the corner, would make the thing more perfect. There was however nothing to be had round the corner but some Iceland moss, which belonged to the chamois, and an extra allowance of north wind."

This next is scribbled on a tiny scrap of paper:

"GLACIER or GREPPOND, _August_ 21.

"MY DEAREST FATHER,

"I am sitting on a gray stone in the middle of the glacier, waiting till the fog goes away. I believe I _may_ wait. I write this line in my pocket-book to thank my mother for hers which I did not acknowledge last night. I am glad and sorry that she depends so much on my letters for her comfort. I am sending them now every day by the people who go down, for the diligence is stopped. You may run the chance of missing one or two therefore. I am quite well, and very comfortable--sitting on Joseph's knapsack laid on the stone. The fog is about as thick as that of London in November,--only white; and I see nothing near me but fields of dampish snow with black stones in it."

And then:

"MONTANVERT, _August_ 22.

"I cannot say that on the whole the aiguilles have treated me well. I went up Saturday, Monday and Tuesday to their feet, and never obtained audience until to-day, and then they retired at twelve o'clock; but I have got a most valuable memorandum."

The parental view was put thus:

GENEVA, _Monday, August_ 20, 1849.

"MY DEAREST JOHN,

"I do not know if you have got all my letters, fully explaining to you in what way the want of a _single_ letter, on two occasions, did _so_ much mischief--made such havoc in our peace. I think my last Thursday's letter entered on it. We are grateful for many letters--that have come. It was merely the accident of the moment when first by illness and then by precipices we were most anxious--being exactly the moment the letters took it into their heads to be not forthcoming. Not writing so often would only keep us more in the dark, with little less anxiety. Please say if you get a letter every day...."

Space can hardly be afforded for more than samples of this voluminous correspondence, or interesting quotations might be given about the "ghost-hunt yesterday and a crystal-hunt to-day," and life at the Montanvert, until at last (August 28):

"I have taken my place in diligence for Thursday, and hope to be with you in good time. But I quite feel as if I were leaving home to go on a journey. I shall not be melancholy, however, for I have really had a good spell of it.... Dearest love to my mother. I don't intend to write again.

"Ever, my dearest father,

"Your most affectionate son,

"J. RUSKIN."