Chapter 25

"UNTO THIS LAST" (1860-1861)

At forty years of age Ruskin finished "Modern Painters." From that time art was sometimes his text, rarely his theme. He used it as the opportunity, the vehicle, so to say, for teachings of wider range and deeper import; teachings about life as a whole, conclusions in ethics and economics and religion, to which he sought to lead others, as he was led, by the way of art.

During the time when he was preaching his later doctrines, he wished to suppress the interfering evidences of the earlier. He let his works on art run out of print, not for the benefit of second-hand booksellers, but in the hope that he could fix his audience upon the burden of his prophecy for the time being. But the youthful works were still read; high prices were paid for them, or they were smuggled in from America. And when the epoch of "Fors" had passed, he agreed to the reprinting of all that early material. He called it obsolete and trivial; others find it interestingly biographical--perhaps even classical.

This year, then, 1860, the year of the Italian Kingdom, of Garibaldi, and of the beginning of the American war, marks his turning point, from the early work, summed up in the old "Selections," to the later work.

Until he was forty, Mr. Ruskin was a writer on art; after that his art was secondary to ethics. Until he was forty he was a believer in English Protestantism; afterwards he could not reconcile current beliefs with the facts of life as he saw them, and had to reconstruct his creed from the foundations. Until he was forty he was a philanthropist, working heartily with others in a definite cause, and hoping for the amendment of wrongs, without a social upheaval. Even in the beginning of 1860, in his evidence before the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Institutions, he was ready with plans for amusing and instructing the labouring classes, and noting in them a "thirsty desire" for improvement. But while his readiness to make any personal sacrifice, in the way of social and philanthropic experiment, and his interest in the question were increasing, he became less and less sanguine about the value of such efforts as the Working Men's College, and less and less ready to co-operate with others in their schemes. He began to see that no tinkering at social breakages was really worth while; that far more extensive repairs were needed to make the old ship seaworthy.

So he set himself, by himself, to sketch the plans for the repairs. Naturally sociable, and accustomed to the friendly give-and-take of a wide acquaintance, he withdrew from the busy world into a busier solitude. During the next few years he lived much alone among the Alps, or at home, thinking out the problem; sometimes feeling, far more acutely than was good for clear thought, the burden of the mission that was laid upon him. In March, 1863, he wrote from his retreat at Mornex to Norton:

"The loneliness is very great, and the peace in which I am at present is only as if I had buried myself in a tuft of grass on a battlefield wet with blood--for the cry of the earth about me is in my ears continually, if I do not lay my head to the very ground."

And a few months later:

"I am still very unwell, and tormented between the longing for rest and lovely life, and the sense of this terrific call of human crime for resistance and of human misery for help, though it seems to me as the voice of a river of blood which can but sweep me down in the midst of its black clots, helpless."

Sentences like these, passages here and there in the last volume of "Modern Painters," and still more, certain passages omitted from that volume, show that about 1860 something of a cloud had been settling over him,--a sense of the evil of the world, a horror of great darkness. In his earlier years, his intense emotion and vivid imagination had enabled him to read into pictures of Tintoret or Turner, into scenes of nature and sayings of great books, a meaning or a moral which he so vividly communicated to the reader as to make it thenceforward part and parcel of the subject, however it came there to begin with. It is useless to wonder whether Turner, for instance, consciously meant what Ruskin found in his works. A great painter does not paint without thought, and such thought is apt to show itself whether he will or no. But it needs imaginative sympathy to detect and describe the thought. And when that sympathy was given to suffering, to widespread misery, to crying wrongs; joined also with an intense passion for justice, which had already shown itself in the defence of slighted genius and neglected art; and to the Celtic temperament of some highstrung seer and trance-prophesying bard; it was no wonder that Ruskin became like one of the hermits of old, who retreated from the world to return upon it with stormy messages of awakening and flashes of truth more impressive, more illuminating than the logic of schoolmen and the state-craft of the wise.

And then he began to take up an attitude of antagonism to the world, he who had been the kindly helper and minister of delightful art. He began to call upon those who had ears to hear to come out and be separate from the ease and hypocrisy of Vanity Fair. Its respectabilities, its orthodoxies, he could no longer abide. Orthodox religion, orthodox morals and politics, orthodox art and science, alike he rejected; and was rejected by each of them as a brawler, a babbler, a fanatic, a heretic. And even when kindly Oxford gave him a quasi-academical position, it did not bring him, as it brings many a heretic, back to the fold.

In this period of storm and stress he stood alone. The old friends of his youth were one by one passing away, if not from intercourse, still from full sympathy with him in his new mood. His parents were no longer the guides and companions they had been; they did not understand the business he was about. And so he was left to new associates, for he could not live without some one to love,--that was the nature of the man, however lonely in his work and wanderings.

The new friends of this period were, at first, Americans; as the chief new friends of his latest period (the Alexanders) were American, too. Charles Eliot Norton, after being introduced to him in London in 1855, met him again by accident on the Lake of Geneva--the story is prettily told in "Præterita." Ruskin adds:

"Norton saw all my weaknesses, measured all my narrownesses, and, from the first, took serenely, and as it seemed of necessity, a kind of paternal authority over me, and a right of guidance.... I was entirely conscious of his rectorial power, and affectionately submissive to it, so that he might have done anything with me, but for the unhappy difference in our innate, and unchangeable, political faiths."

So, after all, he stood alone.

Another friend about this time was Mrs. H. Beecher Stowe, to whom he wrote on June 18th, 1860, from Geneva:

"It takes a great deal, when I am at Geneva, to make me wish myself anywhere else, and, of all places else, in London; nevertheless, I very heartily wish at this moment that I were looking out on the Norwood Hills, and were expecting you and the children to breakfast to-morrow.

"I had very serious thoughts, when I received your note, of running home; but I expected that very day an American friend, Mr. Stillman, who, I thought, would miss me more here than you in London, so I stayed.

"What a dreadful thing it is that people should have to go to America again, after coming to Europe! It seems to me an inversion of the order of nature. I think America is a sort of 'United' States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world, should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably ungrammatical), particularly when they have been making themselves cruelly pleasant to friends here. My friend Norton, whom I met first on this very blue lake water, had no business to go back to Boston again, any more than you....

"So you have been seeing the Pope and all his Easter performances! I congratulate you, for I suppose it is something like 'Positively the last appearance on any stage.' What was the use of thinking about _him_? You should have had your own thoughts about what was to come after him. I don't mean that Roman Catholicism will die out so quickly. It will last pretty nearly as long as Protestantism, which keeps it up; but I wonder what is to come next. That is the main question just now for everybody."

W.J. Stillman had been a correspondent about 1851,--"involved in mystical speculations, partly growing out of the second volume of 'Modern Painters,'" as he said of himself in an article on "John Ruskin" in the _Century_ Magazine (January, 1888). With him Ruskin spent July and August of 1860 at Chamouni. He did but little drawing, and in the few sketches that remain of that summer there is evidence that his mind was far away from its old love of mountains and of streamlets. His lonely walks in the pinewoods of the Arveron were given to meditation on a great problem which had been set, as it seemed, for him to solve, ever since he had written that chapter on "The Nature of Gothic." Now at last, in the solitude of the Alps, he could grapple with the questions he had raised; and the outcome of the struggle was "Unto this Last."

The year before, from Thun and Bonneville and Lausanne (August and September, 1859) he had written letters to E.S. Dallas, suggested by the strikes in the London building trade. In these he appears to have sketched the outline of a new conception of social science, which he was now elaborating with more attempt at system and brevity than he had been accustomed to use.

These new papers, painfully thought out and carefully set down in his room at the Hôtel de l'Union, he used--as long before he read his daily chapter to the breakfast party at Herne Hill--to read to Stillman: and he sent them to the _Cornhill Magazine_, started the year before by Smith and Elder. Ruskin had already contributed to it a paper on "Sir Joshua and Holbein," a stray chapter from Vol. V., "Modern Painters." His reputation as a writer and philanthropist, together with the friendliness of editor and publisher, secured the insertion of the first three,--from August to October. The editor then wrote to say that they were so unanimously condemned and disliked, that, with all apologies, he could only admit one more. The series was brought hastily to a conclusion in November: and the author, beaten back as he had never been beaten before, dropped the subject, and "sulked," so he called it, all the winter.

It is pleasant to notice that neither Thackeray, the editor nor Smith, the publisher quarrelled with the author who had laid them open to the censure of their public,--nor he with them. On December 21st, he wrote to Thackeray, in answer apparently, to a letter about lecturing for a charitable purpose: and continued:

"The mode in which you direct your charity puts me in mind of a matter that has lain long on my mind, though I never have had the time or face to talk to you of it. In somebody's drawing-room, ages ago, you were speaking accidentally of M. de Marvy.[8] I expressed my great obligation to him; on which you said that I could prove my gratitude, if I chose, to his widow,--which choice I then not accepting, have ever since remembered the circumstance as one peculiarly likely to add, so far as it went, to the general impression on your mind of the hollowness of people's sayings and hardness of their hearts. The fact is, I give what I give almost in an opposite way to yours. I think there are many people who will relieve hopeless distress for one who will help at a hopeful pinch; and when I have the choice I nearly always give where I think the money will be fruitful rather than merely helpful. I would lecture for a school when I would _not_ for a distressed author; and would have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but not--unless I had no other object--his widow after he was gone. In a word, I like to prop the falling more than to feed the fallen."

[Footnote 8: Louis Marvy, an engraver, and political refugee after the French Revolution of 1848. He produced the plates, and Thackeray the text, of "Landscape Painters of England, in a series of steel engravings, with short Notices."]

The winter passed without any great undertaking. G.F. Watts proposed to add Ruskin's portrait to his gallery of celebrities; but he was in no mood to sit. Rossetti did, however, sketch him this year. In March he presented eighty-three Turner drawings to Oxford, and twenty-five to Cambridge. The address of thanks with the great seal of Oxford University is dated March 23rd, 1861; the Catalogue of the Cambridge collection is dated May 28th.

On April 2nd he addressed the St. George's Mission Working Men's Institute, and shortly afterwards, though at this time in a much enfeebled state of health, gave a lecture before "a most brilliant audience," as the _London Review_ reported, at the Royal Institution (April 19th, 1861). Carlyle wrote to his brother John:

"Friday last I was persuaded--in fact had inwardly compelled myself as it were--to a lecture of Ruskin's at the Institution, Albemarle Street, Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. A crammed house, but tolerable even to me in the gallery. The lecture was thought to 'break down,' and indeed it quite did '_as a lecture_'; but only did from _embarras de richesses_--a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which were manifold, curious, genial; and in fact, I do not recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one."

Papers on "Illuminated Manuscripts" (read before the Society of Antiquaries on June 6th) and on "The Preservation of Ancient Buildings" (read to the Ecclesiological Society a fortnight later) show that old interests were not wholly forgotten, even in the stress of new pursuits, by this man of many-sided activity.

During May, 1861, he paid a visit to the school girls at Winnington, in June and July he took a holiday at Boulogne with the fisher folk, in August he went to Ireland as guest of the Latouches of Harristown, County Kildare, and in September he returned to the Alps, spending the rest of the year at Bonneville and Lucerne.