Chapter XIV: Part 14

These responsibilities were not light, for they were poor and not yet famous, and must support by their pens not only themselves, but three boys of Mr. Lewes, and their mother. This they found no easy thing to do at first; but when the great success of George Eliot's novels had been attained, their financial affairs became easy, and continued so to the end.

Their life together seemed to be one of unbroken love and confidence, their delight in each other increasing, if possible, with time. The letters and journals of George Eliot are full of expressions of this love and trust, and give us very pleasing pictures of the character and life of Mr. Lewes. He seems to have been an eminently genial, kind, loving, and appreciative man; a man, too, of fascinating manners and wonderfully keen intellect, though totally lacking in any such genius as that which has made George Eliot immortal. Charming glimpses of their home life occur on every page,--a home life that was sweet and well ordered, pervaded by such a spirit of love and devotion as would sanctify any home. George Eliot was the most womanly of women, despite what is often called her masculine intellect; and she made a genuine home, after the true and womanly fashion, delighting in good order and neatness and such attention to details as is an absolute necessity in the formation of a happy home. She never allowed her literary work to prevent her from overseeing that home, and in her younger days seems to have had a real taste for executing these housekeeping details herself. There was no remote hint of Mrs. Jellyby in her, but strong, practical common-sense in all the management of her family affairs, and a real delight in having all things well ordered and agreeable in her home. This is one of the most pleasing of the many revelations of this book. We love to know that she was a true woman, and no intellectual monstrosity. The glimpses that are given of her nursing her father through his long last sickness are very sweet and touching, and everything connected with her devotion to Mr. Lewes's children, down to poor Thornie's death, makes us love her more and more. Indeed, it is a strong, pure, loving, and noble woman that is brought out on every page of this Life. But a very sad and deep-thoughted woman, too; one to whom pity goes out as naturally as love. She was afflicted with ill health all her life, and the record of all this suffering is at times oppressive. One cannot help wishing that we might have had the same woman strong and well, and wondering what sort of books would have been the result. Far pleasanter and more cheering, no doubt, for some of them are heart-breakingly sad as it is, but perhaps no deeper or truer. Then, too, she suffered keenly through her sympathies, feeling for all loss and wrong with the acutest pain; and her lack of faith intensified all her suffering. So did lack of hope; for she was almost as destitute of this cheering friend of man as Carlyle himself, and was given to despondency as the sparks fly upward. In her earlier writing the tears and smiles are blended, her humor lighting up the dark places; but the deepening years deepened her gloom, and her later writing is sombre almost throughout. Yet she had great capacity for joy as well as for sorrow, and enjoyed with the utmost intensity the brighter parts of life, and retained this sense of the pleasure of life even to the end. She speaks much of the intense happiness of her life with Mr. Lewes, and they seem never to have been separated, taking all journeys and holidays together, and never wearying of what she calls their "_solitude a deux_." Such expressions as these are very frequent throughout the book:--

"I never have anything to call out my ill-humor or
discontent,--which you know was always ready enough to come on
slight call,--and I have everything to call out love and gratitude.
I am very happy,--happy in the highest blessing life can give us,
the perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own to
healthful activity. My life has deepened unspeakably during the
last year. I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual
enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a
more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than I remember
at any former period of my life. And my happiness has deepened,
too; the blessedness of a perfect love and union grows daily. Few
women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long,
sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age."

And this extract from the journal of Mr. Lewes leaves us his thought about their life, which is so like her own:--

"I owe Spencer another and a deeper debt. It was through him that I
learned to know Marian,--to know her was to love her,--and since
then my life has been a new birth. To her I owe all my prosperity
and all my happiness. God bless her!"

That her great books would ever have been written without this loving sympathy and appreciation on the part of Mr. Lewes, seems extremely doubtful. She needed encouragement at every step, being prone to despair about her writings, and she had the utmost reliance upon the judgment and taste of the companion of her life. And he seems to have been everything that heart could desire as loving critic and counsellor. Her sympathy with the lives and hopes of others is very charming, particularly with the love and marriage of their eldest boy, though it is shown constantly in a true womanly way; as, for instance:--

"A pretty thing has happened to an acquaintance of mine, which is
quite a tonic to one's hope. She has all her life been working in
various ways, as housekeeper, governess, etc.,--a dear little dot
about four feet eleven in height; pleasant to look at and clever; a
working-woman without any of those epicene queernesses that belong
to the class. More than once she has told me that courage quite
forsook her. She felt there was no good in living and striving.
Well, a man of fortune and accomplishments has just fallen in love
with her--now she is thirty-three. It is the prettiest story of a
swift-decided passion, and made me cry for joy. Madame B---- and I
went with her to buy her wedding clothes. If you will only imagine
all I have not said, you will think this a very charming fairy
tale."

In 1878 her happy companionship with the man she had so passionately loved was ended by his death. The only entry in her diary in 1879 is this: "Here I and sorrow sit." The desolation of her life told terribly upon her health and spirits. She saw no one, wrote to no one, had no thoughts, as she tells us, for many months. Among the first lines she wrote were these:--

"Some time, if I live, I shall be able to see you,--perhaps sooner
than any one else,--but not yet. Life seems to get harder instead
of easier. When I said some time, I meant still a distant time. I
want to live a little time, that I may do certain things for his
sake. So I try to keep up my strength, and I work as much as I can
to save my mind from imbecility. But that is all at present. But
what used to be joy is joy no longer, and what is pain is easier,
because he has not to bear it."

Again:--

"You must excuse my weakness, remembering that for nearly
twenty-five years I have been used to find my happiness in his. I
can find it nowhere else. But we can live and be helpful without
happiness, and I have had more than myriads who were and are better
fitted for it."

As soon as she was able to see any friends, Mr. Cross, who was an old and valued one, began to visit her and be helpful to her in many ways, and he soon became a comfort to that gentle nature to which some prop was indispensable. She grew accustomed to him, and began to rely upon his support. After a while she could read with him, and her mind renewed its vigor. Still later she could play for him, and the consolation of music was added to her life. As the months went by she leaned upon him more and more, and found real comfort in his kindly ministrations. This is the first allusion to him in her letters:--

"I have a comfortable country practitioner to watch over me from
day to day, and there is a devoted friend who is backward and
forward continually to see that I lack nothing."

Of the outcome of that watchful tenderness Mr. Cross says:--

"As the year went on George Eliot began to see all her old friends
again. But her life was nevertheless a life of heart-loneliness.
Accustomed as she had been for so many years to _solitude a deux_,
the want of close companionship continued to be very bitterly felt.
She was in the habit of going with me very frequently to the
National Gallery and to other exhibitions of pictures. This
constant companionship engrossed me completely and was a new
interest to her. A bond of mutual dependence had been formed
between us. It was finally decided that our marriage should take
place as soon and as privately as possible."

She writes thus of this marriage:--

"All this is wonderful blessing falling to me beyond my share,
after I had thought that my life was ended, and that, so to speak,
my coffin was ready for me in the next room. Deep down below there
is a hidden river of sadness, but this must always be with those
who have lived so long; but I am able to enjoy my newly reopened
life. I shall be a better, more loving creature than I could have
been in solitude. To be constantly, lovingly grateful for the gift
of a perfect love is the best illumination of one's mind to all the
possible good there may be in store for man on this troublous
little planet. I was getting hard, and if I had decided differently
I think I should have become selfish.

"The whole history is something like a miracle-legend. But instead
of any former affection being displaced, I seem to have recovered
the loving sympathy that I was in danger of losing. I mean that I
had been conscious of a certain drying-up of tenderness in me, and
that now the spring seems to have risen again."

The consolations of this new love and tenderness were to cheer her but a little time, for they were scarcely settled in the new home after the trip abroad, during which time she had excellent health and enjoyed everything much, before the final illness came, and "the fever called living was over at last."

Amid the falling of the bitter rain of winter, in the deadliest desolation of the year, they bore her to her rest amid the silent. She whose speech has endeared her to the whole thinking world, whose thoughts have borne us like an anthem ever upward to the loftiest and the best, all her sacred service done, shall know hereafter no more work, no more device, but the deep calm of rest, untroubled by the vexing sights and shows of time.

We cannot think that she met the solemn, swift release with dread. She looked too deeply into life to make of it a mere thing of daily bread, of common homely joys and trifling labors; but all its sorest problems weighed her down, and all its deepest doubt and dull despairing went with her to the last, saddening even the happiest moments of her life. And the falling of that cold and solemn winter rain into that grave, about which gathered many of the greatest minds in England with reverent tears, seems not sad but sweet,--a kind release from the stress and strain of a tumultuous existence. Nevermore will that still heart be crushed and riven by wrongs and woes which she has no power to aid; nevermore life's terrors hold and o'ermaster her; nevermore a questioning world look upon her in judgment. With the great of every time and nation she has at last taken her place, and will hold it evermore.

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

Charles Kingsley was born at Holne Vicarage, under the brow of Dartmore, in 1819; but his family removed almost immediately into Nottinghamshire, although he always felt himself to be, and called himself, a Devonshire man. Of his parents he himself gives account as follows:--

"We are but the _disjecta membra_ of a most remarkable pair of
parents. Our talent, such as it is, is altogether hereditary. My
father was a magnificent man in body and mind, and was said to
possess every talent except that of using his talents. My mother,
on the contrary, had a quite extraordinary practical and
administrative power; and she combines with it, even at her
advanced age (seventy-nine), my father's passion for knowledge, and
the sentiment and fancy of a young girl."

The product of the union of such characters could hardly be otherwise than unique; and we see in Charles Kingsley a man of powerful nature,--strong, aggressive, administrative,--but at the same time deeply poetical, and tender almost to weakness. We find in him a union of the intensest sympathy with the weak and helpless, and a comprehension of the flaws and defects which make up their character, which seems at times merciless and almost heartless. We find in him remarkable combative power, united to a desire to use that power purely and simply for the defence and protection of those who are unable to protect and help themselves. We find a man who can deal heaviest blows, who loves the excitement of a battle, and never shuns an occasion for a fight in behalf of humanity, but who was so sensitive to an unfair thrust from an opponent that his life was permanently embittered by the injustice and malignity of literary and political critics of the opposing party. In short, he united a royal aggressiveness shaped and guided entirely by his Christian principles, and a tenderness and sensitiveness such as are rarely found in so strong and fearless a man.

In childhood he is described as strong and active, but not expert at any games; while he bore pain wonderfully well, and excelled in all feats that required nerve and daring. He was well prepared when he went to Cambridge, and obtained a scholarship at Magdalen the first year. He disliked the prescribed course intensely, and sometimes neglected his work and gave himself up to wild sport in the fens, which then presented much of the bleak picturesqueness which he has immortalized in his prose idyls. He was very popular, but not very sociable, and lived then, as afterwards, a most strenuous life. On July 6, 1839, while visiting in Oxfordshire, he met his future wife, Fanny, the daughter of Pascoe Grenfell and Georgiana St. Leger his wife. Circumstances seemed to give the lover very little hope, and in intervals of recklessness Kingsley often dreamed and talked of going to America and joining the wild hunters on the prairies. Had he done so, what bits of strong and striking description should we not have had! Few writers have the photographic accuracy of Kingsley, united to so vivid an imagination; consequently his pictures are all of striking quality. Look at this characteristic bit, when Amyas and his friends walk to the cliffs of Lundy:--

"As they approached, a raven, who sat upon the topmost stone, black
against the bright blue sky, flapped lazily away, and sunk down
the abysses of the cliff, as if he had scented the corpses beneath
the surge. Below them from the gull-rock rose a thousand birds, and
filled the air with sound; the choughs cackled, the hacklets
wailed, the great black-backs laughed querulous defiance at the
intruders, and a single falcon with an angry bark darted out
beneath their feet, and hung poised high aloft, watching the
sea-fowl which swung slowly round and round below."

In all his books we have these glowing pictures of the natural world, intense, graven in as it were with a burin, and colored with tropical magnificence.

Soon after taking orders Charles Kingsley was given the living of Eversley, which he retained to the end of his life. His work there was full of hardship; but he was young and strong, and had a superabundant energy which no toil daunted. Eversley was a democratic parish of "heth croppers," and there were few gentry within its borders. These peasants were hereditary poachers on Windsor Forest and other preserves in the neighborhood, and possessed one and all with a spirit of almost lawless independence. But it was one of Kingsley's most amiable characteristics through life to be able to make friends of uncultivated people without any painful effort of condescension. He visited these poor people of his parish constantly, until he knew every person intimately, and could speak to each with a knowledge of his inmost needs; and their needs, in most cases, were of a very earthly and commonplace kind.

"What is the use," he would say, "of my talking to a lot of hungry paupers about heaven? Sir, as my clerk said to me yesterday, there is a weight on their hearts, and they care for no hope and no change, for they know they can be no worse off than they are." But he did better for them than to preach far-away sermons above their comprehension. "If a man or woman were suffering or dying, he would go to them five or six times a day,--and night as well as day,--for his own heart's sake as well as for their soul's sake." And he won the respect of these people for the Church which they had long neglected, and which had ceased to stand for anything to them, until, "when he announced the first confirmation, and invited all who wished to take advantage of it to come to the rectory on a certain evening for instruction, the stud groom from Sir John Cope's, a respectable man of five-and-thirty, was among the first to come, bringing a message from the whips and stablemen to say that they had all been confirmed once, but if Mr. Kingsley wished it they would all be happy to come again." This was at a time when England was in a really dangerous state of tumult and discontent, and when the Church, through the heartlessness and folly of its leaders, had lost almost all hold upon the people. Is there not in it a hint to the unsuccessful preachers of our time?

In a few years he had raised the whole parish of Eversley to a higher level, and had set his mark upon every individual soul in his keeping. And after he had been appointed to the canonry of Westminster, and was called to preach to immense congregations there, he felt the burden of these new souls, as he had felt that of his more humble charge. He felt that he was personally called to speak some vital word to every soul within his hearing, and the strain upon him was great, as he realized how difficult a thing this was to do in these later days. He expressed his sense of this responsibility in his characteristic way. "Whenever," he said, "I walk along the choir to the pulpit I wish myself dead; and whenever I walk back I wish myself more dead." But though his sense of failure was great, it is certain that those noble sermons in the grand abbey left their ineffaceable mark upon some of that multitude of young men who crowded the north and south transepts of the abbey, and stood there for two hours through a long musical service, that they might hear Kingsley when he spoke; for he spoke with characteristic power and eloquence, moving all by his earnestness and evident sincerity. "If you want to be stirred to the very depths of your heart," said one of the minor canons to Canon Farrar, "come to the abbey and hear Canon Kingsley." And when he preached, as he often did, to classes of college boys, even the youngest, they always found something pertinent to their own cases in what he said.

He had married in the early days of Eversley the one woman he ever loved, and the marriage was one of peculiar happiness, so that his home life was always of the brightest. A family of beautiful children sprung up around him, and in his peculiar fondness for pets he always had dogs about him that were scarcely less dear than his children. He mourned the death of one after another of his favorites, until, when the last one died, he said he would have no more,--the pang of parting with them was too keen.

The influence of his books as they came along one after another--"Yeast," "Alton Locke," "Hypatia," "Westward Ho," "Two Years Ago"--was of a stimulating, even of an exciting, nature, particularly that of the earlier ones. Like nearly all men of genius, when young he was a radical, and upon the publication of his first books the conservatives all took up arms against him. In review after review, all learning, all sincerity, all merit was denied him. He bore up under a storm of obloquy and misrepresentation. This simply because he had shown some of the sufferings of the poor,--given some vivid pictures of life in England as it was in those days, before the repeal of the Corn Laws had mitigated a little the sufferings of the dependent masses; and had expressed some human sympathy with all this fruitless pain, and a manly indignation at some forms of atrocious wrong. But there was nothing in his teaching of the people which should have given offence to the veriest conservative. The main burden of it was that "workingmen must emancipate themselves from the tyranny of their own vices before they could be emancipated from the tyranny of bad social arrangements; that they must cultivate the higher elements of a common humanity in themselves before they could obtain their share in the heritage of national civilization. He discouraged every approach to illegality or violence, and during the riots of that exciting time worked as hard as the Duke of Wellington to keep the peace." But the Philistines of that day looked upon it as crime in a beneficed clergyman to enter into friendly intercourse for any purpose whatever with revolutionists, as they called the agitators, who were engaged in what seem to us now to have been great reforms. They denounced him for a Chartist, a name which he proudly owned, although he never went the lengths of the real leaders in that movement; and owning, as his enemies did, all the powerful papers and reviews, they systematically belittled his work and prejudiced the minds of many people against him to his dying day.

This misinterpretation of his work and misinterpretation of his motives was a keen grief to him throughout life. He never became hardened to such attacks, and they afflicted him to the end. "'Hypatia,'" he once said, "was written with my heart's blood, and was received, as I expected, with curses from many of the very churchmen whom I was trying to warn and save." But he was more than repaid for this misinterpretation and persecution by the orthodox and conservative classes, by seeing the efforts he had put forth--some of them, at least--crowned with considerable success even in his lifetime; while he was conscious of having sown much seed that would ultimately take root in reform. He never faltered, although he grew very weak and discouraged at times. He writes thus to a friend:--

"Pray for me; I could lie down and die sometimes. A poor fool of a
fellow, and yet feeling thrust upon an sorts of great and
unspeakable paths, instead of being left in peace to classify
butterflies and catch trout."

Long before his death he saw the condition of the English poor very materially modified. Bad as things are in England to-day, they are much better than in the days when Charles Kingsley began his labors.

He was accused of growing conservative in later life, and doubtless he did so, as it is natural that man should do; but he had witnessed great improvement during his life, and perhaps felt that the forces which had been called into play needed guiding and directing now, rather than further stimulation. But, like all dreamers, he was obliged to bid farewell to many of his dreams for the good of his fellow-men as he grew older. There was intense sadness to him in this, and Kingsley during all his later life was a very sad man. Striving to be cheery and helpful, as he had ever been, there was yet in his face the look of a defeated man,--the look of a man upon whom life had palled, and who had scarcely hope enough left to carry him through to the end. There was remarkable pathos in many of his sermons, and ineffable sadness in many of his letters. Doubtless much of this was due to overwork, for he had overworked himself systematically for many years, and could not escape the consequences. He paid the penalty in flagging spirits and a growing weariness of life. During the journey in America, near the close of his life, there was but a forced interest where once the feeling would have been real and keen; and we find him once writing like this:--

"As I ride I jog myself and say, 'You stupid fellow, wake up! Do
you see that? and that? Do you know where you are?' And my other
self answers, 'Don't bother, I have seen so much I can't take in
any more; and I don't care about it at all. I longed to get here. I
have been more than satisfied with being here, and now I long to
get back again.'"

And, again, from St. Louis he writes:--

"I wish already that our heads were turned homeward, and that we
had done the great tour, and had it not to do."

There was also much of pathos in his speech at the Lotos Club in 1874, where he said:--

"One of the kind wishes expressed for me is long life. Let anything
be asked for me except that. Let us live hard, work hard, go at a
good pace, get to our journey's end as soon as possible; then let
the post-horse get the shoulder out of the collar. . . . I have
lived long enough to feel like the old post-horse,--very thankful
as the end draws near. . . . Long life is the last thing that I
desire. It may be that as one grows older one acquires more and
more the painful consciousness of the difference between what ought
to be done and what can be done, and sits down more quietly when
one gets the wrong side of fifty to let others start up to do for
us things we cannot do ourselves. But it is the highest pleasure
that a man can have who has (to his own exceeding comfort) turned
down the hill at last, to believe that younger spirits will rise up
after him and catch the lamp of truth--as in the old lamp-bearing
race of Greece--out of his hand before it expires, and carry it on
to the goal with swifter and more even feet."

He did not live long after his return from America. He took cold Advent Sunday, and soon was down with the sickness from which he never recovered. His wife was dangerously ill at the same time, and he made himself seriously worse by leaving his bed once or twice to go to her, where he said "heaven was." To this wife he had been a devoted lover for over thirty years, and retained to the last moment his chivalric devotion. To his children and his servants he was the ideal parent and master, and to every one who had known him personally the ideal friend. His parish was only a large family, where he was held in like honor and esteem. Would that we all in these restless times might find some of the secret springs of his life, and thus make, like him,

"Life, death, and that vast forever
One grand, sweet song"!

His wife remained for a little time to mourn his loss, although he believed at the time of his death that she would not live, and spoke of the supreme blessing of not being divided in the hour of death from her he had loved so well. She lived to tell to the world, in a touching and tender manner, the story of that life of "deep and strange sorrows," as he once expressed it; and then followed him, gladly, into the rest that remains for all who toil earnestly and worthily as he had done. It was proposed to bury him in Westminster Abbey, but agreeably to his own wishes in the matter he was buried in the little churchyard at Eversley, where he had familiar acquaintance with every tree and shrub, and where the poor, to whom he had been so much while living, could still feel him near to them though dead. Upon the white marble cross are carved the words, "God is Love,"--the words which had been the central thought of all his eloquent and effective preaching, and the words by which he had shaped his whole life; for, in imitation of that God he so reverenced, he had made his life one of active love and helpfulness toward the whole brotherhood of man. Few men of loftier aims, higher purposes, purer spirit, have ever lived; few men who fulfilled the priestly office in so high and conscientious a manner have been known in our day; few reformers who have been so aggressive, and yet so temperate in action; few men personally so loved by those who knew him intimately. Soft be the turf at Eversley upon him, and sweet the sighing of her summer winds about his grave!

JOHN RUSKIN.

In the very heart of the great city of London, shut in by dingy brick walls that closed upon him to such an extent that it was only by going into the middle of the street and looking up that he could ever see the sky, in the early part of the century, was born the man who has the finest eye for the beauties of the natural world, and the most eloquent pen in describing them, that the century has produced.

We will make no exception of poet or painter in this statement; for John Ruskin sees more and better than any poet of the day, and can give in words a more vivid picture of a scene he loves than any painter can produce. Indeed, few men have lived at any time who could color a landscape as Ruskin colors it, or who have so delicate an eye for the shyest and most sequestered beauties, as has this poet-painter. Probably Wordsworth comes nearer to Ruskin than any other modern writer in his love of the natural world, and he has given us the finest descriptions we have of some phases of Nature; but there is a glow and a depth of feeling about Ruskin's descriptions which even Wordsworth lacks. A real worship of Nature runs through all that he has written. Think of a child with such a nature as this brought up in a crowded city,--a city unlike many others, especially in this country and on the Continent, where lovely glimpses of Nature may be had from open squares, or streets leading out into lovely country roads. In New York one can hardly walk anywhere without catching glimpses of the water and the shores of New Jersey or Long Island. Most boys, we fancy, penetrate to the Battery and enjoy its superb outlook; or they have the run of Central Park, where they make a sort of acquaintance with Nature, which, if somewhat artificial, is much better than no knowledge at all. In Edinburgh the inhabitants live under the shadow of its two fantastic mountains, and from their windows can trace the windings of its glittering frith. Not even the lofty houses of the Canongate or the battlements of the castle afford the eye an equal pleasure. In Venice not even the Palace of the Doge, the most beautiful building in the world, or the matchless walls of fair St. Mark's, can keep the eye from seeking the blue waters of the Adriatic or the purple outlines of the Alps. Beautiful Verona has a broad and rushing river of deep blue sweeping through the heart of it; it has an environment of cliffs, where grow the cypress and the olive, and a far-away view of the St. Gothard Alps. Rome, from its amphitheatre of hills, has views of unrivalled loveliness, and its broad Campagna is a picture in itself. Paris even has its charms of external nature, as have all the cities of the New World; but London is grim and gray, and bare and desolate, wrapped in eternal fog. To be sure, it has the Thames, and there are lovely suburbs; but we mean that vast, densely crowded part of the city proper which we think of when we say London.

The father of John Ruskin was a London wine-merchant, who made and bequeathed to him a large fortune. But they were very plain people, and the youth knew nothing of ostentation or luxury. He says of his childhood:--

"Nor did I painfully wish what I was never permitted for an instant
to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw
in toy-shops. I had a bunch of keys to play with as long as I was
capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew
older I had a cart and a ball, and when I was five or six years
old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I
still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always
summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled
on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life
and motion; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the
square and comparing the colors of my carpet, examining the knots
in the wood of the floors, or counting the bricks in the opposite
houses, with rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling
of the water-cart through its leathern pipe from the dripping iron
post at the pavement edge, or the still more admirable proceedings
of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang
up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I
could find in bed-covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined,
were my chief resources; and my attention to the particulars in
these was soon so accurate that when at three and a half I was
taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been
ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes
in his carpet."

He was once taken when a child to the brow of the crags overlooking Derwentwater, and he tells of the "intense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in looking through the hollows in the mossy roots over the crag into the dark lake, and which has associated itself more or less with all twining roots of trees ever since." He also speaks of his joy in first treading on the grass; and, indeed, each fresh bit of acquaintance which he made with Nature gave him unbounded delight. He says in his late "Recollections:"--

"To my further great benefit, as I grew older I saw nearly all the
noblemen's houses in England, in reverent and healthy delight of
uncovetous admiration,--perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any
political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live
in a small house and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than
to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at; but
that, at all events, it would not make Brunswick Square in the
least more pleasantly habitable to pull Warwick Castle down. And at
this day, though I have kind invitations enough to visit America,
I could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so
miserable as to possess no castles."

Again he says:--

"For the best and truest beginning of all blessings, I had been
taught the perfect meaning of Peace, in thought, act, and word.
Angry words, hurry, and disorder I never knew in the stillness of
my childhood's home. Next to this quite priceless gift of Peace, I
had received the perfect understanding of the natures of Obedience
and Faith. I obeyed word or lifted finger of father or mother,
simply as a ship her helm; not only without idea of resistance, but
receiving the direction as a part of my own life and force,--a
helpful law, as necessary to me in every moral action as the law of
gravity in leaping. And my practice in Faith was soon complete;
nothing was ever promised me that was not given, nothing ever
threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever told me that
was not true."

Ruskin's father began to read Byron to him soon after he entered his teens, the first passage being the shipwreck in "Don Juan."

"I recollect that he and my mother looked across the table at each
other with something of alarm, when on asking me a few _festas_
afterwards what we should have for after-dinner reading, I
instantly answered, 'Juan and Haidee.' My selection was not
adopted, and feeling there was something wrong somewhere, I did not
press it, attempting even some stutter of apology, which made
matters worse. Perhaps I was given a bit of 'Childe Harold'
instead, which I liked at that time nearly as well; and, indeed,
the story of Haidee soon became too sad for me. But very certainly
by the end of this year, 1834, I knew my Byron pretty well all
through. . . . I never got the slightest harm from Byron; what harm
came to me was from the facts of life and from books of a baser
kind, including a wide range of the works of authors popularly
considered extremely instructive,--from Victor Hugo down to Dr.
Watts."

Byron became a great favorite with the young student, as will be seen from the following passage:--

"I rejoiced in all the sarcasm of 'Don Juan.' But my firm decision,
as soon as I got well into the later cantos of it, that Byron was
to be my master in verse, as Turner in color, was made, of course,
in that gosling, or say cygnet, epoch of existence, without
consciousness of the deeper instincts that prompted it. Only two
things I consciously recognized,--that his truth of observation was
the most exact and his chosen expression the most concentrated that
I had yet found in literature. By that time my father had himself
put me through the first two books of Livy, and I knew, therefore,
what close-set language was; but I saw then that Livy, as afterward
that Horace and Tacitus, were studiously, often laboriously, and
sometimes obscurely concentrated; while Byron wrote, as easily as a
hawk flies and as clearly as a lake reflects, the exact truth in
the precisely narrowest terms,--not only the exact truth, but the
most central and useful one. Of course I could no more measure
Byron's greater powers at that time than I could Turner's; but I
saw that both were right, in all things that I knew right from
wrong in, and that they must henceforth be my masters, each in his
own domain. But neither the force and precision nor the rhythm of
Byron's language was at all the central reason for my taking him
for master. Knowing the Song of Moses and the Sermon on the Mount
by heart, and half the Apocalypse besides, I was in no need of
tutorship either in the majesty or simplicity of English words; and
for their logical arrangement I had had Byron's own master, Pope,
since I could lisp. But the thing wholly new and precious to me in
Byron was his measured and living truth,--measured as compared with
Homer, and living as compared with everybody else."

He began to be an observer of beauty at a very early age, and then, as afterwards, placed beauty first, utility second. He says:--

"So that very early, indeed, in my thoughts of trees I had got at
the principle, given fifty years afterwards in Proserpina, that the
seeds and fruits of them were for the sake of the flowers, not the
flowers for the fruit. The first joy of the year being in its
snowdrops, the second and cardinal one was in the almond-blossom,
every other garden and woodland gladness following from that in an
unbroken order of kindling flower and shadowy leaf; and for many
and many a year to come--until, indeed, the whole of life became
autumn to me--my chief prayer for the kindness of Heaven, in its
flowerful seasons, was that the frost might not touch the
almond-blossom."

His mother, who was a very religious woman, used to oblige him to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart at a very early age, and his favorite chapters were always from the Psalms, where there is so much of grand and glowing poetry. It was a fine diet for such a child as he, or, indeed, for any child; and he attributes his taste for the grand things in literature to his early knowledge of the matchless poetry of the Bible. Doubtless it gave also that devotional bent to his mind which has been one of his many striking characteristics through life. He is as essentially religious as one of the old Hebrew prophets, and has brought forward his religious precepts in season and out of season ever since he began to write.

He was taken on his travels when but a boy, and saw many of the beauties of Europe before he went to Oxford. He made acquaintance at that early age with most of the beautiful buildings about which he has since written so eloquently. The old Gothic buildings pleased him most of all,--even the rugged Gothic of the North. He spent much time in Italy and in Switzerland, which he says is a country to be visited and not lived in. He thinks that such sublimity of scenery should only be looked upon reverently, and that those who view it habitually lose their reverence, and, indeed, do not appreciate it at any time.

At Oxford he produced a prize poem; but he has never been heard of as a poet since, although there is more of poetry in his prose than in the verse of many of his contemporary poetical brethren, and if any man of his time has been endowed with the true poetic temperament, it is surely he.

His constitution has always been feeble, and he can bear no excitement, and has been known to sink into such exhaustion from a little over-tension of the nerves that it has been very difficult to bring him back to consciousness.

A person of this nature was probably very romantic in his youth, and he fell very violently in love with a Scottish lady when quite young. He says that never having been indulged with much affection in youth, or been allowed to bestow a great deal even upon his parents, when in later life love did come, "it came with violence, utterly rampant and unmanageable, at least to me, who never before had anything to manage."

He lived in a world of his own dreams for a long time, endowing the object of his affections with every grace and charm. He was an exacting as well as a passionate lover, and the lady was of far cooler blood than he. But after a variety of experiences, such as fall to the lot of most lovers, the lady became his wife. Of course the world knows little of the inner secrets of that married life, for John Ruskin is not a man to cry his sorrows in the market-place; but the world does know that the marriage proved very unhappy, and that it was finally followed by a separation. Of course there was a world of scandal at the time, which is now happily forgotten; for all this was very, very long ago, and the first scandal was as nothing compared to that which followed the lady's marriage with Millais, the artist of whom London is so proud. There was no moral blame imputed to either party at the time of the separation; and it was understood to have been only one of the numerous cases of incompatibility, of which the world is so full.

This most deplorable event in Ruskin's life was followed by long years of seclusion. He had never gone much into society, but after this he lived in almost utter solitude for years, writing his wonderful books, and making long stays in Venice and other distant cities. He was born to wealth, and never had to trouble himself about the more prosaic affairs of the world. In this country we have had until recently no large leisure class, and those who are now taking that place are few in number, and seem utterly at a loss how to pass their time amid the business and bustle of our hurrying life. More and more are they going to Europe, as is natural; for there they find people like themselves, and multitudes of them, who have nothing to do, and who therefore seek to enjoy their leisure. With such a man as Ruskin this was not difficult, and he became a hard worker, not from necessity, but from the pressure from within. He never made or sought to make any money from his books, but they gave him great delight in the writing, and brought him fame, which he did not disdain. One of the cardinal principles of his morality has always been that poverty is no bar to happiness, but that all that is best in life is open to poor as well as rich. This he proclaimed loudly in lectures to workingmen, which he inaugurated in London, Edinburgh, and other cities. If men can only be taught to see, and to think, and to worship, according to Ruskin they have always sources of happiness at hand, of which no outward force of circumstances can deprive them. This is a great and a true gospel, and would there were more such eloquent proclaimers of it as Ruskin! what could be better doctrine for the men and women of this generation than this:--

"In order to teach men how to be satisfied, it is necessary fully
to understand the art and joy of humble life; this at present, of
all arts and sciences, being the one most needing study. Humble
life,--that is to say, proposing to itself no future exaltation,
but only a sweet continuance; not excluding the idea of
forethought, but only of fore-sorrow, and taking no troublous
thought for coming days. The life of domestic affection and
domestic peace, full of sensitiveness to all elements of costless
and kind pleasure, therefore chiefly to the loveliness of the
natural world."

Again he sums up these costless pleasures in sentences weighty with meaning:--

"To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath
over plough, hoe, and spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope,
to pray,--these are the things which make men happy; they have
always had the power to do this, and they always will. The world's
prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these
few things, but upon iron or glass, or electricity or steam, in
nowise."

Ruskin has always had a quarrel with the railroads, and says that all travelling becomes dull in proportion to its rapidity. "Going by railroad," he affirms, "I do not call travelling at all; but it is merely 'being sent' to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel. A man who really loves travelling would as soon consent to pack a day of such happiness into an hour of railroad as one who loved eating would agree, if it were possible, to concentrate his dinner into a pill." Walking he commends most heartily to young men, and considers it one of the rarest pleasures of life. In this country walking-parties are as yet almost unknown, but in Europe they are extremely common, especially among students. What could be better for the youth of our land than such a pastime as this for their vacations?

He has also a great contempt for some of the feats of modern science, and exclaims somewhere:--

"The scientific men are as busy as ants examining the sun and the
moon and the seven stars; and can tell me all about them, I
believe, by this time, and how they move, and what they are made
of. And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they
move or of what they are made. I can't move them any other way than
they go, nor make them of anything else better than they are made."

It is over forty years ago that Ruskin startled the literary and artistic world with that marvellous book entitled "Modern Painters; Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All the Ancient Masters." The title contained the argument of the book, and it was a monumental heresy to utter at that time. Not that there was the least doubt as to its truth, but no voice had then been raised to proclaim it. The English people at that time were blind worshippers of Claude and one or two other old masters; and here was a daring youth--reminding one of David with his sling--going forth to do battle against all the received art opinions of his day, and boldly proclaiming Turner a better painter than Claude, Salvator Rosa, Gaspar Poussin, and the various Van-Somethings who had until that time held undisputed sway in conventional art circles. The young Oxford graduate was greeted with a perfect tempest of ridicule and denunciation. Every critic in the land hurled his lance at him, and every artist looked upon him with sovereign contempt. The young Oxford man, however, valiantly held his ground. He possessed genius, profound conviction, and a magnificent self-conceit; and he hurled back defiance to the whole art-clan, and rode forward. Criticism beat upon the book in vain. Everybody read it, and everybody talked about it, and it conquered criticism at last. No such sensation in the art line has been made in Ruskin's day. His teachings in the course of a few years well-nigh revolutionized art opinion in England. The sum and substance of it was Nature against conventionality. People must look at Nature with their own eyes and judge art by the help of Nature. This seems simple enough to-day, but it was a new doctrine in Ruskin's youth.

Ruskin has always been an extremest in everything, and he went so far as to denounce Raphael's "Charge to Peter" on the grounds that the Apostles are not dressed as men of that time and place would have been when going out fishing. He held to an almost brutal realism in everything, and preached his doctrine whether men would hear or whether they would forbear. He soon rallied a little coterie of artists about him, and formed a school styled the Pre-Raphaelites. The principal founder of the school was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, since better known as a poet than an artist. He held his little court in London for many years, and a great number of young men sat at his feet. His chief supporters at first were Holman Hunt and Millais. These latter soon left Rossetti far behind in execution; but Rossetti was the soul of the movement. He had received his inspiration directly from Ruskin. Among the reminiscences of this art movement are Oscar Wilde and the esthetes of London to-day, with their "symphonies" in blue and their "arrangements" in yellow, and the hideous females who go about London drawing-rooms in limp dresses of sulphur color and sage green loosely hanging from their shoulders, after the manner of ancient Greece. But they have had real artists among them,--these apostles of the sunflower and knights of the lily,--and although some of the better class have repudiated the antics of their followers, the movement known as Pre-Raphaelitism has really been an artistic success.