Chapter VI: The Edinburgh Lectures (1853-1854)

By the end of June, 1853, "Stones of Venice" was finished, as well as a description of Giotto's works at Padua, written for the Arundel Society. The social duties of the season were over; Ruskin and his wife went north to spend a well-earned holiday. At Wallington in Northumberland, staying with Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan, he met Dr. John Brown at Edinburgh, author of "Pet Marjorie" and other well-known works, who became his lifelong friend. Ruskin invited Millais, by this time an intimate and heartily-admired friend,[4] to join them at Glenfinlas. Ruskin devoted himself first to foreground studies, and made careful drawings of rock-detail; and then, being asked to give a course of lectures before the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, he was soon busy writing once more, and preparing the cartoon-sketches, "diagrams" as he called them, to illustrate his subjects. Dr. Acland had joined the party; and he asked Millais to sketch their host as he stood contemplatively on the rocks with the torrent thundering beside him. The picture with additional work in the following winter, became the well-known portrait in the possession of Sir Henry Acland, much the best likeness of this early period.

[Footnote 4: "What a beauty of a man he is!" wrote old Mr. Ruskin, "and high in intellect.... Millais' sketches are 'prodigious'! Millais is the painter of the age." "Capable, it seems to me, of almost everything, if his life and strength be spared," said the younger Ruskin to Miss Mitford.]

Another portrait was painted--in words--by one of his audience at Edinburgh on November 1, when he gave the opening lecture of his course, his first appearance on the platform. The account is extracted from the _Edinburgh Guardian_ of November 19, 1853:

"Before you can see the lecturer, however, you must get into the
hall, and that is not an easy matter, for, long before the doors
are opened, the fortunate holders of season tickets begin to
assemble, so that the crowd not only fills the passage, but
occupies the pavement in front of the entrance and overflows into
the road. At length the doors open, and you are carried through the
passage into the hall, where you take up, of course, the best
available position for seeing and hearing.... After waiting a weary
time ... the door by the side of the platform opens, and a thin
gentleman with light hair, a stiff white cravat, dark overcoat with
velvet collar, walking, too with a slight stoop, goes up to the
desk, and looking round with a self-possessed and somewhat formal
air, proceeds to take off his great-coat, revealing thereby, in
addition to the orthodox white cravat, the most orthodox of white
waistcoats.... 'Dark hair, pale face, and massive marble brow--that
is my ideal of Mr. Ruskin,' said a young lady near us. This proved
to be quite a fancy portrait, as unlike the reality as could well
be imagined, Mr. Ruskin has light sand-coloured hair; his face is
more red than pale; the mouth well-cut, with a good deal of
decision in its curve, though somewhat wanting in sustained dignity
and strength; an aquiline nose; his forehead by no means broad or
massive, but the brows full and well bound together; the eye we
could not see, in consequence of the shadows that fell upon his
countenance from the lights overhead, but we are sure it must be
soft and luminous, and that the poetry and passion we looked for
almost in vain in other features must be concentrated there.[5]
After sitting for a moment or two, and glancing round at the sheets
on the wall as he takes off his gloves, he rises, and leaning
slightly over the desk, with his hands folded across, begins at
once,--'You are proud of your good city of Edinburgh,' etc.

[Footnote 5: "Mary Russell Mitford found him as a young man 'very
eloquent and distinguished-looking, tall, fair, and slender, with a
gentle playfulness, and a sort of pretty waywardness that was quite
charming.' Sydney Dobell, again, in 1852, discovered an earnestness
pervading every feature, giving power to a face that otherwise
would be merely lovable for its gentleness. And, finally, one who
visited him at Denmark Hill characterized him as emotional and
nervous, with a soft, genial eye, a mouth 'thin and severe,' and a
voice that, though rich and sweet, yet had a tendency to sink into
a plaintive and hopeless tone,"--_Literary World_, May 19, 1893.]

"And now for the style of the lecture.... Properly speaking, there
were two styles essentially distinct, and not well blended,--a
speaking and a writing style; the former colloquial and spoken
off-hand; the latter rhetorical and carefully read in quite a
different voice,--we had almost said intoned.... He has a
difficulty in sounding the letter 'r'; [and there is a] peculiar
tone in the rising and falling of his voice at measured intervals,
in a way scarcely ever heard except in the public lection of the
service appointed to be read in churches. These are the two things
with which, perhaps you are most surprised,--his dress and manner
of speaking--both of which (the white waistcoat notwithstanding)
are eminently clerical. You naturally expect, in one so
independent, a manner free from conventional restraint, and an
utterance, whatever may be the power of voice, at least expressive
of a strong individuality; and you find instead a Christ Church man
of ten years' standing, who has not yet taken orders; his dress and
manner derived from his college tutor, and his elocution from the
chapel-reader."

The lectures were a summing up, in popular form, of the chief topics of Ruskin's thought during the last two years. The first (November 1) stated, with more decision and warmth than part of his audience approved, his plea for the Gothic Revival, for the use of Gothic as a domestic style. The next lecture, given three days later, went on to contrast the wealth of ornament in mediæval buildings with the poor survivals of conventionalized patterns which did duty for decoration in nineteenth-century "Greek" architecture; and he raised a laugh by comparing a typical stonemason's lion with a real tiger's head, drawn in the Edinburgh zoological gardens by Mr. Millais.

The last two lectures, on November 15 and 18, were on Painting; briefly reviewing the history of landscape and the life and aims of Turner; and finally, Christian art and Sincerity in imagination, which was now put forth as the guiding principle of Pre-Raphaelitism.

Public opinion was violently divided over these lectures; and they were the cause of much trouble at home. The fact of his lecturing at all aroused strong opposition from his friends and remonstrances from his parents. Before the event his mother wrote: "I cannot reconcile myself to the thought of your bringing yourself personally before the world till you are somewhat older and stronger." Afterwards, his father, while apologizing for the word "degrading," is disgusted at his exposing himself to such an interruption as occurred, and to newspaper comments and personal references. The notion of an "itinerant lecturer" scandalizes him. He hears from Harrison and Holding that John is to lecture even at their very doors--in Camberwell. "I see small bills up," he writes, "with the lecturers' names; among them Mr. ---- who gets your old clothes!" And he bids him write to the committee that his parents object to his fulfilling the engagement. He postponed his lecture--for ten years; but accepted the Presidency of the Camberwell Institute, which enabled him to appear at their meetings without offence to any.

While staying at Edinburgh, Mr. Ruskin met the various celebrities of modern Athens, some of them at the table of his former fellow-traveller in Venice, Mrs. Jameson. He then returned home to prepare the lectures for printing.

These lectures as published in April, 1854 were fiercely assailed by the old school; but a more serious blow fell on him before that month was out. His wife returned to her parents and instituted a suit against him, to which he made no answer. The marriage was annulled in July. A year later she married Millais.

In May (1854) the Pre-Raphaelites again needed his defence. Mr. Holman Hunt exhibited the "Light of the World" and the "Awakening Conscience." Ruskin made them the theme of two more letters to _The Times_; mentioning, by the way, the "spurious imitations of Pre-Raphaelite work" which were already becoming common. Starting for his summer tour on the Continent, in the Simmenthal he wrote a pamphlet on the opening of the Crystal Palace. There had been much rejoicing over the "new style of architecture" in glass and iron, and its purpose as a palace of art. Ruskin who had declined, in the last chapter of the "Seven Lamps," to join in the cry for a new style, was not at all ready to accept this as any real artistic advance; and took the opportunity to plead again for the great buildings of the past, which were being destroyed or neglected, while the British public was glorifying its gigantic greenhouse. The pamphlet practically suggested the establishment of the Society for the preservation of ancient buildings, which has since come into operation.

This summer of 1854 he projected a study of Swiss history: to tell the tale of six chief towns--Geneva, Fribourg, Basle, Thun, Baden and Schaffhausen, to which in 1858 he added Rheinfelden and Bellinzona. He intended to illustrate the work with pictures of the places described. He began with his drawing of Thun, a large bird's-eye view of the town with its river and bridges, roofs and towers, all exquisitely defined with the pen, and broadly coloured in fluctuating tints that seem to melt always into the same aerial blue; the blue, high up the picture, beyond the plain, deepening into distant mountains.

But his father wanted to see "Modern Painters" completed, and so he began his third volume at Vevey, with the discussion of the grand style, in which he at last broke loose from Reynolds, as was inevitable, after his study of Pre-Raphaelitism, and all the varied experiences of the last ten years. The lesson of the Tulse Hill ivy had been brought home to him in many ways: he had found it to be more and more true that Nature is, after all, the criterion of art, and that the greatest painters were always those whose aim, so far as they were conscious of an aim, was to take fact for their starting-point. Idealism, beauty, imagination, and the rest, though necessary to art, could not, he felt, be made the object of study; they were the gift of heredity, of circumstances, of national aspirations and virtues; not to be produced by the best of rules, or achieved by the best of intentions.

What his own view of his own work was can be gathered from a letter to an Edinburgh student, written on August 6, 1854:

"I am sure I never said anything to dissuade you from trying to
excel or to do great things. I only wanted you to be sure that your
efforts were made with a substantial basis, so that just in the
moment of push your footing might not give way beneath you; and
also I wanted you to feel that long and steady effort made in a
contented way does more than violent effort made from some strong
motive and under some enthusiastic impulse. And I repeat--for of
this I am perfectly sure--that the best things are only to be done
in this way. It is very difficult thoroughly to understand the
difference between indolence and reserve of strength, between
apathy and severity, between palsy and patience; but there is all
the difference in the world; and nearly as many men are ruined by
inconsiderate exertions as by idleness itself. To do as much as you
can heartily and happily do each day in a well-determined
direction, with a view to far-off results, with present enjoyment
of one's work, is the only proper, the only essentially profitable
way."