'Really?' I queried, genuinely surprised. 'Would you tell me about it?'
After a long pause he told me of going to Ireland and visiting a Mrs.
Latouche, and how Rosie, the young daughter of twelve, came down in the evening to greet him, like a fairy in a tiny pink dressing-gown. 'She was only a child, but even then so wise and thoughtful, and I was forty-two.
'When she was seventeen, she came to London with her mother and I had wonderful weeks with her at Denmark Hill: she called it 'Edenland.' We met often, especially at Lady Mount Temple's at Broadlands. It was in this very year that I told her I loved her, and with her deep eyes on mine, she asked me to wait until she was of age-'Only three years more,' she said. Of course I spoke to her mother, but she seemed displeased and very reluctant.
'When Rosie was about twenty she was infinitely distressed by my lack of faith. She published a booklet of poems, Clouds and Light; she was a most fervent Christian, believing every word of the Master. It was in that very year, I think, that she passed me by, without speaking to me, as Beatrice once passed Dante.'
There was intense pathos in his thin voice, something helpless and forlorn in his attitude, in the trembling lower lip and downcast hands, as of one defeated irremediably, that made my heart ache as he spoke.
'My unbelief did me infinite harm with her, loosened the spiritual tie between us, but later I learned the true cause of our separation. Her father (I think Ruskin said) brought her to London and took her to meet Mrs. (afterwards Lady) Millais. My former wife no doubt told her of my asceticism or abstinence, for when after half an hour's talk my darling came downstairs and her father asked her if she now understood his reluctance to sanction our marriage, she said, 'I understand that there are people to whom the body is everything and the soul nothing. Don't talk of it, please; I never want to think of it again!' 'My poor darling! My Rose of Life!'
My notes of all this scene are so fragmentary, mere detached words, only to be explained by the fact that I believed I should never forget the very syllables he used. But alas! The words are all gone and I can only translate, so to speak, my vague impressions into words. I am not certain of anything, but it seems to me, as well as I can remember, that he told me, too, that in her last illness he was allowed to go to Rosie Latouche and for one whole night hold his love in his arms before she died; or was it that he desired this so intensely that he gave it as his supreme desire? I am uncertain and the fact is not very important.
I am certain of the next thing: that he suddenly started up crying:
'There it is! Don't you see the devil?' and he rushed across the room. 'The cat!' — and he appeared to pick up a cat. 'Open the window,' he cried, and I opened the window and he came over and seemed to hurl it out.
'The Devil,' he exclaimed, panting. 'The Evil One come to tempt me. You saw it! Didn't you?'
I could only reply, 'I saw that you seemed to throw something out of the window. But now it's gone,' I added, hoping to allay his breathless excitement.
'I'm not well,' he broke off suddenly. 'Thinking of my dreadful loss and of my darling's death always unmans me: I must not think of it; I dare not. I have been ill every year lately, through thinking of how I lost her, my love. I had an attack of brain fever in '78 and again in '81 and last year again and again. I am getting very old and weak. Forgive me if I wander.'
He reminded me of Lear.
His face had gone quite grey and drawn; he filled me with unspeakable pity.
What a dreadful, undeserved tragedy! I took him out as if he were a child and drove him back to his hotel. All the while tears were running down his thin, quivering cheeks.
I have never seen any sadder face, except Carlyle's.
I asked him once whether I could get Miss Latouche's poems and he told me that he would let me see his copy. His best poem to her, he said, began, 'Rosie, Rosie, Rosie Rare,' and I wondered whether he had copied the German lyric:
Roslein, Roslein, Roslein rot
Roslein auf der Heide, though he knew no German. He dwelt with inexpressible tenderness on the fact that Rosie used to call him 'Saint Chrysostom' or 'Saint Crumpet,' and he always carried in his breast pocket her first letter to him between two thin plates of fine gold.
Ruskin admitted, indeed laid some stress on the fact, that he had lost all belief in what he called derisively 'the Jew Jeweller's Heaven'; but at the same time he declared repeatedly that the one thing he was surest of in his life was that Rosie's spirit often came to him as 'a ministering Angel' and that she was 'quite, quite happy.'
I remember asking him once about the road at Hinksey, the famous road he had begun to get made at Oxford by the students; he defended it, said that it would be a good thing for all the better classes to learn some handicraft.
'Manual labour is good for all of us, even Gladstone,' he added laughing, but he did not appear to take much interest in the road. Toynbee was one of his foremen and Alfred Milner used to work on the road and Oscar Wilde loved to laugh about it. It was from Oscar, I think, when talking of Ruskin's lectures, that I heard Ruskin's epigram on Naples. It combined, he said, 'the vice of Paris, the misery of Dublin, and the vulgarity of New York.' But Ruskin had never seen New York and knew nothing of it, just as he knew nothing of the vice of Paris. He was at his best talking of virtues.
I never heard Ruskin lecture, but he told me himself that after some practice he used to trust to the inspiration of the moment for everything, except perhaps the first words and the peroration, which he usually wrote out and learned by heart. 'Sometimes I omitted the summing-up,' he added, 'just to disappoint the foolish audience.'
After all possible qualifications, it is certain that Ruskin had the most extraordinary influence in the university. Strange to say, I got the full impression of it from one of my earliest dinners with Cecil Rhodes. I knew that everyone, even old professors, went to Ruskin's lectures, knew that all the younger men were profoundly moved by his passionate idealism and patriotic fervour; but it was from Rhodes that I came to understand the full effect of Ruskin's extraordinary talent. One can judge of his rhetoric from his inaugural lecture:
There is a destiny now possible to us, the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern and the grace to obey… Will you youths of England make your country again a royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of learning and of the Arts, faithful guardian of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour, of goodwill towards men?
One can imagine the effect of this noble rhetoric on young enthusiastic spirits. Though ordinary professors were never applauded, Ruskin was always applauded on entering; and sometimes the feeling he called forth was so intense that the students sat spell-bound with bowed heads and dimmed eyes as he folded his notes and went out.
Of course it was his imperialism that endeared him especially to Rhodes; it might have been meant expressly for him.
This is what England must either do, or perish; she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to advance the power of England by land and sea…
You think that an impossible idea. Be it so; refuse to accept it, if you will; but see that you form your own ideal in its stead. All that I ask of you is to have a fixed purpose of some kind for your country and for yourselves, no matter how restricted, so that it be fixed and unselfish.
Among Rhodes's papers after his death was found a note in his handwriting which shows clearly what Ruskin's words had meant to him:
You have many instincts, religion, love, money-making, ambition, art and creation, which from a human point of view I think the best, but if you differ from me, think it over and work with all your soul for that instinct you deem the best. C. J. Rhodes.
It was Ruskin more than any other man who created the empire builder and gave form and purpose to Rhodes's ambition.
Because Rhodes wasn't quite satisfied with English patriotism, he selected Ruskin's last words as the most important. Rhodes had been affected by the Boers as I have been affected by the Americans; he told me often that he could never exclude the Boer from any African empire he might have a hand in forming.
