Ruskin as patriot is admirable, though I much prefer some of his writing descriptive of natural beauty, especially what he says of the Swiss mountains.
It is only fair to note that Ruskin lived his idealism before expressing it rhetorically. He was all of a piece and transparently frank. He had a great love for Oxford, and I had seen somewhere that he resigned his Slade Professorship of Fine Arts because he felt himself growing old. 'It must have been a source of regret to you,' I said to him one day, 'that you felt too weak to go on with your famous Oxford lectures.'
'Too weak,' he repeated scornfully. 'Weakness had nothing to do with it. The room in which I spoke was always overcrowded and had many inconveniences. It was not well lighted for one thing, so I asked the authorities to provide a decent auditorium for the lectures on art that should mean so much to a well graced university. They replied that they were already in debt and left it at that. Yet the very next day they voted 10,000 to erect a laboratory for Dr. Burdon Sanderson to use for his experiments on living animals, and?. 2,000 more to fit up this ante-chamber to Hell with the necessary instruments! Oxford University, too poor to give anything to that love of beauty which does so much to redeem this sordid world, but able to endow vivisection and lavish thousands on instruments of devilish torture!
'My way was clear. I resigned my professorship as a protest and wrote to the vice-chancellor, asking him to read my letter, giving the reasons for my resignation to convocation. But the vice-chancellor had not the grace to answer me or read my letter publicly as I had requested; and when I wrote to the editor of the university paper indignantly, he simply suppressed it; and so the conspiracy of silence triumphed and the London press announced that I had resigned owing to 'advancing years!' 'Oxford preferred the screams of agonizing dumb creatures to anything I could say in praise of the good and beautiful and true! It showed me of what small account I was among men. Perhaps my vanity needed the lesson,' he added, sighing 'but I lamented the good cause hopelessly lost.'
The whole incident is intensely characteristic, showing how England treats its teachers and guides: how differently Paris treated Taine!
As I got to know Ruskin better and we talked of books at great length, I found his taste often to seek. He lauded Mrs. Browning's poetry to the skies and confessed that he disliked Swinburne; the worst prudery of Puritanism went with his thin blood and lack of virility. And his judgment of painting and painters was almost as faulty, though he thought himself a perfect critic and often declared that it was he who discovered and made the reputation of five great artists 'despised until I came: Turner, Tintoret, Luini, Botticelli and Carpaccio, but they were no greater,' he would add, 'than Burne-Jones and Rossetti, my dear boys.' The comparison seemed to me inept, so I changed the subject.
Why do I put these vague and inconsecutive memories together? Though he had great influence and was a great name in England for many years, Ruskin did not impress me profoundly, save as a rhetorician: indeed, to me he was not really a man of genius, not a sacred leader of men. He was perverse and purblind, an English Puritan who after he came out of the prison of Puritanism still bore the marks in his soul of subjection to English ideals and subservience to English limitations. All his economics were better put by Carlyle and he injured Whistler, who was a greater master than his Turner.
In a few weeks of casual meetings I had exhausted him, or felt that he had given all he had to give to me, and his habitual sadness and diseased selfcenteredness distressed my youthful optimism.
One morning I asked him cheekily whether he had not been tempted to keep some of Turner's naughty paintings?
'They would have been very interesting,' I added lamely, feeling him antagonistic.
At once he turned on me. 'I've always felt that you don't approve of what I did,' he said sharply. 'Why don't you speak out? I'm proud of what I did,' and his wintry eyes gleamed with challenge.
'Proud!' I repeated. 'I think it dreadful to kill a man's work!'
'Perhaps it was the kind of work you would wish to preserve,' he snapped; and now I noticed for the first time that when he got angry his lip would curl up on one side and show his canine tooth like a snarl of an angry dog, intensified by the peculiarity that it was only one side of his lip that would lift. He had told me that a dog had bitten him when a boy and split his lip.
'I'm not ashamed to admit that,' I continued. 'Any attack on puritanical standards and English prudery seems worthful to me; but if a great man had done work I hated, work in praise of war, for instance, or defending cruelty, I would not destroy it. Who am I to condemn part of his soul to death? I hate all final condemnations.'
'I did what I felt to be right.'
'I'm sure of that,' I broke In. 'That's the pity of it. The evil men do from high motives is the most pernicious. The being a trustee you took as a challenge to your courage: I understand; but I can only regret it. I'm very sorry.'
I had offended him deeply; I knew I had at the time. He never came to me again and before I could make up my mind to go to him I heard that he had left London.
It is painful to me now to recall my stupid frankness, but in essence we were then at opposite poles; yet I ought to have remembered what he did for the English world and what he gave to the English people; and after all no man's gift is perfect. But the truth is, I did not rate Ruskin then so highly as I do today. I had from the beginning the French view of art and artists and felt as they feel, that admiration of beauty is the highest impulse in our humanity. It has since come to be my very soul and in time it has taught me a new ethic. I had no idea then that the English rated artists like acrobats and thought more of a half-educated politician like Chamberlain than of a great painter or sculptor or musician; and so I underrated the originality of Ruskin and had no idea that his constant preoccupation with what is memorable in art and literature, his impassioned admiration of great work, first astonished and then interested thousands who would never otherwise have come to a comprehension of the artistic ideal. His devotion to art, or, as he would have said, to the beautiful everywhere, lifted thousands of English men and women to a higher understanding of life. Moreover, he enriched English literature with passages of magnificent prose and perhaps the finest descriptions of natural beauty in the language.
Ruskin was to the English a great prophet of the beautiful; art to him was a religion and that view had never suggested itself to them; he taught them to love and admire artists like Turner, Tintoret and Botticelli, and to esteem such great men as benefactors of humanity; he enlarged the English outlook and ennobled it and therefore was a blessing to his people.
I should have been indignant in the eighties with any comparison between him and Carlyle, who to me then was a seer and sacred guide; but Carlyle's deification of force and his disdain for the aesthetic side of life make him appear to me now hardly more valuable than Ruskin. The ordinary English instinct that placed Ruskin side by side with him was nearer right.
In spite of his paltry education and curious limitations, Ruskin was a moral and ennobling influence in England for half a century, and no doubt a stronger influence because at bottom he was bred on the Bible and brought up to revere all English conventions and English ideals.
The end of his life was extremely sad. He went abroad in '88 and '89. In '89 he had an awful illness and he lived almost without mind for another eleven years, dying in 1900.
I do not believe there ever was a sadder life, or, rather, I think he suffered as much as his mind allowed him to suffer; and Carlyle suffered more because he had more intellect, and seeing far more clearly, could not delude himself with the visitations of 'a ministering angel.' Stripped of the pleasure of love, life is a poor inheritance.
CHAPTER XVII
IN MY FIRST YEAR on the Evening News I was reaching success and my employers were more than satisfied with me. I had reduced the loss by more than one half; indeed, I was able to predict that in my second year the loss would be down to?. 15,000 instead of?. 40,000; and the circulation had risen from eight to twenty thousand daily. I was working as hard as ever. In the office at eight every morning, I never left it, except for an hour at lunch, till seven at night; yet I had begun to accept dinner invitations and luncheons on Sunday. Once every week Mrs. Jeune, soon to become Lady Jeune through the knighting of her husband, the well-known judge, invited me to one of her
