and bored by a literary life—“If I were not rather in want of money,” he tells his mother, “I certainly would not write any more”—he must express his mind somehow; and his mind was a courageous mind, an unconventional mind. The Press-gang, he thought an abomination. Why, he asked, do English philanthropists bother about slaves in Africa when English children are working seventeen hours a day in factories? The Game Laws are, in his opinion, a source of much misery to the poor; the law of primogeniture should be altered, and there is something to be said for the Roman Catholic religion. Every kind of topic—politics, science, religion, history—comes into view, but only for a fleeting glance. Whether the diary form was to blame or the jolting of a stage coach, or whether lack of book learning and a youth spent in cutting out brigs is a bad training for the reflective powers, the Captain’s mind, as he remarked when he stopped for two hours and had a look at it, “is like a kaleidoscope.” But no, he added with just self-analysis, it was not like a kaleidoscope; “for the patterns of kaleidoscopes are regular, and there is very little regularity in my brain, at all events.” He hops from thing to thing. Now he rattles off the history of Liège; next moment he discourses upon reason and instinct; then he considers what degree of pain is inflicted upon fish by taking them with the hook; and then, taking a walk through the streets, it strikes him how very seldom you now meet with a name beginning with X. “Rest!” he exclaims with reason; “no, the wheels of a carriage may rest, even the body for a time may rest, but the mind will not.” And so, in an excess of restlessness, he is off to America.
Nor do we catch sight of him again—for the six volumes in which he recorded his opinion of America, though they got him into trouble with the inhabitants, now throw light upon nothing in particular—until his daughter, having shut up her Dictionaries and Gazettes, bethinks her of a few “vague remembrances”. They are only trifles, she admits, and put together in a very random way, but still she remembers him very vividly. He was five foot ten and weighed fourteen stone, she remembers; he had a deep dimple in his chin, and one of his eyebrows was higher than the other, so that he always wore a look of inquiry. Indeed, he was a very restless man. He would break into his brother’s room and wake him in the middle of the night to suggest that they should start at once to Austria and buy a château in Hungary and make their fortunes. But, alas! he never did make his fortune, she recalls. What with his building at Langham, and the great decoy which he had made on his best grazing land, and other extravagances not easy for a daughter to specify, he left little wealth behind him. He had to keep hard at his writing. He wrote his books sitting at a table in the dining-room, from which he could see the lawn and his favourite bull Ben Brace grazing there. And he wrote so small a hand that the copyist had to stick a pin in to mark the place. Also he was wonderfully neat in his dress, and would have nothing but white china on his breakfast table, and kept sixteen clocks and liked to hear them all strike at once. His children called him “Baby”, though he was a man of violent passions, dangerous to thwart, and often “very grave” at home.
“These trifles put on paper look sadly insignificant,” she concludes. Yet as she rambles on they do in their butterfly way bring back the summer morning and the dying Captain after all his voyages stretched on the mattress in the boudoir room dictating those last words to his daughter about love and roses. “The more fancifully they were tied together, the better he liked it,” she says. Indeed, after his death a bunch of pinks and roses was “found pressed between his body and the mattress”.
[Times Literary Supplement, Sep 26, 1935]
Ruskin.
What did our fathers of the nineteenth century do to deserve so much scolding? That is a question which we find ourselves asking sometimes as we dip here and there into the long row of volumes which bear the names of Garlyle and Ruskin. And if we also dip into the lives of those great men we shall find evidence that our fathers were a good deal responsible for the tone which their teachers adopted towards them. There can be no doubt that they liked their great men to be isolated from the rest of the world. Genius was nearly as antisocial and demanded almost as drastic a separation from the ordinary works and duties of mankind as insanity. Accordingly, the great man of that age had much temptation to withdraw to his pinnacle and become a prophet, denouncing a generation from whose normal activities he was secluded. When Carlyle expressed his readiness to work somewhere in a public office, no such place was found for him, and for the rest of his life he was left to grind out book after book with a bitter consciousness within him that such was not the most venerable of lives. All the worship that was offered could not sweeten what wiser treatment might have entirely blotted out. Ruskin started from the opposite pole as far as circumstances were concerned, but he too drifted into the same isolation, and he leaves us convinced that of the two, his was the sadder life.
Yet if all the fairies had conspired together at his birth to protect this man of genius and foster him to the utmost, what more could they have done? He had wealth and comfort and opportunity from the very first. While he was still a boy his genius was recognized, and he had only to publish his first book to become one of the most famous men of the day at the age of twenty-four. But the fairies after all did not give him the gifts he wanted. If one had seen Ruskin about the year 1869, according to Professor Norton, “you would tell me that you had never seen so sad a man, never one whose nature seemed to have been so sensitized to pain by the experience of life.” This surpassing gift of eloquence, in the first place, brought him far more of evil than of good. Still, after sixty years or so, the style in which page after page of Modern Painters is written takes our breath away. We find ourselves marvelling at the words, as if all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight for our pleasure, but it seems scarcely fitting to ask what meaning they have for us. After a time, falling into a passion with this indolent pleasure-loving temper in his readers, Ruskin checked his fountains, and curbed his speech to the very spirited, free, and almost colloquial English in which Fors Clavigera and Praeterita are written. In these changes, and in the restless play of his mind upon one subject after another, there is something, we scarcely know how to define it, of the wealthy and cultivated amateur, full of fire and generosity and brilliance, who would give all he possesses of wealth and brilliance to be taken seriously, but who is fated to remain for ever an outsider. As we read these outbursts of rather petulant eloquence, we find ourselves remembering the sheltered and luxurious life, and even when we are very ignorant of the subject, the tremendous arrogance and self confidence seem to result not from knowledge, but from a tossing and splendid impatience of spirit which is not to be broken into the drudgery of learning. We remember how for years after most men are forced to match themselves with the real world “he was living in a world of his own”, to quote Professor Norton again, and losing the chance of gaining that experience with practical life, that self-control, and that development of reason which he more than most men required. If we reflect, too, that from his childhood, when he stood up among the cushions and preached, “People be good,” the passion of his life was to teach and reform, it is easy to understand how terribly and, as it must have seemed sometimes, how futilely “he hurt himself against life and the world”.
But we do him much wrong if we take him merely as a prophet—a proceeding that is rather forced upon one by his followers, and forget to read his books. For if anyone is able to make his readers feel that he is alive, wrong headed, intemperate, interesting, and lovable, that writer is Ruskin. His eagerness about everything in the world is perhaps as valuable as the concentration which in another sphere produced the works of Darwin, or the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It may be that, if we submitted his works on art to a modern art critic, or his works on economy to a modern economist, we should find that there is very little in them which is accepted by the present generation. Even an unprofessional reader, who picks up Modern Painters attracted very much by the bright patches of eloquence, is fairly startled by some of the statements concerning art and morality which are laid down with the usual air of infallibility and the usual array of polysyllables. Nor is it easy for one reading industriously in the six volumes of Fors Clavigera to find out precisely how it is that we are to save ourselves, though it is plain enough that we are all damned. Nevertheless, though his aesthetics may be wrong and his economics