Part 11 (1/2)
”Vokins wished me to name to you that Carrick, when he read your criticism on 'Weary Life,' came to him with the cheque Vokins had given, and said your remarks were all right, and that he could not take the price paid by Vokins the buyer; he would alter the picture. Vokins took back the money, only agreeing to see the picture when it was done.”
John Ruskin in reply said he did not see why Carrick should have returned the cheque.
A letter from Mrs. Browning describes a visit to Denmark Hill, and ends,--”I like Mr. Ruskin very much, and so does Robert; very gentle, yet earnest--refined and truthful. I like him very much. We count him one among the valuable acquaintances made this year in England.” This has been dated 1855; but Ruskin, writing to Miss Mitford from Glenfinlas, 17th August, 1853, says, ”I had the pleasure this spring, of being made acquainted with your dear Elizabeth Browning, as well as with her husband. I was of course prepared to like _her_, but I did not expect to like _him_ as much as I did. I think he is really a very fine fellow, and _she_ is the only sensible woman I have yet met with on the subject of Italian politics. Evidently a n.o.ble creature in all things.”
In June, 1850, he had met Robert Browning, on the invitation of Coventry Patmore, and said: ”He is the only person whom I have ever heard talk ration-ally about the Italians, though on the Liberal side.”
In these volumes of ”Modern Painters” he had to discuss the Mediaeval and Renaissance spirit in its relation to art, and to ill.u.s.trate from Browning's poetry, ”unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages, always vital and right and profound; so that in the matter of art there is hardly a principle connected with the mediaeval temper that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his.” This was written twenty-five years before the Browning Society was heard of, and at a time when the style of Browning was an offence to most people. To Ruskin, also, it had been some, thing of a puzzle; and he wrote to the poet, asking him to explain himself; which the poet accordingly did.
That Ruskin was open to conviction and conversion could be shown from the difference in his tone of thought about poetry before and after this period; that he was the best of friends with the man who took him to task for narrowness, may be seen from the following letter, written on the next Christmas Eve:
”MY DEAR MR. RUSKIN,
”Your note having just arrived, Robert deputes me to write for him while he dresses to go out on an engagement. It is the evening. All the hours are wasted, since the morning, through our not being found at the Rue de Grenelle, but here--and our instinct of self-preservation or self-satisfaction insists on our not losing a moment more by our own fault.
”Thank you, thank you for sending us your book, and also for writing my husband's name in it. It will be the same thing as if you had written mine--except for the pleasure, as you say, which is greater so. How good and kind you are!
”And not well. That is worst. Surely you would be better if you had the summer in winter we have here. But I was to write only a word--Let it say how affectionately we regard you.
”ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
”3, RUE DU COLYSeE,
”_Thursday Evening, 24th” (December_, 1855).
CHAPTER IX
”THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART” (1857-1858)
The humble work of the drawing-cla.s.ses at Great Ormond Street was teaching Ruskin even more than he taught his pupils. It was showing him how far his plans were practicable; how they should be modified; how they might be improved; and especially what more, beside drawing-cla.s.ses, was needed to realize his ideal. He was anxiously willing to co-operate with every movement, to join hands with any kind of man, to go anywhere, do anything that might promote the cause he had at heart.
Already at the end of 1854 he had given three lectures, his second course, at the Architectural Museum, specially addressed to workmen in the decorative trades. His subjects were design and colour, and his ill.u.s.trations were chiefly drawn from mediaeval illumination, which he had long been studying. These were informal, quasi-private affairs, which nevertheless attracted notice owing to the celebrity of the speaker. It would have been better if his addresses had been carefully prepared and authentically published; for a chance word here and there raised replies about matters of detail in which his critics thought they had gained a technical advantage, adding weight to his father's desire not to see him ”expose himself” in this way. There were no more lectures until the beginning of 1857.
On January 23rd, 1857, he spoke before the Architectural a.s.sociation upon ”The Influence of Imagination in Architecture,” repeating and amplifying what he had said at Edinburgh about the subordinate value of proportion, and the importance of sculptured ornament based on natural forms. This of course would involve the creation of a cla.s.s of stone-carvers who could be trusted with the execution of such work. Once grant the value of it, and public demand would encourage the supply, and the workmen would raise themselves in the effort.
A louder note was sounded in an address at the St. Martin's School of Art, Castle Street, Long Acre (April 3rd, 1857), where, speaking after George Cruikshank, his old friend--practically his first master--and an enthusiastic philanthropist and temperance advocate, Ruskin gave his audience a wider view of art than they had known before: ”the kind of painting they most wanted in London was painting cheeks red with health.” This was antic.i.p.ating the standpoint of the Oxford Lectures, and showed how the inquiry was beginning to take a much broader aspect.
Another work in a similar spirit, the North London School of Design, had been prosperously started by a circle of men under Pre-Raphaelite influence, and led by Thomas Seddon. He had given up historical and poetic painting for naturalistic landscape, and had returned from the East with the most valuable studies completed, only to break down and die prematurely. His friends, among them Holman Hunt, were collecting money to buy from the widow his picture of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, to present it to the National Gallery as a memorial of him; and at a meeting for the purpose, Ruskin spoke warmly of his labours in the cause of the working cla.s.ses.
In the summer of 1857 the Art Treasures Exhibition was held at Manchester, and Ruskin was invited to lecture. The theme he chose was ”The Political Economy of Art.” He had been studying political economy for some time back, but, as we saw from his letter to Carlyle, he had found no answer in the ordinary text-books for the questions he tried to put. He wanted to know what Bentham and Ricardo and Mill, the great authorities, would advise him as to the best way of employing artists, of educating workmen, of elevating public taste, of regulating patronage; but these subjects were not in their programme. And so he put together his own thoughts into two lectures upon Art considered as Wealth: first, how to get it; next, how to use it.[7]
[Footnote 7: July 10 and 13, 1857. He went to Manchester from Oxford, where he had been staying with the Liddells, writing enthusiastically of the beauty of their children and the charm of their domestic life.]
There were very few points in these lectures that were not vigorously contested at the moment, and conceded in the sequel--in some form or other. The paternal function of government, the right of the state to interfere in matters beyond its traditional range, its duty with regard to education--all this was quite contrary to the prevailing habits of thought of the time, especially at Manchester, the headquarters of the _laissez faire_ school; but to Ruskin, who, curiously enough, had just then been referring sarcastically to German philosophy, knowing it only at second-hand, and unaware of Hegel's political work--to him this Platonic conception of the state was the only possible one, as it is to most people nowadays. In the same way, his practical advice has been accepted, perhaps unwittingly, by our times. We do now understand the difference between artistic decoration and machine-made wares; we do now try to preserve ancient monuments, and to use art as a means of education. And we are in a fair way, it seems, of lowering the price of modern pictures, as he bids us, to ”not more than 500 for an oil picture and 100 for a water-colour.”
After a visit to the Trevelyans at Wallington he went with his parents to Scotland; for his mother, now beginning to grow old, wanted to revisit the scenes of her youth. They went to the Highlands and as far north as the Bay of Cromarty, and then returned by way of the Abbeys of the Lowlands, to look up Turner sites, as he had done in 1845 on the St.
Gothard. From the enjoyment of this holiday he was recalled to London by a letter from Mr. Wornum saying that he could arrange the Turner drawings at the National Gallery.