Part 24 (1/2)
”FORS” RESUMED (1880-1881)
Retirement at Brantwood was only partial. Ruskin's habits of life made it impossible for him to be idle, much as he acknowledged the need of thorough rest. He could not be wholly ignorant of the world outside Coniston; though sometimes for weeks together he tried to ignore it, and refused to read a newspaper. The time when General Gordon went out to Khartoum was one of these periods of abstraction, devoted to mediaeval study. Somebody talked one morning at breakfast about the Soudan. ”And who _is_ the Soudan?” he earnestly inquired, connecting the name, as it seemed, with the Soldan of Babylon, in crusading romance.
”Don't you know,” he wrote to a friend (January 8th, 1880):
”That I am entirely with you in this Irish misery, and have been these thirty years?--only one can't speak plain without distinctly becoming a leader of Revolution? I know that Revolution _must come_ in all the world--but I can't act with Dan ton or Robespierre, nor with the modern French Republican or Italian one. I _could_ with you and your Irish, but you are only at the beginning of the end. I have spoken,--and plainly too,--for all who have ears, and hear.”
The author of ”Fors” had tried to show that the nineteenth-century commercialist spirit was not new; that the tyranny of capital was the old sin of usury over again; and he asked why preachers of religion did not denounce it--why, for example, the Bishop of Manchester did not, on simply religious grounds, oppose the teaching of the ”Manchester School,” who were the chief supporters of the commercialist economy. Not until the end of 1879 had Dr. Fraser been aware of the challenge; but at length he wrote, justifying his att.i.tude. The popular and able bishop had much to say on the expediency of the commercial system and the error of taking the Bible literally; but he seemed unaware of the revolution in economical thought which ”Unto this Last” and ”Fors” had been pioneering.
”I'm not gone to Venice yet,” wrote Ruskin to Miss Beever, ”but thinking of it hourly. I'm very nearly done with toasting my bishop; he just wants another turn or two, and then a little b.u.t.ter.” The toasting and the b.u.t.tering appeared in the _Contemporary Review_ for February 1880; and this incident led him to feel that the mission of ”Fors” was not finished. If bishops were still unenlightened, there was yet work to do.
He gave up Venice, and resumed his crusade.
Brantwood life was occasionally interrupted by short excursions to London or elsewhere. In the autumn he had heard Professor Huxley on the evolution of reptiles; and this suggested another treatment of the subject, from his own artistic and ethical point of view, in a lecture oddly called ”A Caution to Snakes,” given at the London Inst.i.tution, March 17th, 1880 (repeated March 23rd, and printed in ”Deucalion”). He was not merely an amateur zoologist and F.Z.S., but a devoted lover and keen observer of animals. It would take long to tell the story of all his dogs, from the spaniel Dash, commemorated in his earliest poems, and Wisie, whose sagacity is related in ”Praeterita,” down through the long line of bulldogs, St. Bernards, and collies, to Bramble, the reigning favourite; and all the cats who made his study their home, or were flirted with abroad. To Miss Beever, from Bolton Abbey (January 24th, 1875) he describes the Wharfe in flood, and then continues: ”I came home (to the hotel) to quiet tea, and a black kitten called Sweep, who lapped half my cream-jugful (and yet I had plenty), sitting on my shoulder.”
Grip, the pet rook at Denmark Hill, is mentioned in ”My First Editor,”
as celebrated in verse by Mr. W.H. Harrison.
Ruskin had not Th.o.r.eau's intimate acquaintance with the details of wild life, but his att.i.tude towards animals and plants was the same; hating the science that murders to dissect; resigning his Professors.h.i.+p at Oxford, finally, because vivisection was introduced into the University; and supporting the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals with all his heart. But, as he said at the Annual Meeting in 1877, he objected to the sentimental fiction and exaggerated statements which some of its members circulated. ”They had endeavoured to prevent cruelty to animals,” he said, ”but they had not enough endeavoured to promote affection for animals. He trusted to the pets of children for their education, just as much as to their tutors.”
It was to carry out this idea (to antic.i.p.ate a little) that he founded the Society of Friends of Living Creatures, which he addressed, May 23rd, 1885, at the club, Bedford Park, in his capacity of--not president--but ”papa.” The members, boys and girls from seven to fifteen, promised not to kill nor hurt any animal for sport, nor tease creatures; but to make friends of their pets and watch their habits, and collect facts about natural history.
I remember, on one of the rambles at Coniston in the early days, how we found a wounded buzzard--one of the few creatures of the eagle kind that our English mountains still breed. The rest of us were not very ready to go near the beak and talons of the fierce-looking, and, as we supposed, desperate bird. Ruskin quietly took it up in his arms, felt it over to find the hurt, and carried it, quite unresistingly, out of the way of dogs and pa.s.sers-by, to a place where it might die in solitude or recover in safety. He often told his Oxford hearers that he would rather they learned to love birds than to shoot them; and his wood and moor were harbours of refuge for hunted game or ”vermin;” and his windows the rendezvous of the little birds.
He had not been abroad since the spring of 1877, and in August 1880 felt able to travel again. He went for a tour among the northern French cathedrals, staying at old haunts,--Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais, Chartres, Rouen,--and then returned with Mr. A. Severn and Mr. Brabazon to Amiens, where he spent the greater part of October. He was writing a new book--the ”Bible of Amiens”--which was to be to the ”Seven Lamps”
what ”St. Mark's Rest” was to ”Stones of Venice.”
Before he returned, the secretary of the Chesterfield Art School had written to ask him to address the students. Mr. Ruskin, travelling without a secretary, and in the flush of new work and thronging ideas, put the letter aside; he carried his letters about in bundles in his portmanteau, as he said in his apology, ”and looked at them as Ulysses at the bags of Aeolus.” Some wag had the impudence to forge a reply, which was actually read at the meeting in spite of its obviously fict.i.tious style and statements:
”HARLESDEN(!), LONDON, _Friday_.
”MY DEAR SIR,
”Your letter reaches me here. Have just returned [commercial English, not Ruskin] from Venice [where he had meant to go, but did not go] where I have ruminated(!) in the pasturages of the home of art(!); the loveliest and holiest of lovely and holy cities, where the very stones cry out, eloquent in the elegancies of iambics” (!!)--and so forth.
However, it deceived the newspapers, and there was a fine storm, which Mr. Ruskin rather enjoyed. For though the forgery was clumsy enough, it embodied some apt plagiarism from a letter to the Mansfield Art School on a similar occasion.
Not long before, a forgery of a more serious kind had been committed by one of the people connected with St. George's Guild, who had put Mr.
Ruskin's name to cheques. The bank authorities were long in tracing the crime. They even sent a detective to Brantwood to watch one of the a.s.sistants, who never knew--nor will ever know--that he was honoured with such attentions; and none of his friends for a moment believed him guilty. He had sometimes imitated Mr. Ruskin's hand; a dangerous jest.
The real culprit was discovered at last, and Mr. Ruskin had to go to London as a witness for the prosecution. ”Being in very weak health,”
the _Times_ report said (April 1st, 1879), ”he was allowed to give evidence from the bench.” He had told the Sheffield communists that ”he thought so strongly on the subject of the repression of crime that he dare not give expression to his ideas for fear of being charged with cruelty”; but no sooner was the prisoner released than he gave the help needed to start him again in a better career.
Though he did not feel able to lecture to strangers at Chesterfield, he visited old friends at Eton, on November 6th, 1880, to give an address on Amiens. For once he forgot his MS., but the lecture was no less brilliant and interesting. It was practically the first chapter of his new work, the ”Bible of Amiens,”--itself intended as the first volume of ”Our Fathers have Told us: Sketches of the History of Christendom, for Boys and Girls who have been held at its Fonts.” The distinctly religious tone of the work was noticed as marking, if not a change, a strong development of a tendency which had been strengthening for some time past.
Early in 1879 the Rev. F.A. Malleson, vicar of Broughton, near Coniston, had asked him to write, for the Furness Clerical Society's Meetings, a series of letters on the Lord's Prayer. In them he dwelt upon the need of living faith in the Fatherhood of G.o.d, and childlike obedience to the commands of old-fas.h.i.+oned religion and morality. He criticised the English liturgy as compared with mediaeval forms of prayer; and pressed upon his hearers the strongest warnings against evasion, or explaining away of stern duties and simple faiths. He concluded: