The Harvest of Ruskin. Graham John William
qualifications Ruskin had his very unusual gifts, which it may be long before we find again combined with the religious faculty – his long lifetime free from the need of earning money, his early popularity, his wonderful style, the vantage ground of his Professorial chair, his penetrating mind, his wit and his fire. It may be long before we see his like again.
I am far from claiming infallibility for Ruskin. Infallibility is an out-of-date conception altogether. There is no such thing on earth. To be infallible you must know everything; you must be infinite. The infallibility of a finite creature is an inhuman, even an inorganic conception. Organic life means growth, and growth means imperfection; but growth is Nature’s way of making things. Infallibility is a tyrant born of ecclesiasticism, and bred on human laziness and fear. It has become the attribute of the quack pill, and there let it abide.
But, beyond this safe generality, Ruskin had human weaknesses of an obvious kind. He loved paradox; he played with his thunderbolts a little, and rather liked to shock people. He was a humorist as well as a divine. It is difficult to put down some of his derivations to anything but sheer fooling; a man who will put the English Force and Latin Fors down to the same root, will do anything in that line. Again, when he was in thunderous action he allowed volcanoes of vituperation to erupt, which one would have wished otherwise. He sadly lacked restraint, but, like the strong language of the old Prophets, his had its root in love of man.
We know more of his intimacies and his foibles, which he loves humorously to exaggerate, than are generally given to the public. He has taken means to prevent any artificial pedestal, in idealized aloofness, ever being raised to him. His utter frankness led him to give the public his private accounts, which people generally keep to themselves; and such correspondence as that painful one with Octavia Hill.2 But when the faults of others were in question he was silent as the grave, to his own hurt. He was “kind even to the unthankful and the evil.” As for many of us, how much more vulgar and base would the world have been without that noble and lovely soul. Many are those who owe him an irredeemable debt. His life was not, as he sadly thought, the story of baffled strife. Of him, as of Dr. Arnold, it could be said that not alone was he saved.3
CHAPTER II
THE PILGRIM’S WAY
H AVING now stated our conviction that Ruskin was always essentially religious, we will trace the history of his beliefs.
He began life in 1819, under the strong influence of his mother, as a Calvinistic Protestant, of the narrow type then current. The Ruskins were properly Scottish Presbyterians, living in London. A Low Church or Spurgeon’s Tabernacle was equally acceptable. His mother made him read with her daily portions of the Bible, two or three chapters, undiluted and unselected. They accomplished the journey from Genesis to Revelation in about a year, and then began at Genesis again next day, “hard names, numbers, Levitical Law and all.” They went through it at least six times together.
She also taught him, “complete and sure,” twenty-six chapters of the Bible, including the 119th Psalm, and all the Scottish Paraphrases of the Psalms.4
This did not make him vitally religious; he was not “converted.” The Bible was, for the present, a rather tiresome task, and to chapel he and his father went submissively, feeling their sad inferiority to the mother in these matters. His mother’s creed he dutifully imbibed, without question or strong feeling of any kind. He had the proper antipathy to Rome, and the habit of outward prayer.5 His real religion was born at Friar’s Crag, Derwentwater, at four years old, when he looked with awe into the dark lake over the mossy tree roots, and felt himself in the Presence.
He was, as an only child, a protected treasure, the pride of and a great responsibility to his wealthy parents. He never went to a Public School, and when he went to Oxford to be made into a Bishop his parents came with him, lived in the High, and his mother saw him every day. With them, far into mid-life, he went on all his foreign journeys but two, those of 1845 and 1858. The parental ideas remained potent with him to an extent hardly realizable by this generation, which often finds it so difficult to bring their parents up properly.
His earlier works are written with the questionless devoutness of the untried mind. They were narrow in theology, fiercely Protestant, earnest enough; and on their positive side, still sound and valuable. The first two volumes of Modern Painters, the whole of the Stones of Venice and the Seven Lamps of Architecture, and the Edinburgh Lectures on Architecture and Painting belong to this period. So, broadly, do the Manchester Lectures on the Political Economy of Art in 1857; but they are the herald of the next epoch.
He resisted the new Geology of Lyell, declared indignantly that God had created the Alpine valleys, and put the rivers to flow along them, denying that the rivers had worn their own valleys out. Somewhere in the later fifties we find him scandalized by the statement of Frederick Denison Maurice that Jael’s treacherous murder of Sisera was a wicked deed. The fact that Deborah the Prophetess sang a sacred song over it was enough to justify it to Ruskin, then over thirty-five.6
Just before this incident, however, his moral sense was beginning to revolt from certain parts of his creed. He was, he says, invited to a “fashionable séance of Evangelical doctrine, at the Earl of Ducie’s, presided over by Mr. Molyneux, then a divine of celebrity in that sect, who sat with one leg over his other knee, in the attitude always given to Herod at the Massacre of the Innocents in mediæval sculpture, and discoursed in tones of consummate assurance and satisfaction, and to the entire comfort and consent of his Belgravian audience, on the beautiful parable of the Prodigal Son. Which, or how many, of his hearers he meant to describe as having personally lived on husks, and devoured their father’s property, did not of course appear; but that something of the sort was necessary to the completeness of the joy in heaven over them, now in Belgrave Square, at the feet, or one foot, of Mr. Molyneux, could not be questioned. Waiting my time, till the raptures of the converted company had begun to flag a little, I ventured, from a back seat, to enquire of Mr. Molyneux what we were to learn from the example of the other son, not prodigal, who was, his father said, ‘ever with me and all that I have, thine.’ A sudden horror and unanimous feeling of the serpent having somehow got over the wall into their Garden of Eden, fell on the whole company; and some of them, I thought, looked at the candles, as if they expected them to burn blue. After a pause of a minute, gathering himself into an expression of pity and indulgence, withholding latent thunder, Mr. Molyneux explained to me that the home-staying son was merely a picturesque figure introduced to fill the background of the parable agreeably, and contained no instruction or example for the well-disposed scriptural student, but on the contrary, rather, a snare for the unwary, and a temptation to self-righteousness – which was, of all sins, the most offensive to God. Under the fulmination of which answer, I retired from the séance in silence, nor ever attended another of the kind from that day to this.”7
It was just this lack of feeling for righteousness as such, the idea that you needed first to be a “most sinful sinner” if you wished to become a “most Christian Christian,” and a want of recognition that forgiveness was a spiritual and inward process, which caused the contemptuous references to his early form of doctrine which are scattered thickly throughout Ruskin’s later writings.
The experiences which make epochs in men’s lives are indeed strangely various and unexpected. Three events stand out as the destroyers of his Protestantism and of much of his outward edifice of faith. Their year was 1858. One was the discovery that the Puritan Sabbath of his youth had no Scriptural authority, but based itself, without confessing it, on the Jewish Sabbath Day, by erroneous interpretation. “If they have deceived me in this, they have deceived me in everything,” he said. His faith in his mother’s religious guides was gone.8 In 1858 for the first time he broke the Sabbath by drawing some flowers on Sunday. That act, in him, stood for emancipation.9 He had been finding that Catholic Psalters were lovely things, that Catholic
The passages were: Exod. xv, xx; 2 Sam. i. 17; 1 Kings viii; Ps. xxiii, xxxii, xc, xci, ciii, cxii, cxix, cxxxix; Prov. ii, iii, viii, xii; Is. lviii; Matt. v, vi, vii; Acts xxvi; 1 Cor. xiii, xv; James iv; Rev. v, vi. See
For his actual experience of prayer, see the incident of 1845 in
Id. p. 41.