The Harvest of Ruskin. Graham John William
in unholy cruelty and impatience.
He describes the limitations of “some scientific minds, which in their judgment of the Universe can be compared to nothing so accurately as to the woodworms in the panel of a picture by some great painter, if we may conceive them as tasting with discrimination of the wood, and with repugnance of the colour, and declaring that even this unlooked for and undesirable combination is a normal result of the action of molecular Forces.”18
We pass on to the third period of sixteen years, the Mature Period as I call it, from 1874 to 1890, when his productive life ended. He now came to know more fully the fullness of faith. Here he entered into his reward, I say. The revelation of God to him became clearer, sweeter, mightier. As in 1858, the time of crisis was marked by two events which occurred that year, one in things spiritual and one in things artistic.19
The artistic event of 1874 was a reversal of the puzzling judgment of 1858 to the effect that the worldly painters excelled the devout ones. It came about through his copying one of Giotto’s frescoes on the roof of the Lower Church at Assisi. He was allowed to erect a platform in that dark church over the High Altar, that he might see the picture. There he discovered that Giotto was only beaten by Tintoret in mere science, technique, laws of perspective, composition and light and shade, and that religion had solemnized and developed every faculty of Giotto’s heart and hand. The Franciscan monastery at Assisi is one of the most sacred places on earth anyhow, but 1874 saw one more gift of light there vouchsafed, and a haunting problem solved. Art was to Ruskin a visible manifestation of life’s full faculties, in a department he specially understood; and religion, which is the source of strength and the support of character, he thought should be judged by its output.
Now we turn to the second event. His hopes of the reality of a Spirit world received unexpected and potent confirmation from the fact that in December, 1875, he had, at the house of Lord Mount Temple, at Broadlands, Romsey, some psychic experience so definite that he was convinced that he had true communication with her whom he had lately lost, the “Rosie” of Præterita, No. XXVII.20 It was a confirmation to his faith. He became an Honorary Member of the Society for Psychical Research the year after its formation in 1882, joining in that well-grounded hope that a true science of human Personality might be built up by its patient experimental methods. To Lady Mount Temple, née Tollemache, the Egeria of the winter of 1840 in Rome, we owe much for the help she was to Ruskin all through life; and much also that from her came the stimulus to Frederick W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney to begin the Society for Psychical Research. Two of Ruskin’s stories of Death wraiths may be found in Fors,21 also a dream in Letter LXV. He never took to ordinary spiritualism; it is indeed from an attack upon it that he turns to a note describing the happiness of his own experience. “I leave this passage as it was written; though as it passes through the press, it is ordered by Atropos that I should hear a piece of evidence on this matter no less clear as to the present ministry of such powers as that which led Peter out of prison, than all the former, or nearly all the former, evidence examined by me was of the presence of the legion which ruled among the tombs of Gennesaret.”22 He allows the contradiction to stand; indeed, in this puzzling and partially known subject, a consistent position is beyond the knowledge of most. He returns to the attack on Spiritualism, however, in his 1883 note to the second volume of Modern Painters, p. 244.
In the following year, 1876, at Venice at Christmas, he had vouchsafed to himself the inward assurance of an immortal life; he entered into a singular happiness; Fors became the organ of a mysticism truly Johannine; he loved to expound universal Christian truth, so catholic indeed in the true sense that Cardinal Manning aspired to turn him to Rome. That was a vain hope. He still retained his analytical faculty. He says that he would “give up Moses” if criticism demanded it.23 Concerning his lectures of 1877 at Oxford he writes to Miss Beever in the “hortus inclusus” at Coniston that he has been able for the first time to speak boldly to the students of immortal life. The concluding passage of the last lecture is this:24
“But obey the word in its simplicity, in wholeness of purpose and with severity of sacrifice, like this of the Venetian Maids’, and truly you shall receive sevenfold into your bosom in this present life, as in the world to come, life everlasting.” “He shall give his angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways; and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” It came to be true of himself that “if life be led under heaven’s law, the sense of heaven’s nearness only deepens with advancing years, and is assured in death.”25
“The faith of the saints and prophets rising into serenity of knowledge, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ is a state of mind of which ordinary men cannot reason; but which, in the practical power of it, has always governed the world, and must for ever. No dynamite will ever be invented that can rule – it can but dissolve and destroy. Only the Word of God and the heart of man can govern.”26
We cannot conclude this analysis better than by quoting from the last number of Fors in 1884:
“Looking back upon my efforts for the last twenty years, I believe that their failure has been in great part owing to my compromise with the infidelity of this outer world, and my endeavours to base my pleading upon motives of ordinary prudence and kindness, instead of on the primary duty of loving God; foundation other than which no man can lay. I thought myself speaking to a crowd which could only be influenced by visible utility; nor was I the least aware how many entirely good and holy persons were living in the faith and love of God as vividly and practically now as ever in the early enthusiasm of Christendom. These have shown me, with lovely initiation, in how many secret places the prayer was made which I had foolishly listened for at the corners of the streets, and on how many hills which I had thought left desolate, the hosts of heaven still moved in chariots of fire.”27 These passages show that F. W. H. Myers, in the beautiful obituary which I am permitted to print as an Epilogue, was not correct in describing the experience with the medium at Broadlands, as Ruskin’s one brief season of blissful trust in the Unseen. It is true of his temporary belief in spiritualism.
I trust it will have become clear that Ruskin’s spiritual history is not a story of arbitrary and fanciful changes without connected significance. It is the orderly development of a research, by a man singularly qualified to hold a religious Research Fellowship.
He may be said to have matriculated in religion at his mother’s knee. There he learnt his Bible. He took a degree with the second volume of Modern Painters and the works allied to it in spirit. He then became a Master of Arts, qualified to teach, a recognized religious authority among many authorities. Had he never gone to Venice and seen Tintoret he might have built, so he says, a Catholic archiepiscopal palace at York instead of a museum at Sheffield; or he might have been such a man as Dean Church or John Henry Newman, on Calvinistic Protestant lines. But Ruskin proceeded to a higher status. He must needs penetrate deeper; and in the crisis of 1858 he took his Fellowship by a thesis on the Irreducible Minimum of the Religious Outfit. Thenceforth he carried on a research, he was a “seeker after God,” often wrote “in much darkness and sorrow of heart”; and in sixteen years the conclusions were ready, the convictions matured, the saint perfected.
CHAPTER III
TO WHAT FOLD?
T O what school of thought or to which among our denominations, if to any, can Ruskin be said to belong? He did not actively, in mature life, belong to any, or attend Church or Chapel. Let us examine his doctrines in this connection.
The first point which strikes the inquirer is Ruskin’s strong hostility to professionalism in religion, to payment for preaching. Against a separate order of clergy, maintained for that object, and claiming a certain position by reason of their ministration,
See
See Epilogue.
Letter LXIII, vol. vi. p. 89.
See also
Id. XCII, vol. viii. p. 205.
This reference is known to refer chiefly to Francesca Alexander and her mother at Florence. Not improbably, also, to the Misses Beever at Coniston.