The Life of John Ruskin. W. G. Collingwood
some practice in using the pencil.
The journey was extended by the old route, conditioned by business as before, round the South Coast to the West of England, and then into Wales. There his powers of drawing failed him; moonlight on Snowdon was too vague a subject for the blacklead point but a hint of it could be conveyed in rhyme:
"Folding like an airy vest,
The very clouds had sunk to rest;
Light gilds the rugged mountain's breast,
Calmly as they lay below;
Every hill seemed topped with snow,
As the flowing tide of light
Broke the slumbers of the night."
Harlech Castle was too sublime for a sketch, but it was painted with the pen:
"So mighty, so majestic, and so lone;
And all thy music, now, the ocean's murmuring."
And the enthusiasm of mountain glory, a sort of ecstacy of uncontrollable passion, strives for articulate deliverance in the climbing song, "I love ye, ye eternal hills."
It was hard to come back to the daily round, the common task, especially when, in this autumn of 1831, to Dr. Andrews' Latin and Greek, the French grammar and Euclid were added, under Mr. Rowbotham. And the new tutor had no funny stories to tell; he was not so engaging a man as the "dear Doctor," and his memory was not sweet to his wayward pupil. But the parents had chosen for the work one who was favourably known by his manuals, and capable of interesting even a budding poet in the mathematics; for our author tells that at Oxford, and ever after, he knew his Euclid without the figures, and that he spent all his spare time in trying to trisect an angle. An old letter from Rowbotham informs Mr. J.J. Ruskin that an eminent mathematician had seen John's attempt, and had said that it was the cleverest he knew. In French, too, he progressed enough to be able to find his way alone in Paris two years later. And however the saucy boy may have satirized his tutor in the droll verses on "Bedtime," Mr. Rowbotham always remembered him with affection, and spoke of him with respect.
In spite of these tedious tutorships, he managed to scribble energetically all this winter, writing with amazing rapidity, as his mother notes: attempts at Waverley novels, which never got beyond the first chapter, imitations of "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan" and scraps in the style of everybody in turn. No wonder his mother sent him to bed at nine punctually, and kept him from school, in vain efforts to quiet his brain. The lack of companions was made up to him in the friendship of Richard Fall, son of a neighbour on "the Hill," a boy without affectation or morbidity of disposition whose complementary character suited him well. An affectionate comradeship sprang up between the two lads, and lasted, until in middle life they drifted apart, in no ill-will, but each going on his own course to his own destiny.
Some real advance was made this winter (1831–32) with his Shelleyan "Sonnet to a Cloud" and his imitations of Byron's "Hebrew Melodies," from which he learnt how to concentrate expression, and to use rich vowel-sounds and liquid consonants with rolling effect. A deeper and more serious turn of thought, that gradually usurped the place of the first boyish effervescence, has been traced by him to the influence of Byron, in whom, while others saw nothing more than wit and passion, Ruskin perceived an earnest mind and a sound judgment.
But the most sincere poem—if sincerity be marked by unstudied phrase and neglected rhyme—the most genuine "lyrical cry" of this period, is that song in which our boy-poet poured forth his longing for the "blue hills" he had loved as a baby, and for those Coniston crags over which, when he became old and sorely stricken, he was still to see the morning break. When he wrote these verses he was nearly fourteen, or just past his birthday. It had been eighteen months since he had been in Wales, and all the weary while he had seen no mountains; but in his regrets he goes back a year farther still, to fix upon the Lakeland hills, less majestic than Snowdon, but more endeared, and he describes his sensations on approaching the beloved objects in the very terms that Dante uses for his first sight of Beatrice:
"I weary for the fountain foaming,
For shady holm and hill;
My mind is on the mountain roaming,
My spirit's voice is still.
"The crags are lone on Coniston And Glaramara's dell; And dreary on the mighty one, The cloud-enwreathed Sea-fell. … "
"There is a thrill of strange delight
That passes quivering o'er me,
When blue hills rise upon the sight,
Like summer clouds before me."
Judge, then, of the delight with which he turned over the pages of a new book, given him this birthday by the kind Mr. Telford, in whose carriage he had first seen those blue hills—a book in which all his mountain ideals, and more, were caught and kept enshrined—visions still, and of mightier peaks and ampler valleys, romantically "tost" and sublimely "lost," as he had so often written in his favourite rhymes. In the vignettes to Rogers' "Italy," Turner had touched the chord for which John Ruskin had been feeling all these years. No wonder that he took Turner for his leader and master, and fondly tried to copy the wonderful "Alps at Daybreak" to begin with, and then to imitate this new-found magic art with his own subjects and finally to come boldly before the world in passionate defence of a man who had done such great things for him.
This mountain-worship was not inherited from his father, who never was enthusiastic about peaks and clouds and glaciers, though he was interested in all travelling in a general way. So that it was not Rogers' "Italy" that sent the family off to the Alps that summer; but, fortunately for John, his father's eye was caught by the romantic architecture of Prout's "Sketches in Flanders and Germany," when it came out in April, 1853, and his mother proposed to make both of them happy in a tour on the Continent. The business-round was abandoned, but they could see Mr. Domecq on their way back through Paris, and not wholly lose the time.
They waited to keep papa's birthday on May 10, and early next morning drove off—father and mother, John and Mary, Nurse Anne, and the courier Salvador. They crossed to Calais, and posted, as people did in the old times, slowly from point to point; starting betimes, halting at the roadside inns, where John tried to snatch a sketch, reaching their destination early enough to investigate the cathedral or the citadel, monuments of antiquity or achievements of modern civilisation, with impartial eagerness; and before bedtime John would write up his journal and work up his sketches just as if he were at home.
So they went through Flanders and Germany, following Prout's lead by the castles of the Rhine; but at last, at Schaffhausen one Sunday evening—"suddenly—behold—beyond!"—they had seen the Alps. Thenceforward Turner was their guide as they crossed the Splügen, sailed the Italian lakes, wondered at Milan Cathedral, and the Mediterranean at Genoa, and then roamed through the Oberland and back to Chamouni. All this while a great plan shaped itself in the boy's head, no less than to make a Rogers' "Italy" for himself, just as he tried to make a "Harry and Lucy" or a "Dictionary of Minerals." On every place they passed he would write verses and prose sketches, to give respectively the romance and the reality or ridicule; for he saw the comic side of it all, keenly; and he would illustrate the series with Turneresque vignettes, drawn with the finest crowquill pen, to imitate the delicate engravings. By this he learnt more drawing in two or three years than most amateur students do in seven. For the first year he had the "Watchtower of Andernach" and the "Jungfrau from Interlaken" to show, with others of similar style, and thenceforward alternated between Turner and Prout, until he settled into something different from either.
But Turner and Prout were not the only artists he knew; at Paris he found his way into the Louvre, and got leave from the directors, though he was under the age required, to copy. The picture he chose was a Rembrandt.
Between this foreign tour and the next, his amusement was to draw these vignettes, and to write the poems suggested by the scenes he had visited. He had outgrown the evening lessons with Dr. Andrews, and as he was fifteen, it was time to think more seriously of preparing him for Oxford, where his name was put down at Christ Church. His father hoped he would go into the Church, and eventually turn out a combination of a Byron and a bishop—something