W. G. Collingwood

“ Coming down by moonlight I found the dales in a dry, cold fog, and heard that there had been no sunshine at Coniston that afternoon. This is Ruskin's plague-cloud, and the real enemy of the weather not only in England but in the Alps. You will see it, according to the wind, on either side of Zurich most notably, and the distance this blight will travel is more than the casual reader might believe. A strong wind carries it away, but only to deposit it somewhere else, cutting off the sun's rays, and breeding rain and storm. ”

“ RUSKIN'S CHAIR
"This is all very well," said a visitor, after looking over the sketches and books of the Ruskin Museum at Coniston, "but what the public would prefer is to see the chair he sat in." Something tangible, that brings before us the person, rather than his work, is what we all like; for though successful workers are continually asking us to judge them by what they have done, we know there is more. We want to see their portraits; their faces will tell us—better than their books—whether we can trust them. ”

“ It had been splendid weather for the last few days, after a cold August in Central France; and the first Jura walk was across the hill to the gorge of the Ain. I had often been through the Jura, as a blind, benighted modern, but never before loitered from slab to slab of its fissured limestone summits, looking for the foreground loveliness of nestling flowers which contrast so delicately with the quaint, crannied rock; there is nothing which gives the same lyrical feeling except some of Nature's gardens in wild Icelandic lava-fields. ”

“ Bernard, it was good to see him eager for the mountains, and looking out for well-known twists in the limestone strata, and clefts and cascades, points of view and distant glimpses, all the way up the valley. If only the smoke-cloud would lift, and a spell of fair weather would tempt him to linger among the Alps, hammering rocks and sketching cottages, the object of the journey would be gained. ”

“ Both in drawing and in writing, much as he talked of truth and simplicity, he was, first and foremost, the stylist: and through half his life the conscious imitator of other men's styles—Hooker or Carlyle, Prout or Turner. But there was always more of Ruskin than of his model; and even in those [124] juvenile essays, when style so completely overwhelms fact, as in some sketches at Venice or Innsbruck, there is a precocious completeness and charm, as in the art of youthful nations, early Greeks, pre-Norman English, or pre-Renaissance Italians. ”

“ Relics of saints our forefathers would fight for and die for. Relics of those who in modern times have made our lives better and brighter we need not be ashamed of preserving. And among relics I count all the little incidents, the by-play of life, the anecdotes which betray character, so long as they are truly told and "lovingly," as George Richmond said about his portrait of Ruskin. ”

“ Paolo's enemies before long drove him out of Lucca, and the city wreaked vengeance on the tyrant by shattering his wife's tomb, this masterpiece. Somehow the effigy itself was spared, and set up again with bits of the wreck against the bare church wall. It was this dead lady, this marble lady, with browned, translucent cheeks, and little nose just bruised away at the tip, that took Ruskin's imagination in his youth. ”

“ It is perhaps all very absurd; but one certainly does not understand Ruskin without knowing this queer side of his character, part sentimental, part grotesque, which creeps out even in his most serious writing, and makes it so impossible to take his every word for gospel message. But very often he wrote to her and of her as Isola—the island—"Isola Bella" standing alone and unapproachable by all ordinary roads, and yet open on all sides to the waifs of the waves, claiming haven and rest in her sympathy. ”

“ RUSKIN'S LIBRARY
In any strange house, while you wait for your host or hostess, how much you gather of their tastes and ways from the books on the table and in the shelves! You cannot help noticing either the presence or the absence of literature, and you do not need to open the volumes to guess what sort of reading the good people like. ”

“ Ruskin had little to say in praise of Japanese art as he knew it, because they could not draw pretty figures, and he had no admiration for dwarfs or monsters; but one cannot help thinking that if he had seen Japan, and if it is all that travellers tell us, he might have written some enthusiastic passages on a people who love stones for their own sake and tub themselves daily. To him, his rock gardens were a joy for ever; and in his working years he set an example of Lake-district landscape-gardening which still, for all I know, remains unfollowed, and is worth a few paragraphs of record. ”

“ After these long mornings of work—inside when it rained, outside when it shone—we always went for a ramble or a drive. One venturesome start in a thunderstorm I recollect, for Ruskin was not the least timid, as you might expect from his highly-strung temperament. He used to walk planks and look down precipices, too, like a regular steeple-jack, and handle all sorts of animals fearlessly. This thunderstorm gave us grand Turneresque effects, of which I have a sketch, but no description; but I have borrowed an old letter of the time which gives a fair sample of an afternoon with Ruskin. ”

“ I do not much believe in physiognomy, and yet in the faces of those who have the gift of execution—quite a separate power from intellectual or emotional appreciation, or even from composition—I think you notice that the groove which marks off the wing of the nose, ala nasi, at the top is strongly developed; sometimes it is so sharp as to be almost a deformity. There is none in Ruskin's face. That trait may mean nothing; but the [162] fact remains that so able a man spent time and labour in vain over an art which many learn easily, without a hundredth part of his general power. ”

“ This, you know, is the wood where Ugolino in Dante dreamed he was hunting when they had shut him up to starve in the Famine Tower at Pisa, and it deserves its fame. It is quite another world from the hot rich valleys below; among the trees there are fresh, English-looking meadows with daisies very big and very pink, and beyond—the wonderful Mediterranean coast, rose colour in the sunset. Pisa far down there showed every detail distinct, cathedral and leaning tower like toys ”

“ Clearness and distinctness, every one must feel, are not the strong points of modern cartography, hence the use of sketch-maps: such as this of Spain, scribbled on a sheet of foolscap to keep him in mind of the graceful, swinging coastline and the proportions of the provinces.
The overloaded modern map is a work of reference—it is a dictionary, not a book. Ruskin felt that it was useless for educational or literary purposes, and he was continually trying to improve away the detail and to substitute graphic statistics. ”

“ Ruskin's teaching was a protest, and it has prevailed.
From any master we learn no more than we are capable of learning, and he never gave me many of the tasks he put upon others of his pupils. Less for any use he made of it, but always with the suggestion that it was for a practical end, he set me to draw glaciers and glaciated rocks at Chamouni; on the Coniston fells demonstrated his method of taking dip and strike from any bit of rock showing cleavage and stratification, and on his own piece of moor made me survey and elaborate a model to scale. ”

“ We all know that his works, from "Modern Painters" to "Præterita," are full of the Bible. Sometimes his allusions and quotations are merely ornamental, and sometimes his remarks are sharp enough to pain the reader; for Ruskin went through many phases of faith, or, rather, through a long period of doubt, from which he came, in his later years, into a new and very simple acceptance of the Christian hope. But at all times he took the Bible seriously, and in many a passage he has made its thoughts and stories live for us with marvellous reality. ”

“ For his mother he had another hand; for his friends and for himself an assortment of varying scribbles. But there, I think, comes out one of the leading points in his character. To be a man of strong thought and will, innovator in art, science, politics, morality, and religion, there never was such a chameleon, always ready to colour his mind after his surroundings; all things to all men. To the opponent he was an opponent; to the admirer an admirer, without at once testing the sincerity of the admiration or the source of the opposition. ”

“ Through unseen fissures and filmy crannies the waters of cliff and plain have alike vanished; only far down in the depth of the main valley glides the strong river, unconscious of change."
Up at Les Rousses he pointed out the fort, then in building or newly built, with scorn—as if the Swiss on the one side or the French on the other could be kept in their bounds by stone walls, when real war comes; and then crossing the frontier there was the elation of getting into Switzerland. "Why do you like it better than France?" ”

“ If you want to be a scholar in the school of the Old Masters, then you might do worse than listen to him. They "leant on a firm and determined outline"—that is Sir Joshua Reynolds; they started with painstaking draughtmanship, and added colour tint by tint; and so he says, "I place map-making first among the elementary exercises," and so forth, and made his young pupils begin with simple facsimile—"If you can draw Italy you know something about form"—and then paint the globe with its conflicting shade and local colour. ”

“ But it does not show you, as Ruskin could—pulling out drawer after drawer of his plush-lined cabinets, and letting you handle and peer into the dainty things with a lens—what gold, as Nature makes it, actually is. The scientific book never asks why some gold is born in the shape of tiny, solid, squarish crystals, as truly crystals as the uncut diamonds lying beside them, or the quartz in which they nestle ”

“ There, they take school-children up mountains. Far better than Helvellyn is known to the English school child, the "dear Dôle" is known to every youngster who has learnt to sing (to the tune of "Life let us cherish") the song of
La Suisse est belle,
Oh qu'il la faut chérir!
We were not quite without our view. For a moment, too short for a sketch, Mont Blanc loomed through the dull haze, red in the sunset, brick red, not Alpine rose; and then all was grey. We found our carriage and drove down. I was waked in the darkness by Ruskin saying, "This is where Voltaire lived." "Oh, indeed!" ”

“ To most of his readers Ruskin has been exclusively the arm-chair philosopher, the dilettante of prints and pictures; but there was a vein of the old blood in him, as in the rest of us, which warmed to the rough sea-life that created Venice (read his prose poem thereon in "Modern Painters," vol. v., "The Wings of the Lion") , and England:—"Bare head, bare fist, bare foot, and blue jacket. If these will not save us, nothing will." ”

“ There are comparatively few people whose chief pleasure is in taking a walk and looking at the country, without any notion of sport or games to eke out the interest. It is true that he sketched and wrote, but his pleasure was in seeing. It was his admiration of Nature that had brought him to admire Art in his youth, and I think it is not too much to say that Art was always a secondary thing to him personally. The desire to see Art healthily and nobly practised made him study the life of the craftsman and the craftsman's surroundings, spiritual and material. ”

“ C'est que la petite fleur des champs et la naïve chanson expriment l'âme des simples; et que la fugue comme le temple ou le palais expriment les raffinements des scholastiques, c'est à dire l'éphémère de l'art. ”

“ In the matter of boats he had a very willing and capable helper in Laurence Hilliard, who was the cleverest and neatest-fingered boy that ever rigged a model; and many [23] were the models he designed and finished with exquisite perfection of detail in the outhouse-workshop at Brantwood. Laurie, as every one called him, was deep in Scott Russell at that time, working away on the ponderous (and now discredited) folio as if he were getting it up for an examination, and covering sheets of cartridge-paper with sections and calculations. ”

“ Some more solid masses, not water-worn nuggets, are like a tiny netsuke; he had a miniature cobra, chased with its scales—all by the art of Nature; and others so like early Greek coins that one might fancy they had given suggestions to primitive mint-masters, who like all good artists modelled their work on Nature. What a happy world, he used to say, if all the gold were in its native fronds ”

“ In his childhood, long before he thought of drawing from Nature, he had learnt great neatness of hand by amusing himself with copying out his juvenile verses to look like print, by drawing maps and by making facsimiles of George Cruikshank's etchings in his "Grimm's Goblins." His father used to sketch a little in the pre-historic style, and was fond of pictures; but they never dreamed of making John an artist. ”

“ In the plantations of larch and timber trees the great bracken takes the place of this aftergrowth of flowerets, shooting up six or eight feet high where a clearing gives it a chance, and then again dwindles as the trees regain their strength, until under a well-grown larchwood there is nothing but a soft, deep, tressy grass, not rank and full tinted like the sward of the meadows, but grey-green and delicate and dry, though so thick and rich that there is no easier couch for a woodland dreamer. ”