Mr. Ruskin's Early Years

AN interesting article might be written upon the influence of the novel upon modern autobiography. The novel has, indeed, affected literature in many ways, and been felt in both history and poetry ; but the taste which it has bred in the incidents and characters of ordinary life has given a great extension to the scope of a man’s account of his own career. It would hardly have occurred to our elder authors to delineate their parents in the way that Carlyle drew his father and mother, or to introduce into their reminiscences finished portraits of any persons who had not won some distinction. Gibbon’s autobiography is a capital instance of a life told without the setting which has now become usual ; it has no such background. In the papers which Ruskin has written about his early years, and which are collected in these volumes,¹ there is no like reserve. He includes in them his family and all his relatives, the home acquaintances and business partners, the clerks of the firm and the servants of the house, his companions and valets ; the work, in other words, is conceived in the new spirit of autobiography, and though he is the hero, there are a host of minor characters and a crowd of trivial incidents which in other days would not have been thought worthy of record. It appeals often, like the novel, to our interest in general life as much as to our curiosity about Ruskin in his distinct personality.

In these pages, too, Ruskin is an ungrown youth ; his account hardly touches on his active career, and nowhere reaches his maturity. The formative years of life are, in a sense, very important, but they are at best only the preface ; what the man at last became and accomplished is the real matter that is worth knowing, unless one is specially concerned with education ; the question how he was developed is subsidiary. And for this reason we must acknowledge some disappointment in the narrative, which is much taken up with childish and futile things, and does not, to our thinking, show the sources of Ruskin’s genius, but the conditions under which he grew ; and these were such as to account more for his defects than his excellences. A great part of what is told is indeed entirely irrelevant, and would have been as interesting in any other man’s life. One or two leading topics, however, may be chosen, which have most bearing on his qualities, and either illustrate his temperament, or seem to have been determining factors in his character ; and the principal of these is his religious training. Ruskin himself lays great stress on the fact that his mother made him early acquainted with the Bible ; she read it with him for years, and went through it in course several times, besides obliging him to commit chapters of it, and the Scotch versions of the psalms in addition. He was, as one would say, piously trained ; the exercise was strenuous while it lasted, and it ended only with his fourteenth year. He thinks it formed and confirmed a taste for the noble element in style, and that it was also morally of great effect. He was an only child, and a solitary one ; this, no doubt, had an influence in lending solemnity to his religious associations, and his beliefs were not early disturbed. When he went to Oxford, the steady Bible-reading had ended, and in its place, he says, “ was substituted my own private reading of a chapter morning and evening, and of course saying the Lord’s Prayer after it, and asking for everything that was nice for myself and my family ; after which I waked or slept, without much thought of anything but my earthly affairs, whether by night or day. It had never entered into my head to doubt a word of the Bible, though I saw well enough already that its words were to be understood otherwise than I had been taught ; but the more I believed it, the less it did me any good. It was all very well for Abraham to do what angels bid him, — so would I, if any angels bid me ; but none had ever appeared to me that I knew of, not even Adèle, who could n’t be an angel because she was a Roman Catholic. . . . On the whole, it seemed to me all that was required of me was to say my prayers, go to church, learn my lessons, obey my parents, and enjoy my dinner.” His religious training had accomplished no more than to put him in possession of the Protestant tradition. It was some years after, when he was twenty-six, that he was first “ put to any serious trial of prayer.” He had been ill, and was now going home from Italy. “ Between the Campo Santo and Santa Maria Novella I had been brought into some knowledge of the relations that might truly exist between God and his creatures ; and thinking what my father and mother would feel if I did not get home to them through those poplar avenues, I fell gradually into the temper, and more or less tacit offering of very real prayer, which lasted patiently through two long days and what I knew of the nights on the road home. On the third day, as I was about coming in sight of Paris, what people who are in the habit of praying know as the consciousness of answer came to me, and a certainty that the illness, which had all this while increased, if anything, would be taken away.” Two days after, he found himself “ in the inn at Beauvais, entirely well, with a thrill of conscious happiness altogether new.” This is the solitary instance of personal religious feeling in the volume, and if we understand Ruskin’s comment upon the incident, it was one never repeated. To what extent his religious training fortified his moral fervor, besides enabling him to enter into the mediæval feeling in sacred art, is another matter ; but the tone of the passages cited show that he holds mentally an attitude of superiority toward common Christian belief and devotions.

A second main characteristic of his education was his separation from healthy association with those of his own age, the care with which he was kept from youthful exercises, and, in general, the making a home-boy of him. He was not at all indulged ; most playthings were denied him ; he was taught to be proper, his faults were followed by the usual penalties, and he seems to have been reduced to an extremely angelic docility, so that he sat for years in a quiet manner in his own niche in the drawing-room, listening every evening to his father reading romance and poetry to his mother, and no more thinking of doing anything disagreeable than a star of falling from heaven. But, more than this, the parents had plans for him as a child of promise, for which the sherry trade would not offer sufficient scope. Their conviction of his genius was formed early and grew with portentous rapidity, and his father’s ideal for his future was " that I should enter college into the best society ; take all the prizes every year, and a double first to finish with ; marry Lady Clara Vere de Vere ; write poetry as good as Byron’s, only pious ; preach sermons as good as Bossuet’s, only Protestant ; be made at forty Bishop of Winchester, and at fifty Primate of England.” The ideal was not so defined as this until he was ready for Oxford, but the vision of the future bishop seems to have loomed up while the child was of very tender years, and it was reluctantly let go after the Modern Painters time. There is one reminiscence of the disappointment here, on occasion of a conversation between his father and an artist, who were lamenting " what an amiable clergyman was lost in me. ‘ Yes,’ said my father, with tears in his eyes (true and tender tears as ever father shed), ‘ he would have been a bishop.’ ” Between this idea that the child was to be a great man and the foolish isolation of him from natural playmates, a remarkable conceit was developed, which Ruskin is only too frank in acknowledging ; he heaps terms of ridicule upon his childish self, and the reader is not disposed to say him nay, but rather to find it a great misfortune of his life that his vanity was coddled in a safe seclusion from the disillusions of a public school. But it is curious, side by side with these comic anathemas on his boyish “ High-Mightiness,” to come upon the mature judgments he has formed of himself, and does not hesitate to proclaim ; he never learned the lesson of modesty, nor did perception of his childish faults enlighten him in respect to weaknesses of his manhood. We find him, for example, quoting Mazzini as having said of him, " in conversation authentically reported a year or two before his death, that I had ‘ the most analytic mind in Europe ; ’ an opinion in which,” he adds, “so far as I am acquainted with Europe, I am myself entirely disposed to concur.” Elsewhere he deplores the loss in him of " a fine landscape or figure-outline engraver,” but this loss he mourns less than " the incalculable one to geology ; ” for, he says, if, in Wales, his father and mother " had given me but a shaggy scrap of a Welsh pony, and left me in charge of a good Welsh guide and of his wife, if I needed any coddling, they would have made a man of me then and there, and afterwards the comfort of their own hearts, and probably the first geologist of my time in Europe.” It was lucky that they did not try to make him an ichthyologist, at any rate. When he got the Poissons Fossiles, he saw that " Agassiz was a mere blockhead to have paid for all that good drawing of the nasty, ugly things, and that it did n’t matter a stale herring to any mortal whether they had any names or not, . . . and that the book ought to have been called after the lithographer, his fishes, only with their scales counted and called bad names by subservient Monsieur Agassiz.” This is a mere explosion of bad temper, but it helps us to guess what sort of " a first geologist of Europe ” he would have been, and to reckon how he would have fared pitted against Lyell. It may be doubted, too, whether he would have kept very long to the management of that wished-for Welsh pony : the parents did try to have him taught riding, both by a groom and at a riding-school, but he had too much facility in slipping off, and was evidently entirely disinclined to learn.

The isolation of his childhood no doubt threw him back upon himself and induced his precocity. Mr. Stevenson has lately remarked upon one virtue of the Scotch Sabbath, in that it made a boy who could not employ himself in his usual play think out of mere idleness, and the time being a solemn one his thoughts were touched by it. Mr. Ruskin’s every-day life was such a Scotch Sabbath. It was empty of most young interests, affections, and amusements. Listening to his father’s readings from Scott, and Cervantes, and Byron, the boy naturally took to literature in imitative verse and prose, just as he wrote abstracts of sermons that he had heard preached ; and he also took to drawing in a similarly obvious way. Whatever literary or artistic talent was possible in him was bound to come out under such circumstances, and power of expression would grow with practice ; and so those first signs of promise put forth which confirmed his parents’ ambition for him as a piously Byronic bishop. This was the compensation for what he lost, but what he lost was never to be recovered, for all that ; and the worst of his loss, besides practical faculty and habits of manliness, was the exercise of his affections. He has cared throughout his life, he says, — and this is certainly true of his earlier career, — for inanimate things, mountains and clouds chiefly ; and one reason of this is, that he, to use his own words, “ had nothing to love ” in his childhood and youth, and indeed did not love anything ; for his affection for his parents was not of the intimate kind, and he looked on them as a part of the beneficent universe, like the sun and the moon. This is his own account of the matter ; and he regrets the circumstance, curiously enough, not because of such results as we have indicated, but because, when he fell in love with that Adèle who “ could n’t be an angel because she was a Roman Catholic,” he did not know how to manage himself. His confession of this first fit of amorousness is one of the oddest things in the volumes, and indeed all his references to the various maidens who attracted his roving fancy, or his parents’ more prudent eyes, are astonishing. Adèle was a bright Spanish girl, the daughter of his father’s partner in sherry, and knew a great deal more than her adorer, who fell in love with her while she was visiting the Ruskins, and found the course of his malady rapid and severe. He wooed her by displaying his powers in Protestant argument and romantic narrative, and by his bad French ; but she was only amused, and the lover, who was still young in his teens, was disconsolate in the old fashion. It was some years before he recovered from the disease ; and reminiscences of the time seem to be disagreeable enough, for he rivals his contempt for his childish conceit by his ridicule of himself as a lovesick youth. There is nothing in the story, however, that excites the reader’s pity ; in this, as well as the other cases, one has a pleased sense of listening to much youthful confession in which there is not the least seriousness. The feeling was real enough, but it was “ fancy,” as we say, and not passion, with all the unreality of sentimentalism in the traditional spring. Oxford apparently cured him, — change of scene and something to think about.

But Ruskin is only a small part of the story ; and one is not sorry that this is the case, for he was not an interesting child, and his boyhood was without the qualities that make boyhood attractive. The scenes in which he lived, however, and the people with whom he dwelt are drawn by the hand of the grown man, and have more of himself in them than has the manikin he then was. The banks of the Tay and the humble relatives at Croydon help his narrative very much, not to mention the view of the Alps from Schaffhausen, where he thinks his destiny was determined for him at fourteen, or the days in the Campo Santo, or the revelation of the infernal in life that the volcanic Neapolitan country was to him, in his own belief, at first sight. The journeys with his parents exhibit their character very pleasantly, and they were excellent persons ; their devotion to their son was entire, and he was at times a trying young man. The first acquaintance with Turner, and the gradually increasing interest of the family, not only in his work, but in artists generally, furnish agreeable passages ; the fortunes of the servants and other connections of the family, and the sketches of the acquaintance of the household who used occasionally to visit them, are interesting in the way of episode, though the manner is somewhat Carlylean, too grim, too indifferent, too consciously superior. Oxford yields one good chapter, and, as was to be anticipated in the case of a youth such as we have intimated Ruskin was, it is not without humor. He entered as a gentleman commoner, that being the safest mode of entrance for one with his weak scholarship, and one attractive to him and his parents because he would wear a velvet cap and silk sleeves, incredible as it seems to us that this should have been, as we are assured it was, a “ telling consideration,” even to the largest importer of sherry and his scriptural wife and heir. His aristocratic mates took his measure and received him very well ; and his mother coming down to live in the city, to be near in case he should be ill, he spent his evenings with her, and apparently did not annoy any one with his frequent presence elsewhere. He was fortunate enough, too, to be taken up by Henry Acland, his senior by a year and a half, whose rooms “ became to me,” he says, “ the only place where I was happy. He quietly showed me the manner of life of English youth of good sense, good family, and enlarged education ; we both of us already lived in elements far external to the college quadrangle.” And he later on completes the picture of Acland’s manliness, in whom he saw “ a noble young English life in its purity, sagacity, honor, reckless daring, and happy piety,” by contrasting him with himself in his own less hardy fibre, and showing at the same time the point of sympathy : “ In all this playful and proud heroism of his youth, Henry Acland delighted me as a leopard or a falcon would, without in the least affecting my own character by his example. I had been too often adjured and commanded to take care of myself ever to think of following him over slippery weirs, or accompanying him in pilot-boats through white-topped shoal water ; but both in art and science he would pull me on, being years ahead of me, yet glad of my sympathy, for, till I came, he was literally alone in the university in caring for either.” Such glimpses of open, honest life on entirely natural and wise terms are not frequent in these pages, but some there are, and they help the interest amazingly. There is a considerable proportion, too, of Turnerian rhetoric about the Alps and Italy, of which the novelty has passed away and only the diffuseness remains ; and there is something of interest in the history of Ruskin’s artistic taste through Prout, rejecting Raphael by the way, to the Campo Santo and the Santa Maria Novella, but this record is already written in his earlier books.

The object of the papers is to tell what sort of a youth Ruskin was, and we have tried to give our impression of that. It is not an agreeable one, but it is to be said that he has shown himself no favor in the narrative, and judgment may be modified by what others may have to tell of him.