My life and loves Vol. 2

by Frank Harris

  Of course, I knew a great deal about him before I met him, knew he had been a great friend of Carlyle's, knew he was perhaps the most extraordinary master of poetic English prose since Sir Thomas Browne.

  I met him first, I think, at the Baroness Burdett Coutts's in Piccadilly. At any rate, wherever it was, my introducer had told Ruskin that I had been a great admirer of Carlyle and that Carlyle had said he expected considerable things from me. This recommendation of Carlyle evidently influenced Ruskin, who treated me from the beginning with caressing kindness.

  According to his wish, I called on him, I think, at Morley's Hotel, in Trafalgar Square. It was, I believe, in 1886, but it may have been a year earlier or a year later. I have only disjointed memoranda of our talks. At first we spoke about Carlyle and I found that Ruskin admired him at least as fervently as I did. At the first pause in the conversation I told him that what he had written on Calais Church always remained with me as perhaps the best piece of description in English, superior even to Carlyle's description of the scene before the battle of Dunbar. "I've so much wanted to know," I confessed, "how you attained such mastery of style so early."

  "Poets and imaginative writers are usually precocious, don't you think?" he began with heart-winning courtesy, putting me at once on his own level, in spite of the difference between us in age and position. We talked on that theme for some tune, but suddenly he startled me. "I suppose I was precocious," he said, "hi many ways. I was in love, I remember, over head and ears in love before I was fifteen."

  As I knew he had been divorced from his wife, who declared that the marriage had never been consummated, this astonished me to amazement.

  "Really!" I exclaimed, "whom with?"

  "A Domecq girl-the daughters of my father's Spanish partner in the winebusiness," he explained. "I met them all in Paris when I was fourteen: 'A Southern Cross of Unconceived Stars,' I called them and fell prone in love before Adele, who was a blonde, a little older than I was. Two or three years later they visited us at Herne Hill, and I remember when I was eighteen or so writing verses on 'her grace, her glory, her smile'; but when I confided to my father that I wanted to marry her, he quickly disillusioned me. 'Your mother would never consent, John,' he said. 'She's a Roman Catholic!' "I loved my mother and besides was very religious at that time, though not so religious as all that; yet it was soon settled, as life has a trick of settling things.

  Adele came to Herne Hill again on a visit in 1839, when I was twenty years of age, but gave me no hope; indeed, I think she did not take me seriously, even; was simply amused and flattered by my devotion. She married the next year, in 1840, and so went out of my life. That affected my health; I was delicate for some years."

  Ruskin made an impression on me of a most affectionate, sweet nature; at every meeting he would take my hand and grip it with an intensity of good feeling. At the same time, there was about him a sort of wistful weakness, as of one whose life was full of regrets; and of course I was all agog to find out about his marriage. I had already noticed that if I let him talk, he would soon begin to talk about himself and say things that were of great interest to me.

  All I had to do was to profess admiration and start him with a question and soon he would become reminiscent and personal- pathetically anxious, I thought, to justify and proclaim himself.

  We had been talking, I believe, about Carlyle's deep love for his wife, when Ruskin suddenly told me off hand that he had never been in love at all with his wife, Miss Gray. When he was about twenty-eight, he said, she came to stay with them at Denmark Hill. His mother wanted the match and "She (Miss Gray) was very pleasant and kind, so in April '48 I married her. I had already lost nearly all my religious faith. I went to Normandy with my wife and began The Seven Lamps of Architecture.

  "When I was a little over thirty, we returned to live in Park Street and I got to know Carlyle and another of your friends, Coventry Patmore and the Pre- Rafaelites. In 1853 we went to Scotland with Millais and Millais did my portrait. It was there I discovered that my wife loved Millais. I went to his studio one morning and opened the door quietly, without the faintest suspicion-there they were in each other's arms on the sofa. I was startled and involuntarily stepped back, drawing the door quietly to after me. What was I to do? I was a little shocked but I had never loved her, so there was no pang of pain. I was merely annoyed but I had my dignity to consider. I resolved simply to be more ceremonious than I had been."

  I stared my astonishment and Ruskin must have felt it, for he began to explain.

  "I did not wish to break off with him. I thought I had no right to. My portrait was not finished and I wanted it finished: I thought it might be one of the great portraits of the world; but I wanted, too, to keep my dignity." I could scarcely help grinning; what had dignity to do with it? But Ruskin went on, "I thought him, and still think, him, a very great master, so I was simply scrupulously polite until the portrait was finished and then he went away. I have no doubt he felt the difference in my manner. I was very cold and reserved and he was not so boisterous as he had been sometimes, or jovialcoarse.

  "A little later, my wife left me and brought an action for divorce, f Of course I did not defend it; I had no interest in it. A year later, in 1854, she got her freedom and married Millais. I am rather proud of the fact that, even after this, I wrote enthusiastically about Millais' genius as a painter. Personally they never touched me, never came near me!"

  I don't remember how I started him off again, but I think I asked him how he came to admire Turner so early. "I always knew a good deal about painting," he began, "and I was the first, I think, to see Turner's real greatness; I bought many of his works before I was twenty-three. You know I published the first volume of Modern Painters when I was twenty-four.

  "When Turner died and left his paintings to the nation, I went to see them and found them still in boxes in the cellars of the National Gallery, unappreciated, seemingly-altogether uncared for. I thereupon wrote to Lord Palmerston, I think, the Prime Minister, and told him I should be very proud, indeed, if I were allowed to put Turner's works in order. He put me in communication with the trustees and I was duly appointed, and all through '57 and half through '58 I worked at classifying Turner's pictures and getting them in order and mounting his water colours. Then came one of the worst blows of my whole life.

  "I had always believed that the good and the pure and the beautiful were one, various manifestations of the Divine. Again and again I had associated beauty of color in painting with holiness of life. I knew, of course, that the rule was not invariable: Titian was supposed to have lived a loose life; they even talk about him in connection with his daughter, but it seemed to me like madness, a mere legend, not to be considered. I always cherished the belief that Goodness and Wisdom and Purity and Truth went together with great talent, and Turner was my hero. One day (I think it was in '57) I came across a portfolio filled with painting after painting of Turner's of the most shameful sort-the pudenda of women-utterly inexcusable and to me inexplicable.

  "I went to work to find out all about it and I ascertained that my hero used to leave his house in Chelsea and go down to Wapping on Friday afternoon and live there until Monday morning with the sailors' women, painting them in every posture of abandonment. What a life! And what a burden it cast upon me! What was I to do?

  "For weeks I was in doubt and miserable, though time and again I put myself in tune with the highest, till suddenly it flashed on me that perhaps I had been selected as the one man capable of coming in this matter to a great decision. I took the hundreds of scrofulous sketches and paintings and burnt them where they were, burnt all of them. Don't you think I did right? I am proud of it, proud-" and his lower lip went up over the upper with a curious effect of most obstinate resolution.

  I thought it the most extraordinary confession I had ever heard; I remember that it kept me from visiting Ruskin for days and days. In fact, the next time we met he came and called upon me in my little house in Kensington
Gore, opposite the Park. I kept away from the Turner question: I felt sure we should quarrel over it, or rather that I should offend him as I had offended other friends with what seemed to me the plain truth. What possible right had he to destroy another man's work, not to speak of the work of one whom he extolled as a heaven-born genius. So I talked of Carlyle and his teaching.

  He admitted to me that it was Carlyle who had practically made him a socialist, though "I was already on the road," he added with huge glee. "I found once, you know, that Xenophon, four hundred years before Christ came upon the earth, had talked about 'common fellows in the mart, who were always thinking how they could buy cheapest and sell dearest.' Our modern Gospel!" he added in a tone of triumphant disdain, "Fit only for 'common fellows!'"

  "Which do you think your best work?" I asked Ruskin once. "The revelations of art and natural beauty or your sociological books?"

  "They form a whole," he replied, pursing out his lower lip in deep thought,

  "but most people seem to prefer my Fors-Fors Clavigera, I mean. Don't you know," he added merrily, "that it was Carlyle who christened my Fors Clavigera 'Fors Clavivinegar'?"

  Of course I laughed with him, but the jest seemed to me to be poor!

  Now and then Ruskin came and spent the evening with me, I remember, in Kensington Gore, but he came oftener to lunch, when we would talk afterwards and I would drive him back to his hotel.

  I remember one day telling him how extraordinary it seemed to me that he should have won to such emotion of style without passion.

  He turned on me at once. "Why do you say that? I loved more than once passionately: if I had married Adele, the marriage would have been consummated, I can assure you. But much later, when I was over forty, I fell in love, oh! in love and was consumed as in a flame. Love, love, has been my undoing!" he added in a thin sad voice.

  "Really?" I queried, genuinely surprised. "Would you tell me about it?"

  After a long pause he told me of going to Ireland and visiting a Mrs.

  Latouche, and how Rosie, the young daughter of twelve, came down in the evening to greet him, like a fairy in a tiny pink dressing-gown. "She was only a child, but even then so wise and thoughtful, and I was forty-two.

  "When she was seventeen, she came to London with her mother and I had wonderful weeks with her at Denmark Hill: she called it 'Edenland.' We met often, especially at Lady Mount Temple's at Broadlands. It was in this very year that I told her I loved her, and with her deep eyes on mine, she asked me to wait until she was of age-'Only three years more,' she said. Of course I spoke to her mother, but she seemed displeased and very reluctant.

  "When Rosie was about twenty she was infinitely distressed by my lack of faith. She published a booklet of poems, Clouds and Light; she was a most fervent Christian, believing every word of the Master. It was in that very year, I think, that she passed me by, without speaking to me, as Beatrice once passed Dante."

  There was intense pathos in his thin voice, something helpless and forlorn in his attitude, in the trembling lower lip and downcast hands, as of one defeated irremediably, that made my heart ache as he spoke.

  "My unbelief did me infinite harm with her, loosened the spiritual tie between us, but later I learned the true cause of our separation. Her father (I think Ruskin said) brought her to London and took her to meet Mrs. (afterwards Lady) Millais. My former wife no doubt told her of my asceticism or abstinence, for when after half an hour's talk my darling came downstairs and her father asked her if she now understood his reluctance to sanction our marriage, she said, 'I understand that there are people to whom the body is everything and the soul nothing. Don't talk of it, please; I never want to think of it again!' "My poor darling! My Rose of Life!"

  My notes of all this scene are so fragmentary, mere detached words, only to be explained by the fact that I believed I should never forget the very syllables he used. But alas! The words are all gone and I can only translate, so to speak, my vague impressions into words. I am not certain of anything, but it seems to me, as well as I can remember, that he told me, too, that in her last illness he was allowed to go to Rosie Latouche and for one whole night hold his love in his arms before she died; or was it that he desired this so intensely that he gave it as his supreme desire? I am uncertain and the fact is not very important.

  I am certain of the next thing: that he suddenly started up crying:

  "There it is! Don't you see the devil?" and he rushed across the room. "The cat!" — and he appeared to pick up a cat. "Open the window," he cried, and I opened the window and he came over and seemed to hurl it out.

  "The Devil," he exclaimed, panting. "The Evil One come to tempt me. You saw it! Didn't you?"

  I could only reply, "I saw that you seemed to throw something out of the window. But now it's gone," I added, hoping to allay his breathless excitement.

  "I'm not well," he broke off suddenly. "Thinking of my dreadful loss and of my darling's death always unmans me: I must not think of it; I dare not. I have been ill every year lately, through thinking of how I lost her, my love. I had an attack of brain fever in '78 and again in '81 and last year again and again. I am getting very old and weak. Forgive me if I wander."

  He reminded me of Lear.

  His face had gone quite grey and drawn; he filled me with unspeakable pity.

  What a dreadful, undeserved tragedy! I took him out as if he were a child and drove him back to his hotel. All the while tears were running down his thin, quivering cheeks.

  I have never seen any sadder face, except Carlyle's.

  I asked him once whether I could get Miss Latouche's poems and he told me that he would let me see his copy. His best poem to her, he said, began, "Rosie, Rosie, Rosie Rare," and I wondered whether he had copied the German lyric:

  Roslein, Roslein, Roslein rot

  Roslein auf der Heide, though he knew no German. He dwelt with inexpressible tenderness on the fact that Rosie used to call him "Saint Chrysostom" or "Saint Crumpet," and he always carried in his breast pocket her first letter to him between two thin plates of fine gold.

  Ruskin admitted, indeed laid some stress on the fact, that he had lost all belief in what he called derisively "the Jew Jeweller's Heaven"; but at the same time he declared repeatedly that the one thing he was surest of in his life was that Rosie's spirit often came to him as "a ministering Angel" and that she was "quite, quite happy."

  I remember asking him once about the road at Hinksey, the famous road he had begun to get made at Oxford by the students; he defended it, said that it would be a good thing for all the better classes to learn some handicraft.

  "Manual labour is good for all of us, even Gladstone," he added laughing, but he did not appear to take much interest in the road. Toynbee was one of his foremen and Alfred Milner used to work on the road and Oscar Wilde loved to laugh about it. It was from Oscar, I think, when talking of Ruskin's lectures, that I heard Ruskin's epigram on Naples. It combined, he said, "the vice of Paris, the misery of Dublin, and the vulgarity of New York." But Ruskin had never seen New York and knew nothing of it, just as he knew nothing of the vice of Paris. He was at his best talking of virtues.

  I never heard Ruskin lecture, but he told me himself that after some practice he used to trust to the inspiration of the moment for everything, except perhaps the first words and the peroration, which he usually wrote out and learned by heart. "Sometimes I omitted the summing-up," he added, "just to disappoint the foolish audience."

  After all possible qualifications, it is certain that Ruskin had the most extraordinary influence in the university. Strange to say, I got the full impression of it from one of my earliest dinners with Cecil Rhodes. I knew that everyone, even old professors, went to Ruskin's lectures, knew that all the younger men were profoundly moved by his passionate idealism and patriotic fervour; but it was from Rhodes that I came to understand the full effect of Ruskin's extraordinary talent. One can judge of his rhetoric from his inaugural lecture:

  There i
s a destiny now possible to us, the highest ever set before a nation to be accepted or refused. We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best northern blood. We are not yet dissolute in temper, but still have the firmness to govern and the grace to obey… Will you youths of England make your country again a royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of learning and of the Arts, faithful guardian of time-tried principles, under temptation from fond experiments and licentious desires; and amidst the cruel and clamorous jealousies of the nations, worshipped in her strange valour, of goodwill towards men?

  One can imagine the effect of this noble rhetoric on young enthusiastic spirits. Though ordinary professors were never applauded, Ruskin was always applauded on entering; and sometimes the feeling he called forth was so intense that the students sat spell-bound with bowed heads and dimmed eyes as he folded his notes and went out.

  Of course it was his imperialism that endeared him especially to Rhodes; it might have been meant expressly for him.

  This is what England must either do, or perish; she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to advance the power of England by land and sea…

  You think that an impossible idea. Be it so; refuse to accept it, if you will; but see that you form your own ideal in its stead. All that I ask of you is to have a fixed purpose of some kind for your country and for yourselves, no matter how restricted, so that it be fixed and unselfish.