by Frank Harris
Among Rhodes's papers after his death was found a note in his handwriting which shows clearly what Ruskin's words had meant to him:
You have many instincts, religion, love, money-making, ambition, art and creation, which from a human point of view I think the best, but if you differ from me, think it over and work with all your soul for that instinct you deem the best. C. J. Rhodes.
It was Ruskin more than any other man who created the empire builder and gave form and purpose to Rhodes's ambition.
Because Rhodes wasn't quite satisfied with English patriotism, he selected Ruskin's last words as the most important. Rhodes had been affected by the Boers as I have been affected by the Americans; he told me often that he could never exclude the Boer from any African empire he might have a hand in forming.
Ruskin as patriot is admirable, though I much prefer some of his writing descriptive of natural beauty, especially what he says of the Swiss mountains.
It is only fair to note that Ruskin lived his idealism before expressing it rhetorically. He was all of a piece and transparently frank. He had a great love for Oxford, and I had seen somewhere that he resigned his Slade Professorship of Fine Arts because he felt himself growing old. "It must have been a source of regret to you," I said to him one day, "that you felt too weak to go on with your famous Oxford lectures."
"Too weak," he repeated scornfully. "Weakness had nothing to do with it. The room in which I spoke was always overcrowded and had many inconveniences. It was not well lighted for one thing, so I asked the authorities to provide a decent auditorium for the lectures on art that should mean so much to a well graced university. They replied that they were already in debt and left it at that. Yet the very next day they voted 10,000 to erect a laboratory for Dr. Burdon Sanderson to use for his experiments on living animals, and?. 2,000 more to fit up this ante-chamber to Hell with the necessary instruments! Oxford University, too poor to give anything to that love of beauty which does so much to redeem this sordid world, but able to endow vivisection and lavish thousands on instruments of devilish torture!
"My way was clear. I resigned my professorship as a protest and wrote to the vice-chancellor, asking him to read my letter, giving the reasons for my resignation to convocation. But the vice-chancellor had not the grace to answer me or read my letter publicly as I had requested; and when I wrote to the editor of the university paper indignantly, he simply suppressed it; and so the conspiracy of silence triumphed and the London press announced that I had resigned owing to 'advancing years!' "Oxford preferred the screams of agonizing dumb creatures to anything I could say in praise of the good and beautiful and true! It showed me of what small account I was among men. Perhaps my vanity needed the lesson," he added, sighing "but I lamented the good cause hopelessly lost."
The whole incident is intensely characteristic, showing how England treats its teachers and guides: how differently Paris treated Taine!
As I got to know Ruskin better and we talked of books at great length, I found his taste often to seek. He lauded Mrs. Browning's poetry to the skies and confessed that he disliked Swinburne; the worst prudery of Puritanism went with his thin blood and lack of virility. And his judgment of painting and painters was almost as faulty, though he thought himself a perfect critic and often declared that it was he who discovered and made the reputation of five great artists "despised until I came: Turner, Tintoret, Luini, Botticelli and Carpaccio, but they were no greater," he would add, "than Burne-Jones and Rossetti, my dear boys." The comparison seemed to me inept, so I changed the subject.
Why do I put these vague and inconsecutive memories together? Though he had great influence and was a great name in England for many years, Ruskin did not impress me profoundly, save as a rhetorician: indeed, to me he was not really a man of genius, not a sacred leader of men. He was perverse and purblind, an English Puritan who after he came out of the prison of Puritanism still bore the marks in his soul of subjection to English ideals and subservience to English limitations. All his economics were better put by Carlyle and he injured Whistler, who was a greater master than his Turner.
In a few weeks of casual meetings I had exhausted him, or felt that he had given all he had to give to me, and his habitual sadness and diseased selfcenteredness distressed my youthful optimism.
One morning I asked him cheekily whether he had not been tempted to keep some of Turner's naughty paintings?
"They would have been very interesting," I added lamely, feeling him antagonistic.
At once he turned on me. "I've always felt that you don't approve of what I did," he said sharply. "Why don't you speak out? I'm proud of what I did," and his wintry eyes gleamed with challenge.
"Proud!" I repeated. "I think it dreadful to kill a man's work!"
"Perhaps it was the kind of work you would wish to preserve," he snapped; and now I noticed for the first time that when he got angry his lip would curl up on one side and show his canine tooth like a snarl of an angry dog, intensified by the peculiarity that it was only one side of his lip that would lift. He had told me that a dog had bitten him when a boy and split his lip.
"I'm not ashamed to admit that," I continued. "Any attack on puritanical standards and English prudery seems worthful to me; but if a great man had done work I hated, work in praise of war, for instance, or defending cruelty, I would not destroy it. Who am I to condemn part of his soul to death? I hate all final condemnations."
"I did what I felt to be right."
"I'm sure of that," I broke In. "That's the pity of it. The evil men do from high motives is the most pernicious. The being a trustee you took as a challenge to your courage: I understand; but I can only regret it. I'm very sorry."
I had offended him deeply; I knew I had at the time. He never came to me again and before I could make up my mind to go to him I heard that he had left London.
It is painful to me now to recall my stupid frankness, but in essence we were then at opposite poles; yet I ought to have remembered what he did for the English world and what he gave to the English people; and after all no man's gift is perfect. But the truth is, I did not rate Ruskin then so highly as I do today. I had from the beginning the French view of art and artists and felt as they feel, that admiration of beauty is the highest impulse in our humanity. It has since come to be my very soul and in time it has taught me a new ethic. I had no idea then that the English rated artists like acrobats and thought more of a half-educated politician like Chamberlain than of a great painter or sculptor or musician; and so I underrated the originality of Ruskin and had no idea that his constant preoccupation with what is memorable in art and literature, his impassioned admiration of great work, first astonished and then interested thousands who would never otherwise have come to a comprehension of the artistic ideal. His devotion to art, or, as he would have said, to the beautiful everywhere, lifted thousands of English men and women to a higher understanding of life. Moreover, he enriched English literature with passages of magnificent prose and perhaps the finest descriptions of natural beauty in the language.
Ruskin was to the English a great prophet of the beautiful; art to him was a religion and that view had never suggested itself to them; he taught them to love and admire artists like Turner, Tintoret and Botticelli, and to esteem such great men as benefactors of humanity; he enlarged the English outlook and ennobled it and therefore was a blessing to his people.
I should have been indignant in the eighties with any comparison between him and Carlyle, who to me then was a seer and sacred guide; but Carlyle's deification of force and his disdain for the aesthetic side of life make him appear to me now hardly more valuable than Ruskin. The ordinary English instinct that placed Ruskin side by side with him was nearer right.
In spite of his paltry education and curious limitations, Ruskin was a moral and ennobling influence in England for half a century, and no doubt a stronger influence because at bottom he was bred on the Bible and brought up to revere all English conventions and English idea
ls.
The end of his life was extremely sad. He went abroad in '88 and '89. In '89 he had an awful illness and he lived almost without mind for another eleven years, dying in 1900.
I do not believe there ever was a sadder life, or, rather, I think he suffered as much as his mind allowed him to suffer; and Carlyle suffered more because he had more intellect, and seeing far more clearly, could not delude himself with the visitations of "a ministering angel." Stripped of the pleasure of love, life is a poor inheritance.
CHAPTER XVII
Matthew Arnold; Parnell; Oscar Wilde; the morning mail, Bottomley
IN MY FIRST YEAR on the Evening News I was reaching success and my employers were more than satisfied with me. I had reduced the loss by more than one half; indeed, I was able to predict that in my second year the loss would be down to?. 15,000 instead of?. 40,000; and the circulation had risen from eight to twenty thousand daily. I was working as hard as ever. In the office at eight every morning, I never left it, except for an hour at lunch, till seven at night; yet I had begun to accept dinner invitations and luncheons on Sunday. Once every week Mrs. Jeune, soon to become Lady Jeune through the knighting of her husband, the well-known judge, invited me to one of her delightful dinners and receptions where one met all the celebrities, from the parliamentary leaders to the choice spirits in art and literature and life.
In the second year, too, I came to know her great rival as a hostess, Lady Shrewsbury, who was a little more exclusive. I have told in my life of him how I met Oscar Wilde at Mrs. Jeune's and the immense impression he made on me; there, too I met Russell Lowell and Thomas Hardy and a host of more or less distinguished writers and politicians, some of whom I have already described in my Contemporary Portraits. But here I shall write only of those who had great influence on me and my development; and among them I must always rank Pater and Matthew Arnold, especially Arnold, to whom I was drawn by that love of ideal humanity which explained all his strictures on English life and English manners.
Matthew Arnold was a delightful companion, full of quaint fancies and willing, usually, to laugh at himself. I remember telling him of Oscar's jibe at his niece's, Mrs. Humphrey Ward's, first novel. He said that "You, Sir, supplied the 'Literature' and she was determined to contribute the 'Dogma.'" Arnold laughed like a schoolboy. "She's very serious," he said.
"I wonder why women are so much more serious than men?" On his return from lecturing in the United States, he told me with humorous enjoyment that most of his success was due to the fact that many people took him for Edwin Arnold. "Yes, yes," he laughed, "it was The Light of Asia that became The Light of the World to me and illumined my path. Thyrsis was unknown, my poetry unconsidered there. Luckily the trip was successful and relieved me from monetary care; America was very kind to me, though occasionally it chastened my conceit. As you predicted, they invited me to study elocution!"
I heard him once make a speech on "Schools" or "Schooling" somewhere in Westminster: it was all good, but not inspiring, and out of pure mischief I wanted to get to the deepest in him, his shortcomings as a critic. He did not appear to understand French poetry at all deeply. When I praised La Legende des Siecles by Hugo to him or the Sagesse of Verlaine, he did not seem to care for them, so I talked of Emerson as a great poet like Whitman, but he would not have it. I began by quoting So take thy quest through Nature, It through thousand natures ply Ask on thou clothed Eternity Time is the false reply.
"But is that poetry?" Arnold doubted. "I can't believe it somehow." "Think of his Humble Bee," I cried, "and deny him if you can," and I quoted again, Aught unsavoury or unclean Hath my insect never seen But violets and bilberry bells Maple sap and daffodils Grass with green flag half-mast high;
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey
Scented fern and acrimony
Clover, catchfly, adder's tongue
And brier-roses dwelt among,
All besides was unknown waste
All was picture as he passed.
Wiser far than human seer
Yellow-breeched philosopher.
"That surely has the true note!"
"It has, it has indeed," Arnold hesitated reluctantly, "but we are all poets at odd moments."
"Only at odd moments, I should say!" was my reply, for he was merely evading the issue, but he shook his head.
"I think the Humble Bee worthy to be ranked with the Skylark of Shelley," I went on. "Not for music, of course, but it has homely poetic virtues of its own, and some day it will be known and loved. I seldom praise Emerson," I added,
"because he quarrelled with Whitman and stood for convention as against freedom of speech."
"I'm afraid that I too am in favour of the conventions," said Arnold. "Speech can easily be too free, can't it?"
"I hate English prudery," I replied, "and English hypocrisy. Life in England is like life in an English Sunday school, with a maiden-lady as a teacher and an atmosphere of deadly dullness. Shall we never get to the larger freedom of Dante, if not that of Goethe?"
"Was Dante ever free in that sense?" asked Arnold.
"Surely," I replied, "some of his humour is the jolly humour of a naughty little boy who puts out his tongue at you and worse."
"Really?" doubted Arnold. "I remember nothing like that in Dante!"
"Here is one verse," and I quoted from the end of the twenty-first canto of the Inferno:
Per l'argine sinistro volta dienno
Ma prima avea ciascun la lingua stretta
Co'denti verso lor duca, per cenno:
Ed egli avea de cul fatto trombetta.
"And he had made a trumpet of his behind!"
"How strange," laughed Arnold. "I never noticed it. I must have read over it!
Goethe of course was free, but Goethe put his worst things in Faust in asterisks instead of plain words."
"Yet we know from Eckermann," I said, "that Goethe used the plain words and even wrote very naughty plays and poems." Arnold was too English, I think, in feeling to take up the gauntlet.
I tried to get him to write for me for the Fortnightly Review and he sent me a poem, a threnody on a favorite dog that has its place in English poetry. He was indeed marvellously gifted, and I always resented the fact that the English had used one of their noblest spirits as an inspector of schools. If Arnold had been honoured from thirty to sixty, as he should have been, had men been willing to pay gold to hear him talk on any subject, he would have given us even more than he did. This is to be the chief mystery of life, why men accord so little love and honour to the real guides during their lifetime.
Arnold should have been put in a high place and listened to with reverence by the ablest politicians and men of letters, but he was simply disregarded, and how he kept his sunny good humour in the universal indifference was a puzzle to me.
I always felt him superior in range and Tightness of thought to any of his contemporaries. There was in him also a depth of melancholy; yet in the intercourse of life he was invariably optimistic. In this, as in many ways, he resembled Anatole France. He had perfect manners, too, like the great Frenchman-met everyone on the pure human level, preferred to talk on high themes, yet used banter charmingly with the barbarians.
He loved to find the best in everyone and gloss over faults, was the first to praise Oscar Wilde to me when everyone condemned him as an eccentric poseur. "A fine intelligence and most wonderful talker," he said. It was because Matthew Arnold seemed to me to reach ideal manhood, was indeed free of faults or mannerisms, that I was always probing to discover his shortcomings.
One day I could not help trying to get to the ultimate of his thought. I used his famous definition of the "Something not ourselves that makes for righteousness" to draw him out. "That 'not ourselves,'" I said, "always seems to me wrong. The only thing in the world that makes for righteousness is the holy spirit of man."
"What about sunsets and flowers and the song of birds?" he replied with a quaint half-smile, "a
nd the music of the spheres. Will you deny them all?"
He had caught me: I could only smile back at him; yet surely the soul of the Divinity is in us men and revealed most completely in our noblest. We cannot read the riddle of nature. Not on the walls of our cell shall the reconciling word be found, but in the heart of man grown tired of bearing:
The weary weight of this unintelligible world.
I had just come to think of Matthew Arnold as the most perfect man of letters I had ever met, when the shocking news came that like his father, he had died of heart failure. He sprang over a gate or fence, fell forward and never spoke again. What a tragedy is the untimely end of so great and sweet a nature.
As I came to know it, life in London grew richer and richer to me. Every dinner at Mrs. Jeune's or Lady Shrewsbury's became an event.
And when I mention Mrs. Jeune as hostess, I must not forget the Arthur Walters, who were more than kind to me from the beginning. Every summer from 1884 to 1895 I went to stay more than once at their country place at Finchampstead for weeks at a time. There I met Hurlbert and Sir Ernest Cassell and his daughter and other notorious people; and both Arthur and Mrs. Walter became dear to me out of their abounding human kindness.
I tried again and again to get Arthur Walter to see Parnell as he was, but all my efforts were in vain. He was always resolved to regard Parnell as a revolutionary and Irish hater of England.
On the other hand, I had a certain admiration for Parnell and some liking. It was Verschoyle who gave me the first idea of him as a great fighter. He told me a story of his youth in the Shelbourne hotel in Dublin. One day Verschoyle and some of his family were in the hotel and at the next table a tall man was talking what they considered treason. At length Verschoyle's cousin, a notorious athlete and boxer, got up, went over to the next table and said, "If you want to talk treason, you had better get a private room, for I won't listen to it in public."