II
RUSKIN'S "JUMP"

"Jump" was the Brantwood vernacular for "Jumping Jenny"; and she was Ruskin's own private, particular "water sulky," as the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table put it. There is hardly any need to say that she was named after the famous though somewhat disreputable brig, commanded and partly owned by the late Anthony Ewart, not unknown to readers of Ruskin's favourite novel "Redgauntlet." I do not mean to commit myself to any statement of literary criticism in calling "Redgauntlet" his favourite novel, or to imply that he thought it the best book ever written: but it was one which he continually quoted in conversation and discussed with pleasure in his autobiography. Of all the novels he read in those evenings of "auld lang syne," when he pulled the four candles close to him at the drawing-room table, and we sketched furtively in corners, Laurence Hilliard and I, and the ladies plied their needles—no novel was read with more delight and effect. It was a pretty way of passing the evening, but not so easy to imitate unless you have a Ruskin to read to you. He had a trick of suggesting the dramatic variety of the conversations without trying to be stagey, and a skill in "cutting" the long paragraphs of Scott's descriptions which made it all as good as a play. He did not make you hot and ready to scream, as many readers do in their anxiety to act the scene.

Ruskin was no sailor, and never went for a real voyage; but he was very fond of boats and shipping, and all that came from the sea. One of his grandfathers had been a sailor. As far as I can make out, this grandfather was an East-coast skipper of small craft, very much like one of the captains of "Many Cargoes" and "Sea Urchins." He had passed out of this world before John Ruskin came into it, and the little genius never had the luck to hear sea-stories and to learn the mysteries of reef-knots and clove-hitch from an old captain grandfather. It would have been so good for him! But one must not forget that in the making of John Ruskin there was a quarter of the blood of a seafarer. It is a rather curious fact, also, and one which has not, I believe, been mentioned in print, that the earliest Ruskin of all was a sea captain. Mr. W. Hutton Brayshay tells me that he has found in the Record Office a notice of the name in the fourteenth century; this mediÆval Ruskin was captain of one of Edward III.'s ships. We cannot connect him with John Ruskin's family, any more than we can connect the Ruskins of Dalton-in-Furness in the sixteenth century; but this identity of name suggests that they may have been ancestors. It is a problem which can only be solved by research, but it should be possible, if one had time and money to work out the pedigree from wills and registers.

Turner was his real teacher in seafaring matters, giving him, if nothing more, a true interest in the look of waves and ships. It was for Turner's sake that he wrote the fine essay on "the boat in art and poetry" which forms the introduction to "Harbours of England"; and this glorification of the coast fishing-craft and the old ship of the line was not merely a literary man's concoction, but the outcome of much study and sketching at Deal, where he spent the summer of 1855 to steep himself in the subject. In the early sixties, again, he stayed for some time at Boulogne in lodgings under the sandhills north of the pier, and made friends with a French pilot and mackerel fisher who, after due apprenticeship, actually promoted him to the tiller—an honour of which he was really prouder than that election to the membership of a foreign Academy which he forgot to answer until it was too late to say any more about it.

So when he came to Coniston, and had his own house on his own lake, he could not be without boats. There was a landing-place on the shore beneath Brantwood, shown in our photograph as it was in the earlier stages of its development, with Mrs. Arthur Severn and Miss Constance Hilliard (Mrs. W. H. Churchill) on the first primitive breakwater, and Mr. Severn's sailboat in the distance. Ruskin did not care for lake-sailing; a busy man hardly has time to wait for the moving of the water; and he got one of the indigenous tubs for the diversion of rowing. He did not fish, and he had the greatest scorn for rowing as it is done at Oxford. "That's not rowing; that's galley-slaves' work!" he used to tell us. "To bend to the stroke, and time your oars to the beat of the waves," was his ideal: he liked going out when there was a little sea on, and white horses; and he would paddle away before the wind with great enjoyment. But when there is a little sea on, at Coniston, it means a good deal of wind; though the waves are not very high they gather a fair amount of force in their four or five miles' career up the long waterway; and the fun of riding with them is quite different from the struggle of getting your boat home again. Now Ruskin was a very practical man in some things. "When you have too much to do, don't do it," he used to say. So after a wild water-gallop, he simply landed and walked home. When the wind changed he could bring back his boat. There was no use in making a pain of a pleasure.

The Lake district rowing-boat is built for the Lake fisherman, and it is as neatly adapted to its purpose as the Windermere yacht which, for the peculiar winds and waters of the place, is pretty nearly perfect. The fishers used to have two chief requirements, whether they netted or trolled; the boat must travel easily in lumpy but not violent water, for the men had far to go in reaching their "drawing-up spots," and in taking their fish to market of an evening; and it must carry a good deal of tackle. In netting, there were always two partners, and so two thwarts and two pairs of sculls were used; in trolling, one went out alone, but there were rods and lines which needed space for convenient stowage. Consequently the boats were rather long, and rather low in the water; the sculls were fixed on pins, so that you could drop them when you got a bite, or landed hastily to take the hair-rope at your end of the net in drawing up. Feathering the oar was quite unknown; great speed unnecessary; great stability desirable; but not what a sailor would call seaworthiness. On the whole, for pleasure-boating on the lakes, these boats are safe and convenient; accidents are extremely rare, though hundreds and perhaps thousands of hopelessly unskilled people every summer try their hands at rowing, and do everything you ought not to do in a boat. It is impossible to insist on an experienced boatman going out with every party, and not always possible to prevent overcrowding. Local authorities have no powers, except to hang life-buoys (at their own personal expense) on convenient points along the shore. You will see one of the Coniston parish council's buoys on the boathouse in our photograph of the Hall: but you will be glad to know that it has hung there for years without being wanted for a rescue.

After some seasons' trial of the local boat, Ruskin thought he could improve upon it for his own purpose. He wanted something less cumbrous and more seaworthy, and he was always trying experiments, uprooting notions to find how they grew, planting them upside down to see what happened, grafting one idea upon another, to the bewilderment of onlookers. 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 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. He was only too pleased to have a hand in a real job, and turned out the drawings and the model for the new boat in workmanlike fashion. This was in 1879 or 1880.

Just opposite Brantwood, across the lake, is the old Coniston Hall, built in the fifteenth century as the home of the Flemings of Coniston, but nearly two hundred years ago abandoned and left to ruin. Mrs. Radcliffe, who wrote the "Mysteries of Udolpho"—known to most readers nowadays less for itself than as the book that so excited the heroine of "Northanger Abbey"—about 1794 came to Coniston, and mistook the old Coniston Hall for Conishead Priory, as it seems: and with an odd fallacy of romance described the "solemn vesper that once swelled along the lake from those consecrated walls, and awakened, perhaps, the enthusiasm of the voyager, while evening stole upon the scene." But she was right enough in being charmed with the spot, as Ruskin was in his boyish visits, long before he dreamed of living—and dying—in view of the old round chimneys among the trees, with the ripple of lake below and the peak of the Old Man rising above. Early in the nineteenth century the ruins were fitted up as a farm, and, somewhat later, the boathouse close by came to be the workshop of the man who built Ruskin's "Jump."

Mr. William Bell was one of the celebrities of this dale. In his youth he had been a sort of right-hand man of John Beever of the Thwaite, brother to the ladies of "Hortus Inclusus," and author of "Practical Fly-Fishing." On the death of his father, William Bell became the leading carpenter of the place, and the leading Liberal, and during Mr. Gladstone's last Administration he was nominated for a Justice of the Peace. Ruskin was told of his neighbour, and sent word that he would like to come and have a talk about politics. Now the carpenter was used to Conservative orators and Liberal arguers, but he knew that Ruskin was a different sort of man; and all day long before the hour fixed for the visit he was in a greatly perturbed state of mind, walking up and down and wondering—a new thing for him—how he should tackle this unknown personality. At last the distinguished guest arrived. He was solemnly welcomed and shown into the parlour. The door was shut upon the twain. The son (Mr. John Bell), who felt he had brought into contact the irresistible force and the irremovable post, waited about hoping it would be all right, but in much trepidation as the sound of talk inside rose from a murmur to a rumble, and from a rumble to a roar. At last his father's well-known voice came through the partition in no trembling accents: "Ye're wrong to rags, Mr. Ruskin!" Then he knew it was all right, and went about his work. And after that Ruskin and "ald Will Bell" were firm friends in spite of differences.

So Will Bell built the "Jump"—or, to be accurate, was master-builder, employing at this job Mont. Barrow, well known to boat-owners on Windermere for one of the most skilful of craftsmen, as his father was before him—and one fine day in spring she was launched at the boat-house with great ceremony. A wreath of daffodils was hung round her bows, and Miss Martha Gale christened her, with this little versicle which Ruskin made for the occasion:

There was one strange face in the group, one uninvited visitor. The people then at the Hall were not successful managers, though they had interested Ruskin, perhaps more through the idyllic prettiness of their homestead than otherwise. He had helped to stave off the failure by lending them £300, which they proposed to pay in geese! And the stranger at the launch was the man in possession. Alas! for "these consecrated walls," and the disillusionments of our Arcadia. Perhaps it is wise to add, in plain words, that twenty years have wrought changes at the Hall, and that the present tenants are quite different people.

The "Jump," so launched at last, was always Ruskin's own boat, for his private particular use. Sometimes as a special honour the favoured guest was sent across the lake in her, rather than in a common boat; but to say the truth, if it wasn't for the honour of the thing, as the Irishman remarked when the bottom of the sedan-chair came out, we had as soon walk round. She rode the waves beautifully, but you didn't seem to get forrarder with her. Perhaps it was the fallacy of the Scott Russell lines that made her heavy, or must we put all the blame upon Ruskin? He tried to build a boat that would sail and row equally well, and that is not easy. She was never sailed, though the model, now in the Coniston Museum, is rigged. The "Jump," still on the water and often used, is treasured, I think, chiefly as a relic—Ruskin's flagship. When she is repainted, the old pattern round the gunwale, his device, and the brilliant blue, his favourite colour, are always reproduced, and she looks sound enough to outlast us all.

At a later time, when he was staying at Sandgate (1887-88), he reverted to his fondness for boating, and had several very beautiful models built and rigged by Charles Dalby, of Folkestone, a past-master in the mystery. These models—the old Dover packet, old-style cutter and yawl, and so forth—are still at Brantwood.

In the spring of 1882, during a visit to London, Mr. Froude described to him the discovery of a Viking ship, which roused great interest. Writing home, he sketched it endwise and sidewise, with notes of its construction, and—"Froude told me she had a horse at the head." 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." He has told me of talks with Carlyle, who regretted he had not taken up the Kings of Norway earlier in life, instead of Frederick the Great, and spent his better strength upon the better subject; and Ruskin himself, though too late for evidences of the taste to appear in his writings, liked to hear of our seafaring ancestors of the North. It was a touch of this feeling that made him so scornful of "sailing-machines," not calling them boats at all. He would not even have a boat-house for his "Jump"; it would be too like yachting, and she must lie on the beach, in open harbour, in the good old way. When we used to laugh at Laurence Hilliard's "Snail," a Morecambe Bay fisherman's craft that wouldn't go, Ruskin always took her part. "You boys can't be content unless you are going fast. I won't have her called the 'Snail'; she is—" and this with his own peculiar lifting emphasis—"a Real Sea Boat."