IV
RUSKIN'S OLD ROAD

In the Life of Ruskin three pages are given to his tour abroad in 1882, a journey of importance to him, because at a critical moment it gave him a new lease of life, and of unusual interest to his biographer, who accompanied him as secretary, which is to say "man-jack-of-all-trades." In such companionship much personality comes out; and the gossip of this period, at greater length than the proportions of a biography allowed, may help to fill in some of the details of his portrait.

Very much broken down in health, despairing of himself and his mission, he left London on Thursday, August 10, 1882. Calais Tower roused none of the old enthusiasm; he said rather bitterly, "I wonder how I came to write about it." But even in his depression the habit of work made him sketch once more the tracery of the HÔtel de Ville. He found out the trick of its geometrical pattern, and explained it, delighted. Then the old chef at the HÔtel Dessein was still in the flesh, and remembered former visits and sent up a capital dinner; so the first day on foreign soil augured hopefully.

On the Saturday he woke up to sunshine at Laon, and took me round the town, setting me to work on various points. He began a drawing of the cathedral front, which he finished on the Monday before leaving. It was always rather wonderful how he would make use of every moment, even when ill-health and the fatigue of travelling might seem a good reason for idling. At once on arriving anywhere he was ready to sketch, and up to the minute of departure he went on with his drawing unperturbed. In the afternoons he usually dropped the harder work of the morning, and went for a ramble out into the country; at Laon the hayfields and pear orchards south of the town gave him, it seemed, just as much pleasure as Chamouni.

Reims bored him; the cathedral he called confectioner's Gothic, and he could not get rid of the idea of champagne and all the vanities and vulgarities which hang on to the very word. There was an ugly prison, too, put up next the cathedral; and even St. Remi did not make amends. So he hastened on to Troyes, spending a few hours between trains at ChÂlons, where we "did" the town in the regular tourist fashion, finding, however, beautiful features of early Gothic at NÔtre Dame and the Madeleine.

At Troyes he spent the 17th, sketching hard at St. Urbain and the cathedral, and next morning reached Sens, a place loved of old for associations with parents and friends, and not less for its little gutter-brooks in the streets, which he pointed out with a sort of boyish glee. The afternoon walk in the valley of the Yonne and up the chalk hills brought much talk of the geology of flints and the especial charm of coteau scenery, which he said had never been cared for until Turner saw it and glorified this comparatively humble aspect of mountains in the "Rivers of France." He set me to draw the defaced statues on the porch of the cathedral, the "finest north of Alps" he declared; but we were getting on rather too fast, and he began to feel the reaction of fatigue. The weather was sultry, and on the 19th our journey to Avallon was followed by distant thunder-storms.

At Avallon he stayed till the end of the month. The place was new to him, but I think he was attracted to it by one of those obscure associations which so often ran in his mind—it must be interesting because it was named Avallon—Avalon he called it always, dominated by the idea of the island-valley of repose where King Arthur found the immortality of fairyland. The first morning's work at the early church of St. Ladre, and the first afternoon's walk down the valley of the Cousin, with brilliant ling in blossom among bold red granite rocks, fully justified his choice. The town, on its Durham-like hill, swept round by the deep river-course, and unspoilt by modernisms, and the wooded, flowery, rocky neighbourhood, full of all that is most charming in French scenery—there are Roman remains, too, but of these he took less note—and the curious details of the twelfth-century church all attracted him mightily. The only drawback was the weather, which broke down with the thunder and gave us cold east winds and dark haze, in which sketching was a penance. This told upon him at once; he even dined alone, wearied out of evenings, and still trying to fix his mind on the writing work he always took with him—in this instance the new edition of "Sesame and Lilies" and the "Bible of Amiens." He burned the candle at both ends; out early to draw elusive detail of battered sculptures, walking far in the afternoon, and writing hard at night, impatient of remonstrance even from those who were much better qualified to order him about than a secretary.

To meet him here came Mr. Frank Randal, who was employed on drawings for "St. George's Work," and making bright, sunny sketches in which the neatest of outline was reconciled with the freshest of colouring. Also came his friend, Mr. Maundrell, to whom I take this chance of offering an apology which makes me blush to record. Among Ruskin's drawings was one, much in his Proutesque style, of a chapel at Rue, near Abbeville. It had been passed as his, when Mrs. Severn went through the portfolios with him, noting the subjects on the back of the mounts; and—with some hesitation, I confess, and neglect of the good rule "When in doubt, don't"—it was shown at both Ruskin Exhibitions as a work by the master, and greatly admired. Too late for correction, it was found to be Mr. Maundrell's. Others have nearly caught Ruskin's style at times—"Bunney's, not mine," he has written on sketches by an assistant, for this very reason; but for all the more important drawings there is a good pedigree, and most of the smaller bits which have been shown or published have come from his sketch-books.

One good excursion from Avallon was to the church of VÉzelay, the twelfth-century place elaborately restored by Viollet-le-Duc, and interesting for the meeting of Richard Coeur-de-Lion with the other leaders of the Crusade famous in "Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." To Ruskin any restoration meant ruin; but as he went round the aisles, disdainful at first but gradually warming to the intelligence and skill of the great modern architect, he confessed that if restoration might be done at all it could not be better done. What pleased him much more was a hunt, on the way back, for the exact spot where the Avallon granite joined the limestone; he found the two rocks side by side in a hummock near the road, and was triumphant.

MontrÉal was another place of pilgrimage, and there the church with quaint wood-carvings and the picturesque village gave him a happy day. In his diary (on which see the next chapter) he scolded himself, after this excursion, for forgetting the good times; of a walk in the rain to the little oratory of St. Jean des Bons Hommes he said: "I ought to vignette it for a title to my books!" and of the Avallon neighbourhood he notes: "Altogether lovely, and like Dovedale and the Meuse and the glens of Fribourg in all that each has of best, and like Chamouni in granite cleavage, and like—itself, in sweet French looks and ways.... The miraculous fairy valley ... one of the sweetest ever made by heaven. The Cyclopean walls, of blocks seven and eight feet long, and three feet thick—the largest—all averaging two and a half (feet) cube, at a guess, laid with their smooth cleavages to the outside, fitted like mosaic—the chinks filled with smaller stones, altogether peculiar to this district of cleaving, and little twisting, granite." It was not only the scenery that he cared for, but the evidences of happy pastoral life, adapting Nature's gifts to human needs. But when, off the kindly granite and on the cold, grey limestone country, we passed a forlorn homestead, ruinous and dirty, he shrank back in the carriage, as if some one had thrown a stone at him.

On the last day of August he left Avallon, and with a short stay at SÉmur reached his old quarters at the HÔtel de la Cloche, Dijon. He was already contemplating "PrÆterita," picking up the memories of early days, and planning a drive by the old road through Jura as his parents used to do it in the pre-railway period. He began by showing me where he bit his "Seven Lamps" plate in the wash-hand basin, and where Nurse Anne used to wake him of mornings. Meanwhile, for the book to be called "Our Fathers have told us," continuing "The Bible of Amiens," he would spend two days with the monks. CÎteaux, the home of the Cistercians, was the first day's trip, marred by the heat and dust, and by finding all vestiges of the monks replaced by an industrial school of the ugliest, which, nevertheless, he inspected with nicely restrained impatience. A moated grange on the wayside homeward caught his eye, and as he sketched it he tried to make me believe that this must at least be a bit of the monks' work, and the journey not in vain. But next day there were far more interesting experiences in a visit to St. Bernard's birthplace. He has described this fully in his lecture called "Mending the Sieve," in the volume of "Verona, &c.," and I need only recall the surprise of a bystander not wholly unsympathetic, when Ruskin knelt down on the spot of the great saint's nativity, and stayed long in prayer. He was little given to outward show of piety, and his talk, though enthusiastic, had been no preparation for this burst of intense feeling.

Later on the same day (Saturday, September 2) he left Dijon for the Jura drive. We passed Poligny, a usual resting-place in bygone journeys, by train, and stayed at Champagnole, where the old HÔtel de la Poste used to be one of his "homes." 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. How eager he was, and delighted with this open upland! You know there is only one place where he speaks of "liberty" as a good thing, and there it means the liberty of this Jura walk, enjoyed that afternoon.

By-and-by we came to a wood. He cast about a little for the way through the trees, then bade me notice that the flowers of spring were gone: "You ought to have seen the wood-anemones, and oxalis, and violets"; and then, picking his steps to find the exact spot by a twisted larch-tree, and gripping my arm to hold me back on the brink of the abyss, "That's where the hawk sailed off the crag, in one of my old books; do you remember?"

There were thunder clouds over the plain-country that evening, and we made no stop to sketch. On our drive next day up to the flat, high country of St. Laurent, with its pine forests and scattered cottages, and down into Morez, the weather worsened. Thence the road climbs by the side of the valley to the highest back of Jura at Les Rousses; the road, he says, "walked most of the way, was mere enchantment." At a halt I sketched, when a break in the clouds gave sunbeams darting into the valley beneath, and wisps of white wreathed the steep forests. You see where he got that beautiful cadence to a fine passage, after comparing the Jura upland with a Yorkshire moor, and contrasting the becks of our fells with the enchanted silence of open Jura. "The raincloud clasps her cliffs, and floats along her fields; it passes, and in an hour the rocks are dry, and only beads of dew left in the Alchemilla leaves—but of rivulet or brook, no vestige, yesterday or to-day or to-morrow. 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?" he asked. I was just trying to say why, that it is a free country and some more innocent gush, when the Swiss Customs officers ran up, and insisted on overhauling us, for they don't often see travellers as in the old days at Les Rousses. I was mightily crestfallen and he not a little delighted at this exemplification of "liberty"; but he did not make the incident a horrid example in "PrÆterita."

Here we diverged a little from the old road of his youth, by going east a few miles to St. Cergues instead of making for the Col de la Faucille at once. The clean inn delighted him; pine boards on the floor, scrubbed white, and no needless furniture. Here he said we should stay a week and rest; he had much to write—first ideas for "PrÆterita," you understand. But the next days were wet, and he sat in his bedroom writing diligently at first, while I caught some bright intervals for a sketch, though we never saw the line of the Alps quite clear.

In the lecture on "the Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century," one of his least convincing though most sincerely meant utterances, there are references to the strange weather of those days. All the way up from Morez he wanted me to come into the carriage and shut the window because of a treacherous east wind, and in my sketch you can see a certain smoky, not only thundery, look in the clouds. At St. Cergues this east wind haze was still more pronounced, the Lake of Geneva ruffled and white, with patches of shadow from small "sailor-boy" clouds, while the whole range opposite was not exactly shrouded but veiled in a persistent thickness of air. Above, the sky was bright, with blue and streaky cirrus, and between the showers the sun glittered on the trees. That fitful wind with the brownish-grey haze he called the plague-wind, and in all his lecture there is no very definite explanation of it, but much declamation against it as the ruin of landscape, and some vague hints of portent, almost as if he had been a prophet of old seeing the burden of modern Babylon in the darkened sun.

It is smoke. Any one who haunts our Lake district hills knows it well. On coronation night I saw it trailing from Barrow and Carnforth up the Lune valley as far as Tebay, always low and level, leaving the upper hills clear, perfectly continuous and distinct from the mist of water. This winter, from the top of Wetherlam on a brilliant frosty day, I saw it gradually invade the Lake district from the south-east; the horizontal, clean-cut, upper surface at about 2000 feet; the body of it dun and semi-transparent; its thick veil fouling the little cotton-woolly clouds that nestled in the coves of the Kirkstone group, quite separate from the smoke-pall; and by sunset it had reached to Dungeon Gill, leaving the Bow Fell valleys clear. 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. This was not understood twenty years ago, but Ruskin's observations of the weather were perfectly accurate and his regrets at the changed aspect of Alpine landscape were only too justifiable.

On Thursday, September 7, he had tired of dull weather at St. Cergues, and written up his notes for "PrÆterita"; he proposed to climb the DÔle and get onward to Geneva. It is a very easy walk of about a couple of hours up the gently sloping backs of the Helvellyn-like Jura range; and from its top one should get a grand view of the lake and the Alps to Mont Blanc. He walked up as briskly as ever; there was a cold wind but sun overhead, though the mountains to the south and east were still in the "plague-cloud." There was no sketching to be done, and we followed the ridge down to the Col de la Faucille. If you look at his map of the Jura, facsimiled at page 109 of this volume, the Col is where the road suddenly turns round into zigzags after going straight south-west behind the DÔle; and you remember how he names the whole chapter from this one spot, as a chief landmark in his memories, for there he always used to get his first full view of the "Mount Beloved." Few travellers know it, he says; but it is far from unknown to all who have lived in la Suisse Romande. 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

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!" said I.

Next morning, from his old front rooms at the HÔtel des Bergues, where he had already begun a sketch of the houses opposite, merely for love of them, we went out in the heat to see the RhÔne. All the haze had gone, at least from the nearer view, and he seemed never tired of looking at the water from the footbridge and wherever it was visible. I wondered why he would not come on; but now I know. "Fifteen feet thick—of not flowing but flying water"—I will not quote the wonderful pages which every lover of Ruskin, of landscape, and of English undefiled, must know—the "one mighty wave that was always itself, and every fluted swirl of it constant as the wreathing of a shell"; and then the bit about its blue, and "the innocent way" of it, and its dancing and rippling and glittering, "and the dear old decrepit town as safe in the embracing sweep of it as if it were set in a brooch of sapphire"—that was what he was thinking, and storing up in his mind the famous description which showed that even so late, in shattered health and, as people said, impaired powers, he could talk and write as brilliantly as ever.

That afternoon in the glaring sunshine we drove out of Geneva through suburban villadom—he much amused at the modern fashion of house-names, "Mon Repos," "Chez Nous," and so forth—towards Monnetier. He was at the moment healthily interested in Alpine structure, the geology of scenery, and could forget "St. George" in his eagerness to expound his views on the cleavage of the SalÈve. I made a slight note of the lines, the cathedral-like buttresses which flank the level-bedded masonry of the great mountain-wall with masses of a different rock, vertically cloven; and the gorge of Monnetier which cuts the range across with an unexpected breach; and we went over his old debate with the Genevese geologists. Then we climbed the Echelle, and from the top found the Annecy Alps fairly clear, but I think the same heaviness over the greater snow-peaks. At last we reached Mornex, his old home in the 'sixties, when he was writing "Munera Pulveris" and first seriously grappling with the social problems which afterwards became his chief theme in so many lectures and books.

A letter he wrote that evening, to describe the visit, has recently been published; how he found his old house a restaurant, with people drinking on the terrace. He was, though he did not say so, rather cast down by the change—he who always deplored changes; but brightened when the landlord guessed who he must be, and quite cheered up—with that last infirmity of noble minds—on hearing that the English sometimes came to see Ruskin's house. Indeed, it was more his home than many a house in England where he spent longer years, for it was of choice, not of necessity, that he lived there, and would have continued there to his own great advantage but for his father's death, which recalled him to the care of his widowed mother.

One phrase in that letter as now printed seems to have pained and alarmed some of his friends; but surely without cause. He says to account for beginning his letter on the wrong side of the paper—as most people seem to do nowadays—that he had taken a glass too much Burgundy. The son of the sherry-merchant, with old-fashioned notions on the fitness of things, always took a glass or two of wine at dinner; one of his sayings was, "A glass of good wine never hurt anybody." But I am sure all his personal friends will bear me out that it never went beyond the glass or two. He was no drinker, and his very strong anti-teetotal attitude was simply the expression of his own habitual and easy temperance. That evening's dinner I remember well. After our walk from Veyrier to Pont d'EtrembiÈres, and more sauntering by the RhÔne in a beautiful red sunset, we came in late. At table we had some debate about the pictures on the walls of the hotel sitting-room, and he would not have it that Madame VigÉe Lebrun's portrait of herself and her daughter was charming. "No decent woman," he said, "would paint herself with bare arms, like that!"—which was quite his usual way of thinking about a much-discussed question of art. And then we settled to a little after-dinner writing, and you will not be surprised if we both nodded over our pens after that long hot day—and, of course, the Burgundy.