IX
RUSKIN'S HAND

It was only the other day that a friend showed me a bundle of old papers, saying, "Some of these are in his writing, but I don't know what to make of the rest." I turned them over and said, "Second volume of 'Modern Painters'; original manuscript!" He had just found them, rolled up in brown paper, in a cupboard, where they had been for years. My friend, who was intimate with Ruskin from his childhood, and of course knew the Professor's later handwriting well, hardly believed me; the difference between the early and later styles is so great.

There may be other letters and papers of Ruskin's in existence and unrecognised; not, perhaps, unprinted, but still of great value, even in hard cash. Correspondents who beg for a Ruskin autograph and a bit of his writing from those whom they suppose to have plenty, are often surprised to hear that others have been before them, and that now the only way is through the dealers at a guinea a page or more. He told me that he thought the manuscripts of his best-known works had been destroyed, and no doubt had forgotten that many of them had been given away to those who treasured them. Since his death a considerable part has been brought to light, but of the vast quantity of writing—notes, rough copies, fair copies, and letters, done in a busy life of sixty working years—there may be much more to find scattered through the world: for Ruskin's hand, like Nuremberg's, goes through every land.

In 1881 a Mr. Atkinson was sent to Coniston to make a bust of Ruskin. With his usual good nature to every one who came personally into contact with him—the roughness was only that of his sharp pen—the Professor treated the unknown as his visitor, found him lodgings and a workshop, and a place at his table for a great while, during which the bust made but slow progress. One reason, perhaps, for Mr. Atkinson's difficulty was that Ruskin had just grown a beard, and the well-known face was no longer there to mould. "Can't you treat the beard early Greek fashion; I should like to be a Bearded Bacchus!" he said. In spite of the admitted failure, he gave further work to the sculptor in casting leaves and other detail "for St. George's Schools"—that visionary object on which so much labour and thought were spent; and this use of casts from natural leaves, I am told by Mr. E. Cooke, was really originated by Ruskin in the Working Men's College days, though now pretty widely known. Some of Mr. Atkinson's casts, I may add, are on view in the Coniston Museum. But the sculptor's chief personal wish was to get a mould of Ruskin's hand. He used to say that there was more in it than in his face; at least, it was the most characteristic feature, and representable in solid form, while the face, depending on the bright blue eye and changeful expression, evaded him as it evaded more celebrated sculptors. But Ruskin did not like being oiled and moulded, and though Mr. Atkinson made enticing demonstrations on less worthy fingers, till we were all up to our elbows in plaster of Paris, he never to my knowledge won his point.

"Such a funny hand," says Browning's lover, "it was like a claw!" Ruskin's was all finger-grip; long, strong talons, curiously delicate-skinned and refined in form, though not academically beautiful. Those whose personal acquaintance with him dated only from the later years never knew his hand, for then it had lost its nervous strength; and in cold weather—the greatest half of the year in the North—the hand suffered more than the head. But his palm, and especially the back of the hand, was tiny. When he rowed his boat he held the oars entirely in his fingers; when he shook hands you felt the pressure of the fingers, not of the palm. In writing, he held the pen as we are taught to hold a drawing-pencil, and the long fingers gave much more play to the point than is usual in formed penmanship. Knowing that, it is not surprising to find that his writing varies, not only from one period to another, but with passing moods. Everybody shows some of this variety, but Ruskin's hand was as flexible and as impressionable as his whole being.

He had an odd way, down to the last, of "printing" an inscription on the fly-leaf of a book or on the mount of a drawing, in neat, square Roman type, inked between double lines ruled in pencil. Sometimes giving a present to a favoured visitor he would say, "Stay, I must write your name in it"; and you expected the well-known autograph cheque-signature, scribbled with a flourish. But no! Spectacles, and ruler, and pencil first; two carefully ruled lines, an eighth of an inch apart; then the cork-handled, fine steel pen, and laborious regularity of inscription; till the onlooking recipient laughed outright at all this time and trouble spent on a trifle. But Ruskin was quite grave about it.

This was a reversion to early habits. His juvenile MSS., of which many were kept by his parents and still remain at Brantwood, contain many pages of similar calligraphy. His first Latin and French declensions are printed in pencil; at the age of seven he wrote the first copies of his "Harry and Lucy" in this way, pencilled first and penned over, thinking he was an author making a book. Many children do, but not with his tenacity and taste. In 1828 (age nine) he had brought this self-imposed education to something like perfection with the tiny "print" of "Eudosia," page after page showing wonderful steadiness of hand and eye; and at the end of that year he executed the masterpiece of childish ingenuity which he described in the autobiographical "Harry and Lucy"—the poem in "double print," all the down-strokes doubled: "And it was most beautifully done, you may be sure," says the saucy infant, not untruly. Some of his early mineral catalogues, begun at this time, appear to have been continued later, though the difference can hardly be told from any improvement in the penmanship.

Meanwhile his ordinary running hand was a shocking scribble, but in the middle of it he seems to have pulled himself up continually, or he was pulled up by an overlooking mother, and the wild scrawl becomes tidy and neat. I suspect that his earlier home lessons did not include much copybook work. He developed his own writing like other precocious boys and girls, though there is some trace of teaching at the very start. But after 1830 he exchanged, perhaps at the instance of superior orders, his "print" for copperplate; the "Iteriad" (1831) is fair-copied in a large, regular round-hand, and the Tour poems of 1833 are in a smaller, less anxious, but more formed business style. One sees the father's influence coming in, and all his letters to the old-fashioned business man show the obvious desire to please. "My dear papa" is flourished around in the most approved writing-master's manner, and "John Ruskin" at the end is in black letter, finishing a sheet of impeccable commercial-hand, in which the free-and-easy wording contrasts quite ludicrously with the formal writing.

It was only, or chiefly, to his father that such letters were written. For his mother he had another hand; for his friends and for himself an assortment of varying scribbles. But there, I think, comes out one of the leading points in his character. To be a man of strong thought and will, innovator in art, science, politics, morality, and religion, there never was such a chameleon, always ready to colour his mind after his surroundings; all things to all men. To the opponent he was an opponent; to the admirer an admirer, without at once testing the sincerity of the admiration or the source of the opposition. It was the cause of many regretted incidents in public life, but in private life the ground of his charm. Nobody who approached him in kindness failed of being met more than half way, while impertinence and rudeness, however unintended, struck a discord at once. So much of a chameleon he was, that he could persuade himself into liking, for the moment, and for the sake of his companion on the spot, many a thing he had denounced or derided; and sometimes he could do curious things out of the same unrecognised sympathy. Once after a lecture, leading Taglioni to her carriage in the midst of a crowd of onlookers, I saw him cross the London pavement with an old-world minuet-step, hardly conscious, I am sure, of the quaint homage he was paying to the great dancer he had admired in his boyhood.

Those flourishes of the pen for his father's pleasure never appear in his own private scribble. His ideas came too quickly to leave him time for ornament, and he had no need to idle in dots and circles between the phrases. His spelling was always good, but he never stopped to punctuate; a dash was enough for most kinds of stops. Letters of 1845 and 1852 are curious for the underlining or interlining of long passages, not, apparently, for emphasis; possibly to mark sections of these general epistles home for copying. In all this early writing there is an effort to keep pace with the flow of thoughts, even in the verse; he wrote so much that mere economy of time must have driven him at speed to the shortest way of getting the matter down. In diaries of the period are some shorthand notes which I take to be his; but if he ever tried shorthand he dropped it soon.

The model upon which Ruskin's usual handwriting was at last formed was his mother's. It is perhaps a commonplace to say that we all betray in our writing the greatest personal influence of our earlier years. While penning this very page, a letter has just been brought to me which at first glance put me in mind of a friend long since dead: it is from his school-master. Not Ruskin's father nor any of his teachers appear to have influenced him like his mother. Her more deliberate writing was extremely elegant; rather small, moderately sloping, with a pretty combination of curve and angle, and capitals carefully formed. In the note-book in which he composed verses from 1831 to 1838 you can see the development of his hand from a spiky and cramped boyish scribble to the more open and slightly more upright style of 1835 and 1836, the year of his matriculation at Oxford; a neat and educated penmanship, easy to read and regular, though differing slightly from day to day in size and slope. The backward switch of his y and forward toss of the tail to his angular t are already there; and the dainty shaping of capitals, based on Italic or Elzevir print, like his mother's, with suggestion of the sÉrif in a little elegant curl to H and F. Instead of spasmodic reform, as earlier, there is perfect steadiness for page after page.

At Oxford his writing became rather larger and looser, perhaps from Latin exercises, in which indubitable distinctness is required. The "Poetry of Architecture" fair copy can be seen in a facsimile in the new Library Edition; the draft scribbled in a sketch-book during Oxford vacation is reproduced (p. 141); you note the tendency to round the foot of the down-stroke and the length of the greater limbs of the letters. He used to tell his secretary to take no notice of a letter in which h and l looked like n and e.

Leaving Oxford and writing hard at "Modern Painters" earlier volumes, which cost a great deal of pen-work, he went back to the smaller hand of voluminous authors, and the constant attention to one subject gave it regularity. But the letters of the time are naturally more impulsive; indeed, in 1849 there are bits which prefigure his latest style in its upright and loose sketchiness. From 1849 or 1850 for some years the chief work was "Stones of Venice," and the note-books and studies for this are fairly represented by the page on "Sta. Maria dell' Orto." This is the earlier "Modern Painters" manner. You see the growing freedom, but it is not yet wild and whirling.

The difference is shown at a glance in comparing this with the sample of his well-known later hand. It was by the end of the 'fifties that the regular and tight spikiness began finally to disappear and give place to far-flung curves. The great turn in his life which took place about 1860 showed itself in his penmanship as well as in his thought, and the final style became formed, which, with merely the differences of better or worse, lasted until all writing was over. After the summer of 1889 it was at very rare intervals that he took pen in hand. For some time before his death by mere disuse he seemed to have lost the very power of writing at all. At last, one day, being asked for his signature, he set down with shaking fingers the first few letters of it, and broke off with "Dear me! I seem to have forgotten how to write my own name!" And he wrote no more.

There have been authors and journalists whose printed work, no doubt, exceeds his in quantity; but in reckoning the sum total of his penmanship we must not forget that every printed page meant, for him, several written pages, especially in earlier books; also, that he was a conscientious correspondent, and every day wrote many letters. It may be set off against this that he sometimes used the help of an amanuensis, though he rarely dictated, and it was only when he had hammered his subject into shape that he had it copied for the printer. Occasionally in late years he let it be type-written, but most of his work was done before the age of type-writers. He would use the most unlikely copyists, as when he got the little girls of his Brantwood class to write out his notes. All he asked was a distinct hand and a docile scribe. His secretary, like the secretary in "Gil Blas," did everything but write, and sometimes was packing parcels or sweeping leaves while the valet was copying lectures on Greek art. Some early MSS. are in the hand of George Hobbs; many of the later were written by Crawley; none by Baxter. At other times he requisitioned the young ladies; it was for this that Mrs. Severn formed her large, round, upright hand, and Miss Anderson had many a copying task, as well as others whose work will be valued by collectors for its corrections from the master's pen, like the quartz which holds the sparkle of gold.

But he taught them to write distinctly—that was his great requirement. Once, on a sleepless night, he called me, with many apologies, to write from dictation. Naturally I wrote fast to get my job done and return to my slumbers; but he continually pulled me up with, "I'm sure you're scribbling. Let me see if I can read it." Out on the fells, taking the dip and strike of strata, or among the cathedrals making notes and measurements, he would often warn his assistant of the folly of hasty scrawling. "I've lost so much time and trouble by my now bad writing," he used to say.

It has been told already how he was struck at first by Miss Francesca Alexander's handwriting before he had seen her drawing, which afterwards he praised so highly. The distinct neatness of her beautiful calligraphy appealed to his love for missals and the lost art, as he feared, of the true scribe. But of queer and quaint writing he was impatient. Words were to be read, not played with in decorative affectations. The baser sort of business-hand roused him to scorn, and he had a sharp eye for the characteristics of a cranky or insincere correspondent. When postcards came in, like many others he did not approve of them and never used them. One of his household sometimes got postcards written in Runes, and, seeing the mystic inscriptions, he wanted to know why. "So that people may not read it," was the answer. "What's the use of that?" replied Ruskin. "Isn't language given you to conceal your thoughts?"

[For further illustrations of his handwriting, see his earliest "printing" at seven or eight, with his latest current style, actual size, on page 108; a pencil scribble at ten or eleven, page 171; his neater writing of the same period, on page 199; his ordinary careful penmanship about 1835, on page 109; and his looser final hand, pages 163 and 174.]