V
RUSKIN'S "CASHBOOK"

So it is lettered on the back; but his titles, as every one knows, are far-fetched. There are some accounts in this volume, but most of it is filled with a diary of the tour abroad in 1882, and subsequent entries, very neatly written; the red lines for £ s. d. serving to keep the manuscript within margins, just like print.

Ruskin's journals, I understand, are not to be published. The bulk of their contents—landscape descriptions and various notes on natural history, architecture, and many different subjects—have been worked into his books. The remainder consists of daily jottings about the weather, always important to one whose chief pleasure was in scenery, with fragmentary hints of his occupations or travels, and still more fragmentary mention of persons. They are not exactly memoranda; still less the memoirs of a literary man, written with one eye on the public. They are mere soliloquies of the moment, gossip of himself to himself before breakfast.

While he lived, though I had often occasion to refer to these journals, I never felt quite at liberty to open this "Cashbook," with its private notes on a period when I was practically alone with him; his valet, Baxter, was also of the party, but at meals and at work, on walks and drives, he had usually to put up with my company. He was exceedingly and unfailingly kind, but exacting; it would have needed great self-confidence to be sure of his good opinion. But now that these papers require it, to paint his portrait as he was at that time, I have taken advantage of Mrs. Severn's kind leave; and in continuing the story of the tour I can sometimes add to my reminiscences Ruskin's impressions on the spot as recorded by himself.

From Geneva we went up to Sallenches (September 9, 1882), hoping to see the Alps, in spite of the smoke-cloud. He was at the moment thinking and talking chiefly of "artistic geology," if one may coin a parallel to "artistic anatomy"—the old subject of his "Modern Painters," vol. iv. In the chapter on the Old Road I said healthily interested, for any work on Nature was good for him personally, and this tour was for the sake of health after long and recurrent attacks of illness.

In those days, and to the few who cared much more for himself than his mission, St. George and St. Benedict were the enemies; his Guild and all the worries connected with it, and his ethico-socio-political meditations, mixed with much wandering into Greek and mediÆval mythology, always meant mischief to him. So after the visit to CÎteaux and the birthplace of St. Bernard, it was good to see him eager for the mountains, and looking out for well-known twists in the limestone strata, and clefts and cascades, points of view and distant glimpses, all the way up the valley. If only the smoke-cloud would lift, and a spell of fair weather would tempt him to linger among the Alps, hammering rocks and sketching cottages, the object of the journey would be gained.

There was a horrid new road being made high up on the flank of his favourite mountain, the Brezon, whose top he had wanted to possess. At Cluses, what were those sticks in the meadow? I asked; and learnt that they marked out the long-intended railway. A railway in the valley of the Arve! It meant to him simply the end of all that made the glory and grandeur of this classic ground. But he was partly comforted by the thought that after all it might not be, or, at least, not in his time. Maglans and the Nant d'Arpenaz were still as Turner painted them; and though his old familiar resting-place at St. Martin was no longer open as an inn, we could stay across the valley at Sallenches, within easy walks of many favourite haunts.

The next day was Sunday, which he usually spent more quietly than other days. We took the walk his father and he used to take on many Sundays passed in that neighbourhood, up a glen to the south of the village. In his diary that day he began an analysis of the Psalms—he had been taking them for his morning Bible-readings; and I find that at St. Cergues, on the 5th, he had thankfully noted the arrival of a telegram with good news from home, just as he was reading me the 104th Psalm. He did not hold "family prayers" as a habit, but sometimes when he was delighted with a nice chapter he couldn't keep it to himself.

Early next morning Mont Blanc was clear, though soon clouded (the diary is quoted in the "Storm-cloud" lecture); and then, in pursuance of the geology study he had begun he set to work "to do a little Deucalion," but opened Job instead, at xi. 16, and read on "with comfort" the "glorious natural history" of the old book. Next day he noted the second speech of Zophar as "the leading piece of political economy" which he ought to have quoted in "Fors."

In spite of the dull weather we had a good ramble up the valley he called "Norton's Glen," from the remembrance of walks there with Professor Charles Eliot Norton; and though sketching was little use, he was happy in the contemplation of boulders. It was in coming down from that walk (if I remember right; the diary does not mention it) that I got such a scolding for proposing to extract a fossil from a stone in a vineyard terrace-wall: "You bad boy! Have you no respect for property?" or words to that effect; and I had to leave the specimen in situ. But next day I "scored" with a careful drawing of the Nant d'Arpenaz, disentangling the contorted beds of limestone; and in the diary is a copy from my sketch, a subject, he said, he had often tried in vain. On the way back to Sallenches we looked at the old HÔtel du Mont Blanc at St. Martin, which gives a title to one of the chapters of "PrÆterita," and need not be described here; but he was so taken with it and its memories that he asked whether it was for sale, and really formed a plan of buying it, and coming to live there. The diary gives various reasons, ending with one of the oddest; I had made some verses about the place, rather on the lines his talk had suggested, but ending with more optimism, and these, too, he notes, contributed to the "leadings" which pointed him to a new home in Savoy. A little later there came a letter addressed to "MM. Ruskin et Collingwood"—"Quite like a firm," he said; "I wonder what they think we're travelling in; but I hope we'll always be partners"—the terms of the offer I forget, but they did not seem practicable, or Coniston might have known him no more.

At least, it was possible, and it would have been good in many ways for him; but there were ties to think of. Next day, after rain in the valley and snow on the Varens, and swallows gathering in crowds along the eaves and cornices of the square, there was a grand clearance at sunset, and he wrote to Miss Beever the note printed in "Hortus Inclusus" about seeing Mont Blanc—"a sight which always redeems me to what I am capable of at my poor little best, and to what loves and memories are most precious to me. So I write to you, one of the few true loves left. The snow has fallen fresh on the hills, and it makes me feel that I must soon be seeking shelter at Brantwood and the Thwaite." And yet he was greatly tempted to stay. On the splendid morning which followed he wrote in his journal, "Perfect light on the Dorons, and the Varens a miracle of aerial majesty. I—happy in a more solemn way than of old. Read a bit of Ezra and referred to Haggai ii. 9—'In this place will I give peace.'"

Letters, however, were expected at Geneva, and with many plans for Sixt and Chamouni he turned his back on Sallenches for the time and had a "marvellous drive through the valley of Cluse; C—— sectionising (making notes of limestone strata) all the way. Divine walk to old spring under Brezon." Then he reproves himself for his annoyance at the "plague-wind" and tiresome letters at Geneva, "for I shall try to remember the Aiguille de Bionassay of the 13th at evening and the Nant d'Arpenaz looked back at yesterday morning—with my morning walk once more among the dew above Sallenches—for ever and a day."

Without keeping constantly before one's mind his passionate love of scenery it is impossible to put a right estimate on much that he has written. There are comparatively few people whose chief pleasure is in taking a walk and looking at the country, without any notion of sport or games to eke out the interest. It is true that he sketched and wrote, but his pleasure was in seeing. It was his admiration of Nature that had brought him to admire Art in his youth, and I think it is not too much to say that Art was always a secondary thing to him personally. The desire to see Art healthily and nobly practised made him study the life of the craftsman and the craftsman's surroundings, spiritual and material. The material needs of Victorian society pressed upon him "Unto this Last" and "St. George"; the spiritual needs drove him back upon ancient religious ideals, "The Queen of the Air" and "St. Benedict." All these various strands of thought were closely woven together in his life, but from the beginning to the end the love for natural scenery was the core of the cable. You gather already from this "Cashbook" that a few days among the Alps had quite restored him to physical strength, and given him hopes and happiness.

On Saturday, September 16, we left Geneva for Annecy, intending more limestone geology, and thenceforward had many days' driving with the "Mephistopheles coachman and the Black Dog," as he put it at first. Later on he became enthusiastic over the same coachman for his capital driving and care of his horses, and because of the story of the dog Tom, whom, the man said, he had rescued from death at the hands of an American owner at Nice. Tom, with his spiked fur collar, was usually absent at the start. The driver said he was shut up so that he might not annoy Messieurs; but he always appeared, was scolded, and forgiven, and petted for the rest of the way. Affection for animals appealed to Ruskin, and in France one sees much of it. On one of these drives we stopped for lunch out of doors before a wayside inn. To this lunch there came a little dog, two cats, and a pet sheep, and shared our wine, bread, and Savoy sponge-cakes. The sheep at last got to putting its feet on the table, and the landlady rushed out and carried him off in her arms into the house; but Ruskin, I think, would quite as soon have let the creature stay. At Annecy the landlord told me stories of his big St. Bernard dog, how he was defended from other dogs by the cat, and how sometimes they quarrelled, and then the dog had to go and sit on the mat out of doors until the cat had forgiven him; how the cat also was in the habit of catching swallows on the wing, and bringing them in to show—as, certainly, cats do with the mice they catch—and then she would let them go uninjured. This delighted Ruskin at dinner, and may have suggested the dream which I see he records in his "Cashbook"—"dreamt of a fine old lion who was quite good if he wasn't kept prisoner; but when I had got him out, I didn't know what to do with him." The parting with Tom and his master I have mentioned elsewhere—how he gave the man twenty francs for a bonne main and two francs over for a bonne patte, he said, to the dog!

At Annecy, in the pleasant HÔtel Verdun, he confessed himself already stronger, and fit for anything but proofs and business letters; but the "plague-cloud" still hung over the view. He noted that the smoke from the factory chimneys could not be told from the clouds except by its density, and mixed with the mist so as to throw a pall over the lake from the town to the Tournette—the great mountain of the neighbourhood above Talloires. But still he did not see that the black, ragged, dirty weather was caused by the smoke, though he compared it with a London November. The nearer scenery was visible and beautiful. The blue lake, always blue, with a light of its own, and Talloires, with pleasant associations and unspoiled surroundings of most romantic character, charmed him as of old. We drove there the first Sunday; he took me up to EugÈne Sue's house and then on to the cascade, two and a half hours' walk, and then sauntered among the vineyards and along the bay, under the plane-tree avenues, driving home in an open carriage, and said he had not spent such an idle day for ten years. Next day we "did" the Gorge of the Fier, and discussed the possible causes of this great ravine, through which the river plunges so unexpectedly and, one would think, unnecessarily. Then to Talloires again, and planned return for work.

Meanwhile he had made appointments in Italy. He talked of a rush to Rome and hasty visits to Lucca and Florence, coming back soon to the Alps. But this turned out to be a longer journey than he had meant. His seal-motto was "To-day," and the business of the moment was always the most important with him; and so the Italian tour was prolonged to nearly two months. It ended in his catching a thorough cold at Pisa through sketching in November winds, and in his longing for the clear air of the Alps again, before returning to London for the lecture he had promised to give in December. This was the lecture announced as "Crystallography," but delivered as "Cistercian Architecture," about which he said, joking at his own expense, that it would probably have come to much the same thing whatever the title had been. I did not quite see why he should lecture on either; but he declared himself quite well, and as we had dropped crystallography—the chief subject before the tour—for cathedrals and abbeys in Italy, he shut himself up at Pisa, cold and all, to write his lecture. Then having, as he thought, mastered it, we ran north. He wanted to stay at St. Michel, a favourite place on the Mont Cenis line, but high, and likely to be bleak in November for a man with a bad cold, I thought—very possibly mistaken. I took tickets for Aix-les-Bains, and we had our only quarrel on that trip. I felt particularly guilty as he recounted to me, in an injured tone, the horrors of Aix, the one place he abominated, and the beauties of St. Michel, while the train climbed the Dora valley to Bardonecchia in fairly fine weather.

On the French side it was deep snow and bitter weather as we ran down to Aix. The next day was delightful, but I always shirked the recollection of my misdemeanour until I found how his diary-entries ignored it. "The cold's quite gone! Friday in glowing sunshine, Pisa to Turin; Saturday in frightful damp and cold, Turin to Aix; but quite easy days both. Sun coming out now. Dent de Bourget over mist and low cloud, very lovely, as I dressed."

The next entry I copy because it shows that he was not as entirely hostile to railways as the casual reader imagines. Writing of the ride to Annecy he says in the "Cashbook": "An entirely divine railway-coupÉ drive from Aix by the river gorges; one enchantment of golden trees and ruby hills." But it was a splendid day. In clumsier phrasing I wrote home of "all the prettiest autumn colours that ever were made out of remnants of old rainbows patched up into a gala dress for the world."

At Annecy we delayed only long enough for me to get rooms in the HÔtel de l'Abbaye at Talloires, where we stayed from the 14th to the 22nd in stormy, snowy weather. He was quite well at first, and proud of leading the way down the steep mountain-tracks—well known to him—in the dark after long walks; but some days we could not get out at all. I sat writing by the log fire in the dining-room; he preferring his bedroom, with what glimpses could be got of the lake through snowstorms; and in the night the wind howled through deserted corridors—for the place was once a real monastery—until it became quite uncanny. His bad dreams had gone, but he could not get exercise enough to sleep well. The lecture was variously rewritten, monks and myths chasing one another through his brain, instead of the crystal-cleavages and rock-forms he had set out to study. St. Benedict had been too strong for us, and the ghost of St. Bernard of Talloires (or of Menthon, not the St. Bernard of his former pilgrimage, but a tenth-century hermit, whose cave is still shown) who saw "not the Lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and Aosta," and founded the hospice that bears his name—as Ruskin would fain have founded, in another way, a refuge for those who fall in the nineteenth-century struggle for life; but fell himself in attempting it.

I did not know at the time that he was meditating a return to his Professorship at Oxford. He kept that a secret, and sent me off on a special mission to draw Alps in snow. Rejoining him at Geneva I found him in the depths of misery, with the weather bad and his work going too slowly forward, and the glamour all gone out of his "mother town" of Geneva, "or what was once Geneva," he said, ruined by touristry and luxury into a mere suburb of Paris, which was a suburb of hell. So through cold and flooded France he took his way homeward. At Paris, HÔtel Meurice was no longer what it had been; the pneumatic clock in his room, with its minute-gun of a tick and a jerk, got on his nerves, and he demanded of the bewildered waiter that it should be stopped. The Tuileries were in ruins, placarded for sale as building material. In the bookshops he could not buy the books he sought, but, as it seemed, only photographs of actresses. The Louvre, even, in such surroundings gave him only suggestions of irritation. And it was a thankful secretary who saw him safely over the Channel and back to Herne Hill on the first Saturday in December.

But the journey was not a failure. At Lucca he made some of his best drawings, and the descriptive passages in "PrÆterita" and elsewhere, written on that tour, or from notes then made, are among his finest; and he was able to write in his "Cashbook" on December 3: "Slept well, and hope to be fit for lecture to-morrow; very happy in showing our drawings and complete sense of rest after three months' tossing." Early in the next year he found himself able to take up his old work at Oxford, and for awhile—but only for awhile—it seemed that the storm-cloud of his life had cleared away.