XII
RUSKIN'S LIBRARY

In any strange house, while you wait for your host or hostess, how much you gather of their tastes and ways from the books on the table and in the shelves! You cannot help noticing either the presence or the absence of literature, and you do not need to open the volumes to guess what sort of reading the good people like. Well-known bindings and styles of binding betray them at once; and unless they are abnormally tidy their pet books are sure to be somewhere in the room they use. Of course, one must discount the evidence of a cover which too obviously matches the furniture; and if you are an author, and expected to call, be not too lifted up on spying your own book gracefully displayed. You may assume that working books, professional tools, are in the workshop; and there are few houses without a certain litter of ephemeral printing, magazines and library volumes, necessary for intelligent conversation. But if the people read, you will soon know it, and learn at a glance much about their tastes and characters.

When you know your friends well enough to browse among their books you learn still more. The way they cut their pages, skipping or plodding; and if they ever do scribble on the margins, what they have marked; and which books are much used, and which are exiled to top shelves; and how they are kept—unbound, or perhaps all too beautifully bound; these things tell you more than an autobiography would, more than many years of ordinary acquaintance.

Ruskin's library was scattered all over his house—and though he has been dead these three years, and for many years earlier made little use of his books, the bulk of them still remain pretty much as he left them. At one time, when he was busy upon literary work, he was continually buying, and every corner was heaped with new purchases and old lots weeded out to be given away or sold; but the net result of his choice and taste, what he personally cared for and kept, can be seen by a visitor at Brantwood—the books for constant use in the study, and favourite reading in his bedroom, and the rest dispersed about the place. Most of these books I remember in just these same places twenty-five years ago, or more; so that in taking you into his study I am showing you the workshop where he wrote "Oxford Lectures" and "Fors Clavigera," and handling the tools he used.

Art and Political Economy were the main subjects of those lectures and letters, and I suppose the public assumes that these were the subjects most interesting to him. Whether you are of those who think him great on Art but astray on Economics, or of the later school who have resolved that he never knew anything of Art, but had real insight and foresight in matters social and political, you would expect to find evidences of both—rows of reference volumes, and all the standard works. But they are not here; Art and Political Economy are conspicuous by their absence.

Perhaps you will query my sweeping statement as you take down a volume of Crowe and Cavalcaselle from the "history bookcase" to the right of the fireplace: but see, it is only a stray volume!—and open it; only a few pages are cut, and those considerably bescribbled with dissent. Ought he to have known by heart these authorities on Italian painting? It might have saved him from an error or two, and from some useless discussions; but he knew the pictures themselves, and his business was not to write handbooks, but to bring his readers directly into touch with the generalised human view he took of painting. There is, however, the "Dictionnaire de l'Architecture" of Viollet-le-Duc, much used in parts, for he alternately admired the research and quarrelled with the conclusions of the great French architect, whose name he persisted in spelling "Violet." There are some very successful artists whose perspective is always wrong; and others whose drawing can always be corrected by an art student; but they can paint pictures! Ruskin's work is full of little faults; de minimis non curat; but he got at the root of the matter, mostly, and he could make you see it. All the tinkering criticism about his mistakes only shows that he thought "first-hand," so to say, and wrote with a full pen.

This bookcase is chiefly made up of Carlyle, Gibbon, Alison, Milman, and the old standards, of course thickly annotated. There are also some volumes of Mr. W. S. Lilly, but you may open them and find no sign of life; Ruskin may have read but he has not marked. There is his old copy of Lord Lindsay's "Christian Art" (1847), reviewed by him in the June Quarterly of that year. It is stamped with "Mr. Murray's compliments," but that must refer to the previous owner. You see his name in queer cramped pencil "Burgon: Oriel," with Greek e—Burgon of the Greek vase, the High Churchman, whose dark thin face and bright eyes, and humorous contempt for all "doxies" but his own, make him so well remembered by Oxford men of the passing generation. There is something odd in Ruskin's early excursion into primitive Italian art being, as it were, "vice Burgon, resigned." Then there is "Roman Antiquities," by Alexander Adam, LL.D., 1819, doubly ear-marked by "John J. Ruskin," and kept for his father's sake, and for the sake of his father's old school-master. Ruskin, at all times, was open to the appeal of associations; all his judgments about men, women and things must be corrected by the personal equation, and without his biography one can never quite rightly appraise his works.

The "Bible of Amiens" and some passages in the latest lectures hint that he was really interested in Anglo-Saxons and Irish Saints. There is the Venerable Bede, evidently studied, and the life of St. Patrick—you know he was always respectful to the patron of Ireland—but not a leaf cut! There is J. R. Green's "Making of England," appreciatively annotated, and Sharon Turner, much marked and cut down in a reckless way to fit the shelf. A much worse example of this chopping of books is Westwood's "Miniatures and Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS.," a most valuable folio, from which Ruskin has sawn the top edge and ripped out all the best plates. As in the case of his mediÆval missals, scribbled on the margin by his irreverent pen, he would say that his books were for use and not for curiosities. These plates were ripped out, not for wanton mischief or in vulgar carelessness, but to show to his classes at lectures. The margins were cut, so that the books might be put away in shelves or cabinets, clearing the workshop of a busy man, instead of leaving them about to be mishandled and dog-eared; for the best of housemaids cannot be expected always to treat the master's litter as if they loved it. None of these volumes are so damaged that a little vamping would not set them right; though of course they would not be the tall copies prized by bibliomaniacs. But how many of these tall copies are read by their buyers?

On the other hand he bound some volumes much more sumptuously than they deserved. On this shelf there is a very splendid tome, lettered on the back "Swisse Histor.," evidently bound abroad, which on opening you find to be Gaullieur's "La Suisse Historique," much used for intended work on Swiss towns; and another grand, thick, bevelled, gilded, crushed-morocco series lettered "Hephaestus," which turns out to be "Les Ouvriers des Deux Mondes" (Paris, 1857)—the only sample we can find of the Political Economy we were looking for. Nor is there anything of the sort elsewhere in the room.

On the other side of the fireplace is a nest of shelves filling the corner; you see it in the picture of Ruskin's study, above his armchair. These shelves are full of maps and scraps, presented poems at the top and other gleanings awaiting removal when he should next put his room in order; old Baedekers and chess-books lower down, with the set of chessmen and the little travelling board handy for a game after tea; and boxes filled with the British Museum reproductions of those bonny Greek coins, thick, rich and bossy, like nuggets come to life or fossils in metal.

Over the fire are no books, but, as many pictures of the Brantwood study have shown, a della Robbia relief, replacing the Turner which once hung there; and the stuffed kingfisher, Cyprus pottery and figurines, a bit or two of colour in Japanese enamel and Broseley lustre, and in the middle of the mantelpiece the Swiss girl which we have photographed. It is a brown old wood-carving, nearly a foot high, with the vineyard pruning-hook (now broken away) and the hotte or creel full of vine-leaves (they use the word hot for a pannier or creel in the Cumberland dialect also); and though the drapery is commonplace—kerchief, corset and skirt—there is something of the fine school of sculpture about the lines, not unworthy of a good Nuremberg bronze. I do not know how or whence this figure came to the family, but it was old Mrs. Ruskin's before it was brought to Brantwood, and here it is, so to say, the very centrepiece of the house. When he sat writing at his usual place and looked up, his eye would light on it first of all, before rising to the Florentine Madonna above or wandering to the Turners on the wall to the right, or out of window to the lake and mountains and Coniston Old Hall opposite. What has he not said about the beauty of the peasant-girl in the fields as compared with the proud ideals of classic art?—that the painting we most need is to paint cheeks red with health, and so on? Here was always the reminder of that bedrock principle of his thought. You know how George Borrow describes a writer who used to find his inspiration in a queer portrait over the fireplace? This, I think—though I never heard Ruskin say so, and perhaps it is rather the symbol than the cause—gives us the keynote of his study and the work that went on in it.

The rest of his library represents not so much his professed occupation as what you might call his hobbies. To the left, within reach of the writing-table, all is Botany, and not very modern botany either. Beyond the cases full of Turners in sliding frames, and drawers of business papers, all is Geology and Natural History, mostly out of date, or shall we call it "classical"? There is Mineralogy, old Jameson, and Cloiseaux, gorgeously bound, and Miller, and perhaps a larger number of the handbook class, in French and English, and of more modern date, than in any other department. There are his old friends Forbes and Phillips on glaciers and geology, and some more recent three-volume treatises with uncomplimentary scribblings on their margins. There is Yarrell's "Birds"—he never could endure the cuts; and three sets of Bewick. One of the most used is Donovan's "British Insects," eight volumes, with coloured plates.

Opposite you find more botany; the nineteen massive folios of "FlorÆ DanicÆ Descriptio," the twenty-seven volumes of the old, old Botanical Magazine, with the beautiful plates of Sowerby, the three dozen volumes and index of Sowerby's "English Botany," the six volumes of Baxter's "Island Plants," the nine volumes of Lecoq's "GÉographie Botanique," and so forth; all showing his purely artistic and "unscientific" interest in natural history. Modern anatomy and evolution were nothing to him; what he cared about was the beauty of the creatures and the sentiments that clustered round them in mythology and poetry.

Of poetry and belles-lettres he had a great assortment, as might be expected, and mostly in volumes interesting for their history, though not chosen as rare editions. He kept his grandfather's "Burns," his father's "Byron," his own college "Aristophanes," with copious lecture-notes and sketches of the Poetry of Architecture in blank spaces. He had Morris's "Earthly Paradise," "from his friend the author"; a "LinnÆus" that had belonged to Ray, the great Cumbrian botanist; "A Dyaloge of Syr Thomas More Knyghte" (1530), with the neat autograph, "ffrancis Bacons booke," apparently that of the famous Lord Bacon; and, of course, his Scott manuscripts have been often described by visitors to Brantwood. One little token of unexpected reverence for a name which hasty readers might think was not to be spoken in Ruskin's study, is a tiny duodecimo in yellow silk—"Dialogo di Antonio Manetti," about the size, form, and measurements of Dante's Hell—inscribed apparently by the great artist "di Michelagnol Buonarroti."

Greek authors, and a few translations like Jowett's "Plato"; Missals and Bibles in mediÆval Greek and Latin; a few old printed books—"Danthe" (1491), and a couple more "fourteeners"—but only on subjects in which he was interested, such as heraldry—Randle Holmes (1688), and Guillim (1638), coloured by Ruskin and much marked; Douglas's "Virgil" (1553), Chapman's "Homer," the original "Cowley" of 1668, various copies of "Poliphilo," together with standard poets, complete what may be called the bric-À-brac of the shelves above the mineral collection. Some readers of Omar Khayyam may be interested in his dissent to stanza 34, and energetic assent to 21, 25, 45 and 46, scored on the margins in the edition of 1879; and some of his artistic readers, will they be sympathetic or scandalised at his collection of Rodolph Toepffer's Genevese caricatures? There is very little about Art in all these lines of books: Millingen's "Greek Vases," and the still greater work of Lenormant and De Witte are there indeed, but the only other art books are those of two old friends, Prout's "Sketches at Home and Abroad," and Harding's "Elementary Art."

Some of the books he used for special work are in other parts of the house, and many must have been sold or given away when they were done with. A number of those he gave away are in a case at the Coniston Museum, from which we photograph a fine Nuremberg Chronicle side by side with the tiny "Horace" he used to carry in his pocket on journeys abroad. In his bedroom he kept a great deal of favourite reading for wakeful nights—Carlyle and Helps, Scott and Byron, Shakespeare and Spenser, Miss Edgeworth and Madame de Genlis, and the books of his youth, a most curious collection of dingy antiquity, with not a few French novels: and elsewhere are the ponderous tomes from which he gleaned. His work was not done without much reference to books; but, after all, it was never compilation. Perhaps it is a truism, but this look round Ruskin's library gives it some freshness and force—that the writing which makes its mark in the world is not the second-hand, patchwork sort, however laborious and however learned. He looked at Nature, and wrote down what he saw; he felt deeply, and wrote what he felt.