James David Symon
John Ruskin, his homes and haunts
language
( Jan. 20, 2013)
PEEFACE
THIS essay is obviously an outline; it could not be otherwise when the story of eighty years had to be told in eighty pages. The reader will find little that is new save an anecdote here and there; but the treatment, as regards locality, has at least the freshness of its attempt to describe places and scenes not as they may appear to the independent observer to-day, but as they appeared to Ruskin himself.
The principal authority has therefore been the works of John Ruskin, in their compass. Quotations not directly acknowledged in the text are from Prceterita. Elsewhere the sources are indicated. The author also acknowledges much valuable help from the biographical notes of Mr. Cook and Mr. Wedder-burn in the Library Edition of Ruskin, as well as from the short biographies of Mr. Collingwood and Mr. Frederic Harrison. On many critical points he has consulted, always with illumination, even where complete agreement was denied him, the invaluable monograph of Mrs. Meynell, and that of Mr. J. M. Mather. In justice to himself, he may perhaps confess that these pages were passed for press before he read Dean Kitchin's " Ruskin at Oxford."
Cordial thanks are due to Mr. John Leith for his kindness in lending for reproduction a memorable letter of Ruskin's.
J. D. S.
Til
JOHN RUSKIN
CHAPTER I
PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD—HUNTER STREET AND HERNE HILL
AT the birth of John Ruskin, the Fates that spin the destinies of Art and Letters must have sung harmoniously to their spindles. For seldom has a man of genius been so favoured by fortune as the child who was born to John James Ruskin and his wife Margaret on February 8, 1819, at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square. An only child, he was from the beginning marked out as one apart: his forbears were no ordinary people; his training was to be peculiar; above all, he was to be spared that which is at once the handicap and the spur of great abilities, a fight with adversity. He was, it is true, to become in after years a combatant among combatants, to fight gallantly for truth, and to pass away grieving that the complete victory he had sought was denied him; but in the early years no cloud obscured his growing powers. He grew up like some rare and curious flower in a garden closed and sheltered from the storms of the world, nurtured
certainly with a strange spiritual rigour, on his mother's part; but that high austerity, unknown to the children of a more favoured age, was tempered and qualified by the humanity and culture of his father.
Between them, John Ruskin's parents exercised upon their son forces differing in degree and in direction, and the resultant was the critic and stylist. A third force was that of surroundings, in a merely topographical sense, and in a certain sense no other English writer has been so much the product and the expression of that which lay about his path. For the most part the dwelling-places of men of genius have been an accident; for John Ruskin, as the event proved, they were an essential. It is said that " home-keeping youth has ever homely wits." John Ruskin, a home-keeper as few men have been, in the respect that he continued to live with his parents even until manhood was well advanced, managed to disprove the proverb. But this close tie to the parental roof and to the society of his father and mother, although a tether, was a tether of elastic that stretched first over England and Scotland, and afterwards across the continent of Europe. The Ruskins were the last to cling to the ideal method of travel, that of the post-chaise, and their gentle and joyous passages throughout the length and breadth of the land gave the boy a temper and an experience that are inseparably interwoven with his character. Ruskin is pa?' excellence the English writer whose career and development are best illuminated by a study of his Homes and Haunts
THIS essay is obviously an outline; it could not be otherwise when the story of eighty years had to be told in eighty pages. The reader will find little that is new save an anecdote here and there; but the treatment, as regards locality, has at least the freshness of its attempt to describe places and scenes not as they may appear to the independent observer to-day, but as they appeared to Ruskin himself.
The principal authority has therefore been the works of John Ruskin, in their compass. Quotations not directly acknowledged in the text are from Prceterita. Elsewhere the sources are indicated. The author also acknowledges much valuable help from the biographical notes of Mr. Cook and Mr. Wedder-burn in the Library Edition of Ruskin, as well as from the short biographies of Mr. Collingwood and Mr. Frederic Harrison. On many critical points he has consulted, always with illumination, even where complete agreement was denied him, the invaluable monograph of Mrs. Meynell, and that of Mr. J. M. Mather. In justice to himself, he may perhaps confess that these pages were passed for press before he read Dean Kitchin's " Ruskin at Oxford."
Cordial thanks are due to Mr. John Leith for his kindness in lending for reproduction a memorable letter of Ruskin's.
J. D. S.
Til
JOHN RUSKIN
CHAPTER I
PARENTAGE AND CHILDHOOD—HUNTER STREET AND HERNE HILL
AT the birth of John Ruskin, the Fates that spin the destinies of Art and Letters must have sung harmoniously to their spindles. For seldom has a man of genius been so favoured by fortune as the child who was born to John James Ruskin and his wife Margaret on February 8, 1819, at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square. An only child, he was from the beginning marked out as one apart: his forbears were no ordinary people; his training was to be peculiar; above all, he was to be spared that which is at once the handicap and the spur of great abilities, a fight with adversity. He was, it is true, to become in after years a combatant among combatants, to fight gallantly for truth, and to pass away grieving that the complete victory he had sought was denied him; but in the early years no cloud obscured his growing powers. He grew up like some rare and curious flower in a garden closed and sheltered from the storms of the world, nurtured
certainly with a strange spiritual rigour, on his mother's part; but that high austerity, unknown to the children of a more favoured age, was tempered and qualified by the humanity and culture of his father.
Between them, John Ruskin's parents exercised upon their son forces differing in degree and in direction, and the resultant was the critic and stylist. A third force was that of surroundings, in a merely topographical sense, and in a certain sense no other English writer has been so much the product and the expression of that which lay about his path. For the most part the dwelling-places of men of genius have been an accident; for John Ruskin, as the event proved, they were an essential. It is said that " home-keeping youth has ever homely wits." John Ruskin, a home-keeper as few men have been, in the respect that he continued to live with his parents even until manhood was well advanced, managed to disprove the proverb. But this close tie to the parental roof and to the society of his father and mother, although a tether, was a tether of elastic that stretched first over England and Scotland, and afterwards across the continent of Europe. The Ruskins were the last to cling to the ideal method of travel, that of the post-chaise, and their gentle and joyous passages throughout the length and breadth of the land gave the boy a temper and an experience that are inseparably interwoven with his character. Ruskin is pa?' excellence the English writer whose career and development are best illuminated by a study of his Homes and Haunts
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