On the morning of John Ruskin’s funeral it was my privilege to be shown over the rooms at Brantwood in which he worked and slept and died. Mr. Arthur Severn, who was my guide, is well known as Mr. Ruskin’s cousin-in-law, if such a degree of relationship is recognised, for he is the husband of Mrs. Severn, the dead man’s cousin.
Admiration of Keats was the first point of contact between Ruskin and the Severn family. It will be remembered that Mr. Severn’s father was Keats’s great friend and was with him at the time of his death, and Ruskin was never tired of hearing from the lips of the elder Severn stories of the poet.
Brantwood stands upon the shore of Coniston Lake, on the further side from the village, from which it is about two miles distant. All the rooms are full of pictures, as indeed are the spacious halls and staircases, Turners being everywhere predominant. The low ceilings tell of a bygone taste in house architecture, and the rambling, unsymmetrical character of the ground plan reminds one that here land is abundant and need not be economised. Mr. Ruskin’s study opens off the wide front hall. To-day the fitful rain is beating upon the windows and gusts of wind ruffle the surface of the lake. It was at this window, which overlooks the lake and the fells, that Mr. Ruskin sat when he was at work. Coniston Old Man, which to-day is merged in the cloud and mist, is clearly seen from Mr. Ruskin’s old seat in normal weather, with all the great breathing space of Nature in between.
The white farmhouse upon the sloping upland opposite was once Coniston Old Hall, where the Countess of Pembroke lived, and where, says tradition, her brother Sir Philip Sydney sometimes visited her and wrote portions of his Arcadia. Mr. Ruskin would never have this tradition submitted to the heartless tests of evidence, for fear it should be swept away as having no foundation, for it was one of his pleasures in Coniston to contemplate it as the birthplace of Arcadia.
Brantwood is embosomed among trees and bracken, and Mr. Ruskin had only to take a few steps from his study to be in the heart of an ancient forest where few feet but his own ever trod. But even when he was confined to this room which convention calls his study he could never feel far distant from the surroundings which more truly deserved that name. And within he had much to console him for inability to walk abroad.
His beloved Turner is represented upon the four walls. Over the beautiful mantelpiece is a splendid Luca della Robbia which every visitor to Brentwood has seen and admired. In the recesses on each side of this work are Greek vases excavated at Cyprus by an American whom Mr. Ruskin generously assisted in his plans. Near the door there is an unfinished picture by Rossetti, the subject being the Passover. The incomplete condition of this little picture is so striking that an appeal for an explanation leaps to the lips involuntarily. “When Ruskin saw the picture at that stage,” explains Mr. Severn, “he insisted upon having it as it was. In fact he was afraid of what Rossetti might do next.”
Mr. Severn told me an anecdote concerning an interview between Ruskin snd one of the workmen engaged on the building of the turret which is so characteristic that I must repeat it. The workman was in business for himself, and had come to receive payment for what he had done. When he had been paid a member of the Brantwood household asked him to sign the receipt. The man, panic-stricken, confessed that he was unable to read or write. Mr.Ruskin at once jumped to his feet, warmly shook hands with him, and exclaimed: “I congratulate you, Mr. —. I understand now why you are such a good workman.”
Mr. Ruskin’s bedroom, like the others, is hung with Turners. Over the fireplace is a drawing which occupies that place of honour not because of any exceptionally high merits it has as a work of art, but because of a thousand hidden merits it had for Ruskin as the work of his father. The bed in which he died is low and narrow, and the room is far from luxurious in the common sense of the word. There are nearly as many books here as in the study, and probably the pictures by Turner in the bedroom are the most valuable in the house.
Mr. Ruskin’s tastes in fiction were, like Mr. Bright’s, peculiar. He liked Dickens because of that writer’s interest in social questions and because of his “essential truth,” and he particularly admired Hard Times. He admitted that Dickens spoke “in a circle of stage fire,” and he once or twice attempted to persuade the novelist to “limit his brilliant exaggeration.” Scott he admired, inconsistent as it may seem, because he did not trouble his head about “questions,” but wrote to amuse. He used often to say that it was the great sorrow of his old age that he knew Scott by heart. Maria Edgeworth was another favourite. As to Thackeray, he admitted reluctantly that the author of Vanity Fair was “a master in writing,” but he added that it was only too evident that “Thackeray hated all the people he described, and described them because he hated them.”
It was surprising to learn that detective stories had a fascination for him, and he was an enthusiastic admirer of Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone. But as a rule he read very little fiction, and in regard to that which he did read his taste is no doubt accurately summarised by Mr. Severn in a sentence: “He liked to read either of very noble characters or of desperate villains.”
They tell you in Coniston that Mr. Ruskin gave away treasures of art, with a lavish hand. As the village school-master said, the only price he asked was appreciation – not appreciation of his own golden nature but of the uses and beauties of his gift. The inscription accompanying a wreath sent to the funeral by the brother and sister of a man whom he despatched to the Mediterranean in quest of health accurately describes the attitude towards him of the simple folks of Coniston: “Lifelong love and gratitude.”
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