1

regretted. In successive volumes he was to deal with (2) Verona, (3) Rome, (4) Pisa, (5) Florence, (6) the Monastic Architecture of England and Wales, (7) Chartres, (8) Rouen, (9) Lucerne, and (10) Geneva. The titles selected for the volumes give tantalising foretaste of the glamour of historical and poetical association which Ruskin threw over his subjects-the "Ponte della Pietra," for Verona, the bridge which had carried the march alike of Roman armies and of Theodoric the Goth; "Ara Coeli," for Rome, a church full of associations in Ruskin's mind, as we shall see; "Ponte-a-Mare," for Pisa, the bridge built in the fourteenth century, "never more to be seen by living eyes "; 1 the "Ponte Vecchio," for Florence; "Valle Crucis," for the monasteries of England and Wales; "the Springs of Eure," for Chartres and its cathedral-the church which he most admired; for Rouen, "Domrémy," in whose forests the Maid of Orleans learnt her woodnotes wild; 2 for the pastoral forms of Catholicism, "The Bay of Uri," so beautiful in Turner's drawings and Ruskin's description;3 and for the pastoral Protestantism of Savoy, "The Bells of Cluse "-the bells from the towers of Maglans, whose harmonious chime once "filled the whole valley with sweet sound,"4"the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediæval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world." The list of titles is as of the chapters in Ruskin's life and studies which comprise his deepest associations and fondest thoughts. The books were, too, to have been largely illustrated. He had by him many drawings of his own which would have found place in the series, and his Museum at Sheffield is rich in records which St. George's artists had made under his directions. He mentions, in an essay of 1887, that his assistant Arthur Burgess had been "employed at Rouen in directing the photography for which I had obtained permission to erect scaffolding before the north gate of the west front"; and he "hoped with his help to carry out the design of Our Fathers have Told Us."8 He hoped, too, to issue coloured outlines of painted glass windows. But these plans, of which the realisation might have occupied many years of his fullest working life, were destined, in the

1 Val d'Arno, § 282 (Vol. XXIII. p. 165).

See Fors Clavigera, Letter 8 (Vol. XXVII. p. 138), and compare Sesame and Lilies, § 82 (Vol. XVIII. p. 133).

3 See Modern Painters, vol. v. (Vol. VII. p. 144).

* See Deucalion, i. ch. v. ("The Valley of Cluse"): Vol. XXVI. p. 151.

Froude's History of England, ch. i.

See Vol. XXX.

* See Plate IX. in Vol. XXX. (p. 189).

Vol. XIV. pp. 355-356.

See (in a later volume of this edition) a letter of December 4, 1881, to the

Rev. J. P. Faunthorpe.

XXXIII.

actual circumstances of his broken health and scattered energies, to remain only a beautiful dream.1

Some little contribution towards its realisation Ruskin did, however, succeed in making, and it is this which forms the Second Part in the present volume.

First are some pages for Ara Cali, the intended Third Part of Our Fathers have Told Us. The pages were to have come in the second chapter of the book, which chapter Ruskin had hoped to have ready for publication in 1884.2 The pressure of his Oxford work in that year, and illness in the year succeeding, prevented this purpose. chapter, so far as Ruskin had prepared it for press, is now printed for the first time (pp. 192-202); I have prefixed some introductory remarks (p. 191) to explain the place and significance of Ara Cœli in Ruskin's scheme.

The

The next chapters were intended for Valle Crucis, the Sixth Part of Our Fathers, which was to have dealt with the monastic architecture of England and Wales. The first chapter (pp. 205-226) is an introduction to a sketch of early Christianity, especially monastic Christianity, in Britain. It is entitled from "Candida Casa," the White House being the ancient name of Whithorn or Whitherne Abbey on the Solway, the famous foundation of St. Ninian in the fourth century, as Bede relates. The place had a personal interest for Ruskin as the home of one branch of his family. A female ancestor was a cousin of Sir Andrew Agnew, the last hereditary sheriff of Wigtownshire. Her grandson had been minister of Whithorn. In a later generation, Mr. George Agnew, father of Mrs. Arthur Severn, was hereditary sheriff-clerk of Wigtown. Ruskin, as we have seen (p. xlviii.), was at Whithorn in October 1883, and in the number of Fors written at the time he recorded some impressions of his visit. He had some of the pages of Candida Casa set up in type, probably at about the same time, and he was at work upon them, as his diary shows, in April 1886, but he never completed the chapter, though his notes for it exist. The pages were published in 1894 as a chapter in Verona and other Lectures, and the editor of that volume (Mr. Collingwood) constructed from Ruskin's notes the missing conclusion of the chapter; and it is here appended (p. 202) to Ruskin's text.

1 Among the MSS. at Brantwood are some sheets on which he had begun to make notes from Gibbon and other sources under the several titles of his projected books. 2 As he states in Roadside Songs: see Vol. XXXII. p. 119 n.

3 Letter 92 (Vol. XXIX. pp. 450-451).

See the Bibliographical Note in Vol. XIX. p. 427.

In the second chapter of Valle Crucis, Ruskin intended to recommence with the history of the Anglo-Saxon Church, but for this chapter there are no materials in completed form.

The third or fourth chapter1 would have been the lecture on "Cistercian Architecture," already referred to (p. xlv.). A summary of this (by Mr. Wedderburn) had appeared, under that title, in the Art Journal of February 1883. Subsequently Ruskin set up in type the full text, and the lecture was referred to in Letter 93 (Christmas 1883) of Fors as "forthcoming." It was not, however, published till 1894, when it appeared as Chapter v. in Verona and other Lectures, under a new title, "Mending the Sieve," with reference to the miracle of St. Benedict's ministry mentioned in § 11 (p. 236). It is this latter text-the text of the lecture as written-which is here given (pp. 227-249); but several passages from the report of the lecture as reported, and some others from the MS., are appended in footnotes (pp. 227, 228, 231, 233, 235, 242, 245, 246, 249).

The Plate (XXXII.) included in this Part of the present volume gives a Plan of the Abbey of St. Gall, adapted by Ruskin from Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary of Architecture; it "may stand for the general plan of a Benedictine abbey of any place or time" (p. 241).

The manuscript of Ara Cœli is at Brantwood, now bound up in a volume containing other material for Our Fathers have Told Us; that of Candida Casa and Mending the Sieve is bound up separately in a volume (also at Brantwood) lettered Valle Crucis. Among the MSS. are an index to leading topics in Gibbon, which Ruskin made for his own use; tables of dates which he put together from other sources; notes on early British and French history, collected from various books; extracts from Palgrave's Arabia; and many other memoranda of a like kind.

"THE ART OF ENGLAND"

The lectures with which Ruskin inaugurated his second tenure of the Slade Professorship at Oxford were written under promise, as it were, of good behaviour. He struck this note in the first of them,

So the notes suggest; but in the passage of Fors cited below Ruskin refers to the lecture on Cistercian Architecture as "the second forthcoming number of Valle Crucis." His order of publication of Parts did not, however, always correspond with the ultimate arrangement.

2 See Vol. XXIX. p. 475.

when he proceeded to relieve the minds of his audience from “unhappily too well-grounded panic," and to assure them that he had "no intention of making his art lectures any more one-half sermons" (p. 279). His message in that sort had, he felt, been delivered; "nor," he added, "have I any more either strength or passion to spare in matters capable of dispute." This self-denying ordinance was not, as we have already seen, kept in force for very long, but it governed the scope and tenour of the lectures which he delivered upon phases of English art in the nineteenth century. Eight years before, he had had the idea of writing "an entirely good-humoured sketch" of modern English painting; but the Academy Notes of 1875 hardly answered to this description; the object was more nearly attained, as has been remarked in an earlier volume, in the present course of lectures.

Among his objects was to give "some permanently rational balance between the rhapsodies of praise and blame" which had been printed in connexion with the exhibition of Rossetti's works at the Royal Academy in the winter of 1883, and the tone which he adopted was throughout "advisedly courteous" (§ 192). Always urbane in private intercourse, Ruskin knew well-no writer perhaps better-how to be the same-when he chose-on paper; and these lectures are a principal example of his more polite and courtly style. Their felicity in praise, their adroitness-sometimes in selection, sometimes in reservetheir delicate touch-now of flattery, and now in censure-must, I think, strike every reader. To the friends, and to the friends of the friends, whose work Ruskin had occasion to notice, the lectures gave the liveliest pleasure. Mr. Holman Hunt wrote to Ruskin expressing in the most generous terms the help which he had derived from the praises of his friend. The lecture on Mr. Hunt's "Triumph of the Innocents" gave fresh confidence to the artist's patrons, and encouraged the artist himself to persevere with the completion both of the original design and of the second version painted from it. Upon the work of Burne-Jones Ruskin did not, as we have seen (p. xlvi.), say within the necessary limits of time all that he had hoped; but the appreciation, as it stood, even in a compressed report in the Pall Mall Gazette, greatly pleased the artist's friends. "A spirit moves me," wrote Mr. Swinburne to his friend in the "palace of painting," "to write a line to you, not of congratulation (which would be indeed an absurd impertinence), on the admirable words which I have just read in this evening's paper's

1 Vol. XIV. pp. xxix.-xxx.

2 See below, p. 277 n.

See the "Dedication" in Poems and Ballads.

report of Ruskin's second Oxford lecture, but to tell you how glad I was to read them. If I may venture to say as much without presumption, I never did till now read anything in praise of your work that seemed to me really and perfectly apt and adequate. I do envy Ruskin the authority and the eloquence which give such weight and effect to his praise. It is just what I see in a glass darkly' that he brings out and lights up with the very best words possible; while we others (who cannot draw), like Shakespeare, have eyes for wonder but lack tongues to praise."1

Miss Kate Greenaway's delight in Ruskin's appreciation will be the more fully understood when the story of her friendship with him is told in a later volume. His appreciation of her work,2 it may be remarked, was prior to the personal friendship, which in its turn was largely directed on his side to criticism and stimulus, as often hortatory and reproachful as complimentary. With Leighton's art, or rather with the directions in which for the most part he employed it, Ruskin had no special sympathy; the critic's tact, in only hinting disagreement and in selecting points for pleasant notice, must have appealed to one who was himself a master in these graceful arts-though, to be sure, Leighton was wont to paint in such matters with a fuller brush. To Ruskin's praise of his friend, Miss Alexander, sufficient notice has been called in the preceding volume.

Of the manuscript of The Art of England, several sheets are preserved at Brantwood. These contain of Lecture III., §§ 61-67; of Lecture V., 124-131, 132-139, 144-147, 150-154; of Lecture VI., the latter part of § 157 and § 158 to nearly the end of 169; and of the Appendix, § 193 to the middle of § 204. A comparison of the MS. with the printed text shows much minor revision. A page of the MS. of Lecture III. is given in facsimile (p. 308).

The Plates illustrating The Art of England are for the first time introduced in this edition. The first (XXXIII.) is a photogravure of Holman Hunt's "Triumph of the Innocents." There are two principal pictures by the artist of this subject; that here reproduced is the completion of the one which was seen and described by Ruskin. The second (XXXIV.) is a photogravure of a drawing by Rossetti, described in the text, which was in Ruskin's collection.

1 Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, vol. ii. p. 132.

They had met shortly before the lecture; but in the lecture Ruskin was only formulating opinions previously formed.