A DRAWING-ROOM LECTURE. 1DDROFESSOR RUSKEN, to please some of his
friends who could not obtain admission to his Oxford Lectures, repeated to them this week, in a private house at Kensington, much of what he had said as Slade Professor on the merits of Miss Kate Greenaway ; but he gave his hearers besides the
pleasant surprise of finding in Miss Francesca Alexander, some of whose drawings were exhibited, an artist whom we may take to be a good exemplar of Professor Ruskin's lifelong teaching.
Slightly altering their application to Miss Greenaway, his words express so well what these drawings appear to us to do, that we venture to quote them :—" The beauty of them is being like. They are blissful just in the degree that they are natural, and the fairyland "—or, in Miss Alexander's case, the spiritual land—" she creates for you is not beyond the sky, nor beneath the sea, but nigh you, even at your doors. She does but show you how to see it and how to cherish. Long since I told you this great law of noble imagination. It does not create, it does not even adorn, it does but reveal the treasures to be possessed by the spirit."
And these drawings by " Francesca " go far, by their power of truth and grace, to reveal to us Professor Ruskin's meanings. They show us wherein his magic lies, and partly explain to us the spell by which he binds all who acknowledge him as a teacher. The opening words of his lecture express the sympathy which exists between his delight in "whatsoever is lovely" and " Francesca's" expression of peasant life and wild-flower beauty in their fairest forms. "I have never until to-day," he said, "dared to call my friends and my neighbours together to rejoice with me, over any recovered good or rekindled hope. Both in fear and much thankfulness, I have done so now ; yet not to tell you of any poor little piece of upgathered silver of my own, but to show you the fine gold which has been strangely trusted to me, and which before was a treasure hid iu a mountain-field of Tuscany ; and I am not worthy to bring it to you, and I can't say what I feel about it, and am only going to tell you simply what it is and how it came into my hands, and to leave you to have your joy of it."
In the first part of the address, the Professor roused his listeners, as he alone knows how, to sympathy with Miss Greenaway's genius, supporting his admiration of her "minuteness and delicacy of touch carried to its utmost limit" by a quotation from M. Chesnean's volume on "La Peinture Anglaise." Then Professor Ruskin, with earnest words, spoke of the idyllic English landscape in Miss Greenaway's drawings. "Would you wish me," said the critic of the ideal life not less than he is the critic of modern Art, "with Professorial authority to advise her that her conceptions belong to the dark ages, and must be reared on a new foundation ; or is it conceivable to you that perhaps the world we truly live in may not be quite so changeable as you have thought it,—that all the gold and silver you can dig out of the earth are not worth to you the king-cups she gave you of her grace, and that all the fury, and the flatter, and the wistfulness of your lives will never discover for you any
other than the ancient blessing, maketh me to lie down in green pastures : he leadeth me beside the still waters, he restoreth my souk' P"
The canons of taste, which he declared in his lecture, canons so well known that we need not discuss their adequateness, were very remarkably illustrated in twenty drawings in pen and ink by Miss Alexander, an artist, we believe, until Mr. Ruskin's recent Oxford Lectures, unknown in England. Since Leonardo da Vinci's flower studies, we can recall no drawings of the "herb of the field" equal to " Francesca's " for strength and delicacy, for truth, and the reverence that comes of truth, though she has perhaps somewhat to learn in expressing human form. From an improvisatrice of the Tuscan villages Miss Alexander received most of the legends and hymns which have suggested her drawings, and which have been collected by her during many years of constant intercourse with the Tuscan eontadini. They are the sparks which have kindled her imagination and given life to her skill. They remind us, in their innocent freshness, of the Fioretti which, six centuries ago, gathered round the memory of St. Francis. The illustrations of "La Madonnina " visiting, with St. Joseph and her child, the gypsy's cottage, in four designs, are, perhaps, the most charming of the drawings which were shown to his friends by Mr. Ruskin; and of them, we may select the group which illustrates Mary's words to her humble hostess as specially fall of true sentiment. Of the Divine Child she says, and the draw ing declares :— "Figlio è dell' Eterno Padre, Come Dio di maeetade, E come nomo ; e figlio mio, Per sae mera cortesia." We know no modern design comparable to this for meaning and grace, unless it be one by the same artist of a Tuscan woman sitting, and the study of the daisy-plant which illuminates the text is worthy of the main figures. " Francesca's Book" deserves, as it is to have, publication, and we trust that before long these twenty drawings may be available to the public, not only because of their intrinsic excellence, but as they are a commentary on much of Professor Ru.skin's teaching, and are a presage of hope for a future Art that may possess the qualities for which he now looks to Pre-renaissance centuries. The Tuscan legends, no doubt, had large part in the spiritual suggestiveness and the singular sweetness which give their charm to Miss Alexander's conceptions. The radiance she evokes from the simplest visible things makes belief in what is not seen easy. The faith of the Tuscan peasant guides, perhaps unconsciously to herself, her accurate design, and she reveals more than she may herself know of what her "Holy Family," her "St. Christopher," and even her lovely "Tuscan Women," truly mean, to those who, shutting out the nineteenth-century glare, study them in earnest and in quiet.
Meantime, they aptly hit the special mark in drawing at which Professor Ruskin teaches his disciples to aim. They illustrate the dictum that all the magic and power of Art are in its truth to Nature, as Nature was created by the Great Artist. The fidelity of " Francesca's " drawing in black-and-white, forces many complex and far-reaching truths on us, and proves once more that very simple means are adequate to rouse in us the highest emotions, when used in good-faith by genius of "good-will."
All Professor Ruskin's friends must be glad to see how well his Oxford work has agreed with him. He has gifts of insight and power of reaching the best feelings and highest hopes of our too indifferent generation which are very rare. Agree or disagree with some of his doctrines as we may, he constrains the least hopeful of his listeners to remember that man is not yet bereft of that "breath of life" which enables him to live in spiritual places that are not yet altogether depopulated by the menacing army of physical discoverers.
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