by Ann Harries
Though the new visitor had leapt up the steps at a speed not normally associated with men of his middle-age, I was able to catch a glimpse of his face with the aid of my convenient binoculars. His smooth features were at once familiar, having stared out at the British public from broadsheets and satirical journals at the time of his trial, and had resurfaced a year or so later when his friend, the Colossus, was publicly interrogated at Westminster.
‘There’s many a man lives famous
For daring a wrong like this!’
Just as I feared that this ditty was about to re-insinuate itself into my brain, out of the thickets a little further up the mountainside, without any warning, poured forth the unrivalled fluty piping, the jug-jug-jug of Luscinia megarhynchos, most musical and melancholy of birds.
Had a nightingale escaped from the aviaries? Acute pleasure at the sound of the warble was replaced within seconds by even more acute anxiety. Reminding myself of the necessity of nervous equilibrium, I rose to my toes and moved as silently as my age would permit in the direction of the tumbling song. The suddenness of the outburst was indeed strange, and it was the wrong time of day – still, no doubt the birds were disoriented, and one could not predict any aspect of their behaviour with certainty.
The song took me deep into the heart of the pine plantation, which now resembled the inky depths of the Schwarzwald, where not even a ray of sunshine can penetrate the dense needles. My binoculars would be of no use in this almost total darkness, and before long total silence had set in as well. I stood motionless for a full five minutes, straining to catch a waft of the nightingale once again. Nothing. Nothing except the sudden strident clatter of a triangle rising from the gardens below: it beat out a six-quaver pattern several times over, angrily, it seemed to me, as if announcing the end of an unnecessary performance. When it too had ceased sounding, I resolved to return to the safety of the sunlit garden, and berate Salisbury and Chamberlain.
But while I stood and listened in vain, I had become aware of a dim path which opened up among the trees and beckoned. Along it I could begin to hear the startled movements of indefinable and invisible creatures further up the steep slope – perhaps the misplaced offspring of the imported fallow deer that wander in the fields above, or birds struggling out of the silence of their nests. At the same time something stirred in my own dark soul, perhaps an atavistic curiosity to know where the path led, and something more: a sudden desire to abandon myself to danger. Yet what lurked in those sunless woods was unlikely to be a leopard, or a lion, or a hyena, and as my feet placed themselves (without my permission) on the pathway, crunchy with pine needles, I felt more like Hansel without his Gretel than the intrepid explorer Livingstone.
The footpath, such as it was, evidently led to the upper regions of the stream which bubbled so peacefully in the Colossus’ garden. Rocks and boulders heaved among pines; squirrels scuttled; a pinecone hurtled, with some malevolence, on to my shoulder. I wondered about snakes.
The path stopped abruptly at a mossy bank beside the stream. I gazed into its clear, dappled waters, feeling foolish, but nevertheless straining my ears. It was a quite delightful spot: Titania herself would not have looked out of place among the wild orchids and ferns peering between the rocks. The cool aroma of mountain waters, mingled with the scent of pine, at once cleansed away the impurities of mind and lung, causing me to inhale deeply, as instructed by my physician. But even as I hesitated in this pleasant place, the melodious trill of the nightingale floated up from lower down the ravine, not far from the gate which opens on to the path. I cursed aloud, and was about to start running down the path back to where I had started, when I noticed something bright among the tall ferns by the stream. A stray shaft of light had caught what appeared to be a humble glass jar: the nature of its lid suggested it must once have contained some kind of fruit preserve.
I hovered over my find indecisively; then turned on my heel and hurried down the mountainside.
Oxford 1870
John Ruskin’s ample gown fluttered against my cheek as he raced up the central aisle, his bowed head now crowned with a velvet college cap. He turned to confront his vast audience, an expression of timid pleasure and surprise on his face. He laid his notes on the table before him. Now he settled a pair of spectacles on his nose, opened the notes, rose up and down on his toes a few times, and cleared his throat.
Above our heads a number of fat putti rolled back ropes and awnings to reveal Geography, Arithmetic, Botany, Astronomy, Law et cetera driving British Scoffing Ignorance out of the South Door, through the organ case of the Sheldonian Theatre. Truth himself, a writhing golden cherub, occupied the central panel, in which he descended from on high on a vast bank of sunlit clouds. Considering that the topic of this inaugural lecture was ‘British Landscape’, a subject that would normally attract perhaps twenty art students, the audience of men and women, maidens and matrons, artists and scientists, covered as wide a range of representatives as that depicted on the ceiling. Now they fell into a motionless silence, as if already mesmerised by the tall, stooping figure before he had even begun to speak.
But if they were expecting the wild words of a prophet from the wilderness – such was his reputation – they were to be disappointed. Ruskin began speaking quietly, his eyes following the written words on the paper before him with an intensity that suggested he had already forgotten about the thousand people who had travelled in bad weather from all over England to hear him lecture. His voice had a penetrating, other-worldly timbre, as if conceived and cultivated in an atmosphere where the vocal cords were the vessels of higher thought only, and had never been used for the humbler modes of communication essential to the survival of the common man. A long sentence was unfolding itself, loop upon measured loop, polite, respectful, an old-fashioned roll of the ‘r’s shimmering in the perfect harmony of his thoughts:
‘The duty which is today laid on me, of introducing, among the elements of education appointed in this great University, one not only new, but such as to involve in its possible results some modification of the rest, is, as you well feel, so grave, that no man could undertake it without laying himself open to the imputation of a kind of insolence, and no man could undertake it rightly, without being in danger of having his hands shortened by dread of his task, and mistrust of himself.’
While he spoke, his downcast face had been furrowed with sadness, but now he lifted his head and presented his audience with a radiant smile, artless in its sincerity, which at once quenched the sorrow in his piercing blue eyes. He returned to his notes; great clouds of words billowed forth as he gently explained the relationship between art and labour, and that it was our moral duty to ensure that beauty and labour went hand in hand. A thousand pairs of eyes were fixed on him with hopeful rapture, whether as an aid to understanding his convoluted speech or merely with a view to judging his performance, I could not say. I discovered that I myself was scrutinising every aspect of the great man’s appearance and memorising details of his clothing and mannerisms as if he were some rare species of bird that might flit away and be seen no more. Beneath his academic gown he wore a double-breasted waistcoat and a blue frock-coat, with a tall Gladstonian collar and blue tie which seemed to intensify the blueness of his eyes. His entire outfit made no concession whatever to fashion, but so lean and graceful was his figure that there was almost the air of the unconscious dandy about him. His hands were peculiarly delicate, with tapering fingers which ever opened and closed in nervous gesticulation, as if preparing for some larger movement, perhaps flight. He spoke about the need for art to follow nature. But it was the exquisite modulations of his voice, punctuated with many artificial pauses and cadences, that seemed to me more compelling than the torrent of words that poured forth so musically, yet so relentlessly. Now and then his eye would meet that of the rosy don seated next to me, who nodded discreet encouragement. Ruskin was behaving himself.
The first rule of art is that art is work; conversely, work must become
art again. ‘Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality,’ declaimed he, unaware of a growing restlessness among his listeners. They were not interested in the morality of art: they were waiting for Ruskin to boil over. Instead he told them that the art of any country was an indication of that country’s social, political and ethical life. And the most moral thing you could do was leave Nature intact. ‘You cannot have a landscape by Turner without a country for him to paint; you cannot have a portrait by Titian without a man to be portrayed. I need not prove that for you, I suppose, in these short terms; but in the outcome I can get no soul to believe that the beginning of art is in getting our country clean, and our people beautiful!’
Mr James nudged me. ‘Railways!’ he whispered in excitement.
At that moment a strange afflatus began to flash in the Professor’s blue eyes, and his spirit appeared rapt in a sudden ecstasy. Abandoning his notes, he strode back and forth behind his table, pouring forth a positive rhapsody of exalted thought in rhythmic phrases which piled upon each other so thick and fast that he seemed to have achieved the impossible: a kind of vocal polyphony, almost fugal in effect, where ideas overlap and blend with each other, producing ever richer resonances, ever more complex textures, as in some mighty chorale. Now his hands flew upwards and, his arms becoming hopelessly involved in folds of black cloth, his gown was flung on to the majestic chair as he began to chant:
The England who is to be mistress of half the earth, cannot remain herself a heap of cinders, trampled by contending and miserable crowds; she must yet again become the England she once was and, in all beautiful ways, more: so happy, so secluded, and so pure, that in her sky – polluted by no unholy clouds – she may be able to spell rightly of every star that heaven doth show.’
Next to me, the plump don stirred uneasily and looked about him. Further down the academic row I could see Dodgson’s mild, watchful face, his lips puckering in controlled astonishment at the performance that held the audience spellbound. I most earnestly hoped that Mr James would not confront him about wet-plate collodion afterwards.
Ruskin had stopped pacing. His gaze swung solemnly round the amphitheatre. His voice dropped to a kind of moan, all the more powerful for its monotonous intensity.
‘And this is what she must either do, or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; seizing every piece of waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea.’
He paused for a full minute. The audience held its breath. Then he narrowed his eyes and repeated thoughtfully: ‘Her most energetic and worthiest men.’ New thoughts were passing through his mind, thoughts that were not penned in the pages before him.
He flung his arms up into the air once more. ‘And how do the energetic young men of this university expend their energy? They fruitlessly slash the river waters’ – and here his arms descended to pull at imaginary oars, to the delight of his audience – ‘or they kick a ball and run after it!’ His voice trembled with incredulity. Now he leaned across the table, his eyes imploring us to understand. ‘Can they not see that muscular effort can be directed towards useful and ennobling ends?’ His melancholy face gave an abrupt spasm of disgust. ‘Such as pulling down monstrous railway embankments and building lovely human pathways in their place, rightly adorning them with wildflowers and shrubs –this is what I shall teach my students!’ He had abandoned his desk again. ‘For a nation is only worthy of the soil and the scenes that it has inherited when by all its acts and arts it is making them more lovely for its children!’
The Professor at my side was shaking his head and groaning, but Mr James, on the other side, was ecstatic. He slapped his knee in delight at this spontaneous outburst and, to my acute embarrassment, even called out: ‘Hear, hear!’
Ruskin ran back to his desk. I became aware that the pale sunlight that had filtered through the long windows was now supplanted by the gloom of approaching dusk, but so completely was he absorbed in his message to us that he, like his audience, was quite unconscious of the flight of time. Yet there was something final in his cadences as he leaned across his desk and seemed to address each one of us personally.
‘Will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings; a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of peace; mistress of Learning and of the Arts; faithful guardian of great memories in the midst of irreverent and ephemeral visions? You will think that an impossible ideal. Be it so; refuse to accept it if you will; but see that you form your own in its stead. All that I ask of you is to have a fixed purpose of some kind for your country and yourselves: it is the fatalest form of error in English youths to hide their hardihood till it fades for lack of sunshine, and to act in disdain of purpose, till all purpose is vain.’
Up until this point I had felt, with all the cynicism of my youth, that I had merely been witnessing a great performance by a renowned professor, which had no possible connection with my own life. But such was the intensity of his words, and the precision with which they had been chosen, that I felt myself straighten, as if his message was aimed at me alone. My eyes shifted to see if others were thus affected.
The entire audience was transfixed. Row after row of faces, young and old, male and female, gazed in silence at the sweet-faced man whose transparent sincerity and intensity of conviction could leave no one unmoved. A young woman who sat in the front row, her hand clasped in that of her lover, gave a low moan and burst into sobs.
And then I saw the tall young man we had met at the museum. He was leaning forward in the upper circle of the theatre, his mass of hair standing on end, as if his fingers had pushed through it in unconscious fervour; his blue eyes were aflame; his mouth had dropped open. If the cherub of Truth had dropped down from the ceiling, the expression on this youth’s face could not have been more astounded, more ecstatic, as if his fate had just been revealed to him, and the rest of his life accounted for.
Cape Town 1899
Chamberlain and Salisbury were on their hands and knees drawing lines in the sand as I approached the aviaries. I was thus in a position to kick at least one backside and shout angrily about escaped nightingales, but one look at the cages told me that the bird who had sung on the mountain had not come from my collection. The two boys expressed indignant innocence, at the same time casting worried glances at the damage my feet were wreaking upon their dusty patterns. Finally I stamped back into the house in a state of some confusion: why had the Colossus hired me to bring nightingales to the colony when a nightingale already sang in his forests, and in the autumn at that?
To distract myself from the anomaly of this state of affairs, I took refuge in a pastime that has been a source of pleasure to me since childhood. Originally I had had no intention of bringing my cameras with me to Africa, even though I realised that there would be much of interest to photograph in the Colony. However, at the last moment before my departure from Oxford, I gave in to the urging of my physician, who assured me that a resumption of my only leisure activity would have a soothing effect upon my shattered nervous system. On arriving at the Cape I discovered that Saunders had packed not only all my photographic equipment, but most of my photograph albums as well. Though displeased about this at first, I gained some solace by unloading the cameras and albums into a lavish dark-room a few doors along my bedroom corridor. Originally intended for the use of the Colossus himself, this haven of darkness remained at the disposal of guests once his interest in photography had waned. In fact, it had become a source of pleasure for me to hide away in this little distraction-free room and turn the pages of those albums which so vividly preserved the images of friends and familiar landscapes.
On the other hand, till this moment, I had had little desire to photograph anything in my new environment, in spite of the
majesty of the mountain which formed a perpetual backdrop to my every move. (Actually, it is the back of Table Mountain which overshadows our estate. When my ship steamed into the harbour of the fairest Cape, I was struck, as were all the passengers, by the extraordinary formation of this rectangular mountain which towers over the rather scrappy little city of Cape Town, and resolved to unpack my camera as soon as I had arrived at the Colossus’ home. But this sudden surge of energy soon fizzled out, to be replaced by the usual inertia, and the ruggedness of the nether side of the mountain did not hold the same mathematical charm for me.)
There is comparatively little of ornithological interest in this area. I am already irritated by the constant calls of the doves and pigeons, the only birds I know who can sing in strict 3/4 time and strut about the lawns in stumpy sarabands. The raptors keep to the upper slopes of the mountain. Probably the most unusual species is the male Cape sugar bird, Promerops cafer, a creature composed almost entirely of beak and tail. I had watched the behaviour of this bird (it has no song: it clacks and hisses merely) in the fynbos and decided to photograph it in its natural habitat when I felt inclined to do so. So it was that I found myself in the upper reaches of the Colossus’ garden, hiding in a structure made of sacking, my head under a black cloth, my new, untried telephotographic lens trained upon this curious creature.
