II

RUSKIN'S "JUMP"

II
RUSKIN'S "JUMP"

"Jump" was the Brantwood vernacular for "Jumping Jenny"; and she was Ruskin's own private, particular "water sulky," as the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table put it. There is hardly any need to say that she was named after the famous though somewhat disreputable brig, commanded and partly owned by the late Anthony Ewart, not unknown to readers of Ruskin's favourite novel "Redgauntlet." I do not mean to commit myself to any statement of literary criticism in calling "Redgauntlet" his favourite novel, or to imply that he thought it the best book ever written: but it was one which he continually quoted in conversation and discussed with pleasure in his autobiography. Of all the novels he read in those evenings of "auld lang syne," when he pulled the four candles close to him at the drawing-room table, and we sketched furtively in corners, Laurence Hilliard and I, and the ladies plied their needles—no novel was read with more delight and effect. It was a pretty way of passing the evening, but not so easy to imitate unless you have a Ruskin to read to you. He had a trick of suggesting the dramatic variety of the conversations without trying to be stagey, and a skill in "cutting" the long paragraphs of Scott's descriptions which made it all as good as a play. He did not make you hot and ready to scream, as many readers do in their anxiety to act the scene.

Ruskin was no sailor, and never went for a real voyage; but he was very fond of boats and shipping, and all that came from the sea. One of his grandfathers had been a sailor. As far as I can make out, this grandfather was an East-coast skipper of small craft, very much like one of the captains of "Many Cargoes" and "Sea Urchins." He had passed out of this world before John Ruskin came into it, and the little genius never had the luck to hear sea-stories and to learn the mysteries of reef-knots and clove-hitch from an old captain grandfather. It would have been so good for him! But one must not forget that in the making of John Ruskin there was a quarter of the blood of a seafarer. It is a rather curious fact, also, and one which has not, I believe, been mentioned in print, that the earliest Ruskin of all was a sea captain. Mr. W. Hutton Brayshay tells me that he has found in the Record Office a notice of the name in the fourteenth century; this mediæval Ruskin was captain of one of Edward III.'s ships. We cannot connect him with John Ruskin's family, any more than we can connect the Ruskins of Dalton-in-Furness in the sixteenth century; but this identity of name suggests that they may have been ancestors. It is a problem which can only be solved by research, but it should be possible, if one had time and money to work out the pedigree from wills and registers.

Turner was his real teacher in seafaring matters, giving him, if nothing more, a true interest in the look of waves and ships. It was for Turner's sake that he wrote the fine essay on "the boat in art and poetry" which forms the introduction to "Harbours of England"; and this glorification of the coast fishing-craft and the old ship of the line was not merely a literary man's concoction, but the outcome of much study and sketching at Deal, where he spent the summer of 1855 to steep himself in the subject. In the early sixties, again, he stayed for some time at Boulogne in lodgings under the sandhills north of the pier, and made friends with a French pilot and mackerel fisher who, after due apprenticeship, actually promoted him to the tiller—an honour of which he was really prouder than that election to the membership of a foreign Academy which he forgot to answer until it was too late to say any more about it.

(Sutcliffe, photographer, Whitby)

BRANTWOOD HARBOUR IN THE SEVENTIES

(Herbert Severn, Esq., photographer)

CONISTON HALL AND BOATHOUSE

So when he came to Coniston, and had his own house on his own lake, he could not be without boats. There was a landing-place on the shore beneath Brantwood, shown in our photograph as it was in the earlier stages of its development, with Mrs. Arthur Severn and Miss Constance Hilliard (Mrs. W. H. Churchill) on the first primitive breakwater, and Mr. Severn's sailboat in the distance. Ruskin did not care for lake-sailing; a busy man hardly has time to wait for the moving of the water; and he got one of the indigenous tubs for the diversion of rowing. He did not fish, and he had the greatest scorn for rowing as it is done at Oxford. "That's not rowing; that's galley-slaves' work!" he used to tell us. "To bend to the stroke, and time your oars to the beat of the waves," was his ideal: he liked going out when there was a little sea on, and white horses; and he would paddle away before the wind with great enjoyment. But when there is a little sea on, at Coniston, it means a good deal of wind; though the waves are not very high they gather a fair amount of force in their four or five miles' career up the long waterway; and the fun of riding with them is quite different from the struggle of getting your boat home again. Now Ruskin was a very practical man in some things. "When you have too much to do, don't do it," he used to say. So after a wild water-gallop, he simply landed and walked home. When the wind changed he could bring back his boat. There was no use in making a pain of a pleasure.

(From a Sketch by W. G. Collingwood)

RUSKIN'S "JUMP" ADRIFT OFF BRANTWOOD

The Lake district rowing-boat is built for the Lake fisherman, and it is as neatly adapted to its purpose as the Windermere yacht which, for the peculiar winds and waters of the place, is pretty nearly perfect. The fishers used to have two chief requirements, whether they netted or trolled; the boat must travel easily in lumpy but not violent water, for the men had far to go in reaching their "drawing-up spots," and in taking their fish to market of an evening; and it must carry a good deal of tackle. In netting, there were always two partners, and so two thwarts and two pairs of sculls were used; in trolling, one went out alone, but there were rods and lines which needed space for convenient stowage. Consequently the boats were rather long, and rather low in the water; the sculls were fixed on pins, so that you could drop them when you got a bite, or landed hastily to take the hair-rope at your end of the net in drawing up. Feathering the oar was quite unknown; great speed unnecessary; great stability desirable; but not what a sailor would call seaworthiness. On the whole, for pleasure-boating on the lakes,