t is 1883, a half decade before Stillman’s essay appears. It is late at night and we are in the parsonage abutting St. Mary’s Church, Bawdsey-on-Sea, Suffolk. If we attend, we can hear, outside, the sea waves pounding at the bottom of the crag. Peering into the dim light of the study, we can make out a man seated at a desk, the parish priest.
He is writing Ruskin a letter. As if unsure of what to say, every few minutes, he pauses, thinks for a time, and then, picking up his pen again, resumes. The process repeats a number of times. This is not the first time this minister has sat to compose such a missive. Hardly! And, tonight, he is as nonplussed as ever about how to bring his task, a task he sees as a sacred duty, to a meaningful close. Nearly a decade and a half before, already a devout follower of Ruskin and his works, they had had a chance, brief meeting in London. The memory of those short moments remains as fresh as if it happened minutes ago. The encounter transformed his life.
On the writing table before him are clippings from local newspapers. He intends to insert these into the envelope which will hold his completed letter. He hopes the clippings will make it palpable to his hero that his, Ruskin’s, teachings, particularly those arguing for the excruciating need for humane social reform, have framed the entirety of his ministry. He starts again, his slowly evolving sentences fashioning one of the most remarkable paeans to another human being I have ever read: "Dear Mr. Ruskin,"
It is New Year’s Night, and I am getting to be an old man (over 63!), and I must write to you – of all men first and most beloved and revered before all the ‘go’ is gone out of me. For I love you, as few men love, or are loved. And before you or I die, you shall know it!...
I am not impressionable, nor superstitious, but I have a feeling as if my life won’t be much longer. I work hard and am mentally, manually, and locomotively far more active than when I was 23. But for many years past, I’ve had, personally, nothing to live for. My heart – all but what you have of it – was buried with my wife, a perfect woman, the only woman I ever loved, and who loved me, and who did all but love you as well.
Now, know that you are – and have ever been – and ever will be – in my heart. That is as nothing to one who is in the hearts of many – which, perhaps, I know better than you – you dear unpretending, unegotistical man! But it is everything to me! And I’ve a right to it! Do you recollect [our chance meeting in] London in 1870? From that day to this I may safely say there has never been a day or night that you have not been in my thoughts. And, as you then ‘saved’ me from – God knows what consequences! – so, I solemnly assure you, I would, any day since then, have given my poor, worthless life for you – at an hour’s notice! And this feeling has been ever, as it will always be, present with me.
When you passed through that critical illness [at Matlock in 1871], when men and women the whole world 'round trembled on the public reports of your state and prayed to God for you, I cannot attempt to describe what an atmosphere of anxiety I lived in. And that’s nothing either! There has been a continual wish within me to write...to you. In truth, I have written a thousand letters to you! I have written to you as I’ve lain awake in the darkness of my bed in the night. When I’ve lain down, you have been, after God, my last thought. And when I’ve wakened in the morning and walked out around my little parson’s lawn like a ghost tired with confinement in the house, and when I’ve refreshed myself with an odd twenty minutes on this lonely beach or that cliff, with the cold waves of the North Sea making sad music at my feet, I’ve written to you – over and over again!
Many are the poets who have never penned their inspiration…"but who have compressed the God within them…’ And so this is the only one of my ten thousand letters to you that you’ve ever been ‘bothered’ with. Doubtless [this is] best....
But I must not occupy you longer. Accept this assurance of a love for you passing the love of woman. Know that you are in my Heart while I live – and I’ve no doubt my dying thought will be of you. And I give you – I, a poor, but true servant and minister of God, I give you this crowning glory. God grant that Better Thousands give it to you too--that it is to you and you only, that I am indebted for realizing the sense of The Savior... Don’t trouble yourself to write to me.
How am I, your kind soul will assuredly ask? As it pleases God to have me. Doing my necessary literacy work...and my best for the Church and the people in my charge here. My Church is the only one for miles around crammed with the Poor... [You will be happy to know that] this out-of-the-way village church [is] almost "fashionable"! Members of "the better classes" from the great country towns of 10 and 20 miles away actually come quite constantly to our services! I enclose a few...[newspaper] clippings that have noticed the work we do here...
Here the letter breaks off, unfinished, perhaps because, once more, the writer's courage retreated when he faced with the prospect of actually mailing it! Attached to what we have read in the file are other handwritten pages, a “continuation" of sorts. On the first such sheet, a handwritten line at the top tells us that our pastor wrote these holographs a little more than a year later, on 13 February 1884. For the most part, the additional leaves brim with the same keen applause of Ruskin. Following their final sentence, we see that the author has appended his signature to his paragraphs.
Examining the file as a whole, we find none of the newspaper clippings mentioned, nor is there any information that would tell us whether or not any of the minister's missives were ever posted to their intended recipient; nor does the file contain any information that would tell us how the file came to reside here in the Rare Book and Manuscript Archive at Princeton University (where I came across it during a day’s research in 2002, a day when I was accompanied by my very dear friend, and much more accomplished Ruskin-researching colleague, Van Akin Burd).
Further enquiry, however, reveals that they were in touch. Lancaster University’s Ruskin Library has one letter attesting to as much, a letter in which Ruskin effusively praises one of Tighe-Gregory's sermons at which he was present in the early 1870s. An internet search turns up little more--some evidence showing that the pastor published a number of ecclesiastical essays during his lifetime and, happily, his picture.
In other words, I've not been able to find anything which would establish that Ruskin ever read any of the moving tributes which had been so painstakingly and lovingly prepared in his honor by this "unimportant" minister, tributes that attested to the abiding gratefulness he had for the goodness which Ruskin had bestowed on his life.
But now, through some good chance of our own, we know of them.
Note:
Regarding Reverend Tighe-Gregory: In his fifth paragraph, he alludes to the first stanza of Byron’s “Many are the Poets who have never Penned” from Canto IV of Byron's “The Prophesy of Dante.” Used there because of Tighe-Gregory’s awareness of Ruskin’s love of both Byron and Dante.
Also regarding Tighe-Gregory: The one surviving letter Ruskin wrote him can be found in The Ruskin Library, Lancaster, UK, in file RF L31. Many thanks to Diane Tyler at the Library for help with this search.
Last modified 30 April 2024