476 PRÆTERITA-III

he was much tired of the place, more of himself, and altogether of my father and me.

Having followed him for a time about the passages of the scattered building, in which there was nothing to show, -not a picture, not a statue, not a bit of old glass, or well-wrought vestment or jewellery, nor any architectural feature in the least ingenious or lovely, we came to a pause at last in what I suppose was a type of a modern Carthusian’s cell, wherein, leaning on the window sill, I said something in the style of Modern Painters, about the effect of the scene outside upon religious minds. Whereupon, with a curl of his lip, “We do not come here,” said the monk, “to look at the mountains.”¹ Under which rebuke I bent my head silently, thinking however all the same, “What then, by all that’s stupid, do you come here for at all?”

3. Which, from that hour to this, I have not conceived; nor, after giving my best attention to the last elaborate account of Carthusian faith, “La Grande Chartreuse, par un Chartreux, Grenoble, 5, Rue Brocherie, 1884,” am I the least wiser. I am informed by that author that his fraternity are Eremite beyond all other manner of men,-that they delight in solitude, and in that amiable disposition pass lives of an angelic tenor, meditating on the charms of the next world, and the vanities of this one.

I sympathize with them in their love of quiet-to the uttermost; but do not hold that liking to be the least pious or amiable in myself, nor understand why it seems so to them; or why their founder, St. Bruno,²-a man of the brightest faculties in teaching, and exhorting, and directing; also, by favour of fortune, made a teacher and governor in the exact centre of European thought and order, the royal city of Rheims,-should think it right to leave all that charge, throw down his rod of rule, his crozier of protection, and come away to enjoy meditation on the next world by himself.

¹ [Ruskin had already recorded this remark in Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Vol. XI. p. 223), and in Modern Painters, vol. v. (Vol. VII. p. 424).]

² [Compare ii. § 159; above, p. 389.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]