624 



RUSKIN, JOHN. 



you so long expected, and what all your best 

 friends so heartily wished ? ' My reason for tell- 

 ing this in this place was chiefly to explain how 

 my mother obtained her perfect skill in English 

 reading, through the hard efforts which, through 

 years of waiting, she made to efface the faults and 

 supply the defects of her early education: effort 

 which was aided and directed unerringly by her 

 natural for its intensity I might justly call it 

 supernatural purity of heart and conduct, lead- 

 ing her always to take most delight in the right 

 and clear language which only can relate lovely 

 things. Her unquestioning evangelical faith in 

 the literal truth of the Bible placed me. as 

 soon as I could perceive or think, in the pres- 

 ence of an unseen world, and set my active 

 analytic power early to work on the questions of 

 conscience, free will, and responsibility, which are 

 easily determined in days of innocence, but are 

 approached too often with prejudice, and always 

 with disadvantage, after men become stupefied by 

 the opinions or tainted by the sins of the outer 

 world; while the gloom, and even terror, with 

 which the restrictions of the Sunday, and the doc- 

 trines of the Pilgrim's Progress, the Holy War, and 

 Quarles's Emblems oppressed the seventh part of 

 my time was useful to me as the only form of 

 vexation i was called on to endure, and redeemed 

 by the otherwise uninterrupted cheerfulness and 

 tranquillity of a household wherein the common 

 ways were all pleasantness, and its single and 

 strait path of perfect peace. 



" Of our neighbors \ve saw nothing, with one 

 exception. They were for the most part well-to-do 

 London tradesmen of the better class, who had 

 little sympathy with my mother's old-fashioned 

 ways, and none with my father's romantic senti- 

 ment. The routine of my childish days became 

 fixed, as of the sunrise and sunset to a nest- 

 ling. It may seem singular to many of my 

 readers that I remember with most pleasure the 

 time when it was most regular and most solitary. 

 Great part of my acute perception and deep feel- 

 ing of the beauty of architecture and scenery 

 abroad was owing to the well-formed habit of 

 narrowing myself to happiness within the four 

 brick walls of our 50-by-100 yards of garden, and 

 accepting with resignation the aesthetic external 

 surroundings of a London suburb, and yet more 

 of a London chapel an oblong, flat-ceiled barn, 

 lighted by windows with semicircular heads, 

 brick-arched, filled by small-paned glass held by 

 iron bars, like fine-threaded halves of cobwebs, 

 galleries propped on iron pipes up both sides, pews 

 well shut in, each of them, by partitions of plain 

 deal, and neatly brass-latched deal doors, tilling 

 the barn floor, all but its lateral, straw-matted 

 passages; pulpit sublimely isolated, central from 

 sides and clear of altar rails at end; a stout, four- 

 legged box of well-grained wainscot, high as the 

 level of the front galleries and decorated with a 

 cushion of crimson velvet, padded G inches thick, 

 with gold tassels at the corners, which was a great 

 resource to me when I was tired of the sermon, 

 because I liked watching the rich color of the folds 

 and creases that came in it when the clergyman 

 thumped it. Imagine the change between one Sun- 

 day and the next, from the morning service in 

 this building attended by the families of the small 

 shopkeepers of the Walworth Road in their Sun- 

 day trimmings; our plumber's wife, fat, good, 

 sensible Mrs. Goad, sat in the pew next in front 

 of us, sternly sensitive to the interruption of her 

 devotion by our late arrivals fancy the change 

 from this to high mass in Rouen cathedral, its 

 nave filled by the white-capped peasantry of half 

 Normandy. Nor was the contrast less enchanting 



or marvelous between the street architecture fa- 

 miliar to my eyes and that of Flanders and Italy. 

 The reader may by effort, though still dimly, con- 

 ceive the effect on my imagination of the fantastic 

 gables of Ghent and orange-scented cortiles of 

 Genoa. I can scarcely account to myself for the 

 undiinmed tranquillity of pleasure with which. 

 after these infinite excitements of travel in foreign 

 lands, my father would return to his desk opposite 

 the brick wall of the brewery, and I to my niche 

 behind the drawing-room chimney piece. The sick 

 thrill of pleasure through all the brain and heart 

 with which, after even so much as a month or 

 two of absence, I used to catch the first sight of 

 the ridge of Herne Hill, and watch for every turn 

 of the well-known road and every branch of the 

 familiar trees, was, though not so deep or over- 

 whelming, more intimately and vitally powerful 

 than the brightest passions of joy in strange land-. 

 or even in the unaccustomed scenery of my own. 

 To my mother, her ordinary household cares, her 

 reading with Mary and me, her chance of a chat 

 with Mrs. Gray, and the unperturbed preparation 

 for my father's return, and for the quiet evening, 

 were more than all the splendors or wonders lie 

 tween poles and equators. 



"I think it must have been early in 1S:5'J that 

 niy father, noticing with great respect the conduct 

 of all matters in the Fall family, wrote Mr. Fall 

 a courteous request that ' the two boys ' might 

 pursue their holiday tasks together. Richard Fall 

 was entirely good-humored, sensible, and practical, 

 but had no particular tastes; a dislike, if anything, 

 for my styles of art and poetry. He stiffly de- 

 clined arbitration on the merits of my composi- 

 tions: took rather the position of putting up with 

 me than of pride in his privilege of acquaintance 

 with a rising author. He was never unkind or 

 sarcastic, but laughed me inexorably out of writ- 

 ing bad English for rhyme's sake or demonstrable 

 nonsense either in prose or rhyme. We got gradu- 

 ally accustomed to be together, and far on into 

 life were glad when any chance brought us to- 

 gether again. 



"The year 1834 passed innocuously enough, but 

 with little profit, in the quadripartite industries 

 before described, followed for my own pleasure 

 with minglings of sapless effort in the classics, in 

 which I neither felt nor foresaw the least good. 

 Innocuously enough, I say meaning with as little 

 mischief as a well-intentioned boy. virtually mas- 

 terless, could suffer from having all his own way. 

 and daily confirming himself in the serious im- 

 pression that his own way was always the best. 

 I can not analyze the mixed good and evil in the 

 third-rate literature which I preferred to the Latin 

 classics. My volume of The Forget-Me-Not, which 

 gave me that precious engraving of Verona (curi- 

 ously also another by Prout, of St. Mark's in Ven- 

 ice), was somewhat above the general caste of an- 

 nuals in its quality of letterpress, and contained 

 three stories The Red-nosed Lieutenant, by Rev. 

 George Croly; Hans in Kelder, by the author ol 

 Chronicles of London Bridge; and The Comet. In 

 Henry Neele, Esq. which were in their several 

 ways extremely impressive to me. The parth 

 childish, partly dull, or even idiotic way I had 

 of staring at the same things all day long carried 

 itself out in reading, so that I could read the 

 same things all the year round. 



"I do not know when my father began to read 

 Byron to me, all primary training, after the Iliad, 

 having been in Scott : but it must have been about 

 the beginning of the 'teen period, else I shovili. 

 recollect the first effect of it. Manfred, evidently. 

 I had got at. like Macbeth, for the sake of tin; 

 witches. Various questionable changes were made, 



