

RUSKIN, JOHN. 



625 



however, at that 1831 turning of twelve, in the 

 hermitage discipline of Herne Hill. I was allowed 

 to taste wine, taken to the theater, and on festive 

 days even dined with my father and mother at 

 four; and it was then, generally at dessert, that my 

 father would read the Noctes Ambrosianee regu- 

 larly when they came out, and at last the ship- 

 wreck in Don Juan, of which, finding me highly 

 appreciative, my father went on with nearly all 

 the rest. By the end of 1834 I knew my Byron 

 pretty well. After taking me at least 

 six times straight through the Bible, my 

 mother was not afraid of plain words to 

 or for me; she had as much sympathy 

 with all that is noble and beautiful in 

 Byron as my father himself; her Puri- 

 tanism was clear enough in common 

 sense to see that, while Shakespeare 

 and Burns lay open on the table all 

 day, there was no reason for much mys- 

 tery with Byron, though until later I 

 was not allowed to read him for myself. 

 I never got the slightest harm from 

 Byron ; what harm came to me was 

 from the facts of life and from books 

 of a baser kind, including a wide range 

 of works of authors popularly considered 

 extremely instructive from Victor 

 Hugo clown to Doctor Watts. I said 

 that my mother was an ' inoffensive 

 prude.' She was herself as strict as 

 Alice Bridgenorth, but she understood 

 the doctrine of the religion she had 

 learned, and without ostentatiously 

 calling herself a miserable sinner, she 

 knew that Madge Wildfire was'no worse 

 a sinner. She had sympathy with every 

 passion as well as every virtue of true 

 womanhood. There was a hearty, frank, 

 and sometimes even irrepressible laugh 

 in my mother. If, however, there was 

 the least bitterness or irony in a jest, 

 my mother did not like it; but my 

 father and I liked it all the more, if 

 it were just; and, so far as I could 

 understand it, I rejoiced in all the sar- 

 casm of Don Juan. Only two things 

 I consciously recognized, that Byron's 

 truth of observation was the most ex- 

 act and his chosen expression the most 

 concentrated that I had yet found in 

 literature. By that time my father had 

 himself put me through the first two 

 books of Livy, and I knew r , therefore, 

 what close-set language was ; but I saw 

 then that Livy, as afterward Horace and 

 Tacitus, was studiously, often labori- 

 ously, and sometimes obscurely concen- 

 trated, while Byron wrote as easily as 

 a hawk flies and as clearly as a lake 

 reflect?, the exact truth in the precisely 

 nar v owest terms; nor only the exact 

 truth, but the most central and useful one. I saw 

 then that both Byron and Turner were right in 

 all things that I knew right from wrong in, and 

 that they must thenceforth be my masters, each 

 in his own domain. 



"I had a sharp attack of pleurisy in 1835, and 

 during the period of nursing and petting after- 

 ward I read The Fair Maid of Perth, learned the 

 song of Poor Louise, feasted on Stanfield's draw- 

 ing of St. Michael's Mount and Turner's Santa 

 S;ilia. Pool of Bethesda, and Corinth, engraved in 

 the Bible series. I got an immense quantity of 

 useful learning out of those four plates." Moreover, 

 planned all my proceedings on my journey to 

 itzerland, which was to begin the moment I 

 VOL. XL. 40 A 



was strong enough. I shaded in cobalt a cyanom- 

 eter, to measure the blue of the sky with ; bought 

 a ruled notebook for geological observations, and 

 a large quarto for architectural sketches, with a 

 square rule and a foot rule ingeniously fastened 

 outside, and I determined that the events and 

 sentiments of this journey should be described in 

 a poetic diary in the style of Don Juan, artfully 

 combined with that of Childe Harold. Two canto's 

 of this work were finished, carrying me across 



RUSKIN'S EARLY HOME AT HERNE HILL. 



France to Chamouni, where I broke down, find- 

 ing that I had exhausted on the Jura all the de- 

 scriptive terms at my disposal, and that none were 

 left for the Alps. 



" In this journey of 1835 I first saw Rouen and 

 Venice Pisa not till 1840. There have been three 

 centers of my life's thought Rouen, Geneva, Pisa. 

 All that I did at Venice was by-work because her 

 history had been falsely written before, and not 

 even by any of her own people understood, and 

 because in the world of painting Tintoret was 

 virtually unseen, Veronese unfelt, Carpaccio not 

 so much as named when I began to study them. 



" My father's Spanish partner, Mr. Domecq, was 

 living in 1835 in the Champs lys6es with his 



