626 



RUSKIN, JOHN. 



English wife and his five daughters, the eldest on 

 the eve of her marriage with one of Napoleon's 

 officers and the four others, much younger, at 

 home on vacation from a convent school. We had 

 happy family dinner with them played afterward 

 ' la toilette de madame ' with me, only I couldn't 

 remember whether I was the necklace or the gar- 

 ters. Then Clotilde and Cecile played Les Echos 

 and other fascinations of dance melody, only I 

 couldn't dance. It puzzles me that I should have 

 no recollection of my first opera, but I then heard 

 four great musicians, all rightly to be called of 

 genius, singing together, with sincere desire to 

 assist each other, not eclipse, and to exhibit not 

 only their own power of singing, but the beauty 

 of the music they sang. Still more fortunately 

 it happened that a woman of faultless genius led 

 the dances Taglioni ; a person of the highest nat- 

 ural faculties and stainless, simple character, gath- 

 ered with sincerest ardor and reverence into her 

 art. Afterward a season did not pass without my 

 hearing, twice or thrice at least, those four singers. 

 " Some little eifort was made to pull me to- 

 gether in 1836 by sending me to hear Mr. Dale's 

 lectures at King's College, where I explained to 

 Mr. Dale, on meeting him one day in the court of 

 entrance, that porticoes should not be carried on 

 the top of arches. The lectures were on early 

 English literature, of which, though I had never 

 read a word of any before Pope, I thought myself 

 already a much better judge than Mr. Dale. His 

 quotation of ' Knut the king came sailing by ' 

 stayed with me, and 1 think that was about all 

 I learned during the summer; for, as my adverse 

 stars would have it, my father's partner, Mr. 

 Domecq, asked if he might leave his daughters 

 at Herne Hill. Clotilde, a graceful, oval-faced 

 blonde of fifteen; Ccile, a dark, finely browed, 

 beautifully featured girl of thirteen ; Elise, fair, 

 round-faced like an English girl, a treasure of 

 good nature and good sense ; Caroline, a delicately 

 quaint little thing of eleven. Deeper than any 

 one dreamed, the sight of them in the Champs 

 FJysees had sealed itself in me, for they were the 

 first well-bred and well-dressed girls I had ever 

 spoken to. I was throw r n, bound hand and foot, 

 in my unaccomplished simplicity, into the fiery 

 furnace or fiery cross of these four girls, who 

 of course reduced me to a mere heap of white 

 ashes in four days. Four days, at the most, it 

 took to reduce me to ashes, but the Mercrcdi 

 ties cendrcs lasted four years. Anything more 

 comic in the externals of it, anything more tragic 

 in the essence, could not have been invented by 

 the skillfullest designer in either kind. In my 

 social behavior and mind I was a curious com- 

 bination of Mr. Traddles, Mr. 'Toots, and Mr. 

 Winkle. I had the real fidelity and single-mind- 

 edness of Mr. Traddles, with the conversational 

 abilities of Mr. Toots, and the heroic ambition 

 of Mr. Winkle all these illuminated by imagina- 

 tion, like Mr. Copperfield at his first Norwood 

 dinner. Clotilde (Ad&le Clotilde in full, but her 

 sisters called her Clotilde, after the queen saint, 

 and I Adle because it rhymed with shell, spell, 

 and knell) was only made more resplendent by the 

 circlet of her sisters' beauty, while my own shyness 

 and unpresentableness were further stiffened, or 

 rather sanded, by a patriotic and Protestant con- 

 ceit which was tempered neither by politeness nor 

 sympathy; so that, while in company I sat jealous- 

 ly miserable like a stockfish (in truth, I imagine 

 like nothing so much as a skate in an aquarium 

 trying to get up the glass), on any blessed occasion 

 of t('tc-(i-itte I endeavored to entertain my Span- 

 ish-born, Paris-bred, and Catholic-hearted mistress 

 with my own views upon the subject of the 



Spanish Armada, the battle of Waterloo, and the 

 doctrine of transubstantiation. I wrote with 

 great pains a story about Naples (which I had 

 never seen), and the Bandit Leoni, whom I 

 represented as typical of what my own sanguinary 

 and adventurous disposition would have been had 

 1 been brought up a bandit; and The Maiden 

 Giuletta, in whom I portrayed all the perfec- 

 tions of my mistress. Our connection with 

 Messrs. Smith & Elder enabled me to get this 

 story printed in Friendship's Offering, and Adele 

 laughed over it in rippling ecstasies of derision, 

 of which I bore the pain bravely for the sake of 

 seeing her thoroughly amused. I dared not ad- 

 dress any sonnets straight to herself, but when 

 she went back to Paris wrote her a French letter 

 seven quarto pages long, descriptive of the desola- 

 tions and solitudes of Herne Hill since her de- 

 parture. This letter, either Caroline or Elise 

 wrote to tell me, she had really read and 

 ' laughed immensely at the French of.' Bitterly 

 ashamed of the figure I had made, but yet not 

 a whit dashed back out of my daily swelling 

 foam of furious conceit, supported as it was by 

 real depth of feeling and by a true and glorious 

 sense of the newly revealed miracle of human 

 love in its exaltation of the physical beauty of 

 the world, I set myself in my seventeenth year. 

 in a state of majestic imbecility, to write a trag- 

 edy on a Venetian subject, in which the sorrows 

 of my soul were to be enshrined in immortal verse. 

 " Out of my feebly luminous complaints to that 

 luminary I was startled by a letter to my father 

 from Christ Church College, advising him that 

 there was room for my residence in the January 

 term of 1837. Strangely enough, my father had 

 never inquired into the nature or manner of ma- 

 triculation till he took me up to display in Ox- 

 ford. He never had any doubt about putting me 

 at the most fashionable college, and of course 

 my name had been down at Christ Church years 

 before I was called up; but it had never dawned 

 on my father's mind that there were two fash- 

 ionable and unfashionable orders or castes at 

 Christ Church, one of these being called gentle- 

 men commoners and the other commoners. My 

 father did not like the word ' commoner ' all 

 the less because our relationships in general were 

 not uncommon. I was entered as a gentleman 

 commoner without further debate, and remember 

 still, as if it w r ere yesterday, the pride of lir^t 

 walking out of the Angel Hotel, and past Uni- 

 versity College, holding my father's arm, in my 

 velvet cap and silk gown. Of course I never u>eil 

 a crib, but I believe the dean would rather I had 

 used fifty than borne the puzzled and helph < 

 aspect which I presented toward the afternoon 

 over whatever I had to do. And as my Latin 

 writing was, I suppose, the worst in the univer- 

 sity, as I never by any chance knew a first 

 a second future, or even, to the end of my Ox- 

 ford career, could get into my head where HIP 

 Pelasgi lived, or where the HeraclidpR returned 

 from, it may be imagined with what sort of coun- 

 tenance the dean gave me his first ami second 

 fingers to shake at our parting, or with what 

 comfort I met the inquiries of my father and 

 mother as to the extent to which i was. in eol 

 lege opinion, carrying all before me. As tin;:' went 

 on, the aspect of my college hall to me meant 

 little more than fear and shame of those examina 

 tion days. I had been received as a good-humore< 

 and inoffensive little cur, contemptuously, yel. 

 kindly, among the dogs of race at the gentle 

 man commoners' table; and my tutor and the 

 men who read in class with me were beginning '" 

 recognize that I had some little gift in rcadim; 



