628 



RUSKIN, JOHN. 



neither Johnsonian balance nor Byronic allitera- 

 tion were ultimate virtues in English prose, and 

 1 had been reading with care, on Gordon's coun- 

 sel, both for its arguments and its English, 

 Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity. I had 

 always a trick of imitating more or less the last 

 book I had read with admiration. At all events, 

 1 did the best I then knew how, leaving no pas- 

 sage till I had put as much thought into it as 

 it could be made to carry, and chosen the words 

 with the utmost precision and tune I could give 

 them." 



Ruskin began his study of social conditions in 

 Switzerland, and physical deformity from the 

 " noon wind," which he came to realize as the 

 distorter of trees, he believed to be associated 

 with warped lives and dwarfed opportunities. He 

 made many fruitless efforts to establish a center 

 of beneficial influence. He writes: "Up to the 

 year with which I am now concerned, 1849, when 

 I was just thirty, no plans of this sort had 

 dawned on me; but the journeying of the year, 

 mostly alone, for the work necessary for the 

 fourth volume of Modern Painters, gave me the 

 melancholy knowledge of the agricultural condi- 

 tion of the great Alpine chain, which was the 

 origin of the design for St. George's Guild, and 

 virtually closed the days of youthful happiness 

 and began my true work in the world for what 

 it is worth." 



In the closing chapter of his autobiography 

 Ruskin says: " In blaming myself, as often I have 

 done, and may have occasion to do again, for my 

 want of affection to other people, I must also ex- 

 press continually more and more wonder that 

 ever anybody had any affection for me. I 

 thought they might as well have got fond of a 

 camera lucida or an ivory foot rule. All my 

 faculty was merely in showing that such and 

 such things were so; I was no orator, no actor, 

 no painter but in a minute and generally in- 

 visible manner; and I couldn't bear being inter- 

 rupted in anything I was about. Nevertheless, 

 some sensible grown-up people did get to like 

 me, the best of them with a protective feeling 

 that I wanted guidance no less than sympathy, 

 and the higher religious souls hoping to lead 

 me to the golden gates." 



When Ruskin turns his analytical powers upon 

 his own nature, it makes profoundly interesting 

 reading, although something in the dramatic but 

 simple fashion of the telling makes one doubt 

 whether he really conceived his own character 

 more accurately than he did that of the world 

 he afterward so savagely and so sorrowfully de- 

 sired and failed to aid. He says: "The thought- 

 ful reader must have noticed with some displeasure 

 that I have scarcely, whether at college or at 

 home, used the word ' friendship ' with respect to 

 any of my companions. The fact is, I am a little 

 jinx/led by the specialty and singularity of poet- 

 ical and classic friendship. I get distinctively 

 attached to places, to pictures, to dogs, cats, and 

 girls, but I have had Heaven be thanked! many 

 and true friends, young and old, who have been 

 of boundless help and good to me nor I quite 

 helpless to them yet for none of whom have I 

 ever obeyed George Herbert's mandate: 'Thy 

 friend put in thy bosom; wear his eyes still in 

 thy heart, that he may see what's there; if cause 

 require, thou art his sacrifice,' etc. Without think- 

 ing myself particularly wicked, I found nothing 

 in my heart that seemed to me worth anybody's 

 -i-ring; nor had I any curiosity for insight into 

 llmso of others; nor had I any notion of being a 

 sacrifice for them, or the hast \\-\<}\ that they 

 should exercise, for my good, any but the most 



pleasurable accomplishments Dawtrey Drewitt, 

 for instance, being further endeared because he 

 could stand on his head and catch vipers by the 

 tail ; Gershom Collingwood, because he could 

 sing French songs about the Earthly Paradise; 

 and Alic Wedderburn, because he could swim 

 into tarns and fetch out water lilies for me like a 

 water spaniel. And I never expected that they 

 should care much for me, but only that they 

 should read my books; and looking back, I be- 

 lieve they liked and like me nearly as well as if 

 1 hadn't written any. First, then, of this Love s 

 Meinie of my own age, or under it, William Ale- 

 Donald took to me, and got me to promise to 

 come to him at Crossmount, where it was his 

 evangelical duty to do some shooting in due 

 season. After once walking up Schehallien with 

 him and his keepers, with such entertainment as 

 I could find in the mewing and shrieking of some 

 seventy or eighty gray hares who were brought 

 down in bags and given to the poorer tenantry, 

 and forming a final opinion that the poorer ten- 

 antry might better have been permitted to find 

 the stock of their hare soup for themselves, I for- 

 swore further fashionable amusement, and set 

 myself, when the days were fine, to the laborious 

 eradication of a crop of thistles which had been 

 too successfully grown by northern agriculture in 

 one of the best bits of unboggy ground by tin 

 Tummel. The ambitions in practical gardening 

 of which the germs had been blighted in Hern< 

 Hill, nevertheless still prevailed over the contem 

 plative philosophy in me so far as to rekindle tin 

 original instinct of liking to dig a hole whenever 

 I got leave. Sometimes, in the kitchen garden of 

 Denmark Hill, the hole became a useful furrow: , 

 but when once the potatoes and beans were set, i 

 I got no outlet nor inlet for my excavatory fancy 

 or skill during the rest of the year. The thist It- 

 field at Crossmount was an inheritance of ame- 

 thystine treasure to me; and the working hours 

 in it are among the few in my life which I re- 

 member with entire serenity, as being certain 1 

 could have spent them no better. For I had 

 wise though I say it thoughts in them, too 

 many to set down here (they are scattered after- 

 ward up and down in Fors and Munera Pul 

 veris), and wholesome sleep after them, in spite 

 of the owls, who were many in the clumps of pine 

 by Tummel shore. On the Cumberland and Swiss 

 lakes, and within and without the Lido, I had 

 learned to manage a boat an extremely different 

 thing from steering one in a race and the little 

 two-foot steps of Tummel were, for scientific pur- 

 poses, as good as falls twenty or two hundiW 

 feet high. I found that I could put the stern <>i' 

 my boat full six inches into the air over the to|> 

 of one of these little falls, and hold it there, witr. 

 very short sculls, against the level stream, with 

 perfect ease for any time I liked, and any chili; 

 of ten years old may do the same. Half my 

 power of ascertaining facts of any kind connected 

 with the arts is in my stern habit of doing tho 

 thing with my own hands till I know its diffi- 

 culty, and though I have no time nor wish to 

 acquire showy skill in anything, I make myself 

 clear as to what the skill means and is. Thus, 

 when I had to direct roadmaking at Oxford, [ 

 sate myself with an iron-masked stonebreake* 

 on his heap to break stones beside the London 

 road till I knew how to advise my too impetu- 

 ous pupils to effect their purposes in that matter, 

 instead of breaking the heads of their hammer* 

 off (a serious item in our daily expenses). f 

 learned from an Irish street-crossing sweeper \vh;i ' 

 he could teach me of sweeping, but found niy-elf 

 in that matter nearly his match; and again and. 



