Letters of John Ruskin

V

1873-1893

AFTER my return from Europe in 1873, ten years passed before I again saw Ruskin. They were years of grave change and sad experience for him. He continued to engage in dangerous excess of dispersed and exhausting work, and to yield to a still more dangerous excess of emotion. The intensity of his sensitiveness to immediate impressions, the passionate ardor of his feelings, the habit of uncontrolled expression reacting to increase the temper from which it sprang, continued to aggravate the bitterness of his resentment against the evil of the world and to deprive him of peace of mind. His unsettled religious convictions left him devoid of spiritual comfort and support. His writings, now largely devoted to social questions, were of a nature to expose him to harsh and often unjust criticism by which he was wounded and embittered. He felt deeply the separation which was growing wider and wider between himself and other men. His firmest convictions were opposed to the prevailing ideas of his time. He stood alone and like a prophet to whom his people would not hearken. Personal sorrows added to his troubles. His brain and his heart were alike overwrought.

Yet there were intervals when the natural elasticity and cheerfulness of his disposition asserted themselves, when the delights of nature or of art could still minister to his happiness, and when all the sweetness and generosity of his nature displayed themselves in their incomparable abundance. His friends could not but be anxious for him, and they strove in vain to persuade him to moderate his exhausting career. For a long time the vigor of his constitution enabled it to endure the excessive strain to which it was subjected, but finally, in 1878, it gave way, and he was brought near death by a violent inflammation of the brain. The immediate attack passed, leaving apparently little effect, but he never recovered the sense of permanent security from similar breakdowns. The monthly issue of Fors Clavigera, which had continued unbroken for seven years, and in which he had poured out his thought on every subject, displaying himself and his affairs with astonishing frankness and sincerity, was suspended. It had been a dangerous mode of relief of his overburdened spirit.

The readers who are acquainted with the intimate revelations of himself which Ruskin published in Fors Clavigera and elsewhere will find in the following selections from the many letters I received from him during this period little that is new except in form and relation, while those who are unfamiliar with his works may learn something from them of his generous nature, his genius, and his occupations, as well as of the darkness gradually closing in upon him.

OXFORD (CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE) 2 December, ’73.

I often hear your sermons over again. I attend to them very much indeed. I think my steady resistance to them the most heroic of all the efforts I make in the service of my poor “Lower than the angels.” Sometimes, when I’m tired in the evening, they nearly break me down, and I’m so proud next morning of not having been beaten.

But I’m very sure you will be better pleased with the Fors for next year, if I live.

I go to Assisi early in the spring to work there, with what help I can gather, on a monograph of it.

I am surprised to find how well my health holds, under a steady press of work; but my sight begins to fail, and I shall begin with spectacles this next year.

PISA, 9th April, 1874.
... I have always thought you just as wrong in following out your America life, as you think me in following Fors to its issue — perhaps we each of us judge best for the other. Suppose we both give up our confounded countries ? — let them go their own way in peace — and we will travel together, and abide where we will, and live B. C. or in the 13th century. I will draw, you shall write — and we shall neither of us be too merry for the other, and both much the stronger for the other. I really think this a very lovely plan — and sometimes we ’ll go and have a symposium at Venice with R. B.!²

ASSISI, 11th April, ’74.
I’m so very glad you like my drawings. That one of the fall of Schaffhausen³ was the only one I ever saw Turner interested in. He looked at it long, evidently with pleasure, and shook his finger at it, one evening, standing by the fire in the old Denmark Hill drawing-room.
How Destiny does mock one, giving all the best things when one is too young to use them! Fancy if I had him to shake fingers at me now!

ASSISI, 20 June, 1874.
. . . I wrote these two pages, and then went to my own work, rewriting or completing my lectures on Botticelli after my work on him in Rome. But it is gray and thunderous, and I can’t write, somehow; — have been awake since four, and am tired. I walk to the window — there’s a lovely little scene down in the valley beneath — steep down — five hundred feet. I see the bed of the brook, Tescio, all but dry; a peasant has brought seven or eight sheep to feed on the shrubs among the stones of it; and his wife or daughter is walking up to their cottage in a white jacket with brown petticoat, carrying an amphora on her head, full (I can see almost into the mouth of the amphora, I look so steeply down with my glass upon her). “Such a picturesque figure, and so classical, and of course you’ll sketch her,” say my London acquaintances, enchanted at the idea — Charles Norton backing them, too. No, my good acquaintances and one friend, I shall go and explain to her why the bed of the stream is dry, why the sheep have to nibble among the stones of it, and why she has to go down to fill her amphora instead of having a fountain at her door.

LUCCA, 12th August, 1874.
Giotto is not dethroned, at least, not diminished in his own real place — which is of human passion. In mystic and majestic thought Cimabue leads wholly, and the Byzantines generally. Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi are loving realists of little things. The finest thing of Giotto’s in Assisi is not the Poverty or Chastity, but a little group of people in the street, looking at a boy who has just been restored to life, after falling out of a three pair of stairs window. The Christ, St. Francis, and Charity, are all three total failures in the great Poverty Fresco; and in the Chastity, she herself, and Fortitude are quite valueless, while Obedience in the opposite one is monstrous. But the sweetness of a monk reading on the grass while St. Francis receives the stigmata, and the sudden passion of a woman clasping her hands and thanking God for the boy brought to life, are more pure and exquisite than anything of the subsequent schools.

ST. MARTIN’S, 12th October, 1874.
You see in Fors how all my thoughts are bent on certain spiritual problems, only to be approached in, I don’t say monastic, but at all events secluded life. These, I believe, you think only morbid remnants of old days. It may be so. I should not be sad, if I did not feel thus. But they are still, you see, questions to me, and now getting imperative.

BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, LANCASHIRE, 25th March, 1875.

... But nothing would beat me except the plague of darkness and blighting winds — perpetual — awful — crushing me with the sense of Nature and Heaven failing as well as man.

I have also been singularly weak and ill all this spring, and am obliged to take warning of many things — and give up . . . some of the most pet possessions of hope. . . . My additional years begin to tell now in the fatal sense of there being no time to try anything again. . . .

Not long after the letter from which the preceding extract is taken was written, the death of Miss LaTouche, the fair and high-souled woman to whom Ruskin’s heart had for many years been devoted, closed for him a period of alternate hopefulness and disappointment which had kept him in a constant state of restless and exhausting emotion. It was a sad story from beginning to end. She died worn out by the stress of the conflict between her heart and her conscience, and he was left hurt with wounds that were little short of mortal.

BRANTWOOD, 19 July, ’75.
I have not been writing, because that death, as you so well understand, has made so much of my past life at once dead weight to me that I feel as I did when I first got out of bed after my illness at Matlock,⁴ as if my limbs were of lead — mentally and bodily. This is so with me just now, and I only fight through by going on with mechanical work all I can — but the effect on my general health has been very paralyzing, and it was no use writing about it; also, my work has now at once and in all things taken the form of bequest, and I am reviewing old notes, drawings, etc., etc., and being my own executor as much as I can, . . . and writing, if I can, some things that I want to say before ending — not that I definitely expect to end yet; and to the public I keep my head above water as if I had no cramp, hitherto, at least, I think so. My literary work seems to me up to its usual mark. . . .

COWLEY, 14th November, ’75.
. . . You cannot have in America the forms of mental rest with soothed memory of other, far distant sorrow, not our own, which is so beautiful in these old countries. How different for a man like you, a walk by our riversides under Bolton or Furness, or in cloister of Vallombrosa or Chartreuse, from any blank cessation from absolute toil in that new land. Do come to us again. . . . Let us have a quiet time in Italy together, as soon as days are long, next year. What will a picture less matter to me ? or a cipher less in my banker’s book ? Let us take a pleasant little suite of rooms in Florence or Venice — and we’ll economize together, and think together — and learn together — and perhaps — even hope a little together before we die. . . .

13th January, ’76.
... It is true that I am burning the candle at many ends, but surely in the many dark places I live in, that is the proper way to use one’s life. . . . I enclose proof of the 5th and roughly bound 4th Morning.⁵ It is woeful to have to leave that pleasant work — driven out by fiendish modern republicanism too horrible to be borne with. Here in England, Atheism and Spiritualism mopping and mowing on each side of me. . . . Which is pleasantest of these things I know, but cannot intellectually say which is likeliest — and meantime, take to geology.

1 February, ’76.
. . . I am being brought every day, now, into new work and new thoughts, and, whether I will or no, into close contact with evidence of an altered phase of natural, if not supernatural, phenomena, the more helpful to me, because I can compare now, with clear knowledge, the phase of mind in which —, and —, and other noble Deists or infidels are, and in which I have been for ten years, with that which I am now analyzing in the earlier Florentines, and recognizing in some living Catholics.

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, 1st March, ’76.
. . . I don’t see why I should be separated from you in our prison, because I hope to get out, now, and you don’t. Certainly, it would be better for any prisoner to have his friend in that — however absurd — condition though he might not find him so literally companionable.
. . . I have no new faith, but am able to get some good out of my old one — not as being true — but as containing the quantity of truth that is wholesome for me. One must eat one’s faith like one’s meat, for what good’s in it. . . .

Regaining some fragments of his old religious faith, modified by new conceptions of the faith of the mediæval Church, and by dallyings with Spiritualism, Ruskin attained for a time a more cheerful mood and more serenity of spirit than he had possessed during recent previous years. A pleasant picture of him at Brantwood was sent to me toward the end of the summer in a letter by the late Professor Gurney of Harvard University, a man whose untimely death can never cease to be a sorrow to those who had the happiness of being numbered among his friends. He wrote: “The day after we arrived at Coniston we received an invitation to a ' high tea ’ or ‘ meat tea ’ from Mrs. Severn, and the next day she called to arrange for our being rowed over. Pleasant as she was, I went over with some misgivings, which proved to be wholly groundless, as we have not had a more delightful evening on this side of the water, and Ruskin was everything that is considerate and courteous and kind. He first showed us his literary and art treasures while there was yet light; had tea laid in the drawing-room that we might enjoy the lake; talked delightfully, with a slight twinkle of humourous enjoyment of his own extravagance, when he trampled upon all the existing arrangements of society and augured its speedy downfall; read us bits of Cowley and Sir Philip Sidney, and, best of all, the preface, so far as yet written, to the edition he is to bring out of Sidney’s version of the Psalms, full of humour and nice feeling, and instead of coming away at nine as we had proposed, we tore ourselves away at half-past ten or later; and instead of walking home as we had arranged to do, the faithful Downs, who wished his duty conveyed to you all, insisted on rowing us back as well as over. It was pleasant to hear him talk of his master and of his own pride in appearing in person in the Fors. The row back in the dusky light was an appropriate close to an evening so delightful in all ways.”

Ruskin spent the autumn of 1876 and the early winter at Venice, and thence he wrote to me as follows: —

VENICE, 16th January, 1877.
. . . I have been four months at work on these three drawings [from Carpaccio’s picture of St. Ursula asleep], with other sketches going on, not slight ones, and a new history and guide in Venice. The detail of each day varies not much; nor in the detail of it ought you to take much pleasure — for I have none — except of a solemn kind. Time was, every hour in Venice was joy to me. Now, I work as I should on a portrait of my mother, dead. I am pleased with myself when I succeed, interested in the questions of the meaning of such and such a bend of lip, such and such a winding vein, pulseless. You will be interested in the history of her life, which I can thus write. So am I; and “happy” — in that way in my work. But it is a different happiness from having my mother to read Walter Scott to me.

There is also now quite an enormous separation between you and me in a very serious part of our minds. Every day brings me more proof of the presence and power of real Gods, with good men; and the religion of Venice is virtually now my own, mine at least (or rather at greatest) including hers, but fully accepting it, as that of John Bunyan, and of my mother, which I was first taught. . . .

At last the catastrophe, long anxiously foreboded, arrived. In February, 1878, Ruskin’s overwrought brain gave way. He was desperately ill. His dear and wise friend, the eminent surgeon and medical adviser, Sir John (then Mr.) Simon, hastened from London to Brantwood, and for a fortnight, while Ruskin hovered between life and death, did everything for him that devotion and skill could devise. He wrote to me on the 4th of March: . . . “I trust that the worst has now passed. . . . You know, without my telling it, all that has brought this dreadful disaster on him, —the utterly spendthrift way in which (with imagination less and less controlled by judgment) he has for these last years been at work with a dozen different irons in the fire — each enough to engage one average man’s mind. And his emotions all the while as hard worked as his intellect — they always blowing the bellows for its furnace. As I see what he has done, I wonder he has not broken down long ago.” . . .

Before the end of March convalescence had begun. It went on rapidly, and by June Ruskin seemed to all intents restored to entire health. He wrote to me without even a reference to his illness. He soon fell into his common modes of life. On the 4th of August Mr. Simon wrote again to me: . . . “ It is now more than three months since I saw him, and I studiously avoid direct correspondence with him; but I think I know his state fairly well, and can tell you as much about him as if we had recently been together. In bodily health he appears to be as well as needs be, and in mind he shows no such fault as would strike casual observers. He appears to be fairly cautious against dangers of re-upset: perhaps not so abstinent as I should wish him to be from use of pen and ink, but, for him, self-restraining; and he professes to be on his guard against over-colloquism.” . . .

As a result of his illness Ruskin resigned his professorship at Oxford, but he would not give up other work.

BRANTWOOD, 26 November, 1878.
... I keep fairly well, on condition of doing only about two hours’ real work each day. But that, with the thoughts that come in idleness, or as I chop wood, will go a good way yet, if I live a few years more.
I hope the III Fésole⁶ will be with you nearly as soon as the II, and two more Proserpinas⁷ not bad ones, are just done, too. . . .

The illness of 1878, although it seemed to pass without leaving serious effects, marks virtually the close of work accomplished by Ruskin with his full powers. His mind continued as active as ever. The diversity of his interests did not diminish, and each in turn was pursued with exhausting enthusiasm. He gave himself no rest, and, rejecting the counsel of Prudence (for him the most difficult of the virtues), he pursued a course which could not but end in renewed disaster. In 1881, after several previous threatenings, afresh attack of trouble in the brain broke him down for a time, and this was followed the next year by a similar, but still more serious and alarming attack. In each instance the illness passed, having apparently done little harm. From each of them Ruskin recovered without consciousness of injury, and without loss of confidence in his own powers, so that in 1883 he accepted reëlection to his Oxford professorship, and began to lecture again not only at the University, but in London and elsewhere.

I made a short visit to England in the summer of 1883, and again in that of 1884, and in both years spent some days at Brantwood. Ruskin,as I have already said, had changed greatly in the ten years since our last meeting. I had left him in 1873 a man in vigorous middle life, young for his years, erect in figure, alert in action, full of vitality, with smooth face and untired eyes; I found him an old man, with look even older than his years, with bent form, with the beard of a patriarch, with habitual expression of weariness, with the general air and gait of age. But there were all the old affection and tenderness; the worn look readily gave way to the old animation, the delightful smile quickly kindled into full warmth, and at moments the unconquerable youthfulness of temperament reasserted itself with entire control of manner and expression. He had become more positive, more absolute in manner, more irritable, but the essential sweetness prevailed, and there were hours when the old gayety of mood took possession of him with its irresistible charm. Given his circumstances, no ordering of life could have been more happy for him than that at Brantwood. He was the object of the most loving and watchful sympathy and care. His cousin, Mrs. Severn, was at the head of his household, and the best of daughters could not have been more dear and devoted to him. Her children kept the atmosphere of the home fresh and bright; the home itself was delightful, beautiful within with innumerable treasures of art, and surrounded without by all the beauties of one of the fairest scenes of the English lake country. A pleasanter home, or one more lovely in its surroundings and more appropriate for him, could not have been desired.

BRANTWOOD, 20th January, ’81.
DEAREST CHARLES, — Very thankful I was for your letter of New Year, received this morning. Many a thought I’ve had of you, but at Christmas time I was not myself — the over-excitement of an autumn spent in France leaving me much pulled down. I am better now (though my hand shakes with cold today), and can report fairly of what is done and doing. I found Chartres, both cathedral and town, far more spared than I had thought possible, and more of historical interest than I had ever dreamed in Amiens; and the book sent with this⁸ is the first of what I believe will bring out more of the at present useless feelings in me than any work lately undertaken.
... I have still eye and hand enough to draw, or even etch what I want, if I can only get time; and I have just laid my hand on a young assistant who can get more of the spirit of sculpture than I can myself. The people over there get interested themselves when I stay a while with them, and I hope to be allowed to cast things for the Sheffield Museum and leave, if I live yet a few years more, more than enough to show what Gothic was. . . . This dull letter will I hope bring a brighter one after it — but I answer by return of post, though to-day with cold wits — not heart.
Ever your loving,
J.R.

BRANTWOOD, 24th March, 1881.
MY DEAREST CHARLES, — I’ve just read your dear letter to me on my birthday — after having another bite or two of Nebuchadnezzar’s bitter grass. I went wild again for three weeks or so, and have only just come to myself — if this be myself, and not the one that lives in dream.
The two fits of whatever you like to call them are both part of the same course of trial and teaching, and I’ve been more gently whipped this time and have learned more; but I must be very cautious in using my brains yet awhile.
I can’t make out why you like that Bible of Amiens. I thought you had given up all that sort of thing. I shall have some strange passages of dream to tell you of as soon as I am strong again. The result of them, however, is mainly my throwing myself now into the mere fulfilment of Carlyle’s work.
Say words of him — say you. Are not his own words written in white-hot fire on every city-wall of Europe ?
Read Past and Present again, now.
This was the main part of the cause of my dream. The other was what we talked of once at Prato (beside Filippo Lippi).
... I’ll write soon again — God willing. . . .

SALLENCHE, 11th September, 1882.
MY DARLING CHARLES, — I think a good deal of you here, and of other people that are not here, without deserving to be scolded for being anywhere else.
I was trying to-day to draw the view I showed you that morning with the piny ridge between us and the Mont Blanc. But I could n’t draw the ridge, and there was no Mont Blanc, any more than there was any you. For indeed the Mont Blanc we knew is no more. All the snows are wasted, the lower rocks bare; the luxuriance of light — the plenitude of power — the Eternity of Being — are all gone from it; even the purity, for the wasted and thawing snow is gray in comparison to the fresh frosted wreaths of new-fallen cloud which we saw in that morning light — how many mornings ago! The sadness of it and wonder are quite unparalleled — as its glory was. But no one is sad for it but only I — and you, I suppose, would be. Lowell would be perfectly happy, doubtless, because Mont Blanc is now sans-culotte literally, and a naturalized, Republican, French Mount besides — without any Louis Napoleon to make the dying snows blush for their master.
And as the Glaciers, so the sun that we knew is gone. The days of this year have passed in one drift of soot-cloud, mixed with blighting air. I was a week at Avallon in August, without being able to draw one spiral of its porch-mouldings — and could not stand for five minutes under the walls of Vézelay, so bleak the wind. The flowers are not all dead yet, however, the euphrasy and thyme are even luxuriant, and the autumn crocus as beautiful as of old, I can’t get up, now, alas, to my favorite field of gentian under the aiguille de Varens, but I find the fringed autumn gentian still within reach and the purple clustered one was rich on the pastures of the Dôle.
The Rhone still runs, too, though I think they will soon brick it over at Geneva, and have an “esplanade” instead. They will then have a true Cloaca Maxima, worthy of Modern Progress — in the Fimetic Arts.
I go back to Geneva on Wednesday, and then to Pisa and Lucca — a line to Lucca would find me in any early day of October, and should be read beside Ilaria, and perhaps with her gift of Cheerfulness.
Don’t think this is a brain-sick statement — I certify you of the facts as scientifically true.
Ever your loving
J. R.

LUCCA, Coffee time (7 A. M.) 3 October, 1882.
. . . Well, about these Pisa measurings. You might as well try to measure the sea-waves, and find out their principle. The beginning of the business would be to get at any historical clue to the facts of yielding foundation. The Parthenon is quite a different case from any mediæval building whatsoever. In all great mediæval buildings you have foundation unequal to the weight; you have more or less bad materials, and you have a lot of stolen ones You might as well go and ask a Timbuctoo nigger why he wears a colonel’s breeches wrong side upwards, as a Pisan architect why he built his walls with the bottom at the top and the sides squinting. He likes to show his thefts to begin with — if the ground gives way under him, he stands on the other leg. I’ve long believed myself that finding the duomo would n’t stand upright anyhow, they deliberately made a ship of it, with the leaning tower for a sail; and my good helper, Mr. Collingwood, who has been doing the loveliest section of the Savoy Alps (who are exactly like Pisan architects in their “ principles,” or unprinciples, too),said that he could n’t look at the north side without being seasick.

But all this entanglement is of no importance as to the main question of “ Liberty” of line, which even I have always taught to be the life of the workman, and which exists everywhere in good work to an extent till now unconceived, even by me, till I had seen the horror of the restoration which put it “ to rights.” Nearly all our early English Gothic is free hand in the curves, and there is no possibility of drawing even the apparent circles with compasses. Here — and I think in nearly all work with Greek roots in it — there is a spiral passion which drifts everything like the temple of the winds. This is the first of all subtle charms in the real work — the first of all that is aἰβoῖ’d out of it by the restorer. . . . And it is n’t of the slightest use to point any of these things out to the present race of mankind. It is finally tramwayed, shamwayed, and eternally damnwayed, and I wish the heavens and the fates joy over it; but they can’t expect any help from me, whatever they mean to make of it.

All the same, it seems to me a great shame that I’m old, and can’t see it come to grief; nor even the snows come back to the Alps again, if they do. Again, all the same, I’ll run back to Pisa just now after I’ve been at Florence, and get at some measures for you, if I find them takeable on the Baptistery. I did the

Florentine Baptistery in 1872, and found there was n’t a single space in all the octagon and all the panelling, that matched another. It is exactly like measuring a quartz crystal, except that even the angles are n’t fixed; but I did n’t measure any of them, practically they are true enough in the main octagon. I think the most important thing for your purposes would be to get the entasis of the great Campaniles and war-towers. The Guinigi here, and the Verona Campanile, and St. Mark’s, are all extremely beautiful. I’ll see what I can make of the Guinigi today, and send you some bits of masonry worth notice for the wanton intricacy of piecing. . . .

HERNE HILL, 1st January, 1883.
What a venomous old infidel you are! I think I never read a nastier comment on a lovely theory than that “other walls are like Fésole that are not on like rocks ” — I don’t believe there are any other walls like Fésole. You could n’t build them but of macigno, and I don’t know any macigno anywhere else. Yes. I got drawings — fairly careful, of wall and rock — both. Those Pisan details are quite delightful, but I think Boni’s report will be exhaustive; he has got his measures to a centimeter, and has such a knowledge of cements and joints that nothing escapes him. I send you a present of one of his little drawings of ornament—which will show you the infinite fineness of the creature.
I’m very well, and doing crystallography and geology. I think my good assistant Collingwood will get the glacier theory well swept out of the way at last. . . .

BRANTWOOD, 28th July, 1883.
What a shame that I’ve never said a word since you left; but somehow I can’t believe in the existence nor mediatorship of Messrs. Baring.
To-day I have your note from blessed Domo d’ Ossola — and I would I were there. But I’ve got entangled in ground veronica and anagallis tenella — and am sick to finish some work in weeds half done years ago, and the ideas of it festering in my head ever since. And worse, I ’ve letters from the Keeper of the National Gallery, and the Librarian of the British Museum, — and the Brit. M. is being broken up, and the National Gallery wants its plates and drawings; and the B. M. writes to me to defend it — and I’ve written back that I’m going to advise sending the MSS. to the Bodleian, and putting the sculpture in the National Gallery cellars! but I must go up to London to get well into the row; and I don’t see my way out of it, and believe it will be very utterly impossible for me to get abroad this year, even as far as Chartres — but it is possible you might like to look at Wells and Glastonbury with me, rather than come to autumnal Brantwood. I’ll write more tomorrow of what I’m doing. This note will, I believe, only stay in London during the Sunday; but I answer yours at once. . . . All our loves, and all manner of every other pleasant feeling mixed in mine.
Your ever faithful and obedient
J. R.

BRANTWOOD, 25 February, ’84.
. . . I can’t write, because I’ve always so much to say. How can I tell you anything of the sea of troubles that overwhelm old age — the trouble of troubles being that one can’t take trouble enough. At this moment I’m arranging a case at the British Museum, to show the whole history of silica, and I’m lending them a perfect octahedral crystal of diamond weighing 129 carats, which I mean to call St. George’s diamond, and to head my history of precious stones. And I’m giving them dreadful elementary exercises at Oxford which they mew and howl over, and are forced to do, nevertheless ; and I’m writing the life of Sta. Zita of Lucca, and an essay in form of lecture, on clouds, which has pulled me into a lot of work on diffraction and fluorescence; and I’ve given Ernest Chesneau a commission to write a life of Turner from a French point of view — under my chastisement “if too French;” and I’ve just got the preface written for Collingwood’s Alps of Savoy, supplement to Deucalion, and I’m teaching Kate Greenaway the principles of Carpaccio, and Kate’s drawing beautiful young ladies for me in clusters — to get off Carpaccio if she can.
And I’ve given Boehm a commission for 12 flat medallions, Florentine manner, life size, of six British men and six British women, of typical character in beauty, all to be looking straight forward in pure profile, and to have their hair treated with the Greek furrow.
And I’m beginning to reform the Drama — by help of Miss Anderson — and I had the Tempest played to me last week by four little beauties — George Richmond’s grandchildren — of whom the youngest (11) played Ferdinand and Caliban, both, and was a quite perfect lover; and the eldest played the boatswain and Miranda. And I’ve given three sets of bells (octaves) to Coniston school, and am making the children learn chimes.
And I’m doing a Fors now and then in a byeway; Allen will have a nice parcel to send soon. And I’m here at Herne Hill — and I’m just going down to breakfast, and I can’t write any more. I’m pretty well, I believe, but watching for breakdown. . . . I’m ever
Your poor old
J. R.

P. S. I am so glad you can remember with happiness. I live wholly to-day, and sadly enough, except in work (or wicked flirting). But, though I say it, nice girls do make quite as much fuss about me as I do about them, and they plague my life out to sign their birthday books.

BRANTWOOD, 2nd January, ’85.
... I am not so well as you hoped, having overstrained myself under strong impulse at Oxford, and fallen back now into a ditch of despond, deepened by loss of appetite and cold feet, and dark weather . . . and people all about more or less depending on me — no S. or M. for me to depend on, no Charles, no Carlyle — even my Turners for the time speechless to me, my crystals lustreless. After some more misery and desolation of this nature I hope, however, to revive slowly, and will really not trust myself in that feeling of power any more. But it seems to me as if old age were threatening to be a weary time for me. I’ll never mew about it like Carlyle, nor make Joanie miserable if I know it — but it looks to me very like as if I should take to my bed and make everybody wait on me. This is only to send you love — better news I hope soon.

BRANTWOOD, 1 October, ’85.
DEAREST CHARLES, — I am certainly better — and at present steadily gaining, bearing the burden of idle hours in the thankfulness that I am myself no longer a burden to poor Joanie. But she insists on the idleness, and will not let me write — but only dictate, and truly it will be better for you to have in her hand the rest of the note.
In the looking over the neglects of my past life, I found a lovely letter of yours of 1882, about the Cathedral of Pisa, giving evidence of the façade being meant to incline forward. Neglected in that year, the result of Signor Boni’s examination, which I suppose he has written out — of course it is lost; but I’m going to ask him this question about the fac^ade. The letter goes on very sadly about the “ Victory of Materialism,” and the distant hope of a revival in a thousand years of all that you and I have cared for—only the Alps to be let go in the meantime!
I believe the despondency caused by their own natural, as it seems, sympathy, with the scorn of their beauty, by the perishing of their snows, has borne a great part in the steady depression which has laid me open to these great illnesses. If only the Mont Blanc that you and I saw from St. Martin’s that morning was still there, I would set out on a slow pedestrian tour, and expect you to meet me there! As it is, I can’t find anything to amuse me, or to bring to any good in my old geological work; but I don’t believe in any “Victory of Materialism.” The last two years have shown me more Spirituality in the world than all my former life. Enough for to-day.
Ever your lovingest,
J. RUSKIN.

BRANTWOOD, Easter Wednesday, ’86.
DEAREST CHARLES, — I am entirely forbidden to write letters, and I’ve written seven difficult ones this morning — and this eighth has been on my mind this month. I thought you might be wondering what I meant to make of Præterita, if I live to finish it; and that you ought to know. There are to be 36 numbers — for sixty years. You and Joan may give account of me afterwards. I’ve got it all planned out now; and it will be pretty and readable enough I think, all through. . . .
I am retouching and mounting drawings also, and liking my own better; and when you come to see Brantwood again, whether I’m in it or not, you will find it in a little better order. . . .

BRANTWOOD, 18th August, ’86.
MY DEAREST CHARLES, — You ought not to be so anxious during these monsoons and cyclones of my poor old plagued brains. They clear off, and leave me, to say the least, as wise as I was before. Certainly this last fit has been much nastier for me than any yet, and has left me more frightened, but not so much hurt, as the last one. . . . Send me a line now and then still, please, — whether I’m mad or not I’m
Your loving
J. R.

BRANTWOOD, 23rd March, 1887.
I’m writing from 15 to 25 letters a day just now,besides getting on with Præterita,Proserpina, Ulric editing, and Christ’s Folk editing; and as you can’t be much more busy, and have n’t been crazy, I think you ought to keep up our acquaintance with an occasional word or two. . . .
The chapter of Præterita I’m upon (“Hotel du Mont Blanc”) is lagging sadly because I can’t describe the aiguille de Varens as I want to. I do hope I shan’t go off my head this summer again, and lose the wild roses, — for Præterita will be very pretty if I can only get it written as it’s in my head while right way on.
It is snowing and freezing bitterly, and I consider it all the fault of America and failure of duty in Gulf Stream, and so on.
. . . Seriously, I believe I am safer than for some years in general health, but have lost sadly in activity and appetite.
Ever your loving
J. R.

It was soon after my last stay with him that Ruskin began to write his Præterita, the record “of scenes and thoughts,” as its title says, “perhaps worthy of memory in my [his] past life.” It was issued in monthly numbers, beginning in April, 1885, but its regular publication was at times interrupted by illness, and the last number, the twenty-eighth, appeared in July, 1889. By far its largest autobiographical part is occupied with the account of Ruskin’s childhood and youth, ending practically with the year 1856, when he was thirty-seven years old. It was the year of the beginning of our friendship. Although there are many passages which indicate the disturbance of his mind, yet, barring these, the spirit and style of the book are thoroughly delightful, and truly represent the finer characteristics of his nature. He has written nothing better, it seems to me, than some pages of this book, whether of description or reflection. The retrospect is seen through the mellowing atmosphere of age, the harshness of many an outline is softened by distance, and the old man looks back upon his own life with a feeling which permits him to delineate it with perfect candor, with exquisite tenderness, and a playful liveliness quickened by his humorous sense of its dramatic extravagances and individual eccentricities.

After his illness in 1889, Ruskin was never able to take up again the broken thread of his story. The last ten years of his life were spent in retirement, and save for recurrent attacks of brain trouble, his days were peaceful and not unhappy. He still enjoyed the beauties of Nature and of Art, still liked to read or hear read his favorite books, still loved to listen to simple music. He was cared for with entire tenderness and devotion. His sun sank slowly, and amid clouds, but they did not wholly darken its light.

The last words of his own writing which I received from him were written on the 21st of November, 1896, a few months more than forty years from the date of the beginning of our friendship. They were at the foot of a letter of Mrs. Severn, and were written in pencil with a trembling hand,— “From your loving, J. R.”

Præterita ends with the following words, strangely symbolic of much of the life of which they close the record: “ Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening on the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the mountainous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, ‘Cor magis tibi Sena pandit,’ and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.”

(The end.)