INTRODUCTION xxix

started for a tour in Normandy, which resulted in the writing of the present volume.¹ “I went to Boulogne,” writes J. J. Ruskin to Harrison on August 12, “and saw my son and his wife off by rail to Abbeville, where he is in his element among cathedrals and tumble-down houses.”

This account of the matter is borne out by Ruskin’s letters and diaries. Now that he had again found definite occupation, all his old enthusiasm revived, and he worked indefatigably and with concentration. He was up at 6, he tells his father, to read before breakfast, which was at 8. By 9.30 he was seated in some corner convenient for sketching, or was busy with his measuring rules and note-books. Dinner was at 1.30, and again from 4 to 6 he was sketching. A “couple of crockets” would sometimes occupy him for “upwards of an hour.” His companions were pressed into the service. His wife posted up the diary; George was sometimes sent off to trace panels and bas-reliefs. Ruskin was in a fever to make the most of the time, and to record the beauties that he saw while yet the stones were standing the one on the other:-

“I was dancing round the table this forenoon,” he writes to his father from Abbeville (Aug. 9), “in rapture with the porch here-far beyond all my memories or anticipation-perfectly superb, and all the houses more fantastic, more exquisite than ever; alas! not all, for there is not a street without fatal marks of restoration, and in twenty years it is plain that not a vestige of Abbeville, or indeed of any old French town, will be left. How I pity the poor people who must live then; and myself, for I was too young to understand or feel enough of it till now, when it is all going. I got into a café and have been doing my best to draw the Cathedral porch; but alas, it is not so easily done. I seem born to conceive what I cannot execute, recommend what I cannot obtain, and mourn over what I cannot save.”

The country delighted him no less than the churches:-

“You never saw anything yet in France,” he writes from Lisieux (August 23) “so lovely as this Normandy-just fancy vallies like rich bits of Italy, tufted with elm, poplar, willow, and Spanish chestnut, set between round sweeping grouse hills of purple heather, as bare as Schehallien.² I think Effie makes the heather grow under her feet. But I never saw such a lovely contrast of purple and green; even in

¹ The following was the itinerary: Abbeville (Aug. 8), by Eu to Rouen (Aug. 16), Lisieux (Aug. 23), Falaise (Aug. 25), Mortain (Sept. 1), Avranches, Mont St. Michel (Sept. 8), Coutances (Sept. 12), St. Lô (Sept. 15), Bayeux (Sept. 21), Caen (Sept. 22), Honfleur (Sept. 29), Rouen (Oct. 1), and home by Gisors, Amiens and Paris to Calais (Oct. 24).

² More correctly Schehallion; at the foot of which mountain was Crossmount.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]