INTRODUCTION xxxix

from passages in the son’s letters) an occasional grumble on this score. The publisher also was despondent. “I got a letter from Mr. Smith yesterday,” wrote Ruskin (Dec. 5, 1851), “very polite and kind as usual, but containing the somewhat unpleasant information that neither the Stones nor Pre-Raphaelitism¹ are selling. I am always ‘going to write something that is to carry off the dead weight with it,’ and never doing it. I must really make this second volume as popular as I can, and put a few plates in it and pretty ones. There is no use in writing fine books, if nobody will read them.” “I am much appalled,” he writes again (Dec. 19), “by the idea of the December account for my unfortunate folio publication, I must really mind very seriously what I am about. Still, I do not think that I shall lose by it in the long run; at all events, the public shall not have it cheap, however long they hold off.” Meanwhile the author’s expenses at Venice were running up into large figures. “I am really very sorry,” he writes (Jan. 16, 1852), “and getting somewhat uncomfortable-one may be sorry without being fidgety, but I am getting fidgety too-at the continual drain I am making upon your purse, giving you no return.” In the long run, Ruskin’s books, and The Stones of Venice among them, were to prove very lucrative to their author; but it was not so at first, nor, as we have seen, did he attempt to make his works popular either by lowering the standard of what he deemed it important to say, or by deliberately indulging in fine writing. What he claimed for himself in later years is fully borne out by the inner history, as we are now able to follow it, of his literary life. He had “never,” he once wrote, “written a word either for money or for vanity, nor even in the careless incontinence of the instinct for self-expression.”²

The slow sale of the volume, and his father’s disappointment, caused Ruskin to feel considerable chagrin at the tone of some of the reviews of The Stones of Venice (vol. i.). This appears in several letters to his father. The following is of particular interest, because the reviewer in question was himself a distinguished man of letters:-

(VENICE, October 16th, 1851.)-I have to-day yours with the Edinburgh Review which is marvellously dull, and I think about the most impertinent-next to the Economist³-that has come out. Fancy their coolly saying that my next volume will be much improved if I engraft their opinions on mine, but that otherwise-for this they

¹ See below, p. xlvii.

² Fors Clavigera, Letter 85, January 1878.

³ The Economist did not notice the Stones of Venice; the allusion must be, therefore, to a review of Pre-Raphaelitism (August 23, 1851) which was somewhat contemptuous in tone.

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