xx INTRODUCTION

sometimes in thoughts and studies which did not excite his strongest feelings there is the serenity of his earlier work, yet on the whole the fire now becomes fitful and feverish. Thus in 1875 Ruskin gave only one course of lectures at Oxford, while in 1876 he gave none. He wrote in these years chapters, rather than books-parts of Ariadne Florentina, of Mornings in Florence, of Proserpina, of Deucalion, and a single number of Academy Notes. His monthly letter, Fors Clavigera, went on regularly, but these letters, though they had a certain inner consistency, were disconnected in immediate subject, and they were also fiery in temper. A remark in a letter of Carlyle to John Forster, of an earlier date, introduces us to one explanation of this temper. Carlyle is describing a meeting with Ruskin at the end of 1872. “Ruskin,” he writes, “good and affectionate. He has fallen into thick quiet despair again on the personal question; and meant all the more to go ahead with fire and sword upon the universal one.”¹ Incidental reference has been made in previous volumes to the alternations of hope and disappointment which accompanied Ruskin’s attachment to Miss Rosa La Touche-a subject to which we shall recur, when we come to his own account of “Rosie” in Præterita. Here it need only be said that the clouds which were settling upon this “personal question” had in 1874 shown some break, as we have seen;² but the clearing was only for a brief time, and early in 1875, all earthly hope was extinguished. “The woman I hoped would have been my wife,” he wrote in Fors Clavigera, “is dying.”³ In May she died.

The chequered course of this romance, which was also in some aspects a tragedy, had for many years placed a severe strain upon Ruskin’s emotions; now that it was closed by death, he was left numb and paralysed. “That death is very bad for me,” he wrote to his friend Dr. John Brown (June 18), “-seal of a great fountain of sorrow which can now never ebb away. Meanwhile I live in the outside of me, and can still work.” He had much work on his hands; at Oxford, the reorganisation of his Drawing School (already described⁴), and elsewhere, the development of various schemes in connexion with Fors Clavigera (of which an account may more conveniently be given in an introduction to that book). In other directions his work during 1875

¹ Letter of December 20, 1872, in New Letters of Thomas Carlyle, 1904, vol. ii p. 293.

² Vol. XXIII. p. liii.

³ Fors Clavigera, Letter 49, § 13. Compare Letter 61 (p. 4).

⁴ Vol. XXI. p. xxiii.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]