IV. FONTAINEBLEAU 311

Considering of these matters, one day on the road to Norwood, I noticed a bit of ivy round a thorn stem, which seemed, even to my critical judgment, not ill “composed”; and proceeded to make a light and shade pencil study of it in my grey paper pocket-book, carefully, as if it had been a bit of sculpture, liking it more and more as I drew. When it was done, I saw that I had virtually lost all my time since I was twelve years old, because no one had ever told me to draw what was really there! All my time, I mean, given to drawing as an art; of course I had the records of places, but had never seen the beauty of anything, not even of a stone-how much less of a leaf!

I was neither so crushed nor so elated by the discovery as I ought to have been, but it ended the chrysalid days. Thenceforward my advance was steady, however slow.

74. This must have been in May, and a week or two afterwards I went up for my degree, but find no entry of it. I only went up for a pass, and still wrote Latin so badly that there was a chance of my not passing! but the examiners forgave it because the divinity, philosophy, and mathematics were all above the average; and they gave me a complimentary double-fourth.¹

When I was sure I had got through, I went out for a walk in the fields north of New College, (since turned into the Parks,) happy in the sense of recovered freedom, but extremely doubtful to what use I should put it. There I was, at two and twenty, with such and such powers, all second-rate except the analytic ones, which were as much in embryo as the rest, and which I had no means of measuring; such and such likings, hitherto indulged rather

¹ [“Ruskin,” says Dean Kitchin (speaking from long and intimate experience of Oxford examinations), “is a wonderful example of the ennoblement of Pass work by a strong and ready intelligence. In my time I have known three men on whom the old Pass education really had excellent effects: Lord Salisbury, Lord Dufferin, and Ruskin. They all brought to it a generosity of mind and breadth of experience which raised them above the work they had to do. Ruskin at the end showed so much work and brilliancy in his final examination, that he was placed in the Class List on his Pass work; his name appears as a Double Fourth Class-man, that is, an Honorary Class-man in both Classics and Mathematics. It was a very rare distinction” (Ruskin in Oxford and Other Studies, pp. 30-31).]

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