618 APPENDIX

I am glad I had at least the grace to recognize thus much of the beauty of landscape round Laon. I did not see the place again till 1882. The following fragment of a letter to Joanie, giving my new impression of it, will show the degree of progress in taste made during the forty years of intermediate work:-

“(HOTEL DE L’ECU DE FRANCE, LAON, 12th Aug. 1882.)-Except Assisi, I never saw a place like it. Cathedral, for that matter, out and out grander than Assisi would be without the supporting terraces. Instead of them it has avenues of plane-trees above a sloping garden of mixed vineyard and flowers, and the town, cheerfully old-fashioned, and lively, yet contented, with the quaintest pepper-boxes and cruets and cat’s-ears of ins and outs in roofs, and ups and downs in walls, and, on the really old outside walls, the houses mixed among the buttresses and towers, with a window here, and a balcony there, and a bit of arch built in, and a bit of bow built out, and a peephole in the roof, and a secret stair in the corner, and nooks and crooks, and outlooks and side-looks; and beautiful bits of garden kept gay but not trim; and vines and pear-trees dropping all over with big pears; and lovely moss and ivy and feathery grass and house-leek, and everything that ever grew on walls or in chinks, and every now and then a cluster of spiry bluebells rooted on a buttress angle; and seven feet high, themselves-like foxgloves made saints of-and going off into raptures of chimes; and little dripping wells into cisterns, and recesses with steps down and roofs over-for all the world like Siena-with sweet gush and tinkle and gleam of running surface-and presently all aglow again with marigolds and purple clematis and scarlet geranium-and blue distance seen beyond all.”

The right work which brought me into this better mind lasted forty years exactly, beginning, as already stated,* in the spring of 1842; and here on the heights of Laon, where I unconsciously measured the change, I will pause for a little while, to describe the sort of creature I then was, and had to be changed, or grown, out of.

In the first place, I had the invaluable quality of ductility. In fact, I was a mere piece of potter’s clay, of fine texture, and could not only be shaped into anything, but could take the stamp of anything, and that with precision. Which is the real virtue of me as respects other people. What shape of vase or cylinder I may arrive at myself is really of small consequence to them, but the impressions I take of things of them are trustworthy to the last line, and by the end of the forty years became sufficiently numerous.

In the second place, I had a curiously broad scope of affection, alike for little things and large. From my ants’ nests in Herne Hill garden,¹ up to Mont Blanc and Michael Angelo, nothing came amiss to me.

* Modern Painters, small edition, vol. ii., Epilogue. [See now Vol. IV. p. 344.]

¹ [See above, p. 45.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]