626 APPENDIX

pleased myself and my friends enough with pencil outlines washed with cobalt and touched with Naples yellow.

If anybody at this time had shown me in the least the way to what I wanted-if Turner had even let me see him lay a tint, or if William Hunt could have travelled with us on the front seat-there had been a chance, as before of my being a great geologist, so now of my being a notable painter, in a certain limited sphere. Again I have only to write -Parcis Aliter.¹

However, the chrysalid epoch was at last past, and in a fluttering, blundering, blinded way I was beginning to see the world of light again; nor did a day pass without my making an advance of some kind or other. My first fair trial of my new method, learnt from Roberts, was on the Château de Blois-from the courtyard of which I came back to the Inn so extremely satisfied with the result, in the form of a flimsy, yet somewhat graceful drawing of its spiral staircase, that I declared to my father that “Prout would give his ears if he could make such a drawing as that”!² Something must be allowed for the first excitement of an unexpected success-something for my fast advancing sense of delicacy and grace in architecture; what, after all allowance, remains of inexcusable arrogance was yet at this time immensely useful to me, in enabling me to plough my way on through every form of false teaching, trusting my own joyful instincts for the right. I forgot to count among my college expenses, very early (I recollect feasting on [it] the first night in my little bedroom at Peckwater,) the cost of Turner’s Rivers of France (how little thinking what was to become of the Loire series!³), and the book thenceforward became the criterion of all beauty to me; so early had I got to the understanding of his latest work, in its light and shade. Nobody but the engravers had ever seen the drawings-Turner had tied them up in a roll and put them away in a drawer.

At Rouen, I hunted down all his points of view from the riverside and hill; and virtually we started for Rome by traversing the “gate of the forest,”⁴ which seems to have been his principal object in the view from Pont de l’Arche. Very truly that gap cut by the broad chausée through the hundred feet high forest-upright wild forest-pathless, except by formal green allée, or paved chausée, must have struck him as an altogether French feature of landscape, impossible among the fungoid bosses of oak or broken clumps of beech in English parks,-how much more in Yorkshire copse and Scottish wild wood.

By Pont de l’Arche to Louviers and Évreux, a long day by Dreux to Chartres,-and I learnt for ever what painted glass was;-another long day to Orleans,-and I learnt at once what bad modern Gothic was.

The essential catastrophe of all that was best in France may be dated by the building of Orleans Cathedral. So to Blois and Amboise, which rightly made a great impression on me with its St. Hubert’s chapel-and

¹ [See above, p. 224 n.]

² [This remark is in the text, ii. § 21 (p. 263).]

³ [Ruskin was afterwards to present them to the University of Oxford: see Vol. XIII. p. 559.]

⁴ [Seen prominently in the drawing by Turner, which is No. 136 in the National Gallery.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]