United States or Guinea-Bissau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
As an instance of what I mean by confession of the frankest order, dealing in this case not only with literature but also with morality, let me take the sorrowful words which Ruskin wrote in his Praeterita, as a wearied and saddened man, when there was no longer any need for him to pretend anything, or to involve any of his own thoughts or beliefs in any sort of disguise.
The personal incidents in his life need not detain us at the outset, as they are not specially eventful, and may be more fully gathered from the excellent "Life" of Ruskin, by his friend and some-time secretary, W.G. Collingwood, or from the delightfully interesting reminiscences by the master himself in his autobiographic "Praeterita," published near the close of his long, arduous, and fruitful career.
Therefore, my Muse, draw up thy flowing sail, And acclamate a gentle hail With all thy art and metaphors, which must prevail. Jam prima Oceani pars est praeterita nostri. Imparibus restat danda secunda modis. Quam si praestiterit mentem Daemon malus addam, Cum sapiens totus prodierit Rabelais. Malevolus.
His taste for art was manifested at an early age, and after passing from the university he studied painting under J.D. Harding and Copley Fielding; but his masters, as he tells us in "Praeterita," were Rubens and Rembrandt.
The perfection of lucid writing, which one sees in books such as Newman's Apologia or Ruskin's Praeterita, seems to resemble a crystal stream, which flows limpidly and deliciously over its pebbly bed; the very shape of the channel is revealed; there are transparent glassy water-breaks over the pale gravel; but though the very stream has a beauty of its own, a beauty of liquid curve and delicate murmur, its chief beauty is in the exquisite transfiguring effect which it has over the shingle, the vegetation that glimmers and sways beneath the surface.
Ruskin's Praeterita, Scenes and Thoughts of My Past Life. Benson's Ruskin: A Study in Personality. Earland's Ruskin and his Circle. Harrison's John Ruskin. Birrell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. Kitton's Dickens, his Life, Writings, and Personality. Gissing's Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Chesterton's Charles Dickens. Hughes's Dickens as an Educator. Philip's A Dickens Dictionary.
However, on this occasion he was very communicative. He had been talking about Ruskin, and he said: "Do you remember in Praeterita how Ruskin, writing about his sheltered and complacent childhood, describes how entirely he lived in the pleasure of sight?
His son, whom he loved to the uttermost and taught to speak truth, says this of him." Ruskin's mother, a devout and somewhat austere woman, brought her son up with Puritanical strictness, not forgetting Solomon's injunction that "the rod and reproof give wisdom." Of Ruskin's early years at Herne Hill, on the outskirts of London, it is better to read his own interesting record in Praeterita.
Bennet, when the Misses Lizzie, Jane and Lydia were in pinafores, must have been another perfect type: we can reconstruct him as he was then from the many fragments of his awfulness which still clung to him when the girls had grown up. John Ruskin's father, too, if we read between the lines of Praeterita, seems to have had much of the authentic monster about him.
In Praeterita, in his diaries and letters, in his familiar and unconsidered utterances, he is perfectly delightful, conscious of his own waywardness and whimsicality; but when he lectures and dictates, he is like a man blowing wild blasts upon a shrill trumpet.
Word Of The Day