The Life of John RuskinCollingwood, W. G. (William Gershom)
Philosophy
The Life of John Ruskin
Collingwood, W. G. (William Gershom)
Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Ruskin, John, 1819-1900
In such times he found relief by reverting to the past. He wrote in the
beginning of February a paper for the _University Magazine_ on "My First
Editor," W.H. Harrison, and forgot himself--almost--in bright
reminiscences of youthful days and early associations. Next, as Mr.
Marcus Huish, who had shown great friendliness and generosity in
providing prints for the Sheffield museum, was now proposing to hold an
Exhibition of Mr. Ruskin's "Turners" at the Fine Art Galleries in New
Bond Street, it was necessary to arrange the exhibits and to prepare the
catalogue. For the next fortnight he struggled on with this labour, and
with his last "Fors"--the last he was to write in the long series of
more than seven years.[40] How little the thousands who read the preface
to his catalogue, with its sad sketch of Turner's fate, and what they
supposed to be its "customary burst of terminal eloquence," understood
that it was indeed the cry of one who had been wounded in the house of
his friends, and was now believing every day that dawned on him to be
his last. He told of Turner's youthful picture of the Coniston Fells and
its invocation to the mists of morning, bidding them "in honour to the
world's great Author, rise,"--and then how Turner's "health, and with it
in great degree his mind, failed suddenly with a snap of some vital
chord," after the sunset splendours of his last, dazzling efforts....
[Footnote 40: "Fors" was taken up again, at intervals, later on; but
never with the same purpose and continuity.]
"Morning breaks, as I write, along those Coniston Fells, and the level
mists, motionless and grey beneath the rose of the moorlands, veil the
lower woods, and the sleeping village, and the long lawns by the
lake-shore. Oh that some one had but told me, in my youth, when all my
heart seemed to be set on these colours and clouds, that appear for a
little while and then vanish away, how little my love of them would
serve me, when the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of morning
should be completed; and all my thoughts should be of those whom, by
neither, I was to meet more!"
The catalogue was finished, and hurried off to the printers. A week of
agitating suspense at home, and then it could no longer be concealed.
Friends and foes alike were startled and saddened with the news of his
"sudden and dangerous illness,"--some form of inflammation of the
brain--the result of overwork, but still more immediately of the
emotional strain from which he had been suffering.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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