INTRODUCTION lix

too. Nowhere did the seed sown by Ruskin in this chapter fall upon more fruitful ground than at Oxford, where Burne-Jones and William Morris were undergraduates. “Ruskin became for them,” says Morris’s biographer, “a hero and a prophet, and his position was more than ever secured by the appearance of The Stones of Venice in 1853. The famous chapter on ‘The Nature of Gothic Architecture,’ long afterwards lovingly reprinted by Morris as one of the earliest productions of the Kelmscott Press, was a new gospel and a fixed creed.”¹ Canon Dixon, another member of the same set at Oxford (though of a different college), draws an interesting picture of their evenings with Ruskin’s books:-

“It was when the Exeter men, Burne-Jones and he [Morris], got at Ruskin, that strong direction was given to a true vocation-The Seven Lamps, Modern Painters, and The Stones of Venice. It was some little time before I and others could enter into this; but we soon saw the greatness and importance of it. Morris would often read Ruskin aloud. He had a mighty singing voice, and chanted rather than read those weltering oceans of eloquence as they have never been given before or since, it is most certain. The description of the ‘Slave Ship’ or of Turner’s skies, with the burden, ‘Has Claude given this?’² was declaimed by him in a manner that made them seem as if they had been written for no end but that he should hurl them in thunder on the head of the base criminal who had never seen what Turner saw in the sky.”³

Morris’s preface to the Kelmscott edition of the chapter is here reprinted in an appendix (p. 460), and in it he tells us what effect Ruskin’s words had upon him, and what was his estimate of their significance. The chapter is, he says, “one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century,” and “to some of us when we first read it, it seemed to point out a new road on which the world should travel.” Morris in after years was to throw himself with eager activity into an endeavour to drive the world along that road; and there were others at the time who felt, like those eager undergraduates at Oxford, that this chapter was essentially a tract for the times. The first suggestion for a separate publication of the chapter seems to have come from Dr. John Brown (author of Rab and his Friends). In sending on a letter from Dr. Brown, Ruskin writes to his father (Aug. 1, 1853): “Please notice what he says about publishing sixth chapter cheap, separate-’The Nature of Gothic’-for railway reading. Would you propose this to Mr. Smith?” Nothing seems to have come of the suggestion for the moment, but in the following year it was adopted

¹ The Life of William Morris, by J. W. Mackail, 1899, vol. i. p. 38.

² See Vol. III. pp. 416-418.

³ Mackail’s William Morris, i. 46.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]