INTRODUCTION xxiii

On wet days and in the evenings there were discussions on art or Scottish history. Millais would make fun of the old masters, or draw sketches for a comic history of Scotland. Several of his sketches are given in the Life of him by his son. One of them shows a game of battledore and shuttlecock; Ruskin does not figure in it, but Dr. Acland, who was on a visit to Ruskin, is taking a hand. Of the party in a more serious mood, we get a glimpse in letters from Dr. Acland. He was impressed by the intensity of Millais. “The point is in his work, and not in his words. He is a man with powers and perception granted to very few; not more imagination, not more feeling, but a finer feeling and more intuitive and instantaneous imagination than other men. Of this his nonsense affords the most striking proof.” On Ruskin, Millais had made the same impression:-

“Millais is a very interesting study,” he writes to his father (July 24), “but I don’t know how to manage him; his mind is so terribly active, so full of invention that he can hardly stay quiet a moment without sketching either ideas or reminiscences; and keeps himself awake all night with planning pictures. He cannot go on this way; I must get Acland to lecture him.”

By Ruskin’s own earnestness and enthusiasm Acland was profoundly struck. “Ruskin,” he writes, “has knocked off my sketching for ever, having quite convinced me that the paltry drawings I have been in the habit of doing are most injurious to the doer in his moral nature. What I can try to do is to draw something really well. I hope to be well enough to try to-morrow a bit of rock and water.” And again: “Ruskin I understand more than I have before; truth and earnestness of purpose are his great guides, and no labour of thought or work is wearisome to him;” and again, “I ought to say, as a key to Ruskin, I had no idea of the intensity of his religious feeling before now.”¹

Though both Ruskin and Millais went to Scotland for relaxation, they stayed to work. Millais’s principal work was the portrait of Ruskin, which is reproduced as frontispiece to this volume. It was at Acland’s suggestion that this portrait of Ruskin standing on the rocks, with the torrent thundering beside him, was undertaken. Ruskin was rejoiced, seeing in this work the promise of such

¹ Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, Bart., K.O.B., F.R.S.: A Memoir, by J. B. Atlay, 1903, pp. 173-174.

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