CHAPTER X

QUEM TU, MELPOMENE¹

195. WHETHER in the biography of a nation, or of a single person, it is alike impossible to trace it steadily through successive years. Some forces are failing while others strengthen, and most act irregularly, or else at uncorresponding periods of renewed enthusiasm after intervals of lassitude. For all clearness of exposition, it is necessary to follow first one, then another, without confusing notices of what is happening in other directions.

I must accordingly cease talk of pictorial and rhythmic efforts of the year 1835, at this point; and go back to give account of another segment of my learning, which might have had better consequence than ever came of it, had the stars so pleased.

196. I cannot, and perhaps the reader will be thankful, remember anything of the Apolline instincts under which I averred to incredulous papa and mamma that, “though I could not speak, I could play upon the fiddle.”² But even to this day, I look back with starts of sorrow to a lost opportunity of showing what was in me, of that manner of genius, on the occasion of a grand military dinner in the state room of the Sussex, at Tunbridge Wells; where, when I was something about eight or nine years old, we were staying in an unadventurous manner, enjoying the pantiles, the common, the sight, if not the taste, of the lovely fountain, and drives to the High Rocks. After the military dinner there was military music,³ and by

¹ [Horace, Odes, iv. 3, 1.]

² [See above, § 75 (p. 68).]

³ [For another reminiscence of these days, see Two Paths, § 140 (Vol. XVI. p. 375), where, however, Ruskin refers to them as “dark days in my life-days of condemnation to the pantiles and band.”]

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