204 PRÆTERITA-I

Englishmen, but I fancy it was his adverse star that made him an Englishman at all-the prosaic and practical element in him having prevailed over the sensitive one. He was the only man in Oxford among the masters of my day who knew anything of art; and his keen saying of Turner, that he “had got hold of a false ideal,” would have been infinitely helpful to me at that time, had he explained and enforced it. But I suppose he did not see enough in me to make him take trouble with me,-and, what was much more serious, he saw not enough in himself to take trouble, in that field, with himself.

231. There was a more humane and more living spirit, however, inhabitant of the north-west angle of the Cardinal’s Square: and a great many of the mischances which were only harmful to me through my own folly may be justly held, and to the full, counterbalanced by that one piece of good fortune, of which I had the wit to take advantage. Dr. Buckland was a Canon of the Cathedral, and he, with his wife and family, were all sensible and good-natured, with originality enough in the sense of them to give sap and savour to the whole college.

Originality-passing slightly into grotesqueness, and a

see ibid., p. 165. The MS. of Præterita gives a characterisation of Liddell at greater length, from which the following passages may be quoted:-

“Gifted with true taste for art in his youth, he did not love it enough to learn its elements; the unpractised faculties got first stunted, then vulgarised, and his powers in that kind finally expired in making monotonous sketches on his blotting paper at the debates in Convocation.... He was himself built into its wall when he was made its Dean. His honesty, balanced intellectual power, and lofty breeding and taste would have been of invaluable alloy in the baser metal of the British Parliament, and he would have made a magnificently picturesque and usefully practical Bishop-nay, conceivably, could his dictionary have been given up, a great historian or sound investigating scholar.... I have but further to say of Liddell at that time that he was always right and serviceable in what notice he took of me, though he took little, and his haughty and reserved, or more accurately annoyed and careless, manner hindered me from asking for more; so that as the presence of Hussey made the Carolinean symmetry of Peckwater terrific to me, that of Liddell made more rigid to me the perpendicular of Tom.”

In connexion with what Ruskin here says of Liddell being “always right and serviceable,” see Vol. XXXIII. p. 525, where he mentions Liddell’s advice to him to study religious art at Oxford; and the letters to Liddell written after the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters, Vol. III. pp. 667-676.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]