372 PRĆTERITA-II

of the School of St. Roch, had I known what was to come of my knocking at its door.¹ But for that porter’s opening, I should (so far as one can ever know what they should) have written, The Stones of Chamouni, instead of The Stones of Venice; and the Laws of Fésole, in the full code of them, before beginning to teach in Oxford: and I should have brought out in full distinctness and use what faculty I had of drawing the human face and form with true expression of their higher beauty.

But Tintoret swept me away at once into the “mare maggiore”² of the schools of painting which crowned the power and perished in the fall of Venice; so forcing me into the study of the history of Venice herself; and through that into what else I have traced or told of the laws of national strength and virtue. I am happy in having done this so that the truth of it must stand; but it was not my own proper work; and even the sea-born strength of Venetian painting was beyond my granted fields of fruitful exertion. Its continuity and felicity became thenceforward impossible, and the measure of my immediate success irrevocably shortened.

141. Strangely, at the same moment, another adversity first made itself felt to me,-of which the fatality has been great to many and many besides myself.

It must have been during my last days at Oxford that Mr. Liddell, the present Dean of Christ Church, told me of the original experiments of Daguerre.³ My Parisian friends obtained for me the best examples of his results; and the plates sent to me in Oxford were certainly the first examples of the sun’s drawing that were ever seen in Oxford, and, I believe, the first sent to England.

Wholly careless at that time of finished detail, I saw

¹ [Compare what Ruskin says in the Epilogue of 1883: Vol. IV. pp. 352-353; and for the effect made upon him and Harding by first sight of the Scuola di San Rocco, ibid., pp. xxxvii., 354.]

² [The reference is to Tintoret’s saying quoted in Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. p. 27), and again in Two Paths, § 70 (Vol. XVI. p. 318).]

³ [Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1789-1851); perfected the process invented by Niepce (1765-1833).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]