CHAPTER III

L’ESTERELLE

SALLENCHES, SAVOY, 9th September, 1888.

47. THE meeting at St. Martin’s with Norton and his family was a very happy one. Entirely sensible and amiable, all of them; with the farther elasticity and acuteness of the American intellect, and no taint of American ways. Charles himself, a man of the highest natural gifts, in their kind; observant and critical rather than imaginative, but with an all-pervading sympathy and sensibility, absolutely free from envy, ambition, or covetousness:* a scholar from his cradle, nor only now a man of the world, but a gentleman of the world, whom the highest born and best bred of every nation, from the Red Indian to the White Austrian, would recognize in a moment, as of their caste.

In every branch of classical literature he was my superior; knew old English writers better than I,-much more, old French; and had active fellowship and close friendship with the then really progressive leaders of thought in his own country, Longfellow, Lowell, and Emerson.

All the sympathy, and all the critical subtlety, of his mind had been given, not only to the reading, but to the trial and following out of the whole theory of Modern Painters; so that, as I said, it was a real joy for him to

* I mean, covetousness of beautiful things, the only sort that is possible to people like Charles Norton or me. He gave me his best Greek “Fortune,” a precious little piece of flying marble, with her feet on the world, engraved with hexagonal tracery like a honeycomb.¹ We both love its honey-but best, given by each other.

¹ [“Not a gift in the usual sense,” says Professor Norton in a note to the letter (May 18, 1871) in which Ruskin acknowledged the receipt. Presumably Ruskin bought it. The marble is mentioned in Aratra Pentelici: see Vol. XX. p. 328 n. The piece remains at Brantwood.]

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