INTRODUCTION lv

iii.-xxiv. of Dilecta?” “Ah,” he replied, “I don’t suppose I shall ever do those; but any kind friend or editor can do them for me when I am dead; the material is all at Brantwood.” The Introductions to the several volumes of this edition are the fulfilment of Ruskin’s wish.

His original idea had been to carry the story down to 1875 only; in some subsequent schemes for the book, it would have reached to 1882. His diaries contain numerous schemes, now collated in an Appendix (below, p. 633).

As it stands, then, the book is a fragment; yet, so far as it extends, it has an artistic completeness. One may wish for more of it, but not that any of it were written otherwise than it is. “The spirit and style of the book,” says Professor Norton, “are thoroughly delightful, and truly represent the finer characteristics of his nature. He has written nothing better, it seems to me, than some pages of this book, whether of description or reflection. The retrospect is seen through the mellowing atmosphere of age, the harshness of many an outline is softened by distance, and the old man looks back upon his own life with a feeling which permits him to delineate it with perfect candour, with exquisite tenderness, and a playful liveliness quickened by his humorous sense of its dramatic extravagances and individual eccentricities.”¹ Præterita, says Mr. Frederic Harrison, “is certainly the most charming thing that he ever gave to the world, and is one of the most pathetic and exquisite Confessions in the language.”² It is, for one thing, a model of perfectly limpid English. The graceful ease and humour of his later style are nowhere better shown. It is also, I think, a model of literary tact. In some ways this last book by Ruskin was a revelation. What surprised many readers was the insight here displayed into human character and his happy skill in portraiture. “Ruskin,” wrote Miss Thackeray (Lady Ritchie), “should have been a novelist. It is true he says he never knew a child more incapable than himself of telling a tale, but when he chooses to describe a man or a woman, there stands the figure before us; when he tells a story, we live it.... How delightfully he remembers! ... We get glimpses of the neighbours, and we seem to know them as we know the people out of Vanity Fair or out of Miss Austen’s novels.... It is English middle-class life for the most part, described with something of George Eliot’s racy reality.”³ Leslie Stephen, a prince of biographers, pronounced

¹ Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, vol. ii. p. 221.

² John Ruskin (“English Men of Letters” Series), p. 197.

³ Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning, 1892, pp. 92-97. Among the brief character-sketches Lady Ritchie specially notices that of Joseph Severn (below, p. 278).

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