lxxii INTRODUCTION

There is a diary of Rosie’s in existence in which, in the same spirit, she made, at the age of nineteen, a review of her mental and spiritual life. There is many a reference in it to Ruskin. “I think it was Mr. Ruskin’s teaching when I was about twelve that made me first take to looking after the poor.” “Mr. Ruskin taught me that which was good.” “The letters Mr. Ruskin wrote me only helped me, and did me no harm, whatever others may say.” But the burden of the “review” is the revelation of deep religious feeling over-weighting the intellectual balance, and of mind and body alike tortured by questionings and perplexities. The appointed period of Ruskin’s probation had passed, but Rose was still irresolute. Sometimes she continued to hold out hopes; at others she would not even let him see her. The girl’s creed was intensely Evangelical, and this set up a barrier between her and her lover, a conflict between her conscience and her heart. Ruskin, intensely religious though he ever was, had now passed wholly away from the Evangelical faith; she shrunk back affrighted from the idea of being yoked to “an unbeliever.” “I had sought for human love,” she makes a character say in one of her tales, “and I had not loved Him.”

The years during which the opponent forces, thus indicated, were at work were to Ruskin a time of that intense strain which comes from hope alternately deferred, stimulated, and once more disappointed. There is a letter to W. H. Harrison, who was correcting some proofs of Love’s Meinie (in 1873), in which Ruskin says:-

“Yes, those are weary words of the girl’s to her lover.

“If you knew what has happened to me, of such kind-the sorrow of it increasing every day during the last ten years-into a story as sad as that of the Bride of Lammermoor,-you wouldn’t wonder at mistakes in proof, sometimes.

“If I hadn’t had good little Joanie to comfort me always, I shouldn’t have been proving anything now, having proved everything-I fancy-of pain, contrivable by the Destinies in such matters. And they can weave a fine web, wrong side outwards.”

Rosie’s moods sometimes succeeded one another very quickly. A few successive entries from Ruskin’s diary for 1872 tell their own story:-

“(August 14, 1872.)-To-day came my consolation. I say ‘to-day.’ But it is two days past; for I could not write on the 14th, and scarcely since, for joy.”

“(August 17.)-Oh me, that ever such thought and rest should be granted me once more.”

[Version 0.04: March 2008]