INTRODUCTION lxxiii

Then came a visit to the country, and the service in church with Rosie on a day of perfect happiness.¹ But she changed her mind:-

“(September 7.)-The ending day.”

“(September 8.)-Fallen and wicked and lost in all thought; must recover by work.”

Ruskin’s diaries and intimate letters show very poignantly the sorrows of his heart-

“All of them craving pity in sore suspense,

Trembling with fears that the heart knoweth of.”

So wrote Dante in the Vita Nuova, and it is often of him that Ruskin’s confidences remind us. Many of his closest friends believed that he idealised his love, and that Rose was his Beatrice. So, I do not doubt, she was. It is Dante’s language that, consciously or unconsciously, he sometimes adopts in speaking of her. “Last Friday noon,” he once wrote to a friend, “my mistress looked at us and passed silently”; it is Beatrice denying to Dante her salutation. But though “a Spirit still, and bright With something of angelic light,” the lady of his love was yet embodied in a real form. The Vita Nuova of Dante was being discussed on one occasion in the Corpus Common Room. Ruskin expressed with intensity his conviction that in that book we have “the record of the poet’s real love for a real person, and not a mere allegory, as some modern critics would have us believe.”² When the clouds concealed the heaven, Ruskin felt (as he wrote to a friend) “as a ship’s captain who may not leave helm, but who shall never see land more; and sea only, not the sky.”

The sky was for a brief space to be revealed, in unclouded blue as it might seem, before the end came. In the autumn of 1874 he had, as we have heard,³ “loveliest letters from Ireland.” Rose came to London. “She has come back to me,” he wrote to a friend, “finding she can’t get on without some of the love she used to have.” But the clouds quickly gathered. Rose’s health gave ground for great anxiety. It was hoped for a while, as Ruskin wrote to Dr. John Brown (October 19, 1874), that “by peace and time” her state might be redeemable. But it was not to be. “The woman that he hoped to make his wife was dying”; the words came from the bitterness of his heart into

¹ See Fors Clavigera, Letter 41 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 88); and Vol. XXII. pp. xxviii.-xxix.

² “Ruskin at Corpus,” in the Pelican Record, vol. ii. p. 136.

³ Vol. XXIII. p. liii.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]