INTRODUCTION xxxv

attempt to transcribe the scene in sober, accurate words, and then to compare our own account with Ruskin’s, we should find that his, in addition to its beauty of form, differed from ours in containing a more exhaustive enumeration of attributes, and a better selection of distinctive features. In short, Professor Waldstein declared the passage to be a masterpiece of observation, analysis, selection, and rhythm.¹ I was curious to know when the passage was written; and chancing to meet Ruskin not long afterwards, I asked him the question. He told me (and indications in his diary confirm his recollection) that it was written in May 1886;² that is, some months after one brain-attack, and a few weeks before another.

Among Ruskin’s papers there is the draft of what was intended to be a Preface to the second volume of Proserpina, its object being to explain why he was retreating from the loftier themes of Christian art into studies of leaves and flowers. Some passages of this Preface are here printed, as giving Ruskin’s own analysis of his case:-

“It is eight years since the first of my ‘Advices’ was printed on the slip inserted in the opening number of Love’s Meinie.³ At that time I had hoped, as from the first in accepting the Slade Professorship at Oxford, to make Natural History one of the chief subjects of Art practice in my school; nor should I have failed to do so, had not my discovery (I had the right to call it a ‘discovery,’ for no one till that time had ever spoken of or studied the frescoes in question) of the Botticelli and Perugino frescoes in the Sistine Chapel in the year 1872, followed by a closer examination in 1874, led me into a course of thought and historical inquiry, of the force and advance of which any reader interested in this matter may find evidence in Fors Clavigera, which entirely decided me from the merely physical and picturesque subjects of art on which I had intended to concentrate my energy, not only in the elementary work at Oxford, but during the available remainder of life.

“The incalculable importance to the history of Christianity of these lower frescoes of the Sistine, and the singular opportunity granted me at Assisi, also in the year 1874, of investigating the

¹ The substance of the lectures was printed in The Work of John Ruskin: its Influence upon Modern Thought and Life, 1894. See pp. 83-86.

² He had last studied the scene in 1882. “We went out in the heat,” says his companion on that journey, “to see the Rhone. All the haze had gone, at least from the nearer view, and he seemed never tired of looking at the water from the footbridge and wherever it was visible. I wondered why he would not come on; but now I know” (W. G. Collingwood, Ruskin Relics, p. 60).

³ See Vol. XXV. p. 11. The “Advice” is dated June 1873; and the present passage was, therefore, written in 1881.

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