But yet if aught of what we fondly boast—
True-hearted warmth of Friendship, frank and free,
Survive yet in this island-circling coast,
We need not fear again to welcome thee:—
So may we, blessing thee, ourselves be blest,
And prove not all unworthy of our guest.
What happy days, what happy evenings we spent together lang syne! How patient they all were with their German guest when he first tried in his broken English to take part in their lively and sparkling conversations. Having once been received in that delightful circle, it was easy to make more acquaintances among their friends who lived at Oxford, or who from time to time came to visit them at Oxford. It was thus that I first came to know Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, and others.
Ruskin often came to spend a few days with his old friends, and uncompromising and severe as he could be when he wielded his pen, he was always most charming in conversation. He never, when he was with his friends, claimed the right of speaking with authority, even on his own special subjects, as he might well have done. It seemed to be his pen that made him say bitter things. He must have been sorry himself for the severe censure he passed in his earlier years on men whose honest labour, if nothing else, ought to have protected them against such cruel onslaughts. Grote’s style may not be the very best for an historian, but in his Quellenstudium he was surely most conscientious. Yet this is what Ruskin wrote of him: “There is probably no commercial establishment between Charing Cross and the Bank, whose head clerk could not have written a better History of Greece, if he had the vanity to waste his time on it.” Of Gibbon’s classical work he spoke with even greater contempt. “Gibbon’s is the worst English ever written by an educated Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic, he is alike incapable either of picturesqueness or wit, his epithets are malicious without point, sonorous without weight, and have no office but to make a flat sentence turgid.” I feel sure that Ruskin, such as I knew him in later years, would have wished these sentences unwritten.
He was really the most tolerant and agreeable man in society. He could discover beauty where no one else could see it, and make allowance where others saw no excuse. I remember him as diffident as a young girl, full of questions, and grateful for any information. Even on art topics I have watched him listening almost deferentially to others who laid down the law in his presence. His voice was always most winning, and his language simply perfect. He was one of the few Englishmen I knew who, instead of tumbling out their sentences like so many portmanteau, bags, rugs, and hat-boxes from an open railway van, seemed to take a real delight in building up their sentences, even in familiar conversation, so as to make each deliverance a work of art. Later in life that even temperament may have become somewhat changed. He had suffered much, and one saw that his wounds had not quite healed. His public lectures as Professor of Fine Art were most attractive, and extremely popular at first. But they were evidently too much for him, and on the advice of his medical friends he had at last to cease from lecturing altogether. Several times his brain had been a very serious trouble to him. People forget that, as we want good eyes for seeing, and good ears for hearing, we want a strong, sound brain for lecturing.
I have seen much of such brain troubles among my friends, and who can account for them? It is not the brain that thinks, nor do we think by means of our brain; but we cannot think without our brain, and the slightest lesion of our brain in any one of its wonderful convolutions is as bad as a shot in the eye.