"Such a funny hand," says Browning's lover, "it was like a claw!" Ruskin's was all finger-grip; long, strong talons, curiously delicate-skinned and refined in form, though not academically beautiful. Those whose personal acquaintance with him dated only from the later years never knew his hand, for then it had lost its nervous strength; and in cold weather—the greatest half of the year in the North—the hand suffered more than the head. But his palm, and especially the back of the hand, was tiny. When he rowed his boat he held the oars entirely in his fingers; when he shook hands you felt the pressure of the fingers, not of the palm. In writing, he held the pen as we are taught to hold a drawing-pencil, and the long fingers gave much more play to the point than is usual in formed penmanship. Knowing that, it is not surprising to find that his writing varies, not only from one period to another, but with passing moods. Everybody shows some of this variety, but Ruskin's hand was as flexible and as impressionable as his whole being.
CONISTON
Written by John Ruskin and Mary Richardson, 1830
He had an odd way, down to the last, of "printing" an inscription on the fly-leaf of a book or on the mount of a drawing, in neat, square Roman type, inked between double lines ruled in pencil. Sometimes giving a present to a favoured visitor he would say, "Stay, I must write your name in it"; and you expected the well-known autograph cheque-signature, scribbled with a flourish. But no! Spectacles, and ruler, and pencil first; two carefully ruled lines, an eighth of an inch apart; then the cork-handled, fine steel pen, and laborious regularity of inscription; till the onlooking recipient laughed outright at all this time and trouble spent on a trifle. But Ruskin was quite grave about it.
This was a reversion to early habits. His juvenile MSS., of which many were kept by his parents and still remain at Brantwood, contain many pages of similar calligraphy. His first Latin and French declensions are printed in pencil; at the age of seven he wrote the first copies of his "Harry and Lucy" in this way, pencilled first and penned over, thinking he was an author making a book. Many children do, but not with his tenacity and taste. In 1828 (age nine) he had brought this self-imposed education to something like perfection with the tiny "print" of "Eudosia," page after page showing wonderful steadiness of hand and eye; and at the end of that year he executed the masterpiece of childish ingenuity which he described in the autobiographical "Harry and Lucy"—the poem in "double print," all the down-strokes doubled: "And it was most beautifully done, you may be sure," says the saucy infant, not untruly. Some of his early mineral catalogues, begun at this time, appear to have been continued later, though the difference can hardly be told from any improvement in the penmanship.
