RUSKIN'S WRITING IN 1836; FAIR COPY OF A POEM
Meanwhile his ordinary running hand was a shocking scribble, but in the middle of it he seems to have pulled himself up continually, or he was pulled up by an overlooking mother, and the wild scrawl becomes tidy and neat. I suspect that his earlier home lessons did not include much copybook work. He developed his own writing like other precocious boys and girls, though there is some trace of teaching at the very start. But after 1830 he exchanged, perhaps at the instance of superior orders, his "print" for copperplate; the "Iteriad" (1831) is fair-copied in a large, regular round-hand, and the Tour poems of 1833 are in a smaller, less anxious, but more formed business style. One sees the father's influence coming in, and all his letters to the old-fashioned business man show the obvious desire to please. "My dear papa" is flourished around in the most approved writing-master's manner, and "John Ruskin" at the end is in black letter, finishing a sheet of impeccable commercial-hand, in which the free-and-easy wording contrasts quite ludicrously with the formal writing.
RUSKIN'S HANDWRITING IN 1837
It was only, or chiefly, to his father that such letters were written. For his mother he had another hand; for his friends and for himself an assortment of varying scribbles. But there, I think, comes out one of the leading points in his character. To be a man of strong thought and will, innovator in art, science, politics, morality, and religion, there never was such a chameleon, always ready to colour his mind after his surroundings; all things to all men. To the opponent he was an opponent; to the admirer an admirer, without at once testing the sincerity of the admiration or the source of the opposition. It was the cause of many regretted incidents in public life, but in private life the ground of his charm. Nobody who approached him in kindness failed of being met more than half way, while impertinence and rudeness, however unintended, struck a discord at once. So much of a chameleon he was, that he could persuade himself into liking, for the moment, and for the sake of his companion on the spot, many a thing he had denounced or derided; and sometimes he could do curious things out of the same unrecognised sympathy. Once after a lecture, leading Taglioni to her carriage in the midst of a crowd of onlookers, I saw him cross the London pavement with an old-world minuet-step, hardly conscious, I am sure, of the quaint homage he was paying to the great dancer he had admired in his boyhood.
Those flourishes of the pen for his father's pleasure never appear in his own private scribble. His ideas came too quickly to leave him time for ornament, and he had no need to idle in dots and circles between the phrases. His spelling was always good, but he never stopped to punctuate; a dash was enough for most kinds of stops. Letters of 1845 and 1852 are curious for the underlining or interlining of long passages, not, apparently, for emphasis; possibly to mark sections of these general epistles home for copying. In all this early writing there is an effort to keep pace with the flow of thoughts, even in the verse; he wrote so much that mere economy of time must have driven him at speed to the shortest way of getting the matter down. In diaries of the period are some shorthand notes which I take to be his; but if he ever tried shorthand he dropped it soon.
NOTES FOR "STONES OF VENICE"