It has been told already how he was struck at first by Miss Francesca Alexander's handwriting before he had seen her drawing, which afterwards he praised so highly. The distinct neatness of her beautiful calligraphy appealed to his love for missals and the lost art, as he feared, of the true scribe. But of queer and quaint writing he was impatient. Words were to be read, not played with in decorative affectations. The baser sort of business-hand roused him to scorn, and he had a sharp eye for the characteristics of a cranky or insincere correspondent. When postcards came in, like many others he did not approve of them and never used them. One of his household sometimes got postcards written in Runes, and, seeing the mystic inscriptions, he wanted to know why. "So that people may not read it," was the answer. "What's the use of that?" replied Ruskin. "Isn't language given you to conceal your thoughts?"
[For further illustrations of his handwriting, see his earliest "printing" at seven or eight, with his latest current style, actual size, on [page 108]; a pencil scribble at ten or eleven, page 171; his neater writing of the same period, on [page 199]; his ordinary careful penmanship about 1835, on [page 109]; and his looser final hand, [pages 163] and [174].]
[X]
RUSKIN'S MUSIC
X
RUSKIN'S MUSIC
"It is well known," says a recent newspaper writer, "that Ruskin's ear was as deaf to musical sound as his eye was sensitive to natural beauty." On the other hand, Miss Wakefield, the celebrated singer and the originator of country Musical Competitions, has put together a volume of 158 pages—most of them, certainly, in rather big type—under the title of "Ruskin on Music." The inference, of course, to an unbelieving world is that he wrote about what he did not understand. But Miss Wakefield understands; and she says, "what is to be admired in what he has said of the art is the beautiful way in which its spiritual meaning and teaching have been expressed by him, in the short passages which he has devoted to it, and in which no one has ever excelled him."