For that summer there was no hurry to be gone; rest was more needed than change, at first. Late in September the same family-party crossed the sea to Calais. How different a voyage for them all from the merry departures of bygone Maytides! Which way should they turn? Not to Paris, for there was the cause of all these ills; so they went straight southwards, through Normandy to the Loire, and saw the châteaux and churches from Orleans to Tours, famous for their Renaissance architecture and for the romance of their chivalric history. Amboise especially made a strong impression upon the languid and unwilling invalid. It stirred him up to write, in easy verse, the tale of love and death that his own situation too readily suggested. In "The Broken Chain" he indulged his gloomy fancy, turning, as it was sure to do, into a morbid nightmare of mysterious horror, not without reminiscence of Coleridge's "Christabel." But through it all he preserved, so to speak, his dramatic incognito; his own disappointment and his own anticipated death were the motives of the tale, but treated in such a manner as not to betray his secret, nor even to wound the feelings of the lady who now was beyond appeal from an honourable lover—taking his punishment like a man.
This poem lasted him, for private writing, all through that journey—a fit emblem of the broken life which it records. A healthier source of distraction was his drawing, in which he had received a fresh impetus from the exhibition of David Roberts' sketches in the East. More delicate than Prout's work, entering into the detail of architectural form more thoroughly, and yet suggesting chiaroscuro with broad washes of quiet tone and touches of light, cleverly introduced—"that marvellous pop of light across the foreground," Harding said of the picture of the Great Pyramid—these drawings were a mean between the limited manner of Prout and the inimitable fulness of Turner Ruskin took up the fine pencil and the broad brush, and, with that blessed habit of industry which has helped so many a one through times of trial, made sketch after sketch on the half-imperial board, finished just so far as his strength and time allowed, as they passed from the Loire to the mountains of Auvergne; and to the valley of the Rhone, and thence slowly round the Riviera to Pisa and Florence and Rome.
He was not in a mood to sympathize readily with the enthusiasms of other people. They expected him to be delighted with the scenery, the buildings, the picture-galleries of Italy, and to forget himself in admiration. He did admire Michelangelo; and he was interested in the back-streets and slums of the cities. Something piquant was needed to arouse him; the mild ecstasies of common connoisseurship hardly appeal to a young man between life and death. He met the friends to whom he had brought introductions—Mr. Joseph Severn, who had been Keats' companion, and was afterwards to be the genial Consul at Rome, and the two Messrs. Richmond, then studying art in the regular professional way; one of them to become a celebrated portrait-painter, and the father of men of mark. But his views on art were not theirs; he was already too independent and outspoken in praise of his own heroes, and too sick in mind and body to be patient and to learn.
They had not been a month in Rome before he took the fever. As soon as he was recovered, they went still farther South, and loitered for a couple of months in the neighbourhood of Naples, visiting the various scenes of interest—Sorrento, Amalfi, Salerno. The adventures of this journey are partly told in letters to Mr. Dale, and in the "Letters addressed to a College Friend."
On the way to Naples he had noted and sketched the winter scene at La Riccia, which he afterwards used for a glowing passage in "Modern Painters"; and he had ventured into a village of brigands to draw such a castle as he had once imagined in his "Leoni." From Naples he wrote an account of a landslip near Giagnano, and sent it home to the Ashmolean Society. He seemed better; they turned homewards, when suddenly he was seized with all the old symptoms worse than ever. After another month at Rome, they travelled slowly northwards from town to town; spent ten days of May at Venice, and passed through Milan and Turin, and over the Mont Cenis to Geneva.
At last he was among the mountains again—the Alps that he loved. It was not only that the air of the Alps braced him, but the spirit of mountain-worship stirred him as nothing else could. At last he seemed himself, after more than a year of intense depression; and he records that one day, in church at Geneva, he resolved to do something, to be something useful. That he could make such a resolve was a sign of returning health; but if, as I find, he had just been reading Carlyle's lately-published lectures on "Heroes," though he did not then accept Carlyle's conclusions nor admire his style, might he not, in spite of his criticism, have been spurred the more into energy by that enthusiastic gospel of action?
They travelled home by Basle and Laon; but London in August, and the premature attempt to be energetic, brought on a recurrence of the symptoms of consumption, as it was called. He wished to try the mountain-cure again, and set out with his friend Richard Fall for a tour in Wales. But his father recalled him to Leamington to try iron and dieting under Dr. Jephson, who, if he was called a quack, was a sensible one, and successful in subduing for several years to come the more serious phases of the disease. The patient was not cured; he suffered from time to time from his chest, and still more from a weakness of the spine, which during all the period of his early manhood gave him trouble, and finished by bending his tall and lithe figure into something that, were it not for his face, would be deformity. In 1847 he was again at Leamington under Jephson, in consequence of a relapse into the consumptive symptoms, after which we hear no more of it. He outgrew the tendency, as so many do. But nevertheless the alarm had been justifiable, and the malady had left traces which, in one way and another, haunted him ever after; for one of the worst effects of illness is to be marked down as an invalid.
At Leamington, then, in September, 1841, he was finding a new life under the doctor's dieting, and new aims in life, which were eventually to resolder for a while the broken chain. Among the Scotch friends of the Ruskins there was a family at Perth whose daughter came to visit at Herne Hill—the Effie Gray whom afterwards he married. She challenged the melancholy John, engrossed in his drawing and geology, to write a fairytale, as the least likely task for him to fulfil. Upon which he produced, at a couple of sittings, "The King of the Golden River," a pretty medley of Grimm's grotesque and Dickens' kindliness and the true Ruskinian ecstasy of the Alps.