the wonderful boy did was
applauded and even dangerously encouraged, both in the way of drawing
and of writing. Though he seems to have been often publicly snubbed by
both his parents, it was more a family custom than anything else, and
was accompanied by undisguised admiration and patent pride. They were
his stupefied critics, when he read aloud his works in the family
circle, and his father obediently produced large sums of money to
gratify his brilliant son's artistic desire for the possession of
Turner's paintings. Ruskin in his morbid moments, in later life, turned
fiercely and unjustly against his fond and tender father. He accused
him with an in temperate bitterness of having lavished everything upon
him except the intelligent sympathy of which he stood in need, and his
father's gentle and mournful apologies have an extraordinary beauty of
puzzled and patient dignity about them.

When Ruskin went to Oxford, his mother went to reside there too, to
look after her darling. One might have supposed that this would have
involved Ruskin in ridicule, but he was petted and indulged by his
fellow-undergraduates, who found his charm, his swift wit, his
childlike waywardness, his freakish humour irresistible. Then he had a
serious illness, and his first taste of misery; he was afraid of death,
he hated the constraints of invalid life and the grim interruption to
his boundless energies and plans. Then came his first great book, and
he strode full-fledged into fame. His amazing attractiveness, his talk,
which combined incisiveness and fancy and humour and fire and
gentleness, made him a marked figure from the first. Moreover, he had
the command of great wealth, yet no temptation to be idle. The tale of
Ruskin's industry for the next fifty years is one that would be
incredible if it were not true. His brief and dim experience of married
life seems hardly to have affected him. As a critic of art and ethics,
as the writer of facile magnificent sentences, full of beauty and
rhythm, as the composer of word-structures, apparently logical in form
but deeply prejudiced and inconsequent in thought, he became one of the
great influences of the day, and wielded not only power but real
domination. The widespread delusion of the English educated classes,
that they are interested in art, was of Ruskin's making. Then something
very serious happened to him; a baffled passion of extraordinary
intensity, a perception of the realities of life, t