Читать книгу The Life of John Ruskin - W. G. Collingwood - Страница 19

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Early in 1836 the quiet of Herne Hill was fluttered by a long-promised, long-postponed visit. Mr. Domecq at last brought his four younger daughters to make the acquaintance of their English friends. The eldest sister had lately been married to a Count Maison, heir to a peer of France; for Mr. Domecq, thanks in great measure to his partner's energy and talents, was prosperous and wealthy, and moved in the enchanted circles of Parisian society.

To a romantic schoolboy in a London suburb the apparition was dazzling. Any of the sisters would have charmed him, but the eldest of the four, Adèle Clotilde, bewitched him at once with her graceful figure and that oval face which was so admired in those times. She was fair, too—another recommendation. He was on the brink of seventeen, at the ripe moment, and he fell passionately in love with her. She was only fifteen, and did not understand this adoration, unspoken and unexpressed except by intensified shyness; for he was a very shy boy in the drawing-room, though brimming over with life and fun among his schoolfellows. His mother's ideals of education did not include French gallantry; he felt at a loss before these Paris-bred, Paris-dressed young ladies, and encumbered by the very strength of his new-found passion.

And yet he possessed advantages, if he had known how to use them. He was tall and active, light and lithe in gesture, not a clumsy hobbledehoy. He had the face that caught the eye, in Rome a few years later, of Keats' Severn, no mean judge, surely, of faces and poet's faces. He was undeniably clever; he knew all about minerals and mountains; he was quite an artist, and a printed poet. But these things weigh little with a girl of fifteen who wants to be amused; and so she only laughed at John.

He tried to amuse her, but he tried too seriously. He wrote a story to read her, "Leoni, a Legend of Italy," for of course she understood enough English to be read to, no doubt to be wooed in, seeing her mother was English. The story was of brigands and true lovers, the thing that was popular in the romantic period. The costumery and mannerisms of the little romance are out of date now, and seem ridiculous, though Mr. Pringle and the public were pleased with it then, when it was printed in "Friendship's Offering." But the girl of fifteen only laughed the more.

When they left, he had no interest in his tour-book; even the mountains, for the time, had lost their power, and all his plans of great works were dropped for a new style of verse—the love-poems of 1836.

His father, from whom he kept nothing, approved the verses, and did not disapprove his views on the young lady. Indeed, it is quite plain, from the correspondence of the two gentlemen, that Mr. Domecq intended his friend and partner's son to become his own son-in-law. He had the greatest respect for the Ruskins, and every reason for desiring to link their fortunes still more closely with those of his own family. But to Mrs. Ruskin, with her religious feelings, it was intolerable, unbelievable, that the son whom she had brought up in the nurture and admonition of the strictest Protestantism should fix his heart on an alien in race and creed. The wonder is that their relations were not more strained; there are few young men who would have kept unbroken allegiance to a mother whose sympathy failed them at such a crisis.

As the year went on his passion seemed to grow in the absence of the beloved object. His only plan of winning her was to win his spurs first; but as what? Clearly his forte, it seemed, was in writing. If he could be a successful writer of romances, of songs, of plays, surely she would not refuse him. And so he began another romantic story, "Velasquez, the Novice," opening with the Monks of St. Bernard, among whom had been, so the tale ran, a mysterious member, whose papers, when discovered, made him out the hero of adventures in Venice. He began a play, which was to be another great work, "Marcolini." He had no playwright's eye for situations, but the conversation is animated, and the characters finely drawn, with more discrimination than one would expect from so young an author.

This work was interrupted at the end of Act III. by pressing calls to other studies. But it was not that he had forgotten Adèle. From time to time he wrote verses to her or about her; and as in 1838 she was sent to school with her sisters at Newhall, near Chelmsford, to "finish" her in English, in that August he saw her again. She had lost some of her first girlish prettiness, but that made no difference. And when the Domecqs came to Herne Hill at Christmas, he was as deeply in love as ever. But she still laughed at him.

His father was fond of her, liked all the sisters, and thought much of them as girls of fine character, but he liked Adèle best. He seems to have been fond of his partner, too, worked very hard in his interests, and behaved very well to his heirs afterwards through many years of responsible and difficult management of their business. And at this time, when he went down to the convent school in Essex, as he often did, he must have had opportunities for seeing how hopeless the case was. Mr. Domecq recognised it, too, but thought, it seems (they manage these things differently in France), that any of his daughters would do as well, and early in 1839 entertained an offer from Baron Duquesne, a rich and handsome young Frenchman. They kept this from John, fearing he would break down at the news, so fully did they recognise the importance of the affair. They even threw other girls in his way. It was not difficult, for by now he had made some mark in magazine literature, and was a steady, rising young man, with considerable expectations. But he could not think of any other girl.

In February or March, 1839, Mr. Domecq died. The Maisons came to England, and the marriage was proposed. Adèle stayed at Chelmsford until September, when he wrote the long poem of "Farewell," dated the eve of their last meeting and parting.

At twenty young men do not die of love; but I find that a fortnight after writing this he was taken seriously ill. During the winter of 1839–40 the negotiations for the marriage in Paris went on. It took place in March. They kept the news from him as long as they could, for he was in the schools next Easter term, and Mr. Brown (his college tutor) had seemed to hope he would get a First, so his mother wrote to her husband. In May he was pronounced consumptive, and had to give up Oxford, and all hope of the distinction for which he had laboured, and with that any plans that might have been entertained for his distinction in the Church. And his parents' letters of the period put it beyond a doubt that this first great calamity of his life was the direct consequence of that unfortunate matchmaking.

For nearly two years he was dragged about from place to place, and from doctor to doctor, in search of health. Thanks partly to wise treatment, more to new faces, and most to a plucky determination to employ himself usefully with his pen and his pencil, he gradually freed himself from the spell, and fifty years afterwards could look back upon the story as a pretty comedy of his youthful days.