He was “black-blooded,” he once said, adding, “like all the Tennysons.”  Doubtless he had in his mind his father, a man often deeply in the grip of melancholy.  And the absurd legend, invented probably by Rossetti, contains a truth in it and may be quoted here.  Rossetti said that he once went to dine with a friend in London, and was shown into a dimly lit drawing-room with no one to receive him.  He went towards the fireplace, and suddenly to his surprise discovered an immensely tall man in evening dress lying prostrate on the hearthrug, his face downwards, in an attitude of prone despair.  While he gazed, the stranger rose to his feet, looked fixedly at him, and said, “I must introduce myself; I am Octavius, the most morbid of the Tennysons.”

With Ruskin we have a different case.  He was brought up in the most secluded fashion, and though he was sharply enough disciplined into decorous behaviour by his very grim and positive mother, he was guarded like a precious jewel, and as he grew up he was endlessly petted and indulged.  The Ruskins lived a very comfortable life in a big villa with ample grounds at Denmark Hill.  Whatever 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.