There was Something in the Weather

by James Walsh

John Ruskin’s obsession with weather has long been a source of fascination for artist and writer James Walsh. Ruskin (1819-1900), the pre-eminent art theorist and critic of Victorian England, is best remembered as the champion of J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and as one of the great prose stylists in English. In There was Something in the Weather, third feuilleton in our Libellulae series, Walsh uses traced excerpts from Ruskin’s travel diaries to create a portrait of the period just before and after the failure of his first great love. The text begins in 1835, when he was sixteen, with his vivid description of a Swiss glacier. The diaries for the next four years are missing. During this time, Ruskin went up to Oxford and began writing on architecture, and he also fell in love with, pined for, and was rejected by Adèle-Clotilde Domecq, the daughter of his father’s partner. When the diaries resume he writes

i have determined to keep
one part of diary
for intellect
and another for feeling

The diary for feeling, which he elsewhere describes as “the book of pain,” seems to have been among those destroyed later by Ruskin himself. The rest of the text is drawn from the diary for intellect, but, being Ruskin, feeling somehow finds its way into his descriptions of Rome, and his account of his inability to feel the beauty around him is itself deeply felt.

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