AMONG English prose writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, John Ruskin was scarcely equaled in the attractiveness of his style, and he was not equaled at all in the range of his thought and the variety of his productions. He is peculiarly identified with the second half of the century, for, with the exception of the first and minor edition of his “Modern Painters,” nearly all his great works were published between 1849 and 1900. As an “art critic,” he has had no equal among English writers. But it is with “art” as the expression of the whole idea impressed on humanity by nature that he deals, rather than with art in the limited sense in which it is generally understood. Students of any single art, as of painting or sculpture, are apt to dissent from his conclusions and to question the practical usefulness of his methods; and in the sense in which a professional painter criticizes technique, Ruskin is hardly to be classed as an art critic at all. He represents in England more nearly than any one else the larger view of art which Hegel in Germany did so much to make possible. It was from Carlyle, however, rather than from any German master, that Ruskin received his most potent inspiration. He may be called Carlyle’s greatest pupil. Indeed in many things he is Carlyle’s superior. His prose style shows traces of Carlyle’s mannerisms, but it is more fluent, more melodious, and more persuasive, than that of Carlyle, whose intensity of expression is often more apt to excite admiration than to carry conviction. Like Carlyle, Ruskin was, in his political views, distrustful of freedom as a mode of progress. He defined his distrust in the assertion that men are only fit for freedom in the inverse ratio of their desire for it. In his later life, he developed an ideal of æsthetic culture for the masses, depending on socialism as a mode of aristocratic control and tutelage. He was deeply moved by beauty in art and nature. The old Greek “beauty worship” has had no greater disciple than he. He himself looked on beauty as a revelation of divine goodness. And his message was one of reverence for the good and true not less than for the beautiful. He seems not to have considered, however, that physiological laws which made the Greeks what they were, operate against substituting the Greek for the Puritan ideal among “Anglo-Saxons.” Pericles and Aspasia, listening to a recitation from Homer with an “ear” which enabled them to co-ordinate perfectly the relation of every vowel to every other in a period of melody as easily as a trained composer does in listening to his own opera,—such finely-organized beings as these were not fitted to serve as saints of progress for the race which produced John Milton and John Bunyan,—which in their spirit must seek its salvation by pressing through the “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” with the smoke of hell coming up through the grass-roots and a leather-winged Apolyon hovering over it. “Sin” was something the Greeks knew nothing about, and when Phidias worked, the self-consciousness of the world had not advanced far enough to make possible the conception of a Devil as it is present in the subconsciousness of English-speaking peoples. The world of the old Saxons was a “Midgard”—a “middle enclosure,” with heaven on one side and hell on the other. The world of the primitive Greeks was thronged with genially human gods and demigods. Heaven was no further away than the top of Mount Olympus, and the idea of hell, of the progressive and finally climacteric punitive reactions of evil, was not sufficiently developed to cause alarm. Neither Ruskin nor any other prophet of art could have transferred to nineteenth-century England the artistic cult developed by such conditions as these. But Ruskin in attempting it, achieved all that was possible.

  He was born in London, February 8th, 1819. His father was a wine merchant who had accumulated a large fortune. On his death it descended to Ruskin, who was thus enabled to gratify without great sacrifices the desire for the study of art, which early in life became his ruling passion. After graduating from Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1842, he studied painting under Copley, Fielding, and Harding, and afterwards spent much of his time in Italy,—especially in Venice where he found everything he most needed to inspire him. He held professorships both at Cambridge and Oxford, and utilized his lectures as material for a number of the remarkable volumes which during the last twenty-five years of his life he published with such astonishing rapidity. The completion of his “Modern Painters” established his standing as the leading English authority on the philosophy of art, and, in consequence, the public demands on his energies were incessant and remorseless. In endeavoring to meet them, he wrecked his nervous system and for several years before he died (January 20th, 1900) he was insane. His life was a tragedy. The beautiful woman whom he loved and married did not love him. Finding that she did love his friend, the painter, Millais, Ruskin secured a divorce for her and brought about her marriage to Millais. Deprived thus of domestic happiness, he devoted himself wholly to his work, and in it found “every good and perfect gift” except that consummation and sum of all, without which all is fruitless—peace.