Born in London, 8 Feb. 1819. Privately educated. Matric. Ch. Ch., Oxford, 20 Oct. 1836; went into residence, 14 Jan. 1837; Newdigate Prize Poem, 1839; B.A., May 1842; M.A., 28 Oct. 1843; Hon. Student, Ch. Ch., 1867; Hon. Fellow, Corpus Christi Coll., 1871; Slade Prof. of Fine Art, 1869–79 and 1883–85. Contrib. to various periodicals, from 1834. Rede Lecturer, Camb., 1867; Hon. LL.D., Camb., 15 May 1867. Endowed School of Drawing in Taylorian Museum, Oxford, 1871. Works: “Salsette and Elephanta” (Newdigate Prize Poem), 1839; “Modern Painters,” vol. i. (anon.), 1843; vol. ii. (anon.), 1846; vols. iii., iv., 1856; vol. v., 1860; “The Seven Lamps of Architecture,” 1849; “Poems” (under initials: J. R.), 1850; “The King of the Golden River” (anon.), 1851; “The Stones of Venice,” vol. i., 1851; vols. ii., iii., 1853; abridged edn. of whole, 1879; “Examples of the Architecture of Venice,” 1851; “Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds,” 1851; “Pre-Raphaelitism,” 1851; “The National Gallery” (from the “Times,” anon.), 1852; “Giotto and his Works in Padua” (3 pts.), 1854–60; “Lecturers on Architecture and Painting,” 1854; “Letters to the ‘Times’ on the principal Pre-Raphaelite Pictures in the Exhibition,” 1854; “The Opening of the Crystal Palace,” 1854; “Notes on … the Royal Academy,” no. i., 1855; no. ii., 1856; no. iii., 1857; no. iv., 1858; no. v., 1859; “The Harbours of England,” 1856; “Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House,” 1857; “Catalogue of the Turner Sketches in the National Gallery,” pt. i., 1857 (enlarged edn. same year); “Catalogue of the Sketches and Drawings by J. M. W. Turner … at Marlborough House,” 1857 (enlarged edn., 1858); “The Elements of Drawing,” 1857; “The Political Economy of Art,” 1857; “Inaugural Address at the Cambridge School of Art,” 1858; “The Oxford Museum” (with H. W. Acland), 1859; “The Two Paths,” 1859; “The Unity of Art” (priv. ptd.), 1859; “The Elements of Perspective,” 1859; “Selections” from his works, 1861; “Unto this Last,” 1862; “Sesame and Lilies,” 1865; “An Enquiry into some of the Conditions at present affecting the Study of Architecture in our Schools,” 1865; “The Ethics of the Dust,” 1866; “The Crown of Wild Olive,” 1866; “Time and Time by Weare and Tyne,” 1867; “First Notes on the General Principles of Employment for the Destitute and Criminal Classes” (priv. ptd.), 1868; “Leoni” (under initials: J. R.), 1868; “The Queen of the Air,” 1869; “Samuel Prout” (priv. ptd.), 1870; “The Future of England” [1870]; “Verona and its Rivers,” 1870; “Lectures on Art,” 1870; “Catalogue of Examples … in the University Galleries,” 1870; “Works” (11 vols.), 1871–83; “Fors Clavigera” (8 vols.), 1871–84; [“Index” to preceding, 1887]; “Munera Pulveris,” 1872: “Aratra Pentelici,” 1872; “The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret,” 1872; “The Eagle’s Nest,” 1872, “The Sepulchral Monuments of Italy,” 1872; “Instructions in Elementary Drawing” (priv. ptd.), 1872; “Instructions in the Preliminary Exercises,” 1873; “Love’s Meinie,” 1873; “The Nature and Authority of Miracle” (priv. ptd.), 1873; “Val d’Arno,” 1874; “Frondes Agrestes” (selected from “Modern Painters”), 1875; “Notes on Some of the Principal Pictures in the … Royal Academy,” 1875; “Proserpina” (10 pts.), 1875–86; “Deucalion” (8 pts.), 1875–83; “Mornings in Florence” (8 pts.), 1875–77; “Ariadne Fiorentina,” 1876; Letters to the “Times” (anon.), 1876; “Letter to Young Girls” [1876]; “St. Mark’s Rest,” 1877–84; “Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice,” 1877; “Yewdale and its Streamlets,” 1877; “The Laws of Fésole” (4 pts.), 1877–79; “Abstract of the Objects … of St. George’s Guild” [1878]; “Notes by Mr. Ruskin on his Collection of Drawings by the late J. M. W. Turner,” 1878; “Letters to the Clergy” (priv. ptd.), 1879; “Circular respecting … St. Mark’s,” 1879–80; “Elements of English Prosody,” 1880; “Notes … on S. Prout and W. Hunt,” 1880; “Arrows of the Chase” (2 vols.), 1880; “The Lord’s Prayer and the Church,” 1880; “Our Fathers have told us,” 1880–85; “General Statement explaining the … St. George’s Guild,” 1882; “The Art of England,” 1883–84; “Cœli Enarrant” (selected from “Modern Painters”), 1884; “Catalogue of Selected Examples of Native Silica in the British Museum,” 1884; “The Pleasures of England,” 1884; “In Montibus Sanctis” (selected from “Modern Painters”), 1884; “The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century,” 1884; “On the Old Road” (2 vols.), 1885; “Præterita” (3 vols.), 1885–88; “Notes on the Principal Pictures of Sir. J. E. Millais,” 1886; “Dilecta” (2 pts.), 1886–87; “Hortus Inclusus,” 1887; “Poems,” 1891; “Gold” (priv. ptd.), 1891; “Letters … to various Correspondents” (priv. ptd.), 1892; “Stray Letters to a London Bibliophile” (priv. ptd.), 1892; “The Poetry of Architecture,” 1893 [1892]; “Three Letters and an Essay on Literature,” 1893; “Letters to W. Ward” (priv. ptd.), 1893; “Letters addressed to a College Friend,” 1894; “Letters … to Earnest Chesneau” (priv. ptd.), 1894; “Letter on Art and Literature” (ed. by T. J. Wise; priv. ptd.), 1894; “Verona, and other Lectures,” 1894; “Letters to … Rev. J. P. Faunthorpe” (ed. by T. J. Wise; priv. ptd.), 1895, etc.; “Studies in Both Arts,” 1895. He has edited: A. C. Owen’s “The Art Schools of Mediæval Christendom,” 1876; “Bibliotheca Pastorum,” vols. i., ii., 1876–77; vol. iv., 1885; F. Alexander’s “The Story of Ida,” 1883; F. Alexander’s “Roadside Songs of Tuscany,” 1884–85; “Dame Wiggans of Lee,” 1885; “Ulric the Farm Servant,” 1886; F. Alexander’s “Christ’s Folk in the Appennine;” and has contributed prefatory letters or introductions to various works.

Personal

  I am very self-indulgent, very proud, very obstinate, and very resentful; on the other side, I am very upright—nearly as just as I suppose it is possible for man to be in this world—exceedingly fond of making people happy, and devotedly reverent to all true mental or moral power, I never betrayed a trust—never wilfully did an unkind thing—and never, in little or large matters, depreciated another that I might raise myself. I believe I once had affections as warm as most people; but partly from evil chance, and partly from foolish misplacing of them, they have got tumbled down and broken to pieces. It is a very great, in the long-run the greatest, misfortune of my life that, on the whole, my relations, cousins and so forth, are persons with whom I can have no sympathy, and that circumstances have always somehow or other kept me out of the way of the people of whom I could have made friends. So that I have no friendships, and no loves.

  Froude, however, was there, and Browning, and Ruskin; the latter and I had some talk, but I should never like him.

  Few authors have put themselves more completely into their writings than Ruskin has done. His own personal history and opinions, his manner of life, the inmost soul of the man, are revealed to the attentive reader of his books, as in the case of almost no other author. He is sympathetic and confidential, touched with egotism, and always open and responsive to whatever influences life may bring to him. Ruskin has the strong and insistent personality of genius, and he will not dress, live, or think in the manner of other men. He has given little heed to the conventional beliefs of his time in art, morals, or religion, preferring to follow his own convictions of truth and duty. His personality is impressed on his every word and act, and stands forth as a magnetic and commanding presence above all his works of every kind.

  Professor Ruskin is emotional and nervous in manner, his large eye at times soft and genial and again quizzing and mischievous in its glance, the mouth thin and severe, chin retreating, and forehead prominent. He has an iron-grey beard, wears old-fashioned coats, sky-blue neck cloths, and gold spectacles; is rather petit, about five feet five in height; his pronunciation as broad as Dundee Scotch, and at times “as indistinct as Belgravia Cockney.” He is one of the most popular lecturers in England, and his influence over the students at Oxford is said to have been such that, at one time, he purposely avoided (in a measure) their society that it might not be thought that he was doing an injustice to his fellow-professors.

  Those who see him now find a strange-appearing man, close upon seventy, with a rather sad face, somewhat “out of drawing,” a large, expressive mouth, and far-away eyes of light grayish-blue, wonderfully charming when he will, and a fascinating though dictatorial talker, identifiable always by a particular blue neckcloth, curiously associated with his personality in the eyes of his friends, the like of which he has worn from time immemorial. The fortune left him by his father was largely spent upon his St. George’s Guild and its Museum at Sheffield, and for other public purposes, but his books, which he now sells through his own book-seller, at a price intended to require readers to know the worth of what they are purchasing, happily assure him a large and sufficient income for the rest of his days.

  Mr. Ruskin’s first professional lecture at Oxford, it may be interesting to say, was announced for the theatre in the Museum, but so great was the crowd that the Professor and his audience adjourned to the large Sheldonian Theatre. This, however, was an exception, and the usual lecture-room was in the Museum. The crowd was always very great, and it was necessary to be outside the doors an hour beforehand to secure a good seat.

  Ruskin seemed less picturesque as a young man than in his later days. Perhaps gray waving hair may be more becoming than darker locks, but the speaking, earnest eyes must have been the same, as well as the tones of that delightful voice, with its slightly foreign pronunciation of the r, which seemed so familiar again when it welcomed us to Coniston long, long years after. Meeting thus after fifteen years, I was struck by the change for the better in him; by the bright, radiant, sylvan look which a man gains by living among woods and hills and pure breezes…. He, the master of Brantwood, came, as I remember, dressed with some ceremony, meeting us with a certain old-fashioned courtesy and manner; but he spoke with his heart, of which the fashion doesn’t change happily from one year to another; and as he stood in his tall hat and frock-coat upon the green, the clouds and drifts came blowing up from every quarter of heaven, and I can almost see him stamp his foot upon the sward, while he spoke with emphasis and remembrance of something which was then in both our minds.

  As I recall my first welcome, I recall too the face and figure of the man who tendered it. But it was the manner that first attracted and arrested attention. In no other man have I seen sweetness, gentleness, genial frankness, and sympathetic cordiality so perfectly allied with virility and activity of mind. His look inspired confidence, just as his hand-grip awoke friendship—a magic quality, it has often been remarked, that he shares in equal degree with his political bête noire, Mr. Gladstone. His smile is sweet and tender, and his whole bearing instinct with kindness, courtesy, and good-fellowship. But it is his eyes that pin you—bright, clear, frank blue eyes that look you through and through, and make you wonder—eyes so pure and truthful that they seem to disarm at once all disingenuousness, but keenly intelligent, notwithstanding, and full of fun; the eyes, in short, that the novelists tell us “dance” upon occasion. Their strong blue—of the intensity of an Italian sky—for all that in these latest years they are to be seen through the screen of the bushy, overhanging eyebrows, is echoed in the satin stock-tie, of the same hue which he has worn for half a century or more…. Nothing could be more vivacious than his conversation, partly through his enormous range of information and experience, partly through his command of language and expression, and partly, too, through his keen and rapid intelligence and striking originality of thought.

  A man of the noblest nature. I knew from W. B. Scott, very friendly with him until differing views of artistic teaching (at the Workingmen’s College and elsewhere) sundered them, of his great life and generosities. Scott, no doubt, was right on the Art question.

  His voice was always most winning, and his language simply perfect. He was one of the few Englishmen I knew who, instead of tumbling out their sentences like so many portmanteaux, bags, rugs, and hat-boxes from an open railway van, seemed to take a real delight in building up their sentences, even in familiar conversation, so as to make each deliverance a work of art.

  I can scarcely imagine that Ruskin ever resembled the old sentimental portrait, with its smooth regularity of feature and softly flowing hair, from which my mental picture of him had been derived. Doubtless the first actual sight of a man whom one has dreamed about for years always dissipates something of the glamour with which fancy has surrounded him. But I am glad to record that the real Ruskin, though widely divergent from his poetic presentment, at once approved himself to me a much more congruous and satisfactory apparition. The disappointment, so far as any was felt, pertained to his size. I have called him slight; he was distinctly short as well, wholly lacking the suave majesty of proportions implied, if not depicted, in the early prints. Not that one could by any means have thought him undignified; but his dignity was no affair of material bulk or imposing manner; it was the worthier dignity of intense earnestness and imperious sincerity. The man’s insistent genuineness would have made any conventional grace or elegance seem affectation and artificiality. Rugged and angular, he still was never awkward. The eager swiftness and vitality of his intellect precluded that. It could not happen to him to be, as Emerson bitingly says, “awkward for want of thought, the inspiration not reaching the extremities.” His face was small, in spite of the largeness of his features; the hair a somewhat tumbled shock of reddish brown, broadly streaked, like the straggling beard and whiskers, with gray. In his costume, simple enough beneath his professor’s gown, there was a suggestion of originality and picturesqueness, chiefly due, I think, to the broad necktie of bright blue satin which he habitually wore.

  His manner of speech had a peculiar power of appeal in it. Its tone and timbre were full of feeling. It was the speech of one who sang rather than spoke to us. His message was rhythmic and musical. His peculiar dwelling on the roll of the r in such a word as “entirely” was never to be forgotten. His manner changed with his feeling, and was swift or slow as suited his subject. He used his hands to emphasize what he said—hands so delicate, so full of expression; hands he used to clap with pleasure, or fold together almost as in prayer. He won all our hearts, not only by his unconventionality and undonnish ways, but because he took such infinite pains for us; and of all men I ever met he was the best listener…. People asked me what he looked like. His notable personal features were his delicate aquiline nose, his sensitive mouth, his tender blue eyes, his abundance of straight yellow-brown hair. Below the average height and somewhat hollow-chested, he made up for a certain unrobustness of appearance by his habit of dressing in the thick gray-brown laxey cloth, as seen in that best of photographs by Barraud. The sky-blue tie, except when he mourned for his mother, was always part of his dress, and a long, delicate gold chain for his watch hung loosely round his neck and fell about his waistcoat.

  Ruskin’s later years were over-shadowed by a dark cloud. Repeated attacks of illness, and continuous overwork, brought on a disease of the brain, which made him sometimes, for months at a time, violently insane. The cloud passed by, and the evening of his life was quiet and serene, but his life’s work was done. On the roll of England’s great men we find few who have been so much revered and loved, by that large mass of people whom we call the laboring classes, as was Mr. Ruskin.

  Ruskin’s was an opulent nature, with material in it to have made three men, as men go. He had in him, indeed, much of the spirit of the knight of chivalry, as well as of the monk or the preacher. Truth was his mistress: he was ready with immediate battle for her against all comers or for whomsoever he saw oppressed. He was sensitive as well as pugnacious; but his own sensitiveness did not teach him indulgence for the sensitiveness of an opponent; so he was continually making enemies of those with whom he had no personal quarrel, and unexpectedly offending all but the closest of his friends. That Whistler, for being called in print a coxcomb flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face, should sue him seemed to surprise him. He called Gladstone an old windbag, and notes, as if it were unexpected, that after this Miss Gladstone would not look at him.

  His most compelling claim on our attention is the assurance his life affords us of a perfect bona fides, of an unselfish motive in all he said and did. No man, surely, could be less led by personal profit. His lavish generosity dissipated before his death nearly the whole of the £200,000 inherited from his father; a circumstance in itself sufficient, with many folk, to wreck his reputation for sanity. Thus £17,000 were disbursed at once to relatives who, he thought, had been neglected in the will; £5,000 went to endow the drawing-school at Oxford, in addition to the valuable drawings placed in the school; £7,000 went to the St. George’s Fund; £15,000 to set up a relative in business; and so on. Of his preference of duty before inclination there are many instances; but the best is that crusade of social and industrial reform which withdrew him for long periods from his beloved field of art, plunged him into endless controversy, and brought so much gloom and bitterness into a naturally sunny spirit.

  More princely hospitality than his no man ever received, or more kindly companionship; but, as might have been expected, we agreed neither in temperament nor in method, if indeed the mainly self-taught way in which I worked and thought could be called method…. Ruskin had dragged me from my old methods, and given me none to replace them. I lost my faith in myself, and in him as a guide to art, and we separated definitely, years later, on a personal question in which he utterly misunderstood me; but, apart from questions of art, he always remains to me one of the largest and noblest of all the men I have known, liberal and generous beyond limit, with a fineness of sympathy in certain directions and delicacy of organization quite womanly. Nothing could shake my admiration for his moral character or abate my reverence for him as a humanist. That art should have been anything more than a side interest with him, and that he should have thrown the whole energy of his most energetic nature into the reforming of it, was a misfortune to him and to the world, but especially to me.

  Ruskin’s own bedroom was entirely hung with the choice specimens of Turner’s drawings, which were so rapturously described in his various books. His own library had a case of exquisite illuminated manuscripts, some rare printed books, some manuscript originals of Scott’s romances, written with the master’s own hand in quarto pages at a furious pace, legible and very little disfigured by erasers; a few smaller pieces of Prout, Hunt, and Burne-Jones; and cases of rare specimens of minerals and precious stones. Until you had closely looked at all these things—the choice remains that had been saved out of the splendid collections of paintings, engravings, specimens, and works of art which he had lavished on public museums and libraries—but for these things, you would not immediately perceive that you were in anything but the ordinary comfortable home of a retired professional gentleman. Here, for twenty years, after life’s fitful fever, John Ruskin sought peace.

Modern Painters, 1843–60

  If we examine how far, in Mr. Ruskin’s writings, desire for display has superseded the love of truth, the task is entered on, not because it is agreeable, but because it is seasonable. After having made a fame, by hanging on to the skirts of a famous artist—after deluding those craving for novelty into the belief that a dashing style must imply precious discoveries—after having met the humour of the time, by preaching the religion of architecture with a freedom in the use of sacred names and sacred things from which a more reverential man would have shrunk—after having served as an eloquent though too flattering guide to the treasures of Venice,—after having enriched the citizens of this Scottish metropolis with receipts how to amend the architecture of our city by patching Paladin squares, streets, and crescents with Gothic windows, balconies, and pinnacles—after having lectured to decorators on the beauty and virtue of painting illegible letters on signboards and shop-fronts—the wisdom of Mr. Ruskin has of late begun to cry in the streets. He attempts to erect the most extravagant paradoxes into new canons of taste; and the virulence of his personalities is only exceeded by the eccentricity of his judgment. He now periodically enters the exhibition-room as an overseer, summoning gallery-loungers to stand and deliver their sympathies,—calling on bad painters to tremble,—and assailing those whom he dislikes with menaces and insults…. Rarely has vanity, so overweening in stature, so unblushing in front, so magisterial in language, risen up between a writer and his public…. We have already bestowed upon this volume more space than its merits deserve, but its gross and glaring extravagances and defects constitute a strong claim to notice. It is the worst book of a bad series of books, mischievous to art, mischievous to literature, but mischievous most of all to those young and eager minds, animated by the love of art and of literature, which may mistake this declamatory trash for substantial or stimulating food.

  Before I had begun to paint either of these pictures an event of no little importance occurred to me; a fellow-student, one Telfer spoke to me of Ruskin’s “Modern Painters,” and ended by lending it for a few days. Up to that time I thought that the world regarded art as a sort of vagabondish cleverness; that it was almost a disgrace to have a passion for art in modern times, and that it was useless to hope that modern intellect would profess its enthusiasm for it. I name this with full knowledge that it reveals a one-sided acquaintance with the society of the day. To get through the book I had to sit up most of the night more than once, and I returned it before I had got half the good there was in it; but, of all readers, none so strongly as myself could have felt that it was written expressly for him. When it had gone, the echo of its words stayed with me and pealed a further meaning and value in their inspiration whenever my more solemn feelings were touched in any way.

  I was profoundly moved by the second volume of Ruskin’s “Modern Painters.”

  If young Americans and young Englishmen do not read Ruskin’s “Modern Painters” now, they ought to read it and if they cannot read all the volumes, let them at least read that most precious and incomparable second volume, which constitutes the third part of the work, and deals with the imaginative and theoretic faculties. What I owe to John Ruskin’s writings I shall never be able to set down in black and white. The only harm that I think they ever did me was, that coming upon me, as they did for the first time, when I was deep in my mediæval researches, they occasioned me an impatient distaste for any book written in a slip-slop style; and, whereas I formerly never cared much how an author told his story, provided he had a story to tell, I found myself suddenly growing over-fastidious as to the manner of a writer, and I became more and more exacting as to the form, and less curious as to the matter, of a book than I had been.

  It was calculated that the money-value of the new “Modern Painters” was nearly £20,000, and the weight over six tons! A portion of this was described as a special edition of 450 copies only, every one of which had been subscribed for, at ten guineas—and already the price had mounted to fourteen guineas. It was said that the author would receive for the whole edition some £6,000!

  It was nearly twenty years before the five volumes of the work were completed, and during that time Mr. Ruskin’s views had broadened and changed, so that there is something of contradiction in the volumes; but it to-day stands as his most forceful work. Philosophical it is not, because lacking in system; scientific it is not, because lacking in fundamental principles. The logic of it is often weak, the positiveness of statement often annoying, the digressions and side issues often wearisome; yet with all this it contains some of his keenest observations on nature, his most suggestive conceits, and his most brilliant prose passages. It made something of a sensation, and Mr. Ruskin came into prominence at once.

  All Ruskin is in the “Modern Painters,” which, as everyone knows, was a most eloquent and fervid glorification of landscape and of the superior way in which it had been painted by certain English painters of the present era, notably Turner—mirabile dictu, who systematically violated every article of the Ruskin creed—compared with its insufficient treatment by the old masters. Five volumes of this surprising work appeared in quick succession, and they revolutionized English feeling on the subject with which they dealt. It may be safely asserted that no writer ever “made” a man as Ruskin did Turner. Plato did less for Socrates. From that time on every work of the new author was greeted with applause and read with avidity.

The Stones of Venice, 1851–53

  Here are bold and effective architectural scenes, set off with colour and conceived in a true Venetian spirit. Here, too, we find a perfect embodiment of the theory which he has unfolded when expounding the charm of Prout.

  His monumental architectural work, “The Stones of Venice,” has probably done more than any other book to awaken admiration for the beauty of the enchanting city of the sea. In an earlier essay, “The Seven Lamps of Architecture,” he had already formulated what he regarded as the fundamental principles of architectural design…. “The Stones of Venice” abounds in misconceptions and mistaken affirmations; but these are largely due to the state of ideas and understanding in respect to mediæval architecture half a century ago. I have said that Ruskin’s interest in architecture was primarily pictorial. I do not, however, mean that he was wholly wanting in apprehension of its structural basis. To a limited extent he felt this strongly. He has, in many parts of the work, shown a just, and even an acute, sense of the elementary structural principles of ordinary wall, column, and arch construction. But beyond this he has hardly understood the more important types of mediæval building on their structural side.

  In “The Stones of Venice,” he arraigned the modern system of industry for this tendency [to dehumanize men], in words as trenchant as any he has ever written. Indeed the germ of all his teaching as a social reformer is found in that chapter on The Nature of Gothic.

Sesame and Lilies, 1865

  The present work consists of two lectures which are more immediately devoted to personal education, and particularly to the proper use of books. It seems to Mr. Ruskin, as it seems to every thinker of our time, that the desire for amusement is becoming the controlling desire of the people, especially of the upper classes; that the disregardful spirit which, as we all know, the present generation shows toward art, it shows also in a less but in an increasing degree toward literature, and indeed toward every manifestation of intellectual and moral life; and that the persistent rejection of thought, and of subjects of occupation requiring thought, is fast depriving people of the power of thought. The truth of these propositions he endeavors to establish, and the right way to deal with the evil is what his lectures are intended to suggest…. The union of imagination and thought is the most remarkable feature of the volume before us.

  Perhaps the most popular of Mr. Ruskin’s works…. The substance of the first lecture may be described in the words of Bacon’s aphorism, “Knowledge is Power.” Its purport is to show, besides, that companionship with the royal leaders of thought, hence the title, “King’s Treasuries,” is the most ennobling condition of humanity. Rules are laid down accordingly for a careful selection of books, and the manner of reading them. If we cannot quite reach Mr. Ruskin’s own standard of minute analysis in reading, or his curious trick of nice discernment for the multifarious shades of meaning in every single word, and even syllable, of the books of great authors, we can at least see here the practical tendency of the specialist combined with both elevation and catholicity of thought…. And it is the absence of this higher sense, as distinguished from common sense, which no doubt prevents the best ideas from gaining currency among the literary mob, and which renders the works of Mr. Ruskin himself caviare to the mixed multitude of general readers.

  “Sesame and Lilies” is written in a style of wonderful strength and richness. It affords perhaps the best example of its author’s mastery over the manifold chords of prose expression.

Fors Clavigera, 1871–84

  It is not surprising that these “Letters” have had but little sale hitherto, and for yet another reason than their cost, their inaccessibility, and their plain-speaking; namely, that their author will not consent in any way to advertise them…. Let us turn at once to his definitely constructive effort in criticism, which has occupied the letters of the last four years, as the destructive criticism occupied the first three; and, also, to the great scheme of his life, now beginning to be made real in lands, and houses, and labourers, the establishment of St. George’s Guild, or St. George’s Company, as he called it at first and until last August. For all these letters were written with this practical object in view…. We may close his letters, I hope, with this clear perception: that after setting aside all of Mr. Ruskin’s “peculiar theories,” the thing that he is doing is what all great reformers have actually done, and will continue to do; namely, he is striving to persuade men that honest living is still possible in the world, and to help them toward it…. And upon those superior persons who tell us, in scorn, that they have “given Ruskin up,” we must pass, I think, the sentence of the Vulgate upon people who “speak evil of the things they understand not:” In corruptione sua peribunt.

  “Fors Clavigera” is at once the wittiest, the charmingest, and the most painfully cynical of Ruskin’s works. No one can understand him who does not read it; and no one but will regret the necessity of having to read certain parts. The work is the autobiography of a soul, a journal of the daily thoughts of one possessing the clear courage to reveal both the good and the bad side of his nature. What pretty little trifles he writes down! If he alights on the recipe for a rich and savory Yorkshire Goose Pie, straightway he imparts it to his readers, consults with his cook, and announces his intention instantly to build the out-of-door brown-bread oven indispensable for the delicate incrustation of the dish. He spills his match-box while dressing, and we learn that just two hundred and sixty-six wax matches were picked up by him, one by one…. One object kept continually in view is the discussion of the prospects of St. George’s Guild, and the publication of portions of the correspondence of its master with those interested in his plans; so that “Fors” may be regarded as the official journal of the Guild, and, in a vague and unintended way, a sort of proselyting medium for the propagation of its principles…. Certainly never before was there a title so loaded with meaning. And the fact that its inventor is still finding out new ones for it indicates his wisdom in choosing two words from the most elastic vocabulary in literature to cover a collection of writings classifiable only in the vaguest way as writings chiefly on social and political topics.

  If we fairly judge the whole series of Letters in “Fors” and seek to understand their purport, we shall find a perfectly definite scheme of ideas and a real working aim. With a mysterious belief in the creation of all Nature and living creatures by a loving and Almighty God, whose eye watches the fall of every sparrow and the opening of every leaf, mixed with an equally active belief in the polytheistic, or fetichist, sanctity of natural things as objects of worship in themselves, Ruskin has brought himself to regard the disfigurement of natural things and the slaughter of gentle creatures as desecration and sacrilege, almost as a Hindoo regards the slaughter of a Brahminee cow, or a Greek would regard the pollution of a Fountain of the Nymphs.

Præterita, 1885–88

  As one reads “Præterita” it seems as if John Ruskin wrote his history not with ink, but painted it down with light and color; he brings the very atmosphere of his life and its phases before us with such an instantaneous mastery as few besides have ever reached—the life within and the sight without, the sweet eternal horizons (even though they be but Norwood hills and ridges), the living and delightful figures in the foreground. Its author has chosen to christen the story “Præterita,” but was ever a book less belonging to the past and more entirely present to our mood than this one? Not Goethe’s own autobiography, not even Carlyle’s passionate reminiscences, come up to it in vividness. There are so few words, such limpid images are brought flashing before us, that one almost asks, “Is it a book or is it something out of our own secret consciousness that we remember as we read?” Are we not actually living in its pages, in the dawning light of that austere yet glorious childhood?

  One of the most charming examples of the most charming kind of literature. No autobiographer surpasses him in freshness and fulness of memory, nor in the power of giving interest to the apparently commonplace. There is an even remarkable absence of striking incident, but somehow or other the story fascinates, and in the last resort, no doubt on account of the unconscious revelation of character. One point is the way in which a singular originality of mind manages to work out a channel for itself, though hedged in by the prejudices of a sufficiently narrow-minded class and an almost overstrained deference to his elders and his spiritual guides. But it is enough to say here that the book should be acceptable even to those to whom his social and artistic dogmas have ceased to have much significance.

  Is certainly the most charming thing that he ever gave to the world, and is one of the most pathetic and exquisite Confessions in the language. After the great cerebral disturbance of 1884 and his final retirement from Oxford, his friend, Professor Eliot Norton, suggested that he should occupy his mind with jotting down reminiscences of his own life, at least, down to the crisis of 1875; and this he began to do at intervals of restored activity. These, with the fragments called Dilecta, are now collected in three volumes, and were composed at odd times down to as late as 1889, in Ruskin’s seventy-first year.

General

  I don’t know whether you look out for Ruskin’s books whenever they appear. His little book on the “Political Economy of Art” contains some magnificent passages, mixed up with stupendous specimens of arrogant absurdity on some economical points. But I venerate him as one of the greatest teachers of the day. The grand doctrines of truth and sincerity in art, and the nobleness and solemnity of our human life, which he teaches with the inspiration of a Hebrew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a promising way. The last two volumes of “Modern Painters” contain, I think, some of the finest writing of the age. He is strongly akin to the sublimest part of Wordsworth—whom, by-the-bye, we are reading with fresh admiration for his beauties and tolerance for his faults.

  May I get Ruskin’s late volumes of “Modern Painters,” from Mr. Langford? I have got the “Life of Turner,” but I believe the last of these volumes is much occupied with that strange, shabby divinity. I suppose it does not much matter in choosing a god what sort of creature it is you choose, as persistent worship seems always to gain a certain amount of credit for the object of it.

  Mr. Ruskin’s power of analysis and habit of subtile and close reasoning are, therefore, more important tools to him as a critic, than even his acquired knowledge of art and literature. But his peculiar gift, which marks him out among men of almost or quite equal intellectual power, is the force of imagination, which is so evident and remarkable in all his reasoning.

  When he says that poetry not first-rate adds altogether to human weariness, in a most uncomfortable manner, I may imagine that I catch the tones of a famous voice, whose natural accent is a Scottish one—a voice which belongs not so much to Mr. Ruskin as to an elder if not a better dogmatizer. I may think that even if Mr. Ruskin be the appointed heir of our well-known Chelsea Elijah, it might have been more discreet to wait, before wrapping himself in the familiar mantle, until the prophet in possession had let it drop.

  Of all men he should be the last to object to criticism, for his own sword seldom seeks the scabbard. And on the whole, though he professes with a certain archness a desire for peace, nothing gives him so much pleasure, or brings out his intellect so well, as war, when it is on a subject with which he is acquainted. He will run on, giving birth to paradox after paradox in an apparently gloomy manner, choosing for very wilfullness the obscurity of the Pythoness, as long as his listeners sit rapt and receptive at his feet. But the moment one of them, seeing that the paradoxes are becoming intolerable, starts up and meets them with a blunt contradiction, and declares war, Mr. Ruskin becomes radiant with good humour, his intellect becomes incisive, and he rushes to the fight with joy. Nothing is worse for him than worship; and if he had had less of it, he would have done the State more service. Half of his morbid and hopeless writing comes directly of this—that he has not been of late sufficiently excited by respectful opposition to feel happy…. His theories may, many of them, be absurd, but we may well put up with the absurdity of some for the sake of the excellence of others, more especially for the sake of the careful work which hangs on to them and can be considered apart from them. We should be dismayed to lose the most original man in England.

  For myself I doubt whether Mr. Ruskin has any great qualities but his eloquence, and his true, honest love of Nature. As a man to stand up before a society of which one part was fashionably languid and the other part only too busy and greedy, and preach to it of Nature’s immortal beauty and of the true way to do her reverence, I think Ruskin had and has a place almost worthy the dignity of a prophet. I think, too, that he has the capacity to fill the place, to fulfill its every duty. Surely this ought to be enough for the work and for the praise of any man. But the womanish restlessness of Ruskin’s temperament, combined with the extraordinary self-sufficiency which contributed so much to his success when he was master of a subject, sent him perpetually intruding into fields where he was unfit to labor, and enterprises which he had no capacity to conduct. No man has ever contradicted himself so often, recklessly, so complacently, as Mr. Ruskin has done…. When all his errors and paradoxes and contradictions shall have been utterly forgotten, this his great praise will remain: No man since Wordsworth’s brightest days ever did half so much to teach his countrymen, and those who speak his language, how to appreciate and honor that silent Nature which “never did betray the heart that loved her.”

  Take a man of unusual if not morbid sensibility, and place him in the midst of the jostling, struggling, unsavoury, and unreasonable crowd; suppose him to have a love of all natural and artistic beauty, which is outraged at every moment by the prevailing ugliness; a sincere hatred for all the meanness and imposture too characteristic of modern life; a determination to see things for himself, which involves an antipathy to all the established commonplaces of contented respectability; an eloquence and imaginative force which transfuses his prose with poetry, though his mind is too discursive to express itself in the poetical form; and a keen logical faculty, hampered by a constitutional irritability which prevents his teaching from taking a systematic form; let him give free vent to all the annoyance and the indignation naturally produced by his position, and you will have a general impression of Mr. Ruskin’s later writings…. Mr. Ruskin, as I have said, is at war with modern society. He sometimes expresses himself in language which, but for his own assurances to the contrary, might be taken for the utterance of furious passion rather than calm reflection.

  I cannot forget how much I owe you and how much our age has owed you; and what we owe to those who have taught us is a debt that we never can repay, a claim that never grows stale. There are so few whose lips have been touched as it were with sacred fire, having eyes that see behind the veil, and whose ears can hear the voices to which the rest are deaf; and when the utterances of such do seem to us to wander—I will almost say to mislead—it is better to keep silence even from good words. Yet when I find you publishing to the world things about those whom I honour, very contrary as I think to the fact, I will ask you to consider your judgment again. You can yet stir men of the finer fibre, and your words from time to time make us all pause and think, as men pause when violet flashes of lightning glance across the sky. Genius, like nobility, has its duties. But to me all blackening of the human race, all outbursts against the generation and its hopes are profoundly painful, born, I should say, of unnatural self-musing and self-torture, sad as those fulminous imprecations on mankind, when Lear bows his head to the storm.

  There is not, there never can be, a test of sincerity but the plain one of doing; and Mr. Ruskin, though he has been crying passionately that the axe is laid at the root of the tree, seems to turn, almost with scorn at his own ineffectual words, to take up the axe himself, striking a blow with a force which is rather nervous than muscular. The eloquence of this writer, and the almost painful precision of his style,—by which he is constantly trying to make his words carry more freight than they ever bore,—his zeal, and the largeness of his intellectual sympathy, carry the reader over many doubtful stretches of logic, and make the entire scheme of St. George’s Company assume an ideal perfectness of proportion and a grace of being which fill the eye as a poetic structure…. The ideal St. George pins the dragon with his lance, but Mr. Ruskin’s St. George sometimes appears to be armed with a fork, vainly endeavoring to expel, not a dragon, but Nature herself.

  What greater sarcasm can Mr. Ruskin pass upon himself than that he preaches to young men what he cannot perform! Why, unsatisfied with his own conscious power, should he choose to become the type of incompetence by talking for forty years of what he has never done! Let him resign his present professorship, to fill the chair of Ethics at the university. As master of English literature, he has a right to his laurels, while, as the populariser of pictures he remains the Peter Parley of painting.

  I spoke of Mr. Ruskin in my lecture at the Royal Institution as the prophet of a new religion, and this is true in a wider sense than I at the time intended; he is not only its prophet but its high-priest. He has the genuine priestly intolerance of independent judgment; partial admission of his doctrine he will not endure; you must accept it in its entirety, or you are of the enemy; he allows of no independence of opinion gained from experience. That anything should be generally accepted that he has not propounded or asserted to be true is in his eyes the unpardonable sin. Hence the comparison between Michelangelo and Tintoret; Mr. Ruskin invented Tintoret in his “Modern Painters,” whereas Michelangelo and Raphael are accepted masters about whom others have ventured to write; and one is irresistibly tempted to believe that for this reason they are disparaged to Tintoret’s advantage.

  Sparkling bits of aphoristic wit and wisdom are scattered in profusion over these letters [“Arrows of the Chase”], even those of which the main tenor is paradoxical or unpractical. Without attempting to deny that many of the social and economical opinions and proposals here put forward are of this unpractical character, I think the reader will nevertheless feel himself stirred and animated in a way which more sober and well-considered suggestions never move him. Mr. Ruskin does not feel more keenly than the rest of us those evils which spoil and darken the wholesomeness and beauty of modern life…. Discussion or argument is not forwarded by such downright denunciation of existing evil as is here found. But we are quickened and invigorated for the struggle in which we are all engaged with the misery of the world, and the sluggish and the selfish may be reached by Mr. Ruskin’s random arrows where homilies and exhortations are all in vain.

  There are many curious points of parallelism between the careers of Carlyle and Ruskin, particularly in their attitude towards public affairs and political economy…. Mr. Ruskin’s impatience with political economy is to be traced partly to the same source with Carlyle’s—the feeling that a science which professes to be based on general, ascertained laws regulating man’s action implies a curtailment of man’s free agency, and seems in so far an impious and immoral science. In Mr. Ruskin’s case, however, this seems to be complicated with an æsthetic feeling that in an ideal state of society, which his conversation leads him to believe once existed on earth, exchanges, rents, profits, etc., were governed not by economic but by moral laws; so that political economy represents a real moral decline, the disappearance of primitive Arcadian simplicity and fair-dealing…. Mr. Ruskin has unquestionably greatly weakened his influence even as an art-critic by his extraordinary excursions during the last ten or fifteen years into non-æsthetic fields. Nobody who feels the force and beauty and moral elevation of much of his writing can help regretting that the fatal gift of expression should have misled him into attempting to deal with subjects with which he is totally unfamiliar.

  Admiration ought ungrudgingly to be bestowed on one who has done good service as an art critic and as a contributor to English literature. The sympathy, moreover, which, denied to those who are in advance of their age, is naturally accorded to the archaic type of mind, is enhanced by the attractiveness of a personality whose idealism is as lofty as that of Mr. Ruskin. But we maintain that there is a further sentiment which contributed to the applause which Mr. Ruskin’s audiences bestowed upon him. Speaking generally, “broadly and comfortably,” as he would say, Mr. Ruskin is not a representative man, yet he represents a certain spirit of Philistinism (for it merits this name), which is far from being unpopular, and which shows itself in opposition to scientific culture. He is the spokesman of that mental attitude which misinterprets the province of science and affects to misunderstand the plainest utterances of the physicist…. We recommend those who sympathise with Mr. Ruskin to study some of those little books which are beginning to be the delight of our children. Such readers may never attain the scientific spirit, yet they may possibly catch a few chords of that great song in which there is complete harmony between the Universe of Nature and that of poetic and artistic sentiment, whose faint beginnings will alone be heard in this plague-stricken century…. His English is often delicious, always in his most dyspeptic diatribes amusing. And we can all appreciate his concluding advice that we should “bring back our own cheerfulness and our own honesty; and cease from the troubling of our own passions,” and (not least we think of all) “the insolence of our own lips.” A good recipe: add a dash of humility and of respect for the opinions of wiser men;—and all may yet be well, even though our return to the paths of rectitude should fail to dissolve the “mangey” clouds, and quench the fevered wind of a storm-harried and woe-worn era.

  In busying himself with his autobiography, Mr. Ruskin is not hampered with considerations of chronology. He notes events as they occur to him, with small deference to order and succession. This irregularity is but another grace adorning the narrative. The privilege is so precious of viewing the inner experience of a beloved author, uncovered by himself with the naïveté of a child, that any waywardness or eccentricity in the proceeding forms a part of its charm. There are repetitions in the story, but none too many. Ruskin never tells a story twice in the same language, and there is always a new and wonderful word-painting when he puts the particles of speech together to convey a favorite idea…. Not more remarkable has been Ruskin’s literary career than the formative period of his life. The account of it is strange and instructive. How much of the brilliant talent and the strong self-poised character which have made him a power for good in the world, is to be referred to the singular manner of his education?

  Probably the reading public has long ceased to expect anything but fresh outbursts of whim and caprice from Ruskin. Carlyle said of him, in 1872, that if he could hold out for another fifteen years or so, he might produce, even in this way, a great effect. But the prophecy has not turned out a true one. “A weak man,” as the sage of Chelsea felt compelled to call him in the same breath in which he ventured the above prediction, will never produce a great effect, give him any length of time. And Ruskin seems fast weakening any impression his earlier works may have made. He has degenerated into a common scold. The public laughs at him, and when the public laughs at a man’s rage, his day is about over. He affects one, in his later utterances, as a tipsy Carlyle. He provokes our mirth and pity instead of convincing us in our own hearts of sin and folly, as Carlyle did. Never a man of such genius with so little commonsense. If ever a writer could be likened to a “dim comet wagging its useless tail of phosphorescent nothing across the steadfast stars,” the description may be applied to Ruskin in his late verdict upon Gibbon and Darwin.

  On the part of this tender and beautiful writer, whose courageous protest against greed and all sorts of moral uncomeliness has brought strength to so many souls, and whose exquisite style is the delight of so many readers, we find the most violent aversion to physical science.

  Ruskin had a powerful influence upon me at one time, though I was interested in art and studied it in various ways before reading him. His influence was agreeable whilst it lasted, and charmed me by authorising my boyish love of nature, but on the side of art it was very harmful by turning aside my attention from what is really essential in art to lands of truth which are not essential, and have never been considered to be so by the great artists. Mr. Ruskin’s substitution of topography for beauty and character as the aim of the modern landscape painter was at one time most prejudicial to me, and the more so that I had naturally an intense affection for certain favourite places. In the way of literary style, I am not aware that Mr. Ruskin ever did me either good or harm. Every author should express himself in his own way, and as it is right for Mr. Ruskin to utter his thoughts in an ornate style, so it is right for me to use a simple one.

  A glowing eloquence, a splendid and full-flowing music, wealth of phrase, aptness of epithet, opulence of ideas—all these qualities characterize the prose style of Mr. Ruskin. His similes are daring, but always true…. His power of painting in words is incomparably greater than that of any other English author; he almost infuses colour into his words and phrases, so full are they of pictorial power.

  One very great writer, Ruskin, developing hints already given by Shelley and De Quincey, showed what criticism may be when united with a poetical temperament. The appreciation of his æsthetic teaching belongs to another department of his work; but literature no less than art responded to his passionate demand for absolute veracity and his assertion of the substantial oneness of utility and beauty. The most vital portion of this teaching was adopted from Carlyle, but the unequalled splendor of Ruskin’s diction recommended him to many whom Carlyle repelled.

  Ruskin is always wandering and digressive, imaginative, and capricious in style and thought. He is generally egotistical, sometimes ill-tempered, occasionally even childish and absurd. Many of his earlier sentences were penned in prejudice and ignorance; some of his last, in senile irritation at the world in which he writes; and, having said all this once, his critic should forever and finally dismiss it from the question…. Insensibly, inevitably, we recur to Ruskin as a moralist; and it is perhaps in this capacity that posterity will chiefly take him.

  In those days all young men who were interested in literature read “Blackwood’s Magazine,” with a unanimity such as the present age will hardly understand, unless, indeed, they learn to read the “Forum” in the same way. In “Blackwood” we began to find careful criticisms of the English Art Exhibitions, by “A Graduate of Oxford.” There did not, at first, seem much hope of interest in articles describing pictures which we have not seen and were not likely to see, but we found these articles worth reading. After the first there was no question with us whether we should read another. Such was the introduction of my generation to John Ruskin. When he revealed his name to the outer world by the first volume of “Modern Painters,” the book made a revolution even in the habits of life of intelligent young people. It taught them to watch the clouds, the shapes of trees, their habits of growth, even, as they had not done, and gave to them a new and higher enjoyment of natural beauty. The new generation of to-day does not read these books of Ruskin, can hardly be made to read them. That is their affair more than it is mine. But the real reason why they do not read them is that they have been already trained in a habit of enjoying nature, and the open. This was largely, as I believe, created by these very books, so that they do not need them as we did. The young artists of our time would look in a very cavalier way on much of Ruskin’s instruction. But nine in ten of them would, perhaps, not be artists, had he not led the English-speaking race out of doors, in a sympathy with landscape painting and the work of true art, which has led to the new enthusiasm of our own time for the arts of design.

  His mistakes in art are in some measure due to his fundamental mistake of measuring it by its moral powers and influence, and the roots of the error are so deeply involved in his character and mental development that it can never be uprooted. It is difficult for me (perhaps for any of his contemporaries) to judge him as a whole because, besides being his contemporary and a sufferer by what I now perceive to be the fatal error of his system, I was for so many years his close personal friend, and because, while I do not argue with his tenets and am obliged by my own sense of right to combat many of his teachings, I still retain the personal affection for him of those years which are dear to memory, and reverence the man as I know him; and because I most desire that he should be judged rightly,—as a man who for moral greatness has few equals in his day, and who deserves an honor and distinction which he has not received, and in a selfish and sordid world will not receive, but which I believe time will give him,—that of being one who gave his whole life and substance to the furtherance of what he believed to be the true happiness and elevation of his fellow-men. Even were he the sound art critic so many people take him to be, his real nature rises above the office as much as humanity rises above art. When we wish to compare him with men of his kind, it must be with Plato or Savonarola rather than with Hazlitt or Hamerton.

  The cardinal doctrine which runs through all his teaching can be stated in a line. It is that men—men and not the works of men, men and not materials, or machines, or gold, or even pictures, or statues, or public buildings—should be the prime objects of our care, and reverence, and love. Hence it is that, as a writer on art he necessarily becomes a moralist, since he must needs inquire from what human faculties does this work of art arise, and to what human faculties does it appeal. Hence it is that in the decline of architecture or painting he reads the degradation of national character. Hence it is that the life of the workman appears to him to be of higher importance than the quantity of work which he turns out. Hence is is that he has opposed himself to the orthodox political economy, with a sense that man, and the life and soul of man, cannot be legitimately set aside while we consider apart from these laws of wealth or of so-called utility. No other truth can be quite so important for our own age, or for any age, as the truth preached so unceasingly and so impressively by Mr. Ruskin.

  His books, so cleverly written, so intensely earnest, were a revelation to his day and generation, but they no longer evoke the enthusiasm that greeted their first appearance. Not that we cannot still find much to learn from Ruskin. He has nurtured his own mind upon high thought, and he would have all other minds equally nurtured. He holds up noble ideals of life. He would see men and women harboring elevating thoughts, pure of heart, honest in their convictions, unselfish in their pursuits, each extending a helping hand, each living for the highest and best. And these are lessons for all ages. He hates sham with the honest soul of Dr. Johnson; he scorns the worship of getting-on to the exclusion of the free exercise of the higher faculties with the unfettered soul of Epictetus; he loves the Gothic past, and he finds little in our modern world to love outside of Turner’s pictures and Walter Scott’s novels. All else in modern life is censurable. He quarrels with our railroads, and our smoking manufactories, and our modern methods of money-getting. Pages of his books are as charming as ever grew under the driving pen, but his digressions are more than his subjects. He lacks ballast.

  In the field of practical ethics and politics Ruskin’s preaching propensities find a more suitable and just scope than in the more theoretical spheres of his literary activity. And his great literary power of diction has enabled him to give new form and emphasis to principles that have almost been adopted by us as moral commonplaces, however little they may have been acted upon, and do show in glaring light the contradiction which obtains between the higher moral and religious tenets and the ordinary working traditions of modern society. He has thus become one of the foremost writers on what might be called practical sociology or economic ethics…. He passes judgment not only upon all forms of art, but upon the works of great and sober men of science, on the problems of these departments of science themselves, whether it be the works of an Agassiz or of a Darwin, the purport of whose work he had never trained himself to realize. Such exaggerations may, alas, from a literary point of view appear to be innocent, but in their effect they certainly are not. He will, for instance, in “Præterita” II., page 298, tell us, with the emphatic terms of a convinced authority, speaking of Sidney Smith’s “Elementary Sketches on Moral Philosophy,” that “they contain in the simplest terms every final truth which any rational mortal needs to learn on this subject.” We must ask what right his reading of that vast subject called philosophy has given him to pass judgment in any way upon it. And so, in almost every chapter of all his books, we cannot help feeling that this is a positive blemish, the influence of which cannot be good; and we turn with pure gratitude to his descriptive passages, where there is no scope for this intellectual vice, and where the good that is in him has brought forth fruit that will be the delight and profit of all the ages in which the English language is read.

  Mr. Ruskin never forgets himself and never can endure to be in the background. Not in any of his writings is he “the man behind the book;” he is always the man in the book, and about whom the book is, in greater part, written. A man of magnificent generosity “ever avaricious of giving,” no one supposes for a moment that he ever gave anything in order that the gift might be talked about. It is not the less true that there does not abide in him that self-abnegation which after he had done good would make him blush to find it fame. He would not be happy if he were not talked about. With this consuming desire to be noticed, Mr. Ruskin’s salvation lies in the nobleness of his sentiment, which leads him to desire to be noticed for noble things.

  Mr. Ruskin laid no claim to any inspiration for himself; he was content to glorify the work of others. When he gave up versifying it was not because he had failed in it; though he has often laughed at some of his less original and more openly derivative juvenile verses, and regretted the haste which led him into their premature publication. He has warned young people against rushing into verse, just as he has warned them against setting themselves up for artists, before they really understand and appreciate the masterpieces of acknowledged genius. But his self-denial has had its reward. In extolling the water-colour and oil painting of Turner and Tintoret he became a painter in words no less renowned than they. In expounding Dante and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser, he has given us prose poems, if I may be allowed the expression, which pedestal him in the “house of Fame” hardly lower than the highest of them. In his case, indeed, the saying is fulfilled, “whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister, and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant.”

  I have never been a Ruskinite, though I have always thought that nobody in our time has touched Mr. Ruskin at his very best as an artist in the flamboyant variety of English prose; and I have never been an anti-Ruskinite, though I know perfectly well what the anti-Ruskinites mean by their fault-finding, and even to a certain extent agree with it. When Mr. Ruskin began, as above remarked, to cry in the wilderness, it must be admitted by everyone who gives himself the trouble to know, that he had a very great and terrible wilderness to cry in…. He had perfect leisure, a considerable fortune, a wonderful literary faculty, an intense love for art. He was gifted by nature with what is the most fortunate gift for a man of genius, the most unfortunate for another, an entire freedom from the malady of self-criticism. It has never during his long career ever troubled Mr. Ruskin to bethink himself whether he knew what he was talking about, whether he was or was not talking nonsense, whether he was or was not contradicting flatly something that he had said before. These are the requisites of a prophet in these modern times; and Mr. Ruskin had them…. To sum up the impression side of the matter—when I was young, Mr. Ruskin’s crotchets used to irritate me more than they ought: they now irritate me hardly at all, and only bore me a little. But I think I like his beauties more than ever; and I am disposed to think, also, that he has brought more folk to art than he has ever bitten with his own heresies about it. And these are, after all, harmless heresies enough; and not more dangerous, while they are much less disgusting, than the exaggerations on the other side.

  Ruskin early began to boast of his analytic powers, and not without reason. His works are divided and subdivided with great elaboration, the later ones more intelligently but less elaborately than the earlier. He usually employs the words paragraph and section synonymously, preferring, however, the former term. The section-mark § he often places before divisions that he calls paragraphs. He is fond of compound paragraphs, numbering the main paragraph and indicating by indentation the subdivisions. In his first edition of collected works he divided the text into “paragraphs,” numbering these consecutively through the volumes. The paragraphs, even of the “Modern Painters,” are almost never heterogeneous, although Ruskin’s later changes in these early works result in breaking up a few of the sections. In the “Modern Painters” the sections are longer than in the “Sesame and Lilies” and later works. The sequence of Ruskin’s early work is marred by dislocations rather than by digressions. Many paragraphs in the “Modern Painters” would be bettered much by mere re-arrangement of the sentences or groups of sentences.

  Ruskin is one of the most turbid and fallacious minds, and one of the most powerful masters of style, of the present century. To the service of the most wildly eccentric thoughts he brings the acerbity of a bigot and the deep sentiment of Morel’s “emotionalists.” His mental temperament is that of the first Spanish Grand Inquisitors. He is a Torquemada of æsthetics. He would liefest burn alive the critic who disagrees with him, or the dull Philistine who passes by works of art without a feeling of devout awe. Since, however, stakes do not stand within his reach, he can at least rave and rage in word, and annihilate the heretic figuratively by abuse and cursing. To his ungovernable irascibility he unites great knowledge of all the minutiæ in the history of art. If he writes of the shapes of clouds he reproduces the clouds in seventy or eighty existing pictures, scattered amongst all the collections of Europe. And be it noted that he did this in the forties, when photographs of the masterpieces of art, which render the comparative study of them to-day so convenient, were yet unknown.

  In Ruskin’s poetry there is much less of himself than young writers of capacity usually contrive to put into their early work. The great prose stylist, as he himself long ago confessed, made a false start when he donned the Byronic collar and set off to climb Parnassus.

  The prose of essay and criticism which had sought, perhaps, an excess of point, precision, and emphasis under the long-continuing and only now declining domination of Macaulay has—thanks in part to the unparalleled power and fascination of John Ruskin, the happily still living successor to the tradition of Landor, De Quincey, and the other early nineteenth-century masters of the rhetorical and “impassioned” prose style—acquired a colour and flexibility, and an adequacy of response to emotional and æsthetic needs, in which for more than a generation it had been lacking.

  The happy life being that in which illusion is most prevalent, and Mr. Ruskin’s enthusiasm having fired more minds to the instinctive quest of beauty than that of any other man who ever lived, we are guilty of no exaggeration if we hail him as one of the first of benefactors. Yet his intellectual nature was from the start imperfect, his sympathies always violent and paradoxical; there were whole areas of life from which he was excluded; and nothing but the splendour and fulness of his golden trumpets concealed the fact that some important instruments were lacking to his orchestra. It is as a purely descriptive writer that he has always been seen at his best, and here he is distinguished from exotic rivals—at home he has had none—by the vivid moral excitement that dances, an incessant sheet-lightning, over the background of each gorgeous passage. In this effect of the metaphysical temperament, Mr. Ruskin is sharply differentiated from Continental masters of description and art initiation—from Fromentin, for instance, with whom he may be instructively contrasted.

  No master of impassioned prose has endowed his writings with more perspicuity of meaning and more force of utterance, or used a fuller liberty of reiteration in placing his chief thoughts before the reading public. And yet these very qualities of brilliance and amplitude have helped to hide from many the supreme value of Mr. Ruskin’s criticism of life, especially in reference to social reform, by giving too great emphasis and attractiveness to unrelated individual thoughts, set in single jewelled sentences, or in purple patches, and by thus concealing the consistency of thought and feeling which underlay and gave intellectual unity and order to his work.

  Among the heroic souls who have sought to recover the lost paradise and recapture the glory of an undefiled and blessed world stands John Ruskin, oft an apostle of gentle words that heal like medicines, and sometimes a prophet of Elijah-like sternness and grandeur, consuming man’s sins with words of flame…. Full fifty years have passed since this glorious youth entered the arena, his face glowing with hope, the heroic flame of the martyrs burning within his breast, his message a plea for a return to the simplicities of virtue. During all these years he has been pouring forth prose of a purity and beauty that have never been surpassed. Over against the brocaded pages of Gibbon and the pomposity of Dr. Johnson’s style stands Ruskin’s prose, every page embodied simplicity, every sentence clear as a cube of solid sunshine. Effects that Keats produced only through the music and magic of verse, John Ruskin has easily achieved through the plainness of prose. What Leigh Hunt said of Shelley we may say of Ruskin—he needs only the green sod beneath his feet to make him a kind of human lark, pouring forth songs of unearthly sweetness.

  He is by turns reactionary and progressive, simple and shrewd, a mystic and a man of practical affairs. He has bewildered men by the very brilliance of his versatility. No sooner has the world owned him as the prince of art-critics than he sets up as the exponent of a new political economy. He will show us how to weave cloth honestly as well as to draw truly; how to build character, as a matter of greater import even than the building of a Venice; and he who is an authority on Botticelli must needs also be an authority on drains. He links together in the strangest fashion the remotest things—philosophy and agriculture, theology and sanitation, the manner of a man’s life and the quality of his pictures. It is this very variety and exuberance of mind which has kept the estimate of his genius low among his countrymen.

  The remedy of the bad Art of the day must begin in the healing of the national life. “Have you seen Keble Chapel, Mr. Ruskin?” we innocently ask him. “No!” “Are you going to see it?” “No! If it is new, it is hideous. Or if it is beautiful, it ought not to be. We don’t deserve it. You clergy ought not to have any beautiful churches. You ought to be out in the wilderness with St. John the Baptist. When you have converted England, it will be time to think whether we may have any beautiful things again.” That was his verdict. It was no day for Art, while our filthy cities cried to Heaven against us. So he preached with ever intenser vehemence and skill, giving precision and reality and exquisite utterance to that which had been, in Carlyle, but as a thunderous roar. To this teaching, he gave close study and thought; and ever he perfected, for its expression, his amazing skill over language. His style freed itself from the overloaded consciousness of its earlier forms; and, without losing any of its beauty, became more concise, well-grit, muscular.

  Since Tennyson died no greater loss has been sustained by English literature in the memory of the present generation than that of John Ruskin. Of all men who have dominated the Art-world of Britain during the nineteenth century, Ruskin is beyond all question and beyond all comparison the greatest, and, by universal admission the most individual and most interesting. What his exact position as a critic and preacher of Art may be, what his rank of scientist or a leader of thought, I make no pretence here of determining. But, by common consent, he has been the most distinguished figure in the arena of Art-philosophy for half-a-century and more, the philanthropist-militant par excellence. He is the man who has admittedly moulded the taste of the public to a preponderating extent in matters æsthetic, and, apart from his labours outside the pale of Art, has exerted an influence so powerful that he has given a direction to the practice of painting and architecture that may still be traced in some of the happiest productions of the day. His death has given reason for mourning to many; no one has more eloquently, more passionately, pleaded the cause of the poor than Ruskin—no one (except perhaps it be Mr. Gladstone, his political bête noire) could boast so vast a number of friends amongst the great mass of the public.

  Ruskin’s diction is noble in vigour and high in vitality in this work of impassioned intellect, “Fors Clavigera.” Not here does he force with difficulty the tired and inelastic common speech to explain his untired mind, as in some pages of “Modern Painters;” not here are perorations of eloquence over-rich; not here constructions after Hooker, nor signs of Gibbon. All the diction is fused in the fiery life, and the lesser beauties of eloquence are far transcended. During the publication of these letters the world told him, now that he could express himself but could not think, and now that he was effeminate. But he was giving to that world the words of a martyr of thought, and the martyr was a man.

  Though there is much that is true and useful in “Modern Painters” and “Stones of Venice,” there is also much that is old fashioned, and the newest notions on the technique and ideals of art are not to be found there. But if it is acknowledged that Ruskin wrote the “Elements of Drawing,” “Lectures on Art,” and “Aratra Pentilici,” I cannot conceive that Ruskin’s theories generally should be spoken of in the tone in which we might speak of crinolines. Nay, not only do I not think them stale, but I should be extremely curious to know what code of art-criticism—whether in England, France, Germany, or Italy—has more clearly understood and defined, or more eloquently set forth the newest tendencies of contemporary art…. Where is the art-critic who has more clearly set forth the principle of the division of colour than the author of the “Elements of Drawing,” published in 1856?… I do not believe that, before Ruskin, any art-critic ever troubled himself, as he has done, about the relation of art to life; and no man since has spoken of it with greater eloquence…. Whether we consider the most recent innovations in the technique of painting: the subdivision of colours; or the latest movement in decorative art: the collaboration or identity of the artist and the craftsman; or the aim of contemporary criticism to delimit the social function of art, we perceive that it was Ruskin who traced the first outlines of each, and that his thoughts have not lost their inspiration. It was at the lamp now burnt out in the seclusion of Brantwood that the torches were lighted which at this day illuminate the world.

  His long and laborious work has no authority with artists. Nor, indeed, even with some of those whom he has most prominently caressed and encouraged. At the bottom of what Mr. Ruskin did was the main trouble of teaching not art, but Mr. Ruskin; a perfectly fair thing, as a practical teaching, if Mr. Ruskin had been a practical artist.

  As Carlyle said long ago, “everything not made of asbestos is going to be burned.” There is, even in a purely literary sense, exceedingly little “asbestos” to be found in the sum of Mr. Ruskin’s works. It is not, indeed, hazardous to venture the prophecy that posterity will find his writings lacking in form as to style, and lacking in substance as to matter. He was to an extraordinary degree a pure sentimentalist, and there are many signs that the day of pure sentimentalists is over. He was not, in fact, of his own time. He not only revolutionized the state of feeling in regard to fine art in England, did wonders both for the awakening of the humdrum, the matter-of-fact, and the Philistine element of English society to the vital truth and real beauty of art, and against the conventionality heretofore accepted as artistic beauty and truth—he made a very deep moral impression upon many serious minds, who still regard him (such is the chaotic condition of our culture) as an evangelist rather than as a mere writer upon fine art…. It is because his great defect is excess of emotion, and because emotion in one way or another is nearly his only source of strength, and because poetical form is almost sure to counteract excess, that English literature has perhaps lost from Mr. Ruskin’s exclusive devotion to prose. To the preponderance of his emotional over his intellectual side, at all events, are justly attributable the two great defects which imperil his position as an English classic, namely, the lack of substance in his matter and the lack of form in his style.

  At his first lecture we are told that undergraduates climbed into the crowded room through the windows and sat on the cupboards. The popularity and the bold excursions of the lecturer, whose comprehensive view of Art enabled him to treat of everything under the sun without digressing from his subject, even excited the alarm of the University authorities. It is a striking testimony to his power that they actually put pressure on him to postpone a lecture in which it was anticipated that he would attack vivisection. He resigned his post on this question, but his name has always remained one to conjure with, and the cheap editions of recent years have carried his influence wide over the English-speaking world. His complete works are about to be translated into French. In spite of attacks of mental disease, of his occasional violence, prejudice, and injustice, of hostile criticism, and of the grave aloofness maintained by some cooler heads and keener intellects, there is probably no Englishman in the last thirty years, not Matthew Arnold, not Tennyson, no! not Mr. Gladstone himself, whose works have excited so much attention, or round whose person has gathered a more genuine affection and respect.

  The name of John Ruskin recalls phases of intellectual activity so diverse, even so heterogeneous, that many of those who pronounce it with a common admiration may be said to be thinking of different men. To express any judgment as to the relative merits of these men—to decide between the claims of the art-critic and the social reformer on the gratitude of their land—may be rather to communicate information about oneself than to contribute towards a judgment of one in whom, through all these varied aspects of his personality, we must reverence lofty ideals, untiring industry, and disinterested devotion to his fellow men. The opinion here avowed, that the earliest phase of his genius was its brightest, may be partly due to the fact that the glow of its emergency blends with that of a far-off youth. When Ruskin speaks of Nature and Art, he seems to me inspired. When he turns to finance, to politics, to the social arrangement and legislative enactments of mankind, I can recognize neither sober judgment nor profound conviction.

  The dictatorship of taste which Arnold held in matters of literature, was held in matters of art by John Ruskin who also broadened his criticism, as did Arnold, into the region of social and moral ideals. His nature was a more ardent one than Arnold’s and his crusade against bad art, as well as against social and moral falsehood, partook of the Hebraic intensity of Carlyle, whose disciple, indeed, he acknowledged himself to be.

  There is no Englishman of his intellectual and moral stature left alive; his peers have all gone before him, and the last of the great spirits who shaped for the Victorian age its ethical and æsthetical ideals has been gathered to his rest.

  Of the two, Ruskin’s is the more sunny, more hopeful nature; unlike Carlyle, he takes no pleasure in censuring or condemning: he points out what is better, and the path leading to it. Nor is he so obstinate or opinionated as his great contemporary and friend, Carlyle; in later editions of his work, we find Ruskin readily and ingenuously admitting errors he had discovered. His style is a charming mixture of sublimity, enthusiasm, and sound English common sense. There is no book of his, even of those which appear to be written in the most technical style (such, for instance, as his work on thunderclouds in painting) which the reader can peruse without deep interest. And even when Ruskin’s views are diametrically opposed to the so called spirit of the times (as, especially, in his hatred of machine labor), they are founded on noble and very justifiable grounds.

  Great in himself, and greater because he changed the minds of many. But for Ruskin, much of Carlyle’s teaching would never have reached people, who, in their turn again, have been allowed to reach yet others. Even if we leave Art, Nature, and the philosophy of Science aside, the man who wrote “Unto this Last” remains a great force, which, thank God, is not yet expended.

  His genius was indeed intellectually far remote from that of Dante, but morally of a type closely akin. There was a similar mingling in both sternness and of tenderness, of self-confidence and of humility; but the resemblances only accentuate the essential differences in their respective natures. The one was self-contained, concentrated, and supported by a steadfast religious faith; the other unrestrained, diffused, and lacking the support of fixed religious convictions. Dante won his way to Paradise: Ruskin did not even attain to the Earthly Paradise upon the summit of the Mount of Purgatory. But Ruskin’s unequalled observation of the aspects of nature deepened his appreciation of the truth and power of Dante’s descriptions of the scenery alike of the actual and of the imagined world; his fancy was stimulated by the mystic symbolism of the “Divine Comedy” and his poetic sensibilities were quickened into poetic sympathies by the spirit with which the poem is inspired. Ruskin was also qualified by experience as well as by genius, beyond most other men to interpret the “Divine Comedy;” yet in spite of the lessons of life and the teachings of Dante himself, he did not learn to control the waywardness of his temperament, or to balance and correct the force of immediate impressions by recollection or comparison.