that each recess of every mountain chain of Europe had
been penetrated and its rocks drawn with such accuracy
that the geologist's diagram was no longer necessary;
suppose that every tree of the forest had been drawn in
its noblest aspect, every beast of the field in its savage
life that all these gatherings were already in our national
galleries, and that the painters of the present day were
112 JOHN RUSKIN
labouring happily and earnestly to multiply them and put
such knowledge more and more within reach of the common
people would not that be a more honourable life for them
than gaining precarious bread by 'bright effects'?"
One may reply, safely enough, that such a life
is honourable in the sense that it is honest, but
if the honour is that of which artists are most
ambitious, it is equally safe to say that there
is very little of it to be gained in that life. And
this method of study has always been the basis
of Ruskin's instruction instruction for this
and other reasons utterly wasted so far as the
proper cultivation of art is concerned. I re-
member how, when Ruskin's drawing-book was
published, an artist whose feeling for all the
nobler qualities of art I have rarely known
equalled, and a personal friend and admirer of
Ruskin, said to me, "He should not have printed
that; we know now just what he does not know."
It is not so much that he ignores the greater
gifts, but that he conceives that they can be
trained or developed by this kind of ant-like pro-
ceeding going over the earth as an insect, not
even as a bird. But it is in the comparison
of the two painters whom he chooses as types
that we most clearly recognise the failure to
distinguish between the two forms of so-called
art.
" Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest, equally
industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render
some part of what they saw in nature faithfully, and other-
wise trained in convictions such as I have above endeavoured
JOHN RUSKIN 113
to induce. But one of them is quiet in temperament, has a
feeble memory, no invention, and excessively keen sight.
The other is impatient in temperament, has a memory which
nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is com-
paratively near-sighted. Set them both free in the same
field in a mountain valley. One sees everything, small and
large, with almost the same clearness ; mountains and grass-
hoppers alike ; the leaves on the branches, the veins on the
pebbles, the bubbles in the stream; but he can remember
nothing and invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself his
mighty task; abandoning at once all thought of seizing
transient effects, or giving general impressions of that which
his eyes present to him in microscopical dissection, he
chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and
calculates with courage the number of weeks which must
elapse before he can do justice to the intensity of his percep-
tions or the fullness of matter in his subject. Meanwhile,
the other has been watching the change of the clouds and
the march of the light along the mountain-sides ; he beholds
the whole scene in broad, soft masses of true gradation, and
the very feebleness of his sight is in some sort an advantage to him
in making him moi'e sensible of the aerial mystery of distance and
hiding from him the multitudes of circumstances which it would have
been impossible for him to represent. ... I have supposed the
feebleness of sight in this last and of invention in the first
painter, that the contrast between them may be the more
striking; but with very slight modification both the char-
acters are real. Grant to the first considerable inventive
power with exquisite sense of colour, and give to the
second, in addition to all his other faculties, the eye of
an eagle, and the first is John Everett Millais, the
second Joseph Mallord William Turner." "And thus Pre-
Raphaelitism and Raphaelitism arid Turnerism are all one
and the same thing, so far as education can influence
them ; they are different in their choice, different in their
faculties, but all the same in this, that Raphael himself, so
H
114 JOHN RUSK1N
far as he was great, and all who preceded or followed him
who ever were great, became so by painting the truths around
them as they appeared to each man's mind, not as he had
been taught to see them except by the God who made both
him and them."
yet, between the first and last sentences
8tfT iich I have quoted, the author has gone
ugh a detailed account of the development
V. 'trier's art, showing that it was a con-
tinuou^ evolution of conventional forms of
treatment borrowed from earlier painters. He
is obliged, to complete his antithesis, to suppose
Turner feeble of sight, because he could in no
other way consistent with his theory (and every-
thing is always bent to his theories) account for
his ignoring "the multitudes of circumstances
which it would have been impossible for him
to represent," whereas the simple fact was that
Turner had, as he afterwards admits, an eagle's
eye, and simply ignored whatever in nature did
not suit his purpose. Turner was bred on con-
ventions ; he began in the style of the men
about him, Girtin and his kind; he went through
the schools of Loutherbourg, Poussin, Claude,
Vandervelde, imitating everybody except the most
naturalistic of the Dutchmen, but never from the
beginning to the end of his career painting
from nature, or in any other way than from
memory, and always in a conventional manner
very much influenced by the early landscape
painters of the true subjective school, to which
he belonged in character, faculties, and method;
JOHN RUSKIN 115
while Millais was a naturalist, who had no
invention, no idealism, but was always working
imitatively, and from direct vision, which Turner
never did. Turner was influenced, and happily,
by Claude to the last day of his life, thou h
not always obeying the influence to the sa 3
apparent degree.
Of Ruskin the writer, aside from th o
critic, it is surely superfluous for me to j any-
thing: for mastery of our language, the greater
authorities long ago have given him his place;
the multitude of petty critics and pinchbeck
rhetoricians, who pay him the tribute of tawdry
imitation, is the ever-present testimony to his
power and masterhood. Probably no prose
writer of this century has had so many choice
extracts made from his writings passages of
gorgeous description, passionate exhortation, path-
etic appeal, or apostolic denunciation; and cer-
tainly no one has so moulded the style of all the
writers of a class as he, for there scarcely can
be found a would-be art critic who does not
struggle to fill his throat with Ruskin's thunders,
so that a flood of Ruskin and water threatens
all taste and all study of art. As an example
of his diction take the description of "Schaff-
hausen " :
" Stand for half an hour beside the Fall of Schaff hausen,
on the north side where the rapids are long, and watch how
the vault of water first bends, unbroken in pure polished
velocity, over the arching rocks at the brow of the cataract,
covering them with a dome of crystal twenty feet thick, so
116 JOHN RUSKIN
t
swift that its motion is unseen except when a foam globe
from above darts over it like a falling star; and how the
trees are lighted above it under all their leaves at the
instant that it breaks into foam ; and how all the hollows of
that foam burn with green fire like so much shattering
chrysoprase ; and how ever and anon, startling you with its
white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing out of the fall like
a rocket, bursting in the wind and driven away in dust,'
filling the air with light; and how, through the curdling
wreaths of the restless crashing abyss below, the blue of the
water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the
sky through white rain-cloud ; while the shuddering iris stoops
in tremulous stillness over all, fading and flushing alternately
through the choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself
at last among the thick golden leaves, which toss to and fro
in sympathy with the wild water; their dripping masses,
lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some
stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon the
mossy rocks as its roar dies away; the dew gushing from
their thick branches through drooping clusters of emerald
herbage, and sparkling in white threads along the dark rocks of
the shore, feeding the lichens which chase and chequer them with
purple and silver"
In the expression of what may be seen in a
waterfall, and the suggestion of what may be
felt, but seen by no bodily eye, is there any-
thing in our language that is comparable to
this? But is it fair to ask art to realise it?
Who shall paint "the shuddering iris fading and
flushing alternately through the choking spray
and shattered sunshine?" It is beyond the
province of art to emulate this vein of feeling,
as much as to paint Shelley's "flames mingling
with sunset." But how many hapless phaetons
JOHN RUSKIN 117
has our Apollo of the pen thus sent tumbling
down on us, entangled in their "predicates and
six," or sixty! Description a la Ruskin has
become a disease of the literature of the gener-
ation, and your novelist coolly stops you in the
crisis of his story to describe a sunset in two
or three pages which, when all is said, compare
with Ruskin as a satyr with Hyperion.
ill
THUS Ruskin obstinately bent all his con-
clusions and observations to his doctrines what
he wanted to see he saw, nothing else. The
summer before one of my early visits to England,
I had painted a picture in what I believed the
spirit of his teachings, being then one of the
most enthusiastic of his disciples. I had con-
ceived a death-struggle between a hunter and a
buck, in which they had fallen together over a
ledge of rock and lay in death at its foot. I had
searched the forest around where I camped in
the Adirondacks until I found the ledge which
suited the conception, and painted it carefully,
with the red sunset light coming aslant through
the forest and falling on the perpendicular cliff,
at the foot of which was a dense, dank growth
of ferns, all painted on the spot and in the
sunset light. At the foot, where they would fall,
I put my guide, locked with a huge buck, and
painted them as carefully as I knew how the
man from life and the buck immediately after I
118 JOHN RUSKIN
had killed him. I took it with me to London,
and one day Ruskin came into my studio, and,
seeing the picture, exclaimed with a gesture of
disgust, "Why do you have this stinking carrion
in your picture? Put it out, it's filthy, it stinks!"
etc. I was too much under his influence to
weigh his judgment against mine, and painted it
out accordingly. Dante Rossetti, who had seen
and liked the picture as it was, coming in again
a few days after, exclaimed, "What have you
done to your picture?" I explained, and with
strong irritation in his manner he replied,
" You Ve spoiled your picture," and walked
straight out of the room. I had spoiled it ; for
everything in it had been chosen and painted
with reference to this deadly duel, with which
Ruskin had no sympathy. Death oppressed him,
whence his annoyance with the picture; but that
he was olfactorily impressed, as he was, could
only be explained by the fact that, as always,
he felt what he imagined or wished to see. He
wanted to see truth in Turner's drawings, and he
made his truth accordingly. I can but regard his
influence on modern landscape painting as per-
nicious from beginning to end ; and, coinciding as
it did with the advent of a great naturalistic and,
therefore, anti-artistic tendency in all branches
of study, it was even more disastrous than it
would have been in ordinary circumstances.
His architectural work, "Stones of Venice," etc.,
I am not so competent to judge, but I believe
that, while on the one hand he did great good by
JOHN RUSKIN 119
bringing out the virtues of Gothic architecture
and awakening the interest of the world in the
art that was passing away, on the other hand he
did harm by repressing the influence of the
better form of Renaissance, which is often of the
noblest and truest art, and is far more adapted
to our modern ways of work and uses than is the
Gothic. He uses here the same bitter polemics
and biased judgment as in the "Modern Painters."
In the lovely little Renaissance church of the
Miracoli at Venice, where are the most exquisite
decorations in that style of which I know, Ruskin
finds among the arabesques a child's head tied by
its locks among the tendrils of the vegetation,
and inveighs bitterly against the brutality of such
a conception as putting a bodiless head in the
decoration. But he never stops to see that it is
a cherub among other cherubim, and that, as it
is in the character of the cherub to have no
body, the tying of one of them by the hair to
the vine is only a bit of playful invention in
which there is no brutality whatever, but the
most seraphic of practical jokes on the bodiless
and helpless state of the charming little creature ;
a creature which, in Gothic days, might have been
believed in as an actuality, but which the Renais-
sance only looked at as a fiction of mythology
with the Tritons and Sirens, and therefore with
no reverence. But with Greek art, all that in any
way sympathised with its dominant character
meets his anathema. It seems to me that even
in architecture his influence is not catholic, but
120 JOHN RUSKIN
is tinged by his devotional tendencies, although
he introduces an element of common sense into
the criticism of architecture unknown before
him.
But Ruskin's true position is higher than that
of art critic in any possible development. It is
as a moralist and a reformer, and in his passion-
ate love of humanity (not inconsistent with
much bitterness, and even unmerited, at times,
to individual men) that we must recognise him.
His place is in the pulpit, speaking largely and
in the unsectarian sense. Truth is multiform,
but of one essence, and, such as he sees it, he is
always faithful to it. I have taken large ex-
ception to his ideas and teachings in respect to
art because I feel that they are misleading. 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 agree 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 mem-
ory, and reverence the man as I know him; and
JOHN RUSKIN 121
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
honour and distinction which he has not re-
ceived, 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 that 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. Art cannot be clearly estimated
in any connection with morality, and Ruskin
could never, any more than Plato or Savonarola,
escape the condition of being in every fibre of
his nature a moralist and not an artist, and as
he advanced in life the ethical side of his nature
more and more asserted its mastery, though less
and less in theological terms.
If I have assumed the right to pass judgment
on his art teachings, it is because I have devoted
most of my life to the study of art and more
years than Ruskin had when he finished his
most important books; but when I come to the
moral problem, so vast, so profound and moment-
ous in comparison with any questions of culture,
I have not the presumption to judge a man
whose moral nature I know to be so exceptional,
122 JOHN RUSKIN
and winged to flights that I can only honour
from below. Here we enter into a world where
only the Judge of all life can pronounce and
where my opinion must be respectful, for the
unquestionable loftiness and unselfishness of his
nature, and the consecration of his life to the
advancement of truth as he has seen it, give
him, to me, an authority I dare not debate with,
and which I insist on all the more because I
know the world does not accord it to him. No
one has yet dared answer Pilate, and I have no
disposition to judge whether Ruskin's social re-
forms and political theories are in accordance
with eternal truth or not whether they are
practical or not is, perhaps, a question of epoch
simply.
As an indication of Ruskin's position more
free, possibly, because more personal than those
given in his early works I quote part of one
of his first letters to me (about 1851). I had
been involved in mystical speculation, partly
growing out of the second volume of "Modern
Painters," and had written to him for counsel.
."I did not, indeed, understand the length to which your
views were carried when I saw you here, or I should have
asked you much more about them than I did ; and your
present letter leaves me still thus far in the dark that I do
not know whether you only have a strong conviction that
there is such a message to be received from all things, or
whether in any sort you think you have understood and can
interpret it, for how otherwise should your persuasion of
the fact be so strong? I never thought of such a thing
being possible before, and now that you have suggested it
JOHN RUSKIN 123
to me I can only imagine that by rightly understanding as
much of the nature of everything as ordinary watchfulness
will enable any man to perceive, we might, if we looked for
it, find in everything some special moral lesson or type of
particular truth, and that then one might find a language in
the whole world before unfelt like that which is forever
given to the ravens or to the lilies of the field by Christ's
speaking of them. This, I think, you might very easily
accomplish so far as to give the first idea and example ; then
it seems to me that every thoughtful man who succeeded
you would be able to add some types or words to the new
language, but all this quite independently of any Mystery
in the Thing or Inspiration in the Person, any more than
there is Mystery in the cleaning of a Eoom covered with
dust of which you remember Bunyan makes so beautiful a
spiritual application, so that one can never more see the
thing done without being interested. If there be mystery
in things requiring revelation, I cannot tell on what terms
it might be vouchsafed us, nor in any way help you to greater
certainty of conviction, but my advice to you would be on
no account to agitate nor grieve yourself nor look for
inspiration for assuredly many of our noblest English minds
have been entirely overthrown by doing so but to go on
doing what you are quite sure is right ; that is, striving for
constant purity of thought, purpose and word : not on any
account overworking yourself especially in headwork but
accustoming yourself to look for the spiritual meaning of
things just as easily to be seen as their natural meaning;
and fortifying yourself against the hardening effect of your
society, by good literature. You should read much and
generally old books ; but above all avoid German books and
all Germanists except Carlyle, whom read as much as you
can or like: read George Herbert and Spenser and
Wordsworth and Homer, all constantly; Young's "Night
Thoughts," Crabbe and, of course, Shakespeare, Bacon and
Jeremy Taylor and Bunyan ; do not smile if I mention also
124 JOHN RUSKIN
" Robinson Crusoe " and the "Arabian Nights," for standard
places on your shelves. I say read Homer : I do not know
if you can read Greek, but I think it would be healthy work
for you to teach it to yourself if you cannot, and then I
would add to my list Plato but I cannot conceive a good
translation of Plato. I had nearly forgotten one of the chief
of all Dante. But in doing this, do not strive to keep
yourself in an elevated state of spirituality. No man who
earnestly believed in God and the next world was ever
petrified or materialised in heart, whatever society he kept.
Do whatever you can, however simple or commonplace, in
your art; do not force your spirituality on your American
friends. Try to do what they admire as well as they would
have it, unless it cost you too much but do not despise
it because commonplace. Do not strive to do what you feel
to be above your strength. God requires that of no man.
Do what you feel happy in doing: mingle some physical
science with your imaginative studies ; and be sure that God
will take care to lead you into the fulfilment of whatever
tasks he has ready for you, and will show you what they
are in his own time.
" Thank you for your sketch of American art. I do hope
that your countrymen will look upon it, in time, as all
other great nations have looked upon it at their greatest
times, as an object for their united aim and strongest efforts.
I apprehend that their deficiency in landscape has a deep
root the want of historical associations. Every year of your
national existence will give more power to your landscape
painting then, do you not want architecture 1 Our chil-
dren's taste is fed with Ruins of Abbeys. I believe the
first thing you have to do is to build a few Arabic palaces by
way of novelty one brick of jacinth and one of jasper. . . .
"Write to me whenever you are at leisure and think I
can be of use to you with sympathy or in any way, and
believe me always interested in your welfare and very
faithfully yours, J. RUSKIN."
JOHN BUSKIN 125
I could not quote from his published works so
condensed a summary of the creed of the man:
it maintains the supremacy of the moral element
which has obtained in his life-work taken as a
whole.
That comparatively few people have read the
"Fors Clavigera" I know, for, having occasion to
complete my set not long since, I found that
several of the numbers supplied me by the
publisher were from the first thousand, published
years ago; and yet, this is the work which more
than any other gives us a clear insight into the
character and mental tendencies of Ruskin. He
is here at his ease, not bound by any preposses-
sions and theories; wayward, outspoken, indif-
ferent to praise or blame; speaking with full
possession of himself and frank appreciation of
his audience, addressing himself " to the workmen
and labourers of Great Britain," not so much in
the hope that they would come to fill his school,
but because he knew that only by the poor and
the despised by the great world was there any
hope of the reconstruction of society, as he
dreamed it, being effected or accepted. The drift
of all Ruskin's preaching (and I use the word in
its noble sense) is a protest against materialism
in ourselves, impurity in our studies and desires,
and selfishness in our conduct towards our fellow-
men.
He considers himself the pupil of Carlyle for
me, he floats in a purer air than Carlyle ever
breathed. As a feminine nature he was capti-
126 JOHN RUSKIN
vated by the robust masculine force of his great
countryman, and there was, in the imperial theory
of Carlyle, much that chimed with Ruskin's own
ideas of human government. The Chelsean, re-
gretfully looking back to the day of absolutism
and brutal domination of the appointed king, was,
in a certain sense, a sympathetic reply to Ruskin's
longings for a firm and orderly government when
he felt the quicksands of the transitional order
of the day yielding under his feet ; but, in reality,
the two regarded Rule from points as far re-
moved from each other as those of Luther and
Voltaire. Carlyle's ideal was one of a Royal
Necessity, an incarnate law indifferent to the
crushed in its marchings and rulings burly,
brutal, contemptuous of the luckless individual
or the overtaken straggler ; his Rule exists not
for the sake of humanity, but for that of Order,