carry further the principles he had sought to apply. Perhaps no writer of his time has led a larger number of conventionally trained people of moderate thinking powers to give up their more irrational traditional opinions. And not only do his urbanity and his culture, the while, secure him distinction and dignity as a publicist, with all his scientific inadequacy, but there stands ever behind the figure of the publicist the more shadowy yet more fascinating figure of the poet, whose song so often turns to a sigh the confident doctrine and cheerful mockeries of the propagandist. And who, in the act of passing judgment on the propagandist, can forget the melancholy undertone of his song, which sadly avows his inner diffidences as to truth:

"Ah! let us make no claim,

On life's incognisable sea,

To too exact a steering of our way;
Let us not fret and fear to miss our aim,

If some fair coast has lured us to make stay,
Or some friend hailed us to keep company."1

1 Human Life.

JOHN RUSKIN.

I.

"1

Ir is nearly thirty-three years since George Eliot wrote privately of Ruskin :-" 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 great teachers of the day." That judgment curiously sums up the average run of opinion about Ruskin now, among the readers who are sympathetic enough to feel his power, and independent enough to admire without total self-surrender. Like Carlyle and Arnold, he himself has put it on record that he has failed in his effort to influence his generation -an instructive and memorable avowal, coming from such different men. Carlyle made it despairingly, Arnold resignedly and half-humorously, Ruskin bitterly and passionately. If they

3

2

could say so, it must be true, for their minds are the measure of their failure, in terms of their aspiration; but the avowal sets us asking: What are the objective facts; how far have these men really failed to influence their generation in the direction in which they strove? Mill and Emerson made no such confession or complaint was it that they had been less aspiring, or were more easily satisfied? In effect, their ideals were as high, and they were far enough from a smug contentment with things as they are. Was it not that they, in their very different ways, were less egoistic than the others, temperamentally more ready to believe that the world might work its salvation by other light than

1 Mr. Cross's Life, ii., 7. It is instructive to compare the temper in which Ruskin later criticised George Eliot, in his essay on Fiction, Fair and Foul.

2 Froude, First Forty Ycars, ii., 478.
4 Fors Clavigera, Letter 84, and others.

8 Discourses in America, p. 3.

theirs? In the contrast they make with Carlyle, that explanation, I think, is not unacceptable; and if it seems less suitable in relation to Arnold, it is probably because, despite the ostensible fanaticism of his conviction that the legality of marriage with a deceased wife's sister is incompatible with a sound remnant, and his dogma that nothing is righteousness but the method and secret of Jesus Christ1-despite those primitive bigotries Arnold had some safeguard in his temperament against maniacal selfabsorption, and thus is not typically at strife with his age. But whether the same explanation of baffled and embittered egoism will serve to explain the confessed defeatedness of Ruskin, we must not attempt to decide until we have investigated his case.

Of the men we have studied in this series, he, perhaps, is the one who is least elucidated by the light of heredity. In that connection he strikes us from the first as an abnormal product, not, of course, at all subversive of the doctrine of heredity, but very suggestive of the limitations of our knowledge, and of the subtlety of the process by which one human organism is proximately compounded out of two. The son of a hard-working and undemonstrative wine-merchant, notably intellectual only on the side of his artistic tastes, and of an evangelical Scotchwoman of tenacious character, but contracted mind and temperament, developes into one of the most eloquent prose writers of any age or literature, whose feeling for art is not a taste but a kind of passion; whose character is wayward and, save in literary and artistic pertinacity, weak; and who is readily admitted by all men to be a genius, in virtue of that evident capacity of high pressure brain action, which is the condition precedent of all eminent human accomplishment, whether in a self-controlled or in an ill-balanced organism. What is clear is that his faculty mainly reposes on an extraordinary power of observation, which we broadly assume to be the basis of artist-craft; and yet he is essentially not an artist in form or colour, though he trained himself to be a faithful and finished draughtsman. He has spent half a lifetime of strenuous if fitful labour on the study and

1 Literature and Dogma, p. 386. God and the Bible, p. 9.

analysis of artistic phenomena, of which he has written with a fire and an earnestness that were quite new in critical literature ; and yet the men of real genius for art often deride his judgments, as being those of one who sees beauty with ethical eyes. Again, he has an almost unparalleled command of language, and in that has carried both art and energy to unsurpassed lengths; and yet in verse, which is the flower of verbal art, he has confessedly failed, lacking evidently a certain essential part of the poet's outfit. And in the end, after an assiduous preparation for the philosophy of æsthetics, he has made himself one of the most stringent and stirring of modern critics of life, attaining in that function to an intensity if not a breadth of impressiveness and of influence reached by none of his contemporaries. Yet here, too, his mastering eloquence and startling insight are flawed by a passion for the irrational and the irrelevant which leaves the dispassionate judge in doubt whether his unreason does not balance, as it certainly discredits, his wisdom.

II.

It is part of the paradox of Ruskin's personality that his nominal rank in English literature is still determined for society by his first ambitious work, which he long refused to reprint, because of his maturer dissatisfaction in it. And this is not wholly unreasonable, for, ill-considered as is much of the thinking, and unchastened as is much of the style of "Modern Painters," it is certainly, for eloquence and energy, one of the most remarkable books ever produced by a youth in his twenties. Born in 1819, he published the first volume at twenty-four. And, further, that work is in many respects the key to his development, since it exhibits him as proceeding habitually from æsthetic observation to moral doctrine, thus reaching his artistic and ethical judgments alike directly from his impressions, and using his reasoning powers always primarily to support, and rarely later to check, his intuitions. And yet so vivid is this very faculty of

observation and impressibility, that to him is due the credit of anticipating criticism on those vices of excess which, for a sensitive taste to-day, disfigure his early writing, apart from the question of the justice of his views. He has been the first to say how overcharged often was his own youthful style. "I am more and more grieved," he wrote in 1874, on one of the extracts then published with his consent, "as I re-read this and other portions of the most affected and weak of all my books (written in a moulting time of my life) the second volume of Modern Painters'-at its morbid violence of passion and narrowness of thought. Yet, at heart, the book was, like my others, honest, and in substance it is mostly good, but all boiled to rags.'

"1

But this is not the only light cast by his later on his earlier self. In "Modern Painters" he roundly asserted that none of the histories or heroes of the Bible have ever been well painted; and in 1874 he writes on this: "I knew nothing, when I wrote this passage, of Luini, Filippo Lippi, or Sandro Botticelli, and had not capacity to enter into the deeper feelings even of the men whom I was chiefly studying-Tintoret and Fra Angelico. But the British public is at present as little acquainted with the greater Florentines as I was then, and the passage, for them, remained true."2 Observe here, in addition to the candour of the selfcriticism as to Tintoret and Fra Angelico, the force of the admission as to the presumption with which the young art-critic made sweeping generalisations on the strength of his knowledge of a few painters; and take, again, the late comment on the passage in which the youth had magisterially set Scott above Wordsworth and Tennyson as a poet, and above Goethe and Balzac " as the great representative of the mind of the age in literature." "I knew nothing of Goethe," he confesses again, "when I put him with Balzac ; ;" 3 but in this case, apparently unabashed, he goes on to justify his ignorant verdict on the strength of his later knowledge -badly enough, it must be said. These confessions will probably hold good of more of Ruskin's works than he himself connects them with. Headlong dogmatism on matters on which his thought 1 Frondes Agrestes, p. 148, note. 2 Ib., p. 9, note. 8 Ib., p. 17, note.