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REESE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
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 , Accession No. H2.;o() . Class No. 
 
R U S K I N 
 
 AND THE 
 
 RELIGION OF BEAUTY 
 
R U S K I N 
 
 AND THE 
 
 RELIGION OF BEAUTY 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF 
 
 R. DE LA SIZERANNE 
 
 L-. 
 
 BY 
 
 THE COUNTESS OF GALLOWAY 
 
 " To have pleasure rightly" 
 
 OF TH~ 
 
 ( UNIVERS 
 
 JAMES POTT & CO. 
 
 119 & 121 WEST 23rd STREET 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN 
 

 
 
 ru 
 
 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 
 
 THESE three essays on Ruskin and the Religion of 
 Beauty appeared first in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 
 and were subsequently published in the form of a 
 book which has, I believe, been widely read in France. 
 Perhaps those who already belong to the band of Mr. 
 Ruskin's disciples and admirers, — those who acknow- 
 ledge the power of his thought in everyday life — will 
 be disappointed to find nothing very new or original 
 in M. De La Sizeranne's picturesque study of the 
 Master, but it will, I hope, be interesting to them 
 as well as to others to note the impression made 
 upon a foreigner by a personage who, not to mention 
 that he is among the greatest of our stylists in 
 prose, has permanently influenced the opinion of the 
 English-speaking people in matters of Art. With 
 all the keen critical feeling of his race M. De La 
 Sizeranne has, I think, made a compact and concise 
 statement of the fundamental ideas of Mr. Ruskin's 
 teaching, and I shall be satisfied if my translation 
 
 82960 
 
vi TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 
 
 gives some of those, who have neither opportunity 
 nor leisure to study the writings fully themselves, a 
 definite conception of the doctrine and dogma of the 
 author of Modern Painters. The judgment of one 
 outside ourselves is valuable when we are anxious 
 to divine the charm by which we are attracted : 
 and even if it should be true that Ruskin like 
 Carlyle wrote for an epoch and a generation which 
 is rapidly passing away, this may be all the more 
 reason for looking at his works from the standpoint 
 of one who came under the spell at a distance 
 of time when their form, colour, and perspective 
 could be appreciated as a whole and not only in 
 parts. Every one no doubt recognises in Ruskin a 
 worshipper of the beautiful. I do not think, how- 
 ever, that it has hitherto been generally admitted that 
 his Lectures on Political Economy, visionary and 
 impossible as they appear to many, are the logical 
 outcome of his Religion of Beauty, and surely there 
 are already signs among us of progress on the lines 
 he has persistently advocated for so many years. I 
 have been asked what is meant by the Religion of 
 Beauty. The answer will be found in these pages. 
 It is a religion that should appeal alike to rich and 
 poor. It is not a substitute for the Christian Faith, 
 \ on the contrary it is a protest against the religion of 
 
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE vii 
 
 Self, of Materialism, and of Worldly Advancement, 
 and it is but a branch growing out of the Igdrasil or 
 World Tree of the religion of Christ. It teaches that 
 the beautiful in Nature is precious because it is the 
 expression of God's Love and Power on earth. It 
 teaches that where there is no truth there can be no 
 Art and no life — and for the work of daily duty its 
 commandment is that of the great German poet — 
 Im Ganzen, Gtiten, Schonen, Resolut zu leben. 
 
 M. A. A. GALLOWAY. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 SOME years ago I was at Florence on the 7th 01 
 March, which is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. 
 In the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella, greatest 
 of all Dominican churches, are certain frescoes by 
 Taddeo Gaddi and Simone Memmi, representing St. 
 Thomas in triumph surrounded by his consistory of 
 the seven celestial and the seven terrestrial sciences. 
 What better day then, said I, to try and attain a 
 sense of his contribution towards the schooling of 
 human thought ? Moreover the sun chanced to be 
 shining brilliantly that morning on the domes of the 
 " city of lilies," and sun is the one thing needful if 
 all the several faces in the frescoes are to be dis- 
 tinguished, whether of apostles or of allegorical 
 animals, — the Lord's hounds tearing the wolves of 
 heresy, — or of wise men from Boethius, who re- 
 sembles a leper, back even to Tubalcain, like nothing 
 so much as an ourang-outang. 
 
 Wishing to be alone, I went as early as nine 
 o'clock, and found the cloister deserted. The fresh- 
 ness of the morning and the monastic calm of the 
 place made it a delicious resort. The grass, ever 
 fading yet ever springing, gleamed green through 
 
x INTRODUCTION 
 
 the old fourteenth-century arches. The sacristan, 
 intent equally on my peace and his own pocket, had 
 closed the door with a wealth of bolts. Long silences 
 followed the occasional clashing of the bells. . . . 
 
 For some little time I had been sauntering along 
 that pavement of tombstones, which fringes the 
 CJiiostri Verdi, and I was approaching the Spanish 
 Chapel, when a soft sound, rising and flowing, fell 
 upon my ear, a murmur of words — speaking, reading 
 — as in prayer. Had I been forestalled ? Suddenly 
 in the luminous shadow I perceived outlines of 
 girlish forms, youthful with Giottesque profiles, wear- 
 ing sailor hats and little white veils, and all carrying 
 bunches of mimosa in their hands. They were 
 clustering together before the Triumph of St. Thomas 
 Aquinas, and one of them was reading: 
 
 " Optavi et datus est mihi sensus, 
 Invocavi et venit in me spiritus sapientiae, 
 Et praeposui illam regnis et sedibus." 
 
 Then the voice resumed the English text : 
 
 " I prayed and the Spirit of Wisdom came upon 
 me. . . . The personal power of Wisdom ; the ao<f>ia 
 or Santa Sophia, to whom the first great Christian 
 temple was dedicated. The higher wisdom, govern- 
 ing by her presence, all earthly conduct, and by her 
 teaching, all earthly art, Florence tells you, she ob- 
 tained only by prayer." 
 
 She read on for some time, passing from eloquent 
 generalisations on the necessity of discipline in human 
 
INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 thought to minutest observations on the fingers or 
 the hair of this or that personage in the fresco, 
 noting where they were retouched, studying the 
 attitudes and the draperies, contrasting the calm air 
 and dignity of the figure of Rhetoric with the extra- 
 vagant gestures of the common people of Florence — 
 "They try to make lips of their fingers," insanely 
 hoping to " drag by vociferation whatever they would 
 have out of man and God." 
 
 The audience listened intently, forming face with 
 the precision of a Prussian platoon towards this figure 
 or that, as the small red and gold book directed them. 
 At times the voice rose even to invocation ; the muffled 
 strains of an organ sounded from afar, the faint per- 
 fumes of flowers were wafted by like incense, and, 
 touched with shafts of sunlight, the golden-tipped 
 mimosas shone like tapers in their midst. I observed 
 that the pilgrims had stationed themselves on the 
 very sepulchral slab of those Spanish Ambassadors 
 who give the chapel its name ; and the words they 
 were reading seemed like a tuft of flowers springing 
 from the dust of the past. What then was this book ? 
 What this unknown liturgy ? Who the priest of this 
 Religion of Beauty ? The sacristan, returning a 
 moment, muttered a name — RUSKIN. 
 
 Another year, in London, after attending a Con- 
 gress of Economists, I was resting in one of those 
 Gothic drawing-rooms where sobriety is wed to com- 
 fort, and the claims of taste are satisfied without 
 sacrifice of ease. The conversation turned on the 
 
xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 transformation wrought in everything by machinery, 
 and especially in textures and embroideries which 
 were formerly products of art, the work of thoughtful 
 minds, and much more enduring in olden times when 
 linen descended as patrimony from generation to 
 generation. The machine-made textures of to-day, 
 it was observed, do not last, — " for example, such as 
 these little napkins," said one of the guests (needless 
 to explain we were at tea.) — " But," answered our 
 hostess, "you forget that this is Langdale linen." — 
 "And my coat," said the master of the house, "is 
 cloth made by the St. George's Guild." This was 
 accepted as conclusive. 
 
 It was then that I first heard of a pretty little 
 cottage in Westmoreland where the thread is spun 
 on the old wheels of our grandmothers, and with 
 the old looms woven by men into cloth. This hand- 
 made fabric costs from two to six shillings a yard, 
 and the money produced by its sale is paid into a 
 bank, and the profits are divided among the workers 
 at the end of the year. The household linen was 
 all made there ; while the coat of my host, the econo- 
 mist, was made of cloth carded, spun, and woven at 
 the St. George's Mill at Laxey in the Isle of Man. 
 Only the natural agency of water, working the mill, 
 assists the human hand. Moreover the colour does 
 not fade, for it is undyed, being natural to the black 
 sheep of the island. Many English ladies have their 
 stuffs made there, for they are very durable, and 
 they have been manufactured without the smoke, noise, 
 
INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 or ugliness of machinery, among trees and green fields, 
 in defiance of progress and of all the social and in- 
 dustrial movements of the age. And when I asked 
 who was the founder of this guild, who the Titan or 
 madman who had undertaken thus to turn the century 
 back upon itself, I received in answer the name that I 
 had heard in the CJiiostri Verdi at Florence — RUSKIN. 
 Here then was a man, at our very doors, just 
 across the Channel, who held such empire in the 
 British mind that he could attune it to the ecstatic 
 visions of the Early Masters, and impose on life, 
 style, economy, and even dress, ideas that were 
 frankly retrograde. Fifty-four years ago he burst 
 upon the world, armed with a book, and dashed 
 into a conflict which speedily made him famous ; 
 and since that epoch, in the threefold guise of writer, 
 orator, and patron of village industries, he has stood 
 forward preaching a threefold doctrine of aesthetics, / 
 morals, and social reform, or, rather let us say, talk- 
 ing at random over every subject under the sun, 
 while his words have been collected with pious care, 
 like drops of a martyr's blood, by admirers, male 
 and female. His books, printed in large numbers 
 notwithstanding their high price, diffused his ideas 
 on nature, art, and life throughout Great Britain, 
 and pirated editions sowed the seed away in the 
 far West. The author's profits on this aesthetic 
 venture amounted to -£4000 a year, and that profit 
 was dedicated to promote the social venture of which 
 he dreamed. There were founded Ruskin Reading 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 Societies in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Glas- 
 gow, to discuss his views, a journal to announce 
 them, a special press, a Ruskin House in London 
 to spread them abroad. At the same time artists 
 occupied themselves in engraving his drawings, and 
 writers in writing his life though he was yet alive, 
 in expounding his doctrines though he had not 
 done writing them, and in making selection from his 
 works of Ruskiniana, of Birthday-books, of Guides 
 to Museums, as well as of books for prize-givings. 
 Already the railway time-tables for the Lake District 
 advertised the hotels from which " the residence of 
 Professor Ruskin " could be seen in the distance 
 among the trees ; while, during strikes, passages 
 from the works of the great aestheticist were thrown 
 into the discussion. Mr. Frederick Harrison described 
 him only the other day as "the brightest living 
 genius, the most inspiring soul still extant among 
 us " ; and not long ago the Principal of a college 
 for girls declared at a school function that it was 
 the writings of Ruskin that would make the nine- 
 teenth century famous to posterity. 
 
 Who is this man? What is his work? Apart 
 from the merely curious interest that one cannot but 
 feel, answers to these questions will be imperative 
 to the future history of art. I set myself, therefore, 
 to probe them more deeply than was possible by 
 the perusal of the excellent study published by M. 
 Milsand thirty-five years ago, at a time when Ruskin 
 had written only one third of his works, lived only 
 
INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 one half of his life and revealed only one aspect ot 
 his thought. It seemed to me that for my purpose 
 I ought not only to read and study those, who knew 
 him best, and above all his most chosen disciple 
 Mr. W. G. Collingwood, but more than that I must 
 retrace through Europe and through the history of 
 "./Esthetic" the path the master had trod. In 
 Switzerland, at Florence, at Venice, at Amiens, on 
 the banks of the Rhine or of the Arno, everywhere 
 where he had worked I too worked after him, some- 
 times sketching over again the sketches whence he 
 had drawn his theories and his examples, waiting 
 for the same light he had waited for, always seeking, 
 as it were, on the eternal monuments the fugitive 
 shadows of his thought. Then for several years I 
 delayed to write until his system dawned upon me 
 no longer as a delicious medley but as a harmony 
 of great lines, like those Alpine mountains which 
 he loved so well. In their midst all is but chaos ; 
 gradually, as we recede, they blend and unite till 
 they stand on the horizon, only a " little blue film " 
 yet "itself a world." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 l'AGE 
 
 Translator's Preface v 
 
 Introduction ix 
 
 PART I.— HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. Contemplation 3 
 
 II. Action 24 
 
 III. Expression , 42 
 
 PART II.— HIS WORDS 
 
 Introduction . . 69 
 
 I. Analysis 71 
 
 II. Imagery 90 
 
 III. Passion 109 
 
 IV. Modernity 129 
 
 xvii 
 
xviii CONTENTS 
 
 PART III.— HIS ESTHETIC AND 
 SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 Introduction 143 
 
 I. Nature— § 1 146 
 
 S 2 155 
 
 § 3 168 
 
 II. Art— § 1 178 
 
 . „ § 2 193 
 
 ., § 3 2I ° 
 
 „ § 4 221 
 
 111. Life— § 1 236 
 
 §2 242 
 
 § 3 259 
 
 § 4 272 
 
 Appendices 297 
 
PART I 
 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
RUSK IN 
 
 PART I 
 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 CONTEMPLATION 
 
 THE guardian of the gates of Schaffhausen was 
 awakened one summer night in 1833 by the noise of 
 a postchaise. He sulkily opened or half opened the 
 barriers at the entreaty of the belated travellers, and 
 the carriage passed through in such haste that it 
 smashed one of its lamps, and at once disappeared 
 into the town. When it reached the hotel a courier 
 alighted, and with him an English gentleman with his 
 wife, a little girl, a boy of fourteen, and a maid ; and 
 all quickly sought their rooms. The following day 
 was Sunday, and they would have to be up in the 
 morning for Church. 
 
 The names which the hotel-keeper wrote the next 
 day on his list would have revealed nothing to any 
 
4 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 one, and the information he obtained about the new 
 arrivals from the courier, Salvador, was quite com- 
 monplace. If he had been told that the gentleman 
 in question was Mr. John James Ruskin, who had 
 his name writ fair on a brass plate in Billiter Street 
 as the head of the firm Ruskin, Telford & Domecq, 
 that he was one of the largest sherry importers of 
 his day and among the most scrupulous merchants 
 of his country, that the lady accompanying him was 
 his wife nee Miss Margaret Cox, the boy his only son 
 John, and the little girl, Mary, an orphan niece, and 
 that they all were Tory and Jacobite in politics and 
 Presbyterian in religion, this bare statement of facts 
 would have seemed fraught with little interest for 
 the history of Art. It might have been added also 
 that the family was somewhat unsociable, giving itself 
 up entirely to the contemplation of the beauties of 
 Nature, while aesthetical enthusiasm was its principal 
 characteristic. 
 
 The city merchants would assuredly have been 
 vastly astonished had they been made aware that Mr. 
 John James Ruskin, so exact in his counting-house, 
 so punctual in his payments, and so good a judge of 
 sherry, cherished the aspirations of an artist. But the 
 fact is, that within his own doors he was at once trans- 
 formed into an enthusiastic and imaginative being. 
 He would rapidly wash in a water-colour, or, taking 
 up some new writing of Walter Scott's, or some old 
 piece of Shakespeare, would read it aloud to his wife 
 and son in a rhythmic and impassioned voice. In 
 
I. CONTEMPLATION 5 
 
 bygone years night had often found him stooping 
 over engravings of Prout or Turner, or with maps of 
 Switzerland or Italy open under the lamp, dreaming 
 of journeys not at that time to be accomplished, to 
 the lands where mountains gleam so white and waves 
 sleep so blue. 
 
 When Mrs. Ruskin came on the scene her persua- 
 sive eloquence recalled him to that preoccupation of 
 moneymaking, which Englishmen are so fain to call 
 their duty. Mrs. Ruskin was a first cousin of her 
 husband, and by four years his senior. Having 
 known her from childhood, it was borne in on him 
 one day that she was exactly the kind of wife he 
 needed. He told her so, and arranged with her that 
 they should postpone their marriage until the family 
 debts were paid, the business well established, and the 
 horizon free from clouds. They waited nine years. 
 At last came an evening when, perceiving that he had 
 a credit balance to his account, Mr. John James 
 Ruskin listened to the dictates of his heart. The 
 young people were married after their supper, and so 
 secretly that the servants discovered it only the next 
 day when they left together for Edinburgh. Such a 
 strange blend of phlegm and sensibility — of romantic 
 fidelity and practical common sense — gave Mr. Ruskin 
 his distinct individuality among his fellow-merchants, 
 and enabled him to save the honour of his family 
 by paying all his father's debts, and to bequeath 
 to his son at the same time two hundred thousand 
 pounds and that worship of Nature which was to 
 
6 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 become the most marked characteristic of the great 
 writer. 
 
 To the child that Nature was revealed only on rare 
 occasions, as a queen appearing on high days and 
 holidays. He used to see her either when visiting his 
 aunts at Croydon, where the view was so beautiful 
 that he cried out to his astonished mother it seemed 
 as if his eyes were coming out of his head, — or at 
 Perth, where the gardens stretching down to the river 
 Tay first enchanted his view. Then the black curtain 
 of London fog fell again upon these visions. But 
 later, when his parents left the town for the suburbs 
 and settled on the edge of the Surrey slopes at Heme 
 Hill, the beauty of inanimate things became more 
 familiar to him. From his father's windows on one 
 side he could see a rich undulating country of green 
 meadows and trees, with houses sprinkled here and 
 there in the foreground, and on the other side his eye 
 could range over London and beyond it towards 
 Windsor and Harrow. The simple comfortable house 
 was surrounded by a garden with well-trimmed lawns 
 sloping to an orchard full of cherries and mulberries, 
 " decked with magical splendour of abundant fruit ; 
 fresh green, soft amber, and rough bristled crimson 
 bending the spinous branches; clustered pearl and 
 pendent ruby joyfully discoverable under the large 
 leaves that looked like vine," altogether a delicious 
 garden which seemed a terrestrial paradise to the 
 child. " All the fruit was forbidden, and there were 
 no companionable beasts." His instinctive taste for 
 
I. CONTEMPLATION 7 
 
 form and colour was no longer restricted to tapestry 
 designs and constructions in brick. " In the garden 
 when the weather was fine, my time there was chiefly 
 passed in the same kind of close watching of the ways 
 of plants. I had not the smallest taste tor growing 
 them, or taking care of them, any more than for taking 
 care of the birds, or the trees, or the sky, or the sea. 
 My whole time was passed in staring at them, or 
 into them. In no morbid curiosity, but in admiring 
 wonder, I pulled every flower to pieces till I knew all 
 that could be seen of it with a child's eye." 
 
 As shy and retiring in society as successful in 
 business, Mr. John James Ruskin lived much alone, 
 happy in the companionship of the romantic and 
 legendary creations of his favourite authors. His wife, 
 who had been brought up amongst people inferior to 
 the Ruskins, was not at home amongst her new con- 
 nections. Too intelligent to ignore the fact and too 
 proud to submit to it, she determined to renounce the 
 world, — a religious and devoted mother who kept the 
 Christian Treasury on her table and the hatred of 
 the Pope in her heart, abhorring the theatre and 
 adoring flowers, uniting the spirit of Martha to that 
 of Mary, indefatigable, well regulated, living only for 
 her husband and her son. To avoid separation from 
 the latter during his university career, she brought 
 herself to live a stranger in Oxford, watching con- 
 tinually to save him from all pain, even should she 
 unman him, and from all danger, at risk of taking 
 from him the power to avoid it. Each day with order 
 
8 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 and regularity she gave him a Bible lesson, and 
 revealed to him by degrees that light of the Old and 
 New Testament which has ever shone on the summits 
 of his achievement. The child had not a conception 
 of what care was. The Ruskins never spent more 
 than the half of their income, and were free from all 
 money troubles. Finding all their joy in admiration, 
 they were ignorant of the pangs of jealousy and 
 ambition. To live in a cottage and to taste the 
 "healthy delight of uncovetous admiration" in visiting 
 Warwick Castle was a greater happiness to them than 
 " to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to 
 be astonished at." Their even temperaments were 
 warmed to enthusiasm only by ideas or by the con- 
 templation of Nature. "Never," says their son, "had 
 I heard my father's or mother's voice once raised in 
 any question with each other. I had never heard a 
 servant scolded." " Under such gentle discipline there 
 reigned in this house peace, obedience, and faith." 
 
 Shielded from all external trouble, the artistic taste 
 of the boy was refined into a sort of ecstatic habit 
 which was encouraged by the perpetual novelty of 
 travel. Every year Mr. J. J. Ruskin started in the 
 month of May on a business tour. His wife, who 
 never allowed him to encounter fatigue alone, went 
 with him ; little John was seated between them on the 
 portmanteau, with the maid in the dickey behind ; and 
 the whole family posted off. Ever}' evening, when 
 his commercial business was over, Mr. J. J. Ruskin 
 took his son out to see the ruins, the castles or the 
 
I. CONTEMPLATION 9 
 
 cathedrals on their route. They read poetry, they 
 made drawings. At five years old, John visited the 
 Scottish lakes ; at six years he went to France, and at 
 Paris was present at the fetes of the coronation of 
 Charles X. ; he saw the field of Waterloo ; and then 
 he returned to England, taking notes and sketches. 
 He described the colleges and chapels and music at 
 Oxford, the tomb of Shakespeare, and a pin manu- 
 factory at Birmingham, drew sketches of Blenheim or 
 of Warwick Castle ; and thus explored the world in 
 all its attractive and picturesque variety, at an age 
 when little French boys worry their heads over the 
 dead names on their maps. Not long after we find 
 him writing verses comparing Skiddaw and the 
 Pyramids, which certainly would not be attributed to 
 an ordinary child of ten years. 
 
 " The touch of man 
 Raised pigmy mountains, but gigantic tombs. 
 The touch of Nature raised the mountain's brow 
 But made no tombs at all." 
 
 At Heme Hill he passed the long winter months 
 dreaming over Turner's illustrations to Rogers' Italy, 
 and a violent desire took possession of him to know 
 in what aliquas partes materia the great seer had 
 seen his vision. In tbe valleys of Clifton or of 
 Matlock in Derbyshire he made collections of minerals, 
 calculated heights, and watched reflections. And all 
 that he perceived with a mind so precocious and over- 
 flowing, he loved with a heart strangely virgin and 
 void ; for he had little sentiment for his family. " My 
 
io HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 mother herself, finding her chief personal pleasure in 
 her flowers, was often planting or pruning beside 
 me, at least if I chose to stay beside her. . . . Her pre- 
 sence was no restraint to me, but also no particular 
 pleasure, for, from having always been left so 
 much alone, I had generally my own affairs to see 
 after." Sixty years afterwards he sadly exclaims, " I 
 had nothing to love. My parents were in a sort 
 visible powers of nature to me, no more loved than 
 the sun and the moon." And as a child he knew no 
 one else. Even when travelling the Ruskins lived 
 apart from their fellows and preferred watching the 
 great poet Wordsworth from behind the pillar of a 
 church, to asking for an introduction. "We did not 
 travel for adventures, nor for company, but to see 
 with our eyes, and to measure with our hearts." 
 Their mode of travelling enabled them to see every- 
 thing thoroughly, and their ignorance of foreign lan- 
 guages prevented them from regarding the people from 
 any other than the picturesque point of view. They 
 found a peculiar charm in the very fact of being 
 unable to understand the speech of those around 
 them. For so they noted each gesture but for its 
 beauty, each voice but for its music, and neither one 
 nor the other for its significance. 
 
 Trained in this special manner, all the child's 
 faculties tended to one result — an acute sensibility, 
 a power of minute analysis of landscape and figures. 
 He could not love his little cousin because she had 
 ringlets, which are not in accordance with true taste. 
 
I. CONTEMPLATION n 
 
 Should he be taken to pay a visit, he would give no 
 attention to the guests, but think of nothing but the 
 pictures which decorated the room. Presently at 
 Oxford he could not bear the sight of certain of his 
 tutors and comrades, because their features were not 
 strongly enough marked, and he listened only to such 
 professors as were endowed with some resemblance 
 to the " Erasmus " of Holbein or the " Melancthon " of 
 Diirer. With a talent for geometry, that science of 
 dimensions that can be seen and touched, he stopped 
 short on the threshold of algebra, for it only deals 
 with the relations of abstract terms. His estimate of 
 things depended entirely on their relation to his idea 
 of beauty and the pain or pleasure communicated by 
 them to the eye; and it is easy to understand how any 
 strong aesthetical impression received at this period 
 of his youth, would determine his whole life. If the 
 full glory of Nature should once open out before him, 
 — not in her grey northern raiment but in the blue 
 blazonry of the south, not with painted face and tired 
 head as in the vicinity of large towns, but in all the 
 naked majesty of her first savageness, — then hers he 
 would be mind and heart and soul, and theirs who, like 
 Turner, should have revealed her to him. 
 
 This ardour without an assured object, this hope 
 for one knows not what, this flame that burns without 
 giving light, — have we not all had experience of these 
 when at twenty we have begun to ask what shall be 
 done with our years ? This was the state of young 
 John Ruskin's mind at fourteen, when he arrived that 
 
12 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 summer's night at Schaffhausen, with his father, his 
 mother, and his cousin Mary. He had longed eagerly 
 for this journey. At Strasburg it had been a question 
 between Basle and Schaffhausen. " Schaffhausen," 
 he cried. " My impassioned petition at last carried 
 it, and the earliest morning saw us trolling over the 
 bridge of boats to Kehl, and in the eastern light I well 
 remember watching the line of the Black Forest hills 
 enlarge and rise, as we crossed the plain of the Rhine. 
 ' Gates of the Hills/ opening for me a new life to 
 cease no more, except at the Gates of the Hills whence 
 one returns not." Let us now hear how he relates 
 his impressions of Eternal Beauty. It seems as though 
 we hear the tremor in his voice even after fifty years. 
 
 " It was past midnight when we reached the closed 
 gates. None of us seemed to have thought the Alps 
 would have been visible without profane exertion in 
 climbing hills. We dined at four as usual, and the 
 evening being entirely fine, went out to walk, all of 
 us — my father and mother and Mary and I. We must 
 have still spent some time in town-seeing, for it was 
 drawing towards sunset when we got up to some sort 
 of garden promenade — west of the town I believe, and 
 high above the Rhine, so as to command the open 
 country across it to the south and west. At which 
 open country of low undulation, far into blue, gazing 
 as at one of our own distances from Malvern of 
 Worcestershire, or Dorking of Kent — suddenly — 
 behold — beyond ! There was no thought in any 
 of us for a moment of their being clouds. They 
 
I. CONTEMPLATION 13 
 
 were clear as crystal, sharp on the pure horizon 
 sky, and already tinged with rose by the sinking 
 sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought 
 or dreamed — the seen walls of lost Eden could not 
 have been more beautiful to us; not more awful, 
 round heaven, the sacred walls of Death. Thus in 
 perfect health of life and fire of heart, not wanting 
 to be anything but the boy I was, not wanting to have 
 anything more than I had; knowing of sorrow only 
 just so much as to make life serious to me, not enough 
 to slacken in the least its sinews ; and with so much 
 of science mixed with feeling as to make the sight 01 
 the Alps not only the revelation of the beauty of the 
 earth, but the opening of the first page of its volume, 
 I went down that evening from the garden-terrace of 
 Schaffhausen with my destiny fixed in all of it that 
 was to be sacred and useful. To that terrace, and 
 the shore of the lake of Geneva, my heart and faith 
 return to this day, in every impulse that is yet nobly 
 alive in them, and every thought that has in it help 
 or peace." 
 
 From that moment the contemplation of Nature was / 
 to absorb his whole life. It would be no longer a 
 distraction, a flirtation with the vague and marvellous, 
 but a vocation, a progress towards the attainment of 
 the ideal. All his first essays, written between the 
 ages of fifteen and twenty, in the scientific journal 
 of the time, the Magazine of Natural History, on 
 the causes of the colour of the Rhine water, on the 
 stratification of Mont Blanc, on the convergence of 
 
14 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 perpendicular lines, or on meteorology, are signed 
 Kata Phusin (according to Nature). The history of 
 Ruskin's career is the history of his relations with 
 Nature, and of the journeys which year by year he 
 undertook in the company of his parents during two- 
 thirds of his lifetime, and, when they were dead, 
 alone. He does not have recourse to Nature as a 
 refuge from weariness and disenchantment, or as a 
 distraction for weary hours, but he goes in the full 
 force of his age as to a goddess who gives joy to 
 youth. She is not only the consoler in love, she is 
 his love itself. 
 
 " I had a pleasure, as early as I can remember, and 
 continuing till I was eighteen or twenty, infinitely 
 greater than any which has since been possible to 
 me in anything ; comparable for intensity only to 
 the joy of a lover in being near a noble and kind 
 mistress, but no more explicable or definable than 
 that feeling of love itself. I never thought of Nature 
 as God's work, but as a separate fact of existence. 
 This sentiment was, according to its strength, in- 
 consistent with every evil feeling, with spite, anger, 
 covetousness, discontent, and every other hateful 
 passion, but would associate itself deeply with every 
 just and noble sorrow, joy, or affection. 
 
 " Although there was no definite religious sentiment 
 mingled with it, there was a continual perception of 
 sanctity in the whole of Nature from the slightest 
 thing to the vastest ; an instinctive awe, mingled with 
 delight ; an indefinable thrill, such as we sometimes 
 
I. CONTEMPLATION 15 
 
 imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit. 
 I could only feel this perfectly when I was alone ; and 
 then it would often make me shiver from head to foot 
 with the joy and fear of it, when after being some time 
 away from the hills, I first got to the shore of a 
 mountain river, where the brown water circled among 
 the pebbles, or when I saw the first swell of distant 
 land against the sunset, or the first low broken wall, 
 covered with mountain moss. I cannot in the least 
 describe the feeling; but I do not think this is my 
 fault, nor that of the English language, for I am afraid 
 no feeling is describable. If we had to explain even 
 the sense of bodily hunger to a person who had never 
 felt it, we should be hard put to it for words ; and this 
 joy in nature seemed to me to come of a sort of heart- 
 hunger, satisfied with the presence of a great and holy 
 Spirit. . . . The feeling cannot be described by any 
 of us that have it. Wordsworth's ' haunted me like 
 a passion ' is no description of it, for it is not like, 
 but is, a passion ; the point is to define how it differs 
 from other passions, what sort of human, pre-emi- 
 nently human feeling it is that loves a stone for a 
 stone's sake and a cloud for a cloud's. A monkey 
 loves a monkey for a monkey's sake, and a nut for 
 the kernel's, but not a stone for a stone's. I took 
 stones for bread." 
 
 To examine these stones more closely, he passed 
 long months in Italy or in Switzerland. He would 
 have liked to establish his home at Chamounix, above 
 the Chalet of Blaitiere, but the rising flood of tourists 
 
16 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 chased him away. He then proposed to buy from the 
 Commune of Bonneville the summit of the Brezon, but 
 the peasants of the place, astounded at the idea of a 
 purchaser for barren rocks and goat pasture, suspected 
 that the milord had divined the existence of some 
 treasure, and discouraged him by their excessive 
 demands. He consoled himself by changing his sky 
 but not his love. " A study in the rose-garden of San 
 Miniato and in the cypress avenue of Porta Romana, 
 remain to me, for memorials of perhaps the best days 
 of early life." 
 
 For long this passion preserved him from all others, 
 and when those others came it kept him sane. Until 
 he was seventeen the intense unremitting application 
 of mind and heart towards the Beautiful had preserved 
 him from the seduction of what the world mostly means 
 by Beauty. This romanticism of the Lake School 
 however, which Englishmen either have pre-eminently 
 or not at all, is very apt to develop into a disease ; 
 and the day that the young anchorite of Heme Hill 
 raised his head from his books and saw before him 
 the face of a young girl, smiling in the first blush of 
 sixteen years, he fell desperately in love. She was a 
 daughter of his father's partner, M. Domecq, called 
 Adele ; and this name became familiar to the readers 
 of Friendship 's Offering, wherein the young man 
 published verses which he addressed to all the world, 
 not venturing to address them to the only reader for 
 whom he cared. When told of the passion of this 
 awkward young geologist, this timorous troubadour, 
 
I. CONTEMPLATION 17 
 
 the young woman only laughed aloud. " On any 
 blessed occasion of tete-a-tete I endeavoured to enter- 
 tain my Spanish-born, Paris-bred, and Catholic-hearted 
 mistress with my own views upon the subject of the 
 Spanish Armada, the battle of Waterloo, and the 
 doctrine of Transubstantiation," says Ruskin in his 
 Prceterita. Mrs. Ruskin was indignant that her son, 
 a sound and instructed Tory, of the straitest sect of 
 Georgian evangelism, should love a Frenchwoman, and 
 still worse a Catholic ; and, wounded in all her deepest 
 sentiments and traditions by what seemed to her a 
 monstrous affection, she obstinately opposed all idea of 
 the marriage. The hopeless passion however lasted 
 four years, years that tried terribly the frail organism 
 of the enthusiastic thinker. Expecting to die of love, 
 he wrote some lines, pathetic enough, and called them 
 " The Broken Chain." But we do not die of love ; 
 broken chains are forged anew, and it is perhaps the 
 most melancholy part of such sorrows that they prove 
 so passing. One fine day it was announced that 
 Adele had married, and the young man was taken 
 away across Europe in the hope that he would leave 
 by its highways some of his painful memories, and 
 something of the image that he carried in his heart. 
 He carried them in turn to the banks of Loire, into 
 the mountains of Auvergne, and to the galleries of 
 Florence and Rome. Each site he visited was like a 
 picture deprived of the one figure which animated it, 
 and in each smiling face, among the thousands of 
 golden frames, he was seeking the reflection of other 
 
1 8 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 features, possibly less beautiful, but more adored. At 
 last, when again he saw the Alps, he seemed to take 
 on new life. " It was not only the air of the Alps 
 braced him," says Mr. Collingwood, "but the spirit of 
 mountain-worship stirred him as nothing else would." 
 He has himself related in his Prceterita how a year 
 later he was cured by the contemplation of Nature. 
 At Fontainebleau, one day, ill and feverish, he made 
 his way painfully to the Forest, and stretching himself 
 at the roadside, under some young trees, tried to sleep. 
 "The branches against the blue sky began to interest 
 me, motionless as the branches of the tree of Jesse on 
 a painted window." And he realised that his death 
 was not to be that day, and began to draw with care a 
 little aspen-tree which was on the other side of the road. 
 Yet he found nothing at Fontainebleau worth seeing. 
 The " hideous rocks " of Evelyn were not ugly enough 
 to cause the least emotion, nor of value but as specimens 
 to carry away, had they been worth the transport. 
 
 "And to-day I missed rocks, palace, and fountain 
 all alike, and found myself lying on the bank of a 
 cart-road in the sand, with no prospect whatever but 
 that small aspen-tree against the blue sky. Languidly, 
 but not idly, I began to draw it ; and as I drew, the 
 languor passed away ; the beautiful lines insisted on 
 being traced, without weariness. More and more 
 beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, 
 and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing 
 every instant, I saw that they composed themselves 
 by finer laws than any known of men. At last the 
 
I. CONTEMPLATION 19 
 
 tree was there, and everything that I had thought 
 before about trees, nowhere." 
 
 Like all great passions this love of Nature, which 
 filled Ruskin's life with great joys, added to these also 
 sorrows unknown to others. When the prospect is 
 framed no longer by the accustomed flowers of his 
 youth he is miserable. " Scarce all the hyacinths 
 and heath of Brantwood redeem the loss of these to 
 me, and when the summer winds have wrecked the 
 wreaths of our wild roses, I am apt to think sorrow- 
 fully of the trailings and climbings of deep purple 
 convolvulus which bloomed full every autumn morning 
 round the trunks of the apple-trees in the kitchen 
 garden." If, returning to a favourite landscape, he 
 finds it changed and disfigured by increased facili- 
 ties of locomotion, by a port or a railroad, by such 
 modern improvements as a tea-garden or an hotel, 
 it is an outrage on his Best Beloved. 
 
 " You have despised nature ; that is to say, all the 
 deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The 
 French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of 
 France ; you have made racecourses of the cathedrals 
 of the earth. Your one conception of pleasure is to 
 drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and 
 eat off their altars. You have put a railroad bridge 
 over the falls of Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled 
 the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel ; you have de- 
 stroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva ; 
 there is not a quiet valley in England that you have 
 not filled with bellowing fire." 
 
20 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 Indeed if the unhappy aestheticist wished to experi- 
 ence over again the impressions of his youth, and 
 wandered to the slopes of Heme Hill, where he 
 dreamed his first dreams, he no longer recognised 
 anything around him. 
 
 " The view from the bridge on both sides was, 
 before railroads came, entirely lovely; westward at 
 evening, almost sublime, over softly wreathing dis- 
 tances of domestic wood ; — but the tops of twenty 
 squares miles of politely inhabited groves. On the 
 other side, east and south, the Norwood hills, partly 
 rough with furze, partly wooded with birch and oak, 
 partly in pure green bramble copse, and rather steep 
 pasture rose with the promise of all the rustic loveli- 
 ness of Surrey and Kent in them, and with so much of 
 space and height in their sweep, as gave them some 
 fellowship with hills of true hill-districts. Fellowship 
 now inconceivable, for the Crystal Palace, without 
 ever itself attaining any true aspect of size, and pos- 
 sessing no more sublimity than a cucumber -frame 
 between two chimneys, yet by its stupidity of hollow 
 bulk, dwarfs the hills at once ; so that now one 
 thinks of them no more but as three long lumps of 
 clay, on lease for building." 
 
 If he wishes to follow the quiet pathway where he 
 composed his Modern Painters — a pathway running by 
 a field where the cows used to browse, and so warm 
 that invalids sought refuge there even in March, when 
 all other walks would have been death — he finds it a 
 street. 
 
I. CONTEMPLATION 21 
 
 " Since I last composed or meditated there, various 
 improvements have taken place; first the neighbour- 
 hood wanted a new church, and built a meagre Gothic 
 one with a useless spire, for the fashion of the thing, 
 at the side of the field ; then they built a parsonage 
 behind it, the two stopping out half the view in that 
 direction. Then the Crystal Palace came, for ever 
 spoiling the view through all its compass, and bringing 
 every show-day from London a flood of pedestrians 
 down the footpath, who left it filthy with cigar-ashes 
 for the rest of the week : then the railroads came, 
 and expatiating roughs by every excursion train, who 
 knocked the palings about, roared at the cows, and 
 tore down what branches of blossom they could reach 
 over the palings on the enclosed side. Then the 
 residents on the enclosed side built a brick wall to 
 defend themselves. Then the path got to be insuffer- 
 ably hot as well as dirty, and was gradually aban- 
 doned to the roughs, with a policeman on watch at 
 the bottom. Finally, this year, a six-foot high close 
 paling has been put down the other side of it, and 
 the processional excursionist has the liberty of ob- 
 taining what notion of the country air and prospect 
 he may between the wall and that, with one bad 
 cigar before him, another behind him, and another 
 in his mouth." 
 
 When Nature herself changes, he complains more 
 gently, but still as if of infidelity. " Yes," he writes 
 from England to a friend who is in the Alps, 
 "Chamounix is as a desolated home to me. I shall 
 
22 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 never I believe be there more : I could escape the 
 riffraff in winter and early spring ; but that the 
 glaciers should have betrayed me, and their old ways 
 know them no more, is too much. Please give my 
 love to the big stone under the Breven, a quarter 01 
 a mile above the village, unless they've blasted it up 
 for hotels." He returned all the same to the Alps in 
 1882. "I saw Mont Blanc again to-day, unseen since 
 1877; and was very thankful. It is a sight that 
 always redeems me to what I am capable of at my 
 poor little best, and to what loves and memories are 
 most precious to me." 
 
 This mystic reverie of contemplation, rapture, and 
 ecstasy whether of joy or sorrow, is the principal feature 
 / in the individuality of Ruskin. Once immersed in it 
 nothing rouses him. Events take place around him 
 without his giving them so much as a thought. Some- 
 times he has passed weeks without so much as knowing 
 what agitated his country. Khartoum fell with the 
 heroic Gordon ; the news had not reached him, and 
 when the Soudan was mentioned, he thought of the 
 figure painted by Giotto at Santa Croce, to face St. 
 Francis of Assisi, and asked curiously, " But who 
 is the Soldan of to-day ? " Even family events did not 
 seem to deserve attention. Whilst in the Alps he 
 heard of the death of his cousin Mary, the companion 
 of his youth and of his early travels, but he did not 
 pause in his endeavour to reproduce the effect of 
 sunrise on Montanvert, and the "aerial quality of 
 Aiguilles." Even in his old age he remains ever the 
 
I. CONTEMPLATION 23 
 
 same — the boy his mother soothed in childish illness 
 by bidding him think of the sky and seas of Dover. 
 The close of Prceterita reveals no melancholy echo 
 of what the aged Petrarch described as " the super- 
 fluous cares, the futile hopes and the unlooked-for 
 events," which had agitated him during his life on 
 earth. No trace of this — but a last note on the infinite 
 and marvellous forms assumed by the " upper cirri " 
 of the sky in the pure air of Kent and Picardy when 
 not " disturbed by tornado nor mingled with volcanic 
 exhalation," and a thrill of joy in the thought that 
 the clouds which float over the English coasts are as 
 full of beauty as those which hover round the Alps. 
 And in those final pages where speaking of himself 
 he might have betrayed or grieved over the secret 
 dramas of his life, the great enthusiast does not seem 
 to avert his gaze for an instant from the radiant 
 horizons of Eternal Nature, the sum of all he has 
 loved on earth. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 ACTION 
 
 THIS dreamer is also a man of action. Like those 
 pious cavaliers, depicted by the Early Italian Masters, 
 though Ruskin holds a flower, he has a sword at 
 his side; and this feature distinguishes him clearly 
 from the art-critics or the poets of the Lake school, 
 who for the most part were satisfied to pass com- 
 ments upon pictures, or encomiums upon Nature, 
 without a thought of bettering the one, or champion- 
 ing the other. Such was not the faith that was in 
 Ruskin ; like a soldier who fires a shot from afar, 
 he projected an idea in a pamphlet or a book, and 
 forthwith plunged into the thick of the fray to sup- 
 port it with his own person, and, as it were, to 
 grapple with the realities of things. 
 
 For example, he wrote that the taste for Art must 
 be spread among the masses. No one would listen 
 to him. So he determined to give drawing-lessons 
 himself in the evening to an adult school, and for 
 four years, from 1854 to 1858, with Rossetti to teach 
 the figure-drawing, Ruskin subjected himself to the 
 task of rekindling fading zeal and guiding incapable 
 hands in the arts of landscape sketching and of 
 
II. ACTION 25 
 
 decoration. In 1876 he founded with his own and his 
 friends' money a Museum of Art for Sheffield, the 
 chosen city of artisans and cutlery, and filled it with 
 delicate and carefully chosen exhibits, amongst others 
 a picture by Verrochio, who was himself a worker in 
 iron. He established his museum in a cottage situated 
 on a hill among green fields, away from the centre of 
 industry. The valley of the Don with the woods of 
 Wharnecliffe Crags opened below the windows, and 
 invited the eye to roam from illuminated missals of 
 the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to a distance 
 gleaming in golden sun, — from show-cases, studded 
 with onyx, various crystals, amethysts, displaying the 
 beautiful colours which enrich the earth, to coloured 
 plates reproducing the birds of all countries, which 
 are the life of the sky. By pictures on the walls, 
 recalling the most beautiful buildings of the world 
 (among others St. Mark's of Venice), the visitors 
 J were transported to an ideal country, and might 
 forget for a moment the gloomy frontages and smoky 
 chimneys of Sheffield. Later the collection was 
 moved into the town itself, and the Ruskin Museum 
 for Working Men is now to be found in Meersbrook 
 Park, in a house presented by the Municipality. 
 
 In like manner when Ruskin was chosen in 1869 
 to occupy the Slade Professorship at Oxford, he felt 
 that he could not lecture profitably on painting with- 
 out showing pictures, or on architecture without ex- 
 hibiting architectural designs, to support his theses 
 and enrich his arguments. So he added to the Slade 
 
26 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 Collection a School of Drawing, and a series of ori- 
 ginal drawings, from Tintoret to Burne-Jones, which 
 could be copied, and specimens by his own hand 
 after the Old Masters, which might be studied. He 
 organised this collection in 1872, in the Oxford 
 Galleries which face towards Beaumont Street, and 
 gave a donation of ^"5600 for the maintenance of 
 the school and the salary of the professor who was 
 to teach there. For thirteen years he devoted him- 
 self to promoting the worship of the Beautiful in 
 the intellectual sanctuary of Great Britain, until on 
 a fatal day the University authorities sanctioned 
 vivisection in their midst in spite of his opposition. 
 He could not tolerate this cruel and hideous practice ; 
 useless, he said, to science, since learned men had 
 for ages done without it ; useless to art, since the 
 Greek sculptors never studied anatomy ; and he nobly 
 resigned his professorship. But the Museum remains. 
 A few undergraduates and many young women profit 
 daily by the Ruskin teaching. The materials are 
 admirably arranged for the education of the eye and 
 mind, and the drawings, ingeniously enclosed in 
 mahogany cabinets with ivory labels, are at the ser- 
 vice of all pupils. Oxford is now a centre of art, 
 thanks to her graduate who signed his name to 
 Modern Painters. 
 
 But what avail a few examples of plastic beauty in 
 academies, if the whole world is growing ugly, and 
 the folk from the country, abandoning that healthy 
 toil which develops their muscles and deepens their 
 
II. ACTION 27 
 
 ruddy tints, crowd together in towns and enervate 
 themselves by guiding machines until they become 
 machines themselves moving mechanically to the hand 
 of a master ? What avails it to collect in museums 
 pale reflections of fair landscapes while industrial 
 buildings and factories, which wither the grass on 
 the earth and spread a pall of smoke across the sky, 
 destroy Nature's own more beautiful originals ? The 
 amateur — the aesthete — is content to worship the 
 Beautiful in museums and particular churches where 
 none but the converted congregate ; but ugliness must 
 be attacked and wrestled with in the use of every 
 day, and having exiled it from our dreams, we must 
 drive it from our waking life. 
 
 "We will try," says Ruskin, "to take some small 
 piece of English ground, beautiful, peaceful, and 
 fruitful. We will have no steam engines upon it, 
 and no railroads; we will have no untended or un- 
 thought-of creatures upon it ; none wretched, but the 
 sick ; none idle, but the dead. We will have no 
 liberty upon it, but instant obedience to known law, 
 and appointed persons ; no equality upon it ; but 
 recognition of every betterness we can find, and 
 reprobation of every worseness. When we want to 
 go anywhere, we will go there quietly and safely, not 
 at forty miles an hour in the risk of our lives ; when 
 we want to carry anything anywhere, we will carry 
 it either on the backs of beasts, or on our own, or in 
 carts, or boats ; we will have plenty of flowers and 
 vegetables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass in 
 
28 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 our fields — and few bricks. We will have some music 
 and poetry ; the children shall learn to dance to it 
 and sing it ; — perhaps some of the old people in time 
 may also. . . . Little by little, some higher art and 
 imagination may manifest themselves among us; and 
 feeble rays of science may dawn for us. Botany, 
 though too dull to dispute the existence of flowers ; 
 and history, though too simple to question the nativity 
 of men ; nay — even perhaps an uncalculating and 
 uncovetous wisdom, as of rude Magi, presenting, at 
 such nativity, gifts of gold and frankincense." 
 
 It was in May 1871, during the days of the 
 Commune, that Ruskin dreamed this dream. Some- 
 time afterwards, with some idea of realising it, he 
 founded the St. George's Guild. 1 The experiment failed, 
 as socialistic experiments always do in simple agri- 
 culture. A farm of eight or nine acres was indeed 
 purchased near Totley for ,£2000, and other pos- 
 sessors of barren pastures or of uncultivated and 
 useless rocks promptly welcomed an opportunity or 
 disposing of them to promote the good of the greatest 
 number. Thus the association soon had lands at 
 Barmouth, at Bewdley in Worcestershire, and other 
 places. When, however, it was discovered that no 
 member of the Guild understood agriculture, and 
 that it would be vain even for one who knew all the 
 secrets of Proserpina to found an agricultural colony 
 
 1 This account of the foundation of St. George's Guild is somewhat 
 too picturesquely described, and must not be taken as a statement 
 of literal facts. See Fors Clavigera, Letter 52, and Appendix. — 
 Editor's Note. 
 
II. ACTION 29 
 
 if he had not put hand to plough, Ruskin turned to 
 the communists and sought their co-operation, offer- 
 ing them lands whereon to try their theories of 
 society, provided they were willing to apply his ideas 
 of aesthetics. Furthermore, he did not oblige them for 
 the present to coin special money after the fashion 
 of the Florentine florin, nor yet to dress themselves 
 like the three Switzers of the Riitli. The commu- 
 nists consented to a conference, and Ruskin came 
 to it in a postchaise with gorgeous postillions, so as 
 to avoid benefiting the unsightly railroad. It was at 
 Sheffield that he met his new allies. There were 
 twenty of them of at least twenty different sects, and 
 between this worshipper of the Beautiful and the 
 reformers of society, between the Tory partisan of all 
 aristocracies, and the levellers of the fourth estate, 
 between this mind free as air, and those brains work- 
 ing rigidly to a system, the interview was most extra- 
 ordinary. Not only did they come to no agreement, 
 but it is very doubtful if each understood what the 
 other meant. Nevertheless, Ruskin confided to them 
 the lands of the St. George's Guild, and stepping again 
 into his postchaise, disappeared with his gorgeous 
 postillions and his picturesque revival of eighteenth- 
 century lordliness, in a cloud of dust, leaving the 
 group of Deists, Nonconformists, and Quakers, not only 
 astounded but vastly disconcerted. For the first time 
 it dawned upon them that no more than Ruskin did 
 they know anything of agriculture; and like every 
 other proprietor they ended by engaging a farmer. 
 
 
 . 
 
30 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 The farm was a failure, and instead of the dreamed-of 
 paradise, they established a tea-shop. Thus neither 
 the theories of the communists, nor those of Ruskin, 
 were tested in the province of agriculture. 
 
 But the master had his revenge in an industrial 
 enterprise. He heard that in the picturesque valleys 
 of Westmoreland the small rural industries were dis- 
 appearing daily. There was no more wood-carving, 
 no more spinning, no more weaving of the good cloth 
 of olden days. The machine, which stupidly rotates, 
 obeying the pestilential breath of steam, was ousting 
 all the pretty motions of the hand which are governed 
 by the living breath of man. Ruskin rushed to a 
 new battlefield to fight a great fight with modern 
 machinery. One of his passionate admirers, Mr. 
 Fleming, vowed he would re-establish the spinning- 
 wheel. But it was not easy to find one, for that wheel 
 at which Margaret sits and sings, " Quel est done ce 
 jeune homme ? " was at the London Opera House, 
 and not available. The whole Langdale district was 
 searched, and advertisements appeared in the local 
 newspapers. At last a wheel was found belonging to 
 an old dame who had not touched it for fifty years ; 
 and immediately, as in the fairy tale where the prin- 
 cess finds the spindle which wounds her and causes 
 her to fall asleep for a hundred years, the entire valley 
 reassumed the aspect of a past century. A loom was 
 next discovered, but all in pieces, and how should 
 it be put together ? Fortunately a drawing of the 
 loom which is carved on the campanile of Giotto — 
 
II. ACTION 31 
 
 the Shepherd's Tower — restored the tradition of the 
 Middle Ages, even as presently some lines of the 
 Odyssey were to teach the Ruskinians to bleach the 
 cloth they had prepared. Perhaps this cloth was a 
 little rough ; but there was consolation in these words 
 of the Seven Lamps : " It is possible for men to 
 turn themselves into machines, and to reduce their 
 labour to the machine level ; but so long as men work 
 as men, putting their heart into what they do, and 
 doing their best, it matters not how bad workmen 
 they may be, there will be that in the handling which 
 is above all price. It will be plainly seen that some 
 places have been delighted in more than others, that 
 there have been a pause and a care about them, and 
 the effect of the whole, as compared with the same 
 design cut by a machine or a lifeless hand, will be that 
 of poetry well read and deeply felt to that of the same 
 verses jangled by rote." And in very truth after a 
 short time this linen, that was first made at Langdale 
 and soon after at Keswick, procured a real livelihood 
 for the old women and for the hardy workers of the 
 village. Fashion came to the rescue, and they say 
 Ruskin Linen sometimes figures even now in wedding 
 trousseaux. *\ 
 
 Another voice was heard from the Isle of Man, 
 crying that wool - spinning was ever on the de- 
 crease. The women were leaving their wheels and 
 their cottages to go and work in the mines. The 
 young girls no longer learned to spin, although the 
 black sheep of the island still gave wool and their 
 
32 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 durable homespun textures were in demand on all 
 sides. Ruskin takes the field, finds capital, builds a 
 mill at Laxey, and, with his lieutenant Mr. R)'dings, 
 starts the necessary machines for carding wool and 
 bleaching cloth. Machines did we say ? but machines 
 worked by the direct forces of Nature, not by artificial 
 force, machines of which the motive power is in con- 
 formity with aesthetics and such as were immortalised 
 by Claude Lorraine in his Molino. " It is to be 
 carefully noted that machinery is only forbidden by 
 the Guild where it supersedes healthy, bodily exercise, 
 or the art and precision of manual labour in decorative 
 work; but that the only permitted motive power of 
 machinery is by natural power of wind or water 
 (electricity, perhaps, not in future refused) ; but steam 
 absolutely refused, as a cruel and furious waste of 
 fuel to do what every stream and breeze are ready to 
 do costlessly " {Fors). Because there was no longer an 
 aesthetic coinage like the beautiful florin of Florence, 
 money was not to be used. The farmers were to bring 
 their wool to be stored in the mill, and they were to 
 be paid in cloth or in knitting thread for home work, 
 or in wool prepared for the spinning-wheel. These 
 bold reactionary ideas did not shipwreck the industry 
 of Laxey homespuns. Moreover the}' are only retro- 
 grade at first sight. For they open mysterious vistas 
 into the coming age ; and when Ruskin tells us that 
 all industry is to borrow its motor-force from the 
 winds and rivers, the question suggests itself whether 
 this aestheticist has not found in his dreams a formula 
 
II. ACTION 33 
 
 for all future mechanics, to be applied as soon as the 
 huge latent power of the rivers and winds, subdued 
 and diverted in the form of electricity, shall be pressed 
 into the service not only of the riverside folk and 
 mountaineers, but of the whole world. 1 
 
 And if outside among the indifferent multitude 
 Ruskin strenuously sought to make public life conform 
 to aesthetical laws, even more strenuously would he 
 endeavour to make his own life conform to those laws. 
 He is none of those priests, who, to use his own 
 expression, "go and dine with the rich and preach to 
 the poor." At Brantwood, his home on Coniston 
 Lake, he devised a very costly reclamation of land in 
 order to entice the peasants away from the toil of 
 towns which degraded while it attracted them. He 
 himself set the example of muscular labour by building 
 a little port on the lake with some of his disciples in 
 the intervals of translating Xenophon, and by repair- 
 ing with his pupils at Oxford a road near Hinksey. 
 No laughter deterred these strange road-makers who 
 broke more pickaxes and took more time than any 
 ordinary labourers would have done. The master 
 himself took lessons in carpentering and in house- 
 painting, in some of which phases he resembles Tol- 
 stoi, of whom he said : " He will be my successor," 
 and who in his turn said of Ruskin, " He is one 
 of the greatest men of this century." Pursuing 
 his contest with machinery to the bitter end, he 
 
 1 The above account does not seem to agree in all details with that 
 of Mr. George Thomson, given in the Appendix to this volume. 
 
34 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 banished gas from his house, and opposed with all 
 his might the introduction of a railroad to Amble- 
 side through the picturesque country of the Lakes in 
 which he lived. The hatred of steam inspired him 
 with startling arguments. Do you wish to know, he 
 cries to his fellow-citizens, what is the purpose of a 
 railway ? Here it is : 
 
 " The Town of Ulverstone is twelve miles from me, 
 by four miles of mountain road beside Coniston lake, 
 three through a pastoral valley, five by the sea-side. 
 A healthier or lovelier walk would be difficult to find. 
 In old times, if a Coniston peasant had any business 
 at Ulverstone, he walked to Ulverstone ; spent nothing 
 but shoe-leather on the road, drank at the streams, 
 and if he spent a couple of batz when he got to 
 Ulverstone, 'it was the end of the world.' But now 
 he would never think of doing such a thing ! He 
 first walks three miles in a contrary direction to a 
 railroad station, and then travels by railroad twenty- 
 four miles to Ulverstone, paying two shillings fare. 
 During the twenty -four miles' transit, he is idle, 
 dusty, stupid ; and either more hot or cold than is 
 pleasant to him. In either case he drinks beer at 
 two or three of the stations, passes his time between 
 them, with anybody he can find, in talking without 
 having anything to talk of; and such talk always 
 becomes vicious. He arrives at Ulverstone, jaded, 
 half-drunk, and otherwise demoralised, and three shil- 
 lings, at least, poorer than in the morning." 
 
 If the Master did not allow the train to carry his 
 
II. ACTION 35 
 
 person he did not even use it to transport his books, 
 if anywise that might be helped. The volumes that 
 his publisher sent from the publishing house at 
 Orpington to his house in London travelled by road. 
 
 With Ruskin action follows speedily upon the idea. 
 His watchword is — To-day. He writes as he fights, 
 to obtain results — evident — immediate — decisive. The, 
 first thing that a visitor observes on entering the 
 National Gallery in London is the crystalline sheen 
 on the pictures there, and he will quickly see that 
 all are under glass, like water-colours. The smoky 
 atmosphere of London renders this precaution neces- 
 sary, but it was not adopted until Ruskin had sug- 
 gested it in a letter to the Times in 1845. Another 
 striking point is the extraordinary wealth of pictures 
 by Early Italian Masters. Five rooms devoted to the 
 Schools of Siena and Florence contain pictures of 
 exquisite purity by Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Benozzo 
 Gozzoli, Perugino, Ghirlandajo, Pinturicchio, whereas 
 our gallery in the Louvre gives us nothing like the 
 same opportunities of study. Now in 1845 the London 
 collection possessed very few examples of these mas- 
 ters ; but there to-day is the answer to Ruskin's cry 
 of reproach when he returned from Italy. Still more 
 in the Turner Room do we perceive the triumphant 
 success of his campaign in favour of the great painter 
 of landscape; and if we descend to the basement 
 where are preserved the drawings and water-colours, 
 down to the slightest sketches, from the same hand 
 as Dido at Carthage, we shall understand that 
 
36 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 Modern Painters was not published in vain. Nor 
 in vain were written the Stones of Venice and the 
 Seven Lamps of Architecture, for English architecture 
 has, largely owing to their influence, been entirely 
 transformed since those books appeared. A sober 
 Gothic, gay Dutch colouring and a picturesque variety 
 has succeeded to the pseudo-Greek style. The archi- 
 tects of the Oxford Museum, Sir Thomas Dean and 
 Mr. Woodward, complied expressly with the precepts 
 of Ruskin, in that they allowed the workmen to design 
 the details of the ornamentation themselves, to decorate 
 in their own fashion the capitals and the spandrils ; 
 and designs of English fern, which show the inexperi- 
 ence but also the independence of the stonecutter, re- 
 place 'ready-made' acanthi of the classic style. It was 
 at Oxford too that a group of young and enthusiastic 
 artists tried, under the direction of Ruskin, to paint 
 in fresco the library of the Union Debating Society. 
 Time has since destroyed these experiments, made 
 under bad material conditions, but it was not therefore 
 all in vain that the Master of the Laws of Fiesole 
 animated with his holy fire men like Dante Ros- 
 setti, William Morris, Munro, Millais, Hunt, Woolner, 
 Prinsep, and Burne-Jones. All those among this 
 group, who were then unknown, have since made 
 their name, and the note of enthusiasm sounded at 
 that time by Ruskin vibrates still, though the colours 
 on the walls of the Union have long since faded 
 away. 
 
 His disciples do him honour. One of them, M. 
 
II. ACTION 37 
 
 Giacomo Boni, has undertaken the preservation of" 
 monuments in Italy, and administers his trust according 
 to the precepts of Ruskin. From the latter's drawing- 
 classes for adults have come artists of all sorts, 
 engravers, draughtsmen, decorators, woodcarvers, such 
 men as George Allen, W. H. Hooper, Arthur Burgess, 
 Bunney, E. Cooke, W. Ward, who continue up to the 
 present time to aid the Master with their labours. 
 The early pre-Raphaelites whom he defended have 
 triumphed. The neo-pre-Raphaelites, like Burne-Jones, 
 whom he encouraged from the beginning, are above 
 the fluctuations of opinion and have taken their place, 
 so to speak, in history. Two of the landscape painters 
 he most praised, Hook and Brett, are certainly among 
 the first, if not quite the first, of their country. It 
 may be boldly stated that at least one half of the 
 higher art of our day in England is due to Ruskin, 
 thanks as much to his immense authority over 
 artists as to his enormous influence upon the public. 
 Great artistic energy cannot produce great art unaided ; 
 there must be amateurs to admire, to encourage, to 
 understand, and, if one dare say the word, to support 
 it. Ruskin multiplied these amateurs by the hundred. 
 He taught his countrymen to appreciate Nature, to 
 look at and to love pictures. Even his enemies cannot 
 deny this. Long ago Miss Bronte wrote : " I have 
 lately been reading Modern Painters, and have de- 
 rived from the work much genuine pleasure, and, I 
 hope, some edification ; at any rate it has made me 
 feel how ignorant I had previously been on the subjects 
 
38 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 which it treats. Hitherto I have had only instinct to 
 guide me in judging of art; I feel now as if I had 
 been walking blindfold — this book seems to give me 
 new eyes." And not Miss Bronte alone says so, but 
 all those in England who in the last forty years have 
 learnt that " a thing of beauty is a joy for ever." 
 
 Although he has not succeeded, as he hoped, in 
 reinstating Beauty as a factor in national life, he has 
 by aiming over-high succeeded none the less in attain- 
 ing certain ends. For instance in 1854 he penned a 
 vigorous diatribe against the Crystal Palace, "this 
 cucumber frame with two chimneys," and in censuring 
 the expenditure on the new architecture in glass and 
 iron he suggested a society for the preservation of old 
 stone monuments. The Crystal Palace was not de- 
 stroyed, but the proposed society was founded. In 
 like manner if engines have not been pulled to pieces 
 nor railroads destroyed, England has learnt that a 
 landscape has a value merely for the pleasure it gives 
 to the eye, and that a picturesque oasis may be a 
 source of wealth. So much so that once a few years 
 ago artists were summoned to give evidence before a 
 committee of the House of Lords as to whether a 
 certain valley would be disfigured, by a projected rail- 
 road. If all the rich people in England have not sold 
 their London houses in order to take up their abode 
 in and restore old palaces of Verona, at least one, 
 whose name is great in poetry, realised at Venice the 
 dream of the great sestheticist. Finally the Ruskinian 
 propaganda in favour of picturesque costumes and the 
 
II. ACTION 39 
 
 masques of olden time has not failed as completely 
 as might be supposed. Any one who asks per- 
 mission to enter the Girls' College of Whitelands in 
 Chelsea on the first of May will find the chapel 
 and the hall decorated with flowers, flowers sent by 
 old pupils from all parts of England ; for the return 
 of Spring is celebrated on that day. One-hundred- 
 and-fifty pupils, assembled in the hall, have elected 
 by ballot a Queen of May. She is chosen not for her 
 beauty, or for her learning, but because she is beloved. 
 Here she comes ! Her companions form a double row 
 and hold out palms, which arch over her head as she 
 passes. She is crowned with flowers, dressed in an 
 archaic costume designed by Kate Greenaway, and 
 decorated with a golden cross designed by Burne- 
 Jones. Behind her walks the Queen of the past year, 
 her head wreathed with forget-me-nots. She mounts 
 her throne and her companions pass in front of her 
 to salute and receive their presents, which are no 
 other than the works of Ruskin, beautifully bound. 
 You may almost hear these clustering flowers murmur 
 together the words written in the pages of Sesame 
 and Lilies : "And whether consciously or not, you 
 must be in many a heart enthroned : there is no 
 putting by that crown ; queens you must always be ; 
 queens to your lovers ; queens to your husbands and 
 your sons ; queens of higher mystery to the world 
 beyond, which bows itself and will ever bow, before 
 the myrtle crown, and the stainless sceptre of woman- 
 hood. But it is little to say of a woman, that she 
 
40 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 only does not destroy where she passes. She should 
 revive; the harebells should bloom, not stoop, as she 
 passes." The prizes are distributed after no com- 
 petition, for the Master holds rivalry in horror. The 
 Queen disposes of them by right of her sovereignty, 
 to this one because she is faithful to her friends, to 
 that one because she delights in music, to that other 
 because she is always merry, to this last because the 
 Queen loves her well. And it is especially charming, 
 writes a witness, to see the Queen's grateful smile 
 when a special friend passes by and kisses her hands 
 on receiving the book. The praises of the King 
 Eternal sung at chapel in the morning have pre- 
 ceded this homage to the Queen of a day. And 
 in the evening if she, who has received as a prize 
 the Ruskin Birthday-Book, should open it at the 
 first day of May, she will find there, not as in the 
 socialist newspapers recriminations against the law 
 of daily toil, but these words of the Master : " If, 
 resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come 
 to like doing it." 
 
 Doubtless it will be said that this insignificant pro- 
 test of a remote school in London against the apathy 
 of the mass and the ugliness of all things is but of 
 little moment. But of the pupils in this school, who 
 are all educated to be teachers, already more than 
 one has instituted in her village Ruskin's aesthetical 
 festival. The wreaths of flowers may fade, but the 
 seed sown ten years ago will blossom afar off, even 
 in Ireland, and each first of May will bring before 
 
II. ACTION 41 
 
 this little band of disciples, visions, not of gloomy 
 meetings where black - coated doctrinaires preach a 
 doctrine of " Union against Labour," as in M. Beraud's 
 picture of La Salle Graffard, but of a day of peace 
 and joy and bright garments, when no socialistic creeds 
 are proclaimed but the gospel of Nature, whose first- 
 fruits gathered in spring are due to the long hard 
 dark travail of winter — Nature, whose lessons are not 
 those of idleness, but of toil, not of revolt against 
 human laws, but of obedience to those divine laws, 
 which we may disown but we cannot disobey. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 EXPRESSION 
 
 The man who has accomplished these things, smiles 
 even in his sorrow, is sympathetic even when he 
 tyrannises, and noble even when he hates. We 
 have seen him standing in ecstasy, like one of Fra 
 Angelico's angels, in a meadow-land dazzled by the 
 flowers of the field ; and we have seen him in battle, 
 his muscles braced like one of Michael Angelo's 
 figures withstanding the onslaught of a multitude. 
 Let us now examine him as we might examine a 
 portrait by Holbein of a face in repose, so tranquil 
 that we can count the faintest wrinkles, so clear that 
 we may follow every line of their maze. Perhaps in 
 considering him in his private life, in his immediate 
 and personal surrounding, we shall find that Dante 
 might have said of him also : — 
 
 " And if the world knew his heart, 
 After having praised him much 
 It would have praised him yet more." 
 
 But the world knew it not. Vexed by his militant 
 enthusiasm, it has taxed him with intolerance, and 
 annoyed with his child-like joy at being his own 
 personal witness to those beauties and truths which 
 
III. EXPRESSION 43 
 
 he proclaimed, it has called him presumptuous. 
 Ruskin's enthusiasm for these truths, as they were 
 borne in upon him one by one, it calls contradictory, 
 his admiration for all great work it calls incon- 
 stancy, his zeal it calls tyranny, his generosity it 
 calls egoism. The word which most correctly and 
 comprehensively describes all these characteristics and 
 explains Ruskin — the quality which forms the third 
 great feature of his personality — is outspoken sincerity 
 and frankness, or, as he himself terms it from its old 
 derivation, Franchise. 
 
 "To be ik€v9epo<;, liber or franc, is first to have 
 learned to rule our own passions ; and then, certain 
 that our own conduct is right, to persist in that conduct 
 against all resistance, whether of counter-opinion, or 
 counter-pain, or counter-pleasure. To be defiant alike 
 of the mob's thought, of the adversary's threat, and the 
 harlot's temptation, — this is in the meaning of every 
 great nation to be free ; and the one condition upon 
 which that freedom can be obtained is pronounced 
 to you in a single verse of the 119th Psalm, 'I will 
 walk at liberty, for I seek Thy precepts.' " This rugged 
 and independent frankness towards others made him 
 sometimes lose all sense of proportion and forget all 
 politeness. When some one told him that he had been 
 much interested in his writings he answered shortly, 
 " I don't care whether they have interested you ; have 
 they done you any good ? " He answered in French 
 to a lady president of the Society for the Emancipation 
 of Women who asked for his countenance, " You are 
 nothing but a set of fools in this matter." He wrote 
 
44 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 to the students of Glasgow who offered to nominate 
 him for the Rectorship of the University in opposition 
 to Mr. Fawcett and the Marquis of Bute, but begged of 
 him a statement of his political ideas, — at least so much 
 that they might know whether he was for Mr. Disraeli 
 or Mr. Gladstone — " What in the devil's name have 
 you to do with either Mr. Disraeli or Mr. Gladstone ? 
 You are students at the University, and have no more 
 business with politics than you have with ratcatching. 
 Had you ever read ten words of mine (with under- 
 standing) you would have known that I care no more 
 either for Mr. Disraeli or Mr. Gladstone than for two 
 old bagpipes with the drones going by steam, but that 
 I hate all Liberalism as I do Beelzebub, and that, with 
 Carlyle, I stand, we two alone now in England, for 
 God and the Queen." Just what he thinks he boldly 
 states, without heeding the effect, and without con- 
 sideration for his own admirers. A clergyman, who 
 had run into debt by building a church at Richmond, 
 appealed to Ruskin for money. He wrote to him : — 
 
 " Brantwood, Coniston, Lancashire, 
 May \qt/i, 1886. 
 
 "SIR, — I am scornfully amused at your appeal to 
 me, of all people in the world, the precisely least likely 
 to give you a farthing. My first word to all men and 
 boys who care to hear me is, ^Don't get into debt. 
 Starve and go to heaven — but don't borrow. Try 
 first begging, — I don't mind, if it is really needful, 
 stealing. But don't buy things you can't pay for.' 
 
 " And of all manner of debtors, pious people building 
 
III. EXPRESSION 45 
 
 churches they can't pay for are the most detestable 
 nonsense to me. Can't you preach and pray behind 
 the hedges — or in a sand-pit — or a coal-hole — first? 
 
 " And of all manner of churches thus idiotically built, 
 iron churches are the damnablest to me. And of all 
 the sects of believers in any ruling spirit — Hindoos, 
 Turks, Feather-idolaters, and Mumbo-Jumbo, Log and 
 Fire-worshippers, who want churches, your modern 
 English Evangelical sect is the most absurd, and 
 entirely objectionable and unendurable to me. All of 
 which they might very easily have found out from my 
 books — any other sort of sect would ! — before bother- 
 ing me to write it to them. Ever, nevertheless, and in 
 all this saying, your faithful servant, 
 
 "John Ruskin." 
 
 This is the abrupt side qL his frankness, where 
 spring more briars and brambles than beneficent and 
 nourishing herbs. But we may observe that the 
 Master did not spare himself any more than he spared 
 others. Often in Prcsterita he speaks of the "fol- 
 lies and absurdities " of his youth : he derides his 
 own pompous style in Modern Painters, and the 
 period when, if he had to tell any one their house was 
 on fire, he would not have said, " Sir, your house is 
 on fire," but " Sir, the abode in which I presume you 
 passed the days of youth is in a state of inflammation." 
 He boldly reprints his writings, mutilated, in confession 
 of his errors, and having spoken of Mr. Gladstone, 
 whom he scarcely knew, with the audacity which was 
 
46 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 usual to him, he suppressed the violent sentences in 
 the next edition, and left a blank space in record of 
 his unjust judgment. He does no more than justice 
 to himself and also to the futility of literature. In 
 1870, when his friends entreated him to write to the 
 King of Prussia and beg him to divert his guns from 
 those Gothic cathedrals of France which he was wont 
 to admire most in the world, he refused, calling his 
 friends " vain persons who imagine that a writer has 
 any power of intercession " with a sovereign so little 
 sentimental as he of Germany. Nevertheless he 
 subscribed largely to the famine fund in Paris with 
 Archbishop Manning, Sir John Lubbock, and Professor 
 Huxley. The moment that it struck him that criticism 
 of art cannot seriously improve the art of a country, 
 nor even improve the character of any but the most 
 mediocre works, he did not pause to reflect that such 
 an avowal could be turned against himself, and against 
 the thirty volumes into which he had put all his life, 
 but loudly proclaimed what he had just discovered. 
 "You sent for me to talk to you of art; and I have 
 obeyed you in coming. But the main thing I have to 
 tell you is — that art must not be talked about. The 
 fact that there is talk about it at all, signifies that it 
 is ill done, or cannot be done. No true painter ever 
 speaks, or ever has spoken much of his art. The 
 greatest speak nothing." Here we have one of those 
 frequent sentences of his which have seemed inconsis- 
 tent, and which have caused the Master of the Stones 
 of Venice to be considered a Bonghi or a Chamberlain 
 
III. EXPRESSION 47 
 
 in art criticism. Certainly he has contradicted himself, 
 for the simple reason that he has thought differently on 
 the same subject at different times. We all do that, 
 but we do not all say we do it, and moreover, we 
 do not generally rush into print at fifteen, and few 
 of us at sixty-eight write with our mental vigour un- 
 impaired. Ruskin was in haste to write his thoughts 
 without reservation, and he was still thinking even 
 as he wrote. He did not wait to write until certain 
 that his views were finally formed, even as later he 
 did not stop writing when he found that they were 
 still fluid. Wherever he thought to find a fresh light 
 he advanced towards it, and having sometimes gone 
 forward without prudence he has come back without 
 shame, having only one thing in view, namely Truth. 
 Where his armour is weak, the armour of many 
 another author would be weak equally had he the 
 same sincerity. In thought every one of us is in- 
 consistent ; let us not blame Ruskin overmuch if he 
 is inconsistent also in utterance. 
 
 But his " franchise " did him good service when it 
 opened his eyes to all the wretchedness which lies 
 below the ivory tower of the dilettante and the 
 aesthete, and pointed out his plain duty to descend 
 and offer help. We have seen his sincerity lead him 
 to diatribe ; now let us see it lead him to charity. 
 Being during March 1863 in the Alps at Mornex, 
 Ruskin in that splendid and restful scenery examined 
 his conscience and asked himself if he had the right 
 to gratify in peace his passion for nature. He wrote 
 
48 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 to a friend : " The loneliness is very great ; and the 
 peace in which I am at present is only as if I had 
 buried myself in a tuft of grass on a battlefield wet 
 with blood — for the cry of the earth about me is in 
 my ears continually. ... I am still very unwell, and 
 tormented between the longing for rest and lovely life, 
 and the sense of this terrific call of human crime for 
 resistance, and of human misery for help." Then he 
 tears himself away from his egotistical contemplation, 
 calling to mind that there are at least as many peasants 
 as painters in a landscape. He would look no longer 
 at Turner, but would read the economists ; and he 
 found them ridiculous with their universal optimism, 
 and even went to Manchester itself to deliver a vehe- 
 ment onslaught on the theory of laissez-faire and lais- 
 sez-passer. And he wrote Fors Clavigera, a monthly 
 letter to artisans of all classes, and developed therein 
 his gospel of society. But he is not one of those who 
 think to speak is to act. He admitted loyally that he 
 was wrong, to give advice instead of example, and 
 proceeded forthwith to found and endow St. George's 
 Guild, to give Miss Octavia Hill houses for working 
 men's dwellings, and to subscribe everywhere to 
 special schemes. And the searching sincerity which 
 with him knows no bounds finds vent in vigorous 
 words : " I am trying to reform the world," said he 
 one day in his rooms at Oxford to one of his friends, 
 " and I suppose I ought to begin with myself. I am 
 trying to do St. Benedict's work, and I ought to be a 
 saint. And yet I am living between a Turkey carpet 
 
III. EXPRESSION 
 
 49 
 
 and a Titian, and drinking as much tea " (taking his 
 second cup of tea) "as I can swig." 
 
 "This is just what we feel ourselves," writes to him 
 a lady admirer. " I will join St. George's Guild when- 
 ever you join it yourself. Above all things, you urge 
 our duties to the land, the common earth of our 
 country. You speak of the duty of acquiring, if 
 possible, and cultivating the smallest piece of ground. 
 But (forgive the question), where is your house and 
 your garden ? I know you have got places, but you 
 do not stay there. Almost every month you date 
 from some new place, a dream of delight to me ; and 
 all the time I am stopping at home, labouring to im- 
 prove the place I live at, to keep the lives entrusted 
 to me. And when I read } r our reproaches, and see 
 where they date from, I feel as a soldier freezing in 
 the trenches before Sebastopol might feel at receiving 
 orders from a general who was dining at his club in 
 London. Again I agree with you in your dislike of 
 railways, but I suspect 3 r ou use them, and sometimes 
 go on them. I never do. You see you are like a 
 clergyman in the pulpit in your books ; you can scold 
 the congregation, and they cannot answer; behold the 
 congregation begins to reply." 
 
 The prophet did not flinch from this sharp attack. 
 He inserted the letter of the recalcitrant member in the 
 next number of Fors and answered it. "She tells me 
 first that I have not joined the St. George's Company, 
 because I have no home. It is too true. But that is 
 because my father, and mother, and nurse, are dead ; 
 
 D 
 
50 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 because the woman I hoped would have been my wife 
 is dying; and because the place where I would fain 
 have stayed to remember all of them, was rendered 
 physically uninhabitable to me by the violence of my 
 neighbours — that is to say by their destroying the 
 fields I needed to think in, and the light I needed 
 to work by. Thirdly my correspondent doubts the 
 sincerity of my abuse of railroads, because she sus- 
 pects I use them. I do so constantly, my dear lady ; 
 few men more. I use everything that comes within 
 reach of me. If the devil were standing at my side 
 at this moment, I should endeavour to make some 
 use of him as a local black. The wisdom of life is in 
 preventing all the evil we can, and using what is in- 
 evitable for the best purpose. I use my sicknesses for 
 the work I despise in health ; my enemies for the 
 study of the philosophy of benediction and maledic- 
 tion ; and railroads for whatever I find of help in them 
 — looking always hopefully forward to the day when 
 their embankments will be ploughed down again, like 
 the camps of Rome, into our English fields." Sar- 
 casm can hardly be deaf to such a cry of distress ; 
 but the Master has withheld nothing which could give 
 support to the irrepressible sallies of his detractors. 
 
 It was to be his lot to direct this brilliant and pene- 
 trating force of observation into the recesses of his 
 own heart, and conscience ; into the home of all un- 
 acknowledged feelings and all unexpressed doubts, 
 where all light wounds and where all wounds kill. 
 It was to be his lot to apply it where analysis can be 
 
III. EXPRESSION 51 
 
 least endured ; to both Faith and Love. He has in 
 Prceterita dissected his first passion in terms cold and 
 mordant as steel : " I wonder mightily now," he cries 
 with the regret of a devotee, " what sort of a crea- 
 ture I should have turned out, if at this time love 
 had been with me instead of against me ; and instead 
 of the distracting and useless pain, I had had the 
 joy of approved love, and the unreliable incalculable 
 motive of its sympathy and praise," but loyal to the 
 Eternal purpose he added at once : " It seems to me 
 such things are not allowed in this world. The men 
 capable of the highest imaginative passion are always 
 tossed on the fiery waves by it ; the men who find it 
 smooth water and not scalding, are of another sort." 
 Faith he still thought to possess, if not exactly that 
 which he had gleaned from reading the Psalms in 
 the orchard at Heme Hill, at any rate such as his 
 admiration for George Herbert and the Vaudois had 
 given him. He recollected that on one Sunday at 
 Gap he had broken the Sabbath by climbing after 
 church among his beloved mountains, and this victory 
 of his passion for nature over his religious duty 
 haunted him afterwards as a cruel memory. Twelve 
 years later he took to drawing on Sundays. By 
 degrees disgust with the narrowness of those sects 
 which he had been taught to love, a clearer under- 
 standing of the aesthetical beauty of that Catholicism 
 which he had been taught to abhor, and the doubts 
 which science sets in all our paths, plunged him in the 
 agnosticism which Mallock, his disciple, has described 
 
52 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 in his New Republic : "Am I a believer? No, I am a 
 doubter too. Once I could pray every morning, and go 
 forth to my day's labour stayed and comforted. But 
 now I can pray no longer. You have taken my God 
 away from me, and I know not where you have laid 
 Him." By a strange chance it was at the most acute 
 moment of this perpetual but unavowed torture that 
 love came to him and forced him to look with open 
 eyes into himself, and to put his sincerity to a test 
 which was most painful. He was at Oxford. A young 
 lady, for whom his attachment was known, and who 
 even passed as his betrothed, was dying. Her reli- 
 gious sentiments had revived during the last years of 
 her life, and for some time past she had refused to 
 entertain any further thought of marriage with an 
 unbeliever. He asked to see her again. She sent " to 
 ask him whether he could yet say that he loved God 
 better than he loved her." Ruskin scanned his mind 
 as closely as any sailor the horizon on a murky night, 
 but no light showed him safety either on the shores 
 of that Presbyterianism which he had just left, or on 
 those of that catholic Christianity, 1 where some years 
 later he was to find a haven. Loyally and bravely he 
 answered No, and the door closed upon him. 
 
 The man who denounced his own weaknesses to 
 himself so frankly did not hesitate to rejoice in his 
 own work when it seemed to him good. His may 
 not have been modesty as the hypocrites of society 
 
 1 In the widest sense. It is clear that the Roman Catholic Church 
 is not here included. 
 
III. EXPRESSION 53 
 
 understand it, but modesty it was as we may under- 
 stand it in him. Modesty for Ruskin does not consist 
 in doubting his own capacity or in hesitating to main- 
 tain his own opinion, but in understanding aright 
 the relation between what he is capable of and what 
 others are capable of, and in measuring exactly and 
 without exaggeration his own worth. For modesty is 
 the "measuring virtue, the virtue of modes or limits. 
 Arnolfo is modest when he says he can build a 
 beautiful dome at Florence. Diirer also, who wrote 
 to some one who found fault with his work, ' Sir, it 
 cannot be better done,' for he was convinced of it, 
 and to say anything else would have been a want of 
 sincerity. Modesty is so pleased with other people's 
 doings, that she has no leisure to lament her own; 
 and thus, knowing the fresh feeling of contentment, 
 unstained with thought of self, she does not fear being 
 pleased, when there is cause, with her own Tightness, as 
 with another's, saying calmly : ' Be it mine, or yours, 
 or whose else it may be, it is no matter; — this also 
 is well.' " In writing these lines Ruskin intended to 
 declare his opinion ; he has succeeded in reproducing 
 his personality. For no one was less greedy of ad- 
 miration or more prodigal of encouragement. Modern 
 Painters was respectfully dedicated not to a prince, 
 not to a great writer, but to the "Landscape painters 
 of England, by their sincere admirer." " Contrast his 
 career as a critic," says Mr. Collingwood, "with that of 
 other well-known men, the Jeffries and the Giffords, 
 not to mention writers of a later date ; and note that 
 
54 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 his error has been always to encourage too freely, not 
 to discourage hastily." This characteristic will hardly 
 perhaps commend Ruskin to such of our younger 
 critics as are only too ready to score through and 
 through with their pens the sum of an artist's lifelong 
 labour ; but they may well lay it to heart. If by any 
 chance Ruskin believed himself in duty bound to 
 chastise an artist, whose private character he honoured, 
 he would chastise him, but at the same time write a 
 private letter expressing sorrow, and an earnest hope 
 that "this may make no difference to our friendship." 
 Whereby he brought on himself the following reply 
 from a certain artist: "My dear Ruskin, the first time 
 I meet you I shall knock you down, but I hope that 
 will make no difference to our friendship." 
 
 The fervour and the simplicity of his enthusiasm 
 are equally proverbial. Every new artist whom he 
 studies, every important book which he analyses, he 
 desires his audience to accept as the greatest and the 
 most perfect of all time, wholly oblivious that he has 
 already assigned this unique throne to a hundred other 
 such. At one time it was a pleasantry among the 
 philistines of Oxford to ask the admirers of Ruskin 
 who was " the greatest painter in the world " for the 
 current day? "Yesterday it was Carpaccio. . . ." 
 The professor would rave also about his pupils' works, 
 attributing to them a thousand imaginary merits. For 
 instance he announced that he had met a young 
 American lady who could draw so admirably, that, 
 having previously declared no woman could draw, he 
 
III. EXPRESSION 55 
 
 was now tempted to believe that no one could draw 
 but a woman. And the same day he discovered two 
 young Italians so deeply imbued with the spirit of 
 their Early Schools that " no hand like theirs had been 
 put to paper since Lippi and Lionardo." 
 
 This enthusiasm vents itself sometimes in a comic 
 outburst. The disdain of the Master for the instruc- 
 tion usually given in national schools may be easily 
 conceived, — pedantic dogmatism without thought of 
 promoting manual skill or exciting artistic taste in the 
 workman ! One day a mason, employed in building 
 some addition to Brantwood, was in need of money 
 and asked for an advance. Ruskin gave it and asked 
 him to sign a receipt. Much hesitation and confusion 
 followed this natural request, and at last the workman 
 exclaimed in his own dialect: "Aa mun put maa 
 mark ! " He did not know how to write ; upon which 
 Ruskin sprang up, held out his two hands to the 
 astonished mason and cried : " I am proud to know 
 you ! Now I understand why you are such a perfect 
 workman." 
 
 Some of these unexpected and paradoxical features 
 might almost lead one to imagine that the Master hid 
 his real self behind a mask, and that his originality 
 was a cloak in which he enveloped himself after the 
 fashion of the "aesthetes," whom he considered per- 
 sonal enemies, and strongly and continuously con- 
 demned. It was nothing of the kind. His " franchise," 
 while it led him into the most direct contradictions 
 and the strangest exaggerations, preserved him from all 
 
56 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 affectation. No man could have lived more simply than 
 he the domestic life of a gentleman-farmer, a kind and 
 courteous neighbour, keeping his ice-house cold and 
 his hot-house hot, so as to give ice or grapes to the 
 villagers when they needed it, but maintaining nothing 
 in his costume, his manners, or his home that could 
 surprise them, — no " aesthetic " affectation of dress, fur- 
 niture, or architecture. He wore no slouch felt hat 
 like William Morris nor carried in his hand the sun- 
 flower of a Cyril or of a Vivian, He wished everything 
 to be beautiful but above all appropriate to its use. 
 " Do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers 
 in enamel. Do not thrash with sculptured flails : nor 
 put bas-reliefs on millstones," said he to his disciples. 
 He lived with the old mahogany furniture of his 
 parents. He insisted that St. George's Mill at Laxey 
 should be so solid and comfortable as thoroughly to 
 fulfil its function as a mill, without any superfluous 
 decoration. His own house at Brantwood is simple, 
 ample, comfortable, adorned with creeping plants but 
 devoid of any exquisiteness of style; nothing is in 
 bad taste, but nowhere is a symptom of affectation. 
 
 His simple good-humour and personal modesty have 
 struck all those who have had any intimacy with him. 
 " I will tell you," writes Mr. James Smetham to a friend, 
 after a visit to Denmark Hill, in 1858, — "that he has 
 a large house with a lodge, and a valet, and footman 
 and coachman, and grand rooms glittering with pictures, 
 chiefly Turner's, and that his father and mother live 
 with him, or he with them. His father is a fine old 
 
III. EXPRESSION 57 
 
 gentleman, who has a lot of bushy grey hair, and 
 eyebrows sticking up all rough and knowing, with a 
 comfortable way of coming up to you with his hands 
 in his pockets, and making you comfortable, and 
 saying, in answer to your remark, that 'John's' prose 
 works are pretty good. His mother is a ruddy, digni- 
 fied, richly dressed old gentlewoman of seventy-five, 
 who knows Chamouni better than Camberwell ; evi- 
 dently a good old lady, with the Christian Treasury 
 tossing about on her table. She puts ' John ' down 
 and holds her own opinions, and flatly contradicts 
 him; and he receives all her opinions with a soft 
 reverence and gentleness that is pleasant to witness. 
 I wish I could reproduce a good impression of ' John ' 
 for you, to give you the notion of his ' perfect gentle- 
 ness and lowlihood.' He certainly bursts out with a 
 remark, and in a contradictious way, but only because 
 he believes it, with no air of dogmatism or conceit. 
 He is different at home from that which he is in a 
 lecture before a mixed audience, and there is a spiri- 
 tual sweetness in the half-timid expression of his 
 eyes ; and in bowing to you, as in taking wine with 
 (if I heard aright) ' I drink to thee,' he had a look 
 that has followed me, a look bordering on tearful." 
 
 But in public lecturing he charmed his audience by 
 that same sort of personal magnetism that made him so 
 many friends amongst the London workmen and the 
 peasants at Coniston. Look for instance at him in the 
 professorial chair at Oxford in 1870. For some time 
 past the room has been filled to overflowing, every 
 corner carried by assault by students who have 
 
58 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 deserted the other classes or their luncheons or, what 
 seems still more incredible, their cricket in order to 
 hear him. They fill the windows, are standing even 
 on the cupboards. Here and there are ladies, occa- 
 sionally as numerous as the students, some of them 
 Americans who have crossed the Atlantic to see 
 the man whom Carlyle calls " the Ethereal Ruskin." 
 The doors remain open, blocked by the crowd over- 
 flowing into the passage. Now the Master appears, 
 and all Oxford receives him with acclamation. Those 
 who have never seen him, raise themselves on tiptoe 
 and catch glimpses of a tall thin figure accompanied, 
 like a philosopher of Athens, by a train of disciples. 
 This is not perhaps quite orthodox, but Ruskin seems 
 to occupy the Chair of Heterodoxy. His thick hair 
 is long and fair, his eyes are clear and blue and 
 changing as a rippling sea, his mouth is fine, ironic, 
 and more mobile than a resilient bow, his complexion 
 is bright, and his eyebrows are strongly marked. 
 The whole countenance speaks alike of enthusiasm 
 and of sarcasm, reflecting equally the passion which 
 burns or the contemplative habit which soothes, the 
 face of a fighter and of a seer. He bows slightly 
 and ceremoniously, recognises friends scattered in 
 the audience, disposes around him a quantity of odd 
 and whimsical articles, minerals, coins, drawings, 
 photographs, his "diagrams," as he calls them, to 
 be used in his demonstration ; then he throws aside 
 his long black professor's gown, and his academic 
 character disappears with it. For now he wears a 
 blue-skirted coat with large white cuffs, a spreading 
 
III. EXPRESSION 59 
 
 " Gladstone " collar, and a voluminous blue cravat, 
 his most distinctive mark ; quite simply dressed, 
 however, with quiet old-world elegance and neither 
 rings nor trinkets. 
 
 He begins, and at first it seems as if a clergyman 
 were preaching a sermon in the hall — for he is reading 
 passages written with much care, marking his cadences, 
 balancing his periods, restraining his gesture, and 
 subduing his glance. Little by little, as he reads over 
 his own words, he grows animated. Exaltation re- 
 turns as on the day he wrote them. He forgets the 
 dead pages which lie before him on the table and looks 
 at the living faces of his listeners. Do they agree 
 with him up till now ? He cannot go on without 
 knowing. He asks them, makes them lift their hands 
 in sign of agreement, and, emboldened, he attacks the 
 heart of his subject, improvises, pauses to show a 
 diagram. It may be the head of a lion by a pseudo- 
 classic sculptor with which he compares a tiger's bead, 
 drawn by Millais in the Zoological Gardens. At the 
 incongruous sight there is loud laughter. But this 
 is not enough, the Master must give a pictorial de- 
 scription of things; he lets himself go and loses all 
 restraint. If be is speaking of birds he imitates those 
 which fly and those which strut. If he would explain 
 that the art of engraving is the art of scratching, he 
 imitates the cat's use of its claws. The audience 
 would howl down any one else, but it feels that here 
 is a man speaking under the influence of an idea, not 
 declaiming but crying aloud a truth which he has 
 
60 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 discovered but a moment ago. It is not of himself that 
 he makes an exhibition but of his subject. He heaps 
 observation on observation, he multiplies arguments. 
 Botany, geology, exegesis, philology, all is good which 
 serves to prove his thesis. Now he no longer pleads 
 but prophesies, and those who are taking notes give 
 up co-ordinating them. He has lost his thread but 
 he has gained his audience. The confused succession 
 of lucid and ingenious thoughts at once puzzles and 
 enthrals. What is it — instinct ? science ? imposture ? 
 genius ? Who can say ? But we listen and de- 
 lightedly follow this jolting jerking road, which is 
 always winding and at each turn opens to us some 
 new valley, some unexpected horizon. At last we 
 seem to be near the summit ; as we climb the view 
 opens more and more, and amidst loud applause the 
 lecture which began with microscopic details ends with 
 a grand first principle. From the humble village 
 hidden in the hollow of a valley our guide, with the 
 edelweiss for his badge, has conducted us by a 
 thousand windings to a lofty peak whence we may 
 look out over all a world. 
 
 But one day the guide himself halted at the foot of 
 the mountains he had so often ascended. And now 
 let us look at the old man, whose voice resounds no 
 longer in public, in his retreat at Brantwood, among 
 the rocks and wild wood {brant-wood) on the edge of 
 Coniston Lake, where he went to live after the death 
 of his parents because nothing there could trouble 
 his dreams : " Ruskin," writes Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, 
 
III. EXPRESSION 6 1 
 
 "seems to me less picturesque as a young man than 
 now in his later days. Perhaps grey waving hair 
 may be more becoming than darker locks, but the 
 speaking earnest eyes that 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 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 breeze. 
 . . . That evening, the first we ever spent at Brant- 
 wood, the rooms were lighted by slow sunset cross- 
 lights from the lake without. Mrs. Severn sat in 
 her place behind a silver urn, while the master of 
 the house, with his back to the window, was dis- 
 pensing such cheer, spiritual and temporal, as those 
 who have been his guests will best realise, — fine 
 wheaten bread and Scotch cakes in many a crisp 
 circlet and crescent, and trout from the lake, and 
 strawberries such as grow only on the Brantwood 
 slopes. Were these cups of tea only, or cups of 
 fancy, feeling, inspiration ? And as we crunched and 
 quaffed we listened to a certain strain not easily to 
 be described, changing from its graver first notes to 
 the sweetest and most charming vibrations. Who 
 can ever recall a good talk that is over? You can 
 remember the room in which it was held, the look of 
 the chairs, but the actual talk takes wings and flies 
 away. . . . The text was that strawberries should 
 
62 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 be ripe and sweet, and we munched and marked 
 it then and there ; that there should be a standard 
 of fitness applied to every detail of life ; and this 
 standard, with a certain gracious malice, wit, hospi- 
 tality, and remorselessness, he began to apply to one 
 thing and another, to dress, to food, to books." 
 
 And already legends have grown up around the 
 great charmer. It is said that one day he entered a 
 jeweller's shop in London, and being recognised, all 
 the precious stones were spread before him and he 
 was begged to reveal their mysteries. And standing 
 there in the midst of the listening ladies, the author 
 of Deucalion spoke. He spoke with the knowledge 
 of the Dwarf who stole the Rhine-gold but with the 
 charm of the Rhine-maidens who guarded it. He told 
 his hearers the secret of the ruby — in heraldry gules — 
 which is the Persian rose, colour of love and joy, and 
 of all life on earth, the flower from whose bud was 
 modelled the alabaster box of precious ointment that 
 the Magdalen poured over the feet of the Saviour. 
 And the secret of the sapphire — in heraldry azure — 
 which is the type of joy and love in heaven, a stone 
 of one nature with the ruby but another colour. I 
 will lay thy foundations with sapphires, says the 
 Scripture. And the secret too of the pearl, which is 
 the subduing of light, symbol of patience, colour of 
 the dove that carries the news that the waters are 
 abating — the marguerite in Norman heraldry — grey, 
 an inferior colour in arms, but of great price — for 
 humility opens the gates of Paradise, and we are told 
 
III. EXPRESSION 63 
 
 that though the walls are of jasper each door is a 
 pearl. He told of the dark and gradual birth of gems 
 in the depths of the earth or the sea, and then turning 
 towards the fine ladies he spoke to them to this 
 purpose : — 
 
 " Are we right in setting our hearts on these stones, 
 loving them, holding them precious ? Yes, assuredly, 
 provided it is the stone we love, and the stone we 
 think precious; and not ourselves we love, and our- 
 selves we think precious. To worship a black stone, 
 because it fell from heaven, may not be wholly wise ; 
 but it is half-way to being wise ; half-way to worship 
 heaven itself. Or, to worship a white stone because 
 it is dug with difficulty out of the earth, and to put 
 it into a log of wood, and say the wood sees with 
 it, may not be wholly wise ; but it is half-way to 
 being wise; half-way to believing that the God who 
 makes earth so bright, may also brighten the eyes 
 of the blind. It is no true folly to think that stones 
 see, but it is to think that eyes do not ; it is no true 
 folly to think that stones live, but it is to think that 
 souls die ; it is no true folly to believe that, in the day 
 of the making up of jewels, the palace walls shall be 
 compact of life above their corner-stone, but it is to 
 believe that in the day of dissolution the souls of 
 the globe shall be shattered with its emerald, and no 
 spirit survive, unterrified, above the ruin. Yes, pretty 
 ladies, love the stones, and take care of them ; but 
 love your own souls better, and take care of thou, for 
 the day when the Master shall make up His jewels." 
 
64 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 Leaving words such as the jeweller's fair clients had 
 never heard at rout or ball yet ringing in their ears, the 
 prophet was gone. He had marched off to a pastry- 
 cook's, where still he talked on while he lunched, 
 and those present left their sandwiches and their buns 
 and grouped themselves silently about him to receive 
 the spiritual food which he was pleased to dispense. 
 
 So tradition will have it that he taught not only in 
 the synagogues, but also in the public places in the 
 midst of profane life and vulgar cares. It tells us 
 also that he appeared suddenly wherever there was 
 an artist soul to be comforted, or a flame of enthusiasm 
 to be kept alight. One morning in the Louvre two 
 diligent readers of his works, who had never seen 
 him, were standing before the Walk to Emmaus 
 which one of them was endeavouring to copy. An 
 old man approached and entered into conversation, 
 and speaking of the picture of Rembrandt, confessed 
 that he had once copied it himself. He grew excited, 
 renewed his youth in recollection of the heroic days 
 of art, and a gleam which thrilled the two disciples 
 passed across his eyes. He invited them to breakfast 
 at his hotel, and only in the breaking of bread did 
 they discover that they were in the presence of the 
 Master. It was Ruskin. And surely they said to 
 each other as they went away, like the pilgrims in 
 the old picture they were looking at two hours before, 
 " did not our hearts burn within us while he talked 
 with us," and opened to us the Holy Gospel of Art ? 
 It is related also that one night at Rome Ruskin 
 
III. EXPRESSION 65 
 
 dreamed that he had become a Franciscan monk, and 
 that he had devoted himself to that great community 
 which he had extolled in his chapter on Santa Croce. 
 A little while after this dream, as he was going up 
 the steps of the Pincio, he was accosted by an old 
 beggar sitting on the steps. He gave him alms and 
 was about to continue his way when the beggar 
 seized his hand and kissed it. Ruskin bent over and 
 embraced the old man. The next day the latter, with 
 tears in his eyes, came to see him in all his rags, and 
 begged him to accept a precious relic, a piece of brown 
 cloth which he assured him had belonged to the robe 
 of St. Francis. Was not this the saint himself, says 
 a biographer, who appeared to one who had learned 
 of him to interpret the voices of Nature ? Be that 
 as it may, Ruskin remembered his dream and went 
 at once on a pilgrimage to the convent of the saint 
 at Assisi, dreaming of great things to be done. But 
 he found Assisi haymaking, so in the end he also 
 made hay. 
 
 He could have chosen no more fitting patron-saint, 
 and we can compare him to no purer model. Like 
 St. Francis, Ruskin has performed some very pretty 
 miracles. He made his philosophy heard not indeed 
 of the birds but of smart ladies — perhaps the greater 
 feat. He caused no roses to spring in the snow, but 
 he grafted on cold British souls rosy flowers of en- 
 thusiasm upon which one chances still. He did not 
 order the seasons, but once, when he had asked the 
 painters to paint apple-trees in bloom, the walls of an 
 
66 HIS PERSONALITY 
 
 Academy were apple-blossom from end to end. Such 
 at any rate are the tales, and the tender recollection 
 that the Master has left with some, the rapturous 
 smiles he has called to the lips of others, have perhaps 
 given rise to many such legends. Be that as it may, 
 it is in any case not the common lot even for great 
 men to be veiled, while yet alive, in the gracious cloud 
 of legend ; and only on the highest summits for the 
 most part are the mists wont to gather. 
 
 Will not this " Old-Man of Coniston," think you, 
 loom loftier yet when death has added her supreme 
 and hoi}' darkness to the profane mists of fiction ? 
 It may be then that the countless tourists for whom 
 Ruskin has made bread of the stones of Venice, 
 and flowers of the jewels of Pallas Athene, will 
 bethink them to visit the shrine, where he lived 
 who woke so many souls to life, and where shone 
 the fire whence so many torches took their flame. It 
 may be also that those very railroads, which he 
 fought so obstinatel}', will bring worshippers of the 
 Beautiful from all parts of the world. And even 
 it may be that if ugliness eventually should triumph, 
 as everything seems to augur, with science for its 
 accomplice and political economy for its ally, we shall 
 deem this man but a hero of fable, who alone against 
 all a world, fought not for Truth, who has her pro- 
 phets, nor for Justice, who has her apostles, nor for 
 Religion, who has her martyrs, but for an ideal that 
 has had no other champion and perhaps will know 
 no other victory — the ideal of the Beautiful. 
 
PART II 
 HIS WORDS 
 
PART II 
 HIS WORDS 
 
 Of the many surprises which Mr. Ruskin's personality 
 occasions, none is greater than his popularity. A 
 nineteenth-century philosopher, whose works are read 
 by the masses, is not common clay. But when that 
 philosopher happens also to be an asstheticist, works 
 of art forming the subject or the pretext of his writings, 
 the phenomenon is altogether amazing. For of all 
 literature, art-criticism is by a strange irony just that 
 on which authors like best to embark, but which 
 readers most distrust, convinced as they have been 
 by long and conclusive experience that they will find 
 it to consist mostly in a superficial and pedantic 
 verbiage. And if in order to explain to some extent 
 the popularity of Ruskin's books and the charm they 
 have even for women and children, we add that in 
 reality they do not all deal with questions of art, but 
 often also with the most stirring problems in public 
 economy, the phenomenon becomes a miracle, and the 
 explanation more strange than the fact. 
 
 The better to find a more satisfactory explanation, 
 let us hear Ruskin's own words, and let us listen to 
 
 these, moreover, not with the intention of discovering 
 
 6 9 
 
70 HIS WORDS 
 
 the guiding thought which runs through and co- 
 ordinates them, but, for the moment, without system 
 and at random, so as to detect the new processes, the 
 manifold aspects, the hidden and devious ways of the 
 method whereby Ruskin has inclined the least artistic 
 people in the world towaids aesthetical thought, and 
 this religion of beauty. Let us mark them all, words 
 alike of his twentieth year and words of his seventy- 
 sixth year, words persuasive, words romantic, words 
 passionate. Ruskin is at once man of letters, orator, 
 and guide : and there are words of his that float back 
 into the memory by the fireside in winter when the 
 logs crackle on the hearth, words spoken to an audi- 
 ence thrilled by the inward excitement of the speaker, 
 and again words to be read only at the foot of ancient 
 monuments, on the steps of a campanile or the slope 
 of a mountain, words to teach the truth, words to 
 evoke the past, — words to charm the fancy, words to 
 touch the heart and hold it spell-bound beneath a 
 dome which but veils infinity, or by a tomb which 
 hides but nothingness. ... If we analyse some of 
 these words we may perhaps come to understand why 
 so many have listened to the voice. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 ANALYSIS 
 
 THERE is a story that in 1 85 1 some Scotch farmers, 
 seeing in the windows of a bookshop a pamphlet 
 entitled Notes on the Construction of Sheep/olds, 
 by John Ruskin, and thinking to find some useful 
 advice in the matter of herding sheep, expended two 
 shillings and carried off the pamphlet. They found 
 that they had purchased instead a theological thesis 
 which inculcated the doctrine of " One Flock One 
 Shepherd," and ended by expressing the hope that 
 England might become a New Jerusalem. 
 
 Thus the very title of a work by Ruskin challenges 
 attention and sets logic in disarray. The banner that 
 he displays is equally splendid and incomprehensible. 
 What more beautiful ensign than Deucalion, a title 
 so concise that it serves as a telegraphic address 
 for his publisher, what more beautiful than Queen 
 of the Air, Munera Pulveris, Love's Meinie, the 
 Crown of Wild Olive, Sesame and Lilies, Aratra 
 Peutelici, Ariadne Florentina, On the Old Road, and 
 Our Fathers have told its? But what less informing ? 
 Who can guess what will be found under these 
 many-coloured flags that flutter in the wind ? And 
 
72 HIS WORDS 
 
 if we pass to the descriptive sub-titles, what en- 
 lightenment shall we gain from those of Sesame 
 and Lilies — I. "King's Treasuries," II. "Queen's 
 Gardens," III. "The Mystery of Life and its Arts?" 
 or from that of Hortus Inclusus — "The Message from 
 the Wood to the Garden " ? But because the human 
 mind is averse to leaving a fact or a strange word 
 unexplained, the key is sought and not infrequently 
 found. Sometimes the significance of the title is 
 vouchsafed by the preface, as in Unto this Last; 
 sometimes we must wait till the last page, as in 
 Munera Pulveris ; here it is taken from an Ode of 
 Horace and there from a Gospel parable. 6\ Mark's 
 Rest is an allusion to the relics in the church at 
 Venice, and Love's Meinie, an essay in ornithology, is 
 owed to a verse of the Roman de la Rose where it is 
 said of Love il etait tout convert doisiaulx. At other 
 times the title is borrowed from an old Florentine 
 engraving of the Labyrinth (Ariadne Florentind) and 
 sometimes from a poem of Keats (A Joy for Ever). 
 Ruskin himself felt how baffling some of his titles 
 were, and tried to put his readers on the track. In 
 Fors Clavigera — a series of monthly letters addressed 
 to workmen from 1871 to 1884 — there are three pages 
 devoted to this thankless task, at the end of which one 
 begins to realise that Fors, the root word of " Fortune," 
 means " Destiny," that Clavi- means the key needed to 
 open the door of Truth (clavis), as well as the club of 
 Hercules needed to war against evil (clava) and the 
 helm which keeps us in the course of life (clavus) ; 
 
I. ANALYSIS 73 
 
 finally the -gera from Gero means " that which carries." 
 But what is the use of all these etymologies? The 
 titles of the works of a writer who is for ever cham- 
 pioning Art against the modern social state are 
 battle-cries. As long as they make themselves heard 
 it does not signify what they mean. How many of 
 those who rushed to the assault crying " Montjoie et 
 Saint Denis ! " knew the meaning of their cry ? 
 
 If after scrutinising the flag we pass to the goods 
 which it covers, we are not less outraged by their 
 disorder than attracted by their riches. No coherent 
 scheme, no consistent arrangement, at the utmost — " a 
 tendency like the law of form in crystal." 
 
 " The subject which I want to bring before you is 
 now branched and worse than branched, reticulated in 
 so many directions that I hardly know which shoot 
 of it to trace or which knot to lay hold of first." So 
 Ruskin lays hold of everything at once, and at a bound 
 you are in the heart of the subject. Stunned however 
 by the shock, you do not exactly see what that sub- 
 ject is. Pitchforked into the midst of this vast display 
 of ideas, you branch off in all directions, fearing to 
 lose yourself and yet charmed to be rambling. There 
 is no lack of guides or of labels. Ruskin uses these 
 more than any other writer; each phrase is numbered, 
 and Ruskinians say among themselves, " Do you re- 
 member Paragraph 25 of the 6th chapter, Volume 
 II., Stones of Venice?" or perhaps, " Let us think over 
 Paragraph 213 of Aratra Pentelici." Everywhere 
 there are partitions, divisions, compartments, which 
 
74 HIS WORDS 
 
 would appear to divide the subjects one from another. 
 But put no faith in them. Some chapters are re- 
 printed in several different volumes : there are others 
 which, anticipating those that follow or going back 
 on those that have preceded them, upset the whole 
 economy of the volume. " This," he acknowledges from 
 time to time, " belongs to another part of my subject." 
 His books are as entangled as our Budgets, and their 
 composition as perplexing as those time-tables which 
 forlorn travellers strive to unravel in the railway 
 stations. 
 
 " A friend in whose judgment I greatly trust, remon- 
 strated scornfully with me, the other day, on the de- 
 sultory character of Fors ; and pleaded with me for the 
 writing of an arranged book instead. But he might as 
 well plead with a birch tree growing out of a crag, to 
 arrange its boughs beforehand. The winds and floods 
 will arrange them according to their wild liking ; and 
 all that the tree has to do, or can do, is to grow gaily, 
 if it may be ; sadly, if gaiety be impossible ; and let the 
 black jags and scars rend the rose-white of its trunk 
 where Fors shall choose." 
 
 Certainly in his early works, Modern Painters, 
 Seven Lcunps of Architecture , and Stones of Venice, 
 there is some perceptible attempt at composition even 
 if it is unskilful, and his materials are classified, if not 
 in order, at any rate with some kind of symmetry. 
 But after he has laid these mighty foundations of his 
 life's work all plan vanishes and his composition be- 
 comes wholly amorphous. At all seasons Ruskin will 
 
I. ANALYSIS 75 
 
 speak to you of all subjects, "Of Many Things" 
 indeed, as says the sub-title of a volume of Modern 
 Painters, a title which excited no little amusement, but 
 yet is the only one at all exact that he has assigned. 
 If you expect a book of his to give any single con- 
 nected thesis on a definite subject, if you have not 
 made up your mind, ere opening it, to abandon all 
 desire of logic and all instinct of classification, you had 
 best not venture into the marvellous maze. Sesame 
 would not serve to open the door, nor would Ariadne 
 supply a guiding thread. 
 
 Within the maze we adventure ourselves never- 
 theless, because although the whole is confused, each 
 particular idea to be distinguished therein shows 
 clearer and sharper cut than in any ordinary treatise 
 on ^Esthetic. We are not invited to consider such 
 axioms as the following : " The object of Art is to 
 discover the Me in external objects," or Art is "the 
 interpretation of the beauty of nature and the beauty 
 of force by means of their most expressive signs ; " 
 nor are we asked to draw long deductions from the 
 thought, " The Beautiful is the splendour of the 
 True " — propositions which the reader is the more 
 careful not to contest in that he does not in the least 
 understand them. No. A simple and concrete thesis 
 is advanced, for example this : — 
 
 " The art of Bellini is centrally represented by two 
 pictures of Venice ; one, the Madonna in the Sacristy 
 of the Frari with two saints beside her, and two angels 
 
76 HIS WORDS 
 
 at her feet ; the second, the Madonna with four saints, 
 over the second altar of San Zaccaria. 
 
 "Observe respecting them — 
 
 " First, they are both wrought in entirely consistent 
 and permanent material. The gold in them is repre- 
 sented by painting, not laid on with real gold. And 
 the painting is so secure, that four hundred years have 
 produced on it, so far as I can see, no harmful change 
 whatever, of any kind. 
 
 " Secondly, the figures in both are in perfect peace. 
 No action takes place except that the little angels are 
 playing on musical instruments, but with uninter- 
 rupted and effortless gesture, as in a dream. A choir 
 of singing angels by La Robbia or Donatello would be 
 intent on their music, or eagerly rapturous in it, as 
 in temporary exertion : in the little choirs of cherubs 
 by Luini in the Adoration of the Shepherds, in the 
 Cathedral of Como, we even feel by their dutiful 
 anxiety that there might be danger of a false note if 
 they were less attentive. But Bellini's angels, even 
 the youngest, sing as calmly as the Fates weave. 
 
 " Let me at once point out to you that this calm- 
 ness is the attribute of the entirely highest class of 
 art : the introduction of strong or violently emotional 
 incident is at once a confession of inferiority. 
 
 " Those are the two first attributes of the best art. 
 Faultless workmanship, and perfect serenity ; a contin- 
 uous not momentary action. You are to be interested 
 in the living creatures; not in what is happening to 
 them. 
 
I. ANALYSIS 77 
 
 " Then t the third attribute of the best art is that it 
 compels you to think of the spirit of the creature, and 
 therefore of its face, more than of its body. 
 
 "And the fourth is that in the face, you shall be led to 
 see only beauty or joy ; — never vileness, vice, or pain. 
 
 " Those are the four essentials of the greatest art. I 
 repeat them, they are easily learned. 
 
 " I. Faultless and permanent workmanship. 
 
 " 2. Serenity in state, or action. 
 
 " 3. The Face principal, not the bod} r . 
 
 " 4. And the Face free from either vice or pain." 
 
 We have here a clear thesis. Every reader knows 
 what position he has to meet, what plastic practical 
 results and what modifications of his judgment and 
 future work the side he takes will entail. He foresees 
 that Michael Angelo with his studies of outline, Raphael 
 who sets on bodies so eloquent, heads so indifferent and 
 so mute, Ribera with his anguished faces, — all these 
 will be proscribed by this definition of great art ; while 
 on the contrary the primitives and certain artists of 
 the earlier Renaissance will be ordained as models. 
 And if so be he cares first and foremost for the move- 
 ment of limbs displayed, for the human figure hurtling 
 through space, for the telling effect of wrinkles, and 
 the contraction of facial muscles, he will range himself 
 against the aestheticist. But in so ranging himself 
 against the latter's thesis he at any rate pays homage 
 to his lucidity. For he can only dissent in that he has 
 understood. 
 
78 HIS WORDS 
 
 Having so understood he will follow easily when 
 the professor of Fine Art, in order to defend his 
 thesis, would take him still deeper into the subject, 
 and, to make his own aesthetical impressions clear, 
 shall disentangle them by analysis. For example 
 the thesis in one of Ruskin's books is this, that the 
 worst form of deceptive architecture is deception of 
 handiwork, that is to say the substitution of castings 
 fashioned by machinery for hand-made work. This 
 deception is dishonest, he says. But why ? Demand 
 of yourself how it first impressed you — and you will 
 learn. 
 
 " Ornament has two entirely distinct sources ot 
 agreeableness : one, that of the abstract beauty of its 
 forms, which, for the present, we will suppose to be the 
 same whether they come from the hand or the machine ; 
 the other, the sense of human labour and care spent 
 upon it. How great this latter influence we may per- 
 haps judge, by considering that there is not a cluster 
 of weeds growing in any cranny of ruin, which has 
 not a beauty in all respects nearly equal, and, in some, 
 immeasurably superior, to that of the most elaborate 
 sculpture of its stones : and that all our interest in the 
 carved work, our sense of its richness, though it is 
 tenfold less rich than the knots of grass beside it ; of 
 its delicacy, though it is a thousandfold less delicate ; 
 of its admirableness, though a millionfold less admir- 
 able ; results from our consciousness of its being the 
 work of poor, clumsy, toilsome man. Its true delight- 
 fulness depends on our discovering in it the record of 
 
I. ANALYSIS 79 
 
 thoughts, and intents, and trials, and heart-breakings — 
 of recoveries and joyfulnesses of success ; all this can 
 be traced by a practised eye ; but, granting it even 
 obscure, it is presumed or understood ; and in that is 
 the worth of the thing, just as much as the worth 
 of anything else we call precious. The worth of a 
 diamond is simply the understanding of the time it 
 must take to look for it before it is found ; and the 
 worth of an ornament is the time it must take before 
 it can be cut. It has an intrinsic value besides, which 
 the diamond has not ; (for a diamond has no more real 
 beauty than a piece of glass ;) but I do not speak of 
 that at present ; I place the two on the same ground ; 
 and I suppose that the hand-wrought ornament can 
 no more be generally known from machine work, than 
 a diamond can be known from paste; nay, that the 
 latter may deceive, for a moment, the mason's, as the 
 other the jeweller's, eye ; and that it can be detected 
 only by the closest examination. Yet exactly as a 
 woman of feeling would not wear false jewels, so 
 would a builder of honour disdain false ornaments." 
 
 You will now understand how such and such a work 
 appeals to you. But that is not enough. You must 
 also understand the intention of him who created it. 
 Not that you should assign to him ideas and feelings 
 which in truth he had not — that Ruskin holds to be 
 mere puerility though it was the outcome of all the 
 energies of a whole school of criticism during fifty 
 years. Rather you should seek by thorough study 
 of the artist's works to determine simply to what end 
 
80 HIS WORDS 
 
 his effort was directed. In order that we may be 
 convinced of the error of modern architects, who 
 substitute machine work for the hand of man, Ruskin 
 invites us to examine ourselves, and ourselves to give 
 ( an exact account of out own feelings in presence of 
 a work of art, in short, in a manner to make our 
 aesthetical confession of faith. \ In order really to feel 
 the greatness of the ancient artists — the Greek for 
 instance — of their myths, and of their religious 
 imaginings, there is something yet more difficult to 
 be done — namely to reconstruct the psychology of 
 their art. Ruskin compares the Greek to a child and 
 asks himself what the child sees, what he seeks, what 
 he desires, and of what he dreams. 
 
 " So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive 
 character of a child is to live always in the tangible 
 present, having little pleasure in memory, and being 
 utterly impatient and tormented by anticipation : weak 
 alike in reflection and forethought, but having an 
 intense possession of the actual present, down to the 
 shortest moments and least objects of it; possessing 
 it, indeed, so intensely that the sweet childish days are 
 as long as twenty days will be; and setting all the 
 faculties of heart and imagination on little things, so as 
 to be able to make anything out of them he chooses. 
 Confined to a little garden, he does not imagine him- 
 self somewhere else, but makes a great garden out of 
 that ; possessed of an acorn-cup, he will not despise 
 it and throw it away, and covet a golden one in its 
 stead : it is the adult who does so. The child keeps 
 
I. ANALYSIS 8 i 
 
 his acorn-cup as a treasure, and makes a golden one 
 out of it in his mind; so that the wondering grown-up 
 person standing beside him is always tempted to ask 
 concerning his treasures, not, 'What would you have 
 more than these ? ' but 'What possibly can you see in 
 these ? ' for, to the bystander, there is a ludicrous and 
 incomprehensible inconsistency between the child's 
 words and the reality. The little thing tells him 
 gravel}', holding up the acorn-cup, that ' this is a 
 queen's crown/ or 'a fairy's boat/ and, with beauti- 
 ful effrontery, expects him to believe the same. But 
 observe — the acorn-cup must be there, and in his 
 own hand. ' Give it me ; then I will make more of 
 it for myself.' That is the child's one word, always. 
 
 " It is also the one word of the Greek — ' Give it 
 me.' Give me any thing definite here in my sight, 
 then I will make more of it." 
 
 The example is typical but it is as charming as it 
 is clear ; and these subtle psychological points, which 
 the aestheticist raises to make himself better under- 
 stood, greatly assist the reader to hear him to the end. 
 Without wandering from his thesis, Ruskin has re- 
 lieved its severity by introducing us to the simplest 
 child's play and the most undogmatic talk. It no 
 longer seems tiresome to delve deep into the under- 
 lying significance of the plastic product before us — on 
 the contrary it amuses, the mind relieving the eye] 
 and the understanding aiding the sensible impression. 
 One wearies soon of seeing and admiring the purely^ 
 external aspect of things without knowledge of their J 
 
82 HIS WORDS 
 
 structure, of their history, of their functions, or of their 
 symbolism. If you have spent hours on the sea-shore 
 and watched the coming and going of ships, yachts 
 or merchant craft, fishing boats or coasters, admiring 
 ignorantly these common things and involuntarily 
 following them with your eyes, you will not reject the 
 teacher who whispers in your ear the cause of all this 
 unreasoned admiration and involuntary sympathy. 
 
 " The boat's bow is naively perfect : complete with- 
 out an effort. The man who made it knew not he 
 was making anything beautiful, as he bent its planks 
 into those mysterious, ever-changing curves. It grows 
 under his hand into the image of a sea-shell ; the seal, 
 as it were, of the flowing of the great tides and streams 
 of ocean stamped on its delicate rounding. He leaves 
 it when all is done, without a boast. It is simple 
 work, but it will keep out water. And every plank 
 thenceforward is a Fate, and has men's lives wreathed 
 in the knots of it, as the cloth-yard shaft had their 
 deaths in its plumes. 
 
 " Then, also, it is wonderful on account of the 
 greatness of the thing accomplished. No other work 
 of human hands ever gained so much. Steam-engines 
 and telegraphs indeed help us to fetch, and carry, and 
 talk ; they lift weights for us, and bring messages, 
 with less trouble than would have been needed 
 otherwise ; this saving of trouble, however, does not 
 constitute a new faculty, it only enhances the powers 
 we already possess. But in that bow of the boat is 
 the gift of another world. Without it, what prison 
 
I. ANALYSIS 83 
 
 wall would be so strong as that ' white and wailing 
 fringe' of sea. What maimed creatures were we all, 
 chained to our rocks, Andromeda-like, or wandering 
 by the endless shores, wasting our incommunicable 
 strength, and pining in hopeless watch of unconquer- 
 able waves ? The nails that fasten together the planks 
 of the boat's bow are the rivets of the fellowship of 
 the world. Their iron does more than draw lightning 
 out of heaven, it leads love round the earth." 
 
 Should you be among mountains where the flora is 
 rich and varied, and at each step, in retired nooks, on 
 high uplands, in clefts of chalky rocks, in damp combes 
 and in long water-courses, you come upon blossoms 
 for which the dull labels of horticultural exhibitions 
 have no name, you will wish not only to see, but also 
 to know ; and if to the pure artist there is indeed a 
 charm in walking amongst plants and flowers, know- 
 ing only that they are lovely, just as one may pass 
 through a reception-room full of unknown beauties, 
 the average passer-by nevertheless likes to find out 
 something about them. And amongst all these beau- 
 teous anonyms he will regret that there is no botanist 
 at hand to give him the name of their outward aspects, 
 and the ideas instinct in their forms. For the eye 
 is already sated with pleasure long-drawn-out, and the 
 flower will drop from the listless hand if there be 
 nothing for the intelligence to work upon. But in 
 the nick of time the historian appears from under the 
 shadow of a rock and takes up his parable. 
 
 " No tribes of flowers have had so great, so varied, 
 
84 HIS WORDS 
 
 or so healthy an influence on man as this great group 
 of Drosidas, depending not so much on the whiteness 
 of some of their blossoms, or the radiance of others, as 
 on the strength and delicacy of the substance of their 
 petals ; enabling them to take forms of faultless elastic 
 curvature, either in cups, as the crocus, or expand- 
 ing bells, as the true lily, or heath-like bells, as the 
 hyacinth, or bright and perfect stars, like the star of 
 Bethlehem, or, when they are affected by the strange 
 reflex of the serpent nature which forms the labiate 
 group of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely 
 fantastic symmetry in the gladiolus. Put by their side 
 their Nereid sisters, the water-lilies, and you have in 
 them the origin of the loveliest forms of ornamental 
 design, and the most powerful floral myths yet re- 
 cognised among human spirits, born by the streams 
 of Ganges, Nile, Arno, and Avon. 
 
 " For consider a little what each of those five tribes 
 has been to the spirit of man. First, in their noble- 
 ness ; the Lilies gave the lily of the Annunciation ; 
 the Asphodels, the flower of the Elysian fields ; the 
 Irids, the fleur-de-lys of chivalry; and the Amaryllids, 
 Christ's lily of the field : while the rush, trodden 
 always under foot, became the emblem of humility. 
 Then take each of the tribes, and consider the extent 
 of their lower influence. Perdita's ' The crown im- 
 perial, lilies of all kinds,' are the first tribe ; which, 
 giving the type of perfect purity in the Madonna's 
 lily, have, by their lovely form, influenced the entire 
 decorative design of Italian sacred art ; while ornament 
 
I. ANALYSIS 85 
 
 of war was continually enriched by the curves of 
 the triple petals of the Florentine ' giglio,' and French 
 fleur-de-lys ; so that it is impossible to count their 
 influence for good in the middle ages, partly as a 
 symbol of womanly character, and partly of the utmost 
 brightness and refinement of chivalry in the city which 
 was the flower of cities." 
 
 From the very fields you step into a museum ; as in 
 many a small Italian township, for example, on the 
 flowery hill of Fiesole or in the deserted island of 
 Torcello ; and from the growing corn, glowing in 
 the sun, you pass immediately to chill and ancient 
 stones, upon which even the mosses will no longer 
 grow. These also at first appeal only to the eye. 
 You admire the modelling, the relief, and the play of 
 shadow, perhaps the graceful movement of a simple 
 gesture, or the noble lines of multiplex folds, but 
 unless you be truly a craftsman your attention will 
 wander if your intellectual appetite be not excited. 
 Those relics resting on the black marble pavements 
 of chill halls in the British Museum, or standing in 
 the niches of the German galleries of sculpture are 
 so far from life ! So scarcely do they touch the eco- 
 nomy of the great world as we know it, its passions 
 or its sorrows as we feel them, its pleasures as we 
 love them. . . . But indeed they do touch it, says the 
 asstheticist, as dropping his flowers, he lays a finger 
 on the dull, cold stone, on the fragment of sculptured 
 drapery, and calls from its inert body the idea which 
 stirred it at birth. 
 
86 HIS WORDS 
 
 " All noble draperies, either in painting or sculpture 
 (colour and texture being at present out of our con- 
 sideration), have, so far as they are anything more 
 than necessities, one of two great functions : they are 
 the exponents of motion and of gravitation. They are 
 the most valuable means of expressing past as well 
 as present motion in the figure, and they are almost 
 the only means of indicating to the eye the force of 
 gravity which resists such motion. The Greeks used 
 drapery in sculpture for the most part as an ugly 
 necessity, but availed themselves of it gladly in all 
 representation of action, exaggerating the arrange- 
 ments of it which express lightness in the material, 
 and follow gesture in the person. The Christian 
 Sculptors, caring little for the body, or disliking it, 
 and depending exclusively on the countenance, re- 
 ceived drapery at first contentedly as a veil, but soon 
 perceived a capacity of expression in it which the 
 Greek had not seen or had despised. The principal 
 element of this expression was the entire removal 01 
 agitation from what was so pre-eminently capable of 
 being agitated. It fell from their human forms plumb 
 down, sweeping the ground heavily, and concealing 
 the feet ; while the Greek drapery was often blown 
 away from the thigh. The thick and coarse stuffs of 
 the monkish dresses, so absolutely opposed to the 
 thin and gauzy web ot antique material, suggested 
 simplicity of division as well as weight of fall. There 
 was no crushing nor subdividing them. And thus 
 the drapery gradually came to represent the spirit of 
 
I. ANALYSIS 87 
 
 repose as it before had of motion, repose saintly and 
 severe. The wind had no power upon the garment, 
 as the passion none upon the soul ; and the motion of 
 the figure only bent into a softer line the stillness 
 of the falling veil, followed by it like a slow cloud 
 by drooping rain : only in links of lighter undulation 
 it followed the dances of the angels. 
 
 "Thus treated, drapery is indeed noble; but it is 
 an exponent of other and higher things. As that 
 of gravitation, it has especial majesty, being literally 
 the only means we have of fully representing this 
 mysterious natural force of earth (for falling water 
 is less passive and less defined in its lines). So, 
 again, in sails it is beautiful because it receives the 
 forms of solid curved surface, and expresses the force 
 of another invisible element." 
 
 Such words extend our field of thought and open 
 
 our horizon. To further the comprehension of a work 
 of art, to detain us an instant longer before a detail 
 in sculpture, Rusk in lays the whole physical world 
 under contribution, as elsewhere the world of morals. 
 Here in the fold and fall of drapery he sees the 
 mysterious law which governs the stars, and there 
 in the curve of a petal the flower which foreshadows 
 a God. All scientific or moral ideas, accumulated 
 during centuries, group themselves naturally round 
 the object which he examines with us. For him more 
 than for any one else "The sound of the Ocean is 
 prison'd in a shell," and every grain of dust is a magic 
 Sesame for the palace of Knowledge. He seems to 
 
88 HIS WORDS 
 
 possess some circular receptive apparatus like that 
 used to take panoramic photographs. Wherever he 
 places himself he discerns as a whole the harmony of 
 natural phenomena and human sympathies : and into 
 whatever chalice he gazes it reflects a universe of 
 things on high. 
 
 From these simple comparisons is born a poetry, 
 healthy, scientific, instructive. Ruskin neither invents 
 nor creates nor discovers nor imagines; he does but 
 link ideas together, pass rapidly from one point of 
 >view to others hitherto unperceived, and synthetises 
 unsuspected sympathies. / Taking up a central position 
 where the conclusions of science, of art, of religion 
 and philosophy converge, he puts these ideas into 
 sudden communication as an electric circuit is closed 
 by a touch — and lo ! a flash ! . . . What new force 
 is this ? Here were two ideas dormant without 
 energy, instinct with no poetry./ There is nothing 
 new : simply these ideas, charged as they were with 
 infinity, kiss, and lo ! life, where once was but inert 
 matter of thought. Carlyle wrote of Ruskin on the 
 19th of April 1 86 1 : — 
 
 • " Friday last I was persuaded — in fact had inwardly 
 compelled myself as it were — to a lecture of Ruskin's 
 at the Institution, Albemarle Street. Lecture on Tree 
 Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical 
 objects. A crammed house, but tolerable even to me 
 in the gallery. The lecture was thought to ' break 
 down,' and indeed it quite did ' as a lecture ' ; but only 
 did from embarras de richesses — a rare case. Ruskin 
 
I. ANALYSIS 89 
 
 did blow asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf 
 notions, which were manifold, curious, genial ; and in 
 fact I do not recollect to have heard in that place any 
 neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one." 
 
 The truth is that with such a method as this chaos 
 cannot be avoided, and the attention is exhausted at 
 last by the ceaseless display of incongruous treasure. 
 Ruskin, with his mania for appropriating all things, 
 comes in the end to resemble the child in St. Augus- 
 tine's story, who would have the sea to stay in a 
 hole he was digging on the sea-shore. We weary 
 of passing from one idea to another. Bidden evoke 
 all science and all dogma, our intelligence satisfied 
 and our memory replete, we resent a longer tension. 
 We are overfeasted with ideas. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 IMAGERY 
 
 AND here thought blossoms into imagery. . . . Just as 
 Ruskin makes the reader understand so he makes him 
 see, and the moment that, weary and wandering, we 
 would steal away from dialectic, we are captive again 
 through the imagination. In what at first sight seems 
 to appeal to sense only, the aestheticist shows the 
 intellectual element, and that usually held to be purely 
 intellectual is now to be made perceptible by sense. 
 He has transformed the visible imagery of the painters 
 into ideas ; he is going to transform the ideas of 
 philosophers into visible imagery. He will demon- 
 strate by way of narration, and paint by way of proof. 
 If he pleads in favour of simple composition in a 
 historical landscape, he is not content with telling 
 you that "the impression is destroyed by a multitude 
 of contradictory facts, and the accumulation, which is 
 not harmonious, is discordant," and that the painter 
 " who endeavours to unite simplicity with magnificence, 
 to guide from solitude to festivity, and to contrast 
 melancholy with mirth, must end by the production 
 of confused inanity," and that because "there is a 
 peculiar spirit possessed by every kind of scene ; and 
 
II. IMAGERY 91 
 
 although a point of contrast may sometimes enhance 
 and exhibit this particular feeling more intensely, it 
 must be only a point, not an equalised opposition. 
 Every introduction of new and different feeling weakens 
 the force of what has already been impressed, and the 
 mingling of all emotions must conclude in apathy, as 
 the mingling of all colours in white," — which would be 
 an interesting but abstract view of the question. He 
 tests his artistic thesis by a concrete example, by a 
 landscape which he has seen ; and his argument is 
 shot through with that splendid fleeting vision well 
 known to those who have followed the Appian Way 
 at nightfall. 
 
 " Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on 
 earth than the solitary extent of the Campagna of 
 Rome under evening light. Let the reader imagine 
 himself for a moment withdrawn from the sounds and 
 motion of the living world, and sent forth alone into 
 this wild and wasted plain. The earth yields and 
 crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly, 
 for its substance is white, hollow, and carious, like 
 the dusty wreck of the bones of men. The long 
 knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in the evening- 
 wind, and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly 
 along the banks of ruin that lift themselves to the 
 sunlight. Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around 
 him as if the dead beneath were struggling in their 
 sleep ; scattered blocks of black stone, four-square, 
 remnants of mighty edifices, not one left upon another, 
 lie upon them to keep them down. A dull purple, 
 
92 HIS WORDS 
 
 poisonous haze stretches level along the desert, veiling 
 its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose rents 
 the red light rests like dying fire on defiled altars. 
 The blue ridge of the Alban mount lifts itself against 
 a solemn space of green, clear, quiet, sky. Watch- 
 towers of dark clouds stand steadfastly along the 
 promontories of the Apennines. From the plain to 
 the mountains, the shattered aqueducts, pier beyond 
 pier, melt into the darkness, like shadowy and count- 
 less troops of funeral mourners, passing from a 
 nation's grave." " Let us, with Claude, make a few 
 ' ideal ' alterations in the landscape," says Ruskin, and 
 the dissertation continues. Thenceforth the author's 
 thought and the reader's attention have a picture 
 before them which soothes and assists concentration. 
 Just as the mysterious laws of nature and the moral 
 necessities of life were not lost sight of in gazing upon 
 the falling folds of a Greek tunic or the delicate work- 
 manship of a Gothic mullion, so the picturesque aspect 
 of things is not neglected when we follow pure 
 aesthetics, history, and natural or social science. We 
 are not forced to quit the kingdom of form and colour 
 because we would enter that of ideas. Art need not 
 be deserted because one enters on the study of man. 
 For it is not alone the life of a picture that Ruskin 
 has delineated, it is also a picture of life. 
 
 Here is such a picture of Venetian life at the end of 
 the fifteenth century, or rather a view of Venice as 
 Turner or Ziem would have imagined it. It comes up 
 suddenly in the course of a comparison between two 
 
II. IMAGERY 93 
 
 colourists, Giorgione and Turner. Ruskin wishes to 
 show what influence the first impressions of childhood, 
 the rich surroundings in which he lived, would have 
 upon the eye and soul of a painter, and to emphasise 
 his point he recalls this scene to those who might have 
 forgotten it : — 
 
 11 A city of marble, did I say ? nay, rather a golden 
 city, paved with emerald. For truly, every pinnacle 
 and turret glanced or glowed, overlaid with gold, or 
 bossed with jasper. Beneath, the unsullied sea drew 
 in deep breathing, to and fro, its eddies of green wave. 
 Deep-hearted, majestic, terrible as the sea, — the men 
 of Venice moved in sway of power and war ; pure 
 as her pillars of alabaster, stood her mothers and 
 maidehs ; from foot to brow, all noble, walked her 
 knights ; the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted ar- 
 mour shot angrily under their blood-red mantle-folds. 
 Fearless, faithful, patient, impenetrable, implacable, 
 — every word a fate — sate her senate. In hope and 
 honour, lulled by flowing of wave around their isles 
 of sacred sand, each with his name written and the 
 cross graved at his side, lay her dead. A wonderful 
 piece of world. Rather, itself a world. It lay along 
 the face of the waters, no larger, as its captains saw 
 it from their masts at evening, than a bar of sunset 
 that could not pass away ; but for its power, it must 
 have seemed to them as if they were sailing in the ex- 
 panse of heaven, and this a great planet, whose orient 
 edge widened through ether. A world from which 
 all ignoble care and petty thoughts were banished, 
 
94 HIS WORDS 
 
 with all the common and poor elements of life. No 
 foulness, nor tumult, in those tremulous streets, that 
 filled or fell, beneath the moon ; but rippled music of 
 majestic change, or thrilling silence. No weak walls 
 could rise above them ; no low-roofed cottage, nor 
 straw-built shed. Only the strength as of rock, and 
 the finished setting of stones most precious. And 
 around them, far as the eye could reach, still the soft 
 moving of stainless waters, proudly pure ; as not the 
 flower, so neither the thorn nor the thistle, could grow 
 in the glancing fields. Ethereal strength of Alps, 
 dreamlike, vanishing in high procession beyond the 
 Torcellan shore; blue islands of Paduan hills, poised 
 in the golden west. Above, free winds and fiery 
 clouds raging at their will : — brightness out of the 
 north, and balm from the south, and the stars of the 
 evening and morning clear in the limitless light of 
 arched heaven and circling sea. 
 
 " Such was Giorgione's school — such Titian's home." 
 All things naturally strike Ruskin as in relief, in 
 perspective, distinguished as light or shade. The 
 most abstract problems of social economy always 
 present themselves to him in plastic and picturesque 
 guise. To his eyes there is no machinery of life 
 which cannot be composed as a picture, nor any in- 
 ternational problem which is not to be resolved into 
 a living drama played by actors whom he himself 
 creates, tricks out forthwith and produces in the 
 theatre of his imagination. If he attacks the useless 
 and costly system of armed peace which obtains with 
 
II. IMAGERY 95 
 
 the Great Powers of Europe, it is in this highly 
 coloured trope : — 
 
 " Friends, I know not whether this thing be the 
 more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is 
 quite unspeakably both. Suppose, instead of being 
 now sent for by you, I had been sent for by some 
 private gentleman, living in a suburban house, with 
 his garden separated only by a fruit wall from his 
 next door neighbour's ; and he had called me to con- 
 sult with him on the furnishing of his drawing-room. 
 I begin looking about me, and find the walls rather 
 bare ; I think such and such a paper might be 
 desirable — perhaps a little fresco here and there on 
 the ceiling — a damask curtain or so at the windows. 
 'Ah,' says my employer, 'damask curtains, indeed! 
 That's all very fine, but you know I can't afford that 
 kind of thing just now ! ' ' Yet the world credits you 
 with a splendid income!' 'Ah, yes,' says my friend, 
 ' but do you know, at present I am obliged to spend 
 it nearly all in steel - traps ? ' ' Steel - traps ! for 
 whom ? ' ' Why, for that fellow on the other side the 
 wall, you know: we're very good friends, capital 
 friends ; but we are obliged to keep our traps set 
 on both sides of the wall ; we could not possibly 
 keep on friendly terms without them, and our spring 
 guns. The worst of it is, we are both clever fellows 
 enough ; and there's never a day passes that we don't 
 find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or some- 
 thing ; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in 
 our traps, take it altogether; and I don't see how we're 
 to do with less.' A highly comic state of life for 
 
96 HIS WORDS 
 
 two private gentlemen ! but for two nations, it seems 
 to me, not wholly comic. Bedlam would be comic, 
 perhaps, if there were only one madman in it ; and 
 your Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is 
 only one clown in it; but when the whole world 
 turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's 
 blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than 
 comic, I think." 
 
 These last words are not proper to a writer de- 
 veloping an idea ; they would be those of a lunatic 
 were their speaker not a painter. Occupied always 
 with visual sensations, Ruskin passes without transi- 
 tion from the red of vermilion to the red colour of 
 blood — because in colour there is no transition. His 
 images, as successively he calls them up, warp and 
 destroy his argument. He might say, parodying a 
 well-known aphorism, " Cogito ergo sum, video ergo 
 sum ! " — We must see in order to think. To praise 
 the inward life — what does that amount to ? or the 
 teaching that man does not profit sufficiently by the 
 experience of ancient leaders of men and by the 
 thought of great philosophers ? To most of us it 
 is nothing but an idea, to Ruskin it is a picture, 
 a landscape animated with figures: "It is a drawing 
 of Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, and of its brook, 
 and valley, and hills, and folded morning sky be- 
 yond. And unmindful alike of these, and of the 
 dead who have left these for other valleys and for 
 other skies, a group of schoolboys have piled their 
 little books upon a grave, to strike them off with 
 stones. So, also, we play with the words of the dead 
 
II. IMAGERY 97 
 
 that would teach us, and strike them far from us with 
 our bitter, reckless will ; little thinking that those 
 leaves which the wind scatters had been piled, not 
 only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an en- 
 chanted vault — nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping 
 Kings, who would awake for us, and walk with us, 
 if we knew but how to call them by their names." 
 
 And what is the external life — ambition and osten- 
 tation, sounding praise and vanity of vanities, which 
 we seek even at the price of our peace ? Again it is 
 a picture, a canvas touched by the hand of a master, 
 where Ribera's awful shadows alternate with the irony 
 of a Holbein and the terror of a Schongauer : — 
 
 "My friends, do you remember that old Scythian 
 custom, when the head of a house died ? How he 
 was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his chariot, 
 and carried about to his friends' houses ; and each of 
 them placed him at his table's head, and all feasted 
 in his presence ? Suppose it were offered to you in 
 plain words, as it is offered to you in dire facts, that 
 you should gain this Scythian honour, gradually, 
 while you yet thought yourself alive. Suppose the 
 offer were this: You shall die slowly; your blood 
 shall daily grow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart 
 beat at last only as a rusted group of iron valves. 
 Your life shall fade from you, and sink through the 
 earth into the ice of Caina ; but, day by day, your 
 body shall be dressed more gaily, and set in higher 
 chariots, and have more orders on its breast — crowns 
 on its head, if you will. Men shall bow before it, 
 
 G 
 
98 HIS WORDS 
 
 stare and shout round it, crowd after it up and down 
 the streets; build palaces for it, feast with it at their 
 tables' heads all the night long ; your soul shall stay 
 enough within it to know what they do, and feel the 
 weight of the golden dress on its shoulders, and the 
 furrow of the crown-edge on the skull ; — no more. 
 Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death- 
 angel ? Would the meanest among us take it, think 
 you ? Yet practically and verily we grasp at it, every 
 one of us, in a measure ; many of us grasp at it in its 
 fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, who desires 
 to advance in life without knowing what life is ; who 
 means only that he is to get more horses, and more 
 footmen, and more fortune, and more public honour, 
 and — not more personal soul. He only is advancing 
 in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood 
 warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering 
 into Living 1 peace." 
 
 Let us turn several pages : the sombre vision has 
 vanished. From the psychology of ambition we have 
 passed to the psychology of the woman dear to 
 Ruskin's heart, the intellectual and modest woman, 
 to whom all knowledge should be given, not to 
 "turn her into a dictionary," not "as if it were, or 
 could be, for her an object to know; but only to feel 
 and to judge." 
 
 And here again this penetrating analysis of feminine 
 education is crowned by a portrait as full of play of 
 light and shade as a canvas of Diaz : — 
 
 1 " t6 5e (ppbf7}na rod Trpevfiaros fw7) /ecu elprjVTj." 
 
II. IMAGERY 99 
 
 " Wherever a true wife comes, this home is always 
 round her. The stars only may be over her head ; 
 the glowworm in the night-cold grass may be the 
 only fire at her foot ; but home is yet wherever she 
 is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round 
 her, better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with 
 vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who 
 else were homeless." 
 
 " This, then, I believe to be, — will you not admit it to 
 be, — the woman's true place and power ? But do not 
 you see that, to fulfil this, she must — as far as one 
 can use such terms of a human creature — be incapable 
 of error ? So far as she rules, all must be right, or 
 nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly 
 good ; instinctively, infallibly wise — wise, not for self- 
 development, but for self-renunciation : wise, not that 
 she may set herself above her husband, but that she 
 may never fail from his side : wise, not with the 
 narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the 
 passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because 
 infinitely applicable, modesty of service — the true 
 changefulness of woman. In that great sense — 'La 
 donna e mobile,' not ' Qual pium' al vento ' ; no, nor 
 yet ' Variable as the shade, by the light quivering 
 aspen made'; but variable as the light, manifold in 
 fair and serene division, that it may take the colour of 
 all that it falls upon, and exalt it." 
 
 It is always with a painter's eye that the writer 
 scrutinises dogmas and examines archives. For 
 Ruskin history is as it were a perspective view of 
 
 V 
 
ioo HIS WORDS 
 
 some great piazza by Canaletto, wherein are set figures 
 by Guardi or Tiepolo, coming and going either splen- 
 didly or miserably attired, carrying banners which he 
 joyfully describes, fashioning coat armour which he 
 analyses with care, striking medals which with a 
 prompt and subtle gesture he flashes before your eyes 
 like the Piero de Medici's of the Uffizi. In a trefoil 
 engraved under the feet of St. John, on a florin coined 
 in the Val di Serchio, is expressed all the victory of 
 the Florentines over the Pisans ; and Ruskin follows 
 the progress of the popular party at Florence by the 
 development of the use of a certain colour in the 
 arms of the town, as he might follow the march of 
 the hours by some rising shadow on a wall. 
 
 When he speaks of lavas and siliceous rocks, of 
 pudding-stones and limestones, of deposits in Cumber- 
 land, and the movement of glaciers in Switzerland, he 
 is always an artist treating science like a landscape — 
 a landscape, whose lines are modified insensibly by the 
 pressure of elemental forces, here sinking there rising 
 anew, the laws of change being expressed in forms of 
 cloud and flower. All religions appear to Ruskin like 
 the frescoes of the Primitive Master wherein cardinal 
 virtues are expressed by grace of gesture, and dogmas 
 are appraised by purity of colour. Paint-brush in 
 hand he traverses the whole universe of ideas and 
 things. The author thinks in images — which certain 
 great painters of his country assuredly do not — and 
 for that much more than for his drawings and water- 
 colours he is really a pictor and one of the most truly 
 
II. IMAGERY 101 
 
 pictorial of all that the United Kingdom has produced. 
 This is so true that he cannot find words strongly 
 coloured enough to translate his images. He is not 
 satisfied with the general ideas which, formless and 
 colourless from long use, his words present to the 
 mind. Like a painter squeezing his tubes to force out 
 more cobalt or vermilion, so Ruskin presses his words 
 till he makes the original image which gave them birth 
 emerge, and sparkle in their appeal to the eye. 
 
 "The 'Paese che Adice e Po riga' is of course 
 Lombardy; and might have been enough distinguished 
 by the name of its principal river. But Dante has an 
 especial reason for naming the Adige. It is always by 
 the valley of the Adige that the power of the German 
 Caesars descends on Italy; and that battlemented 
 bridge which doubtless many of you remember, thrown 
 over the Adige at Verona, was so built that the Ger- 
 man riders might have secure and constant access to 
 the city. In which city they had their first strong- 
 hold in Italy, aided therein by the great family of the 
 Montecchi, Montacutes, Mont-aigu-s, or Montagues ; 
 lords, so called, of the mountain peaks ; in feud with 
 the family of the Cappelletti,— hatted, or more properly, 
 scarlet-hatted, persons : And this accident of nomen- 
 clature, assisted by your present familiar knowledge of 
 the real contests of the sharp mountains with the flat 
 caps, or petasoi, of cloud (locally giving Mont Pilate 
 its title, 'Pileatus,') may in many points curiously 
 illustrate for you that contest of Frederick the Second 
 with Innocent the Fourth, which in the good of it and 
 
102 HIS WORDS 
 
 the evil alike, represents to all time the war of the solid, 
 rational, and earthly authority of the King and state, 
 with the more or less spectral, hooded, imaginative, 
 and nubiform authority of the Pope, and Church." 
 
 To excuse this mania for etymology, which at every 
 moment draws him from his subject, in vain does he 
 say that " philological and philosophical subtlety are 
 one," for the end which he pursues is much less philo- 
 sophical precision than brilliancy of tone. 
 
 But these are only images for the eye of the mind ; 
 Ruskin professes also to attract the physical eye of his 
 reader. To that end he fills his volumes with graphic 
 illustrations. Wherever he can, he gives the plastic 
 instead of the literary example. No written page 
 would avail to show the different manner in which 
 Ghirlandajo and Claude Lorraine interpret the same 
 landscape so well as the juxtaposition of two engrav- 
 ings which Ruskin displays in the fourth volume of 
 Modern Painters. No poetry, however suggestive, 
 could measure for us the remoteness of the bull of 
 Indian art, conventional and cold, from the living 
 bull of a Greek coin so well as the two engravings 
 set side by side on p. 226 of Aratra Pentelici. And 
 although it is more in fun than by way of demon- 
 stration that Ruskin gives together on the same page 
 exquisite reproductions of god-man as he was formerly 
 conceived — the Apollo of Syracuse — and the portrait 
 of the London citizen, — the self-made man wearing 
 a chimneypot hat, with spectacles astride on his 
 nose, and whiskers brushed up, we have at once a 
 
II. IMAGERY 103 
 
 more vivid presentment than we should gain from the 
 longest report ever presented to a society by any 
 anthropologist. 
 
 Ruskin's imagery pervades even the typing of his 
 books, which is inspired by the same desire to fasci- 
 nate the eye. The paragraphs are cleverly divided, 
 the spacing is laboriously studied, italics and capita}' 
 letters appear in great numbers, and words in old 
 French or in Greek insinuate themselves gracefully 
 into the monotony of the English paragraphs. More 
 than that, where the author wishes to show that the 
 nineteenth century has failed in its social duty, he is 
 not content with reproducing as it stands a passage 
 from the Daily Telegraph relating a drama of cruelty 
 and misery which happened in the Spitalfields district. 
 The words themselves might have seemed sufficiently 
 pictorial, but the painter's instinct, which is in Ruskin, 
 needs more colour, and so he prints them in red 
 letters, alleging for reason that " the facts themselves 
 are written in that colour, in a book which we shall 
 all of us, literate or illiterate, have to read our page of, 
 some day." Meanwhile, ere we come to that awful last 
 Prelection, we may peruse in the volume of Sesanm 
 three blinding, bleeding pages which no one who has 
 once read can ever forget — especially if he read them 
 in the evening, by lamplight, for the utter weariness 
 of his flesh ! 
 
 Here Ruskin's passion for minuteness rages in all 
 its intensity. Not but that it has a charm, when it 
 succeeds to generalities. Etymology is a relief after 
 
i 
 
 104 HIS WORDS 
 
 vague eloquence, and it is refreshing to contemplate 
 the colour of a single word after gazing on the tones 
 washed so broadly over the frescoes of history. The 
 images are in constantly varying dimension. From 
 a comprehensive view of the Roman Campagna we 
 pass to close study of details, of an individual, of an 
 hour, of a blade of grass, of a syllable. If our eyes 
 be tired with deciphering such puzzles as the letters of 
 a missal, Ruskin directs them to distant plains spread 
 out in the sunshine ; the V E space of Chintreuil suc- 
 ceeds to the Buisson of Ruysdael. If on the other 
 hand our sight be fatigued with wandering over 
 expanses where it perceives nothing to analyse nor 
 anything distinct to grasp, he recalls it to the beetle 
 which crawls at our feet. Slingelandt after Turner. 
 A panorama is a relief from the microscope, and the 
 microscope from the panorama. At different stages of 
 our journey it seems as if we took up sometimes 
 an entomologist, sometimes a cosmographist. But 
 whether entomologist, cosmographist, or poet, our 
 companion always expresses himself as a painter; and 
 as painter he does not invent or compose his pictures 
 at his good pleasure out of scattered elements. When 
 he describes a landscape it is not any landscape, but 
 one which he has seen at a certain spot, in a certain 
 season, at a certain time, in a certain light. Like 
 Claude Monet painting his Meules, and like Achand 
 working at a landscape, Ruskin would not add a blade 
 of grass he had not seen, or before which he had not 
 stood in rapture. He specifies : it is one hour he 
 
II. IMAGERY 105 
 
 passed " near time of sunset, among the broken 
 masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the 
 Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura." 
 
 " It was spring time, too ; and all were coming 
 forth in clusters crowded for very love ; there was 
 room enough for all, but they crushed their leaves 
 into all manner of strange shapes only to be nearer 
 each other. There was the wood anemone, star after 
 star, closing ever}' now and then into nebulae; and 
 there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal 
 processions of the Mois de Marie, the dark vertical 
 clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with 
 heavy snow, and touched with ivy on the edges — ivy 
 as light and lovely as the vine ; and, ever and anon, 
 a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny 
 places ; and in the more open ground, the vetch, and 
 comfrey, and mezereon, and the small sapphire buds 
 of the Polygala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just 
 a blossom or two, all showered amidst the golden soft- 
 ness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out 
 presently on the edge of the ravine : the solemn murmur 
 of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with 
 the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs ; 
 and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along 
 as it was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk 
 sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly 
 with his wings, and with the shadows of the pines 
 flickering upon his plumage from above ; but with the 
 fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the 
 curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering 
 
106 HIS WORDS 
 
 dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with 
 him as he flew." 
 
 This has been actually seen — not laboriously trans- 
 lated into terms of imagery, but felt in a pictorial form. 
 Here is no man of letters turning painter, but a 
 painter turning writer. We have not a caligraphist 
 labouring to introduce an image here and there into 
 a Book of Hours he has copied : but an illumina- 
 tor who, after long rubbing of his paint-brushes on 
 the vellum, snatches up a pen wherewith to explain 
 himself; and indeed it seems that some of the gold 
 or ultramarine which he has handled so long still 
 remains on the tips of his fingers. Pigments withal 
 are needed in so hard a task, for he will presently 
 undertake to paint the very air. But all the ideas, 
 which he has discerned beneath the outward seeming 
 of masterpieces of art and nature, come to his aid, till 
 at last ideas and images mingled, coalescing and 
 supporting each other, are so entirely fused that it 
 is impossible to say whether the result is a lyric, a 
 water-colour, or a page of natural history. 
 
 "The deep of air that surrounds the earth enters 
 into union with the earth at its surface, and with its 
 waters ; so as to be the apparent cause of their as- 
 cending into life. First, it warms them, and shades, 
 at once, staying the heat of the sun's rays in its own 
 body, but warding their force with its clouds. It 
 warms and cools at once, with traffic of balm and 
 frost ; so that the white wreaths are withdrawn from 
 the field of the Swiss peasant by the glow of Libyan 
 
II. IMAGERY 107 
 
 rock. It gives its own strength to the sea, forms 
 and fills every cell of its foam ; sustains the preci- 
 pices, and designs the valleys of its waves ; gives the 
 gleam to their moving under the night, and the white 
 fire to their plains under sunrise ; lifts their voices 
 along the rocks, bears above them the spray of birds, 
 pencils through them the dimpling of unfooted sands. 
 It gathers out of them a portion in the hollow of 
 its hand : dyes, with that, the hills into dark blue, and 
 their glaciers with dying rose; inlays with that, for 
 sapphire, the dome in which it has to set the cloud; 
 shapes out of that the heavenly flocks : divides them, 
 numbers, cherishes, bears them on its bosom, calls 
 them to their journeys, waits by their rest; feeds from 
 them the brooks that cease not, and strews with them 
 the dews that cease. It spins and weaves their fleece 
 into wild tapestry, rends it, and renews ; and flits 
 and flames, and whispers, among the golden threads, 
 thrilling them with a plectrum of strange fire that tra- 
 verses them to and fro, and is enclosed in them like 
 life. 
 
 " It enters into the surface of the earth, subdues it, 
 and falls together with it into fruitful dust, from which 
 can be moulded flesh ; it joins itself, in dew, to the 
 substance of adamant ; and becomes the green leaf out 
 of the dry ground ; it enters into the separated shapes 
 of the earth it has tempered, commands the ebb and 
 flow of the current of their life, fills their limbs with 
 its own lightness, measures their existence by its 
 indwelling pulse, moulds upon their lips the words by 
 which one soul can be known to another ; is to them 
 
io8 HIS WORDS 
 
 the hearing of the ear,jind the beating of the heart; 
 and, passing away, leaves them to the peace that hears 
 and moves no more." 
 
 Something however would still be lacking if this con- 
 fused mass of ideas and images contained the whole of 
 Ruskin, and if, with-jour intelligence sated, and our 
 imagination filled, he- either left us there or else per- 
 petually prepared the same feast for the imagination, 
 the same repast for the intelligence. Others also in 
 art criticism have known how to evolve the ideal from 
 things of sense, and to make the one a relief to the 
 other. Others have painted while thinking, and have 
 thought while painting, have fed their poetry on the 
 hidden meaning of nature and adorned science with the 
 visible charms of her beauty. But a moment comes 
 when the variety of all this cunning dilettantism, ceasing 
 to refresh, becomes stale and tiresome. Passing hues, 
 ideas flashing and reflecting, new points of view open- 
 ing out, always the same landscape seen from different 
 peaks, the relating of facts and the analysis of race — 
 a spectacle so compounded does not suffice to call into 
 play the whole of our being. Pleasures of imagination, 
 pleasures of the intellect do not suffice alone for life. 
 Our instinct seeks something more, something to en- 
 chain, to captivate, to animate these ideas and images, 
 something which may not only attract our philosophic 
 and artistic nature, but in addition may command all in 
 us which is neither the one nor the other — something 
 to touch the human soul more profoundly and more 
 enduringly — a passion that will knit us yet closer to 
 the religion of the Beautiful. 
 
f 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 PASSION 
 
 AND this passion is that of love. All art critics have 
 written, many have philosophised, few have loved. 
 Too often we find the authenticity of a picture dis- 
 cussed, as though it were security on a mortgage, and 
 the soul of the writer is as the soul of a commission 
 agent, unmoved by its loveliness. The reader soon 
 tires of seeing without understanding ; he tires also 
 of understanding without seeing; but he will weary 
 alike of seeing and understanding if he may not love. 
 With Ruskin we understand, we see, and we love] 
 and by this last I mean that he invokes passion in 
 favour of an epoch, a people, or the talent of an artist ; 
 and as soon as we perceive by what living fibres a 
 statue or a portrait is chained to our own lives, their 
 joys, their sufferings, their misfortunes, and their 
 welfare, we become at once zealous partisans. Dilet- 
 tantism, the disinterested curiosity of the aesthete, is 
 not Ruskin's affair and he derides it. In Lessing 
 we find arguments of the same order more logically 
 connected, and with Michelet the same imagery better 
 followed out. Stendhal gives us psychology, Topffer 
 humour, Fromentin technique, Winckelmann dialectic, 
 
 
no HIS WORDS 
 
 Th. Gautier colour, Reynolds instruction, Taine genera- 
 lisation, Charles Blanc selection; but Ruskin gives 
 us love. Notes of enthusiasm or of anger sound 
 throughout his books : the arguments to which we 
 have alluded serve only as engines of propaganda, 
 the images he has called up appear only as material 
 evidence. If both the one and the other are chaotic, 
 it is because the hand of the advocate trembled with 
 emotion as he marshalled them under the eye of the 
 judge, his reader. Taken one by one these passages- 
 are not superior to many others in our own literature, 
 but taken together, and quickened by the passion of] 
 the fighter, they carry us off our feet. Here love is 
 the cinematograph to give them back their life. 
 
 Love also, as it penetrates every detail with a 
 tenderness we might call Virgilian, smoothes away 
 the wrinkles of the pedant and corrects the poses of 
 the virtuoso. Why have we those thirty pages on 
 clouds, on their equilibrium, on the projection of their 
 shadows, on their geometrical forms, their fleecy 
 masses, their chariots ? Because it must be shown 
 that Turner, who has been a scoff and a mockery, 
 " stands more absolutely alone in this gift of cloud- 
 drawing, than in any other of his great powers . . . 
 none but he ever drew them truly." 
 
 Why these sixteen pages on the branches of trees ? 
 Because against certain interpretations of Claude 
 Lorraine must be vindicated the surpassing beauty 
 of branches and their ramifications which that classic 
 painter expresses, much as a knapsack would express 
 
III. PASSION in 
 
 human shoulders, "and if it be still alleged that such 
 work is nevertheless enough to give any one an ' idea ' 
 of a tree, I answer that it never gave, nor ever will 
 give, an idea of a tree to any one who loves trees." 
 
 Thus understood the description has nothing in it 
 artificial or rhetorical. It is not an intellectual pastime ; 
 often it were truer to say it is a heartache. Read for 
 instance the preface to Queen of the Air, written at 
 Vevey amidst the smoke of factories and steamboats. 
 
 "This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where 
 my work was begun thirty-five years ago, within sight 
 of the snows of the higher Alps. In that half of the 
 permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought 
 upon ever)- scene that I best loved, or tried to make 
 beloved by others. The light which once flushed 
 those pale summits with its rose at dawn, and purple 
 at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which 
 once inlaid the clefts of all their golden crags with 
 azure is now defiled with languid coils of smoke, 
 belched from worse than volcanic fires ; their very 
 glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as 
 if Hell had breathed on them ; the waters that once 
 sank at their feet into crystalline rest are now dimmed 
 and foul, from deep to deep, and shore to shore. 
 These are no careless words — they are accurately — 
 horribly — true. I know what the Swiss lakes were ; 
 no pool of Alpine fountain at its source was clearer. 
 This morning, on the Lake of Geneva, at half a mile 
 from the beach, I could scarcely see my oar-blade a 
 fathom deep. 
 
ii2 HIS WORDS 
 
 " The light, the air, the waters, all defiled ! How of 
 the earth itself? Take this one fact for type of honour 
 done by the modern Swiss to the earth of his native 
 land. There used to be a little rock at the end of 
 the avenue by the port of Neuchatel ; there, the last 
 marble of the foot of Jura, sloping to the blue water, 
 and (at this time of year) covered with bright pink 
 tufts of Saponaria. I went, three days since, to 
 gather a blossom at the place. The goodly native 
 rock and its flowers were covered with the dust and 
 refuse of the town ; but, in the middle of the avenue, 
 was a newly-constructed artificial rockery, with a 
 fountain twisted through a spinning spout, and an 
 inscription on one of its loose-tumbled stones, — 
 
 " Aux Botanistes, 
 Le club Jurassique." 
 
 Ah, masters of modern science, give me back my 
 Athena out of your vials, and seal, if it may be, once 
 more, Asmodeus therein. You have divided the 
 elements, and united them ; enslaved them upon the 
 earth, and discerned them in the stars. Teach us, 
 now, but this of them, which is all that man need 
 know, — that the Air is given to him for his life ; and 
 the Rain to his thirst, and for his baptism; and the 
 Fire for warmth; and the Sun for sight; and the 
 Earth for his meat — and his Rest." 
 
 Be not surprised at this cry of distress about smoke 
 which passes away nor at these tears over a " tuft of 
 saponaria " which has missed the call of spring. This 
 
III. PASSION 113 
 
 passion is all of the virtuoso there is in Ruskin. He 
 describes only because he loves. His affection is be- 
 stowed on everything which pleases the eye ; — on the 
 crystals of which he has celebrated the virtues, the 
 caprices, the quarrels, the sorrows and the slumbers ; 
 on the mountains which he calls the muscles and the 
 sinews of the body of the earth distended by furious 
 and convulsive energy ; on the plains and the low 
 hills — its repose or ease w T hile the muscles rest or 
 sleep ; on the snows and the glaciers whose journeys 
 he has sung ; and on the stones whose history he 
 has told, "the iris of the earth," "the living waves," 
 bruma artifex and the " schism of the mountains." 
 He bestows it on all plants, on those which have their 
 habitation on the soil, like the lilies, or on the surface 
 of the rocks or the trunks of other plants, like the 
 lichens and the mosses. Some remain a year, others 
 many years, others an aeon, but all when they perish 
 pass as the Arab who folds his tent, " poor nomads of 
 the vegetable life who leave no record of themselves." 
 And also on the builder plants, which " raise a struc- 
 ture on the earth and thrust deep down their roots " — 
 the architectural plants. It is given alike to the bud 
 and to the stalk which carries the buds, sacrificing to 
 each some of its diameter, like " the spire of Dijon or 
 turretted fountain of Ulm or the columns of the 
 Verona " ; and also to the leaf, of which he says, " If 
 you can paint a leaf you can paint the whole world"; 
 and to the tree-trunk, which he calls " a messenger to 
 the roots " ; and to the roots themselves, who " have at 
 
 H 
 
ii 4 HIS WORDS 
 
 heart the same desire ; — which is, the one to grow as 
 straight as he can towards bright heaven, the other 
 as deep as he can into dark earth." And he has 
 tears still for those of the buds which have never 
 opened, sacrificed by an inflexible law to the beauty 
 of the whole. And this tenderness, breathed forth 
 with the soft voice of a Virgil, passes over the 
 tops of forests waving in the wind, descends to the 
 motionless leaves, touches the little recluses with the 
 flowing brush of a Corot, and in touching them infuses 
 that life which love gives to all that is beloved. 
 
 "We have found beauty in the tree yielding fruit, 
 and in the herb yielding seed. How of the herb 
 yielding no seed, the fruitless, flowerless lichen of 
 the rock ? 
 
 "Lichen, and mosses (though these last in their 
 luxuriance are deep and rich as herbage, yet both for 
 the most part humblest of the green things that live), 
 
 how of these ? Meek creatures ! the first mercy of 
 
 the earth, veiling with hushed softness its dintless 
 rocks ; creatures full of pity, covering with strange and 
 tender honour the scarred disgrace of ruin, — laying 
 quiet finger on the trembling stones, to teach them 
 rest. No words, that I know of, will say what these 
 mosses are. None are delicate enough, none perfect 
 enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the 
 rounded bosses of furred and beaming green, — the 
 starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the 
 Rock Spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass, — 
 the traceries of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, 
 
III. PASSION 115 
 
 lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every fibre 
 into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken 
 change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for 
 simplest, sweetest offices of grace ? They will not be 
 gathered like the flowers, for chaplet or love-token ; 
 but of these the wild bird will make its nest, and the 
 wearied child his pillow. 
 
 "And, as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last 
 gift to us. When all other service is vain, from plant 
 and tree, the soft mosses and gray lichen take up their 
 watch by the head-stone. The woods, the blossoms, 
 the gift-bearing grasses, have done their parts for a 
 time, but these do service for ever. Trees for the 
 builder's yard, flowers for the bride's chamber, corn 
 for the granary, moss for the grave." 
 
 The human note touched by Ruskin when he calls 
 up the idea of man who suffers and remembers amid 
 the joys of expanding nature which remembers not, 
 allures those who would not have been persuaded by 
 mere admiration for the beauty of plants themselves. 
 For with Ruskin pity for humanity seldom fails to 
 trouble his admiration for things. Flowers do not 
 hide men from him as did the roses of Heliogabalus. 
 Works, even works of art, do not make him forget the 
 workers. In the silent museum, among the exquisite 
 or the grandiose creations that past centuries have 
 provided for our pleasure, Ruskin thinks of the present 
 century, and when injustice triumphs and the wail of 
 misery arises, he turns from the pictures and sends 
 forth a cry of anger against the realities of things, 
 
n6 HIS WORDS 
 
 which appeals to those who have been deaf to his cry 
 of ecstasy. One day at Oxford, while he was conjur- 
 ing up before his pupils' eyes two of the greatest 
 pages of art in the whole world, the Last Judgment 
 of Michael Angelo at the end of the Sistine, with its 
 fall of the damned, and the Paradise of Tintoretto 
 filling the end of the great hall of the Palace of the 
 Doges with its souls in bliss rising to the ceiling, 
 descending on to the plinths, overflowing the doors — 
 at the moment that he was concluding his comparison 
 between these two chef-d'ceuvres by deploring that 
 the Paradise should be doomed to destruction by the 
 bad condition of the hall, all of a sudden he stopped, 
 thinking of other misfortunes. ... It was Paris 
 which was besieged, Paris a prey to famine and fire, 
 and he asked if justice could be claimed for works 
 of art when there was no pity among men. . . . And 
 the calm dissertation on chronology and dialectic 
 was cut short by an excited harangue, which thrilled 
 his auditors to the innermost fibre of their hearts. 
 
 "The years of that time have perhaps come, when 
 we are to be taught to look no more to the dreams 
 of painters, either for knowledge of Judgment, or of 
 Paradise. The anger of Heaven will not longer, I 
 think, be mocked for our amusement ; and perhaps 
 its love may not always be despised by our pride. 
 Believe me, all the arts, and all the treasures of men, 
 are fulfilled and preserved to them only, so far as they 
 have chosen first, with their hearts, not the curse of 
 God, but His blessing. Our Earth is now encumbered 
 
III. PASSION 117 
 
 with ruin, our Heaven is clouded by Death. May we 
 not wisely judge ourselves in some things now, instead 
 of amusing ourselves with the painting of judgments 
 to come ? " 
 
 Some months later the fusillades of Satory inter- 
 rupted his dream and are echoed even in his descrip- 
 tions. It is indeed a case of " the heart making big 
 the words," according to the old writer's adage, caus- 
 ing the sestheticist, before the hackneyed picture of 
 an illustrated journal, to burst forth into apostrophes, 
 exasperated, confused, extravagant, but very human 
 and very rarely found among the words of art critics 
 or collectors of curios. 
 
 " Did you chance, my friends, any of you, to see, 
 the other day, the 83rd number of the Graphic, with 
 the picture of the Queen's concert in it ? All the 
 fine ladies sitting so trimly, and looking so sweet, 
 and doing the whole duty of woman — wearing their 
 fine clothes gracefully; and the pretty singer, white- 
 throated, warbling 'Home, sweet home' to them, so 
 morally, and melodiously ! Here was yet to be our 
 ideal of virtuous life, thought the Graphic! Surely, 
 we are safe back with our virtues in satin slippers 
 and lace veils; — and our Kingdom of Heaven is 
 come again, with observation, and crown diamonds 
 of the dazzlingest. Cherubim and Seraphim in toil- 
 ettes de Paris, — (bleu-de-ciel — vert d'olivier-de — 
 Noe" — mauve de colombe-fusillee,) dancing to Coote 
 and Tinney's band; and vulgar Hell reserved for 
 the canaille, as heretofore! Vulgar Hell shall be 
 
1 1 8 HIS WORDS 
 
 didactically pourtrayed, accordingly; (see page 17,) 
 — Wickedness going its ways to its poor Home — 
 bitter-sweet. Ouvrier and petroleuse — prisoners at 
 last — glaring wild on their way to die. 
 
 " Alas ! of these divided races, of whom one was 
 appointed to teach and guide the other, which has 
 indeed sinned deepest — the unteaching, or the un- 
 taught ? — which now are guiltless — these, who perish, 
 or those — who forget ? 
 
 " Ouvrier and petroleuse ; they are gone their way 
 — to their death. But for these, the Virgin of France 
 shall yet unfold the oriflamme above their graves, and 
 lay her blanched lilies on their smirched dust. Yes, 
 and for these, great Charles shall rouse his Roland, 
 and bid him put ghostly trump to lip, and breathe a 
 point of war; and the helmed Pucelle shall answer 
 with a wood-note of Domremy ; yes, and for these 
 the Louis they mocked, like his master, shall raise 
 his holy hands, and pray God's peace." 
 
 Concluded after this fashion, the analysis of a work 
 of art does not dry up the heart. The study of im- 
 pressions experienced, the culture of the Ego, has 
 only rendered it more kindly to human sorrow, just as 
 a tree is pruned to make it yield more fruit. Ruskin 
 warms with a ray of love his analysis of the human 
 mind, as well as his analysis of nature and his ana- 
 lysis of art. When in his lectures at Woolwich he 
 probed the soul of the young soldier, his tenderness 
 was the same that he lavished on the mosses of the 
 forest or the Paradise of Tintoretto. 
 
III. PASSION 119 
 
 "To be heroic in danger," cries he, in appealing to 
 the wives of the English officers, " is little ; you are 
 Englishwomen. To be heroic in change and sway 
 of fortune is little ; — for do you not love ? To be 
 patient through the great chasm and pause of loss is 
 little ; — for do you not still love in heaven ? But to 
 be heroic in happiness ; to bear yourselves gravely 
 and righteously in the dazzling of the sunshine of 
 morning; not to forget the God in whom you trust, 
 when He gives you most ; not to fail those who trust 
 you, when they seem to need you least; this is the 
 difficult fortitude. It is not in the pining of absence, 
 not in the peril of battle, not in the wasting of sickness, 
 that your prayer should be most passionate, or 3'our 
 guardianship most tender. Pray, mothers and maidens, 
 for your young soldiers in the bloom of their pride ; 
 pray for them, while the only dangers round them are 
 in their own wayward wills ; watch you, and pray, 
 when they have to face, not death, but temptation." 
 
 So Love it is which, having veiled whatever is too 
 minute in the analysis, mitigates whatever is too 
 paradoxical in the irony of the master. But the 
 impulse of his thoughts proceeds quite as often from 
 humour. His persiflage disconcerts those whom his 
 lyrical outbursts exalt. He scatters his hearers, 
 and gathers them to him again ; shocks them and 
 charms them in a breath. He will not lull you to 
 sleep as a poet with the rhythmic flowing of a tender 
 and noble song; but at his most lyric moment will 
 rudely wake you with a violent paradox propounded 
 
120 HIS WORDS 
 
 in a manner familiar and slightly oratorical, and indeed 
 qualified by himself as too antithetic. 
 
 "The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic 
 element in the soldier's work seems to be — that he is 
 paid little for it — and regularly : while you traffickers, 
 and exchangers, and others occupied in presumably 
 benevolent business, like to be paid much for it — and 
 by chance. I never can make out how it is that a 
 knight-errant does not expect to be paid for his trouble, 
 but a pedlar-err arri always does ; — that people are will- 
 ing to take hard knocks for nothing, but never to sell 
 ribands cheap ; that they are ready to go on fervent 
 crusades, to recover the tomb of a buried God, but 
 never on any travels to fulfil the orders of a living 
 one ;— that they will go anywhere barefoot to preach 
 their faith, but must be well bribed to practise it, and 
 are perfectly ready to give the Gospel gratis, but never 
 the loaves and fishes." 
 
 Enough, you cry. . . . But the author has tired even 
 more quickly than we. His irony takes no delight in 
 itself or in cold and fruitless play. For it does not 
 proceed from want of fellow-feeling or contempt of 
 mankind, but from indignation against evil and hypoc- 
 risy, — that is to say from love, — not from a heart 
 which does not beat, but from a heart which beats 
 too quickly. 
 
 Even his habit of paradox is but a means to vary 
 effects and another form of passion ; and it leads 
 always to charity. Ruskin tells us that we should 
 take for a device of noble life, "Let us eat and drink, 
 
III. PASSION 121 
 
 for to-morrow we die." Is this a paradox ? No ; 
 listen to what follows : " . . . but let us all eat and 
 drink. And not a few only, enjoining fast to the rest." 
 " Dress yourselves nicely and dress everybody else 
 nicely. Lead the fashions for the poor first, make 
 them look well first, and you yourselves will look — in 
 ways of which you have now no conception — all the 
 better," says he to women, and he goes on to develop 
 his thought with an irony so keen that it would be 
 unbearable, did not his sarcasm melt into a love-song 
 as legendary sword-points of old blossomed into 
 flowers. 
 
 " Let those arches and pillars . . . alone, young 
 ladies : it is you whom God likes to see well decorated, 
 not them. Keep your roses for your hair — your em- 
 broidery for your petticoats. You are yourselves the 
 church, dears ; and see that you be finally adorned, as 
 women professing godliness with the precious stone 
 of good works, which may be quite briefly defined 
 for the present, as ' decorating the entire tabernacle ' ; 
 and clothing your poor sisters with yourselves. Put 
 roses also in their hair, put precious stones also on 
 their breasts ; see that they also are clothed in your 
 purple and scarlet, with other delights; that they 
 also learn to read the gilded heraldry of the sky ; 
 and, upon the earth, be taught, not only the labours 
 of it, but the loveliness. For them, also, let the here- 
 ditary jewel recall their father's pride, their mother's 
 beauty." 
 
 When it has attained these heights of charity, Love 
 
122 HIS WORDS 
 
 can only rise higher by coming to Christ. Is it to be 
 led to Him by a theological dissertation ? by a pious 
 biography ? No, but by one of the most secular 
 things in the world — a lyric which the aestheticist 
 recites smiling at the end of a lecture on the educa- 
 tion of women, entitled "Queens' Gardens," in Sesame 
 and Lilies. For all Ruskin's aesthetical passion is 
 saturated with the poetry which the Gospel holds in 
 store for all, even for singers and romanticists who 
 repudiate its teaching but echo its charm. And just 
 when the last words seem to have been said — at the 
 moment when he has made the figures in the fres- 
 coes and the leaves of the trees speak their human 
 utmost, there by a movement of infinite adroitness 
 he sets them vibrating to the harmonies of Heaven. 
 And those fervent or mystic souls who have been 
 already guided by the dignity of charity to the 
 aesthetic of apparel and adornment, attain now to 
 the true aesthetic of the plants and flowers, which 
 rise like Christ in the spring-time and are adorned 
 with fair colours by the subtle perception of the Divine 
 Gardener : — 
 
 " ' Come into the garden, Maud, 
 For the black bat, night, has flown, 
 And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, 
 And the musk of the roses blown ?' 
 
 "Will you not go down among them? — among 
 those sweet living things, whose new courage, sprung 
 from the earth with the deep colour of heaven upon it, 
 is starting up in strength of goodly spire ; and whose 
 
III. PASSION 123 
 
 purity, washed from the dust, is opening, bud by bud, 
 into the flower of promise ; — and still they turn to you, 
 and for you, ' The Larkspur listens — I hear, I hear ! 
 And the Lily whispers — I wait.' 
 
 " Did you notice that I missed two lines when I 
 read }-ou that first stanza ; and think that I had 
 forgotten them ? Hear them now : — 
 
 " ' Come into the garden, Maud, 
 For the black bat, night, has flown, 
 Come into the garden, Maud, 
 I am here at the gate, alone.' 
 
 "Who is it, think you, who stands at the gate of 
 this sweeter garden alone, waiting for you ? Did you 
 ever hear, not of a Maud, but a Madeleine, who went 
 down to her garden in the dawn, and found One 
 waiting at the gate, whom she supposed to be the gar- 
 dener? Have you not sought Him often; — sought 
 Him in vain, all through the night; — sought him in 
 vain, at the gate of that old garden where the fiery 
 sword is set ? He is never there ; but at the gate 
 of this garden He is waiting always — waiting to take 
 your hand — ready to go down to see the fruits of the 
 valley, to see whether the vine has flourished, and the 
 pomegranate budded. There you shall see with Him 
 the little tendrils of the vines that His hand is guiding 
 —there you shall see the pomegranate springing where 
 His hand cast the sanguine seed ; — more : you shall 
 see the troops of the angel keepers that, with their 
 wings, wave away the hungry birds from the path-sides 
 where He has sown, and call to each other between 
 
124 HIS WORDS 
 
 the vineyard rows, ' Take us the foxes, the little foxes, 
 that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes.' 
 Oh — you queens — you queens ! among the hills and 
 happy greenwood of this land of yours, shall the foxes 
 have holes, and the birds of the air have nests ; and in 
 your cities, shall the stones cry out against you, that 
 they are the only pillows where the Son of Man can 
 lay His head ? " 
 
 If this ecstatic tone were prolonged it would quickly 
 exhaust all that can vibrate in us. But Ruskin 
 presently lowers it to the pitch of conversation, and 
 behold the prophet, who was crying upon the moun- 
 tain, now seated in a rocking chair, and crossing his 
 legs to read the newspaper ! 
 
 While enthusiasm and irony contest his thought, the 
 period and the brilliant touch fight for mastery in his 
 style, the one by its masterful continuity, to sweep 
 the reader away; the other by its fanciful mobility, to 
 save him from exhaustion. It is the first of these 
 two forms of style, which predominates in the earlier 
 half of Ruskin's life-work from 1843 to i860, when 
 Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, George Herbert, John- 
 son, and Gibbon seem to have been his models. His 
 great phrases with their facile cadences and their 
 sonorous periods, containing as many as 619 words 
 and 80 intermediate signs of punctuation, unroll them- 
 selves slowly, like those long waves that are of no 
 moment to a swimmer, but in succession curve and 
 swell one after the other until the last breaks, and 
 all the tossing foam, and all the noisy tumult leave 
 
III. PASSION 125 
 
 scarcely so much as a trace of brine on the shore. 
 And all this hubbub is pervaded by a science of 
 melody, of rhythm, which, if we are to believe Mr. 
 Frederick Harrison, is " without rival in English 
 literature." But after i860 everything is changed. 
 No longer have we that passion for theory of a 
 young man who with all life before him fights de- 
 liberately and studies his attitudes. We become con- 
 scious of a combatant who means once for all to strike 
 home. Those long waves are no more ; the sea is 
 short and rude. A hail-storm of crisp apt phrases 
 falls upon the reader, and yet for all their brevity 
 these reflect what there is of blessedness in earth 
 and heaven. Here is a very armoury of sunrays. 
 We walk no longer by the dim light of the Seven 
 Lamps of Architecture but in the clear Attic sunshine 
 of the Queen of the Air. Ruskin has washed the 
 bitumen from his canvases, and even repudiates half- 
 tones, not graduating the passage from style to style 
 any more than the painters of his country graduate 
 the intervals of their discordant tints. He will not 
 gloss his surface over. There is no padding. Every- 
 thing is ideas. And as if to compress a greater 
 number of ideas into the space — like those flowers 
 " which press one on the other in love " — not only 
 his phrases but his words are cut short. The end 
 of the preface to Queen of the Air is almost entirely 
 composed of monosyllables. It seems as if the 
 splendours of style embarrass him as he rises into the 
 pure region of philosophy, and like an aeronaut who 
 
 ' 
 
126 HIS WORDS 
 
 in order to mount higher throws out his superfluous 
 gear, Ruskin makes jetsam of the " long periods," and 
 the "bombastic phrases," the " quaintnesses " of the 
 time of Elizabeth, " the inversions, the long exegetic 
 sentences," and the purpurei panni and the cascade 
 fashions and the alliterations, — all the superfluities 
 of Seven Lamps and of Modem Painters ,i--and his 
 style, thereby lightened, makes direct, precise and 
 prompt, for its goal. 
 
 And now we have the real Ruskin, and may gather 
 here the ripest though not the most brilliant fruits 
 of his mind : intellectual images flowering into ideas, 
 ideas transformed into images, reveries developed into 
 polemics, analyses completed by acts of worship. 
 Ruskin still keeps enough antithesis to give him dis- 
 tinctness, sufficient erudition to give him balance, too 
 much poetry to let him grovel, too much science to 
 let him soar, and to save him from being quite the 
 dupe of his heart, he retains withal a certain humour, 
 and to save him from being at all the dupe of his 
 intellect, a great store of love. 
 
 In illustration of this we may cite his "Letter to 
 young girls " on the manner in which they should 
 practice charity. 
 
 " If you can afford it, get your dresses made by a 
 good dressmaker, with utmost attainable precision and 
 perfection ; but let this good dressmaker be a poor 
 person, living in the country; not a rich person living 
 in a large house in London. Devote a part of every 
 day to thorough needlework, in making as pretty 
 
III. PASSION 
 
 127 
 
 dresses as you can for poor people, who have not 
 time nor taste to make them nicely for themselves. 
 
 " Never seek for amusement, but be always ready 
 to be amused. The least thing has play in it, — the 
 slightest word, wit, — when your hands are busy 
 and your heart is free. But if you make the aim 
 of life amusement, the day will come when all the 
 agonies of a pantomime will not bring you an honest 
 laugh. 
 
 " What of fine dress your people insist upon your 
 wearing, take — and wear proudly and prettily, for 
 their sakes; but so far as in you lies, be sure that 
 every day you are labouring to clothe some poorer 
 creatures. And if you cannot clothe, at least help 
 with your own hands. You can make your own bed ; 
 wash your own plate ; brighten your own furniture, — 
 if nothing else. 
 
 "Don't fret nor tease yourself about questions of 
 religion, far less other people. Don't wear white 
 crosses, nor black dresses, nor caps with lappets. 
 Nobody has a right to go about in an offen- 
 sively celestial uniform, as if it were more their busi- 
 ness, or privilege, than it is everybody's, to be God's 
 servants. 
 
 "Help your companions, but don't talk religious 
 sentiment to them ; and serve the poor, but for your 
 lives, you little monkeys, don't preach to them. They 
 are probably without in the least knowing it, fifty 
 times better Christians than you; and if anybody is 
 to preach, let them. Make friends of them when they 
 
128 HIS WORDS 
 
 are nice, as you do of nice rich people ; feel with them, 
 work with them, and if you are not at last sure it is 
 a pleasure to you both to see each other, keep out of 
 their way. For material charity, let older and wiser 
 people see to it ; and be content, like Athenian maids 
 in the procession of their home-goddess, with the 
 honour of carrying the basket." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MODERN SPIRIT 
 
 THE words we have cited are instinct with the 
 spirit of our own day. They are full of analytical 
 curiosity, cosmopolitan imagery, and human tender- 
 ness. No other epoch could have inspired or have 
 understood them. Consider on the one hand what 
 are the three great characteristics of our modern life. 
 It is more analytical than that of our fathers, that is 
 to say, it examines into the reason of its impres- 
 sions ; it is more cosmopolitan, that is to say, it is 
 coloured by recollections gleaned from a larger field ; 
 and it is more socially conscious, that is to say, 
 more conscious of the difficulties and more conscious 
 of the strife of classes. If on the other hand one 
 is to sum up the impressions which the Ruskinian 
 criticism leaves with us as compared with ordinary 
 criticism, we perceive that it embarks on a more 
 detailed analysis of artistic work — that it draws its 
 examples from a greater variety of countries and 
 landscapes, and that it is more penetrated with the 
 social significance of art and with its obscure relations 
 to the life of the masses. And it is in these three 
 most obvious aspects of his work that the man of 
 
 I2Q J 
 
1 3 o HIS WORDS 
 
 Brantwood is seen to be not an author of a past time, 
 but an author of the time present or even to come. 
 Each day which passes now, like a leaf which falls 
 from a tree, reveals a little more of the heaven that 
 he conceived. As our life becomes more and more 
 analytic, more wandering and more restless, as we 
 gain greater knowledge and more store of imagina- 
 tion and of human pity, so we feel more sympathy 
 for Ruskin's science, his cosmopolitanism, and his 
 social theory. Those who, deceived by the Tory 
 and Lake-school phases of his mind, term him 
 "antiquated" and out of date, have neither under- 
 stood his work nor the life of our age. 
 
 In every age no doubt there have been analysts of 
 nature and of art, but they have not always had at 
 their disposal the material and the documents either 
 of science or of contemporary historical criticism. In 
 every age there have been artists, but these have 
 not always been able to select examples from every 
 museum in Europe, to study the hues of every glacier, 
 or to dip their brushes in the water of every lake. In 
 every age there have been apostles, and hearts full of 
 sympathy for the misery of the poor, but the domi- 
 nating idea of brotherhood with the needy has not 
 always thus haunted the mind of the richer classes. 
 Nor in bygone days has humanity lived continually 
 in gloomy or feverish expectation of the inaugura- 
 tion of a new era. Ruskin therefore — like the nurs- 
 ling described by La Bruyere who, strengthened by 
 her milk, turns to beat his nurse— is fighting his 
 
IV. THE MODERN SPIRIT 131 
 
 own century, and the very words he uses do but 
 reflect the force of what he execrates. 
 
 In listening a moment ago to his analytic discourse^ 
 we were reminded of Mazzini's words : " Ruskin's ] 
 is the most analytic mind in Europe at this moment." 
 He carries scientific investigation into the very heart,/' 
 of poetry — pulling the words to pieces to examine 
 their structure, and the motive of their imagery or 
 their song ; resolving the massing of clouds into 
 geometric figures the better to understand their per- 
 spective and their schemes of light and shade, making r 
 a study of the geology of Turner's mountains, of the 
 botany of Claude Lorraine's trees, of the psychology 
 of Delia Robbia's angels, of the physiology of Polla- 
 juolo's or Ghiberti's birds, of the pathology of the 
 sculptured head of Santa Maria Formosa, of the 
 dynamics of the bas-reliefs of John of Pisa, — search- 
 ing all science to find scaffolding for his aesthetical 
 structure. And in the process he has given rein to 
 his feelings for or against many things — the argu- 
 ments of Saussure, of Darwin, of Tyndall, of James 
 Forbes, of Alphonse Fabre, of Heim ; putting forward 
 his own theories on the movement of serpents, the 
 progression of glaciers ; bethinking him as he faces 
 a Greek or a Florentine sculpture of the " variability 
 of species," ever anxious to give the appearance of 
 scientific experiment to his systems. His books as 
 we have seen are filled with examples disposed in 
 the form of equations, with arguments pro and con, 
 and sometimes accompanied by diagrams. As early 
 
132 HIS WORDS 
 
 as 1845 at Venice he was studying by means of 
 the daguerreotype architectural details, which till 
 then had escaped attention, and in 1849 ne was 
 photographing the Matterhorn — doubtless the first 
 to do so. To turn over his books is to turn the 
 pages of a Lionardo manuscript, pages closely packed, 
 rich and sparkling — here the dimensions of a cata- 
 pult following a treatise on the muscles, sketches 
 overlapping mathematical calculations, caricatures in- 
 sinuating themselves among notes on volitation, and 
 mechanics side by side with landscapes. Ruskin, like 
 Lionardo, felt in all things the beauty of science, and 
 in every case endeavoured to formulate a science of 
 beauty. As we read we may well doubt whether he 
 Ts most at home in a museum or a laboratory ; and 
 the figure of him that suggests itself is such as that 
 of Pasteur as once M. Edelfeldt represented him, 
 eye and thought intent upon a jar which he handles 
 in the brilliant light of a clinical laboratory. And it 
 ceases to astonish us that Sir John Lubbock, when 
 asked whether Ruskin or Goethe had done most for 
 science, replied that Ruskin had " undoubtedly done 
 very much more valuable work, and that without any 
 pretensions to profound scientific knowledge, he had 
 an extraordinary natural gift for observation and 
 seemed to know by instinct what to observe, what 
 was important amidst so much that was fanciful 
 and poetical." 
 
 In our first glance at the main outlines of his 
 opinions we noted that they were preoccupied with 
 
IV. THE MODERN SPIRIT 133 
 
 social theories even more strongly than with science. 
 In addition to those works which treat specially of 
 political economy, such as Unto this Last, Munera 
 Pulveris, Time and Tide, Crown of Wild Olive, 
 Fors Clavigera, A Joy for Ever, there are many 
 others that touch the same subject at some point. 
 The sestheticist has rarely been able to write a whole 
 chapter on Art without some recollection breaking in 
 upon his serenity — of those human beings " who have 
 a strong objection to hearing a disquisition on Michael 
 Angelo when they are cold." Throughout his works 
 Ruskin is the same man who from the Hotel Danieli 
 at Venice wrote in Fors Clavigera : — 
 
 " Here is a little grey cockle-shell, lying beside me, 
 which I gathered the other evening, out of the dust 
 of the Island of St. Helena ; and a brightly spotted 
 snail-shell, from the thistly sands of Lido ; and I want 
 to set myself to draw these, and describe them in 
 peace. 'Yes,' all my friends say, 'that is my business; 
 why can't I mind it, and be happy ? ' But alas ! my 
 prudent friends, little enough of all that I have a mind 
 to may be permitted me. For this green tide that 
 eddies by my threshold is full of floating corpses, and 
 I must leave my dinner to bury them, since I cannot 
 save : and put my cockle-shell in cap, and take my 
 staff in hand, to seek an unencumbered shore." 
 
 These words were written over twenty years ago. 
 They might well have seemed incomprehensible to 
 the dilettanti travelling that winter in Italy. But in 
 these days they are understood, or at any rate there 
 
i 3 4 HIS WORDS 
 
 is some inkling abroad of their profound and sad 
 significance. The world is no longer surprised if the 
 tourist pays as much attention to the social problems 
 of a country, in which he travels, as to its stones and 
 monuments. And when Ruskin adds that : " It is 
 the vainest of affectations to try and put beauty into 
 shadows, while all real things which cast them are 
 left in deformity and pain," and when he thereby 
 makes a pretext in the middle of a dissertation on 
 Art for talking to us of strikes, wages, and co-opera- 
 tion, we shall find his words even more applicable to 
 industrial life to-day than they were yesterday. 
 
 At any rate they respond to the nomadic instinct 
 in us and to our cosmopolitan curiosity. Ruskin is 
 not content to teach at Oxford only ; he follows his 
 pupils on their journeys to Amiens, Florence, and 
 Venice, — to save them from the heretical suggestions 
 of Murray, Baedeker, Woerl, and such like. He 
 follows them by means of little thin volumes of twenty 
 pages for pocket use, bound in pliant covers, quickly 
 read, and easy to manage, for they do not deprive the 
 disciple of a hand or impede him in the purchase of 
 an armful of almond blossom in the Lung' Arno on 
 the road back from the Uffizi, nor in feeding the 
 pigeons at S. Mark's on the way to the Palace of the 
 Doges. These little books are Mornings in Florence, 
 S. Mark's Rest, Our Fathers have told us, and The 
 Bible of Amieits. When we reach the chapel or the 
 museum out comes the book, and this little whisper- 
 ing demon in red, all promises, and surprises, pierces 
 
IV. THE MODERN SPIRIT 135 
 
 the old walls and the old canvases, and through 
 them opens out to us horizons of ideas, valleys of 
 dreams, and centuries of history. It is as though 
 one of the window-holes in that interminable corridor 
 of the Ponte Vecchio, connecting the Uffizi and the 
 Pitti Palaces, were thrown open, and we turned from 
 the innumerable dingy portraits of Grand Dukes to 
 the flowing Arno and to Florence, and to the marble 
 mountains and the gardens and the snowy summits, 
 to the villas of the Decameroni, and the monasteries 
 of saints and the loggias and the porticos. A whole 
 vision of living nature, bright and gay, speaking 
 straight to the heart, bursts in among the dead things, 
 saying to the wanderer : Weary one ! Be not sad ! 
 All that thou seest is living yet. In the pictures the 
 trees have faded and the flowers are brown, but 
 outside there are green forests, and perfumed flowers, 
 running rivers, smiling women, fighting warriors, 
 mobs to curse or applaud, — and the breezes which 
 sweep through the tops of the cypresses of San 
 Miniato, or raise the lily heads at Fiesole, are as 
 strong and as sweet as when they garnered perfume 
 of white lilies for Fra Angelico, or blew away over 
 the blue sky golden lilies on the banners of Charles 
 the Eighth. 
 
 By thus infusing new life into faded works of art 
 and cities grown cold with age, and by mingling 
 with his criticism the unfailing charm of nature and 
 melancholy born of thought, Ruskin endows us with 
 a new sense to wait upon our travels. Without him 
 
136 HIS WORDS 
 
 we had a great deal — express trains enabling us to 
 rush from one monument to another and to com- 
 pare the portal of Amiens immediately with the 
 bronze gates of Ghiberti ; sleeping-cars allowing us 
 to arrive among these masterpieces with heads clear 
 and minds attuned, prompt to receive the most delicate 
 messages of art. We had hotels and the almost 
 magical apparatus of modern comfort wherein a 
 finger on one button annihilates distance, on another 
 produces light, on a third heat; where a polyglot 
 and provident establishment spares us even the 
 fatigue of giving an order, where everything tacitly 
 conspires to leave the mind its penetrative power 
 unimpaired between one museum and another, and 
 the soul all its strength to summon up the ghosts of 
 past ages in the intervals of a historian's lectures. 
 In a manner, then, we had all that was needful for. 
 seeing the world ; only we needed an excuse for so 
 seeing it and for enjoying it when we saw. Ruskin 
 has supplied all this. We were walking forward on 
 our own way; he came and opened a new horizon. 
 We had eyes and saw not ; Ruskin gave us eyes to 
 see. And withal he gave us plausible reasons for our 
 wandering habit, and noble pretexts for our amuse- 
 ments, and he told us where we were going and 
 why. Chiefly he has addressed his own compatriots, 
 and because they believe him they are now in- 
 finitely more observant of all things of art in their 
 path, and study these with an ecstatic air to be 
 sought in vain among such as do not belong to what 
 
IV. THE MODERN SPIRIT 137 
 
 the sacristans in Italy already term " the Ruskin 
 Brotherhood." 
 
 But do they really understand these things the 
 better ? I dare not wager so, but at least they 
 know that an Englishman has understood them. 
 Have they a greater enjoyment of them ? At least 
 they know that one of their own race and faith 
 has enjoyed them, and that for scientific reasons 
 and with moral motives, which it is honourable to 
 share. He it is who by his sense of history, and the 
 raising of dead men to life, has made them realise 
 that countless generations have paused in front of 
 these monuments "with admiration, joy, and love." 
 Therefore we also now admire, enjoy, and love. And 
 by this continuity of worship, we seem to be linked 
 with the great world-soul which has vibrated and will 
 ever vibrate in contemplation of the same horizons. 
 On the balcony of the Palace of the Doges, or at 
 the windows of the Campanile of Santa Maria del 
 Fiore, or again on the highest turret of the Cathedral 
 of Milan, whence may be espied the fleecy blue of 
 the distant Alps, should you cast a glance at the 
 stones on which you lean you will see them scrawled 
 and hacked with inscribed names and dates — names 
 of inhabitants of every village in Europe, and dates of 
 every year, good or bad, in the latter half of this 
 century. All these folk of humble condition — mainly 
 German or English, who occupy most of the time 
 they spend there in writing their unknown names 
 on these illustrious marbles, in attaching something 
 
138 HIS WORDS 
 
 of their ephemeral life to these all but eternal monu- 
 ments — these folk are feeling some instinctive de- 
 sire to join in admiration with the rest of humanit}'. 
 Assuredly they acquire a sense of increased nobility 
 by contact with these monuments, the goal of so 
 many pilgrimages ; and they imagine they are honour- 
 ing themselves, while in fact they dishonour the 
 monument by their shameless scrawls. This rare 
 visit is a gleam of poetry, in their existence, to be 
 recalled again and again, while they sew by the 
 hearth at home or smoke in the halls of the " Bier- 
 brauerei," — nameless travellers, swift-flowing ripples 
 of the river, chasing each other past a town, and 
 reflecting for an instant the palaces, the cathedrals, 
 the mountains, the forests, and all the transient and 
 diverse colours of the banks, and thence returning 
 to the ocean whence they came — to the crowd and 
 routine of every day, and the grey monotonous life, 
 with no light to cast a shade. . . . But if at the 
 moment that these rays darted upon the wayfarers 
 they were asked, " What is it you think ? What 
 is it you feel ? " they would not be able to say. 
 They who have read Ruskin would know — for what 
 they have not seen in the heavens they find in his 
 diagrams, what they have not divined in the stones 
 they discover in his antitheses, what they have for- 
 gotten to love among tangible and living realities, 
 they adore in the images which a great poet has 
 painted in tones of love. 
 
 Ruskin may be said then to speak to us as a 
 
IV. THE MODERN SPIRIT 139 
 
 cicerone more than as a professor or a theorist on 
 society. He magnifies his functions into a divine 
 mission and turns the inn, wherein he preaches, to a 
 temple, which need not be the less sacred to us 
 because it happens to be provided with lifts and 
 electric light. We can be thrilled in a castle by the 
 recollection of the sojourn of a king, or in a monas- 
 tery which shows us the dwelling of a saint. For the 
 castle was formerly the outward sign of power ; the 
 monastery that of zeal and devotion. Both stood on 
 mountains or plains as abiding-places for those who 
 sought to know the world in its grandeur or in its 
 charity. In these days when kings alight at hotels, 
 and when wandering saints neither wear peculiar 
 garb nor dwell amid ideal architecture, the inn has 
 inherited the poetry of the ancient manorial or mon- 
 astic building. It may be an ancient palace, as 
 at Venice ; or it may be the precincts of a chapel, as 
 on the shores of the Mediterranean. So an apostle 
 may well teach there, and his eloquence may be 
 displayed without let or hindrance. Ruskin is just 
 such an apostle of cosmopolitan caravansaries. He 
 is like an archangel to Cook's tourists, or a railway- 
 station prophet, and the locomotive gives him night 
 and day his column both of fire and smoke. In the 
 days gone by, the days of undisturbed lives and 
 rooted existences, this function of an aestheticist, and 
 teacher of the people, would not have been under- 
 stood. But now that restless humanity upsets its 
 household gods, extinguishes the fire on its hearth, 
 
140 HIS WORDS 
 
 and goes forth to visit every shrine, to the foot of 
 every mountain, to cities long dead but still cherished 
 as reliquaries of the past — to gather knowledge con- 
 cerning this earth which we find too small and that 
 past which we find too short — now that doubtful of 
 the future we seek rather to prolong our existence 
 in this world, to live through past centuries by 
 identifying ourselves with lives pictured only in 
 museums, or to get experience of the complex life 
 and aspirations of the crowds about our path — surely 
 for such an age this aesthetical guide becomes like the 
 priest — a minister of the Infinite. . . . He brings back 
 for us the life of buried ages and unknown peoples. 
 His words endow us with life; they are the life we 
 lead and still more the}' are the life we desire to lead 
 — analytic like our scientific life, suggestive like our 
 cosmopolitan life, unquiet like our social life. These 
 words share all the vivacity of life, because they touch 
 on all subjects, and guide towards all lands ; share 
 all its contradictions, because they reflect all impres- 
 sions and all systems; share all its subtlety, because 
 they mingle enthusiasm with irony and humour with 
 love. And if here and there they seem to hold 
 something of mystery, may it not be because life 
 with its ever recurring problems and infinity is 
 scarcely less mysterious than death itself. . . . 
 
PART I I I 
 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
PART III 
 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 ANCIENT wisdom has said that it is impossible to 
 plunge twice into a river and find it the same flood. 
 As we close the varied volumes filled with striking 
 pages of analysjs^ imagery, and passion, we feel in- 
 clined to echo, . It is impossible to plunge twice and 
 find the same Ruskin. His contradictions are the joy 
 of his adversaries, and furrow as with a plough the 
 foreheads of his disciples. M. Augustin Filon once 
 stated that he would undertake to extract from the 
 works of Ruskin the most contradictory doctrines, 
 and Mr. Whistler amused himself by collecting into 
 a large volume aphorisms which may be said to rival 
 in distinctness that renowned artist's Symphony in 
 Black. After reading one page of the Master we 
 think we have grasped his idea ; after reading ten we 
 feel doubtful ; after twenty we are lost. With all the 
 subtleties, all the waverings, all the convolutions of 
 his various aesthetical, religious, and social systems, 
 he is ever an ethereal and elusive magician. If we 
 try to imprison him in a logical formula, he escapes 
 
 in smoke like the genius of the Thousand and one 
 
 143 
 
144 HIS ^ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 Nights, and we seem to have before us a host of 
 little things, precious and varied, glittering and attrac- 
 tive, but fitful and changeful as the flame or the 
 wave. 
 
 And yet the river remains the same, and flows in 
 the same place, and is called by the same name as 
 when our grandfather took us by the hand to show 
 it us for the first time. This leaping flame which 
 peoples with strange figures the great hall of the old 
 family mansion recalls in its general aspect the flame 
 that warmed our childish fingers, and gave us the 
 beautiful dreams now vanished up the chimney. No 
 wave is precisely the wave of yesterday, but the river 
 is unchanged. No flame reproduces photographically 
 the arabesques of years gone by, but the hearth is 
 unchanged. Ruskin is like a river and like a flame. 
 He never resembles himself, he renews himself 
 unceasingly, and yet he is always the same. His 
 thoughts spring ever from the same lofty region. 
 They go ever to swell the same far-distant ocean. 
 What is this source ? Where is this ocean ? 
 
 Let us go in search of it. If in the search we 
 disturb some established prejudice founded on some 
 isolated text of Ruskin's, our excuse must be the fact 
 that this is not an analysis of one or other of his works, 
 but a general view of his thought from 1843 U P to 
 1888, — his thoughts on Nature, his thoughts on Art, 
 his thoughts on Life. And if perchance disciples more 
 ardent than clear-sighted, or adversaries more ingenious 
 than honest, have even in England adopted some false 
 
HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 145 
 
 ideas of the Ruskinian doctrine, this proves nothing 
 against the accuracy of the synthesis which follows, 
 but pleads only for its necessity. Texts of the Master 
 which seem to contradict us may indeed be easy 
 to find, and as these texts are always aphoristic 
 and absolute in form, they seem to exclude any 
 other opinion. This is not, however, really the case. 
 They are back-waters of the stream, eddies which 
 momentarily and locally run counter to the current, 
 but they do not change it. And even their violence 
 does not affect the trend we believe we discern and 
 wish to determine in his thought. 
 
 That thought — let there be no mistake — is Ruskin's 
 not ours. If we propound it in all its native force, 
 it is a proof not of our adherence but of our loyalty. 
 We deem it neither useful nor opportune to delay the 
 statement and complicate our scrutiny by personal re- 
 marks and reservations. To be discussed a doctrine 
 must be known. We give that of Ruskin. Once 
 completely realised, whoever will can contest it. 
 
 K 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 " NATURE " 
 
 Are there not more things aesthetic in heaven and 
 earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy ? Are 
 not men more often guided by sight than by reason ? 
 Is it only children who look through the pages of 
 picture-books, and who forget as they look the realities 
 of life ? Of this life we assuredly know already many 
 things. The chemist takes a plant, carries it into his 
 laboratory, analyses it, submits it to a multiplicity of 
 tests, and tells us of how many elements it is composed, 
 how much nitrogen, how much lime, how it grows and 
 why it is developed. Be it so; it is very interest- 
 ing. The economist scans balance sheets and market 
 reports, follows the zig-zags of diagrams, deciphers 
 ledgers and statistics, shakes the dust out of charters 
 and deeds, and teaches us how the wealth of a country 
 is developed by exchange, how the value of a com- 
 modity is fixed by its utility, and how a monetary 
 crisis is brought about. Very well ; that is all true, 
 but is that all ? Why, we may say to the chemist, do 
 
 we on this winter's evening find the solitude less dull 
 
 i 4 6 
 
I. NATURE 147 
 
 and the cold less rigorous because a bunch of roses is 
 on the chimneypiece ? They neither speak nor warm 
 us. . . . Why, we may say to the economist, has this 
 excrescence of a shell with no useful purpose a market 
 value much greater than a sack of corn which would 
 sustain a man for a given time ? . . . And why, we 
 should say to the man of science, are we saddened by 
 the sound of a minor scale, and why are we cheered 
 by a ray of sun ? Why does not this fire which burns 
 on the hearth gladden us like the sun which blazes 
 in at the window ? Nay more, why in this artificial 
 fireplace, where a regulated jet of gas sets light to 
 stationary blocks of asbestos, is there heat for the 
 thermometer and so little warmth for the heart ? 
 
 Let us leave this city where the sky is hidden by 
 smoke and the earth is paved with wood, where fire 
 burns only supplied by gasometers and water is such 
 that one dares not drink it, and let us go forth 
 to contemplate Nature where she yet abides undis- 
 figured by man. Why should the same sky discour- 
 age us when it is grey and kindle hope when it is 
 blue ? Here among the fields look at this green, even 
 turf trimmed as with a line, and then turn to that 
 undulating ground full of wild herbs subtly interlaced. 
 We find the same chemical composition, the same 
 power of production, the same value. The two fields 
 are exactly similar in the eyes of the agriculturist, 
 the economist, the philosopher, and the tax-gatherer. 
 Yet the one with its monotonous lines would not 
 stay our steps or our cares. The other would attract 
 
148 HIS .ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 us, would distract us, perhaps would charm us, and 
 thanks to its thousand fantastic aspects and outlines 
 we might for an instant forget the world and return 
 home soothed, calmer, and morally refreshed. Why ? 
 And why should Nature be full of colour as a 
 picture instead of grey like an engraving ? Why does 
 she paint with most brilliant colours the most useless 
 as well as the most inoffensive creatures ? Assuredly 
 there are poisonous toadstools which might have 
 been washed in colour by Delacroix, and carrion-flies 
 which might have been touched by the brush of Fra 
 Angelico; but are not the gentlest birds usually the 
 most beautiful ? Bend over these rocks broken in 
 their fall. "Pure earths are white when in powder; 
 and the same earths which are the constituents of clay 
 and sand, form, when crystallised, the emerald, ruby, 
 sapphire, amethyst and opal. . . . It is a universal law 
 that according to the purity of any substance, and 
 according to the energy of its crystallisation, is its 
 beauty of brightness. . . . The Spirit in the plant . . . 
 is of course strongest at the moment of its flowering. 
 . . . And where this Life is at its full power, its form 
 becomes invested with aspects that are chiefly de- 
 lightful to our own human passions; namely, first, 
 with the loveliest outlines of shape ; and secondly, 
 with the most brilliant phases of the primary colours, 
 blue, yellow, and red or white, the unison of all ; and, 
 to make it all more strange, this time of peculiar and 
 perfect glory is associated with relations of the plants 
 or blossoms to each other, correspondent to the joy 
 
I. NATURE 149 
 
 of love in human creatures." . . . Why ? Go higher 
 up in the scale of life. What is this twisted brilliant 
 object which slides on the pathway — "a rivulet of 
 smooth silver which slips between the grass," a little 
 " ridged " form " which rows on the earth with every 
 scale for an oar. A wave, but without wind ! a 
 current, but with no fall ! Why that horror ? There 
 is more poison in an ill-kept drain, — in a pool of dish- 
 washings at a cottage-door, than in the deadliest asp 
 of Nile." Or perhaps there is hidden in our heart 
 some obscure relation between the form of the serpent 
 and the idea of evil ? . . . Why on the contrary is 
 there pleasure in the "rapid and radiant passage of 
 purpled wings " of no utility to man, while the grey, 
 dull flesh of fowls is far more serviceable to him ? 
 Why this thrill of joy quick and instinctive in the 
 free supple movement of a horse's limbs. The motor- 
 car has none and yet carries us faster whither we 
 would go. . . . 
 
 It may be objected that these things do not attract 
 attention or give pleasure equally to all creatures. 
 This is true, and is yet another mystery in them and 
 in ourselves. Can it be that these impressions and 
 their consequences on the actions of creatures are not 
 truly existent ? Is it not rather that having more or 
 less existence they constitute between these beings a 
 hierarchy, or if need be a classification not yet deter- 
 mined ? Whence comes it that one man pauses and 
 is impressed by the blue mountains on the horizon 
 standing like waves made stationary by the wand of 
 
150 HIS ^ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 a magician, and that another creature proceeds on his 
 way indifferent ? Should not all who have eyes see 
 alike ? Are there differences between species other 
 than those of which the biologists are aware ? " How 
 many manner of eyes are there ? You physical-science 
 students should be able to tell us painters that." 
 " We see, as we try to draw the endlessly-grotesque 
 creatures about us, what infinite variety of instruments 
 they have ; but you know, far better than we do, how 
 those instruments are constructed and directed. You 
 know how some play in their sockets with independent 
 revolution, — project into near-sightedness on pyramids 
 of bone, — are brandished at the points of horns, — 
 studded over backs and shoulders, — thrust at the ends 
 of antennae to pioneer for the head, or pinched up into 
 tubercles at the corners of the lips. But how do the 
 creatures see out of all these eyes ? " When you look 
 at a serpent coming out of his hiding-place or resting 
 on a branch like a coil of rope, or flattening against 
 the glass of his cage the round curves of his clammy 
 coils, have you ever asked whether the serpent is 
 looking at you and what he sees of you ? " It will 
 keep its eyes fixed on you for an hour together, a 
 vertical slit in each admitting such image of you as is 
 possible to the rattlesnake retina, and to the rattle- 
 snake mind. How much of a man can a snake see ? 
 What sort of image of him is received through that 
 deadly vertical cleft in the iris ; — through the glazed 
 blue of the ghastly lens ? ... A cat may look at a 
 king ; — yes ; but can it see a king when it looks at 
 
I. NATURE 151 
 
 him ? When a cat caresses you, it never looks at 
 you. Its heart seems to be in its back and paws, 
 not its eyes." The fawn, the horse, appear more 
 susceptible to differences of aspect, the dog yet more, 
 and man more than all beasts together. Man looks 
 and considers ; man enjoys and suffers through his 
 sight ; he is enraptured by things which have no 
 function in his life : — before reflections which he 
 cannot grasp, before rocks which he cannot cultivate, 
 before the colours of that ether whither he cannot 
 ascend. Why ? 
 
 And why did the greatest of men — the saints whose 
 histories are shown on banners or in the glories of old 
 gilded panels — love to fortify their souls by the sight 
 of mountains, wings, water, and flowers, " whenever 
 they had any task or trial laid upon them needing 
 more than their usual strength of spirit ? " And 
 finally, why are these brilliant and disinterested im- 
 pressions more acute and more profound in the same 
 man when his heart is free from low passion or mean 
 envy ? Why is the joy of colour deeper in his soul 
 when his constitution is sound, and in his spirit when 
 it is calm, and in his senses when they are at rest ? 
 Why in this case does the joy of colour and its recol- 
 lection stay by him for the rest of his life on earth ? 
 " Let the eye but rest on a rough piece of branch of 
 curious form during a conversation with a friend, rest, 
 however, unconsciously, and though the conversation 
 be forgotten, though every circumstance connected 
 with it be as utterly lost to the memory as though 
 
 H 
 
r 
 
 152 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 it had not been, yet the eye will, through the whole 
 life after, take a certain pleasure in such boughs 
 which it had not before, a pleasure so slight, a trace of 
 feeling so delicate as to leave us utterly unconscious 
 of its peculiar power, but undestroyable by any rea- 
 soning, a part thenceforward of our constitution." 
 Why? Many things indeed are explained in our 
 schools, but who can explain the part that form and 
 colour play in our lives ? The properties of bodies 
 are analysed, — but has any one ever sought to under- 
 stand that quality of qualities which mingles and 
 combines all things in this world — the power of 
 attraction and sympathy ? The arguments of our 
 physiologists and psychologists are ingenious enough, 
 but would they not apply equally well to all our sur- 
 roundings, irrespective of curve of line or charm of 
 colour ? Would the teaching of philosophers who 
 describe this world in terms so abstruse, so grey, and 
 so cold, ever lead us to imagine it to be such shimmer 
 of foliage, such a flood of sunshine, such pulsation of 
 life, such a tremor of eyelids and fire of glances, as 
 indeed constitute all its value ? Philosophers construct 
 systems which explain everything in the world except 
 its charm. They analyse all the secret forces of the 
 soul except its power of admiration. They dissolve 
 all our relations with Nature, so-called inanimate, 
 except its power of love. . . . 
 
 All these things, our professor may reply, come into 
 the province of diverse sciences, which to some extent 
 take note of them, or perhaps they come into no 
 
I. NATURE 153 
 
 province at all, because being only variable impressions 
 in each individual they are not capable of scientific 
 analysis, and can in every case be resolved into mere 
 appearances or effects of perception. Effects of per- 
 ception ? Granted. But is it likely that because they 
 are so labelled they will lose their power over man 
 and his existence ? Do you doubt that to perception, 
 that is, the perception of glory and the perception of 
 love, we owe most of our resolutions and most of our 
 weaknesses — and in consequence, most of our misery 
 and most of our happiness ? Is it not to the present- 
 ment of ancient heroism that we owe our true modern 
 heroes ; and from the illusion of the oasis, the mirage 
 itself, that we derive sufficient consolation to pursue 
 our path towards the reality ? Are legends true ? 
 and assuming the contrary, have they exercised less 
 influence than history on the facts of life ? Waiving 
 all proof of religion, is it not to the phantoms of the 
 sky that we owe most of the things which have trans- 
 formed the earth ? Can we say the radiance of the 
 sun is not needful to our lives so long as it gives us 
 light, or the harmony of the flowers, so long as they 
 give us healing ? Should we not rather say that the 
 relation of these things to man, of these ideas to our 
 intelligence, of these phenomena to our acts and senti- 
 ments, that all these mighty yet imperceptible fibres, 
 
 " These mysterious fibres by which our hearts are bound," 
 
 are too subtle or too personal to be disentangled 
 without damage by the rude scalpel of science as at 
 
i 54 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 present organised, and organised to meet quite other 
 needs. 
 
 Any science of nature to accomplish this end must 
 give heed not only to her chemical or physical com- 
 position, her truth, her utility, her riches, her evolu- 
 tion, even her fecundity, but to that also which we 
 worship in life and despise in argument, which is 
 graven in facts and proscribed by systems, which we 
 seek in silence and dream of with awe — the Beauti- 
 ful. The only psychology capable of explaining the 
 phenomena just described and a thousand others fore- 
 seen or divined, is one which would treat the qualities 
 of form and colour as part of the primary and domi- 
 nant qualities of natural objects exercising their action 
 not only on the sense of touch but on that nobler 
 sense of sight, and not so much on our sentiment 
 of desire or possession as on the most unselfish of 
 sentiments, that of admiration. The only complete 
 philosophy would be one which would not only ask 
 the cause of fojres but also of forms. It should 
 ascertain not only the laws but also and above all 
 the joys of creation, and should classify human beings 
 not alone according to their aspects and mechanical 
 functions — as engines are classed in an exhibition of 
 machinery — but chiefly according to their artistic at- 
 tributes and their evidence or expression of Beauty — 
 just as pictures or statues are classified in a Gallery. 
 
 We shall be told that this science or this philosophy 
 would not be strictly speaking either a science or a 
 philosophy at all. Perhaps so ; we will not dispute 
 
I. NATURE 155 
 
 about words. Between the two methods of research, 
 there is truly a profound difference. " Science deals 
 exclusively with things as they are in themselves; 
 and art exclusively with things as they affect the 
 human senses and human soul. " Her work is to 
 portray the appearance of things, and to deepen the 
 natural impressions which they produce upon living 
 creatures. The work of science is to substitute 
 facts for appearances, and demonstrations for im- 
 pressions. Both, observe, are equally concerned with 
 truth; the one with truth of aspect, the other with 
 truth of essence. Art does not represent things 
 falsely, but truly as they appear to mankind. " Science 
 studies the relations of things to each other; but 
 art studies only their relations to man ; and it re- 
 quires of everything which is submitted to it impera- 
 tively this, and only this, — what that thing is to the in- 
 human eyes and human heart." 
 
 There is a difference greater still between the 
 diverse faculties called into play by these two in- 
 vestigations. For although our present inquiry is 
 to be scientific, that is to say experimental, in one 
 direction it will be chiefly artistic and intuitive. It 
 is the function of the artist to interpret the effect of 
 Nature on the eyes and on the heart, and "to this end 
 clear vision is more important than much knowledge. > 
 His faculty of perception penetrates far deeper than I y 
 
156 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 the instruments of the student. "The labour of the 
 whole Geological Society, for the last fifty years, has 
 but now arrived at the ascertainment of those truths 
 respecting mountain-form which Turner saw and ex- 
 pressed with a few strokes of a camel's hair pencil 
 fifty years ago, when he was a boy. "The know- 
 ledge of all the laws of the planetary system, and of 
 all the curves of the motion of projectiles, would 
 never enable a man of science to draw a waterfall 
 or a wave ; and all the members of the College 
 of Surgeons helping each other could not at this 
 moment see, or represent, the natural movement of a 
 human body in vigorous action, as a poor dyer's son 
 [Tintoret] did two hundred years ago." And in order 
 to feel all the power of Nature upon the heart as 
 well as upon the eye, it is needful not only to see 
 her well but also to love her well. "We cannot 
 fathom the mystery of a single flower, nor is it 
 intended that we should; but that the pursuit of 
 science should constantly be stayed by the love of 
 beauty, and accuracy of knowledge by tenderness of 
 emotion." 
 
 What then is this inward faculty which enables us 
 to see and to study man as something more than a 
 marvellous automaton, plants as something more than 
 alembics, flowers as something more than remedies ? 
 And how shall we designate it ? Clearly it is not the 
 intellect, for ideas of beauty are instinctive, and the 
 most we can say for the intellect when it deals with 
 them is that it is useless. Any doubt as to this 
 
I. NATURE 157 
 
 may be removed by reading M. Thiers where he 
 treats of art criticism. " If ever a critic tells you 
 two colours do not go together make a note of it, so 
 as to put them as often as possible side by side." 
 Should we call it sensibility ? If we must lean to 
 one or other side it is to this that we should incline, 
 for sensibility is what is both most powerful and 
 most noble in us. " Men are for ever vulgar, pre- 
 cisely in proportion as they are incapable of sym- 
 pathy — of quick understanding, — of all that, in 
 deep insistence on the common, but most accurate 
 term, may be called the ' tact ' or ' touch-faculty,' of 
 body and soul : that tact which the Mimosa has in 
 trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures ; 
 — fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason ; 
 — the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason 
 can but determine what is true : — it is the God-given 
 passion of humanity which can alone recognise what 
 God has made good." 
 
 But does sensation suffice ? All created things have 
 sensation. Even the plant feels — does it therefore 
 perceive Beauty ? Are not the sensations of men so 
 diverse that they seem to differ not only in degree 
 but also in kind ? Is the sense of charm as we 
 watch a sunbeam skim along the distant waters of a 
 lake at all akin to the sense of pleasure given by 
 the savour of roast beef? This latter sensation is 
 much the most useful — but it is precisely in the 
 former that the relation between Nature and the soul 
 is to be discerned. Further, it is these so-called 
 
158 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 useless sensations which are the most powerful, the 
 most exquisite, and the most indefinitely enduring. 
 "The pleasures of touch and taste are given to us as 
 subservient to life, as instruments of our preservation 
 — compelling us to seek the things necessary to our 
 being, and that, therefore, when this their function is 
 fully performed, they ought to have an end ; and can 
 only be artificially, and under high penalty prolonged." 
 Although it is very necessary to eat in order to 
 live, it becomes destructive to live in order to eat. 
 " But the pleasures of sight and hearing are given 
 as gifts. They answer not any purposes of mere 
 existence, for the distinction of all that is useful or 
 dangerous to us might be made, and often is made, 
 by the eye without its receiving the slightest pleasure 
 of sight. We might have learned to distinguish 
 fruits and grain from flowers, without having any 
 superior pleasure in the aspect of the latter. And 
 the ear might have learned to distinguish the sounds 
 that communicate ideas, or to recognise intimations 
 of elemental danger without perceiving either music in 
 the voice, or majesty in the thunder. And as these 
 pleasures have no function to perform, so there is 
 no limit to their continuance in the accomplishment 
 of their end, for they are an end in themselves, and 
 so may be perpetual with all of us — being in no way 
 destructive, but rather increasing in cxquisiteness 
 by repetition. Herein then we find very sufficient 
 ground for the higher estimation of these delights, 
 first in their being eternal and inexhaustible, and 
 
I. NATURE 159 
 
 secondly, in their being evidently no means or in- 
 strument of life, but an object of life. Now in 
 whatever is an object of life, in whatever may be 
 infinitely and for itself desired, we may be sure 
 there is something of divine." 
 
 The faculty therefore which apprehends the beautiful 
 is not "a mere operation of sense." Something else 
 is interwoven to preserve it from the material and to 
 prolong the passing element. Something is mingled 
 which combines the serene peace of contemplation and 
 the formless force of the senses. If we need to be 
 convinced of this let us recall the feelings which 
 assert themselves in the presence of the horizon we 
 love best, at the magical moments of special inspira- 
 tion. Let us recall what every one must have ex- 
 perienced as he passed in a carriage some lovely 
 spot, where he felt " I must come back, I must pass 
 my life here," yet he has never returned. It is 
 primarily a sensuous pleasure, but it is accompanied 
 with joy, with love for the object, with a kind of 
 veneration for its unknown cause, "with a percep- 
 tion of kindness in a superior intelligence," with 
 gratitude towards Beauty for itself and for its gift to 
 us who alone have eyes to perceive it — perchance also 
 the same feeling as in some pictures of the early 
 masters where the Virgin and flowers are contemplated 
 by knights and donors here below, while from the 
 clouds they are watched over by the Eternal Father 
 and His angels.,. . . "No idea can be at all con- 
 sidered as in any way an idea of beauty, until it be 
 
160 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 made up of these emotions, any more than we can be 
 said to have an idea of a letter of which we perceive 
 the perfume and the fair writing, without understand- 
 ing the contents of it, or intent of it ; and as these 
 emotions are in no way resultant from, nor obtainable 
 by, any operation of the intellect, it is evident that the 
 sensation of beauty is not sensual on the one hand, 
 nor is it intellectual on the other, but is dependent on 
 a pure right and open state of the heart, both for its 
 truth and for its intensity, insomuch that even the 
 right after-action of the intellect upon facts of beauty 
 so apprehended, is dependent on the acuteness of the 
 heart feeling about them." The heart is the source 
 of high and serene emotion in the presence of the 
 large expanse of Nature. And the response is a 
 faculty of the heart — a sentiment. 
 
 This is the "aesthetical sentiment," or as Ruskin 
 terms it the " theoretic faculty." It is this sentiment 
 which thrills us in the most exquisite hours of life, 
 those hours alone worthy of being lived. It is this 
 sentiment which establishes that mysterious harmony 
 between Nature and man, which we ask science in 
 vain to analyse. We must not confound it with any 
 other faculty either higher or lower. We must hold 
 fast to its autonomy. We shall have against us the 
 pure Hedonists and the pure Rationalists. We shall 
 have to fight against those who see in this sentiment 
 a physiological instinct, as well as against those who 
 treat it as a process of reason. It is neither the one 
 nor the other. This aesthetical sentiment (" theoretic 
 
I. NATURE 161 
 
 faculty ") is not the far-off echo of a physical instinct ; 
 it is an intuition differing from all other instinct, and 
 physiology has nothing to do with it. "A girl is 
 praised because she is like a rose, not a rose because 
 it is like a girl." Neither is it love in the higher sense 
 of sacrifice of self; such love is self-surrender, and in 
 the pleasure we receive from plants and water and 
 light, we take everything and we surrender nothing. 
 Still less is it the product of reasoning : the impression 
 disappears directly we begin to reason. For example : 
 " All these sensations of beauty in the plant arise 
 from our unselfish sympathy with its happiness, and 
 not from any view of the qualities in it which may 
 bring good to us, nor even from our acknowledgment 
 in it of any moral condition beyond that of mere 
 felicity; . . . the moment we begin to look upon any 
 creature as subordinate to some purpose out of itself, 
 some of the sense of organic beauty is lost. Thus, 
 when we are told that the leaves of a plant are occu- 
 pied in decomposing carbonic acid, and preparing oxy- 
 gen for us, we begin to look upon it with some such 
 indifference as upon a gasometer. It has become a 
 machine ; some of our sense of its happiness is gone." 
 — " It is true that reflection will show us that the plant 
 is not living for itself alone, that its life is one 01 
 benefaction, that it gives as well as receives, but no 
 sense of this whatsoever mingles with our perception 
 of physical beauty in its forms. These forms appear 
 to be necessary to its health ; the symmetry of its 
 leaflets, the vivid green of its shoots, are looked upon 
 
 L 
 
162 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 by us as signs of the plant's own happiness and 
 perfection ; they are useless to us, except as they give 
 us pleasure in our sympathising with that of the 
 plant." — " Both the Book of Job and the Sermon on 
 the Mount give precisely the view of nature which is 
 taken by the uninvestigating affection of a humble, 
 but powerful mind. There is no dissection of muscles 
 or counting of elements, but the boldest and broadest 
 glance at the apparent facts, and the most magnificent 
 metaphor in expressing them. ' His eyes are like 
 the eyelids of the morning. In his neck remaineth 
 strength, and sorrow is turned into joy before him.' 
 And in the often repeated, never obeyed, command, 
 ' Consider the lilies of the field,' observe there is pre- 
 cisely the delicate attribution of life which we have 
 seen to be the characteristic of the modern view 
 of landscape. . . . There is no science, or hint of 
 science ; no counting of petals, nor display of provi- 
 sions for sustenance : nothing but the expression of 
 sympathy, at once the most childish, and the most pro- 
 found." It is the " aesthetical sentiment " or " theoretic 
 faculty." * 
 
 1 In these pages and those which follow an effort has been made to 
 give a faithful rendering not of the words of Ruskin but of his thought. 
 It has been sometimes necessary to transpose the words so as to give 
 the idea more accurately. For instance, here the phrase " aesthetic 
 sentiment " has been used in every case where Ruskin would use the 
 phrase " theoretic faculty." The word "aesthetic" has been proscribed 
 by Ruskin in English as meaning something other than this "energy 
 of contemplation " which he is considering. But in French the word 
 " aesthetic " has quite the same sense that Ruskin gives to " theoretic." 
 It is the sense that has been given to it by all oestheticists, especially 
 
I. NATURE 163 
 
 It is this faculty that apprehends better than 
 Reason or the Senses, " the claim of all lower nature 
 on the hearts of men ; of the rock, and wave, and 
 herb as a part of their necessary spirit life." We 
 have found the instrument of our study as well as 
 our goal, and its reward as well as its instrument. 
 Enthusiasm alone can analyse enthusiasm. Admira- 
 tion alone can deal with the phenomena of admiration. 
 The accusation of Schwarmerei % Enthusiasm, will not 
 deter us, and we leave the scoffers to their barren 
 task. When with their cold critical minds they 
 attempt to analyse impressions of beauty, they might 
 as well gravely set about lowering the temperature of 
 those objects upon which they propose to study the 
 action of heat. Far from enlightening and sharpening 
 the faculty of the aestheticist, the critical spirit falsifies 
 it, experience blunts it, science destroys it. " If it 
 were possible for us to recollect all the unaccountable 
 and happy instincts of the careless time, and to reason 
 upon them with the maturer judgment, we might 
 
 M. Charles Leveque in his Science du Beau. And when Topffer 
 speaks in his Menus I'ropos of the " aesthetic faculty," or when more 
 recently M. Cherbuliez in his book L'Art et la Nature analyses 
 the plaisir esthetique, they express the same idea in the same manner 
 as Ruskin, though they use another phrase. 
 
 Translator 's note. — To meet the difficulty of translating the phrase 
 sentiment esthetique, I shall in future use Mr. Ruskin's own words, 
 " theoretic faculty," although perhaps the difference might be rendered 
 by the phrase "cesthetical sentiment" which I have used hitherto. 
 Also, as Mr. Ruskin proscribes the use of the words aesthetic and 
 aesthete, I have used asthctical and icstheticist to render the French 
 esl/u'tique and esthe'ticien. 
 
1 64 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 arrive at more rapid and right results than either the 
 philosophy or the sophisticated practice of art have 
 yet attained." Only those who have preserved the 
 purity of their impressions can fathom the purity of 
 crystalline colours. The world of beauty is like the 
 beryl in Rossetti's ballad : 
 
 " None sees here but the pure alone," 
 
 and, in truth, " ye must be as little children or ye will 
 not enter into the kingdom " of art. 
 
 Because it belongs to the simple-minded and does 
 not depend upon active reason, this faculty is not to 
 be ignored, still less is it to be disdained. For this 
 were to despise the most precious of the gifts dis- 
 tributed by those good fairies who stood by the cradle 
 of humanity. The theoretic or aesthetical faculty 
 belongs to man alone. Whether an animal is affected 
 by the Utility of things, we cannot assert or deny, but 
 before Beauty man alone is moved and trembles. " So 
 much as there is in you of ox or swine perceives no 
 beauty and creates none. What is human in you, in 
 exact proportion to the perfectness of its humanity, 
 can create it and receive." That the animal sees is 
 indisputable, and up to a certain point he reasons : 
 but man contemplates. Paul Potter's Vache qui se 
 mire looks at her own reflection : but man marvels 
 at the likeness of God. " It is the human faculty, 
 entirely human, which makes us love rocks not for 
 ourselves but for themselves," — for their outline 
 against the blue sky. We need look no further for' 
 
I. NATURE 165 
 
 the fundamental difference between man and all that 
 is said to resemble him. For instance : Here is a 
 beautiful and slender plant with infinitely changing 
 curves and harmoniously assorted tints : some crea- 
 ture on all fours rushes towards it, seizes it, and de- 
 vours it. What was that creature ? I do not know. 
 It was a sudden impulse. But it tore up the plant 
 in order to hide it and find it again. What creature 
 was that ? I do not know. There are many animals 
 that hide their prey or their food. It is an act which 
 borders on the reasoning power. — But yet another 
 creature paused before the plant for a long time to 
 admire it. What was this creature ? I know that 
 well : it was a man. The theoretic faculty was there. 
 
 Whereas this faculty is distinctive of the nature of 
 man, nothing human should escape from its grasp. 
 Every true philosopher furnished with this instrument 
 of study must take into consideration the part which 
 nature and beauty play in every action or idea brought 
 to his notice. He must seek in the soul for the lines 
 of the landscapes upon which the eye gazed. He 
 must seek in the heart for the resolves left there by 
 the "grandeur or expression of the hills." While 
 searching out final causes in the presence of " frown- 
 ing rocks," he will not say in the words of a past 
 thinker, wondering in himself for whom their creator 
 could have made them, " They are inhabited by the 
 beasts " ; but he will study whether they " seem to 
 have been built for the human race as at once their 
 schools and cathedrals, full of treasures of illuminated 
 
1 66 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons 
 to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, 
 glorious in holiness for the worshipper." He will in- 
 quire whether "the occult influence of mountains has 
 been both constant and essential to the progress of 
 the race," and whether he can "justly refuse to moun- 
 tain scenery some share in giving the Greeks and the 
 Italians their intellectual lead among the nations of 
 Europe." He must consider for example that " there 
 is not a single spot of land in either of these countries 
 from which mountains are not discernible ; almost 
 always they form the principal feature of the scenery. 
 The mountain outlines seen from Sparta, Corinth, 
 Athens, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Verona, are of con- 
 summate beauty; and whatever dislike or contempt 
 may be traceable in the mind of the Greeks for 
 mountain raggedness, their placing the shrine of 
 Apollo under the cliffs of Delphi, and his throne upon 
 Parnassus, was a testimony to all succeeding time 
 that they themselves attributed the best part of their 
 intellectual inspiration to the power of the hills." 
 
 Perhaps too the source of many great ideas which 
 govern the world might be traced to the contem- 
 plation of certain familiar horizons : for instance the 
 source of patriotism. The country is in fact the 
 beloved face of this mother — Trjv fir)Tpi,8a — which else 
 would be represented by a cold abstraction only, or 
 by a heavy female statue like those in the Place de 
 la Concorde. We do not associate our country with 
 an assembly of bald and black men, gesticulating in 
 
I. NATURE 167 
 
 the light of parliamentary gas, or writing within the 
 precincts of municipal offices : no, but rather it is 
 the fringe of mountains, the flowing water of rivers, 
 the blue curves of limpid bays, the undulating valleys 
 scored, like engraved plates, with fields and furrows, 
 the villages scattered by the roadside, the smoke of 
 cities rising in the azure sky of evening. . . . And 
 the more beautiful the vision so much the greater will 
 be the love its image will inspire. The Scot for 
 example adores his country. For " it is the peculiar 
 character of Scottish as distinct from all other scenery 
 on a small scale in North Europe, to have these dis- 
 tinctively ' mindable ' features. One range of coteaux 
 by a French river is exactly like another; one turn 
 of glen in the Black Forest is only the last turn 
 returned ; one sweep of Jura pasture and crag, the 
 mere echo of the fields and crags of ten miles away. 
 But in the whole course of Tweed, Teviot, Gala, Tay, 
 Forth, and Clyde, there is perhaps scarcely a bend of 
 ravine, or nook of valley, which would not be recog- 
 nisable by its inhabitants from any other. And there 
 is no other country in which the roots of memory are 
 so entwined with the beauty of nature, instead of the 
 pride of men." 
 
 Hence it follows that this Beauty ought to be the 
 chief preoccupation of the patriot, inasmuch as she 
 has been his chief instructress. For it boots little 
 what we do to perpetuate the idea of our country 
 if we do not also preserve her beloved face with solici- 
 tude. It is not by scattering statues broadcast that we 
 
1 68 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 shall reap a harvest of great men, but by respecting 
 the unhewn stones throughout the land. "A nation 
 is only worthy of the soil and the scenes that it has 
 inherited, when, by all its acts and arts, it is making 
 them more lovely for its children." 
 
 § 3 
 
 Finally, when the effects of Nature and Beauty 
 on the human soul have been fully studied, and we 
 enter upon a survey of the causes of Nature and 
 Beauty, the "theoretic faculty" is again called upon 
 to intervene. Of the great problems belonging to 
 the soul nothing should be decided without reference 
 to that science whose domain is a part of the soul, 
 nor until it is measured and gauged by this superior 
 instinct. Ruskin teaches us that to propound any 
 theory of the law, origin, and destiny of the universe 
 is useless if, while satisfying our reason, it jars with 
 our feeling ; if all the enthusiasm of our nature pro- 
 tests against its conclusions. Whenever the theory 
 of " Progress by Evolution " is advanced, we should 
 seek the presence of the Theseus of the Parthenon to 
 explain why that glorious and immortal relic bears 
 witness to what Taine once termed "a. more complete 
 humanity than our own." And likewise in the British 
 Museum in front of an " Etruscan Demeter riding on 
 a car, whose wheels are of wild roses," we have to 
 learn wherein — setting aside their perfume — these 
 
I. NATURE 169 
 
 roses differ from those growing wild on the hillside 
 at Brantwood. Trifling problems indeed. Has a 
 student leisure to look up to the eyes of statues or 
 to lower his own to the roses ? No ! but those who 
 have the leisure should be satisfied with this sort of 
 curiosity. "To a painter the essential character of 
 anything is the form of it; and the philosophers 
 cannot touch that. They come and tell you, for in- 
 stance, that there is as much heat, or motion, or 
 calorific energy, (or whatever else they like to call it) 
 in a tea-kettle as in a Gier-eagle. Very good; that 
 is so; and it is very interesting. It requires just as 
 much heat as will boil the kettle, to take the Gier- 
 eagle up to his nest; and as much more to bring 
 him down again on a hare or a partridge. But we 
 painters, acknowledging the equality and similarity 
 of the kettle and the bird in all scientific respects 
 attach, for our part, our principal interest in the 
 difference in their forms. For us, the primarily cog- 
 nisable facts, in the two things, are, that the kettle 
 has a spout, and the eagle a beak ; the one a lid on 
 its back, the other a pair of wings." 
 
 Further, " when we examine these wings and find 
 in all birds such divers types of beauty," or when " we 
 study the varied colours which correspond to our 
 innermost sensations of joy or melancholy, awaking 
 them at the sight of a passing redbreast, or again 
 lulling them to rest," let us beware of explanations, 
 which account for everything except that beauty, 
 and thereby destroy the very charm we desire to 
 
i;o HIS AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 preserve. Darwin was a great man, and we owe 
 him many true ideas concerning what he saw, but 
 did he see everything ? " We might even suffi- 
 ciently represent the general manner of conclusion in 
 the Darwinian system by the statement that if you 
 fasten a hairbrush to a millwheel, with the handle 
 forward, so as to develop itself into a neck by moving 
 always in the same direction, and within continual 
 hearing of a steam-whistle, after a certain number of 
 revolutions the hairbrush will fall in love with the 
 whistle ; they will marry, lay an egg f and the produce 
 will be a nightingale." Although perhaps some- 
 what extravagant, this interpretation of the origins 
 of beauty does not differ very largely from state- 
 ments propounded with great gravity by learned men. 
 "The Theorists of development say, I suppose, that 
 partridges get brown by looking at stubble, seagulls 
 white by looking at foam, and jackdaws black by 
 looking at clergymen." After these hypotheses we 
 may perhaps be permitted to remark that the feathers 
 of birds are usually " reserved and quiet in colour " 
 when they are " feathers of force " and brilliant when 
 they are intended for " decoration or expression." — 
 " There is no iridescent eagle, no purple and golden 
 seagull ; while a large mass of coloured birds — parrots, 
 pheasants, humming birds — seem meant for human 
 amusement. Seem meant — dispute it if you will : no 
 matter what they seem, they are the most amusing 
 and infinitely delicious toys, lessons, comforts, amaze- 
 ments, of human existence." 
 
I. NATURE 171 
 
 Thus when an explanation is offered of the creation 
 of birds or any other organised creatures, its artistic 
 side must not be overlooked. " Hold fast to the form 
 and defend that first as distinguished from the mere 
 transition of forces. Discern the moulding hand of 
 the potter commanding the clay from his merely 
 beating foot as it turns the wheel. It is curious how 
 far mere form will carry you ahead of the philoso- 
 phers." For the aesthetic instinct proceeds by syn- 
 thesis, and "a modern philosopher is a great separator: 
 it is little more than the expansion of Moliere's great 
 sentence : 'It follows from this that all that is 
 beautiful is to be found in dictionaries, it is only the 
 words which are transposed.'" But "there is beyond 
 the merely formative and sustaining power another 
 which we painters call ' passion.' " " I don't know 
 what the philosophers call it ; we know it makes people 
 red or white ; and therefore it must be something 
 itself: and perhaps it is the most truly 'poetic' or 
 ' making ' force of all, creating a world of its own out 
 of a glance, or a sigh : and the want of passion is 
 perhaps the truest death, or 'unmaking' of every- 
 thing; — even of stones." 
 
 Now this power is that of the artist ; and it is un- 
 mistakable. " I can very positively assure }'ou that 
 in my poor domain of imitative art, not all the 
 mechanical or gaseous forces of the world, nor all 
 the laws of the universe, will enable you either to 
 see a colour, or draw a line, without that singular 
 force anciently called the soul." The power of chance 
 is very great but it is not artistic, and though if 
 
172 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 forced to it we might imagine "a clock without a 
 clockmaker," it is very difficult to study a master- 
 piece and forthwith deny the master. The learned 
 are quite at their ease over this problem. They do 
 not see the picture ! The more they reason about 
 the aesthetical side of nature, the more they prove 
 by their arguments that they do not perceive it. 
 When they pretend to explain the Beautiful by the 
 Useful, " they can be compared to nothing so accur- 
 ately as to the woodworms in the panel of a picture 
 by some great painter, if we may conceive them as 
 tasting with discrimination of the wood, and with re- 
 pugnance of the colour, and declaring that even this 
 unlooked-for and undesirable combination is a normal 
 result of the action of molecular Forces." 
 
 For those who have seen the picture, for those who 
 have found the happiness of their lives in its varied 
 and delicate colour, its hues spiritual, harmonious, 
 and powerful, who have loved it with the passion of 
 youth and sought to produce unworthy though faith- 
 ful imitations, who have suffered when anything 
 came to tarnish it and wept for joy when it was 
 restored to them in its primitive purity, for such as 
 these the problems of creation cannot be altogether 
 solved by " variations of species," and the last word 
 is not said though men have thought for six thou- 
 sand years. 
 
 ''The sesthetic relations of species are independent 
 of their origin. The flower is the end or proper object 
 of the seed, not the seed of the flower. The reason 
 for seeds is that flowers may be; not the reason of 
 
I. NATURE 173 
 
 flowers that seeds may be. The flower itself is the 
 creature which the spirit makes; only, in connection 
 with its perfectness, is placed the giving birth to its 
 successor. The main fact then about a flower is that 
 it is the part of the plant's form developed at the 
 moment of its intensest life : and this inner rapture 
 is usually marked externally for us by the flush of one 
 or more of the primary colours. What the character 
 of the flower shall be, depends entirely upon the 
 portion of the plant into which this rapture of spirit 
 has been put. Sometimes the life is put into its outer 
 sheath, and then the outer sheath becomes white and 
 pure, and full of strength and grace ; sometimes the 
 life is put into the common leaves, just under the 
 blossom, and they become scarlet or purple; sometimes 
 the life is put into the stalks of the flower, and they 
 flush blue ; sometimes into its outer enclosure or 
 calyx ; mostly into its inner cup ; but, in all cases, 
 the presence of the strongest life is asserted by char- 
 acters in which the human sight takes pleasure, and 
 which seem prepared with distinct reference to us, 
 or rather, bear, in being delightful, evidence of having 
 been produced by the power of the same spirit as our 
 own. . . . And observe, again and again, with respect 
 to all these divisions and powers of plants, it does not 
 matter in the least by what concurrences of circum- 
 stance or necessity they may gradually have been 
 developed : the concurrence of circumstance is itself 
 the supreme and inexplicable fact. We always come 
 at last to a formative cause, which directs the circum- 
 stance and mode of meeting it. If you ask an ordinary 
 
174 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 botanist the reason of the form of a leaf, he will tell 
 you it is a ' developed tubercle,' and that its ultimate 
 form ' is owing to the directions of its vascular 
 threads.' But what directs its vascular threads ? 
 ' They are seeking for something they want,' he will 
 probably answer. What made them want that ? 
 What made them seek for it thus ? Seek for it, in 
 five fibres or in three ? Seek for it, in serration, or 
 in sweeping curves ? Seek for it, in servile tendrils, 
 or impetuous spray ? Seek for it, in woollen wrinkles 
 rough with stings, or in glossy surfaces, green with 
 pure strength, and winterless delight ? There is no 
 answer. But the sum of all is, that over the entire 
 surface of the earth and its waters, as influenced by 
 the power of the air under solar light, there is de- 
 veloped a series of changing forms, in clouds, plants, 
 and animals, all of which have reference in their action 
 or nature to the human intelligence that perceives 
 r them ; and on which, in their aspects of horror and 
 beauty, and their qualities of good and evil, there is 
 engraved a series of myths, or words of the forming 
 power, which, according to the true passion and energy 
 of the human race, they have been enabled to read 
 into religion. And this forming power has been by 
 all nations partly confused with the breath or air 
 through which it acts, and partly understood as a 
 creative wisdom; proceeding from the Supreme Deity; 
 but entering into and inspiring all intelligences that 
 work in harmony with Him. And whatever intel- 
 lectual results may be in modern days obtained by 
 regarding this effluence only as a motion or vibration, 
 
I. NATURE 1 75 
 
 every formative human art hitherto, and the best 
 states of human happiness and order, have depended 
 on the apprehension of its mystery (which is certain) 
 and of its personality (which is probable)." 
 
 At this point the Prophet of the Beautiful stops. 
 He has said enough for those who love Nature, and 
 too much for those who do not love her. Yet he ' 
 cannot be reproached either with prejudice or dogma- 
 tism. He affirms only what his eyes have seen : he 
 repeats only what his ears have heard. The faith 
 that cradled his childhood is long since vanished under 
 the stress of doubt. From the professorial chair at 
 Oxford, to the scandal of the old university, he attacked 
 with righteous indignation the tyranny of dogma and 
 " the insolence of faith." He denounced the pride of 
 that church which " imagines that myriads of the 
 inhabitants of the world for four thousand years have 
 been left to wander and perish, many of them ever- 
 lastingly, in order that, in fulness of time, divine 
 truth might be preached sufficiently to ourselves," and 
 derided those mystics " who are withdrawn from all 
 such true service of man, that they may pass the best 
 part of their lives in what they are told is the service 
 of God ; namely, desiring what they cannot obtain, 
 lamenting what they cannot avoid, and reflecting on 
 what they cannot understand." Yet he renounced 
 not at the behest of materialism the free discussion 
 of his perceptions, nor bowed the knee before "the 
 insolence of science." He maintained at the doors of 
 laboratories the same earnest scepticism he dared to 
 advocate in the precincts of cathedrals. He would 
 
176 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 not by denying or belittling the problems before him 
 accept the solutions of either reason or faith. In 
 the fulness of his strength and fame, in all sanity of 
 thought, and before the evening of life, Ruskin turned 
 again to Nature and found her still unexplained, if 
 not in her forces at least in her beauty. The Beauty 
 of Nature, he always insisted, is the mainspring of 
 men's actions, the supreme joy and the law for ever. 
 Therefore it demands explanation, or, if it cannot 
 be explained, the mystery which hangs about our 
 most intense life, the life of "admiration," must be 
 acknowledged. The gate of the Unknown, that 
 science would fain close, he opens quietly but firmly, 
 showing that there is no one science, but simply 
 divers sciences, and among them one so little ad- 
 vanced as to be hardly recognised or definable, but 
 which must exist since its object plays so important 
 a part among those things which make us what we 
 are, as well as among those which we ourselves create. 
 It seems clear to him that the question he asked 
 remains unanswered, and that there is truly " more 
 ^Esthetic in heaven and earth," than is taught in our 
 schools of philosophy. . . . 
 
 Thus he returns to the God of his youth, not so 
 much because He is Truth as because He is the 
 revelation of Beauty, and the philosophers explain 
 only Ugliness. Throughout the range of legend he 
 yields to the spell that mars no beauty and casts no 
 gloom, and that accords best with his own " theoretic 
 faculty." Christ becomes for him the supreme and 
 benign Artist Who works with His hands to adorn 
 
I. NATURE 177 
 
 the dwelling-place of man ; He is the Gardener met 
 by the Magdalen, Who watches over new-born flowers; 
 He is the unknown Painter Who gives to the edge of 
 the gentian the touch that beautifies; He is the subtle 
 Weaver Who arrays the lily in glory greater than that 
 of Solomon ; He is the Labourer in the vineyard, 
 admitted to the feast of Cana, Who in every cluster 
 of grapes changes the water of earth and heaven into 
 wine. In the awakening of Spring, in the light that 
 shines on the hills, in the refreshing stream from the 
 mountain, — Christ is all in all. He is Nature, He is 
 Beauty, He is Love. We cannot then wonder that 
 the disciple of Beauty is the disciple of Christ; nor 
 yet that, towards the evening of his life in September 
 1888, when making his intellectual testament and 
 garnering into a sheaf all the radiance of his thought 
 — as the sun at the moment of setting seems to gather 
 up every beam it scattered during the day, Ruskin 
 says: "And now, in writing beneath the cloudless 
 peace of the snows of Chamouni, what must be 
 really the final words of the book which their beauty 
 inspired and their strength guided, I am able, with yet 
 happier and calmer heart than heretofore, to enforce 
 its simplest assurance of Faith, that the knowledge of 
 what is beautiful leads on, and is the first step to 
 the knowledge of the things which are lovely and of 
 good report ; and that the laws, the life, and the joy 
 of Beauty, in the material world of God, are as eternal 
 and sacred parts of His creation as, in the world of 
 spirits, virtue; and in the world of angels, praise." 
 
 M 
 
CHAPTER II 
 "ART" 
 
 If this be Nature, what must be demanded of Art ? 
 Verily something exceeding great, and at the same 
 time exceeding humble ; great compared with our- 
 selves, humble compared with Nature. For if " the ■ 
 life, the joys, and the laws of Beauty in God's 
 material world are as sacred a part of His creation 
 as" virtue in the world of spirits, the man who 
 investigates those laws recalls those joys, and pro- 
 longs that life, the artist, accomplishes one of the 
 highest tasks of humanity. He stands between us 
 and nature. He is the decipherer, the singer, the 
 recorder. All others have their divers pursuits, their 
 writing, their cricket, their business. His mission 
 is to arrest and say to us : " Look at this pebble 
 and its veins. Look at this blade of grass and 
 learn its lesson. Look at this muscle. Look at this 
 sky. . . . Do you think this is purposeless ? " 
 
 "Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can 
 tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain 
 
 of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at 
 
 178 
 
II. ART i 79 
 
 noon yesterday ? " — " One says, it has been wet ; 
 and another, it has been windy; and another, it has 
 been warm." — "Who saw the narrow sunbeam that 
 came out of the south, and smote upon their summits 
 until they melted and mouldered away in a dust of 
 blue rain ? " The artist sees it all. He makes us 
 pause with him, or at any rate he makes it pause 
 for us. For this man performs miracles. " He may 
 at last literally command the rainbow to stay and 
 forbid the sun to set . . . he incorporates the things 
 which have no measure and immortalises the things 
 that have no duration." He watches Nature like a 
 sentry. He awakens our admiration. He grasps 
 elusive laws ; he gives us living joys ; it is he who 
 unfolds the aesthetical mysteries that bind us to 
 things on high and to things on earth. Further, it 
 is he who shows us how his age and his country 
 understood these things, and who bequeathes to us 
 the truest testimony. "Great nations write their 
 autobiographies in three manuscripts : the book of 
 their deeds, the book of their words, and the book 
 of their art. Not one of these books can be under- 
 stood unless we read the two others ; but of the 
 three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. 
 The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good 
 fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a 
 few of its children ; but its art, only by the general 
 gifts and common sympathies of the race." Thus 
 towards ourselves "all art is teaching." 
 
 But at the same time and in the same way that 
 
180 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 the function of Art is very great as regards ourselves, 
 it is very humble as regards Nature. With regard to 
 her "all art is Praise." For if the material world 
 has been specially organised with artistic design — if 
 the clouds are painted al fresco each evening to 
 delight our eyes as we look up, and the blossoms 
 washed with colour each morning to delight them 
 when they look down — it is in Nature that we must 
 seek for all Beauty. She is the supreme type and 
 the eternal model. Beauty is not found in dreams 
 of the imagination, or in some ideal imposed by tra- 
 dition. " It is to be found in the leaf that fades and 
 falls to the passing wind, in the smallest pebble which 
 rolls down from the mountain, in the frailest reed 
 which bends over the water. ... In each of these 
 things the eye of an artist discerns the signature of 
 the Supreme Artist. Nowhere has He forgotten to 
 impress the Seal of Beauty." 
 
 What matter if a passer by, absent and preoccu- 
 pied, observed not the beauty of a dead leaf touched 
 by the sun at the door of a picture-gallery, and when 
 within the gallery admired the picture of some such 
 leaf touched by the far weaker paint-brush of a Vene- 
 tian. What matter that when he reflected on it, he 
 was surprised and scandalised that Art should have 
 caused him to admire the image of something when 
 he did not admire the reality. Finally, what matter 
 that this man was Pascal, and that his observation is 
 a postulate of the strangest controversies on Nature 
 and Art. It merely proves that he may be a great 
 
II. ART 181 
 
 logician and a poor artist. No artist would have 
 passed with indifference a leaf touched by the sun ; 
 he would see it, would look at it, would love it for 
 its golden browns, for its decay, for its touch of 
 light, and for its effect as background ; if he had his 
 paint-box perhaps he would have copied it, and thus 
 diverted by this little object despised of Pascal, he 
 would forget to visit the collection of pictures which 
 Pascal felt it his duty to admire. For " a true artist 
 always prefers those reflections which quiver in the 
 Grand Canal to those which sleep in a Canaletto, and 
 the bronzed beggars who bask in the sun at Seville 
 to the mellow flesh tones on the canvases of Murillo." 
 "What healthy art is possible to you must be the 
 expression of your true delight in a real thing, better 
 than the art. . . . You may think, perhaps, that a 
 bird's nest by William Hunt is better than a real 
 bird's nest. We indeed pay a large sum for the one, 
 and scarcely care to look for, or save, the other. But 
 it would be better for us that all the pictures in the 
 world perished, than that the birds should cease to 
 build nests." Yes, leaf or nest, branch or pebble, 
 pearl or wave, in Nature all is Beauty. 
 
 It is useless to seek for it on rare occasions or 
 in passing effects. It is useless to lie in wait for 
 marvellous sunsets or to hunt on high plateaux for 
 a flower whose species is almost extinct. " On the 
 shapes which in the everyday world are familiar 
 to the eyes of men, God has stamped those char- 
 acters of beauty, which He has made it man's 
 
182 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 nature to love. . . . Yes. . . . Only a coteau, scarce 
 a hundred feet above the rivers, nothing like so high 
 as the Thames banks between here and Reading, — 
 only a coteau, and a recess of calm water, and a 
 breath of mist, and a ray of sunset. The simplest 
 things, the frequentest, the dearest ; things that you 
 may see any summer evening, by a thousand streams 
 among the low hills of old familiar lands. Love them, 
 and see them rightly, — Andes and Caucasus, Amazon 
 and Indus, can give you no more." 
 
 Idealists deceive themselves when they seek far 
 and high the mysterious formula which is graven 
 on every leaflet like the fortune to be told in every 
 open hand. The classical school sought for it in 
 the impossible ; the romantic school sought for it in 
 the exceptional. It is in the familiar and the frequent, 
 and we may boldly assume "that which is most 
 (visibly) frequent to be most beautiful." 
 
 Mark, not in the things of man but in the things 
 of Nature, the most ordinary things ordained by her, 
 not the extraordinary things of the gardeners ; the 
 commonest realities of the mountain not the most 
 ingenious artifices of the mason ; the rocks not the 
 rockeries ; the lakes not the reservoirs ; the clouds 
 not the smoke ; the mosses not the carpets. There 
 will indeed be relics of nature and in consequence 
 relics of beauty in a plant trained on a wall, in a tree 
 pruned for its crop of fruit or leaves, in a field satu- 
 rated with superphosphates, in a canal made with 
 concrete for irrigation. But these are only relics, 
 
II. ART 183 
 
 poor recollections of the great one we have defaced. 
 We can still love them as we love the features, how- 
 ever withered and seamed and scarred, of a face that 
 was dear to us. We can no longer see their proto- 
 type and the criterion of beauty. Only in nature, 
 and in virgin nature, is it present, because nature is 
 only truly herself when nothing has been done to 
 travesty or deface her. " Note that there is this 
 great peculiarity about sky subjects, as distinguished 
 from earth subjects ; — that the clouds, not being much 
 liable to man's interference, are always beautifully 
 arranged. You cannot be sure of this in any other 
 feature of landscape. The rock on which the effect 
 of a mountain scene especially depends is always pre- 
 cisely that which the roadmaker blasts or the landlord 
 quarries; and the spot of green which Nature left 
 with a special purpose by her dark forest sides, and 
 finished with her most delicate grasses, is always that 
 which the farmer ploughs or builds upon. But the 
 clouds, though we can hide them with smoke, and mix 
 them with poison, cannot be quarried nor built over, 
 and they are always therefore gloriously arranged." 
 
 It is in the presence of the free unbridled waves, 
 in the deep valleys, where the water, the herbs, the 
 lights, the shadows, and all living growths have full 
 play that the artist finds the keenest enjoyments of 
 his life. " The pure love of nature in myself has 
 always been quite exclusively confined to wild, that 
 is to say, wholly natural places, and especially to 
 scenery animated by streams, or by the sea. The 
 
1 84 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 sense of the freedom, the spontaneous, unpolluted 
 power of nature was essential in it." All that leads 
 back to Nature makes for Beauty. All that departs 
 from her walks in the way of ugliness. 1 
 
 This conception of Beauty determines the attitude 
 the artist adopts towards Nature, and the attitude he 
 adopts towards Nature is the only question in art. 
 
 All the technical experiments of a painter among 
 his colours or pounded bones, or of the sculptor 
 kneading his clay, all the philosophical comments of 
 aesiheticists haranguing in their lectures, lead back 
 at last to this question : What attitude to adopt 
 towards Nature ? From the answers given, all the 
 schools, cliques, sects, and studios derive their differ- 
 ences. Divested of the verbiage and ambiguities 
 which encumber it, the question propounds itself to 
 these witnesses to the splendour of nature under 
 heaven, in just the same form that it is put to 
 witnesses of the crimes of men in a court of justice. 
 Shall I speak the truth ? Shall I speak the whole 
 truth ? Shall I speak nothing but the truth ? asks 
 the landscape painter under his tent, the sculptor 
 with his chisel, the portrait painter walking round 
 
 1 On this point as on all others the statement that we make of 
 Ruskin's thought is not based on an isolated text nor on a passing 
 opinion of the Master, but on the general scope of his teaching. 
 So that the thesis here expounded is taken from the works belong- 
 ing to all the periods of his life, from Modern Painters, published 
 1 843- 1 860, from Seven Lamps, 1849, from Elements of Drawing, 
 1857, from The Art of England, 1883, and from Praterita, 1883- 
 18S9. 
 
II. ART 185 
 
 his model. Shall I draw the oak as it appears to 
 me in its entirety, without adding anything to it, 
 without falsifying its appearance, but massing the 
 foliage and overlooking certain branches seemingly 
 unnecessary to its beauty ? or in other terms, shall 
 I tell the truth ? Shall I draw the smallest details ? 
 Shall I mark out with equal distinctness even the 
 accidents and the appearances which please me least 
 — in other words, shall I tell the whole truth ? Shall 
 I not add to the theme suggested by this oak, the 
 improvements, the embellishments, all the other ideas 
 of oaks that I may have — in a word, shall I say 
 nothing but the truth ? According to his decision 
 the artist will be classed as an eclectic, a realist, or 
 an idealist. He will follow one of the three great 
 theories whence all the theories of art proceed ; the 
 theory of choice, the theory of literal imitation, the 
 theory of idealisation. 
 
 We have defined Beauty to be " the signature of 
 God upon His works," and even in the very least; 
 of His works, if we have affirmed that all Nature 
 is Beauty, we do not therefore accept the theory 
 of choice, still less that of idealisation, Choice ! 
 Who would dare make it ? 
 
 " Let therefore the young artist beware of the 
 spirit of Choice ; it is an insolent spirit at the best, 
 and commonly a base and blind one too, checking all 
 progress and blasting all power, encouraging weak- 
 nesses, pampering partialities. . . ." " He draws 
 nothing well who thirsts not to draw everything; 
 
1 86 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 when a good painter shrinks, it is because he is 
 humbled, not fastidious; when he stops, it is because 
 he is surfeited, and not because he thinks Nature 
 has given him unkindly food. ... I have seen a 
 man of true taste pause for a quarter of an hour to 
 look* at the channelings that recent rain had traced 
 in a heap of cinders. . . . Perfect art perceives and 
 reflects the whole of nature ; imperfect art is fasti- 
 dious, and impertinently prefers and rejects." 
 
 Therefore it follows according to the saying which 
 created Pre-Raphaelitism, that the artist " should go 
 to nature in all singleness of heart, rejecting nothing, 
 selecting nothing, and scorning nothing." 
 
 Is it necessary to add also idealising nothing ? To 
 choose is insolence, but to idealise is sacrilege. It 
 is the paradoxical, absurd pretension of a narrow 
 mind which, unable to penetrate the beauty scattered 
 throughout Nature, undertakes to create beauty ac- 
 cording to its own wretched imagination. Imagina- 
 tion must create nothing; its function is to "penetrate 
 truth, to associate truth, to contemplate truth." It 
 is not to substitute or add anything to truth. "The 
 error respecting this faculty is, in considering that its 
 function is one of falsehood, and that its operation is 
 to exhibit things as they are not." Why falsify when 
 the reality is so beautiful ? What " moulding and 
 melting of individual beauties together," what academic 
 outline, what marble statues, could ever have the value 
 of living children of men with " their colour heightened 
 by the sun," and " their hair drifted by the breeze " ? 
 
II. ART 187 
 
 " No Greek goddess was ever half so pretty as an 
 English girl of pure clay and temper." The greatest 
 of the Old Masters introduced into all their works 
 claiming imagination, their Paradises and Resurrec- 
 tions, the true portraits of their patrons, of their ser- 
 vants, of their mistresses, of their creditors ; and this 
 was " not an error in them, but the very source and 
 root of their superiority in all things ; for they were 
 too great and too humble not to see in every face 
 about them that which was above them, and which 
 no fancies of theirs could match or take place of." 
 
 What need have we to paint those regions of 
 dreams to which we have never attained, those crea- 
 tures of faith which we have never seen ? When the 
 masters have attempted it they have always fallen 
 therein below their accustomed level. "Whatever is 
 truly great in either Greek or Christian art is also 
 restrictedly human, and even the raptures of the 
 redeemed soul who enters ' celestemente ballands ' 
 the Gate of Angelico's Paradise were seen first in 
 the terrestrial yet most pure mirth of Florentine 
 maidens." " Of that which is more than creature no 
 creature ever conceived," and it is neither useful nor 
 proper to attempt it. Not to see beauty in a swallow 
 and to fancy we can depict it in a seraph, what mad- 
 ness ! "If you are not inclined to look at the wings 
 of birds which God has given you to handle and to 
 see, much less are you to contemplate or draw imagi- 
 nations of the wings of angels which you can't see. 
 Know your own world first — not denying any other — 
 
188 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 but being quite sure that the place in which you are 
 now put is the place with which you are now con- 
 cerned." And above all do not dare under the pre- 
 tence of idealism or of mysticism to teach nature or 
 " to improve the works of God." 
 
 Realism then is all that is left for us, and we 
 should approve of it if Realism, as the modern studios 
 understand it, were truly the imitation and worship of 
 nature. But far from admiring and seeking nature, 
 there is perhaps no school extant that has more 
 deliberately proscribed it and more insolently traduced 
 it than the Realistic. Far from attempting to repro- 
 duce what is natural and original in the world, it has 
 set itself to depict the artificial and the accidental. 
 The sophism of this school must be unmasked. Start- 
 ing from a true principle, namely that Nature far 
 surpasses human imagination, it has by a strange 
 abuse of words arrived at the extravagant conclusion 
 that everything due to man's handiwork — factories, 
 pavements, locomotives, cabs, bicycles, tea-gardens, 
 and railway banks, may be classed as nature, and 
 under this title must compel our admiration. These 
 whimsical lovers of reality who begin by fabricating 
 according to their own ideas some ugly object opposed 
 to all natural laws, and then assert that the object is 
 beautiful simply because it is real, show both a lack of 
 precision in their argument (because in this manner 
 the real cannot be contrasted with the artificial) and 
 of love for the reality, which they disfigure before 
 reproducing. 
 
II. ART 189 
 
 They invent a tall hat, a chimney - pot a huit 
 reflets, and immediately reproduce it on canvas or in 
 bronze, saying it is beautiful because it is nature. 
 They go into a bar, catalogue its collection of many- 
 coloured bottles, study the dimmed and many-spotted 
 mirrors, steep themselves in its smoky atmosphere, 
 and then paint the barmaid in the midst of this grim 
 circumstance of false civilisation, and say to us it is 
 beautiful because it is nature. They go into a hospital 
 and taking a face under chloroform, anaesthetised, 
 and insensible, turn rlicopJwres on to it, to galvanise 
 smiles from a suffering man, obtain angry grimaces 
 where all was at rest, study thus each movement of 
 the muscles, and then tell us that they have found 
 "Nature and the man that has lived," when they 
 should say that they have taken pains to find artifice 
 and the man that is dead. Even worse, they go 
 and look for nature in the theatre with the light not 
 of the sun but of the gas, lighting no living flesh but 
 "the gauze transparencies of creatures," skimming 
 not the ground but boards, breathing not beneath the 
 clouds but " chemical illuminations," treading not with 
 bare lithe feet but pirouetting, their toes deformed by 
 dancing — and dancing to some pizzicato mode, not to 
 a measure of flutes in an ancestral barn. Here is 
 Nature, they say, taken in the act, and here also 
 is Beauty. But if this is Nature, what is artifice ? 
 If this be the earth, where then is the soil and the 
 nourishing corn and the consoling flowers ? If this 
 be sky, where then is the firmament, whence come 
 
igo HIS AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 the rain which fructifies and the rays which ripen, 
 — to find them again, rather let us open our windows ; 
 no, let us leave the theatre where the realists seek 
 models for their faces ; let us pass the suburbs where 
 they seek the models for their landscapes ; and let 
 us go forth where electricity does not meander along 
 the ground, where the air is not imprisoned or com- 
 pressed to carry telegrams but free to form clouds ; 
 where " the play shall be wholesome play, not in 
 theatrical gardens with tin flowers and gas sunshine, 
 and girls dancing because of their misery; but in 
 true gardens, with real flowers and real sunshine, and 
 children dancing because of their gladness." There 
 is nature and there also is beauty. 
 
 The plastic beauty in form as well as the pictur- 
 esque in landscape — that is plain enough, for if we 
 maintain that it is to be found in the human body 
 as created by nature, we do not say that the types 
 ordinarily chosen by the realists represent nature or 
 correspond to beauty. Let us take an elector or a 
 petty official sitting outside a cafe, who with a suitable 
 gesture drinks a good bock, or tastes an absinthe. 
 He is stooping under the weight of inherited ill, de- 
 formed by the accessories of modern costume, soured 
 by the passions and vices of our time, his muscles 
 atrophied by want of use, his skin white and dis- 
 coloured from useless clothing, his hand trembling 
 with drink. ... Is this the natural man, and if ever 
 there was an artificial being in the world is it not 
 he ? Is the morphomaniac or the clilorotic woman 
 
II. ART i 9 i 
 
 as Nature made her, or the powdered and enamelled 
 lady with hair interwoven with threads of gold ? Is 
 it Nature who formed the hands of modern workmen, 
 who has put these weals on the leather-dresser, those 
 blisters on the workers in metal ? Is the complexion 
 of a face under an electric lamp natural ? According 
 to this, which would be the true light, which the arti- 
 ficial ? Doubtless that of the sun. . . . Under what 
 pretext do the realists proscribe the lights of the 
 romanticists or of M. Hebert as false, as gleams 
 filtered into cellars, when they admit in their own 
 pictures the lights of theatres and factories, when all 
 the artificial effects of M. Hubert or of M. Henner 
 can be obtained if necessary by the well-combined play 
 of gas and electricity ? When they show us, in those 
 hospital scenes which they so much affect, the electrical 
 treatment on the muscles and the skin, or when they 
 whiten the face of a clown and transfer him to their 
 canvases, informing us that these are all realities, have 
 they truly any realism, and have they any real respect 
 for that nature whose name they inscribe on their 
 banner? No, the man of nature, the true creature 
 supremely beautiful, is such a form as arises lithe 
 and joyous from the strong hand of the Potter Who 
 moulds the human clay, not such as the needs, true or 
 false, of civilisation have caricatured it. It is the man 
 of the early ages, straight as a lath, not the man of the 
 age of steam, distorted by a false education. It is the 
 Apollo of Syracuse, not Mr. Gladstone's elector. It 
 is the man made by nature, not the " self-made man." 
 
192 HIS ^ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 The beautiful is not then to be found in an ideal 
 on the one hand, nor is it on the other hand in nature 
 deformed as copied by the realists, but in natural 
 Nature, and if in the present day we do not easily 
 find this nature, if all the human figures around us 
 are blurred by " the visible and instant operation of 
 unconquered Sin," then let us go back not to a dream 
 but to a reality, — a reality which has passed away, to 
 a memory of the happy time when man, strong, pure, 
 radiant and confident, stepped free in the splendid 
 landscapes, not yet destroyed or polluted. Plato 
 possibly was not very far wrong. The ideal of to- 
 day is perhaps merely a memory of the realities gone 
 by. . . . Let us piously keep the recollection of this 
 brilliant vision not the less real because it has passed 
 away. Let us respect the monuments which have 
 been left to us. "A beautiful thing may exist but 
 for a moment as a reality ; — it exists for ever as a 
 testimony. To the law and to the witness of it the 
 nations must appeal in scecula scsculortim ; and in 
 very deed and very truth a thing of beauty is a law 
 for ever." 
 
 The reply then to the question : What is the aim 
 of art, and what should it show us ? is simply : Nature 
 as it is, Man as he has been. The road to virgin 
 nature is easy to find ; it leads us to the valleys that 
 factories have respected and to the seas they cannot 
 pollute. For the painter of figures and for the 
 sculptor, it is perhaps a difficult enterprise to re- 
 constitute man not yet debased by vice or deformed 
 
II. ART 193 
 
 by mechanical labour, but at any rate we must press 
 towards the attainment of this reality, and not in the 
 direction of anything but reality. We must have no 
 abstractions, additions, or embellishments, but we may 
 banish from the face the signs of degradation that 
 the artificial life of our day has stamped upon him. 
 We must not invent anything outside reality, but 
 we may efface the accretions that civilisation and mis- 
 fortune have added to reality. Thus we shall not be 
 effacing natural truths but on the contrary reconsti- 
 tuting the true text by getting rid of interpolation. 
 " Now, first of all, this work, be it observed, is in 
 no respect a work of imagination. Wrecked we are, 
 and nearly all to pieces ; but that little good by 
 which we are to redeem ourselves is to be got out of 
 the old wreck, beaten about and full of sand though 
 it be ; and not out of that desert island of pride 
 on which the devils split first, and we after them. 
 . . . We lay it down for a first principle that our 
 graphic art, whether painting or sculpture, is to 
 produce something which shall look as like Nature 
 as possible." 
 
 But Nature how looked at ? With the eyes or 
 with the Rontgen ray^ ? Nature how touched ? 
 With the hand or with the scalpel ? Nature how 
 observed ? Contemplatively during years as by the 
 recluse of Mount Athos or of the Alps, or chrono- 
 photographically in the two-thousandth of a second 
 
 N 
 
t 
 
 194 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 by a disciple of Mr. Muybridge or of Mr. Marey, 
 who arrives, photographs, and departs by the next 
 express? We must distinguish, for in ^Esthetics 
 words are so accommodating, and the vocabulary 
 so ill defined, that in saying we ought to keep close 
 to Nature we may be taken for a photographer, 
 for an anatomist, for a geologist, for a scavenger. 
 None of these men see, or come near to seeing, 
 Nature aesthetically, any more than the fireman 
 standing behind the scenes has any idea of the 
 effect of an opera. He is opposite to the things 
 he ought only to see in profile, and deafened by a 
 single part, he cannot seize the whole. He will only 
 see something the day the theatre takes fire. We 
 shall need him then, and he will know better than 
 we do why it burns, the causes thereof, and — speak- 
 ing of the student's view of Nature — the mighty 
 convulsions of the human machine which holds our 
 soul, of the earth and the sea around us ; but in that 
 day there will be no more art, and the spectacle will 
 be at an end. ... As long as it lasts it is not as a 
 student, but as a seer that we must look at Nature 
 
 simply with the eyes of a man " in health," and 
 
 with the heart of a lover who seeks only to admire. 
 "Turner, in his early life, was sometimes good- 
 natured, and would show people what he was about. 
 He was one day making a drawing of Plymouth 
 harbour, with some ships at a distance of a mile 
 or two, seen against the light. Having shown this 
 drawing to a naval officer, the naval officer observed 
 
II. ART 
 
 195 
 
 J 
 
 with surprise, and objected with very justifiable in- 
 dignation, that the ships of the line had no port-holes. 
 ' No,' said Turner, ' certainly not. If you will walk 
 up to Mount Edgecumbe, and look at the ships 
 against the sunset, you will find that you can't see 
 the port-holes.' 'Well, but,' said the naval officer, 
 still indignant, 'you know the port-holes are there.' 
 ' Yes,' said Turner, ' I know that well enough ; but 
 my business is to draw what I see, and not what 
 I know is there.' " 
 
 What we see, what we know, what we feel, not 
 what we understand, — this is cesthetical truth as 
 opposed to scientific truth, and this is the truth which 
 Art should as closely as possible express, and should 
 penetrate in order to express. Do those learned men 
 who maintain that they show things as they are 
 adhere to the plan of Nature ? No, they violate 
 it, for her plan is often to show us the things as 
 they are not. And to reproduce the keels hidden 
 under the dark water, the bones hidden under opaque 
 flesh, movements disguised by the rapidity with which 
 they are executed, — in a word, to show in everything 
 the " appearances " she hides from our eyes is not 
 to follow Nature, nor to be faithful to her, — it is to 
 betray her. All treachery is punished, and Nature 
 does not give her full beauty to the artist who has 
 questioned her without reverence and despoiled her 
 without love. She bestows her treasure on those 
 who love her. She yielded herself to the Greeks 
 who beheld her in her plastic purity, living, moving, 
 
196 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 blushing, fading, trembling before them. . . . The 
 Greeks went in quest of her in full light of day, in 
 the free air, under the blue sky of Attica, following 
 her design and the way she wishes to be seen — 
 and they captured her beauty. The study of the 
 nude is the science of the living. 
 
 The learned men of the Renaissance looked at 
 her otherwise, with inquisitorial and indiscreet eyes. 
 They exposed the muscle and studied the anatomy 
 of the human frame by torchlight, in its darkest 
 recesses. It is the science, of the tomb. What has 
 come of it ? Muscles swollen and stiffened, figures 
 as if flayed in the pictures of Mantegna, iron-bound 
 outlines as in the engravings of Diirer, bundles of 
 ropes for tendons and knots for muscles. " Look 
 at Mantegna's magnificent Mythology of the Vices in 
 the Louvre for instance, the anatomy is entirely 
 revolting to all women and children. ... In the 
 middle of the gallery of the Brera at Milan there is 
 an elaborate study of a dead Christ entirely char- 
 acteristic of early fifteenth-century Italian madman's 
 work. It is only an anatomical study of a vulgar 
 and ghastly dead body, with the soles of the feet set 
 straight at the spectator and the rest foreshortened. 
 It is exactly characteristic of this madness in all of 
 them — Pollajuolo, Castagno, Mantegna, Vinci, Michael 
 Angelo — these great artists who polluted all their work 
 with the science of the sepulchre." 
 
 The great crime of the Renaissance was not, as 
 the Mystics have supposed, indolence and pleasure, 
 
II. ART 197 
 
 but knowledge. The Renaissance did not sin by 
 too much exuberance of life, and of love, but by 
 too much ambition, deadness, and horror. Where 
 love dwells there can be no scientific inquiry, no 
 learned display of discoveries. We shall not vivisect 
 what we love. Elsa asked his name of Lohengrin, 
 but not the number of the muscles of his skin nor 
 the form of his spinal apophyses, and even she 
 asked too much. Lohengrin disappeared. ... It is 
 the eternal punishment of the scientific spirit taking 
 the place of love. This punishment awaits all our 
 investigators, our anatomists, our radiographists, our 
 chemists, our electro-biologists, our chronophotogra- 
 phers, and our mathematicians. The scientist thinks 
 to discover movement ; he stops it. He thinks to 
 command light ; he destro}^ it. He thinks to seize 
 the life of the muscle ; he kills it. 
 
 It is the letter of Science which killeth, the spirit \ 
 of Art which maketh alive; the spirit of Art is nothing 
 but Love, simple, passionate admiration, satisfied with 
 what the eyes see, seeking neither to fathom its 
 mystery nor to improve it outwardly. In saying that 
 " all great Art is Praise," Ruskin means that the 
 artist must not only seek Nature with Love but come \ 
 to her with reverence, that he must reverence not | 
 only her forms and colours but also her whole plan 
 and her design, even in all the details and forms 
 of art. He will not permit the artist to arrange or 
 order her otherwise than she arranges or orders 
 herself. He will be careful how he uses the word 
 
1 98 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 "daring nobility" in composition. He abominates 
 generalisation, he distrusts all synthesis. If he 
 admits that a picture should have a guiding line, a 
 principal mass of light, a dominant figure, he adds 
 immediately, " it is in the bad pictures that you 
 would see this law most rigorously manifested." 
 When he speaks of harmony it is as if he were 
 writing a treatise on poison. When he permits the 
 grouping of figures he derives its laws from the 
 | attentive examination of the grouping of plants. He 
 only tolerates the subordination of one thing to 
 another because he observes that whenever a leaf 
 is composite — that is to say divided into other leaflets 
 which imitate and repeat it — these leaflets are not 
 symmetrical like the principal leaf, but always smaller 
 in some part, so that one of the elements of subordinate 
 beauty in every tree consists in the confession of its 
 own humility and subjection. The laws of landscape 
 control him equally in sculpture, and prompt those 
 of " glyptic " engraving. He insists above all that 
 the sculptured mass should present from a distance a 
 pure and simple outline and an imperceptibly modelled 
 surface, a "magnificent attribute of reciprocal inter- 
 ference," the planes melting softly one into the other 
 — as in Nature hills are seen at a distance through 
 the rays of the sloping sun, or like waving leaves 
 or rounded fruits with no single flat spot, and no 
 indentations or deep grooves such a,s Bernini and 
 other artists of the decadence so much affect. The 
 modelling of statues should follow the lines not of 
 
II. ART 199 
 
 drapery but of the human flesh, and not the flat 
 surfaces designed by men, but the rounded spaces 
 decreed by God. 
 
 Even in architecture this "thread of Ariadne" is to 
 guide us, because architecture is the art next to 
 landscape which most recalls nature. Ruskin likes 
 architecture better than statues, better than portraits, 
 better than anything which deals with man alone. 
 Because the Gothic style of architecture reproduces 
 most fully and most faithfully the sinuosities of ^ 
 branches, of streams, of leaves, and of flowers, he has 
 greatly preferred that style to the Roman, or Byzan- 
 tine, or Arab, or Renaissance. In dark and deep 
 recesses of cathedrals his predilections are still those 
 of the landscape painter fascinated by the rocks and 
 the meadows, the rivers and the sunshine. Among 
 the Baptisteries he thinks of the rocky, beds whence 
 flow the rivers, and in view of the- cupola he thinks of 
 the rounded form of the granite mass. The moun- 
 tains teach him the construction of churches. In a 
 basilica he would have the stones placed as they lay 
 embedded in the quarry, and not "set up on end." 
 The blocks of marble must lie in accordance with 
 quasi horizontal lines because the masses of the 
 Matterhorn appear to lie thus. He looks askance at 
 the straight line, for it is rarely to be seen in Nature 
 herself, and he would have been ready to attack the 
 cathedrals of Pisa, Florence, Lucca, and Pistoja, for 
 their geometrical ornaments had he not recollected 
 just in time that he has seen the same in crystals. 
 
i 
 
 200 HIS AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 But as crystals are not often to be met with in the 
 visible aspects of nature, he will not sanction the 
 frequent recurrence of their forms in decoration. 
 
 Thus he is irritated by the architect who rounds 
 the curves of the trefoils according to the most exact 
 law of science. In studying the Romanesque and the 
 Byzantine he awaits with impatience the moment 
 when the arch takes the shape of a leaf, the ogive. 
 He watches the length of the smooth and rounded 
 pillars with the anxiety of a Tannhauser, waiting till 
 his staff bursts into blossom. ... In proportion as 
 the leaf of the Greek acanthus expands, subsides, 
 "rolls hither and thither, as if just fresh gathered 
 out of the dew " in the ravine, in proportion as he 
 perceives the winding tracery of the stem rising into 
 " wreaths of flowers on the capitals," he becomes 
 agitated, he recognises a memory of nature, and cries : 
 Here it is ! He shares the Byzantine mind, delight- 
 ing in " the delicacy of subdivision which Nature 
 shows in the fernleaf or parsleyleaf, and so also 
 often the Gothic mind, much enjoying the oak, thorn, 
 and thistle." He praises "the builder of the Ducal 
 Palace " for " using great breadth in his foliage, in 
 order to harmonize with the broad surface of his 
 mighty wall, as Nature delights in the sweeping 
 freshness of the dockleaf or waterlily." In fact he 
 demands that architecture should place "her most 
 exuberant vegetable ornament just where Nature 
 would have placed it." — " Thus the Corinthian capital 
 is beautiful, because it expands under the abacus 
 
II. ART 201 
 
 just as nature would have expanded it; and because 
 it looks as if the leaves had one root, though the root 
 is unseen." 
 
 And as in nature nothing is colourless or mono- 
 tonous, this landscape-architect will have his buildings 
 coloured from top to bottom. Not with red or blue 
 lines marking out the blocks of stone or the fluting of 
 the columns as the braided stripes of uniforms repro- 
 duce the ribs of the human skeleton, but on the 
 contrary in varied tones, brilliant and interlaced, 
 overlapping each other like the colours of a shield, 
 playing on the surface of the building as they play 
 in nature, softly veiling without hiding the interior 
 structure of the great architectural building of stone. 
 
 Even the simplest houses were painted thus in old 
 days. At Venice "the arms of the family were of 
 course blazoned in their own proper colours, but I 
 think generally on a pure azure ground ; the blue 
 colour is still left behind the shields in the Casa Priuli 
 and one or two more of the palaces which are un- 
 restored, and the blue ground was used also to 
 relieve the sculptures of religious subjects. Finally, 
 all the mouldings, capitals, cornices, cusps, and 
 traceries, were either entirely gilded or profusely 
 touched with gold." 
 
 Nature ordains it. And beyond ordaining she 
 offers us the necessary materials for the beautifying 
 of our towns. "This rock, then, is prepared by 
 Nature for the sculptor and architect, just as paper 
 is prepared by the manufacturer for the artist. The 
 
202 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 colours of marble are mingled for us just as if on a 
 prepared palette. They are of all shades and hues 
 (except bad ones), some being united and even, some 
 broken, mixed and interrupted, in order to supply, 
 as far as possible, the want of the painter's power of 
 breaking and mingling the colour with the brush. 
 But there is more in the colours than this delicacy 
 of adaptation. There is history in them. By the 
 manner in which they are arranged in every piece of 
 marble, they record the means by which that marble 
 has been produced, and the successive changes 
 through which it has passed. And in all their veins 
 and zones, and flame-like stainings or broken and 
 disconnected lines, they write various legends, never 
 untrue, of the former political state of the mountain 
 kingdom to which they belonged, of its infirmities 
 and fortitudes, convulsions and consolidations, from 
 the beginning of time." 
 
 Let us take these materials and cover our dwellings 
 with them. When this is achieved we have the 
 chefs-dceuvre of architecture, — the achievement of 
 Gothic cathedrals, painted doorways, carved and 
 coloured woods, panels gilded like the sunset. In 
 the Venetian, where all was natural and covered 
 with paintings as rich as the leaves of autumn, we 
 find the apogee. The Renaissance with its grey 
 palaces, its geometric panels, its precise, pompous, 
 cold science, is the winter, — " the winter which suc- 
 ceeded was colourless as it was cold." The day the 
 architect forgot Nature in all her variety of form and 
 
II. ART 203 
 
 colour, that day he lost sight of Beauty. " The de- 
 gradation of the cinque cento manner of decoration 
 was not owing to its naturalism, to its faithfulness of 
 imitation, but to its imitation of ugly, i.e. unnatural 
 things. So long as it restrained itself to sculpture 
 of animals and flowers, it remained noble. But the 
 moment that unnatural objects were associated with 
 these, and armour, and musical instruments, and wild 
 meaningless scrolls and curled shields, and other 
 such fancies," from the day when the landscapists 
 gave place to the archaeologists, we feel the chill of 
 reopened sarcophagi, the deadly prick of the com- 
 passes, we feel the formalism of the classical and 
 pedantic spirit permeating our dwellings and freezing 
 them. The ribbon without beginning or end re- 
 places the living grass, the senseless streamer knots 
 together the scattered flowers, the sumptuous folds 
 of draperies blown out by imaginary storms dis- 
 guise the human form. " It is as if the soul of 
 man, itself severed from the root of its health, and 
 about to fall into corruption, lost the perception of 
 life in all things around it; and could no more dis- 
 tinguish the wave of the strong branches, full of 
 muscular strength and sanguine circulation, from the 
 lax bending of a broken cord. "At that moment the 
 doom of Naturalism was sealed, and with it that of 
 the architecture of the world." 
 
 We are to follow then in all forms of art, painting, 
 sculpture, architecture, the path Nature traces for us 
 when we behold her with love, and we must seek 
 
204 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 after her teaching even in the smallest technical detail. 
 Her first teaching is that of repose — repose in 
 colour, repose above all in movement. Her transfor- 
 mations are not rapid, her gestures are not vehement. 
 The tree slowly extends itself towards the sun ; the 
 sun sinks by degrees behind the mountain ; the moun- 
 tain stands immovable for centuries. Natural pheno- 
 mena rarely exhibit those rapid changes of scene 
 which are the joy of children in fairyland. Full- 
 grown men will marvel more at the slow miracles 
 of germination or at the gradual growth of islands 
 emerging from the sea, the product of myriads of 
 tiny insects during myriads of years. In art we 
 must then deprive ourselves of all representation 
 of tumultuous events, of violent scenes, of figures 
 which run, dance, fall, struggle, or wound ; pictures of 
 battles, of the Last Judgment, of Bacchanalian feasts, 
 of martyrs in great contortions of pain, victims nailed 
 to doors, and Christs dying on the Cross. We must 
 condemn naturalism in death in the name of Nature's 
 life, and also dying Christs in the name of her 
 serenity. Simple shepherds kneeling around a cradle, 
 the play of a fountain under the sky, the touch of a 
 bow on a string, a procession of knights to a church, 
 the slow march of ambassadors along a canal, the 
 depression of Melancholy amid the tools of science, 
 the fall of roses from the finger-tips of an angel 
 one by one on to the soft form of the infant Christ 
 playing below, — these are the movements which we 
 may reproduce, because they do not shock our 
 
II. ART 205 
 
 instinct of " permanence." The shepherds of Lorenzo 
 di Credi may retain for any length of time their caress- 
 ing posture ; the monks of Mont Salvat and the great 
 nobles of Carpaccio may pass eternally before our 
 eyes without fatigue, Durer's figure may remain lean- 
 ing perpetually on her hand as motionless as a 
 caryatid, and the angel of Botticelli shall strew his 
 flowers everlastingly. 
 
 In the lines of these scarce visible gestures or of 
 these pensive attitudes care must be taken to avoid 
 the restlessness which has been excluded from the 
 composition. We must not contort the limbs or twist 
 the draperies of these tranquil personages after the 
 manner of Bernini or Gustave Dore. " The great and 
 temperate designer does not allow himself any violent 
 curves ; he works much with lines in which the curva- 
 ture, though always existing, is long before it is 
 perceived." It is quite the same when he takes the 
 paint-brush. As Nature teaches us repose of line, 
 she teaches us repose of light and shade; and not 
 the chiaroscuro of Salvator Rosa, of Rembrandt, or 
 of Ribera. She does not allow herself great divi- 
 sions of light and shade, she repudiates illuminated 
 dungeons, the play of dark lanterns and pistol shots 
 in caverns, she abhors contrasts, or tolerates them 
 only well disguised, only allowing " the opposition to 
 tell upon the mind as a surprise but not as a shock." 
 Our interest in the work of art must be awakened 
 in the same manner by the truth of colours and not 
 by their contrasts, by the force of the limbs and not 
 
206 HIS ^ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 by their efforts, by their forms and not by their 
 deformities. The scene portrayed must attract us not 
 by the strangeness of the situation, but by the reality 
 of the characters. No matter that there is no action 
 amongst the figures, if the outline is so pure and the 
 life so intense that we are in love with this outline 
 and this life for their own sake. No matter that their 
 feet carry them nowhere if they are beautiful in 
 repose ; that their hands do not work if they hold in 
 their idle fingers " imprisoned destinies." This is a 
 proof of the greatest art : — The figures in our picture 
 are to be so beautiful that we are moved to love 
 them, and then all action, all gesture, all incident, all 
 movement, become immaterial. "To be with those 
 we love is enough," says La Bruyere ; " dreaming, 
 speaking, or not speaking, thinking of them, or think- 
 ing of indifferent things, it is all the same to us if 
 only we are near them." 
 
 Because we regard her with love Nature must be 
 reproduced with all . her minutiae. The smallest 
 details about those we love are interesting to us, the 
 fleeting expression of the countenance, the veriest 
 detail of the features, the shadow of an eyelid on 
 the cheek, the setting of a nail on the finger, the line, 
 ever deepening, alas, which an invisible hand draws 
 along the forehead. . . . Thus Nature must be rendered 
 with "an eagle's keenness of eye, fineness of finger 
 like a trained violinist, and patience and love like 
 Griselda's." The modern engraver is " presumptuous 
 who covers his plate with intersecting lines sketched 
 
II. ART 207 
 
 at random in shadow with no effort to express a 
 simple leaf or a clod of earth," and draws with flat 
 vague outlines a nameless landscape which we may 
 see anywhere from the window of a railway carri- 
 age travelling at sixty miles an hour. "The more 
 cautious he is in assigning the right species of moss 
 to its favourite trunk, and the right kind of weed 
 to its necessary stone, in marking the definite and 
 characteristic leaf, blossom, seed, fracture, colour, 
 and inward anatomy of everything, the more truly 
 ideal his work becomes. All confusion of species, all 
 careless rendering of character, all unnatural and 
 arbitrary association, is vulgar and unideal in pro- 
 portion to its degree." 
 
 But from the very beginning this absolutely correct 
 and precise line must be obtained "with the point, 
 not of pen or crayon, but of the brush, as Apelles 
 did, and as all coloured lines are drawn on Greek 
 vases." Accustomed to draw with the brush, the 
 artist will have much greater facility in the execution 
 of his picture, for he can at any moment rectify by 
 a stroke of his brush any line that a preceding touch 
 had obliterated. The painter who cannot outline with 
 his brush has not mastered the art of drawing. " By 
 the greatest men — by Titian, Velasquez, or Veronese 
 — you will hardly find an authentic drawing at all. 
 For the fact is, that while we moderns have always, 
 learned, or tried to learn, to paint by drawing, the 
 ancients learned to draw by painting — or by engrav- 
 ing, more difficult still. The brush was put into their 
 
208 HIS .ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 hands when they were children, and they were forced 
 to draw with that, until, if they used the pen or 
 crayon, they used it either with the lightness of a 
 brush or the decision of a graver." 
 
 To judge is to choose. Because in the recesses 
 of a thicket the "veins and lines wind and cross by 
 millions, the leaflets make apertures, the angles of 
 the stipules and spines intrude, the circles of the 
 sporangia, the ellipses of the tendrils roll up," because 
 in nature everything is beautiful, must her design 
 be effaced in the drawing and her beauty lost in 
 her luxuriance ? No. Nature has its characteristic 
 features and Art should express them. " It may be 
 with lines as with soldiers : three hundred, knowing 
 their work thoroughly, may be stronger than three 
 thousand less sure of their aim." Moreover this is 
 exactly the meaning of the word drawing or designing 
 in things, these qualities that Taine has defined as the 
 "essential qualities of the object." But Taine like all 
 philosophers maintains that the artist should and can 
 make use of this character of Designer according to 
 his particular fancy, his special human inclinations, 
 and his individual temperament. He admits that in 
 so doing the artist becomes superior to his model, 
 and that according to the vigorous and adequate 
 expression of Cherbuliez, " he disentangles Nature." 
 ~(Ruskin never admits even for an instant the superi- 
 J>{ority of Art over Nature. The artist is not free to 
 choose as he will this or that line in Nature ; the 
 conditions of his sight are imperative. Practically in 
 
II. ART 209 
 
 a thicket we do not see all ; we cannot see all. . . . 
 Now " the really scientific artist is he who not only 
 asserts bravely what he does see, but confesses 
 honestly what he does not. You must not draw all 
 the hairs in an eyelash ; not because it is sublime to 
 generalise them but because it is impossible to see 
 them. How many hairs there are, a sign painter or 
 anatomist may count ; but how few of them you 
 can see, it is only the utmost masters, Carpaccio, 
 Tintoret, Reynolds, and Velasquez, who count and 
 know." Does the chiromancer regard all the cross- 
 ings in the open hand that you present to him ? No. 
 There are some lines which alone determine the 
 Fortune — the master lines. " It is by seizing these 
 leading lines, when we cannot seize all, that likeness 
 and expression are given to a portrait, and grace and 
 a kind of vital truth to the rendering of every natural 
 form. I call it vital truth, because these chief lines 
 are always expressive of the past history and present 
 action of the thing. They show in a mountain, first, 
 how it was built or heaped up ; and secondly how it is 
 now being worn away, and from what quarter the 
 wildest storms strike it. In a tree, they show what 
 kind of fortune it has had to endure from its childhood : 
 how troublesome trees have come in its way, and 
 pushed it aside, and tried to strangle or starve it ; 
 where and when kind trees have sheltered it, and 
 grown up lovingly together with it, bending as it bent ; 
 what winds torment it most ; what boughs of it behave 
 best, and bear most fruit, and so on. In a wave or 
 
 O 
 
210 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 cloud, these leading lines show the run of the tide 
 and of the wind, and the sort of change which the 
 water or vapour is at any moment enduring in its 
 form, as it meets shore, or counter-wave, or melt- 
 ing sunshine. Now remember, nothing distinguishes 
 great men from inferior men more than their 
 always, whether in life or in art, knotving the way 
 things are going. Try always, whenever you look at 
 a form, to see the lines in it which have had power 
 over its past fate and will have power over its 
 futurity. Those are its awful lines; see that you 
 seize on those, whatever else miss." 
 
 §3 
 
 Finally Nature teaches us the., worship of colour. 
 We mean colour and not chiaroscuro, which is quite 
 different: "Here is an Arabian vase, in which the 
 pleasure given to the eye is only by lines ; — no effect 
 of light, or of colour is attempted. Here is a moon- 
 light by Turner, in which there are no lines at all, and 
 no colours at all. The pleasure given to the eye is 
 only by modes of light and shade, or effects of light. 
 Finally, here is an early Florentine painting, in which 
 there are no lines of importance, and no effect of light 
 whatever; but all the pleasure given to the eye is in 
 gaiety and variety of colour. 
 
 " In preparing to draw any object, you will find that, 
 practically, you have to ask yourself, Shall I aim at 
 the colour of it, the light of it, or the lines of it ? You 
 
II. ART 211 
 
 can't have all three ; you can't even have any two out 
 of the three in equal strength. 
 
 "And though much of the two subordinate qualities 
 may in each school be consistent with the leading 
 one, yet the schools are evermore separate : as for 
 instance, in other matters, one man says, I will have 
 my fee, and as much honesty as is consistent with 
 it; another, I will have my honesty, and as much 
 fee as is consistent with it. Though the man who 
 will have his fee be subordinately honest, though the 
 man who will have his honour, subordinately rich, 
 are they not evermore of diverse schools ? 
 
 " So you have, in art, the utterly separate provinces, 
 though in contact at their borders, of 
 
 The Delineators ; 
 
 The Chiaroscurists ; and 
 
 The Colourists ; " 
 
 or, to give them their right names, the schools of 
 Raphael, Rembrandt, and Fra Angelico ; the laws 
 of Rome, the laws of Amsterdam, and the Laws of 
 Fesole. 
 
 It is Nature herself who teaches us the Laws of 
 Fesole. There have been great masters in the three 
 schools, just as in the dissensions of the Church 
 there have been saints in every order. But the true 
 draughtsman is to look at things in the light of the 
 sun which shimmers, trembles, and blurs the lines. 
 The chiaroscurists have looked at them in the half 
 light and in the mystery of the studio, the walls of 
 
212 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 which they have sometimes painted in black, so as 
 to concentrate all the strength of light into a focus 
 which kindles the flesh tints, which flashes on armour, 
 or lights the points of spears like tapers. Whoever 
 looks at things in the full light and full air, simply, 
 truthfully, joyously, as Nature herself shows them, 
 will see them not in black and white squares, but in 
 a conglomeration of coloured points. " It is better 
 to consider all Nature merely as a mosaic of different 
 colours, to be imitated one by one in simplicity," and 
 take no count of the supposed laws of chiaroscuro 
 or of shade. We must follow Angelico and Perugino, 
 who are without shade, without sadness, without evil, 
 and not Caravaggio or Spagnoletto, these black slaves 
 of painting. In ourselves there is no shade any 
 more than light ; there are only degrees of colour 
 stronger, deeper, thicker. Away then with the grey, 
 the black, the brown, all the tar-brush of the French 
 landscapists of the middle of the century, who seemed 
 to look at " Nature carelessly in the dark mirror." 
 We must darken each tint not with a mixture of dark 
 colour but with its own tint strengthened. Neither 
 must we speak of weakening anything under the pre- 
 text of " aerial perspective." There is no special colour 
 which expresses distance. It is false that because our 
 object is far away it has less colour than if it were 
 near. " Vivid orange in an orange is a sign of near- 
 ness, for if you put the orange a great way off, its 
 colour will not look so bright ; but vivid orange in 
 sky is a sign of distance, because you cannot get the 
 
II. ART 213 
 
 colour of orange in a cloud near you. The green of 
 a Swiss lake is pale in the clear waves on the beach, 
 but intense as an emerald in the sunstreak six milo§ 
 from shore. It is absurd to expect any help from 
 laws of ' aerial perspective.' Look for the natural 
 effects, and set them down as fully as you can, 
 and as faithfully, and never alter a colour because 
 it won't look in its right place. . . . Why should 
 you suppose that Nature always means you to know 
 exactly how far one thing is from another ? She 
 certainly intends you always to enjoy her colour- 
 ing, but she does not wish you always to measure 
 her space. You would be hard put to it, every 
 time you painted the sun setting, if }'ou had to 
 express his 95,000,000 miles of distance in 'aerial 
 perspective.' " 
 
 But it would be a mistake to imagine that Ruskin, 
 this Guebres in love with colour, did not appreciate 
 both its delicacies and its harmonies. And as he 
 knew his fellow-countrymen's taste for loud colours, 
 he boldly warns them not to trust in them. " If 
 colours were twenty times as costly as they are, we 
 should have many more good painters. If I were 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer I would lay a tax of 
 twenty shillings a cake on all colours, and I believe 
 such a tax would do more to advance real art than 
 a great many schools of design." Look at Nature. 
 "She is economical of her fine colours. . . . You 
 would think by the way she paints, that her colours 
 cost her something enormous ; she will only give 
 
214 HIS AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 you a single pure touch, just where the petal turns 
 into light ; but down in the bell all is subdued, and 
 under the petal all is subdued, even in the showiest 
 flower. . . . Sometimes I have really thought her 
 miserliness intolerable ; in a gentian, for instance, 
 the way she economises her ultramarine down in the 
 bell is a little too bad." Like her, we must be 
 lovingly sparing of our colours. " A bad colourist 
 does not love beautiful colour better than the best 
 colourist does, nor half so much. But he indulges 
 in it to excess ; he uses it in large masses, and un- 
 subdued ; and then it is a law of Nature, a law as 
 universal as that of gravitation, that he shall not be 
 able to enjoy it so much as if he had used it in 
 less quantit}'. His eye is jaded and satiated, and 
 the blue and red have life in them no more. He 
 tries to paint them bluer and redder, in vain : all 
 the blue has become grey, and gets greyer the more 
 he adds to it ; all his crimson has become brown, 
 and gets more sere and autumnal the more he deepens 
 it. But the great painter is sternly temperate in 
 his work ; he loves the vivid colour with all his 
 heart ; but for a long time he does not allow himself 
 anything like it, nothing but sober browns and dull 
 greys, and colours that have no conceivable beauty 
 in them ; but these by his government become lovely : 
 and after bringing out of them all the life and power 
 they possess, and enjoying them to the uttermost, — 
 cautiously, and as the crown of his work, and the 
 consummation of its music, he permits the momentary 
 
II. ART 215 
 
 crimson and azure, and the whole canvas is in a 
 flame." 
 
 r"Jhe plan of Nature must be imitated not only in 
 .colour but also in composition. "There are all kinds 
 of harmonies in a picture, according to its mode of 
 production. There is even a harmony of touch. If 
 you paint one part of it very rapidly and forcibly, 
 and another part slowly and delicately, each division 
 of the picture may be right separately, but they will 
 not agree together. . . . Similarly, if you paint one 
 part of it by a yellow light in a warm day, and 
 another by a grey light in a cold day, though both 
 may have been sunlight, and both may be well toned, 
 and have their relative shadows truly cast, neither 
 will look like light; they will destroy each other's 
 power." This clearness, this precision of effect, must 
 govern all the details of the composition. No more 
 retouches, no more daubs, no more blotchy lines, 
 no more dragged paint-brushes, no more slips, no 
 more spreading of colour with the palette knife. Our 
 colours are to be kept dry and our palette clean, so 
 that we can clearly see the pure tint, and may not 
 be tempted to mix. Turner did quite the contrary, 
 it is true, and his palette kept in the National 
 Gallery is an eloquent witness of it; but on this 
 point Ruskin disavows him. By the same rule he 
 forbids all medium, varnish, bitumen, and even water. 
 Thus in water-colour he forbids great washes and 
 wetted surfaces. He speaks of the sponge as of 
 a monster. The wet blot is his nightmare. He 
 
216 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 condemns coarse paper because it holds the water. 
 He is a water-colourist with a horror of water. If 
 we ask how we are to weaken the colour he teaches 
 us to use white. His fear of a daub leads him to 
 body-colour. For he is not one of those who say 
 with admiration : This is done with nothing at all. 
 He likes what is done with something. He has no 
 care for transparency. " I am now entirely convinced 
 that the greatest things that are to be done in art 
 must be done in dead colour. The habit of de- 
 pending on varnish or on lucid tints for trans- 
 parency, makes the painter comparatively lose sight 
 of the nobler translucence which is obtained by 
 breaking various colours amidst each other. All the 
 degradation of art which was brought about after 
 the rise of the Dutch school, by asphaltum, yellow 
 varnish, and brown trees would have been prevented, 
 if only painters had been forced to work in dead 
 colour. Any colour will do for some people, if it is 
 browned and shining ; but fallacy in dead colour is 
 detected on the instant. I even believe that when- 
 ever a painter begins to wish that he could touch 
 any portion of his work with gum, he is going 
 wrong. "Whatever may be the pride of a young 
 beauty in the knowledge that her eyes shine (though 
 perhaps even eyes are most beautiful in dimness), 
 she would be sorry if her cheeks did ; and which of 
 us would wish to polish a rose ? " 
 
 Then we must make frescoes ? Yes, and better still 
 mosaics. " In drawing the trunk of a birch tree, there 
 
II. ART 217 
 
 will be probably white high lights, then a pale rosy 
 grey round them on the light side, then a (probably 
 greenish) deeper grey on the dark side, varied by 
 reflected colours, and, over all, rich black strips of 
 bark and brown spots of moss. Lay first the rosy 
 grey, leaving white for the high lights and for the 
 spots of moss, and not touching the dark side. Then 
 lay the grey for the dark side, fitting it well up to 
 the rosy grey of the light, leaving also in this darker 
 grey the white places in the paper for the black and 
 brown moss ; then prepare the moss colours separately 
 for each spot, and lay each in the white place left 
 for it." 
 
 This system of marking out applied to oil-painting 
 leads the artist to superpose the leaves of a tree into 
 the sky, or to cut out pieces of the sky in the inter- 
 stices already made without repainting these on those 
 or those on these. This is a condemnation of Corot 
 and of nearly all our great landscapists. 1 
 
 "In fact Ruskin would not have mixed colour on 
 his palette any more than on his canvas. We may 
 mix two colours together if we will, but not more. 
 " If you have laid a red colour, and you want a 
 purple one above, do not mix the purple on your 
 palette and lay it on so thick as to overpower the 
 
 1 It is perhaps necessary to repeat here where the Ruskinian theory 
 most shocks our French ideas on colour and composition, that the 
 author of these pages intends in no way to state the truth on 
 this question but only Ruskin's opinion, and even if this opinion 
 seems worthy of investigation, it does not follow that it should be 
 adopted. 
 
218 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 red, but take a little thin blue from your palette and 
 lay it lightly over the red, so as to let the red be 
 seen through, and thus produce the required purple." 
 Better still, place the bright colours in little spots on 
 or in the interstices of the others and " carry out the 
 principle of separate colours to the utmost possible 
 refinement ; using atoms of colour in juxtaposition, 
 instead of large spaces." Finally he says, " If you 
 have time, be careful to get the gradated distribu- 
 tion of the spots well followed in the calceolarias, 
 foxgloves, and the like. " Practise the production of 
 mixed tints by interlaced touches of the pure colours 
 out of which they are formed." 
 
 Is not this pointillisme, prophesied here as early 
 as 1856? It certainly is, and although we under- 
 stand why some good critics attack Ruskin, we do 
 not understand why they attack him as " obsolete." 
 They would be right if they meant by this that 
 he has sometimes defended certain eternal prin- 
 ciples which were true before we were born, and 
 which will remain true when we are no more. But 
 those who have insinuated that he has neither ad- 
 mitted nor understood, nor foreseen the new schools, 
 make acknowledgment that they have not read his 
 works. For the man who in 1843 wrote that we 
 must go to Nature, despise nothing, reject nothing, 
 and thus foretold what realism was to be ; he who in 
 1846 laid down the rule that extreme tints and pure 
 colour might only exist on points, and in 1853 that 
 the landscape must be painted from Nature in the 
 
II. ART 219 
 
 open air up to the very last touch, and thus foretold 
 the school of impressionists, is for all times not 
 only a pioneer but the one pioneer amongst critics 
 of art, who are wont generally " to fly to the help of 
 victory " rather than take sides before the battle and 
 lead a doubtful attack. 
 
 In this system, however, of minute drawing consci- 
 entious accentuated lines, and dull colours put on dis- 
 connectedly and laboriously, point by point, of hard, 
 dry, and honest stippling, what scope is left for breadth 
 of composition, flowing softness of touch, talent of 
 hand, freedom of brush ? None whatever, because 
 there should be none. Freedom is a vice, virtuosity 
 is ridiculous. The virtuoso is a Pharisee who takes 
 pleasure in himself and not in beauty. Having entered 
 into the temple he does not kneel down before the 
 supreme God of Beauty beating his breast and saying, 
 "I am a deformity." No, he struts about and con- 
 gratulates himself for having so little imitated the 
 saintliness of the model, and he holds to it. He is a 
 juggler who juggles with his ochres, with his ultra- 
 marines, and his vermilion, instead of bringing them 
 as tribute to priceless nature and illimitable sky. He 
 says : " Look at my cleverness, look at my dexterity, 
 look at the work of my hands." But he does not say : 
 "See here, how beautiful she is! how far above our 
 poor human artifice ! " He says : " See how with the 
 single stroke of the brush I flashed the light on to this 
 crystal ! " but he does not say : " See how a hundred 
 strokes of the brush can never give the infinite 
 
220 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 softness of this curve, the radiant colour of this light 
 ^.composed of snow, of silver, of azure, and of night." 
 The virtuoso delays with his trills and his wire- 
 drawn notes. Why ? Is it to extol the deep voices 
 of nature ? No, it is to extol his own little larynx. 
 He makes Art for Art's sake. The true artist 
 takes up his tools not to shine himself, but to 
 make others admire the loveliness of nature ; he 
 expresses himself not in liberty of success, but in 
 constraint of adoration ; and not in order that men 
 should say : " How clever he is ! " but that they 
 should say : " How beautiful she is ! " He does not 
 make Art for Art's sake : he makes Art for Nature 
 and for Beauty. 
 
 Perfection in composition, skill, and success matter 
 but little, for it is the effort which we should recognise. 
 Unfortunate efforts ! What matter, provided they 
 are heroic ? Painful efforts ! What matter, provided 
 they are passionate ? The true lover is always 
 awkward. Falls, errors, new beginnings, agonies, 
 before this supreme model. . . . What matter, if 
 ever3'thing combines to show how far this model is 
 above our attainment ? " The glory of a great pic- 
 ture is in its shame ; and the charm of it, in speaking 
 the pleasure of a great heart, that there is some- 
 thing better than picture." So long as you do not 
 recognise this, the achievement is mediocre, "you 
 have never sufficiently admired the work of a great 
 workman if you have not begun by despising it." 
 "The demand for perfection is always a sign of a 
 
II. ART 221 
 
 misunderstanding of the ends of art. This for two 
 reasons, both based upon everlasting laws. The first, 
 that no great man ever stops working till he has 
 reached his point of failure : The second reason is, 
 that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that 
 we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal 
 body, that is to say, of a state of progress and 
 change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly 
 perfect ; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The 
 foxglove blossom, — a third part bud, a third part 
 past, a third part in full bloom, — is a type of the 
 life of this world. And in all things that live there 
 are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are 
 not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No 
 human face is exactly the same in its lines on each 
 side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its 
 symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply 
 change ; and to banish imperfection is to destroy 
 expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality. 
 All things are literally better, lovelier, and more 
 beloved for the imperfections which have been 
 divinely appointed, that the law of human life may 
 be Effort, and the law of human judgment Mercy." 
 
 Their exaggerations and paradox notwithstanding, 
 no one can say that these are the ideas of a moralist. 
 They are undoubtedly the sentiments of an artist, 
 and he who has never experienced them is no artist, 
 
222 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 whatever his banner or his motto. To forget one's 
 art for Nature, to forget oneself for art, is surely the 
 express condition of all initiation into the mysteries 
 of the Beautiful, and it is also the first condition of 
 success from a practical point of view in monumental 
 works of art. In saying that "all art is praise," 
 humble and devoted, self-sacrifice and self-forgetful- 
 ness, the Master of the Laws of Fesole has expressed 
 something more than a moral and sentimental 
 aphorism. He has given a precise rule which can 
 be applied every day to the most delicate aesthetical 
 problems of our time. This enthusiast has seen 
 clearly through these modern sophisms, and this 
 prophet has discerned under the glosses of the 
 critic and in spite of the interested theories of 
 artists the true evil, the deep - seated evil, from 
 which certain of our arts suffer — Vanity. He has 
 noted and proclaimed that together with the material 
 and technical qualities, without which there is no 
 art, — " a painter's business is to paint, primarily," 
 — a certain moral quality is also essential for the 
 production of a great artistic creation. He has 
 perceived that to science it is essential to add 
 conscience, and to cleverness of hand simplicity of 
 heart. 
 
 For if cleverness were sufficient, how is it that 
 our nge, so fruitful of clever men, can produce no 
 monument to be compared to the Greek temples or 
 the Gothic cathedrals ? Were talent the only thing 
 required of the artist, whence comes it that with so 
 
II. ART 223 
 
 much talent, and the accumulated experience of so 
 man}- schools, we can neither create nor perpetuate 
 a style, nor accomplish the harmonious decoration 
 of a work, nor compete with less educated and less 
 skilful ages in the "worth and delightfulness of our 
 implements of daily use and materials of dress, 
 furniture, and lodging ? " Do we not then lack 
 something ? This something may it not be moral 
 qualities, and chiefly that quality which produces 
 worship: Humility? Humility which does not seek 
 rapid and noisy success, but follows slow and 
 silent research ; humility which does not confine itself 
 exclusively to intellectual and aristocratic arts, nor 
 recoil from any necessary task ; humility which leads 
 to the union of all artists, founded on the mutual 
 esteem that each has for the work of all. 
 
 If nowadays we occasionally find beautiful easel 
 pictures, pretty statues, good pieces in a building, but 
 never an entirely beautiful decoration throughout the 
 whole, it is not technique or talent which is lacking ; 
 it is that, in order to reach success and above all 
 fortune more rapidly, the artist follows the artisan 
 and specialises ; he directs all his efforts towards 
 attaining the highest virtuosity, and, in his works, 
 the most lucrative subject. He avoids devoting 
 himself to all the arts for fear he may not succeed 
 in any. " Under the present system } - ou keep 
 your academician occupied only in producing tinted 
 pieces of canvas to be shown in frames, and smooth 
 pieces of marble to be placed in niches; while you 
 
224 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 expect your builder or constructor to design coloured 
 patterns in stone and brick, and your chinaware 
 merchant to keep a separate body of workwomen 
 who can paint china, but nothing else." This sub- 
 division of labour is, it seems, in industrial works 
 most successful for rapidity and prompt return, but 
 "it ruins all the arts at once." It separates them from 
 their sources, and the greatest efforts cannot reunite 
 them. It creates parts, nothing complete ; collections, 
 never an organic whole. To create true architecture 
 demands the whole power and life, and that that life 
 be given and always sustained by one creator or 
 inspirer. 
 
 This is the law that created the great monuments 
 that we admire in Italy. " Note this — that in the 
 fourteenth-century group of great artists, Cimabue, 
 Giovanni Pisano, Arnolfo, Andrea Pisano, Giotto, 
 four out of the five men are architects as well as 
 sculptors and painters. . . . And the meaning of that 
 is that in this century the arts were all united and 
 duly led by architecture . . . later, painting arrogated 
 all and at last betrayed all. You may justly conclude 
 therefore that the three arts ought to be practised 
 together, and that no man could be a sculptor who 
 was not an architect — that is to say who had not 
 knowledge enough and pleasure enough in structural 
 law to be able to build on occasion, better than a 
 mere builder." And just as all the work can be done 
 by the same hand, so every beauty should be gathered 
 into the same work. "The junction of the three arts 
 
f^ OF 
 
 II. ART 225 
 
 in men's minds, at the best time, is shortly signified - 
 in these words of Chaucer — 
 
 " Everidele 
 Enclosed was, and walled well 
 With high walls, embatailled, 
 Portrayed without, and well entayled 
 With many rich portraitures." 
 
 — LovJs Garden. 
 
 We can perceive the proof of this unity of the arts 
 at Florence in the campanile of Santa Maria del Fiore. 
 " There are there two rows of hexagonal panels filled 
 with bas-reliefs. Some are by unknown hands, some 
 by Andrea di Pisa, some by Lucca della Robbia, two 
 by Giotto himself, and one of these symbolic of the 
 whole art of painting is represented by a painter in 
 his bottega. This bas-relief is one of the foundation 
 stones of the most perfectly built tower in Europe, 
 and this stone was carved by the hand of the architect 
 himself, and further this architect and sculptor, Giotto, 
 was the greatest painter of his time, and the friend of 
 the greatest poet." 
 
 The artist of our own day, far from being willing to 
 finish for another the details of a great monument 
 of art, despises even completing his own. "The 
 modern system of modelling the work in clay, getting 
 it into form by machinery, and by the hands of sub- 
 ordinates, and touching it at last, if indeed the (so 
 called) sculptor touch it at all, only to correct their 
 inefficiencies, renders the production of good work in 
 marble a physical impossibility. The first result of 
 
 P 
 
226 HIS ^ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 it is that the sculptor thinks in clay instead of marble, 
 and loses his instinctive sense of the proper treatment 
 of a brittle substance. The second is that neither 
 he nor the public recognise the touch of the chisel 
 as expressive of personal feeling or power, and that 
 nothing is looked for except mechanical polish." 
 
 In engraving the same division of labour produces 
 the same mediocrity of labour. "At the bottom of 
 the pretty line engravings one saw always two in- 
 scriptions. At the left-hand corner, ' Drawn by 
 so-and-so;' at the right-hand corner, 'Engraved by 
 so-and-so.' And you will observe that the only 
 engravings which bear imperishable value are en- 
 graved by the artist himself. It is true that, in 
 wood cutting, both Diirer and Holbein have workmen 
 under them who can do all they want. But in metal 
 cutting it is not so. For, as I have told you, in metal 
 cutting, ultimate perfection of Line has to be reached ; 
 and it can be reached by none but a master's hand ; 
 nor by his unless in the very moment and act of 
 designing. Never, unless under the vivid first force 
 of imagination and intellect, can the line have its full 
 value." ..." For it must be done throughout with 
 the full fire of temper in it, visibly governing its lines, 
 as the wind does the fibres of cloud." 
 
 But should the great painter condescend to plaster 
 the walls, the sculptor to hew the marble himself, and 
 the engraver to engrave his own design ? Certainly, 
 for there is no beautiful mural decoration, there is no 
 beautiful engraving, there is no beautiful statue, but 
 
II. ART 227 
 
 at that price. " Fine art is essentially athletic." It 
 is precisely here we find what distinguishes it and 
 puts it above all others. " Literature, while it gives 
 play to intellectual and emotional faculties, does not 
 require the physical organisation of the painter or 
 sculptor," nor Music either. A dwarf can write and 
 a cripple can make music, but for the severe labour 
 of a Michael Angelo or a Tintoret we must have 
 not only a strong soul but a vigorous body. The 
 whole man must be given to his art. "The work 
 of the limbs and the fingers aiding the soul." " All 
 the great arts form one united system from which 
 it is impossible to remove any part without harm to 
 the rest. They are founded first in mastery, by 
 strength of arm of the earth and sea, in agriculture 
 and seamanship ; then their inventive power begins, 
 with the clay in the hand of the potter, whose art is 
 the humblest but truest type of the forming of the 
 human body and spirit ; and in the carpenter's work, 
 which probably was the early employment of the 
 Founder of our religion." 
 
 "And man grows great by this labour. Nothing is 
 more useful for developing the moral qualities of 
 uprightness, patience, and simplicity, than the habit of 
 struggling with difficult and stubborn matters. ... All 
 the great early Italian masters of painting or sculp- 
 ture without exception began by being goldsmiths' 
 apprentices. Francia was a goldsmith ; Ghirlandajo 
 was a goldsmith, and was the master of Michael 
 Angelo; Verrochio was a goldsmith, and was the 
 
228 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 master of Leonardo da Vinci ; Ghiberti was a gold- 
 smith, and beat out the bronze gates which Michael 
 Angelo said might serve for gates of Paradise. 
 Several reasons may account for the fact that gold- 
 smiths' work is so wholesome for young artists : 
 first, that it gives great firmness of hand to deal 
 for some time with a solid substance ; again, that it 
 induces caution and steadiness — a boy trusted with 
 chalk and paper suffers an immediate temptation to 
 scrawl upon it and play with it, but he dares not 
 scrawl on gold, and he cannot play with it ; and 
 lastly, that it gives great delicacy and precision of 
 touch to work upon minute forms." " All arts 
 needing energy and physical application are equally 
 good. Every artist should be a workman." 
 
 But at the same time to re-establish the equilibrium 
 every workman should be an artist. It does not 
 suffice for the thinker to work, the worker must 
 also think. It matters little that, distracted some- 
 times by his thought, he forgets the mechanical 
 regularity of his task, and that his fancy attempts 
 to form an original but living work rather than 
 a work slavishly following the given pattern. " I 
 shall only give one example, which however will 
 show the reader what I mean, from the manufac- 
 ture already alluded to, that of glass. Our modern 
 glass is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its 
 form, accurate in its cutting. We are proud of this. 
 We ought to be ashamed of it. The old Venice 
 glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and 
 
II. ART 229 
 
 clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was 
 iustly proud of it. For there is this difference between 
 the English and Venetian workman, that the former 
 thinks only of accurately matching his patterns, and 
 getting his curves perfectly true and his edges 
 perfectly sharp, and becomes a mere machine for 
 rounding curves and sharpening edges ; while the 
 old Venetian cared not a whit whether his edges 
 were sharp or not, but he invented a new design 
 for every glass that he made, and never moulded a 
 handle or a lip without a new fancy in it. And 
 therefore, though some Venetian glass is ugly and 
 clumsy enough when made by clumsy and unin- 
 ventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely 
 in its forms that no price is too great for it ; and 
 we never see the same form in it twice. Now 
 you cannot have the finish and the varied form too. 
 If the workman is thinking about his edges, he 
 cannot be thinking of his design ; if of his design, 
 he cannot think of his edges. Choose whether you 
 will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, 
 and choose at the same moment whether you will 
 make the worker a man or a grindstone. . . . 
 
 " Nay, but the reader interrupts me, — ' If the work- 
 man can design beautifully, I would not have him 
 kept at the furnace. Let him be taken away and 
 made a gentleman, and have a studio, and design 
 his glass there, and I will have it blown and cut 
 for him by common workmen, and so I will have 
 my design and my finish too.' 
 
230 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 "All ideas of this kind are founded upon two mis- 
 taken suppositions : the first, that one man's thoughts 
 can be, or ought to be, executed by another man's 
 hands; the second, that manual labour is a degrada- 
 tion, when it is governed by intellect." 
 
 Rather it is a necessity. The artisan must have 
 no ambition mechanically to perform an artistic trade, 
 but artistically to follow his trade of artisan. Great 
 decorative and great popular art can only be ob- 
 tained at this price. And if nowadays we do not 
 find among the cabinetmakers, masons, jewellers, 
 blacksmiths, the marvellous craftsmen of the centuries 
 of great art, it is not that the craftsmen do not 
 exist, but that they have lost the sense of their true 
 mission. They are no longer where they ought to 
 be — the desire of raising themselves on the social 
 ladder has made them leave the modest workshop 
 where they would have created marvels, and has 
 given them over to the plush and bric-a-brac of 
 Kensington hotels, or to rows of villas where they 
 only fabricate rubbish. Schools of painting and of 
 sculpture without end have multiplied a hundredfold 
 people making art into a profession. We shall no 
 longer find in the pastures of Europe a Giotto taking 
 care of sheep and goats, and it is hardly probable, 
 with the fall in the price of paper, that any mute 
 Miltons will lie inglorious in a village cemetery. But 
 these schools of which we are so proud, while they 
 give ambition do not give genius. They have only 
 skimmed off, with no profit to painting or sculpture, 
 
II. ART 231 
 
 the best artisans who might have intelligently deco- 
 rated the base or carved the capital of a column. 
 The cabinetmaker who with a sure hand might have 
 composed and executed a reredos of beautiful design 
 becomes an architect and constructs absurd exhibition 
 buildings. The plasterer with the exact eye, who 
 might have decorated ceilings and vaultings with 
 right tones and harmonious decoration, becomes a 
 painter, and exhausts himself fruitlessly in historical 
 pictures. The whole democracy of working men 
 aspire to become artists, till no artist is to be found 
 among workmen; nothing but machines remain. It 
 is a loss all round ; great art is lowered ; art in 
 furniture does not improve, and the ambitious man 
 who vegetates or dies of hunger among his unsold 
 allegories and Venuses, with his divans and his 
 marbles, would have been rich and prosperous as a 
 cabinetmaker. Here too it is not intellectual power, 
 it is not ambition or ideal that art demands, it is 
 the solemn feeling produced by the unselfish admira- 
 tion of Nature : — Humility. 
 
 The device of the artist then should be quite simple, 
 and we find the whole of it in this saying that we 
 cited at the beginning of our inquiry : " All great Art 
 is Praise." 
 
 To seek Nature the tru^.nnt what w/* have made 
 her, but what she is herself; to observe her with eyes 
 that have been given us that we may see her, not with 
 the instruments that have been made to betray her, 
 and with the heart given us to feel her, not with the 
 
> 
 
 y 
 
 . 
 
 232 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 reason we have perfected in order to understand her ; 
 to observe her in the fields, and not in our workshops, 
 with her own lights and not with our chiaroscuro ; 
 to follow her in the repose of her vigorous outline 
 and not in our vain agitations, in her harmony and 
 not in our adjustment, to love her for herself and not 
 for ourselves, and if need be to set ourselves to the 
 most humble manual toil to express her better or to 
 make her more admired — all Art is in this. Therefore 
 no more rules, no more receipts, entire freedom and 
 God be with you. 
 
 "Go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral 
 front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic 
 ignorance of the old sculptors : examine once more 
 those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern 
 statues, anatomiless and rigid ; but do not mock at 
 them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of 
 every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of 
 thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, 
 no charters, no charities can secure ; but which it 
 must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to 
 regain for her children." 
 
 Art lives by praise of Nature but it dies of slavery 
 to men. "The only doctrine or system peculiar to 
 me," says Ruskin in Saint Mark's Rest, " is the abhor- 
 rence of all that is doctrinal instead of demonstrable, 
 and of all that is systematic instead of useful : so that 
 no true disciple of mine will ever be a ' Ruskinian ' — 
 he will follow, not me, but the instincts of his own 
 soul, and the guidance of his Creator." " For, indeed, 
 
II. ART 233 
 
 the arts, as regards teachableness, differ from the 
 sciences also in this, that their power is founded not 
 merely on facts which can be communicated, but 
 on dispositions which require to be created. Art is 
 neither to be achieved by effort of thinking, nor ex- 
 plained by accuracy of speaking." " No true painter 
 ever speaks or ever has spoken much of his art. . . . 
 The moment a man can really do his work he be- 
 comes speechless about it. All words become idle 
 to him — all theories. . . . Does a bird need to theorise 
 about building his nest — or boast of it when built ? " 
 Have the great artists ever had the occult or meta- 
 physical motives, which their critics assign to them, 
 at the moment they found the controlling line of a 
 gesture, a happy harmony of tones, or the unexpected 
 arrangement of a whole ? No. A thousand times 
 No. " They did it I think with the childlike unpre- 
 tending simplicity of all earnest men : they did what 
 they loved and felt." And it is precisely "because 
 they did so that there is this marvellous life of 
 changefulness and subtlety running through their 
 every arrangement : and that we reason upon the 
 lovely building as we should upon some fair growth 
 of the trees of the earth that know not their own 
 beauty." 
 
 Here then is the thought of the Master who has 
 so often been accused of wishing to order painting by 
 moral laws and of making verses of the Bible serve 
 for the grammar of the art of drawing. And after 
 the most minute researches that have ever been made 
 
234 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 into the mysteries of composition, after probings as 
 profound as have ever been attempted by the 
 Poussins, Reynolds, Gerard de Lairesse, Lessing, 
 Stendhal, Topffer, Winckelmann, or Leonardo da 
 Vinci, doubtless after many errors, as well as many 
 penetrating observations, the great oestheticist owns 
 with melancholy : " I have now stated to you all the 
 laws of composition which occur to me as capable of 
 being illustrated or defined; but there are multitudes 
 of others which, in the present state of my know- 
 ledge, I cannot define, and others which I never 
 hope to define ; and these the most important, and 
 connected with the deepest powers of the art. The 
 best part of every great work is always inexplicable ; 
 it is good because it is good : and innocently gracious, 
 opening as the green of the earth, or falling as 
 the dew of heaven." 
 
 We may smile at this confession. We ought 
 rather to admire it as we reflect how powerless 
 reason is compared to our instinct. It may be said 
 that it is superfluous to pile up so many books 
 under our feet, only to raise our eyes to the edge of 
 the wall which surrounds the terra incognita of the 
 Beautiful. We ourselves would rather say this labour 
 is necessary if we are to appreciate and affirm that 
 there is in art a terra incognita where presumptuous 
 geographists by means of ill-drawn maps may mislead 
 and lose credulous travellers — and morever that man 
 raises himself perhaps higher by the sentiment he 
 has for what cannot be known than by the science 
 
II. ART 235 
 
 he believes himself to have of the unknown. It 
 might be said that here the failure of ^Esthetic lies 
 and also the condemnation of the philosopher who 
 discussed it; but we would rather say it proves that 
 this philosopher was an artist, and that he was 
 greater as artist than as philosopher, since he grasped 
 more things intuitively through enthusiasm than he 
 was able to explain inductively by his science. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 " LIFE " 
 
 "THE art is an exact exponent of the life." It is 
 agreed that true art is to reproduce only beautiful 
 bodies, and only beautiful landscapes, that is to say, 
 such as are untouched by man. But if men and 
 Nature are no longer beautiful ? . . . And if it can 
 be achieved only by simple, modest and devoted 
 artists, and if simple, modest, devoted artists are 
 no longer to be found ? . . . Where are the models 
 for such works, and above all where are the work- 
 men ? Where are the forms wherein Beauty dwells, 
 and where are the souls who sacrifice themselves for 
 her? Where is the great national idea, where the 
 joyous ceremonies of public life, which supply the op- 
 portunity for achievements springing from the heart 
 of the people like the cathedrals of olden days ? 
 Above all, where are the bonds of common aesthetical 
 interest which should cause the multitude of artists 
 and workmen to forget the differences in their sta- 
 tions and so to assist each other in realising the 
 
 design ? We see at once how Ruskin's aesthetical 
 
 236 
 
III. LIFE 237 
 
 idea became a moral and social idea, and why since the 
 middle of his career in i860, he thinks it no longer 
 possible to recover art-power without the reform and 
 purification of social life. 
 
 Truly, however high a conception we may have of 
 modern life, however high an idea we may have of 
 its conquests and of its progress, on one point at any 
 rate this progress is not easy to discover, for our 
 country has not in any sense added to human 
 patrimony in respect of Beauty. Day by day the 
 picturesqueness of our houses, of our dress, of our 
 festivals, of our fields, of our implements, even of our 
 arms, disappears from life and is to be found only 
 in the fictions of theatres or in the restorations 
 of museums. The railways carry us quicker than 
 formerly to favoured portions of the globe, but these 
 are already disfigured by rails and tunnels before we 
 arrive there. They convey us in a few hours to old 
 and distant provinces that we may enjoy their kindly 
 habits and traditional costumes, but they carry still 
 more quickly newspapers to put these customs to 
 flight, and Paris fashions to replace the national dress. 
 The numerous hotels built upon "sites " whose charm 
 lay in their wildness, enable us indeed to live com- 
 fortably among the rocks and the forests, but in order 
 to erect them the rocks have been blasted, and in 
 order to supply material the forests have been cleared. 
 Each new line of railway worn like a wrinkle into the 
 face of the country detracts something from its beauty. 
 Old picturesque towns disappear stone by stone, 
 
238 HIS AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 rivers are dammed up and polluted wave by wave. 
 Those among us who live by the pleasure of the eye, 
 who derive their highest enjoyment from line and 
 colour, are day by day deprived of the sights which 
 delighted their fathers, — and are forced into exile 
 hoping to find at a distance those rare cities and 
 colonies not yet laid out in imitation boulevards, 
 with the usual accompaniment of shops and black- 
 coated uniformity. . . . Can Beauty exist in art when 
 it no longer exists in life ? . . . 
 
 Maybe so : the professors and the economists will 
 say, but there is wealth. We must live before we 
 philosophise. What matter that sundry effeminate 
 dilettanti or certain idle dreamers regret these odd 
 aesthetical pleasures which for our part we have 
 never desired or experienced, if the well-being of the 
 masses is increased and the people are happier for 
 the industrial and economic regime which science has 
 inaugurated ? 
 
 The people ? Let us look at this side of the 
 subject. They are advancing with threats and griev- 
 ances to the attack of modern society armed with 
 heavier claims than were ever put forward in the 
 ancient world. Day by day the tide-mark of crime 
 rises like a flood of blood. Day by day the number 
 of suicides grows in the columns of the newspapers 
 and should be writ in letters of red, and — until now 
 unheard of — even the suicide of children. . . . Day 
 by day in some portion of the civilised globe we hear 
 of workmen in revolt who destroy the wonderful 
 
III. LIFE 239 
 
 and fragile machinery which science has invented for 
 their happiness. " Our cities are a wilderness of 
 spinning-wheels instead of palaces; yet the people 
 have not clothes. We have blackened every leaf of 
 English greenwood with ashes, and the people die 
 of cold ; our harbours are a forest of merchant ships, 
 and the people die of hunger. . . ." The picturesque 
 monuments of the Middle Ages are overthrown, even 
 to the ramparts of the towns which until now formed 
 a distant picture for the eye of the traveller, but 
 has anything been given to the people in exchange ? 
 Have these stones been made bread ? The trees of 
 the forest have been cut to build workshops, and in- 
 stead of the songs of birds the whistle and roar of the 
 steam engine meet the ear. But are the workmen 
 the happier ? Do they sing the more ? Alas, no. 
 Formerly the poor in France were always singing : 
 they sang at table, they sang at work. In these 
 days France grown wealthy is like the rich cobbler 
 of the fable — he sings no longer. The promises of 
 the Manchester school then have deceived the world, 
 or at least it thinks itself deceived, which is the 
 same thing, for nothing is so subjective as the 
 feeling of happiness. It is possible, nay probable, 
 that all the socialistic theories which promise yet 
 greater things will be followed by }xt deeper and 
 more bitter disenchantment, but this we need not 
 consider. The professors and the economists, the 
 men of progress, promised the masses when they 
 deprived them of traditions, costumes, faith, and 
 
240 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 Beauty, that they would give them happiness. Is 
 this the result ? 
 
 Reply is unnecessary. The cry of the rising 
 generation replies for us. As soon as we grasp in 
 the name of progress what the professors and the 
 economists promised the people, we perceive that 
 Happiness is not one of the things " qua> numcro, 
 pondere, mensurave constant" ; but a divine coinage 
 which we long ago dissipated, throwing the divine 
 chimaerse to the winds. . . . Here is the cruel, evident, 
 undeniable barrier ; for though it may be demonstrated 
 by the aid of ingenious and consoling statistics that 
 the workman and the peasant of to-day are richer 
 than the workman and the peasant of the good old 
 times, can it be proved to him that he is happier 
 when he feels the reverse ? 
 
 In short, it is vain to hope that the murmurs of 
 the artist against the devastation of modern progress 
 can be drowned by the cheers of the artisan over 
 its benefits. From below as from above the same 
 reproach echoes. What have you done with Beauty ? 
 say the one side. And the other — What have you 
 done with Happiness ? Has this progress given a 
 higher ideal ? asks the first, — and the second : Has 
 it lightened the burden of existence ? Wonders in- 
 deed from graceless laboratories and factories have 
 been exhibited in 1889 and will be exhibited again 
 in 1900, and the envy of the poor who pass in front 
 of these marvels will be excited ; — but will their lot 
 seem thereby more fortunate ? It is announced that 
 
III. LIFE 241 
 
 scenes of the French Revolution are to be repre- 
 sented in gigantic proportions among clouds. The 
 clouds will be disfigured, but will the crowds below 
 be more beautiful ? We boast that rapidity of loco- 
 motion will be increased tenfold ; the sorrows that we 
 carry with us will only gallop the faster. It used to 
 be said : — 
 
 " Chagrin d'amour ne va pas en voyage, 
 Chagrin d'amour ne va pas en bateau." 
 
 What are the sorrows which do not now go every- 
 where with man ? And the more the difficulties of 
 travel are minimised, the more the soul is left without 
 resource to its private griefs. If every village on the 
 globe were enclosed in a network of telephonic wire, 
 would the news communicated be better news ? If 
 every road were furrowed by those horseless carriages 
 still rare enough to attract people in the street, would 
 that make them better worth looking at, or the land- 
 scape more beautiful for the passengers ? However 
 quickly they may go, will they ever reach another 
 goal than that which all must reach one da}-, horse- 
 men, pilgrims, monks, and cripples, that represented 
 in the Campo Santo at Pisa ? And is there any 
 advantage in hurrying towards this end, inevitable 
 alas, and common to all ? . . . 
 
 But since in the same hour the happiness of man 
 and the loveliness of nature are seen to vanish ; since 
 the same storm silences the singing of birds and 
 men, does it not follow that from the same causes 
 
 Q 
 
242 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 also arise the lack of social ease and aesthetic 
 joys ? Shall we then marvel greatly if Ruskin 
 dreamed that in restoring Beauty to the world — 
 Beauty in Nature — Beauty in the human form — 
 Beauty in the human soul — he would by so doing 
 restore Happiness ? 
 
 Now the leprosy which corrodes and destroys 
 beauty in the landscape we love is due to machinery 
 and speculation, in other words, simply to wealth. . . . 
 A rich country is an ugly country. Ruskin relates 
 that he once knew a small piece of land at the sources 
 of the Wandle which he esteemed the most delicious 
 landscape in the south of England. He tells us 
 " that no clearer or diviner waters ever sang with 
 constant lips," that " no pastures ever lightened in 
 springtime with more passionate blossoming," that 
 " no sweeter homes ever hallowed the heart of the 
 passer-by with their pride of peaceful gladness — fain 
 hidden, yet full confessed. . . ." Twenty years after- 
 wards he returned to the sources of the Wandle. 
 All was changed. . . . "Just where the welling of 
 stainless water, trembling and pure, like a body 
 of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself 
 a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp 
 of feathery weeds, all waving, which it traverses with 
 its deep threads of clearness, like the chalcedony 
 in moss-agate, starred here and there with the white 
 
III. LIFE 243 
 
 grenouillette ; just in the very rush and murmur of 
 the first spreading currents, the human wretches 
 of the place cast their street and house foulness ; 
 heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old 
 metal, and rags of putrid clothes ; which, having 
 neither energy to cart away, nor decency enough 
 to dig into the ground, they thus shed into the 
 stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and 
 melt, far away, in all places where God meant 
 those waters to bring joy and health. Half-a-dozen 
 men, with one day's work, could cleanse those pools, 
 and trim the flowers about their banks, and make 
 every breath of summer air above them rich with 
 cool balm ; and ever}' glittering wave medicine, as if 
 it ran, troubled only of angels, from the porch of 
 Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, nor, 
 I suppose, will be ; nor will any joy be possible to 
 heart of man, for evermore, about those wells of 
 English waters." 
 
 Afterwards he walked slowly up through the 
 village to the principal street, asking himself whether 
 poverty was the cause of this culpable neglect of 
 natural things. No. He found on the contrary 
 signs of luxury everywhere, magnificent shop-win- 
 dows, sumptuous public-houses, but neither greater 
 happiness nor health among the inhabitants, only 
 more pretension and useless parade of high iron rail- 
 ings everywhere. " Now, how did it come to pass 
 that this work was done instead of the other : that 
 the strength and life of the English operative were 
 
244 HIS ^ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 spent in defiling ground, instead of redeeming it : 
 and in producing an entirely (in that place) valueless 
 piece of metal, which can neither be eaten nor 
 breathed, instead of medicinal fresh air and pure 
 water ? There is but one reason for it, and at 
 present a conclusive one, — that the capitalist can 
 charge percentage on the work in the one case, and 
 cannot in the other." 
 
 If the economists deigned to make any reply they 
 would certainly say that the capitalist system of the 
 day, however despised by visionaries, is none the 
 less the best hitherto discovered. They would admit 
 that in developing industrial progress the principles 
 of the Manchester school had not perhaps added 
 much to the poetry of the world, but that was not 
 the object in view, and assuredly they had added to 
 its riches. They would maintain that to lead a 
 crusade against capitalism because it entails factories, 
 mines, and railroads does homage to it from the 
 economic point of view, and that to demand its 
 destruction is to demand at the same time the de- 
 struction of everything which makes the wealth of 
 the proletariat as well as that of the capitalists, of 
 nations as well as of individuals. 
 
 For that matter, given their conception of wealth, 
 economists are right, but it never even occurs to 
 them that this conception could be disputed. In an 
 age when everything is doubted, they never for an 
 instant suppose it could be questioned whether wealth 
 were an essential, and whether accumulated money 
 
III. LIFE 245 
 
 and nothing else were truly wealth. It is quite true 
 that for making money the present economic system 
 is the best. The colossal fortunes amassed in the 
 present age^ prove it abundantly. It is even quite 
 possible — whatever the socialists may say — that this 
 system, in spite of its defects, is productive of the 
 greatest pecuniary gain to the masses, and that pre- 
 cisely in those countries where the pinnacles of 
 fortune have been lifted highest by speculation, the 
 average of modest fortunes also rises. Granting all 
 this, it remains to be proved whether the acquisition 
 of wealth is a real gain in all circumstances — even 
 when it involves the loss of life — and whether true 
 wealth consists in the possession of gold, or can be 
 procured by it. We should say so, looking at the 
 business world, and the fever of speculation by which 
 it is impelled, at the merchant in his office, and at 
 the artisan on his way to the factory. He grudges 
 nothing, care, fatigue, journeys, struggles, bad dreams, 
 by day and night, all to gain one object — money. 
 He does not think what he will do with this money, 
 or he only thinks later on : his passion is to possess 
 it, not necessarily as a mercenary man, but merely 
 as a man of business according to the economical 
 notions of our fathers. To make as much money 
 as possible is in itself a final end, as admirable 
 and as essential as it is in cricket to make runs. 
 He does not read : he has no time, because he 
 has to amass more money. He cannot see the 
 blossoming flowers of spring in a landscape he 
 
246 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 loves : he must make yet more money. Later, much 
 later, when he is very rich and very old, and when 
 he has ruined ten rivals, and triumphed over ten 
 strikes, these riches will procure him all that Nature 
 can yield of flowers, all that Art can bestow of 
 harmony, all that thought can grant of true joy, — 
 were he still able to appreciate them. . . . But he 
 will never reach this second stage : to procure every 
 luxury of existence he ruins his health : to secure 
 all the joys of the spirit he destroys his soul : and 
 what this millionaire is pleased to call gaining his 
 livelihood is in reality with great trouble and fatigue 
 earning old age and death. 
 
 But this life, this health, these aesthetical pleasures, 
 which he has sacrificed in pursuit of riches, are they 
 not also wealth ? And if money is an essential, is 
 it not also needful for its proper use to have living 
 hands, and for the enjoyment of life, is it not indis- 
 pensable to possess life ? " At the crossing of the 
 transepts of Milan Cathedral has lain, for three hun- 
 dred years, the embalmed body of St. Carlo Borro- 
 meo. It holds a golden crosier, and has a cross of 
 emeralds on its breast. Admitting the crosier and 
 emeralds to be useful articles, is the body to be con- 
 sidered as 'having' them? Do they, in the politico- 
 economical sense of property (Mr. John Stuart Mill's, 
 for instance) belong to it ? If not, and if we may, 
 therefore, conclude generally that a dead body cannot 
 possess property, what degree and period of animation 
 in the body will render possession possible ? " Is 
 
III. LIFE 247 
 
 it not enough to be physically dead, extended on 
 an altar tomb with a sculptured dog at one's feet, 
 like the lords and ladies of the fifteenth century? 
 Has he any enjoyment of wealth, though he still 
 breathe, when, crushed by the care and pleasures 
 of money, he is extended on a couch with a living 
 dog asleep at his feet ? Surely not. To enjoy 
 wealth a man must be erect and standing, and the 
 dog too should be barking gaily in the thicket amid 
 the flying birds, or among the flowing waters in the 
 meadows. 
 
 We shall find then on reflection that health is the 
 first of all riches. Now do money and the pleasures 
 of money endow us with health ? For health we 
 must have pure water. The factory makes money 
 but it poisons the streams around, till the manu- 
 facturer finds no natural water to drink. Is that 
 wealth ? But money enables our hands to remain 
 idle, and our body to avoid all muscular toil. This is 
 the great modern progress. True, but at the end of 
 a few years the body, exhausted by cerebral action, 
 becomes diseased, and the doctors prescribe in the 
 name of hygiene that active exercise from which the 
 engineers in the name of progress have triumphantly 
 rescued man. Is this exhaustion wealth ? More- 
 over, if there are no longer forests into which we 
 can follow the birds, nor meadows where we can 
 admire the flowers, what is the use of health ? 
 Natural beauty is destroyed in the pursuit of riches 
 — it is preserved only in certain privileged parks. 
 
248 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 What shall avail this beauty if man does not culti- 
 vate within him that enthusiastic spirit which can 
 appreciate all its grace and be responsive to all 
 its energies ? Does the rich man possess this 
 enthusiasm ? No. It is a great error of the 
 age to think that any one absorbed in money- 
 making, who in the interval between two coups goes 
 luxuriously to listen to the Opera, can hear any- 
 thing. . . . He hears nothing. It is a great error 
 to think that the collector appreciates the beauty of 
 the works of the Master when he has only to hold 
 out his hand to procure them. . . . He does not see 
 them. The one hears only the sound of gold jingling 
 on the international counter, or maybe the groans of 
 the crowd ruined by his lucky speculation. The other 
 perceives in the cloudscape of his pictures only the 
 white of the bank-notes he gave for them, and his eyes 
 scrutinise the corner of the canvas, as if it were a 
 cheque, for the signature which makes it of value. 
 " It is not by paying for them but by understanding 
 them that we become the real possessors of works 
 of art and of the enjoyment they give. It is not by 
 opening our purse, but by opening our hearts, and 
 for this we must have hearts to open. Money can- 
 not procure the pleasures belonging to true wealth, 
 only love." 
 
 Lastly, do we by accumulating gold obtain truer 
 friends, more real sympathy, franker greetings, more 
 enduring affections. Can gold give serenity of heart 
 and soul, and that peace which sheds a brighter 
 
III. LIFE 249 
 
 glow upon our lives ? It would be absurd to say 
 so. Money, while it seems to gather round the 
 rich man more friends, sows the seed of doubt in 
 friendship, and the hands offered to him in greeting 
 are as the hands of statues — waiting to receive — 
 cold hands of stone, unable to sustain or bestow. 
 But peace and gladness, everything that renders life 
 more beautiful, are these not riches to be desired 
 next after our daily bread ? " The economists seem 
 to have a misgiving that there is other wealth than 
 the gold found in Australia, since they speak of all 
 ' useful articles ' and proclaim that ' time is money.' 
 Health is money, wit is money, knowledge is money ; 
 and all your health, and wit, and knowledge, may 
 be changed into gold, but the gold cannot be changed 
 in its turn back into health and wit." 
 
 And whatever is true of private wealth, is it not 
 still more true of national wealth ? Is it possible to 
 estimate in figures or to measure by credit the true 
 wealth of a country ? There have been and there still 
 are to be found countries which may be called poor. 
 Are the people less happy there than elsewhere ? 
 Are they less prosperous, less healthy, less energetic, 
 and, small though they be, is it not often these same 
 people who, while rich countries hesitate (like the 
 soldier mentioned by Horace with too much gold in 
 his belt), lead all the others into the paths of justice 
 and of liberty ? " The strength of a nation is in its 
 multitude, not in its territory; but only in its sound 
 multitude. ... It has been the madness of kings to 
 
250 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 seek for land instead of life." Is it necessarily a sign 
 of strength for a nation to have a large revenue ? 
 For example, one of the reasons which makes France 
 so rich relatively to the total of her population is her 
 diminishing birth-rate. . . . The economists boast of 
 this high level of fortune for each individual. But is 
 it truly a national strength ? Is it wealth ? — One 
 of the reasons which enables us to meet the expenses 
 of our budgets is that each year the taxes on drink 
 yield a greater return, exceeding often the optimistic 
 forecasts of the financiers. This proves only that an 
 increasing number of people leave their health and 
 sometimes their reason in the gin-shops, but the eco- 
 nomists triumph. Moreover, because ruined healths 
 and darkened intellects add to revenue returns, do 
 they therefore create national wealth ? and can this 
 be rightly termed wealth ? 
 
 The absurdity of these propositions is enough to 
 condemn them. The truth is that the indefinite 
 accumulation of money for the sake of money, the 
 production of capital for the sake of capital, without 
 regard to the end attained by this accumulation, is in 
 no sense the same thing either for a man or for a 
 nation as the accumulation of things useful, necessary, 
 and beneficent. " The best and simplest general type 
 of capital is a well-made ploughshare. Now if that 
 ploughshare did nothing but beget other plough- 
 shares, in a polypous manner, — however the great 
 cluster of polypous plough might glitter in the sun, it 
 would have lost its function of capital. And the true 
 
III. LIFE 251 
 
 home-question to every capitalist and to every nation, 
 is not, ' how many ploughs have you ? ' but, ' where are 
 your furrows ? ' not — ' how quickly will this capital 
 reproduce itself?' — but, 'what will it do during repro- 
 duction ? ' What substance will it furnish, good for 
 life ? what work construct, protective of life ? " If it 
 is used to make adulterated alcohol, to build suburban 
 residences less healthy than cottages, to create an 
 industry out of pure luxury, which destroys the lungs 
 or blinds the eyes of the workmen, or a harmful 
 literature, a restless and pessimistic art which en- 
 feebles the soul of the intellectual classes, it is fatal. 
 " Production does not consist in things laboriously 
 made, but in things serviceably consumable ; and the 
 question for the nation is not how much labour it 
 employs but how much life it produces." 
 
 "There is no Wealth but Life, Life including all 
 its powers of love, joy, and admiration." Men were 
 deceived " if in a state of infancy they supposed 
 indifferent things such as excrescences of shell-fish, 
 and pieces of blue and red stone, to be valuable, 
 and spend large measures of the labour which ought 
 to be employed for the extension and ennobling of 
 life, in diving or digging for them, and cutting them 
 into various shapes, — or if, in the same state of 
 infancy, they imagine precious and beneficent things, 
 such as air, light, and cleanliness, to be value- 
 less, — or if, finally, they imagine the conditions of 
 their own existence, by which alone they can truly 
 possess or use anything, such, for instance, as peace, 
 
/ 
 
 252 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 trust, and love, to be prudently exchangeable, when 
 the markets offer, for gold, iron, or excrescences of 
 shells. — In fact it may be discovered that the true 
 veins of wealth are purple — and not in Rock, but 
 in Flesh — perhaps even that the final outcome 
 and consummation of all wealth is in the producing 
 as many as possible full - breathed, bright - eyed, 
 and happy -hearted human creatures. ... It is 
 open to serious question, whether, among national 
 manufactures, that of souls of a good quality may 
 not at last turn out a quite leadingly lucrative one ? 
 ^—The real science of political economy — or rather 
 of human economy — is that which teaches nations to 
 desire and labour for the things that lead to life 
 and which teaches them to scorn and destroy the 
 things that lead to destruction." 
 
 Wealth, then, as it is understood in the current 
 language of financiers and economists, is an evil : the 
 enemy, not only of the picturesque beauty of nature, 
 but also of social happiness. Thus it is bad in every 
 way and therefore not legitimate. What ? it may be 
 said, is there no legitimate wealth ? Not very great 
 wealth, replies Ruskin. "The lawful basis of wealth 
 is, that a man who works should be paid the fair 
 value of his work : and that if he does not choose to 
 spend it to-day, he should have free leave to keep it, 
 and spend it to-morrow. Thus, an industrious man 
 working daily, and la} r ing by daily, attains at last 
 the possession of an accumulated sum of wealth, to 
 which he has absolute right. . . . Therefore the first 
 
III. LIFE 253 
 
 necessity of social life is the clearness of national 
 conscience in enforcing the law — that he should 
 keep who has JUSTLY EARNED." So far we agree 
 with the economists and we admit readily the in- 
 equality of fortune. Great wealth is hardly to be 
 acquired in this way. " No man ever became, or can 
 become, largely rich merely by labour and economy. 
 All large fortunes (putting treasure-trove and gam- 
 bling out of consideration) are founded either on 
 occupation of land, usury, or taxation of labour." — 
 " But there is also a false basis of distinction : 
 namely, the power held over those who are earning 
 wealth by those who already possess it, and only 
 use it to gain more." This is not to say that ^he 
 labour-master is not permissible. This is not to say 
 that there should only be workmen in the world, 
 and no one to give them tools and to direct them. 
 This is not to say that the socialists are right in 
 maintaining that they can do without " captains of 
 work." But the economists are wrong in maintaining 
 that the masters may appropriate the whole profits 
 of labour up to that extreme limit which causes a 
 strike. " But I beg you to observe that there is a 
 wide difference between being captains or governors 
 of work, and taking the profits of it. It does not 
 follow because you are general of an army, that you 
 are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins." The 
 profit due to the master by reason of his intellectual 
 or moral labour is quite legitimate. But the excessive 
 profit by this master or capitalist, solely by reason 
 
254 HIS .ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 of his capital, is not legitimate. The Church de- 
 nounced this as " the execrable multiplying of money." 
 It is not wealth, it is the " too great riches " con- 
 demned by the saints when they spoke Kara tov<; 
 TrXeove/cras. 
 
 But, the economist may exclaim, what do you mean 
 by "too great riches"? Is this a scientific formula? 
 How can what is just at a certain figure become 
 unjust when it passes beyond that figure ? And 
 what figure would you fix ? It would be a strange 
 miracle that could transform an action quite lawful for 
 a working man who has economised several years of 
 wages, into a wrongful action for his grandson whose 
 fortune, increased by successive interests, arrives at 
 several millions. Whatever is right in a financial 
 operation remains right for this also, no matter what 
 number of zeros you add to it. Yes, mathematically 
 it is true, but humanly and socially speaking it can 
 be infinitely less so. Human equations are not 
 algebraic equations. There are certain moral ele- 
 ments which falsify all calculations, certain truths 
 which pushed to a certain point become errors, and 
 certain kinds of justice pushed to a certain point 
 which become injustice : summumjus, summa injuria. 
 In theory, a large capital lawfully acquired may also 
 be lawfully employed. As a fact its power ruins 
 and its weight crushes the small rival industries 
 ready to grow up under its shelter. " In this 
 respect, money is now exactly what mountain pro- 
 montories over public roads were in old times. The 
 
III. LIFE 255 
 
 barons fought for them fairly : — the strongest and 
 cunningest got them ; then fortified them, and made 
 every one who passed below pay toll. Well, capital 
 now is exactly what crags were then. Men fight 
 fairly (we will, at least, grant so much, though it 
 is more than we ought) for their money : but, once 
 having got it, the fortified millionaire can make 
 everybody who passes below pay toll to his million, 
 and build another tower of his money castle. And 
 I can tell you, the poor vagrants by the roadside 
 suffer now quite as much from the bag-baron, as 
 ever they did from the crag-baron." 
 
 And if we are told that this is no injustice because 
 it is the immediate and necessary effect of " the 
 struggle for life," we shall reply that the supreme 
 injustice of our age lies precisely in this horrible 
 fratricidal conflict which students complacently de- 
 signate the struggle for life. We ought boldly to 
 censure as cruel, cowardly, and pagan, this merciless 
 rivalry by which the most intelligent and the most 
 persevering and the most sagacious ruin the feeble 
 in mind, will, and judgment. " Is it not wonderful, 
 that while we should be utterly ashamed to use a 
 superiority of body, in order to thrust our weaker 
 companions aside from some place of advantage, we 
 unhesitatingly use our superiorities of mind to thrust 
 them back from whatever good that strength of mind 
 can attain ? You would be indignant if you saw a 
 stout fellow thrust himself up to a table where some 
 hungry children were being fed, and reach his arm 
 
256 HIS ^ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 over their heads, and take their bread from them. 
 But you are not in the least indignant if, when a 
 man has stoutness of thought and swiftness of capa- 
 city, and, instead of being long-armed only, has the 
 much greater gift of being long-headed — you think it 
 perfectly just that he should use his intellect to take 
 the bread out of the mouth of all the other men in 
 the town who are of the same trade with him." 
 
 But the economist will say this competition or, if 
 you will, this struggle, is the very soul of commerce. 
 Without it there would be no emulation, no progress, 
 no effort, no business, and therefore no wages for 
 working men. It is as sad as it is inevitable that 
 here and there it should crush the imprudent and 
 unskilful. It is the law of all progress. It is very 
 praiseworthy of an owner to give, as Ruskin ordains, 
 the whole of his actual profit to his workmen, when 
 he has no means of making them suffer any of his 
 loss. It is very edifying that he should abstain from 
 all competition that might ruin rivals less wealthy 
 or less skilful. Unfortunately these praiseworthy 
 edifying practices extolled by Ruskin might possibly 
 result in his gradual ruin : a crisis of difficult cir- 
 cumstances might arise in which he would be forced 
 either to disobey the prophet of Brantwood or to die 
 of hunger. . . . 
 
 Ruskin quietly replies : Let him die of hunger. 
 " All which sounds very strange : the only real 
 strangeness in the matter being, nevertheless, that 
 it should so sound." Would it be the first time in 
 
III. LIFE 257 
 
 the world that a man gave his life for his fellows 
 in a time of public danger? "Why in the public 
 estimate of honours is the soldier preferred before 
 the merchant ? " " Philosophically, it does not, at 
 first sight, appear reasonable that a peaceable and 
 rational person, whose trade is buying and selling, 
 should be held in less honour than an unpeaceable 
 and often irrational person, whose trade is slaying. 
 Nevertheless the consent of mankind has always, in 
 spite of the philosophers, given precedence to the 
 soldier. And this is right. 
 
 " For the soldier's trade, verily and essentially, is 
 not slaying, but being slain. This, without well 
 knowing its own meaning, the world honours it for. 
 A bravo's trade is slaying; but the world has never 
 respected bravos more than merchants : the reason 
 it honours the soldier is, because he holds his life at 
 the service of the State. . . . The merchant is pre- 
 sumed to act always selfishly. His work may be 
 very necessary to the community ; but the motive of 
 it is understood to be wholly personal. So that 
 among the five great intellectual professions relating 
 to the necessities of life " which have hitherto existed, 
 his alone incurs no personal danger. 
 
 " The Soldier's profession is to defend life. 
 
 The Pastor's, to teach it. 
 
 The Physician's, to keep it in health. 
 
 The Lawyer's, to enforce justice in it. 
 
 The Merchant's, to provide for it. 
 
 R 
 
258 HIS .ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to 
 die for it. 
 
 The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle. 
 The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague. 
 The Pastor, rather than teach falsehood. 
 The Lawyer, rather than countenance injustice. 
 The Merchant — what is his ' due occasion ' ot 
 death ? 
 
 It is the main question for the merchant, as for all 
 of us. For, truly, the man who does not know when 
 to die, does not know how to live." 
 
 Well, for the merchant who becomes every day 
 more important in the modern world, for the owner, 
 for the manufacturer, who is in our days a real leader 
 of men, there are occasions of devotion to the com- 
 mon welfare. "There are circumstances in which he 
 can show a self-sacrifice equal to that of the soldier, 
 and which would raise him to the level of the soldier, 
 — if he could understand social duty as military duty 
 is understood, and fulfil it. And when social duty 
 calls upon him to sacrifice riches rather than cause 
 ruin to his competitors, or a reduction of wages to 
 the workmen, he is bound to do so." 
 
 For from whichever point of view we regard it, 
 from the point of view of the iEsthetic of Nature, 
 disfigured and defiled by industrial speculations, or 
 from the point of view of the welfare of the lower 
 classes who are pillaged and crushed by it, wealth 
 of gold is an evil. "There IS NO WEALTH BUT 
 
III. LIFE 259 
 
 LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, 
 of admiration. That country is the richest which 
 nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy 
 human beings : that man is richest who, having per- 
 fected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has 
 also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and 
 by means of his possessions, over the lives of others." 
 A so-called wealthy country is not a happier nor a 
 more beautiful country, and the worship of mammon is 
 quite as impossible to reconcile with social justice as 
 with the Religion of Beauty. 
 
 §3 
 
 There is a story ot a famous aesthete who over- 
 took a poor wretch begging on London Bridge 
 in an aggressively inartistic costume. This beggar 
 wore a filthy frock coat and a horrible tall hat. The 
 aesthete, disgusted by the want of harmony between 
 the garments of the wretch and his profession, took 
 him to the cleverest tailor that he could find, and 
 fitted him out at his own expense in correct begging 
 clothes, copied from the pictures of the Old Masters 
 in the National Gallery. He then took him back to 
 the bridge, but the story does not relate that he gave 
 him anything to eat. This aesthete was neither a 
 follower of Ruskin nor an aestheticist. 
 
 The story goes on to say that an evangelist, coming 
 along the same bridge, was indignant that the outward 
 appearance of the hungry man had been cared for 
 
2 6o HIS .ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 and his soul neglected. So he led him off to a 
 chapel, and after showing him the way of eternal 
 life, took him back again to his bridge. But the 
 story does not say that he gave him anything to 
 drink. This evangelist was not a disciple either. 
 Ruskin would have taken the beggar not to a 
 picture-gallery nor to a meeting-house, but into a 
 pastry-cook's shop. He would have given heed not 
 to his clothes, not to his soul, but first of all to his 
 stomach. 
 
 For if too much "industrial enterprise" and wealth 
 in a country destroys the beauty of nature, too much 
 misery in a town destroys the beauty of the human 
 form, and without plastic beauty no art and no visions 
 of art are possible. " You cannot have a landscape 
 by Turner, without a country for him to paint ; you 
 cannot have a portrait by Titian, without a man to 
 be pourtrayed. The beginning of art is in getting 
 our country clean, and our people beautiful. There 
 has been art where the people were not all lovely, 
 where even their lips were thick — and their skins 
 black, because the sun had looked upon them; but 
 never in a country where the people were pale with 
 miserable toil and deadly shade, and where the lips 
 of youth, instead of being full with blood, were 
 pinched by famine, or warped with poison." 
 
 For the human form, then, we must lay stress on 
 the cultivation of the beautiful. "The body of each 
 poor child must be made as beautiful and perfect in 
 its youth as it can be, wholly irrespective of ulterior 
 
III. LIFE 261 
 
 purpose." When he arrives at the age when he 
 must earn his bread, his labour will perhaps deform, 
 deface, debase, and distort the splendid pliant muscles, 
 as we see them in the Vatican athletes who anoint 
 themselves for the coming contest. But meanwhile, 
 " let the living creature whom you mean to kill, get 
 the full strength of its body first, and taste the joy, 
 and put on the beauty of youth. ... To this end, 
 your schools must be in fresh country," and exer- 
 cises of all sorts and music "should be the primal 
 heads of this bodily education." Why are we forced 
 to study and grow pale before headless and handless 
 marbles in a museum ? Our chests and shoulders 
 should be as well worthy to be seen as those Elgin 
 Marbles. We should listen neither to the ascetics 
 nor to the preachers. We should not imprison the 
 best among men in cloisters, that they may devote 
 themselves to what they pompously term "the Ser- 
 vice of God " ; rather should they devote themselves 
 to the service of man. "A woman should earnestly 
 desire to be beautiful, as she should desire to be in- 
 telligent. The man and woman are meant by God 
 to be perfectly noble and beautiful in each other's 
 eyes." 
 
 Now the greatest obstacle to plastic beauty is 
 poverty, and, in default of human sentiment, it is the 
 aesthetical sentiment which urges us to fight and to 
 vanquish it. But how ? By all means in our power : 
 by charity towards unmerited misfortune, by the re- 
 pression of vice, by grace, by strength, by gold, and 
 
262 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 by iron. Gold scattered by handfuls as the poet 
 scattered lilies on the ancient tomb, as Spring scatters 
 the roses over Botticelli's grass. What we are in 
 the habit of giving is nothing : we must give all. 
 The economists are content with the remedies offered 
 to the poor by public or private charity ; they pride 
 themselves on the hospitals, asylums, orphanages, 
 and dispensaries. What avails it ? And if it avails, 
 whence come all the crippled limbs, the emaciated 
 faces in our towns, the livid countenances in our 
 prisons ? How can society speak of charity while 
 so much injustice remains, or of the fine arts while 
 so much human misery exists ? So long as human 
 beings suffer cold and hunger in the country around 
 us, not only is art not possible, but it cannot be 
 denied that splendour of raiment and furniture is a 
 crime. Better a hundred times that the marbles of 
 Phidias should crumble and the colours of Lionardo's 
 portraits fade, than that the features of living women 
 should be defiled or tears fill the eyes of children 
 who are living or who at least might live if poverty 
 had not already tainted them with the hues of death. 
 In the living ^Esthetic all the gold given to art 
 is lost when life is needing it, and it is shameful to 
 find pleasure in the adornment of some women while 
 other women lack sufficient clothing, and are despoiled 
 of all human beauty by cold, sickness, and the weari- 
 ness of unhealthy life. 
 
 Then the economists rise up with the ironical smile 
 so often seen in Holbein's portraits of learned men. 
 
III. LIFE 263 
 
 When we attack luxury by the plea of charity they 
 defend it by that of science. One of their favourite 
 theories, also the most questionable, is that it is of 
 little importance how the rich man spends his gold • 
 provided he spends it, and the more he spends it 
 even in useless articles of luxury, the more effica- 
 ciously he assists society. "Another erroneous idea," 
 says a Report of the New York Council, "is that 
 luxurious living, extravagant dressing, splendid turn- 
 outs and fine houses, are the cause of distress to a 
 nation. No more erroneous impression could exist. 
 Every extravagance that the man of 100,000, or 
 1,000,000 dollars indulges in adds to the means, the 
 support, the wealth of ten or a hundred who had 
 little or nothing else but their labour, their intellect, 
 or their taste. If a man of 1,000,000 dollars spends 
 principal and interest in ten years, and finds himself 
 beggared at the end of that time, he has actually 
 made a hundred who have catered to his extrava- 
 gance, employers or employed, so much richer by 
 the division of his wealth. He may be ruined, but 
 the nation is better off and richer, for one hundred 
 minds and hands, with 10,000 dollars apiece, are 
 far more productive than one with the whole." 
 
 " Yes, gentlemen of the Common Council," replies 
 Ruskin, " but what has been doing in the time of the 
 transfer? The spending of the fortune has taken 
 a certain number of years (suppose ten), and during 
 that time 1,000,000 dollars' worth of work has been 
 done by the people, who have been paid that sum 
 
264 HIS AESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 for it. Where is the product of that work ? By your 
 own statement, wholly consumed ; for the man for 
 whom it has been done is now a beggar. ... If a 
 schoolboy goes out in the morning with five shillings 
 in his pocket, and comes home at night penniless, 
 having spent his all in tarts, principal and interest 
 are gone, and fruiterer and baker are enriched. So 
 far so good. But suppose the schoolboy, instead, 
 has bought a book and a knife ; principal and interest 
 are gone, and bookseller and cutler are enriched. But 
 the schoolboy is enriched also, and may help his 
 schoolfellows next day with knife and book, instead of 
 lying in his bed and incurring a debt to the doctor." 
 
 The study of expenditure, therefore, is not super- 
 fluous when we are investigating the causes of poverty 
 and its remedies. And it is important not only to 
 know whether the wealthy spend their money and 
 whether it gives work, but also to define how they 
 spend it and the use of this work. For good sense 
 without the aid of science, and practical knowledge 
 without the aid of political economy, show that the 
 expenditure of this money in useless luxuries, which 
 are rapidly consumed without any benefit to health 
 or wealth, is not the same thing as the expenditure 
 of it in making roads, ports, canals, and sanitary 
 appliances, which will not only augment the wealth 
 of the workmen but also that of the community. 
 To plead for luxury because it gives work to the 
 makers of luxury cannot be a solid argument till it 
 can be shown that the makers of unnecessary articles 
 
III. LIFE^ 265 
 
 are more interesting than others, or when it can be 
 proved that they are more numerous, and that con- 
 sequently the general well-being of workmen should 
 be sacrificed to them — a thesis which the partisans 
 of luxury are not yet in a position to establish. 
 
 Further, what is the meaning of " making work- 
 men live " ? There is only one way of making any 
 one live ; that is, to produce, or to help to produce, 
 things useful to life, things which nourish, which 
 clothe, which preserve from heat or cold, which heal, 
 which purify. All the ingenuity of economists would 
 not alter the fact that a hundred men employed in 
 demolishing the insanitary hovels of a town so as 
 to rebuild them, or in cleaning out the cesspools 
 of a village, would do more for life than a hundred 
 men transformed into footmen, spending the time 
 waiting in antechambers during a hundred unneces- 
 sary conversations, or in figuring uselessly with folded 
 arms by the side of a hundred coachmen. 
 
 "For instance," says Ruskin, "if you are a young 
 lady, and employ a certain number of sempstresses 
 for a given time, in making a given number of simple 
 and serviceable dresses — suppose, seven ; of which 
 you can wear one yourself for half the winter, and 
 give six away to poor girls who have none, you 
 are spending your money unselfishly. But if you 
 employ the same number of sempstresses for the 
 same number of days, in making four, or five, or six 
 beautiful flounces for your own ball-dress — flounces 
 which will clothe no one but yourself, and which 
 
266 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 you will yourself be unable to wear at more than 
 one ball — you are employing your money selfishly. 
 You have maintained, indeed, in each case, the same 
 number of people ; but in one case you have directed 
 their labour to the service of the community, in the 
 other case you have consumed it wholly upon your- 
 self. I don't say you are never to do so; I don't 
 say you ought not sometimes to think of yourselves 
 only, and to make yourselves as pretty as you can ; 
 only do not confuse coquettishness with benevolence, 
 nor cheat yourselves into thinking that all the finery 
 you can wear is so much put into the hungry mouths 
 of those beneath you." 
 
 Neither let us confuse vanity with the love of art, 
 nor plead for luxury on the pretext that it creates a 
 taste for Beauty. The majority of the great works of 
 the Middle Ages are not due by any means to the 
 personal luxury of an individual, but on the contrary 
 to the encouragement of combined artistic effort. 
 And in the present day, for the true encouragement of 
 art, it is not the treasure of a Maecenas but a " com- 
 monalty " of small purses that is needed. " Instead of 
 the capitalist-employer's paying three hundred pounds 
 for a full-length portrait of himself, in the attitude of 
 investing his capital, the united workmen had better 
 themselves pay the three hundred pounds into the 
 hands of the ingenious artist, for painting, in the 
 antiquated manner of Lionardo or Raphael, some 
 subject more religiously or historically interesting to 
 them ; and placed where they can always see it." 
 
III. LIFE 267 
 
 Thus gold can do much to avert poverty. And 
 society is responsible for many of the physical evils 
 of its environment, but is it responsible for all ? 
 Those who attack society the most, do they produce 
 the weapons needed to triumph over poverty? Not 
 at all. They refuse them, on the contrary, so that 
 the fiercest socialists are not any nearer the solution 
 of the social problem than the most plausible among 
 economists. For it is true that society is respon- 
 sible, but it is only responsible for the things that 
 it can prevent. And among miseries there are those 
 which are not the result of an inadequate wage or 
 insufficient education : there are those which result 
 from misconduct, for example, alcoholism. Now can 
 we prevent alcoholism ? Have we the right to shut 
 the public-houses? Have the socialists ever pro- 
 posed any law to abolish three-fourths of the dis- 
 tilleries of alcohol? And without going as far as 
 legislation, have the socialist municipalities used the 
 means given them by law in order to reduce the 
 number of these destructive and poisonous dens ? 
 These same socialists who make society responsible 
 for the harm done by the gin-shop would, were the 
 suggestion made, support these causes of the evil 
 in the name of liberty. It is the duty of society to 
 aid the drunkard coming out of the gin-shop, but it 
 has not the right to stop him going in. How can 
 it be responsible if it is not free, and why should it 
 accept the duty of curing these wretched ones if it 
 has no right of previous interference ? 
 
268 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 Ruskin assures us it has the right. It has especi- 
 ally such rights, for there is no remedy so good as 
 prevention. " The right of public interference with 
 their conduct begins when they begin to corrupt 
 themselves ; — not merely at the moment when they 
 have proved themselves hopelessly corrupt. ... It 
 has been the manner of modern philanthropy to 
 remain passive until that precise period, and to 
 leave the sick to perish, and the foolish to stray, 
 while it spent itself in frantic exertions to raise the 
 dead, and reform the dust. "The recent direction 
 of a great weight of public opinion against capital 
 punishment is, I trust, the sign of an awakening 
 perception that punishment is the last and worst 
 instrument in the hands of the legislator for the 
 prevention of crime. The true instruments of re- 
 formation are employment and reward ; — not punish- 
 ment. Aid the willing, honour the virtuous, and 
 compel the idle into occupation, and there will be 
 no need for the compelling of any into the great and 
 last indolence of death." 
 
 To begin with, the State is to accustom the child 
 to an intellectual and manual labour, compulsory and 
 free: — "Go out into the highways and hedges, and 
 compel them to come in." But at the same time it 
 must not allow this work to be excessive. " In order 
 that men may be able to support themselves when 
 they are grown, their strength must be properly 
 developed while they are young ; and the State 
 should always see to this — not allowing their health 
 
III. LIFE 269 
 
 to be broken by too early labour, nor their powers 
 to be wasted for want of knowledge." Later, it 
 should not permit the health of man to be injured by 
 the want of muscular toil, nor his mind to be distorted 
 by too much knowledge. There is much talk of the 
 right of work, but there is little talk of the duty of 
 working. Again, if the workman has the right to 
 insist that the State should keep him employed on 
 Saturday because he has need of his wages that 
 day, surely the State should have the right to say 
 he must work on Monday instead of going to drink 
 his wage at the gin-shop. You must do something 
 for me, says the idle beggar. Good, replies society, 
 but then you must do something for us. These 
 clothes that you wear, this food that you eat, have 
 been produced by some one's labour. What labour 
 do you give us in return ? None. This is not 
 just. " Since for every idle person, some one else 
 must be working somewhere to provide him with 
 clothes and food, and doing, therefore, double the 
 quantity of work that would be enough for his 
 own needs, it is only a matter of pure justice to 
 compel the idle person to work for his maintenance 
 himself." 
 
 But here again the would-be reformer comes into 
 collision with the protests of economists and radicals. 
 They oppose the despoiling of the rich for the sake 
 of the usefulness of luxury, and in like manner they 
 oppose the compulsion of the poor in the name of 
 liberty. Misery proceeds from two things, misfortune 
 
270 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 and vice. The unfortunate should not be succoured 
 at the expense of the industries of luxury, the vicious 
 should not be restrained at the expense of individual 
 liberty. 
 
 What then is liberty ? This word irritates Ruskin 
 immeasurably, like a lie, a defiance, a hypocrisy, the 
 laugh of a cretin. What is the liberty spoken of, 
 and what the independence ? And liberty from 
 what ? From eternal laws and venerable people ? 
 Then liberty is a privilege of the most insignifi- 
 cant, the most feeble, and the vainest of creatures. 
 " The dog fastened to a chain is a good animal and 
 strong. The fly is free. Throughout nature there is 
 obedience, the laws of gravitation govern everything. 
 The massive rock obeys more docilely than the 
 miserable feather, falling in endless gyrations to the 
 ground. When Giotto drew his circle, saying, 'You 
 may judge my masterhood of craft by seeing that I 
 can draw a circle unerringly,' did he give perfect 
 freedom to his hand ? " The radical doctrine is that, 
 whatever use he may make of it, liberty is a good 
 thing for man. " Folly unfathomable, unspeakable, 
 unendurable to look in the full face of, as the laugh 
 of a cretin. You will send your child, will you, 
 into a room where the table is loaded with sweet 
 wine and fruit — some poisoned, some not ? — you 
 will say to him, ' Choose freely, my little child. 
 It is so good for you to have freedom of choice ; it 
 forms your character — your individuality. If you 
 take the wrong cup, or the wrong berry, you will 
 
III. LIFE 271 
 
 die before the day is over, but you will have acquired 
 the dignity of a free child ' ? " 
 
 But there is a holy liberty which each man should 
 possess : it is freedom from his own tyrannical in- 
 stincts and from his absorbing prejudices. Before 
 he can be free from others, he ought to be free from 
 himself. What is the use of liberating him from 
 all outside obligations if his power is always impeded 
 by his own vicious tastes ? Where is the use of 
 space if we have no power to expand ? We cry 
 out against despotism. Are we capable of liberty ? 
 " Tintoret's touch, Luini's, Correggio's, Reynolds', and 
 Velasquez's, are all as free as air, and yet right. . . . 
 By the discipline of five hundred years they had 
 learned and inherited such power. . . . and whereas 
 all former painters could be right only under re- 
 straint, they could be right, free. . . . Obey, and 
 you also shall be free in time ; but in these minor 
 things, as well as in great, it is only right service 
 which is perfect freedom." 
 
 Right service alone can triumph in life over un- 
 happiness, as in art it triumphs over ugliness. It 
 is by assiduous work among the poor and the 
 condemnation of all luxury and all unproductive 
 spending among the rich that health, vigour, and 
 grace, that is to say Beauty, can be restored to 
 suffering mankind. And perhaps here again the 
 worship of loveliness in all things is the surest 
 guide towards the solution of those problems which 
 are called social. 
 
272 HIS .ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 §4 
 
 Lastly, it would be of no advantage to restore 
 their primitive beauty and grace to living human 
 bodies, if man's soul is not able to find pleasure in 
 their happiness. What is the use of the loveliness 
 of things if man is not capable of appreciating it ? 
 What is the use of beautiful creatures and objects, 
 unless there are souls able to take delight in them ? 
 Now have the minds 01 our fellow-men the capacity 
 for such admiration ? Some there are, no doubt, 
 and they are the fortunate ones. But do not many 
 of us pass by the beauties scattered in profusion 
 throughout nature and art much as the attendants 
 in a museum, or the policemen, walk about among 
 the pictures of Win Dyck and Hobbema ? Our 
 education, our manners, our occupations, give no 
 training in this sense. We have neither sufficient 
 attention nor leisure for the higher joys of aesthetical 
 life. "The whole force of education, until very lately, 
 has been directed in every possible way to the de- 
 struction of the love of nature. The only knowledge 
 which has been considered essential among us is that 
 of words, and, next after it, of the abstract sciences ; 
 while every liking shown by children for simple 
 natural history has been either violently checked, 
 (if it looked an inconvenient form for the house- 
 maids,) or else scrupulously limited to hours of play ; 
 and the love of nature has become inherently the 
 
III. LIFE 273 
 
 characteristic of truants and idlers. While also the 
 art of drawing, which is of more real importance to 
 the human race than that of writing (because people 
 can hardly draw anything without being of some 
 use both to themselves and others, and can hardly 
 write anything without wasting their own time and 
 that of others), — this art of drawing, I say, which on 
 plain and stern system should be taught to every 
 child, just as writing is, — has been so neglected 
 and abused, that there is not one man in a thou- 
 sand, even of its professed teachers, who knows its 
 first principles." 
 
 We must first cultivate the faculty of admiration 
 among children. "Botanists have discovered some 
 wonderful connection between nettles and figs," . . . 
 which is very interesting, but a cowboy had better 
 learn " what effects nettles have on hay, and what 
 taste they will give to porridge ; and it will give him 
 nearly a new life if he can be got but once, in a 
 springtime, to look well at the beautiful circlet of 
 white nettle blossom, and work out with his school- 
 master the curves of its petals, and the way it is 
 set on its central mast." The scholars in primary 
 schools should be told : " Draw such and such a 
 flower in outline, with its bell towards you. Draw 
 it with its side towards you. Paint the spots upon 
 it. Draw a duck's head — her foot. Now a robin's 
 — a thrush's, — now the spots upon the thrush's 
 breast." But instead the contents of the bird's 
 stomach are described. Children are not taught to 
 
 S 
 
274 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 admire the beauties of the clouds or the mosses, 
 they are taught the value of the air for heating 
 furnaces, and that of textile fibres for use in looms. 
 The object seems to be their "erudition" but not 
 their education ; for to educate a child is not to 
 teach him " what he knew not, but to make him 
 what he was not." And the beginning of all educa- 
 tion is " Reverence, Compassion, Admiration." For 
 what ? No matter what. Let the child worship 
 pebbles or vegetables if he has nothing else to 
 reverence, but " reverence and compassion we are 
 to teach him primarily." And above all that he 
 should not learn analysis and dissection which chill 
 and destroy. It is of no moment that he learns 
 rather less. We do not live to learn any more than 
 we live to eat. We live in order to love. As long 
 as knowledge stimulates or increases this strength 
 in us, it is serviceable, but it is fatal directly it dimi- 
 nishes it. What ! Knowledge can be an evil ? No, 
 it is a good like light. But butterflies perish in 
 seeking light, and man perishes in seeking knowledge. 
 Men or butterflies, what we demand from light is 
 less that it should explain things than that it should 
 beautify them. 
 
 " In Reverence is the chief joy and power of life. 
 . . . What I have suggested hitherto . . . you must 
 receive throughout as merely motive of thought. . . . 
 The feelings that I most desire to cultivate in your 
 minds are those of reverence and admiration. . . . 
 This is the thing which I KNOW — and which, if you 
 
III. LIFE 275 
 
 labour faithfully, you shall know also. . . . Reverence, 
 for what is pure and bright in your own youth ; for 
 what is true and tried in the age of others ; for all 
 that is gracious among the living, — great among the 
 dead, — and marvellous, in the Powers that cannot 
 die." This is the secret of happiness. For the 
 disciple of Ruskin there is no pleasure to be com- 
 pared to aesthetical pleasure, and it alone is sufficient 
 to take the place of all others. If he should be rich 
 he will undertake by intelligent patronage to furnish 
 the people with something to admire. He will not 
 make use of his resources for personal enjoyment of 
 the moment, but for monuments serviceable for after 
 ages. Should he have the good fortune to meet with 
 a Michael Angelo, he will not command him to mould 
 a statue out of snow like Pietro di Medici. His first 
 duty on the contrary would be "to see that no 
 intellect shall thus glitter merely in the manner of 
 hoar-frost ; but that it shall be well vitrified, like a 
 painted window, and shall be set so between shafts 
 of stone and bands of iron, that it shall bear the 
 sunshine upon it, and send the sunshine through it, 
 from generation to generation." If he be poor he 
 would rejoice in seeing things of beauty possessed 
 by others, by churches, by museums, surpassing all 
 private collections in their manifold treasures. If he 
 has the means of travelling and following up abroad 
 the artistic relics of great creators of Art, he would 
 do so constantly, marking with a white cross those 
 days of his life when a new interpretation of beauty 
 
276 HIS .ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 dawned upon him, or when in the solitude of a 
 museum a new master was revealed to him. If he 
 is stopped on the way by want of funds, he would 
 recall the pilgrimages so often undertaken by poor 
 artists of Poussin's time, who, leaving for Rome, 
 stopped at Lyons or at Avignon, and paid for each 
 stage by a picture, vainly stretching out their arms 
 toward the Eternal City, and arriving at last better 
 fitted by long expectation to feel its eternity, and by 
 long desire to taste its joys. It is unnecessary for 
 the enjoyment of aesthetical life, that he should visit 
 every beautiful country : but it is essential that he 
 should give heed to all loveliness in the country that 
 he does see. If he sees a beautiful woman he would 
 admire her beauty : if she is ugly he would admire 
 her smile : if she does not smile he would reflect on 
 her dignity or nobility. If only one note remains in 
 his clavichord, the disciple would love this note. If 
 the country where he dwells has only one river, like 
 Zeeland, he would love this river : if his window is 
 so small that at night he can see only one star, 
 he would adore this star: and by dint of watching 
 for the beauty that is in everything, he would 
 create happiness for himself with the crumbs of the 
 feast, where others, satiated, drink long draughts 
 of boredom. 
 
 As it is not possible to admire anything that is 
 inferior to him, he would desire to have many things 
 and many people superior to him. In this way he 
 would transform into happiness such things as are 
 
III. LIFE 277 
 
 often secret causes of annoyance or discomfort to 
 others. Walking he would wish to see handsome 
 equipages passing along the roads ; they are a 
 pleasure to his sight which he is not to theirs. In 
 a town he would dwell, not in a palace, but in a 
 modest house opposite a palace, that he might admire 
 at leisure the beautiful architecture. It is from the 
 end of the table that the general effect of the dresses 
 and flowers can be best observed. It is from the 
 nameless crowd that the effect of a procession is 
 the most appreciated. He would obey his king if 
 he has a king; the elders of his family if he has 
 elders; the laws of his country if his country has 
 laws ; but he will know how to become free, and 
 being free inwardly, in spite of all his submission, 
 he will experience the true joys of freedom. He 
 would fear no greatness, no honour, no talent, for 
 he fears only evil. He would be sceptical only 
 on one point, viz. the reputed ease of the pillow 
 of scepticism to a teste bien faicte. If he lacks 
 pedigree, he would rejoice in the aristocracy, and 
 still more that he does not belong to it, for in be- 
 holding it at a distance he can admire it the better 
 and respect it the more. He w r ould have rebellious 
 thoughts only for ugliness. He would only find fault 
 with great personages if they were too small, badly 
 dressed, or appeared in assemblies in vulgar grace- 
 less costumes, or if they kept their fine collections 
 from the public, and cut down their old oaks or 
 olives. Against the wealthy he would only have one 
 
278 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 complaint; the ruin of old dwellings, and the con- 
 struction of new buildings of which " the counte- 
 nance is indifferent." But everything which honours 
 what is ancient and beautiful he would honour. He 
 would mock only at mockery. He would hate only 
 hatred. He would contemn only contempt. 
 
 Thus by true reverence and with no thought ot 
 self he would be happy. We may judge whether 
 many lives in history are happier than those of the 
 great landscape-painters. These were often ill like 
 Chintreuil, often poor like Corot, often misanthropic 
 like Turner, often threatened with blindness like 
 Troyon; and if, nevertheless, their lives have been 
 as relatively happy as their letters and their auto- 
 biographies seem to indicate, the reason is, that they 
 spent their life in reverent admiration. Unhappiness 
 comes from envy ; whoever admires with all his 
 heart does not envy. Unhappiness proceeds also 
 from regret — in revering, we no longer remember; 
 or from rancour — in revering, we pardon ; or from 
 doubts — in revering, we believe. 
 
 The unhappiness not only of the individual but 
 also of the community, proceeds from these evils and 
 can be cured only by this antidote. This feeling of 
 reverent admiration, which, while it is the sole and 
 supreme necessity for jesthetical life, is at the same 
 time the one remedy for social evils. It is the direct 
 antidote to the foolish desire for praise, a desire 
 which destroys all enthusiasm, a puerile conceit 
 which consumes all love. We protest a great deal 
 
III. LIFE 279 
 
 in these days against the power of money, but the 
 social canker does not lie here ; it is only one of 
 its symptoms. Money is deeply coveted because the 
 satisfactions it procures for vanity are the principal 
 objects coveted. When we seek for gold rather 
 than life, it is not to transform it into useful means 
 of existence, but into the playthings of vanity and 
 luxury. It is not that we should be able to say 
 frankly and openly: Let us eat and drink, but to be 
 able to think secretly and jealously: Let us be bril- 
 liant and admired, and above all let no one be more 
 brilliant or more admired than ourselves ! The pas- 
 sion of the capitalist for accumulation is one form 
 which this desire takes, but it is not the only one; 
 the other is the passion of the revolutionist. He 
 who for his own advantage endeavours to extend the 
 power of money because he has it, and he who asks 
 to destroy it because he has none, are impelled alike 
 by the same feeling : pride. It gleams in the eyes of 
 the revolutionary apostle who arrays himself with 
 the pomp of poverty, quite as much as in those of 
 the pharisee resplendent in his luxury. Impatient of 
 all inequality, dissatisfied with all superiority, and 
 detesting all kinds of government, the one and the 
 other have the same object : the wish to appear to 
 the world in the same guise as the great. This is 
 manifested quite as much by loud and vaunted con- 
 tempt of money as by extreme and obstinate desire 
 of it, and is reiterated by the onslaught of the Socialist 
 prophets in their attempts to cut down the steps or 
 
280 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 the social ladder, and by the worshippers of Mammon 
 in their clever manoeuvres to hide each step by cover- 
 ing it with gold. A painting by M. Rochegrosse gives 
 one of the truest pictures of our modern social system. 
 It was exhibited at one of our recent Salons, and 
 will not be easily forgotten. Upon the heights of 
 a rich, ugly, unquiet manufacturing town, its sky 
 darkened with smoky emanations from an unhealthy, 
 profitless toil, a crowd of human beings, hungering 
 for riches, honour, social advancement, and notoriety, 
 is struggling, every man with his brother, in a kind 
 of human pyramid. They hurtle and fight, fall and 
 rise again, climbing regardless of peace, regardless 
 of beauty, regardless of life, towards a gilded figure 
 of Fortune which soars above, always out of reach, 
 eluding the empty outstretched hands below. 
 
 For an idea of another and better life let us 
 turn to a well-known picture by Burne-Jones, The 
 Golden Stairs. In a high narrow frame, a golden 
 staircase, spiral and without balusters, like a ladder 
 in a dream, leads from an unknown floor up to an 
 unseen landing. Maidens crowned with leaves and 
 draped in delicate tunics, the folds as straight as the 
 fluting of a column, are descending the steps, some 
 holding violas, others cymbals or tambourines, others 
 again the long trumpets which in the blue skies of 
 Fra Angelico dart like sunbeams from the hands 
 of angels. Their bare feet are standing on the 
 golden steps, and the fingers of their tapering hands 
 touch the silver strings of lutes, and press the stops 
 
III. LIFE 281 
 
 of reeds. The gleaming stairs reflect their feet, and 
 the vibrating chords the souls of the sad-faced 
 minstrels. Sheaves of foliage stand below as in the 
 porch of a church on Palm Sunday. Here and 
 there a head is turned — as if in regret. Eye looks 
 into eye as if to read a secret. A head is bowed 
 as if in thought — lips smile to lips as if for a kiss. 
 Here and there beneath the peaceful brows, deep-set 
 eyes look forth beyond the frame, beyond the halls, 
 beyond the house, perhaps beyond the world itself. 
 They carol and they play. In truth, the music is 
 weak, their raiment simple, and it is but a narrow 
 dwelling. But there is grace in their light gestures, 
 calm on their steadfast countenances. Quite at the 
 top of the canvas doves have settled for a moment 
 on the tiled roof, to draw as it seems the envy of 
 the skies to this lovely spot on earth, or it may be, 
 perhaps, to carry the olive branch gathered here to 
 ambitious souls storm-tossed on the breakers of the 
 world. Every ambition is appeased, all noise is 
 hushed, and instead of climbing to grasp a Chimera, 
 all step gladly and simply down the grades of social 
 existence, descending the slopes of Fortune — the 
 Steps of the Golden Stairs. 
 
 When Ruskin's dream is accomplished Humanity, 
 instead of mounting to the assault of riches, will 
 descend the Golden Stairs. Everything will be 
 ordered for peace and for beauty. The rails of the 
 railway will be buried in the fields : the remains of 
 stations will be as rare as the vestiges of ancient 
 
282 HIS iESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 Roman camps : and the last of the locomotives will 
 be on show in some museum, by the side of the coach 
 that Louis XVI. had to wait for. No factory chimney 
 will darken the sky with smoke. The hand of man 
 will take the place of steam, so that we shall hear 
 no more of work without workmen, or of workmen 
 without work. Steam reaping-machines, monsters 
 which devour the wage of the agricultural labourer, 
 will no longer creak and scream in the fields, but 
 "the curves of the scythe will dart forth blue light- 
 nings as they catch the sunlight in the hands of the 
 reapers." The illogical temper of the age which 
 replaces as far as possible manual labour by newly 
 invented machines, and at the same time is indig- 
 nant at the number of hands it leaves unoccupied, 
 will disappear. Iron will no longer be cast in un- 
 changing moulds, it will be forged each time anew. 
 Certain tasks will be performed less quickly, but 
 they will be better accomplished. We shall no 
 longer buy butter from unknown people who send 
 it to us from a distance of two or three hundred 
 miles. The purchaser will know his provider, and 
 they will shake hands with each other. Perhaps also 
 the suppression of the intermediary, " the middle- 
 man," will bring greater profit to both. Travellers will 
 journey along the roads more observant if more dila- 
 tory than in these days, and the news they bring will 
 be coloured by their imagination. It will probably 
 be quite as true as accounts in newspapers. The 
 social condition of the wayfarer will be recognised 
 
III. LIFE 283 
 
 at the distance of a hundred yards, for the people 
 of every caste and of every trade will have special 
 costumes, designed and fitted to perfection, but not 
 interchangeable. The glazier will have one as well 
 as the haberdasher. There will be no fear of mis- 
 taking the senator for a hairdresser, or the Prime 
 Minister for his youngest clerk. The clothes of all 
 will be as spotless as those of the Horse Guards 
 or of the Queen's dairymaids. But on high-days 
 and holidays family chests will be ransacked for 
 gorgeous apparel. "The women will have jewellery 
 and uncut gems ; the peasants will be dressed in pure 
 colours, beautiful and bright. Those who nurse the 
 sick and feed the poor will be clad in purple and 
 gold : soldiers on the contrary in black, like public 
 executioners, so that children, who are fond of bright 
 uniforms, instead of playing at soldiers, should play 
 at philanthropists. The nobles will keep all the in- 
 signia of their rank, but with gems uncut, their beauty 
 not being increased by cutting, which disturbs the 
 poor mineralogists in their researches and is very 
 expensive. The money which the English habitu- 
 ally spend in cutting diamonds would, in ten years, 
 if it were applied to cutting rocks instead, leave no 
 dangerous reef nor difficult harbour round the whole 
 island coast." 
 
 The great nobles, possessors of ancestral estates, 
 will not be despoiled by others, but they will set to 
 work to despoil themselves. They will live con- 
 stantly on their properties, teaching the peasants 
 
284 HIS .ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 dancing, music, with the history of their provinces, 
 even to that of their old clock-tower. The landowner 
 will no longer live in Piccadilly and spend on race- 
 courses the money produced by the labour of the 
 workman in the country. He will live in his own 
 park and scatter his money on the fields of corn 
 and flowers. He will indeed only retain of this 
 money the just rent due for the directing of the 
 labour of his workmen, that is, if he is capable of 
 so directing them. The remainder he will restore 
 to its owner. If it is asked : To whom, and how ? 
 — To the land, in manure to renew it ; and to the 
 workmen, in works of art to educate them. For 
 example, "he would give the parish school precious 
 minerals or books or beautiful Greek vases, Lecythi, 
 (Enochoes, or those little Tanagra figures so full of 
 teaching from having dwelt so long among the dead." 
 The schools will be decorated from top to bottom 
 with images of the highest art or specimens of the 
 most serviceable objects, for it is "just in the 
 emptiest room that the mind wanders most, for it 
 gets restless like a bird for want of a perch, and 
 casts about for any possible means of getting out 
 and away." 
 
 Not only in school but everywhere we shall gain 
 all our knowledge from the eye. Art will penetrate 
 into all the nooks and corners of life, for the cowl 
 truly makes the monk, and " to teach taste is inevit- 
 ably to form character." Everything around will 
 speak first to the eye and then to the heart. A 
 
III. LIFE 285 
 
 Lraveller who visits an unknown town will be greeted, 
 not by colossal advertisements of chocolate mer- 
 chants or bicycles, but by some such inscription as 
 formerly met the eyes of wearied wayfarers on 
 entering the north gate of Siena : 
 
 " Cor magis tibi Sena pandit." 
 
 So, too, when standing for a moment or leaning 
 against the pillars of a shop door, where some poet 
 — Roumanille or William Morris — may be offering 
 for sale books or candlesticks, these pillars will recall 
 to us something well worth the memory touching 
 the marble or stone quarries of Italy, or Greece, of 
 Africa, or Spain, — for " even the unsculptured walls 
 of our streets will become to us volumes as precious 
 as those of our libraries." The metallic currency 
 will also address the eye by its chasing, the touch 
 by its " delicacy, and the heart by its purity ; there 
 will be ducats and half-ducats, in gold, florins, penny, 
 halfpenny, and one fifth of penny in silver": the 
 smaller coins being "beat thin and pierced with 
 apertures." The gold ducat " will bear the figure of 
 the archangel Michael : on the reverse, a branch of 
 Alpine rose : above the rose - branch, the words 
 1 Sit splendor s '; above the Michael, * Fiat voluntas'; 
 . . . round the edge of the coin, 'Domini. 1 " The 
 coin will be not only up to standard but absolutely 
 pure metal, so as to teach honour to the nation. In 
 this way the State will speak of beauty to the multi- 
 tude by all means in its power, by the temples, by 
 
286 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 the walls, by the bells, by the costumes, by the 
 arms, and especially by public ceremonies which 
 will be luxurious — of a luxury for all and by the 
 help of all — and by national festivals. 
 
 One of these festivals will be that of marriage. 
 " In every year there should be two festivals, one 
 on the first of May, and one at the feast of harvest 
 home in each district," at the time when heaven 
 promises, and at the time when it has given. The 
 authorities will proclaim the permission to marry, 
 before the assembled people, for they alone may 
 marry who have attained a vigorous physical and 
 moral existence. This permission will be given to 
 them " as the national attestation that the first 
 portion of their lives has been rightly fulfilled." 
 The young girls will receive the title of " rosiere " 
 and the youths that of " bachelor," " and so be led in 
 joyful procession, with music and singing." Nothing 
 must be done impromptu or by chance. " When a 
 youth is fully in love with a girl, and feels that he 
 is wise in loving her, he should at once tell her so 
 plainly, and take his chance bravely, with other 
 suitors. No lover should have the insolence to 
 think of being accepted at once, nor should any girl 
 have the cruelty to refuse at once; without severe 
 reasons. If she simply does not like him, she may 
 send him away for seven years or so — he vowing 
 to live on cresses, and wear sackcloth meanwhile, 
 or the like penance ; if she likes him a little, or 
 thinks she might come to like him in time, she may 
 
III. LIFE 287 
 
 let him stay near her, putting him always on sharp 
 trial to see what stuff he is made of, and requiring, 
 figuratively, as many lion-skins or giants' heads as 
 she thinks herself worth. The whole meaning and 
 power of true courtship is Probation ; and it ought 
 not to be shorter than three years at least, — seven 
 is, to my own mind, the orthodox time. And these 
 relations between the young people should be openly 
 and simply known, not to their friends only, but to 
 every one who has the least interest in them : and 
 a girl worth anything ought to have always a dozen 
 or so of suitors under vow for her." 
 
 When she has chosen her companion for the 
 journey she will await the national feast of marriage, 
 for there will be but one marriage-day, as at Venice 
 in the tenth century. "This day will be a festival 
 for all, — an actual festival for some, a commemorative 
 festival for others. There will be a great display of 
 magnificence, and no one will be envious that every 
 bride is vestita, per antico uso, di bianco, e con chioine 
 sparse giu per le spalle, conteste con filo d'oro." On 
 other days the villagers will be enacting scenes de- 
 picted by Le Nain or by Millet, but on that day 
 scenes such as Lancret or Watteau would love 
 to paint. Perfect equality will exist between all as 
 the same sun shines upon all, and the couples 
 there united will not start along different paths in 
 life according to their social conditions. When they 
 leave the church one will not, as nowadays, find in 
 readiness a softly-cushioned coupe full of flowers, 
 
288 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 while another has to climb the rude staircase of a 
 hovel. No. The State will provide every poor 
 bachelor and rosiere with a fixed income for seven 
 years, and will withhold from every rich "bachelor" 
 and every rich " rosiere " all their wealth for the same 
 period, allowing them an equal sum with the poor, 
 11 so that the rich and poor should not be sharply 
 separated in the beginning of the war of life; but 
 the one supported against the first stress of it long 
 enough to enable them to secure their footing, the 
 others trained somewhat in the use of moderate means," 
 and therefore disposed to acquire greater abundance 
 by the exercise of a handicraft and also to find 
 pleasure in work. 
 
 It will be said : That is impossible. Ruskin has 
 never said it was possible : he only said it was to be 
 desired. He never speaks of these things except as 
 of a picture for which both canvas and colours are 
 lacking, and has never put them elsewhere than in 
 the Island of Barataria. Ruskin does not look to 
 the reason of man to move the world, — he puts his 
 trust in love, 
 
 " L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle," 
 
 and he appeals for aid to the queenly power of 
 women. She is the Dea ex machina in this sweet 
 fable of humanity that he puts into the place of the 
 world. When he despairs of ugly and perverse man, 
 he turns to her " whose first duty is to charm," 
 and he begs her openly to be strong where man is 
 
III. LIFE 289 
 
 weak, to be modest where he is boastful, devoted 
 where he is egotistical. In the portrait he paints 
 we do not recognise the sumptuous and learned 
 women of the Renaissance, the Isabella d'Este of 
 Lionardo or of Lorenzo Costa, as depicted in the 
 Louvre picture, nor even the Marchesa di Pescairo 
 of Paolo Veronese, nor yet St. Anna's visitor, who 
 in the frescoes of Santa Maria Novella advances 
 with measured step, all sparkling with gems, and 
 garlanded by Ghirlandajo, the man of gems. No, it 
 is the woman of the primitive pictures and of the old 
 Flemish or Tuscan masters of the first period, sitting 
 erect and calm on a queenly chair and "govern- 
 ing her house by her glance, pale like the faces in 
 tapestry, bewitching as a fairy, tranquil and glowing 
 as a torch." She knows everything, but she does not 
 deck herself with knowledge as with a jewel. She 
 learns many languages in order that she may " under- 
 stand the sweetness of a stranger's tongue." She 
 also knows how to sew, to prepare the daily meal, 
 to keep accounts, and to tend the sick. Her clothing 
 is not luxurious, but she thinks of that of others — the 
 poor and needy in workhouses, asylums, and hospitals. 
 When she dresses in costly garments it is for a great 
 public ceremony of traditional solemnity, like the 
 maidens who follow St. Ursula in Carpaccio's picture, 
 or that her beauty may do homage to some great 
 idea and be a gracious spectacle for the people who 
 have no other spectacles. She enters into no con- 
 tests or struggles, but she buckles the armour on the 
 
 T 
 
290 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 shoulder of her husband for the battle. She does 
 not speak of emancipation nor go to women's meet- 
 ings in rivalry with men, but she becomes the last 
 appeal of man's action and accords the prize of the 
 tournament. "A true wife, in her husband's house, 
 is his servant ; it is in his heart that she is queen. . . . 
 From her, through all the world's clamour, he must 
 win his praise ; in her, through all the world's war- 
 fare, he must find his peace." She will not be at her 
 mirror like Titian's picture of Laura Dimiti. The 
 pure simple lines of her face will be reflected in the 
 polished copper on the dresser or in the deep blue of 
 the cuirass. Above all she is joyous. She does not 
 dwell upon the pious pictures of Mothers weeping 
 beneath a crucifix. If she has sorrow, if she has 
 tears, she shakes them off like a "roseleaf shakes off 
 rain," and reappears the brighter. She "follows after 
 righteousness," but she does not preach sermons. 
 Her hands are busy, not folded. She stays in her 
 house as a queen in her kingdom — she watches and 
 beautifies it, active in the morning, tired at night. 
 Her life flows onward amidst work, love, and beauty. 
 And when it is in part run out " the perfect loveli- 
 ness of a woman's countenance will consist in that 
 majestic peace which is founded in the memory of 
 happy and useful years." She will thus shed light 
 on everything around her and on the path of her 
 husband and son. In her eyes there will be light 
 as well as fire, in her soul there will be reverence as 
 well as pity. She will have no imaginary grievances 
 
III. LIFE 291 
 
 against the decrees of fate, as she will not expect of 
 life more than it can bestow, or of death any certain 
 promise. No sadness will float across her sweet un- 
 covered brow ; none, unless perhaps now and then 
 when she wanders through this Ruskinian Arcadia 
 circled by blue mountains, and discovers some simple 
 tomb beneath an olive tree revealing some forgot- 
 ten life with the melancholy thought of Poussin's 
 shepherdess scarce expressed : Et in Arcadia ego. 
 
 And the future ? The future need not concern us. 
 Our duty in this life is enough. It is puerile to 
 deny the next ; and to discuss and argue about it is 
 presumptuous. What is there to affirm ? Let us be 
 content to admire and love what we can see and 
 not to expect any material reward. " The purest 
 forms of our own religion have always consisted in 
 sacrificing less things to win greater ; time, to win 
 eternity ; the world, to win the skies." Let us ex- 
 pect no other recompense from the skies but their 
 splendour, from the earth but its peace. Let us 
 adopt our notion of heroism from the young Greek 
 of old, who would give his life for a kiss and not 
 obtain it. It is not well to disturb seers when they 
 speak to us of a marvellous land where " the ocean 
 breezes blow round the Blessed Islands, and golden 
 flowers burn on their bright trees for evermore." 
 Let us listen to the prophets as we listen to the 
 singing of the birds. They form part of the heri- 
 tage of Beauty. Let us not imagine " the sight of 
 any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of any spirits 
 
2Q2 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 but the clouds." In the flowers among the rocks, 
 in the broideries of the clouds, so intensely loved, 
 we may acknowledge " the mystery of Power, Bene- 
 ficence, and Peace which underlies them," and not 
 deny the personality of their Maker. Life has no 
 reward but life itself, veneration for the Unknown 
 artist none but veneration, love for all His works 
 none but Love itself. 
 
 " But if this life be no dream, and the world no 
 hospital, but your palace-inheritance; — if all the peace 
 and power and joy you can ever win, must be won 
 now, and all fruit of victory gathered here, or never; 
 — will you still, throughout the puny totality of your 
 life, weary yourselves in the fire for vanity ? If 
 there is no rest which remaineth for you, is there 
 none you might presently take ? was this grass of 
 the earth made green for your shroud only, not for 
 your bed ? and can you never lie down upon it, but 
 only under it ? The heathen, in their saddest hours, 
 thought not so. They knew that life brought its 
 contest, but they expected from it also the crown of all 
 contest : No proud one ! no jewelled circlet flaming 
 through Heaven above the height of the unmerited 
 throne ; only some few leaves of wild olive, cool to 
 the tired brow, through a few years of peace. It 
 should have been of gold, they thought ; but Jupiter 
 was poor ; this was the best the god could give 
 them. Seeking a better than this, they had known 
 it a mockery. Not in war, not in wealth, not in 
 tyranny, was there any happiness to be found for 
 
III. LIFE 293 
 
 them — only in kindly peace, fruitful and free. The 
 wreath was to be of wild olive, mark you: — the 
 tree that grows carelessly, tufting the rocks with no 
 vivid bloom, no verdure of branch ; only with soft 
 snow of blossom, and scarcely fulfilled fruit, mixed 
 with grey leaf and thorn-set stem ; no fastening of 
 diadem for you but with such sharp embroidery ! 
 But this, such as it is, you may win, while yet you 
 live ; type of grey honour, and sweet rest. 1 Free 
 heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, 
 and requited love, and the sight of the peace of 
 others, and the ministry to their pain; these, — and 
 the blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and 
 flowers of the earth beneath ; and mysteries and pre- 
 sences, innumerable, of living things, — may yet be 
 here your riches ; untormenting and divine : service- 
 able for the life that now is; nor, it may be, with- 
 out promise of that which is to come." 
 
 This might be called the metaphysic of the land- 
 scape-painter. "The sun is God," said the dying 
 Turner, and Corot also on his deathbed cried : " Look, 
 look at these landscapes." In admiration and grati- 
 tude, they prayed in their last hour that the beauty of 
 Nature might remain their reward beyond the grave. 
 Their happiness had been in things seen far from 
 the haunts of men, by the banks of rivers, on the 
 slopes of the hills, in the solitude of the woods and 
 in the caves of the earth, and when the time came 
 for them to leave this world they desired only to 
 
 1 ixeXirdeacra, ae6\wv y' 'ivenev. 
 
294 HIS ESTHETIC AND SOCIAL THOUGHT 
 
 find its image in heaven. Or might we say this earth 
 had been indeed their heaven ? 
 
 For Ruskin also passionate love of nature has been 
 Alpha and Omega. It has controlled every feature 
 of his personality, dictated all his words, dominated 
 every thought. This was the fire which illuminated, 
 animated and purified him, preserving him from the 
 meanness of hatred, and prevailing over the sorrows 
 of human love. It led him by the path of analysis 
 to a truer knowledge of his mistress, and over the 
 highest regions of synthetic thought to a deeper love 
 of her he had learned to know. It sent him in quest 
 of science, that he might dive deep into the secrets of 
 Nature ; but it shielded him against the futilities of 
 that science by revealing those aesthetic relations of 
 things which science neither explores nor admits, if 
 only for the very reason that they belong to the 
 domain of Art. It determined his conception of Art 
 and was the foundation of all his definitions. Lastly, 
 it armed him against those presumptuous men who 
 would fain improve upon Nature, and imbued him 
 with the deepest sympathy for those who live labori- 
 ously amidst her joys, or for those who, in our artificial 
 nineteenth-century cities, are for ever deprived of 
 them. Though in our opinion he may not have at- 
 tained to absolute Truth, we are not therefore alarmed 
 either for him or for ourselves. It may be in the 
 darkness of our night the " Wise Men " are led astray 
 by Will-o'-the-wisps, and only the poor shepherd 
 marks the guiding star. But speaking of these kingly 
 
III. LIFE 295 
 
 wanderers, of whom Ruskin has been one, let us say 
 that it is not the light in their sky but the power in 
 their heart which prevails. The star may lead them 
 to the oasis of faith or to the desert of doubt, but if 
 they have prayed for Truth and sought her honestly, 
 disinterestedly, and humbly, oasis or desert will be 
 alike for them a Bethlehem. And for this aged man 
 who for sixty years of his life has chanted, " Glory 
 to Beauty in the highest," there must surely be some 
 angels of the Holy Night who tarry still to answer, 
 "On earth Peace, Goodwill towards men." 
 
APPENDICES 
 
APPENDIX A 
 
 Pp. 28, 29, 30. — Referring to the meeting at Sheffield 
 of some members of the St. George's Guild — the occasion 
 was the inauguration of the new Museum at Meersbrook 
 Park. Mr. Ruskin could not be present, owing to ill- 
 health ; he had previously visited Sheffield as the guest 
 of some friends who were not members of St. George's 
 Guild. The journey by postchaise did not take place on 
 any of these occasions, but was undertaken purely as an 
 experiment in travelling, and was wholly unconnected 
 with any operations of St. George's Guild. For the history 
 of the tea-shop, see Fors Clavigera, Letter 48. 
 
 G. A. 
 
APPENDIX B 
 
 P. 32. — Mr. George Thomson, one of the Trustees for 
 St. George's Guild, comments as follows on the account 
 of the mill at Laxey : "Not true to fact — all machine 
 carding and spinning ; " and he substitutes " weaving " 
 for " bleaching." His remark on the mode of payment 
 to the farmers for their wool is : " Not true now — con- 
 ducted on ordinary business lines." 
 
 The letter from Mr. Thomson to me, appended below, 
 speaks for itself : — 
 
 " Jan. 18/99. 
 
 " You give me a somewhat difficult task. The whole 
 statement should be reduced to a very simple paragraph, 
 as the matter is an exaggerated view of Fors — entirely 
 misleading and really not true in fact. 
 
 " My first active association with Ruskin economies arose 
 through Swan showing me some patterns — which I had 
 previously been led from reading Fors to believe were 
 made under such conditions as the writer describes. To 
 my amazement I found they were really produced upon 
 very antiquated machinery, and badly made machine goods ; 
 and being very anxious for the Master's reputation I at 
 once condemned them as frauds on the public, which 
 would sooner or later lead to failure. Swan told the 
 Master, and he wrote asking me to take the whole thing 
 off his hands, as it had been a great bother to him. I 
 
APPENDIX B 301 
 
 went over and found the place exactly what I had imagined 
 from seeing the goods ; neither hand-spinning or hand- 
 weaving — about three persons employed, two men including 
 Rydings and one old woman doing odd jobs. I saw at 
 once the only way to save the Guild money was to put 
 the place upon a business footing, and it has continued 
 ever since to just manage to keep the few people employed 
 in a more or less satisfactory manner ; but I never saw 
 either hand-spinning or weaving, and the demand for the 
 goods arises almost entirely from ' sentimental ' considera- 
 tions for the Master, and not from any special virtue in 
 them. This has been a difficulty, i.e. keeping up the 
 sentiment, since the Master withdrew from activity." 
 
 G. A. 
 
APPENDIX C 
 
 List of Ruskin's Works quoted : 
 
 Mornings in Florence — Prseterita — Modern Painters — 
 Sesame and Lilies — The Oxford Museum — Fors Clavigera 
 — The Seven Lamps of Architecture — General Statement 
 explaining the Nature and Purposes of St. George's Guild 
 — Val dArno — Arrows of the Chace — The Queen of the 
 Air — Deucalion — Time and Tide — The Crown of Wild 
 Olive — The Relation between Michael Angelo and Tintoret 
 — Aratra Pentelici — The Harbours of England — Letter to 
 Young Girls — Unto this Last — Munera Pulveris — Frondes 
 Agrestes — The Eagle's Nest — The Stones of Venice — The 
 Elements of Drawing — Lectures on Art, 1870 — Ethics of 
 the Dust — Love's Meinie — St. Mark's Rest — Ariadne 
 Florentina — The Laws of Fesole — The Art of England — 
 Lectures on Architecture and Painting — A Joy for Ever. 
 
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