ART. VII.-JOHN RUSKIN.

1. Ruskin and the Religion of Beauty. Translated from the French of Robert de la Sizeranne by the Countess of Galloway. London: George Allen, 1899.

2. The Art- Teaching of John Ruskin. By W. G. Collingwood, M.A. Cheaper issue. London: Rivingtons, 1900.

3. John Ruskin, Social Reformer. By J. A. Hobson. Second edition. London: James Nisbet, 1899.

4. Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and other literary estimates. By Frederic Harrison. London: Macmillan, 1899.

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THE HE last of the prophets is gone. The most eloquent of all the voices which have stirred the heart of England during the century now drawing to a close has passed into silence. The great life is over, and John Ruskin sleeps in the quiet churchyard on the shores of Coniston Water, among the mountains that were his home and his daily delight. all sides we mourn for him to-day; in all lands the same expressions of respect and honour are heard, alike in France, where the glorious old man' numbers some of his most devoted admirers; in Germany, where Professor Begas has lately paid a splendid tribute to his memory; in Italy, which owes him so large a debt of gratitude; and in the New World, where his works are studied by an ever-increasing multitude of readers. Here at home the soul of the nation has been deeply moved, and generous amends have been made for any neglect or injustice that may have been done him in the past. A year or two ago Count Tolstoi remarked that he himself thought Ruskin the greatest of his contemporaries, but that he was pained to find how few Englishmen agreed with him. man, he added, is a prophet in his own country; and the greatest men are seldom recognised, for the very reason that they are in advance of their age and that their countrymen are therefore unable to understand them. Certainly no living writer has provoked more scorn and ridicule, or been more fiercely assailed, than Ruskin. But if he was the best-abused, he was also the best-praised man in England. To-day the strife of tongues is hushed, and all hearts go out to him in love and reverence. We recall the vast treasure of beautiful and inspiring thought which he has left us, the charm of the voice that we shall never hear again. If for many years of his long life he seemed to himself and others a lonely prophet crying in the wilderness, now as we look round we begin to realise how

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the words which he flung on the winds have sprung up and borne fruit in a hundred new and unexpected forms.

The excellent biography published a few years ago by Mr. Collingwood, and the charming recollections given us by Ruskin himself in the pages of 'Præterita,' have already made us familiar with the chief outlines of his life. Before long a full and authoritative record is to appear, which will include Ruskin's letters to his parents-a correspondence of priceless value and interest. This being the case, we will not attempt to repeat the story of his life, but will endeavour to give our readers a brief estimate of his work as teacher, art-critic, moralist, and social reformer.

The four works at the head of these pages illustrate the wide range of Ruskin's teaching, while they bear witness to the farreaching effects of his influence. First of all, we have a lively and picturesque study of the great Englishman's life and work from the pen of a distinguished French critic. M. de la Sizeranne's intimate acquaintance with English art is well known, and the deep impression which Ruskin's writings have made upon him is evident on every page of this book, which, having been widely read in France, has now been admirably translated into English by Lady Galloway. His judgment is the more valuable because it is that of a foreigner, and because he has inherited both the classical traditions and the keenly critical faculty of his race. The three other writers have each of them dealt with a separate aspect of Ruskin's teaching. Mr. Collingwood, a faithful friend and follower of the great man whose loss we lament, has drawn up a clear and concise statement of the fundamental principles of Ruskin's art-teaching, which is especially to be commended to students who are anxious to arrive at an exact understanding of his doctrines and of the real unity of design underlying his somewhat discursive criticism. Mr. Hobson, on the other hand, treats exclusively of Ruskin's social teaching. He describes the process of thought by which Ruskin was led to leave art for social reform, and gives an exhaustive analysis of his views on political economy, as well as a very interesting account of the different industrial experiments which he initiated or encouraged with Quixotic generosity, and to which he devoted so large a proportion of his time and fortune. Mr. Hobson frankly admits the fallacy of some of Ruskin's theories and his failure to solve many of the problems with which he was confronted, but justifies his claim to rank as the foremost social reformer of his age, 'not merely because he has told the largest number of important truths upon the largest variety of vital matters, in

language of penetrative force, but because he has made the most powerful and the most felicitous attempt to grasp and to express, as a comprehensive whole, the needs of a human society and the processes of social reform' (p. vi). Lastly, Mr. Frederic Harrison has come forward to maintain the supremacy of Ruskin as a consummate master of English prose, of whom it may be said, not only that he had 'a soul as sensitive to all forms of beauty as Shelley,' but that, as Villari tells us of Dante, he had the most exquisite style that the language ever produced. And it is the glory of our great teacher, Mr. Harrison remarks in his essay on Ruskin as a prophet, that he has used this gift with unfaltering courage and perseverance to irradiate with ennobling ideas the whole field of morality, education, industry, art, poetry, and religion' (p. 103).

In the first place, then, Ruskin stands before the world as an art-critic-probably the greatest art-critic that has ever lived, certainly the greatest that this country has produced. Coleridge and Burke, Hazlitt and Reynolds had discoursed on the spirit of art and beauty, and theorised on the grand style; but Ruskin invented art-criticism as most of us understand it to-day, and showed that the critic could be at the same time poet, historian, and ethical teacher. Nature had endowed him with an exquisite sensibility to beauty, and a faculty of close and accurate observation. He combined in a remarkable degree the sympathy and imagination of the artist with the scientific tendency that made Mazzini call him the most analytical mind in Europe.' Not Leonardo himself was more keenly interested in geological studies, in the formation of rivers and mountains, in the life of plants and birds. Fortunately for mankind these natural gifts were stimulated by foreign travel and by the careful education which he received from his parents. The child of an artistic father and an evangelical mother, born in London and bred in the suburbs, he early became acquainted with our English lake-country and with the Swiss mountains, and was familiar from his boyhood with the drawings of Turner and Prout. He tells us how at four years old he rambled with his nurse among the gnarled trunks and rocky heights of Friar's Crag, on Derwentwater, and he has left us an imperishable record of the summer evening when he first saw the Alps from the terrace at Schaffhausen :

'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 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 walls of sacred 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 of 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. terrace, and to 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.' ('Præterita,' i, 195.)

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Like all clever children, John Ruskin began by writing poetry. Skiddaw and Snowdon inspired his first verses, but the sight of Turner's vignettes to Rogers's ' Italy' turned his thoughts into another channel. On a journey abroad, when he was fourteen, he sketched the Alps, and made careful architectural drawings in the style of Prout and Turner. He became an exquisite draughtsman, and for sensitive delineation and accurate detail nothing can surpass his drawings of Venetian palaces and other subjects now in the University galleries at Oxford. From the first, architecture had a special attraction for him, and, because he found that Gothic architecture reproduced the forms of trees and stems of leaves and flowers the most faithfully, he always preferred this style to any other. This violent instinct for architecture' prompted his first prose essays, a series of articles on the Poetry of Architecture, or the architecture of the nations of Europe' considered in its association with Natural Scenery and National Character,' which he contributed to 'Loudon's Magazine' during his first two years at Oxford, under the nom de guerre of Kata Phusin- according to nature.' By degrees the study of Turner's landscapes opened his eyes to the primary function of Art as the interpreter of Nature, and he determined to renounce alike his poetic dreams and artistic inspiration, and to devote his life to what he felt was his true vocation. It was at Chamouni, in the summer of 1842, that his final decision was made. He had been reading Carlyle's 'Heroes,' and there, under the snows of Mont Blanc, he vowed to go forth on his heaven-sent mission and tell the world that ‘Art, no less than other spheres of life, had its heroes; that the main

spring of their energy was sincerity, and the burden of their utterance truth.'

Early in the following spring the first volume of 'Modern Painters' appeared. In this first volume, originally undertaken with the express object of vindicating Turner from the charge of untruthfulness, Ruskin already lays down the fundamental principles of his art-teaching. All art, he insists, must, first of all, rest upon a patient study and a thorough knowledge of Nature. Go to Nature!' he cries in the famous sentence which created Pre-Raphaelitism, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.' For there-not in dreams of the imagination, not in some conventional ideal imposed by tradition-is Beauty.

What matter if there are irregularities and imperfections in Nature? These are signs of life. To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to paralyse the source of beauty and 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.' Perfection in composition, skill and success in the painting of a picture, matter comparatively little, for the true artist does not make art for art's sake, in order that men should praise his cleverness, but seeks after Nature, and in her for Beauty. By the light of this doctrine Ruskin framed his great indictment against the post-Raphaelite masters, and principally Claude and Poussin, Canaletto and the Dutch landscape painters, whom he held guilty of the deadly sin of conventionalism. Thus at one blow this daring young author swept away the old superstition of the grand style, as advocated by Reynolds and his contemporaries, and boldly proclaimed his belief in an art as wide as nature and humanity.

But although art is based upon nature, it is no mere transcript of phenomena. On the contrary, says Ruskin, the primary aim of the artist should be to convey great ideas to the spectator; and the right definition of a great artist is that he is one who succeeds in embodying the greatest number of the greatest ideas in his work. First of all, there must be 'the earnest and intense seizing of natural facts, then the ordering of these facts by the strength of natural intellect, so as to make them for all who look upon them to the utmost serviceable, memorable, and beautiful.' Already, in this first volume of 'Modern Painters,' Ruskin lays stress on a want of solemn and definite purpose as the chief defect in contemporary painting, and maintains that great art consists in the habitual choice of noble and elevating