GENERAL WRITERS.
To the various and voluminous works of Mr. Ruskin, corresponding to every facet of his singular intellect and character, justice cannot possibly be done within our space. The son of a rich wine-merchant of Scottish extraction, he was born and bred among books and works of art, and, without attending any public school, entered Christ Church as a gentleman commoner. He won the Newdigate prize poem, and in 1843 published the first volume of his "Modern Painters". His primary object was to assert the supremacy of Turner, which involved him in a comparative study of art, modern, mediaeval and classical, and of the intellectual, literary, social, and moral conditions of the societies in which the art, in each case, arose. He had also to observe Nature accurately, from the contour of the Alps to the development of the forms of trees, and, indeed, of "the meanest flower that blows". He drew excellently, and many of the copious and beautiful illustrations are from his own pencil. His own opinions, which, as he confessed, varied greatly at different times, were constantly exhibited, and he wrote in a style as highly pitched and coloured as that of De Quincey. The effect of the whole, at least on young readers, was immensely exciting and inspiriting, whatever the topic might be on which he expressed himself. His was the prose of a man who was almost a poet, but his verses proved to the world, as they must have done to himself, that formal poetry was not his forte. In art his affections were with les primitifs, the artists, holy and humble men of heart, before the Revival of learning, before Raphael; and he was actually fierce over Claude and Salvator Rosa. "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" (1849) and "The Stones of Venice" (1852) continued the teaching of "Modern Painters". In his "Academy Notes" his attitude was thus described by a painter in "Punch".
I sits and paints,
Hears no complaints,
I sells before I'm dry;
Comes savage Ruskin,
Puts his tusk in—
And nobody will buy.
Ruskin was extolling and defending the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Rossetti—whom he knew well, and bought from gladly—Millais, Holman Hunt, and others less celebrated, with whom were joined William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. They went back to the art of the Middle Ages, often applying its minute study of detail to incidents in modern life. The value of Ruskin's theories of art is now, and has long been, disputed. Ruskin was not an "impressionist," and the libel action brought against him by Whistler, characteristically appealing to a British jury on a question of art, and receiving one farthing of damages, left the questions open to each impartial mind. Ruskin's socialistic theories, in "Unto This Last" have had infinitely more permanent and wide-reaching results than his æsthetics. But, be these right or wrong, his early works are of the highest and most varied interest, both in matter and expression. There never was a man more rich in pity, and more open-handed, whether it was his pictures and other objects of art, or his money that he lavishly bestowed. In the sixties and later he produced many small books with pretty symbolical titles, dealing with all things from personal confessions to social problems: he was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, where his lectures were crowded, and his "Fors Clavigera," an autobiography in numbers, came out in parts. It contains many examples of his style at its best, that is, at its simplest. One glorious passage gives a great Turneresque picture of a scene viewed from a certain bridge over Ettrick, whence, in fact, to mortal eyes no such prospect is visible! In "Fors" Ruskin wrote with great sympathy and affection about Sir Walter Scott.
In his later years and writings, the contradictions of his complicated character, and the effects of over-work, and too keen a vision of "the sad pageant of men's miseries," began to affect his work with eccentricity; and he sought retirement near Coniston Lake with his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Severn.
Of joy in widest commonalty spread,
of joy in art and Nature, he had made many thousands of people participators, for while others had written on art, none had done so with so much contagious enthusiasm, varied eloquence, and magnificent imagination. The rhythm of his style is almost as often invaded by blank verse, as in Dickens's case, and, according to R. L. Stevenson, an irruption of blank verse into prose is a symptom of great fatigue. In one short sentence of prose in Swinburne's essay on Lamb and Wither we read:—
Behind him and beneath we see....
The Hazlitts prattling at his heel,
The Dyces labouring in his wake.
Two other Oxford critics, Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) and John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) are so recently silent that they cannot here be critically estimated. Both were devoted to literature and art, classical, modern, and of the Renaissance. Both had their peculiar styles, that of Symonds very animated, but somewhat Corinthian; that of Pater remarkable for a kind of hieratic precision, and sedulous daintiness, and a vocabulary in which certain favourite terms occurred but too frequently. Symonds sufflaminandus erat; in his "History of the Renaissance in Italy" he is certainly unable to keep the stream of his learning and enthusiasm within its banks; while an impatient reader might demand a more rapid and less obviously self-conscious movement in the style of Pater. His first volume, "Studies in the History of the Renaissance" (1873), brought to young readers the same kind of pleasant surprise as "The Defence of Guenevere" or "Atalanta in Calydon". The essay on Coleridge, and the "little poem in prose" on the Monna Lisa of Leonardo, appeared to be new models of excellence. This book remains the most characteristic of the author, though he seems to have thought that his style verged perilously on that of poetry. He avoided this possible danger, without ceasing "still to be neat, still to be dressed," in his reflective novel of Roman life, "Marius the Epicurean" (1885), in which Marius is far from being an Epicurean in the vulgar sense of the word, but is rather the John Inglesant of the period. The book, like "Clarissa Harlowe," is not to be read so much for the story as for the delicate dreamy succession of the moods, and of the inclinations and half-beliefs of the hero, and for the pictures of the manners of the age. "Plato and Platonism" is a valuable study, and "Imaginary Portraits" shows more imagination in the designing of character than Marius. The reef which he and R. L. Stevenson did not always steer clear of was préciosité, over-anxious effort towards novelty and perfection of phrase.