Of course Mr. Ruskin was never a man to do anything by halves, and having once laid down the canon that nature and truth are to be the guides of the artist, he soon began to write and to think as if nature and truth alone were concerned. He seemed to have taken no account of the fact that one great object of art is simply to give delight, and that however natural and truthful an artist may be, yet he is to bear in mind this one purpose of his work, or he might almost as well let it alone. Nature and truth are to be his guides to the delighting of men; to show him how he is to give a delight which shall be pure and genuine. A single inaccuracy as to fact seems at one time to have spoiled all Mr. Ruskin's enjoyment of a painting, and filled him with a feeling of scorn and detestation for it. He denounces Raphael's "Charge to Peter," on the ground that the apostles are not dressed as men of that time and place would have been when going out fishing; and he makes no allowance for the fact, pointed out by M. Taine, that Raphael's design first of all was to represent a group of noble, serious men, majestic and picturesque, and that mere realism entered little into his purpose. It may seem the oddest thing to compare Ruskin with Macaulay, but it is certain that the very kind of objection which the former urges against the paintings of Raphael the latter brings forward against one of the poems of Goldsmith. "What would be thought of a painter," asks Macaulay, "who would mix January and August in one landscape, who would introduce a frozen river into a harvest scene? Would it be a sufficient defence of such a picture to say that every part was exquisitely colored; that the green hedges, the apple trees loaded with fruit, the wagons reeling under the yellow sheaves, and the sunburned reapers wiping their foreheads, were very fine; and that the ice and the boys sliding were also very fine? To such a picture the 'Deserted Village' bears a great resemblance." Now it would indeed be an incomprehensible mistake if a painter were to mix up August and January as Macaulay suggests, or to depict the apostles like a group of Greek philosophers, as in Ruskin's opinion Raphael did. But I venture to think that even the extraordinary blunder mentioned in the first part of the sentence would not necessarily condemn a picture to utter contempt. It was a great mistake to make Dido and Iulus contemporaries; a great mistake to represent angels employing gunpowder for the suppression of Lucifer's insurrection; a great mistake to talk of the clock having struck in the time of Julius Cæsar. Yet I suppose Virgil and Milton and Shakespeare were great poets, and that the very passages in which those errors occur are nevertheless genuine poetry. Now Ruskin criticises Raphael and Claude on precisely the principle which would declare Virgil, Milton, and Shakespeare worthless because of the errors I have mentioned. The errors are errors no doubt, and ought to be pointed out, and there an end. Virgil was not writing a history of the foundation of Carthage. Shakespeare was not describing the social life of Rome under Julius Cæsar. Milton was not a gazetteer of the revolt of Lucifer and his angels. Mr. Ruskin might as well dispose of a sculptured group of Centaurs by remarking that there never were Centaurs, or of the famous hermaphrodite in the Louvre by explaining that hermaphrodites of that perfect order are unknown to physiology. The beauty of color and contour, the effect of graceful grouping, the reach of poetic imagination, the dignity of embodied thought, outlive all such criticism even when in its way it is just, for they bear in themselves the vindication of their existence. But Ruskin's criticism is the legitimate result of the cardinal error of his career—the belief that the morality of art exactly corresponds with the morality of human life; that there is a central law of right and wrong for everything, like Stephen Pearl Andrews's universal science, of which when you have once got the key you can open every lock—which is the solving word of every enigma, the standard by which everything is finally to be judged. I need not show how he followed out that creed and gave it a new application in "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" and the "Stones of Venice." In these masterpieces of eloquent declamation, the building of houses was brought up to be tried according to Mr. Ruskin's self-constructed canons of æsthetic and architectural morality. No one, I venture to think, cares much about the doctrine; everybody is carried away by the eloquence, the originality, and the feeling. Later still Mr. Ruskin applied the same central, all-pervading principle to the condemnation of fluttering ribbons in a woman's bonnet. The stucco of a house he set down as false and immoral, like the painting of a meretricious cheek. His æsthetic transcendentalism soon ceased to have any practical influence. It would be idle to try to persuade English house-builders that the attributes of a building are moral qualities, and that the component parts of a London residence ought to symbolize and embody "action," "voice," and "beauty." It may be doubted whether a single architect was ever practically influenced by the dogmatic eloquence of Mr. Ruskin. In fact the architects, above all other men, rebelled against the books and scorned them. But the books made their way with the public, who, caring nothing about the principles of morality which underlie the construction of houses, were charmed by the dazzling rhetoric, the wealth of gorgeous imagery, the interesting and animated digressions, the frequent flashes of vigorous good sense, and the lofty thought whose only fault was that which least affected the ordinary reader—its utter inapplicability to the practical subject of the books.
It was about the year 1849 that that great secession movement in art broke out to which its leaders chose to give the title of pre-Raphaelite. The principal founder of the movement has since been almost forgotten as an artist, but has come into a sort of celebrity as a poet—Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With him were allied, it is almost needless to say, the two now famous and successful painters, Holman Hunt and Millais. Decidedly that was the most thriving controversy in the world of art and letters during our time. It was the only battle of schools which could tell us what the war for and against the Sturm-und-Drang school in Germany, the Byron epoch in England, the struggle of the Classicists and Romanticists in France, must have been like. The pre-Raphaelite dispute has long ceased to be heard. Years ago Mr. Ruskin himself, the prophet and apostle of the new sect, described the defection of its greatest pupil as "not a fall, but a catastrophe." Rossetti's sonnets are criticised, but not his paintings. "Are not you still a pre-Raphaelite?" asked an inquisitive person lately of the sonneteer. "I am not an 'ite' of any kind," was the answer; "I am an artist." John Everett Millais is among the most fortunate and fashionable painters of the day. Those who saw his wonderful "Somnambulist" in last season's exhibition of the London Royal Academy would have found in it little of the harsh and "crawling realism" which distinguished the "Beauty in Bricks Brotherhood," as somebody called the rebellious school of twenty years ago. A London comic paper lately published a capital likeness of Mr. Millais, handsome, respectable, tending to stoutness and baldness, and described the portrait as that of the converted pre-Raphaelite. The progress of things was exactly similar to that which goes on in the English political world so often. A fiery young Radical member of Parliament begins by denouncing the Government and the constitution. He wins first notoriety, and then, if he has any real stuff in him, reputation; and then he is invited to office, and he takes it and becomes respectable, wealthy, and fashionable; and his rebellion is all over, and the world goes on just as before. Such was, so far as individuals are concerned, the course of the pre-Raphaelite rebellion; undoubtedly the movement did some good; most rebellions do. It was a protest against the vague and feeble generalizations and the vapid classicism which were growing too common in art. Ruskin himself has happily described the generalized and conventional way of painting trees and shrubs which was growing to be common and tolerated, and which he says was no less absurd than if a painter were to depict some anomalous animal, and defend it as a generalization of pig and pony. Anything which teaches a careful and rigid study of nature must do good. The pre-Raphaelite school was excellent discipline for its young scholars. Probably even those of Millais's paintings which bear on the face of them least evident traces of that early school, might have been far inferior to what they are, were it not for the slow and severe study which the original principles of the movement demanded. The present interest which the secession has for me is less on its own account than because of the vigorous, ingenious, and eloquent pages which Ruskin poured forth in its vindication. He gave it meanings which it never had; found out truth and beauty in its most prosaic details such as its working scholars never meant to symbolize; he explained and expounded it as Johnson did the meaning of the word "slow" in the opening line of the "Traveller," and in fact well-nigh persuaded himself and the world that a new priesthood had arisen to teach the divinity of art. But even he could not write pre-Raphaelitism into popularity and vitality. The common instinct of human nature, which looks to art as the representative of beauty, pathos, humor, and passion, could not be talked into an acceptance of ignoble and ugly realisms. It may be an error to depict a Judean fisherman like a stately Greek philosopher; but error for error, it is far less gross and grievous than to paint the exquisite heroine of Keats's lovely poem as a lank and scraggy spinster, with high cheek bones like one of Walter Scott's fishwives, undressing herself in a green moonlight, and displaying a neck and shoulders worthy of Miss Miggs, and stays and petticoat that bring to mind Tilly Slowboy.
The pre-Raphaelite mania faded away, but Ruskin's vindication endures; just as the letters of Pascal are still read by every one, although nobody cares "two copper spangles" about the controversy which provoked them. Mr. Ruskin's mental energy did not long lie fallow. Turning the bull's-eye of his central theory upon other subjects, he dragged political economy up for judgment. Who can forget the whimsical sensation produced by the appearance in the "Cornhill Magazine" of the letters entitled "Unto this Last"? I need not say much about them. They were a series of fantastic sermons, sometimes eloquent and instructive, sometimes turgid and absurd, on the moral duty of man. They had literally nothing to do with the subject of political economy. The political economists were talking of one thing, and Mr. Ruskin was talking of another and a totally different thing. The value of an article is what it will bring in the market, say the economists. "For shame!" cries Mr. Ruskin; "is the value of her rudder to a ship at sea in a tempest only what it would be bought for at home in Wapping?" So on through the whole, the two disputants talking on quite different subjects. Mr. Ruskin might just as reasonably have interrupted a medical professor lecturing to his class on the effects and uses of castor oil, by telling him in eloquent verbiage that castor oil will not make men virtuous and nations great. Nobody ever said it would; but it is important to explain the properties of castor oil for all that. It would be a grand thing of course if, as Mr. Ruskin prayed, England would "cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom they first arose," and leave "the sands of the Indus and the adamant of Golconda" to "stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash from the turban of the slave." This would be ever so much finer than opening banks, making railways (which Mr. Ruskin specially detests), and dealing in stocks. But it has nothing to do, good or bad, with the practical exposition of the economic laws of banking and exchange. It is about as effective a refutation of the political economist's doctrines as a tract from the Peace Society denouncing all war would be to a lecture from Von Moltke on the practical science of campaigning. But Mr. Ruskin never saw this, and never was disconcerted. He turned to other missions with the firm conviction that he had finished off political economy, as a clever free-thinking London lady calmly announced a few years back to her friends that she had abolished Christianity. Then Mr. Ruskin condemned mines and factories, railways and engines. With all the same strenuous and ornate eloquence he passed sentence on London pantomimes and "cascades of girls," and the too liberal exposure of "lower limbs" by the young ladies composing those cascades. Nothing is too trivial for the omniscient philosopher, and nothing is too great. The moral government of a nation is decreed by the same voice and on the same principles as those which have prescribed the length of a lady's waist-ribbon and the shape of a door-scraper. The first Napoleon never claimed for himself the divine right of intermeddling with and arranging everything more complacently than does the mild and fragile philosopher of Denmark Hill. Be it observed that his absolute ignorance of a subject never deters Mr. Ruskin from pronouncing prompt judgment upon it. It may be some complicated question of foreign, say of American politics, on which men of good ability, who have mastered all the facts and studied the arguments on both sides, are slow to pronounce. Mr. Ruskin, boldly acknowledging that until this morning he never heard of the subject, settles it out of hand and delivers final judgment. Sometimes his restless impulses and his extravagant way of plunging at conclusions and conjecturing facts lead him into unpleasant predicaments. He delivered a manifesto some years ago upon the brutality of the lower orders of Englishmen, founded on certain extraordinary persecutions inflicted on his friend Thomas Carlyle. Behold Carlyle himself coming out with a letter in which he declares that all these stories of persecution were not only untrue, but were "curiously the reverse of truth." Of course every one knew that Ruskin believed them to be true; that he half heard something, conjectured something else, jumped at a conclusion, and as usual regarded himself as an inspired prophet, compelled by his mission to come forward and deliver judgment on a sinful people.
Mr. Ruskin's devotion to Carlyle has been unfortunate for him, as it has for so many others. For that which is reality in Carlyle is only echo and imitation in Ruskin, and the latter has power enough and a field wide enough of his own to render inexcusable the attempt to follow slavishly another man. Moreover, Carlyle's utterances, right or wrong, have meaning and practical application; but when Ruskin repeats them they become meaningless and inapplicable. Mr. Ruskin endeavoring to apply Carlyle's dogmas to the business of art and social life and politics often reminds one of the humorous Hindoo story of the Gooroo Simple and his followers, who went through life making the most outrageous blunders, because they would insist on the literal application of their traditional maxims of wisdom to every common incident of existence. When a self-conceited man ever consents to make another man his idol, even his very self-conceit only tends to render him more awkwardly and unconditionally devoted and servile. The amount of nonsense that Ruskin has talked and written, under the evident conviction that thus and not otherwise would Thomas Carlyle have dealt with the subject, is something almost inconceivable. I never heard of Ruskin taking up any political question without being on the wrong side of it. I am not merely speaking of what I personally consider the wrong side; I am alluding to questions which history and hard fact and the common voice and feeling of humanity have since decided. Against every movement to give political freedom to his countrymen, against every movement to do common justice to the negro race, against every effort to secure fair play for a democratic cause, Mr. Ruskin has peremptorily arrayed himself. "I am a Kingsman and no Mobsman," he declares; and this declaration seems in his mind to settle the question and to justify his vindication of every despotism of caste or sovereignty. To this has his doctrine of æsthetic moral law, to this has his worship of Carlyle, conducted him.
For myself, I doubt whether Mr. Ruskin has any great qualities but his eloquence, and his true, honest love of Nature. As a man to stand up before a society of which one part was fashionably languid and the other part only too busy and greedy, and preach to it of Nature's immortal beauty and of the true way to do her reverence, I think Ruskin had and has a place almost worthy the dignity of a prophet. I think, too, that he has the capacity to fill the place, to fulfil its every duty. Surely this ought to be enough for the work and for the praise of any man. But the womanish restlessness of Ruskin's temperament, combined with the extraordinary self-sufficiency which contributed so much to his success when he was master of a subject, sent him perpetually intruding into fields where he was unfit to labor, and enterprises which he had no capacity to conduct. No man has ever contradicted himself so often, so recklessly, so complacently, as Mr. Ruskin has done. It is absurd to call him a great critic even in art, for he seldom expresses any opinion one day without flatly contradicting it the next. He is a great writer, as Rousseau was—fresh, eloquent, audacious, writing out of the fulness of the present mood, and heedless how far the impulse of to-day may contravene that of yesterday; but as Rousseau was always faithful to his idea of Truth, so Ruskin is ever faithful to Nature. When all his errors and paradoxes and contradictions shall have been utterly forgotten, this his great praise will remain: No man since Wordsworth's brightest days ever did half so much to teach his countrymen, and those who speak his language, how to appreciate and honor that silent Nature which "never did betray the heart that loved her."
CHARLES READE.
A few days ago I came by chance upon an old number of an illustrated publication which made a rather brilliant start in London four or five years since, but died, I believe, not long after. It sprang up when there was a sudden rage in England for satirical portraits of eminent persons, and it really showed some skill and humor in this not very healthful or dignified department of art. This number of which I speak has a humorous cartoon called "Companions of the Bath," and representing a miscellaneous crowd of the celebrated men and women of the day enjoying a plunge in the waves at Havre, Dieppe, or some other French bathing-place. There are Gladstone and Disraeli; burly Alexandre Dumas and small, fragile Swinburne; Tennyson and Longfellow; Christine Nilsson and Adelina Patti, the two latter looking very pretty in their tunics and caleçons. Most of the likenesses are good, and the attitudes are often characteristic and droll. Mr. Spurgeon flounders and puffs wildly in the waves; Gladstone cleaves his way sternly and earnestly; Mario floats with easy grace. One group at present attracts very special attention. It represents a big, heavy, gray-headed man, ungainly of appearance, whom a smaller personage, bald and neat, is pushing off a plank into the water. The smaller man is Dion Boucicault; the larger is Mr. Charles Reade. This was the time when Reade and Boucicault were working together in "Foul Play." The insinuation of the artist evidently was that Boucicault, always ready for any plunge into the waves of sensationalism, had to give a push to his hesitating companion in order to impel him to the decisive "header."