One of those cardinal doctrines by which we may learn the bearings of a writer's system of truth is that of Ruskin's of the intimate connection between landscape art and humanity.
"Fragrant tissue of flowers, golden circlet of clouds, are only fair when they meet the fondness of human thoughts and glorify human visions of heaven.
"It is the leaning on this truth which more than any other has been the distinctive character of all my own past work. And in closing a series of art-studies, prolonged during so many years, it may be perhaps permitted me to point out this specialty,—the rather that it has been, of all their characters, the one most denied. I constantly see that the same thing takes place in the estimation formed by the modern public of the work of almost any true person, living or dead. It is not needful to state here the causes of such error; but the fact is indeed so, that precisely the distinctive root and leading force of any true man's work and way are the things denied him.
"And in these books of mine, their distinctive character, as essays on art, is their bringing everything to a root in human passion or human hope. Arising first not in any desire to explain the principles of art, but in the endeavor to defend an individual painter from injustice, they have been colored throughout, nay, continually altered in shape, and even warped and broken, by digressions respecting social questions, which had for me an interest tenfold greater than the work I had been forced into undertaking. Every principle of painting which I have stated is traced to some vital or spiritual fact; and in my works on architecture the preference accorded finally to one school over another is founded on a comparison of their influences on the life of the workman,—a question by all other writers on the subject of architecture wholly forgotten or despised.
"The essential connection of the power of landscape with human emotion is not less certain because in many impressive pictures the link is slight or local. That the connection should exist at a single point is all that we need…. That difference, and more, exists between the power of Nature through which humanity is seen, and her power in the desert. Desert,—whether of leaf or sand,—true desertness, is not in the want of leaves, but of life. Where humanity is not and was not, the best natural beauty is more than vain. It is even terrible; not as the dress cast aside from the body, but as an embroidered shroud hiding a skeleton."
The volume, as a whole, will be found less dogmatic, calmer, more convincing, and more directly applicable to artistic judgment, than any of the others. There is the same love of mysticism and undermeanings, but freighted with deeper and more central truths: a charming conclusion to a fourteen-years' diary of such study of Art and Nature, so severe, so unremitting, as never critic gave before.
Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb. By W.W. GOODWIN, Ph.D. Cambridge: Sever and Francis.
Grammarians had once a simple way of disposing of the subject on which Professor Goodwin has given us this elaborate treatise of three hundred pages.
In the Greek Grammar of the Messieurs de Port Royal, which Gibbon praises so highly in his charming autobiography, and which has passed through several editions in England within the present century, we are taught, that, "though the moods [in Greek] are not to be rejected entirely, yet their signification is sometimes so very arbitrary, that they are put for one another through all tenses." Lancelot himself seems to have had a glimmering of the essential incredibility of this statement; for, though he attempts to substantiate it by citing from Greek authors a number of passages in which the Greek idiom happens to differ from the Latin,—passages, however, which Mr. Goodwin would have been glad to use, had they fallen in his way, to illustrate the regular constructions of the language,—he feels it necessary to appeal to the authority of the learned Budæus, the greatest of the early Greek scholars. Strange as it seems that really accomplished Greek scholars should have charged Plato and Demosthenes, speaking the most perfect of tongues, with arbitrary interchanges of moods and tenses, yet the same views continued to be presented in grammatical works down to the close of the last century. The transition to the new school of grammarians was made in 1792, by the publication of a Greek Grammar by Philip Buttmann, which, in the greatly improved form which it afterwards received from his hands, is familiar to all Greek scholars. In our frequent boasts of the great strides that knowledge has taken in the present century, we commonly have in mind the physical sciences; but we doubt whether in any department of physical science the manuals in use seventy-five years ago are so utterly inferior to those of the present day as are, for instance, the remarks of Viger, and his commentators before Hermann, on the syntax of the Greek verb, to the philosophical treatment of the same points by Professor Goodwin.
This work is entitled, we think, to rank with the best grammars of the Greek language that have appeared in German or English, in all the points that constitute grammatical excellence; while its monographic character justified and required an exhaustive treatment of its particular topic, not to be found even in the huge grammars of Matthiæ and Kühner. Indeed, not the least of its merits is this, that, in addition to the excellent matter which is original with Professor Goodwin, it furnishes to the student, American or English,—for we hope to see its merits recognized on the other side of the Atlantic,—a digest, as it were, of all that is most valuable on the subject of the syntax of the Greek verb in the best German grammars, from Buttmann to Madvig, enhanced, too, in value by being recast and worked into a homogeneous system by an acute scholar and experienced teacher. One excellence of the book we would by no means pass over, an excellence which we are sure will be particularly appreciated by all who have used translations of German grammars,—the precision both of thought and expression by which it is characterized, which releases the student from the labor of constructing the meaning of a rule from the data of the appended examples. Not that Mr. Goodwin is chary of examples; on the contrary, one of the most attractive and not least profitable features of the book is the copiousness and freshness of the illustrative quotations from Greek authors. These are as welcome as the brightness of newly minted coin to the eye which, in consulting grammar after grammar, has been condemned to meet under corresponding rules always the same examples, till they begin to produce that effect upon the nerves which all have experienced at the mention of the deadly upas-tree, or the imminence of the dissolution of the Union.