ART. V. JOHN RUSKIN.

EVERY race and age, if not every nation, has its poets and prophets. Whether they are sent of God directly, or are the product of the highest forces and best tendencies of a people, matters not. In either case, if their mission is not one of blessing, it is because the people will not receive their message.

Like the potencies of nature which are ever struggling for higher and clearer expression, and find it in flower, fruitage, odor, form, beauty, so genius and goodness seem to be like products of the mental and spiritual potencies of a people, modified, of course, by environment, and differentiated by the relative persistency of the different forces struggling within them for mastery and expression.

The name of John Ruskin has been before the literary public for more than forty years, and commands as much interest to-day as ever. He is the expression of the broadest and highest culture of the Anglo-Saxon race, and of the English tongue, along the lines of sociology, art, and polite literature. Known best as the literary exponent of art, he is by no means a specialist, but is equally at home in sociology and economics, and occupies no mean place in scientific and theological studies. A tireless student, highly gifted by nature, having had every advantage of scholastic training in youth and manhood, inheriting an ample fortune, he has had the gifts, taste, time, means, and opportunities, to pursue lines of investigation and study open to but the favored few; that he has faithfully improved them, his various and voluminous works-comprising almost half a hundred volumes-attest.

His influence in the departments of study to which he has devoted his life is, perhaps, unequaled by any other writer in the English language. Not that his theories are all accepted by artists, or political economists, or Churchmen; the æsthetic, economic, or religious world; but, like the subtle influence of the sunlight when poured upon the earth, or the fragrance of a flower when breathed into the air, mankind are influenced by him and his teachings, while they declare his sunrays to be full of dust, and his perfume to be mingled with offensive odors. Part of this influence is due to the originality

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of his thought, part to his candid spirit and evident familiarity with the subjects he treats, and part to the charming clearness and beauty of his literary style. No writer ever clothed his thoughts in finer garb. In clear, forceful, and graceful expression he is without a peer in English prose. Strength and beauty are the pillars which support this temple, as they did that of old. A temple in whose walls every stone is a gem, flashing prismatic hues; all as fair, and pure, and many-colored as the mo. saics adorning St. Mark's in Venice, which he so graphically and worshipfully describes.

True, at times he permits his rhetoric to dazzle himself, and his imagination to run riot; but these are mere sportive sallies, the exuberance of conceptions which fill his mind, and overflow from it like falling sheets and torrents of water from an overflowing fountain, or like the rainbow-spangled spray of a cataract as it dashes itself over a precipice. But usually his style moves on like a majestic river, crystal clear, winding amid beautiful and continually changing scenery.

The Beauties of Ruskin can never be crowded into one volume. Attempt to gather all his flowers and you must gather every thing upon the sward, and instead of having a few bouquets you will have winrows of perfumed loveliness. The whole meadow is bespangled and variegated with color, and fragrant with every perfume. It is like a California road-side in the spring-time.

The effect of this style upon the reader is marvelous. It fires his imagination and arouses and stimulates every power of his soul. One has said: "Naturally I have no poetry in me; figures of speech fly from me; but when I read Ruskin he so excites me that they throng upon me, and beautiful, too, as troops of angels."

His finest writing is not found in his earlier works. Modern Painters contains hundreds of fine passages; so does the Seven Lamps of Architecture, Stones of Venice, and many of his smaller works; but his most vigorous, compact, forceful, and expressive writing is found in his later works, in many of his lectures, and especially in Fors Clavigera; or, Letters to Workingmen. These abound in gems of thought and expression. Satire, invective, pathos, poetry, beauty, and force are everywhere present. The nearer he approaches the insanity which

overtook him a few years ago, the brighter and more glowing is the splendor of his style. The star of his genius blazes brightest as it hangs in poise between sanity and insanity. Here the fire of his ardor, the holiness of his anger, and the most vivid of his thoughts are found in their intensest forms and most forceful utterance.

Ruskin's style is the farthest possible removed from any thing like rhapsody or "windy wordiness." It is not in the least like that of Krummacher, or Christmas Evans, or even Jean Paul Richter. There is no brilliancy in it like the brilliancy of the opium-eating De Quincey, or even like that of S. T. Coleridge, as illustrated in Christabel and the Ancient Mariner. It is simple, healthful, direct; removed alike from verbosity and an over-condensation. Smoother than Macaulay, simple as Addison, he always uses the exact language that expresses his meaning-enough words and no more. He says he never uses a word which he has not weighed thoroughly. He knows its root, its history, its development, and precisely what it expresses. This makes his meaning always clear. There is nothing esoteric, nothing secret, hidden away behind the frankness of its bright and glowing face, as it shines forth upon his page. There is nothing there Janus-faced, nothing diplomatic or capable of two interpretations. All is as clear, frank, and honest as himself.

It may be asked, What is the practical worth of any thing Mr. Ruskin has written? We have all long known of his literary merit; but is there any other merit? Is he not an impractical visionary and is any thing he has written valuable, either in art or economics?

He has been, and is by many, considered untrustworthy as authority in these, and in other things. Even his literary attainments and work have been most unmercifully criticised. His descriptions of nature are said to be overdrawn; his theory of art foundationless; his dissertations upon political economy the ravings of a semi-madınan; and his biblical exegesis and theological teaching, heterodox.

It is not the purpose of this paper to defend either Mr. Ruskin or his theories, but to point them out, show what they are, and how he has treated them; leaving them to defend themselves and the reader to draw his own inferences and form his own conclusions concerning them. It is worthy of remark, how

ever, that the beauty of the world, nay, of all things, is in the see-er. To the dull, unimaginative mind, all description that rises above its own level will seem overdrawn. A poet can only be interpreted by a poet. Mr. Ruskin sees beautiful things where others do not, and he sees them because he has larger and keener eyes than others. He describes what he sees, and without doubt the description seems to himself tame indeed.

There is a single stand-point from which Mr. Ruskin must be judged. He is a teacher of ethics. A moral philosopher. This is the root out of which all his opinions and theories grow. He looks at every thing from the moral stand-point; a standpoint the central object of which is the most elevated, æsthetically cultivated, morally perfect, in every way developed, disciplined, refined, and purified human being. Man, and his development in nobility and true manhood, is always his ideal. Art is nothing only as it pertains to and helps in this; only as it expresses man's aspirations and conceptions along the lines. of his moral and spiritual nature, and his struggles after a higher perfectness. It is highest and best when it expresses the purity and elevation of our nature, as nature about us expresses the elevation and purity of the Godhead nature. Therefore, that art which is nearest to nature, which is most like nature-as far as it is possible for art to be like natureand which represents that which is good in man, is the best art; because it is just these qualities that represent God. This must, therefore, be the only criterion of truth and beauty, and hence the only standard of true art; that which appeals to the higher and nobler within us, excites and develops it, and not that which appeals to the base and vile, and develops it. True art is the expression of truth, of love, of faith, of aspirations after the godlike and the divine. That art is base, no matter what it shows of the dexterous hand, or brilliant execution, which represents and ministers to pride, to vanity, to the sensual and fallen part of our nature. So it is, in his theories upon sociology and economics, Man is the central object, and not material wealth; man developed and cultivated, in his moral and spiritual nature as well as his physical, intellectual, and æsthetical. He is, therefore, opposed to every thing in our civilization that dwarfs man, physically, mentally, or morally;

all that makes him a mere drudge, a beast of burden, or bru talizes him in the least; all that does not elevate and refine. And, as he believes our modern mechanical industries and forms of commercialism do debase man, he is opposed to them. The same thing is true concerning his views of modern science. He judges it from the same stand-point and applies to it the same tests. He is as merciless in his criticisms of Tyndall, Spencer, Huxley, and that school, as he is of the art of the Renaissance, or of Doré, the modern stage, or the whole school of political economists, from Ricardo to John Stuart Mill. In all things he must be judged of from this same standpoint. Any other judgment does him injustice. This explains all his peculiarities, and gives him his true place in art, in literature, and in sociology.

Mr. Ruskin's criterion of the value of a work of art is not what the multitude think of it, but that which the refined and cultivated few think. The standards of art are the opinions of such persons, tested by time, and accepted by other persons of a kindred class, and only received by the many upon this testimony. The people who admire the gloss of a garment, or some tricks of the brush, or loudness of color in a painting, and pass by some work that reveals the most noble conception or most perfect truth because it is devoid of these, are not judges of art, and their opinions are worthless.

We must remember always, that his idea of a refined and cultivated person embraces moral and spiritual culture as well as intellectual and æsthetical. He says:

Every kind of knowledge may be sought from ignoble motives and for ignoble ends, and in those who so possess it it is ignoble knowledge, while the very same knowledge is, in another mind, an attainment of the highest dignity, and conveying the greatest blessing.*

All true art, in his estimation, has a religious basis, and is impossible without religious faith. All other is an advertisement, more or less, of human vanity, and an exhibition of immoral quality. The true master never, in his work, purposely advertises himself or his skill.

In the reading of a great poem, in the hearing of a noble oration, it is the subject of the writer and not his skill, his passion

* Preface to Second Edition Modern Painters.