Selections from the Works of John Ruskin

But none knew better than Ruskin that a style so stiff with ornament was likely to produce all manner of faults. In overloading his sentences with jewelry he frequently obscures the sense; his beauties often degenerate into mere prettiness; his sweetness cloys. His free indulgence of the emotions, often at the expense of the intellect, His beauty leads to a riotous extravagance of superlative. of style But, above all, his richness distracts attention tracts from from matter to manner. In the case of an author the thought. so profoundly in earnest, this could not but be unfortunate; nothing enraged him more than to have people look upon the beauties of his style rather than ponder the substance of his book. In a passage of complacent self-scourging he

says:

often dis

"For I have had what, in many respects, I boldly call the misfortune, to set my words sometimes prettily together; not without a foolish vanity in the poor knack that I had of doing so, until I was heavily punished for this pride by finding that many people thought of the words only, and cared nothing for their meaning. Happily, therefore, the power of using such language if indeed it ever were mine is passing away from me; and whatever I am now able to say at all I find myself forced to say with great plainness."

But Ruskin's decision to speak with "great plainness" by no means made the people of England attend to what he said rather than the way he said it. He could be, and in his later work he usually was, strong and clear; but the old picturesqueness and exuberance of passion were with him still. The public discovered that it enjoyed Ruskin's denunciations of machinery much as it had enjoyed his descriptions of mountains, and, without obviously mending its ways, called loudly for more. Lecture-rooms were crowded and editions exhausted by the ladies and gentlemen of England, whose nerves were pleasantly thrilled with a gentle surprise on being told that they had despised literature, art, science, nature, and compassion, and that what they thought upon any subject was "a matter of no serious importance"; that they could not be said to have any thoughts 1 The Mystery of Life.

His pictur

esque extravagance of style.

at all—indeed, no right to think. The fiercer his anathemas, the greater the applause; the louder he shouted, the better he pleased. Let him split the ears of the groundlings, let him out-Herod Herod, the judicious might grieve, but all would be excitedly attentive. Their Jeremiah seemed at times like to become a jester, there was

a suggestion of the ludicrous in the sudden passage from 'birds to Greek coins, to mills, to Walter Scott, to millionaire malefactors, a suggestion of acrobatic tumbling and somersault; but he always got a hearing. In lecturing to the students of a military academy he had the pleasing audacity to begin:

"Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that many of you came unwillingly to-night, and many of you in merely contemptuous curiosity, to hear what a writer on painting could possibly say, or would venture to say, respecting your great art of war ";"

after which stinging challenge, one has no doubt, any feeling of offense was swallowed up in admiration of the speaker's physical courage.

There can be little doubt that this later manner in which Ruskin allowed his Puritan instincts to defeat his æstheticism, and indulged to an alarming degree his gift of vituperation, was profoundly influenced by his "master," Carlyle, who had long since passed into his later and raucous manner. Carlyle's delight in the disciple's diatribes probably encouraged the younger man in a vehemence of invective to which his love of dogmatic assertion already rendered him

Influence of Carlyle

upon Ruskin.

too prone. At his best, Ruskin, like Carlyle, reminds us of a major prophet; at his worst he shrieks and beats the air. His high indignations lead him into all manner of absurdity and selfcontradiction. An amusing instance of this may be given from Sesame and Lilies. In the first lecture, which, it will be recalled, was given in aid of a library fund, we find 3 the remark, "We are filthy and foolish enough to thumb one another's books out of circulating libraries." His friends

1 Sesame and Lilies, "Kings' Treasuries," §§ 25, 31.
2 The Crown of Wild Olive, "War."

8 46 'Kings' Treasuries," § 32.

and his enemies, the clergy (who "teach a false gospel for hire") and the scientists, the merchants and the universities, Darwin and Dante, all had their share in the indignant lecturer's indiscriminate abuse. And yet in all the tropical luxuriance of his inconsistency, one can never doubt the man's sincerity. He never wrote for effect. He The unity may dazzle us, but his fire is never pyrotech- of Ruskin's nical; it always springs from the deep volcanic style. heart of him. His was a fervor too easily stirred and often ill-directed, but its wild brilliance cannot long be mistaken for the sky-rocket's; it flares madly in all directions, now beautifying, now appalling, the night, the fine ardor of the painter passing into the fierce invective of the prophet. But in the end it is seen that Ruskin's style, like his subject-matter, is a unity, an emanation from a divine enthusiasm making for "whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are of good report."

SELECTIONS FROM MODERN PAINTERS

THE five volumes of Modern Painters appeared at various intervals between 1843 and 1860, from the time Ruskin was twenty-four until he was forty. The first volume was published in May, 1843; the second, in April, 1846; the third, January 15, 1856; the fourth, April 14, 1856; the last, in June, 1860. As his knowledge of his subject broadened and deepened, we find the later volumes differing greatly in viewpoint and style from the earlier; but, as. stated in the preface to the last volume, " in the main aim and principle of the book there is no variation, from its first syllable to its last." Ruskin himself maintained that the most important influence upon his thought in preparation for his work in Modern Painters was not from his "love of art, but of mountains and seas"; and all the power of judgment he had obtained in art, he ascribed to his "steady habit of always looking for the subject principally, and for the art only as the means of expressing it." The first volume was published as the work of "a graduate of Oxford," Ruskin "fearing that I might not obtain fair hearing if the reader knew my youth." The author's proud father did not. allow the secret to be kept long. The title Ruskin originally chose for the volume was Turner and the Ancients. To this Smith, Elder & Co., his publishers, objected, and the substitution of Modern Painters was their suggestion. The following is the title-page of the first volume in the original edition:

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