inclinations would probably be rather conservative than otherwise. He is
drawn toward Gladstone and the Liberal party less by distinct political
affinity, of which there is but little, than by his hope and belief that
through Gladstone something will be done for that Ireland which to this
Oxford scholar is still the "island of the saints." The Catholic members
of Parliament, whether English or Irish, consult Archbishop Manning
constantly upon all questions connected with education or religion. His
parlor in York Place--not far from where Mme. Tussaud's wax-work
exhibition attracts the country visitor--is the frequent scene of
conferences which have their influence upon the action of the House of
Commons. He is a devoted upholder of the doctrine of total abstinence
from intoxicating drinks; and he is the only Englishman of real
influence and ability, except Francis Newman, who is in favor of
prohibitory legislation. He is the medium of communication between Rome
and England; the living link of connection between the English Catholic
peer and the Irish Catholic bricklayer. The position which he occupies
is at all events quite distinctive. There is nobody else in England who
could set up the faintest claim to any such place. It would be
superfluous to remark that I do not expect the readers of "The Galaxy"
to have any sympathy with the opinions, theological or political, of
such a man. But the man himself is worthy of profound interest, of
study, and even of admiration. He is the spirit, the soul, the ideal of
mediaeval faith embodied in the form of a living English scholar and
gentleman. He represents and illustrates a movement the most remarkable,
possibly the most portentous, which has disturbed England and the
English Church since the time of Wyckliffe. No one can have any real
knowledge of the influences at work in English life to-day, no one can
understand the history of the past twenty years, or even pretend to
conjecture as to the possibilities of the future, who has not paid some
attention to the movement which has Dr. Manning for one of its most
distinguished leaders, and to the position and character of Manning
himself.
JOHN RUSKIN.
Any one who has visited the National Gallery in London must have seen,
and seeing must have studied, the contrasted paintings placed side by
side of Turner and of Claude. They will attract attention if only
because the two Turners are thus placed apart from the rooms used as a
Turner Gallery, and containing the great collection of the master's
works. The pictures of which I am now speaking are hung in a room
principally occupied by the paintings of Murillo. As you enter you are
at once attracted by four large pictures which hang on either side of
the door opposite. On the right are Turner's "Dido Building Carthage,"
and Claude's "Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba." On the left are a
"Landscape with the Sun Rising" by Turner, and "The Marriage of Isaac
and Rebecca" by Claude. Nobody could fail to observe that the pictures
are thus arranged for some distinct purpose. They are in fact placed
side by side for the sake of comparison and contrast. They are all
eminently characteristic; they have the peculiar faults and the peculiar
merits of the artists. In the Claudes we have even one of those yellow
trunks which are the abomination of the critic I am about to speak of,
and one might almost suppose that the Queen of Sheba was embarking for
Saratoga. I do not propose to criticise the pictures; but in them you
have, to the full, Turner and Claude.
Now in the contrast between these pictures may be found, symbolically at
least, the origin and motive of John Ruskin's career. He sprang into
literary life simply as a vindicator of the fame and genius of Turner.
But as he went on with his task he found, or at least he convinced
himself, that the vindication of the great painter was essentially a
vindication of all true art. Still further proceeding with his
self-imposed task, he persuaded himself that the cause of true art was
identical with the cause of truth, and that truth, from Ruskin's point
of view, enclosed in the same rules and principles all the morals, all
the politics, all the science, industry, and daily business of life.
Therefore from an art-critic he became a moralist, a political
economist, a philosopher, a statesman, a preacher--anything, everything
that human intelligence can impel a man to be. All that he has written
since his first appeal to the public has been inspired by this
conviction--that an appreciation of the truth in art reveals to him who
has it the truth in everything. This belief has been the source of Mr.
Ruskin's greatest successes and of his most complete and ludicrous
failures. It has made him the admiration of the world one week, and the
object of its placid pity or broad laughter the next. A being who could
be Joan of Arc to-day and Voltaire's Pucelle to-morrow would hardly
exhibit a stronger psychical paradox than the eccentric genius of Mr.
Ruskin commonly displays. But in order to understand him, or to do him
common justice--in order not to regard him as a mere erratic utterer of
eloquent contradictions, poured out on the impulse of each moment's new
freak of fancy--we must always bear in mind this fundamental faith of
the man. Extravagant as this or that doctrine may be, outrageous as
to-day's contradiction of yesterday's assertion may be, yet the whole
career is consistent with its essential principles and belief.
Ruskin was singularly fitted by fortune to live for a purpose; to
consecrate his life to the cause of art and of what he considered truth.
As everybody knows, he was born to wealth so considerable as to allow
him to indulge all his tastes and whims, and to write without any regard
for money profit. I hardly know of any other author of eminence who in
our time has worked with so complete an independence of publisher,
public, or paymaster. I do not suppose Ruskin ever wrote one line for
money. Some of his works must have brought him in a good return of mere
pounds and shillings; but they would have been written just the same if
they had never paid for printing; and indeed the author is always
spending money on some benevolent crotchet. He was born in London, and
he himself attributes much of his early love for nature to the fact that
he was "accustomed for two or three years to no other prospect than that
of the brick walls over the way," and that he had "no brothers nor
sisters nor companions." I question whether anybody not acquainted with
London can understand how completely one can be shut in from the pure
face of free nature in that vast city. In New York one can hardly walk
far in any direction without catching glimpses of the water and the
shores of New Jersey or Long Island. But in some of the most respectable
middle-class regions of London, you might drudge away or dream away your
life and never have one sight of open nature unless you made a regular
expedition to find her. Ruskin speaks somewhere of the strange and
exquisite delight which the cockney feels when he treads on grass; and
every biographical sketch of him recalls that passage in his writings
which tells us of the first thing he could remember as an event in his
life--his being taken by his nurse to the brow of one of the crags
overlooking Derwentwater, and the "intense joy, mingled with awe, that I
had in looking through the hollows in the mossy roots over the crag into
the dark lake, and which has associated itself more or less with all
twining roots of trees ever since." Ruskin travelled much, and at a very
early age, through Europe. He became familiar with most of the beautiful
show-places of the European Continent when a boy, and I believe he never
extended the sphere of his travels. About his early life there is little
to be said. He completed his education at Oxford, and, more successful
than Arthur Pendennis, he went in for a prize poem and won the prize. He
visited the Continent, more especially Switzerland and Italy, again and
again. He married a Scottish lady, and the marriage was not a happy one.
I don't propose to go into any of the scandal and talk which the events
created; but I may say that the marriage was dissolved without any moral
blame resting on or even imputed to either of the parties, and that the
lady afterwards became the wife of Mr. Millais. Since then Mr. Ruskin
has led a secluded rather than a lonely life. His constitution is
feeble; he has as little robustness of _physique_ as can well be
conceived, and no kind of excitement is suitable for him. Only the other
day he sank into a condition of such exhaustion that for a while it was
believed impossible he could recover. At one time he used to appear in
public rather often; and was ready to deliver lectures on the ethics of
art wherever he thought his teaching could benefit the ignorant or the
poor. He was especially ready to address assemblages of workingmen, the
pupils of charitable institutions for the teaching of drawing. I cannot
remember his ever having taken part in any fashionable pageant or
demonstration of any kind. Of late he has ceased to show himself at any
manner of public meeting, and he addresses his favorite workingmen
through the medium of an irregular little publication, a sort of
periodical or tract which he calls "Fors Clavigera." Of this publication
"I send a copy," he announces, "to each of the principal journals and
periodicals, to be noticed or not at their pleasure; otherwise, I shall
use no advertisements." The author also informs us that "the tracts will
be sold for sevenpence each, without abatement on quantity." I doubt
whether many sales have taken place, or whether the reference to
purchase in quantity was at all necessary, or whether indeed the author
cared one way or the other. In one of these printed letters he says:
"The scientific men are busy as ants, examining the sun and the moon and
the seven stars; and can tell me all about them, I believe, by this
time, and how they move and what they are made of. And I do not care,
for my part, two copper spangles how they move nor what they are made
of. I can't move them any other way than they go, nor make them of
anything else better than they are made." This might sound wonderfully
sharp and practical, if, a few pages on, Mr. Ruskin did not broach his
proposition for the founding of a little model colony of labor in
England, where boys and girls alike are to be taught agriculture, vocal
music, Latin, and the history of five cities--Athens, Rome, Venice,
Florence, and London. This scheme was broached last August, and it is
rather soon yet even to ask whether any steps have been taken to put it
into execution; but Mr. Ruskin has already given five thousand dollars
to begin with, and will probably give a good deal more before he
acknowledges the inevitable failure. Ruskin lives in one of the most
beautiful of London suburbs, on Denmark Hill, at the south side of the
river, near Dulwich and the exquisite Sydenham slopes where the Crystal
Palace stands. Here he indulges his love of pictures and statues, and of
rest--when he is not in the mood for unrest--and nourishes philanthropic
schemes of eccentric kinds, and is altogether about the nearest approach
to an independent, self-sufficing philosopher our modern days have
known. Of his life as a private citizen this much is about all that it
concerns us to hear.
Twenty-eight years have passed away since Mr. Ruskin leaped into the
critical arena, with a spring as bold and startling as that of Edward
Kean on the Kemble-haunted stage. The little volume, so modest in its
appearance, so self-sufficient in its tone, which the author defiantly
flung down like a gage of battle before the world, was entitled "Modern
Painters: their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the
Ancient Masters. By a Graduate of Oxford." I was a boy of thirteen,
living in a small provincial town, when this book made its first
appearance, but it seems to me that the echo of the sensation it created
still rings in my ears. It was a challenge to all established beliefs
and prejudices; and the challenge was delivered in the tones of one who
felt confident that he could make good his words against any and all
opponents. If there was one thing that more than another seemed to have
been fixed and rooted in the English mind, it was that Claude and one or
two other of the old masters possessed the secret of landscape painting.
When, therefore, this bold young dogmatist involved in one common
denunciation "Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Ruysdael, Paul
Potter, Cavaletto, and the various Van-Somethings and Koek-Somethings,
more especially and malignantly those who have libelled the sea," it was
no wonder that affronted authority raised its indignant voice and
thundered at him. Affronted authority, however, gained little by its
thunder. The young Oxford graduate possessed, along with genius and
profound conviction, an imperturbable and magnificent self-conceit,
against which the surges of angry criticism dashed themselves in vain.
Mr. Ruskin, when putting on his armor, had boasted himself as one who
takes it off; but in his case there proved to be little rashness in the
premature fortification. For assuredly that book overrode and bore down
its critics. I need not follow it through its various editions, its
successive volumes, its amplifications, wherein at last the original
design, the vindication of Turner, swelled into an enunciation and
illustration of the true principles of landscape art. Nor do I mean to
say that the book carried all its points. Far from it. Claude still
lives, and Salvator Rosa has his admirers, among whom most of us are
very glad to enroll ourselves; and Ruskin himself has since that time
pointed out many serious defects in Turner, and has unsaid a great deal
of what he then proclaimed. But if the Oxford graduate had been wrong in
every illustration of his principal doctrine, I should still hold that
the doctrine itself was true and of inestimable value, and that the book
was a triumph. For, I think, it proclaimed and firmly established the
true point of view from which we must judge of the art of painting in
all its departments. In plain words, Ruskin taught the English public
that they must look at nature with their own eyes, and judge of art by
the help of nature. Up to the publication of that book England, at
least, had been falling into the way of regarding art as a sort of
polite school to which it was our duty to endeavor to make nature
conform. Conventionality and apathy had sunk apparently into the very
souls of men and women. Hardly one in ten thousand ever really saw a
landscape, a wave, a ray of the sun as it is. Nobody used his own eyes.
Every one was content to think that he saw what the painters told him he
saw. Ruskin himself tells us somewhere about a test question which used
to be put to young landscape painters by one who was supposed to be a
master of the craft: "Where do you put your brown tree?" The question
illustrates the whole theory and school of conventionality.
Conventionality had decreed first that there are brown trees, and next
that there cannot be a respectable landscape without a brown tree. Long
after the teaching of Ruskin had well-nigh revolutionized opinion in
England, I stood once with a lover of art of the old-fashioned school,
looking on one of the most beautiful and famous scenes in England. The
tender autumn season, the melancholy woods in the background, the little
lake, the half-ruined abbey, did not even need the halo of poetic and
romantic association which hung around them in order to render the scene
a very temptation, one might have thought, to the true artist. I
suggested something of the kind. My companion shook his head almost
contemptuously. "You could never make a picture of that," he said. I
pressed him to tell me why so picturesque a scene could not be
represented somehow in a picture. He did not care evidently to argue
with ignorance, and he even endeavored to concede something to my
untutored whim. "Perhaps," he began with hesitation, "if one were to put
a large dark tree in there to the left, one might make something of it.
But no" (he had done his best and could not humor me any further), "it
is out of the question; there couldn't be a picture made out of _that_."
How could I illustrate more clearly the kind of thing which Ruskin came
to put down and did put down in England?
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 Caesar. 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
Caesar. 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
aesthetic 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 aesthetic
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.