CHAPTER VI

WRITERS ON ART

IT is fortunate that there can be no doubt possible as to the greatest writer on art in the Victorian age, that position belonging absolutely, from the point of view of literature, to John Ruskin (born 1819), who has not only pervaded the world with his theories, and led rightly or wrongly (and sometimes both together) the generations of his time, but added to it such a wealth of beautiful writing, expressed in the noblest language and full of the purest sentiment, as few writers of the time have equalled. This is not to say that he has always been a safe or even just guide. He has, like other men, a world of prejudices, dislikes, and aversions, which he does not, like most other men, attempt to subdue in public, but which with an amiable egotism and high yet not unjustifiable sense of his own worthiness to form an opinion, and of the unusual opportunities he has had to

enable him to do so, he sets forth without disguise, not only praising what he loves, but denouncing what he hates with the force of infallibility. He is of the Boanerges order, an apostle of love, and full of the most amiable. qualities, yet always ready to call down fire from heaven to consume those who follow another standard, or go by different rules from his. It is perhaps scarcely too much to say that the overwhelming reputation which Turner held for a time, was greatly owing to the interpretation and adoration of his chief disciple and worshipper. Turner's real fame endures, and so far as a posterity so near his own age can foresee, will endure to the end of time-if any pictures last so long; but the fury of enthusiasm which for a time encircled his name, as if no such painter had ever been, was no doubt driven into the British mind partly by the efforts of that Oxford Graduate, who, attired in the glittering panoply of literary genius and with all its weapons at his command, burst into the world of art, at once as a revolutionary and iconoclast, and the setter-up of new shrines. It very rarely happens that a devotee and fanatic in one art should be so great an ornament and influence in another. Mr. Ruskin has done much to alter the British standards in respect to all the productions of the pictorial and architectural arts; but he is himself the pride of

English literature, one of the greatest writers of

this or any age.

Mr. Ruskin has himself given us, in Praeterita, his remarkable but unfortunately incomplete history of himself, a most attractive and minute picture of his own early training, and the manner in which his childish mind was educated in the love of everything beautiful, and at the same time in many old-fashioned bourgeois tastes and prejudices, and many cranks and twists of fancy peculiar to itself. An only child with an indulgent father and mother, who brought him up with Spartan simplicity, almost severity, though this seems a paradox,-every incident of his early life and every influence that affected it, remain as interesting and delightful to him at sixty as at twenty. In respect to education the world is divided into two classes, those who regard their own training with happy complacence, and desire that all who succeed them should be brought up just so; and those who see the defects of their education so strongly that they almost reverse it in the case of their children. Mr. Ruskin is of the first class; and it is perhaps because of the gentle strain of self-satisfaction and self-belief which runs through all his work, and the conviction that the principles which produced such a man as himself are the best that could be followed, that his autobiographical chapters are so delightful.

In

his later years this beautiful conviction has become so hot and strong as to lead to the formation of much dogma and other unpleasant accompaniments of conscious infallibility: but it is otherwise so justified by the result that it is difficult not to look upon it with something of his own unmingled and exquisite pleasure in the training which made so remarkable a man.

It is inevitable with every Reformer that he should feel himself sent as to a world lying in wickedness from which every good principle and power of perception has gone. And this was the attitude taken emphatically by Mr. Ruskin in the beginning of his career. There was no doubt much warrant for it, for the English school of painting, which has always hard ado to keep itself above the level of mediocrity in art, was then at a low ebb, full of artificial brilliancy and conventional methods. The fact that English art is very much confined by our conditions of existence, and that pictures adapted for the domestic interior, for the decoration of rooms in which the ordinary living of the nineteenth century is carried on, are the only ones in much demand, cannot fail to affect, more or less, the mind of the artist; and a young revolutionary coming, storming into the exhibitions which were full of scenes from Shakespeare, in which the costume was much more important than the meaning—and historical subjects of the

same kind, and scenes from the Vicar of Wakefield, and illustrations of country schools, and impossible fêtes and weddings, and Sir Edwin Landseer very naturally ran amuck among these productions, and lifted up his hand to heaven and swore that better things should be. Along with this determination to overturn the established and complacent school with which life and nature had so little to do, or which trimmed them down to so prim a standard, there arose in the young man's mind a revelation and a new light. Turner stood out before him in eccentric and irrestrainable glow of colour, rainbows and mists which were defiant of all rules, and scenes which gave sometimes the most absolutely truthful imaginative representation of nature, sometimes the ideal picturesque of the classic ages bathed in that glow of aerial light which never was on sea or shore—but seldom or never anything petty or vulgar. Mr. Ruskin at once placed himself in front of this great painter as interpreter, worshipper, advocate and champion, allowing no equal, and fiercely tilting at everything modern or ancient which put itself in competition with his hero. The curious fervour of Turner's posthumous duel with Claude so affected his knight that Mr. Ruskin would sometimes almost foam at the mouth in his assault upon the Frenchman (all unconscious of the rivalry thus forced upon him so long after his time), and pour