sion;" because he has set down all his thoughts and feelings in their natural order, without exaggeration or extenuation of their form and intensity, many of his critics have chosen to represent him as a loose and reckless thinker, borne along by sudden gusts of sentiment, and void of any stable unity of thought or clear order of development. Now the utter groundlessness of such criticism is demonstrable by any one who takes the trouble to read his representative books in the order of their publication.

§ 4. Such a study will disclose, even in his earliest writings, certain prime and fundamental laws of thought and feeling which enable us to see all his later work in its true light as a multifarious and harmonious application of these same principles. This true, deep consistency is not impaired by change of view leading to new lights upon important subjects, or by the inherent difficulties of getting lucid arrangement in the expression of ideas. This latter difficulty Mr. Ruskin always felt to be responsible for much misunderstanding. "It is strange that I hardly ever get anything stated without some grave mistake, however true in my main discourse." 1

The intelligent and minute love of Nature which showed itself so early in Mr. Ruskin's life must be taken as the starting-point in the just appreciation of his work. In time and in intensity it took precedence of his interest in art. "The beginning of all my own right art-work in life depended, not on my love of art, but of mountains and sea."2 His childish pursuits, the collection of stones, which began his geological and

1 Letter quoted, Collingwood, ii. 138. 2 Eagle's Nest, p. 45.

metallurgical studies, the minute devotion to wild flowers, the study of river-beds, cloud-forms, the shape of hills, were not merely his early passion, but his chief intellectual training. At the same time, in his literary education it was the same detailed attention to the forces and forms of words, the units in the natural history of literature, which was laying the foundation for the "absolute accuracy of diction and precision of accent in prose," 1 which he attributes to his mother's teaching, and which are the chief sources of his literary power. In later life, as we have seen, the intellectual capacity to which he laid especial claim was analysis, and this capacity was grounded in the "patience in looking and precision in feeling" which marked the youthful lover of Nature. It was no mere accident, but a just instinct which led young Ruskin to attach to his earliest publication of importance the nom de plume κarà pûow (according to Nature).

It was inevitable that a close student of Nature, gifted with power of analysis, who turned his attention to any of the orthodoxies of English art half a century ago, should take up an attitude of radical reform. By natural disposition an upholder of established order, and a man of peace, Mr. Ruskin was yet driven by the conditions of his age and country into as many "heresies" as he had interests. Though not till later did he discover the deeper nature of the malady which made this inevitable, he could not fail to find the evil symptoms in each separate art of human life.

The "violent instinct for architecture" 2 which first drove him, while still an Oxford undergraduate, into 2 Ibid., i. 206.

1 Præterita, i. 208.

the field of battle,1 is significant alike for its title, and the scathing criticism it contains of the thraldom of architecture to narrowly conceived principles of utility. This early treatment of "The Poetry of Architecture; or the Architecture of the Nations of Europe considered in its Association with National Scenery and National Character," is chiefly noteworthy as containing the first germs of that splendid exposition of the true human uses of architecture in "The Seven Lamps," and as indicating his early sense of the principle that honest adaptation of material to the true needs of life is the basis of rightness and of beauty in buildings. The first germ of his special thought, that "realism," or study of the facts of life, and "idealism," or the use of the imagination to impose forms of beauty which shall appeal to taste, are not contradictory but complementary processes, is traceable in embryo, even in this boyish work. The full relation, however, between architecture and national character which "The Seven Lamps" was to disclose and illustrate is yet hardly traceable.

§ 5. To the first of Mr. Ruskin's two great masters, J. W. Turner and Thomas Carlyle, allusion has already been made. Making all due allowance for the enthusiasm of hero-worship, it may fairly be said that these two men were chief instruments in determining Mr. Ruskin's career. Turner made him an art prophet, Carlyle, a social reformer. Mr. Collingwood, in his

1 Earlier boyish essays, published in the "Magazine of Natural History" (March, 1834), and elsewhere, as well as an unpublished early draft of the leading ideas of "Modern Painters" contained in a reply to a criticism on Turner in Blackwood's Magazine, show the same early spirit of defiant scrutiny of established opinions.

admirable work, "The Life and Work of John Ruskin," traces the focusing of these rays of art-truth in a swift process of conviction, almost of conversion, in the year 1842, when his eyes were opened to the true mission of higher art as the interpreter of Nature in her deeper attributes and motives by the capacity of human sincerity. It was the perception of the distinctive qualities of Turner's landscapes which drove this conviction home, and Mr. Collingwood tells us how young Ruskin renounced henceforth his poetic aspirations, his capacities of art production, and his hopes to be a man of science, taking on him the mission "to tell the world that Art, no less than the other spheres of life, had its heroes; that the mainspring of their energy was Sincerity, and the burden of their utterance, Truth."1

This carries us to the first great art crusade. 2 John Ruskin was only twenty-three years old when he wrote the first volume of his "Modern Painters; their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters proved by Examples of the True, the Beautiful, and the Intellectual, from the Works of Modern Artists, especially from those of J. M. W. Turner, Esq., R.A.”

With the effect of this bombshell upon the world of painting we are not here concerned; nor need we discuss the extraordinary brilliancy of literary style, and the display of art learning it contains. What does con

1 Life and Work, vol. i., p. 103.

2 Though "Modern Painters" is rightly taken as the first full teaching of Mr. Ruskin's art-criticism, the character of that teaching amply justifies the claim which the author, in reviewing his life's work from the wider human standpoint, assigns it. "Modern Painters' taught the claim of all lower nature on the hearts of man." (Fors, Let. lxxviii.)

cern us is the clear exposition of root principles in artcriticism, which were afterwards to inspire his social teaching. In this first volume of "Modern Painters," published in 1843, we find stated, in language of uncompromising vigour, the three main canons which Mr. Ruskin later carried from art in its narrower connotation to the art of life. All art must be based upon patient, thorough, detailed knowledge of the facts of its subject-matter in Nature. This is the groundwork of "realism," the lack of which forms one of the two chief heads of his indictment against most of the great "masters" of the post-Raphaelite schools in Italy and in England. In enforcing this canon against reputations so great as Claude and Poussin, Mr. Ruskin exposes the deadly sin of conventionalism. The object of art is not to imitate, nor to deceive the senses, but to tell the truth. But is art to tell all truths, to give a literal transcript of all individual phenomena of the outer world? No; such realism is not art. On the contrary, art is concerned with the rendering of ideals. Nature is the servant of this idealism by furnishing ideas of truth and beauty. "Ideas of truth are the foundation, and ideas of imitation the destruction of all art." These "ideas of truth" are the essential characters of any object where all that is accidental or merely individual is brushed off from the type. We need not pause to consider how far Locke or how far Plato was responsible for this doctrine of ideas, but it is important to discover that these ideas, which are strictly Utopian (for, like Plato's, "they have no existence upon the earth, but are found, if anywhere, in

1

1 Modern Painters, vol. i., p. 29.