The name of John Ruskin recalls phases of intellectual activity, so diverse, even so heterogeneous, that many of those who pronounce it with a common admiration may be said to be thinking of different men. To express any judgment as to the relative merits of these men-to decide between the claims of the art critic and the social reformer on the gratitude of their kind -may be rather to communicate information about oneself than to contribute towards a judgment of one in whom, through all these varied aspects of his personality, we must reverence lofty ideals, untiring industry, and disinterested devotion to his fellow men. The opinion, here avowed, that the earliest phase of his genius was its brightest, may be partly due to the fact that the glow of its emergence blends with that of a far-off youth. When Ruskin speaks of Nature and Art, he seems to me inspired. When he turns to finance, to politics, to the social arrangements and legislative enactments of mankind, I can recognize neither sober judgment nor profound conviction. Every one must regret such an incapacity. It is a natural instinct which desires to find in the recorded results of every life an exhibition of increasingly fertile activity; it is perplexing and disappointing

to have to recognize, without discerning any infidelity to a lofty aim, that the later date points to a lower stage. But the fact, we cannot doubt, is common. Much earnest and patient labor seems fruitless, much rich outpouring is unpreluded by any such labor; the race is not always to the swift, the battle to the strong. Whether the benefactors of mankind have given their harvest early or late is a question full of interest to the biographer, by no means devoid of interest for the historian; its answer teaches much that concerns our knowledge of the course of evolution and the relation of epoch to epoch. But when we come to consider the value of the work, and the rank of the workers, it tells us little or nothing. If the work of the eleventh hour may be worth that of the whole day, so may that of the first hour. Let it not be thought, therefore, that an attempt to estimate the genius and character of a great man removed from us in the fulness of years must aim at minimizing his fame because it is focussed on the first portion of his intellectual activity.

The world on which the genius of John Ruskin first flashed was very different from the world of to-day. When the work of the Oxford Graduate first roused vehement disapproval and pas

sionate admiration no single name was before the public which has any special interest for our own time. We had never heard of George Eliot or George Meredith, of Herbert Spencer or Matthew Arnold; we knew Charles Darwin as the writer of an interesting book of travels, and Alfred Tennyson as the singer of a few graceful lyrics. The name of Comte was so unfamiliar, that I remember a young man fresh from college, not at all stupid, informing his cousins that it was the French way of writing and pronouncing Kant. We knew nothing of Evolution beyond what we gleaned from the Vestiges of Creation, and any question as to the origin of species would have been associated by us with the first chapters of Genesis. The popular art of the day was pretty, sentimental, conventional; popular fiction was decorous, heresy was timid, orthodoxy was secure. Science was rather a respectable comrade of literature than the omnipotent dogmatist and legislator we know to-day. It seems, in looking back, as if nothing was the same then as now, except that which is the same always.

This describes the world in which Ruskin wrote and published "Modern Painters." But the middle of the century inaugurated a vast change. The stir of '48 was in the air when first we learned to associate the name of John Ruskin with the heavy green volumeso characteristic in its disregard of the reader's convenience-which was rousing such glowing enthusiasm and provoking such fierce indignation that the shape of clouds and the proportion of the branch to the tree became subjects almost as dangerous as the Gorham controversy. The year of revolution seems a natural time for the emergence of his genius into fame. The vague, vivid hopes of that era blend well, at

1 I need hardly inform any reader that the barbar. ous and confusing antithesis of "classes and masses" has no bearing here. The masses are

least in retrospect, with the new ideas he infused into the current of thought, although he had not himself any sympathy with the coming change. The most active foe of one good thing is generally another good thing, and Ruskin's sympathies were diverted from the uprising of the nations, perhaps, by some refraction from that sympathy with classes' which always opposes sympathy with nations; and which was, no doubt, a strong tendency with him before it became a dominant impulse. At any rate, the reproach sometimes addressed to literary genius, of a want of sympathy with national life, was not wholly undeserved by him. But it was true of him only as it may have seemed true of Jeremiah. In his genius there was a strong revolutionary element, and it is difficult, in looking back, not to melt it in with the other revolutionary manifestations of the time. From the first it was as a prophet he addressed the world; it was the ring of hortatory earnestness in denunciation or appeal which gave so vivid an originality to dissertations on matters previously associated with mere dilettantism. The tone of the pulpit, enforcing the teaching of the artist, was something wonderfully entrancing to a generation knowing that kind of earnestness only in connection with religion; and his teaching gathered up much of the attention which was then withdrawing itself from the ebbing tide of the High Church revival. He influenced many who hated or despised the High Church revival; some voices sound in my ear, as I write, which seem to protest against a judgment either obliterating from recollection a whole-hearted and characteristic admiration, or else associating it with a discipleship the unseen speakers never approached near enough to repudiate. As

classes. I am opposing the stratification of the civilized world to the organic unity of a nation.

I listen to them, and follow them till their vanishing out of sight, it seems hard to retain my conviction that the life of Ruskin stood in any relation to a great Church movement. And yet it does seem to me that the enthusiasm with which we welcomed the first wonderful volume would have been something different if it had come before the "Tracts for the Times," and all that they suggest and imply. How much they suggest and imply which their authors would never have accepted as standing towards them in any relation whatever! How many a great man would draw back in astonishment if he were shown his spiritual heir! I believe that John Ruskin was, in some sense, the heir of John Newman. The successor would have recognized the legacy as little as the testator; still, it remains that we, looking back upon both across the chasm of revolutionary years, may recognize a common element in their teaching, a common spirit in their learners, a certain analogy in the result. But such a suggestion needs a brief excursion beyond its immediate limits.

The spiritual life of the past was bound up with the conception of authority-that is, of visible authority, of guides discernible to mortal eyes in the flesh, or present in the writings which were a solid guarantee for their decision. The men who reverenced the Church and the men who reverenced the Bible have set the keynote of what religion we have known in the first two milleniums of Christianity. The dominion of an infallible church was split up 500 years ago by those who asserted the dominion of an infallible book; our own time has recognized the analogy between the two claims, and, setting both on one level, has prepared the way for a conception including all that is true in both, or else for a blank denial of any important subject-matter represented by either. The worship

pers of the book and the worshippers of the church have sometimes united their forces against their common foes, but the union is transient, the antagonism has been perennial. Seventy years ago the claims of the church, after a long slumber, began to revive. It was, to many minds, like a breath of spring. The first stirrings of a new belief that an institution visible among men was not merely a commemoration of what had passed away and a promise of what was to come, but an actual fountain of power and life-this came as a wonderful revival of much besides personal religion. It is still commemorated in beoutiful buildings, in some true poetry, in much interesting fiction; it marks an era in art and literature, and encircles the memories of that time like an atmosphere, coloring what it did not mould. I have seen a copy of the Christian Year, which bears sympathetic pencillings from William Wilberforce; in a contemporary copy of the Lyra Apostolica I find initials recalling a much wider divergence from High Church doctrine even than his. It is almost as surprising to trace the hostility as the sympathy which it aroused. The vehement protests against "Newmanism" contained in the letters of Dr. Arnold, for instance, strike one, at the present hour, as betraying a strange ignorance of issues so close at hand when he wrote-issues beside which his divergence from John Newman seems a small thing. It was a movement swaying more or less the spirits of men who opposed, repudiated, or even ignored it. But the ebb was rapid, and the strength of the current was soon forgotten.

When Ruskin first became famous the current was already slackening. Its Romeward tendencies were clearly recognized; its greatest teacher had openly joined that church, and many were following him. The Broad Church, though not so named till later, was beginning to be felt as a stirring of vague hereti

cal tendencies, attractive to what then seemed audacious thought. There was a kind of blank in the world which Ruskin was eminently adapted to fill. He was, we may say, Catholic and Protestant at once. He has told us in his deeply-interesting fragments of autobiography that his mother made him learn the Bible by heart, and has actually expressed his gratitude to her for the discipline. His Scotch blood somehow benefited by a process which might, one would think, have resulted in making him loathe the deepest poetry in the world's literature. The Bible has passed into his heart, his imagination, not less effectively than into his memory; so far he is a Scotchman and a Protestant. But he could not be a Protestant in an exclusive sense. We cannot, indeed, say that his writings are untouched by this narrow Protestantism; his criticism of Raphael's well-known cartoon of the giving of the keys to Peter seems to me even a grotesque instance of it. To blame a great church painter for translating into pictorial record the symbolism of the command "Feed my sheep," instead of reproducing with careful accuracy the details of a chapter of St. John he may never have read -this we must confess to be a strange aberration of genius into something like stupidity. It is so far characteristic that it expresses Ruskin's hatred of the Renaissance; but it leads the reader who seeks to understand his real bent of sympathy astray. The spirit of the Renaissance was equally hostile to Catholicism and Protestantism. Ruskin, by birth and breeding, a child of stern Scotch Protestantism, was, by the necessities of his art-life, an exponent of that which is enduring in the influence of the Catholic Church. For what has given enduring power to Rome, in spite of her association in the past with all that is foul and all that is cruel, is her hold on the vast, deep, lofty revelation that what we see and what we

handle is not only an object for sight and touch, but a language unfolding to us the reality of that which eye hath not seen and shall not see. This truth, known in ecclesiastical dialect as the Real Presence, however contemptuously ignored or passionately denied in that particular form, is one that will never lose its hold upon the hearts of men; the church which bears witness to it survives crimes and follies, and manifests in every age its possession of something for which the world consciously or unconsciously never ceases to yearn. "To them that are without, these things are done in parables," is, in some form, the message of almost every great spiritual teacher; it has never been set forth more eloquently than by Ruskin. Sometimes his love of symbolism passes into extravagance. One of the later volumes of "Modern Painters" contains a passage, for instance, on the symbolism of the color scarlet, against which a pencil that was hardly ever permitted such license left a mark of explanation expressing, I will venture to say, the judgment of every sane reader, and though we rarely come upon anything in him that is merely extravagant, we often find it very difficult to go along with his pictorial interpretations. The student who takes with him to the contemplation of any great picture some description from the pen of the great critic is often bewildered in the endeavor to apply it to what he sees before his eyes. Every one must have felt this, I think, in the case which he chooses as the typical example of imagination-Tintoret's great picture at Venice of the Crucifixion. As we make out the figure of the ass behind the Cross, feeding on withered palm trees, in which Ruskin has taught us to see a mournful judgment on the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, we cannot but ask ourselves-How much did the critic find, and how much did he bring? It is pathetic to remem

ber that he was himself at times conscious of the doubt. "I wonder how much Shakespeare really meant of all that," he once said to a friend, after listening to a lecture on Shakespeare. "I suppose, at any rate, he meant more than we can follow, and not less," said his friend-Frederick Maurice. "Well, that is what I used to think of Turner," he replied, sadly, "and now I don't know." I give the reminiscence as illustrating the fluctuating revelations of the prophet, his temptations to doubt the revelation, not as an index to the bent of his true thought. Inspiration and doubt are as substance and shadow; we might almost venture to say that a man must know neither or both. He who has never doubted the revelation has never, in the true sense of the word, believed it. But the message was in the revelation, not the doubt.

Those haunting voices, which come back as I write, seem again to bring their protest against any association of the lesson of Ruskin with mystic truth. "What we cared for in his teaching," I hear them say, "was not hidden meaning or mystery; it was an escape from all that. He taught us to see things. He opened our eyes to discern what was before us. The waves had danced and broken on the shore. The clouds had woven gold and silver draperies over our head, and we had looked at them, but when Ruskin anointed our eyes with his euphrasy and rue, we discovered that we had never previously seen them. To see the beautiful world is enough; an excursion into that region would be only embarrassed by this heavy baggage of symbolism." The protest embodies the recollections of hundreds, perhaps thousands-my own among them. How vividly across the mist of years I recall first reading his description of a wave. The waves, as I read, broke round me on rocks and sand I had known from childhood, yet my feeling was one of perplexity.

"What can this and that mean-overhanging lips, lacework, etc.-I have often seen waves and never all that!" It was like reading it in a foreign tongue. Then I looked at the waves, and discovered that never before had I seen one. Perhaps even more have felt this in looking at the clouds; for no spot of earth shuts us off from testing the truth of his description of them. Ruskin did for every reader what spectacles do for a short-sighted person. Where we saw a vague blur he gave definite form and distinct color. He did not necessarily pass on a message from the breaking wave and the melting cloud, but he could not have passed on the outward image if to him it had not been much more than an image. It would not have been sight to his readers if to him it had not been thought.

Perhaps I may make my meaning clearer by comparing him with a great poet. Wordsworth saw in Nature the same kind of reflection and interpretation of the moral life of man as Ruskin saw in Art. He brought Wordsworth's ideas afresh to the minds of men, dyed with fresh splendor and purified from their clogging accretions. Eloquence is not subject to the invasions of the prosaic in the same way that verse is, and is also more welcome to an average intelligence. To translate poetry into eloquence is, for the time at all events, to give its meaning a wider audience. One who reads the lines on Peel Castle, on revisiting the Wye, the sonnet beginning "Hail, Twilight," and one or two others, and then turns to many passages in "Modern Painters," may test the effect of such a translation. Both writers bring home to the mind of the reader that he who sees only outward things sees these incompletely. If Ruskin were remembered only as one who had taught us to look at the outward face of Nature, we should have incurred a deep debt of gratitude to him,