3rts.

RUSKIN'S MODERN PAINTERS.*

THE interval between the appearance of the second and the third volumes of Modern Painters has extended almost to ten years. Meanwhile, Mr. Ruskin has written The Lamps of Architecture The Stones of Venice, the Edinburgh Lectures, &c. ; Turner has died ; Sremphaelitism been born ; and a still-gathering increase has taken place in the interest which Eng- land vouchsafes to art, evidenced in the rearing of two " Crystal Pa- laces," the progress of the movements for Gothic architecture and the education of the art-workman, the reconstitution of the National Gallery and Schools of Design, and many other signs of the times. On this tendency in the direction of art Ruskin himself has set his stamp in- delibly ; and, if the conditions which now greet his book are changed from what they were in its previous stages, there is no single individual to whom more of the change is due.

The central purpose of Modern Painters it will be remembered, is the upholding of the greatness of Turner ; an upholding which began in aggressive vindication, hut which can be completed in calm exposition— the vilifiers being cowed into some comparative degree of moderation, partly by the great man's death, partly by the impetus of the aggression. The first volume declared his truthfulness ; the second, by an inquiry into ideas of beauty and relation, and the contemplative and imaginative faculties which take cognizance of these, prepared the way for illus- trating how they are exemplified by Turner; the third is before us, and a fourth and fifth are to follow within the year. Thus will finish a work whose first volume, crying like a trumpet among sleepers when even the name of its author was unknown, made everybody ask "Who is the Oxford Graduate ?"

The present volume is still only preparatory. It does not begin the illustration of Turner's mastery of beauty and invention, but continues to load up to it. As the titlepage indicates, it treats " of many things" ; and treats them with somewhat less of systematic arrangement than in the previous volumes. Several abstract points of the inquiry commenced in the second part were left over; and these, with collateral points to which they again lead, are disposed of here. Of Turner himself there is much less in this volume than in the first, and, proportionately, perhaps hardly more than in the second. Its discursiveness makes it more diffi- cult to deal with the volume in generalities than is even commonly the case with Ruskin's books. Abundant as is every paragraph of his writing in thought and suggestion, these are here so packed and so various, and they come with so much authority in virtue of the mental power and in- tense study which the author has devoted to his subject, that the or- dinary "breadth" of review would necessarily leave out many matters of no less importance than such as might be dwelt upon. A few main points, however, claim to be brought out before we proceed to a closer analysis. Truth in art—in its directest sense—formed the exclusive theme of the first volume. But the image of Truth is not by any means dimmed when the author comes to speak of Beauty and Relation : on the contrary, her vital and all-pervading force is only the more clearly affirmed as lying at the root of every other excellence. He rejects so loose and slovenly a formula as that "Beauty is Truth" but he brings finish, imagination, and the ideals of art, to the test of Truth, and shows that the higher the embodiment of these qualities in art., the higher in every case is the cha- racter and amount of the truth represented. The entire work will consti- tute a passionate preaching of the dignity of Truth, such as had never before been made at its application 'to art, and certainly seldom in its application to anything. Allied to this is the definite assertion of the principle that greatness, whether in ert or in other fields of imagination and human productive- ness, is an inspiration—a faculty God-given, instinctive, and unteaeh- able. This we all know, if we would only lay it to heart ; but the teaching of the schools ignores it Many may be surprised to hear it said—but we believe it is neverthe- less the fact—that the quality, above all others, which renders Ruskin difficult of acteptance with the mass of readers and writers, and arrays them in hostility against him, is, not " erotehettiness," not intolerance, but conspicuous and judicial impartiality. His loves are strong, and his hates strong, for both are genuine ; and he will take nothing on trust. Hence he often speaks in the most trenchant terms of some man or work, according to the immediate purpose which he has in view ; but what there is to be said per contra may also be looked for confidently in its proper place. His sympathies include Angelico and Tinton; • Turner and Gainsborougb, Raphael and Mulready, the Parthenon and the Lom-

bardi° churches Wordsworth and Eugene Sue ; and each of these he can venerate and denounce or censure as the point of view changes. But hasty readers, themselves incapable of any such depth or latitude of sin-

cere opinion, will not see or remember this ; or, if they do, it is only to substitute the charge of inconsistency for that of intolerance. Now it is quite true—to take an extreme instance—that Mr. Ruskin on the whole almost worships Turner, and on the whole contemns Claude, yet that he has distinctly, on oceasion, rendered Claude the superiority over Turner ; but this is not inconsistency. Inconsistency would only arise if he praised either in one place for what he censures him for in another, or if

the asserted merit were incompatible with the admitted defect. The impartiality which takes count of both may be a stumblingblock to the

prejudiced or the shallow, but it is a virtue notwithstanding. "A man was born who could see both sides of a question," says Emerson of Plato, the so-called idealist; and the more he writes the more ground we see for saying the same of Ruskin, the so-called iconoclast and exclusive. On the other hand, there is one sense in which the author of Modern Painters may rightly be called " crotchetty " ; on account, however, not of narrowness or vagueness, but of acuteness. We mean, that he has the habit of seeing farther into a millstone, not only than another man, but even than the depth of the millstone itself. Enemy as he is to pe- dantic rules in matters of invention, he yet does not allow sufficiently for the casual. He discovers meanings in the smallest details of fine works, whether of art or literature, and founds inferences upon them, while all the while the reader often feels persuaded that the meanings exist only in Ruskin's subtilty, not in the work under discus-

• Modern Painters. Volume III. containing Part IT. Of Many Things. By John Buskin, M.A., Author of" The Stones of Venice," "The &rem Lamps 0/Archi-

tecture," , Published by Smith and Elder.

sion. Thus Turner, as the story goes, (falsely or truly,) was annoyed at being credited, in some instances, with profound purposes which he had never entertained; much of the reasoning in the present volume upon Greek and Mediceval feeling for landscape is based upon data too casual, as many will think, for any definite superstructure; and we remember an instance in one of his last lectures where Mr. Ruskin detected a spectre horse in what, to our eyes, was just a Gothic water-spout. This super- subtilty is compounded of conscientiousness of intellect, which refuses to believe that anything coming from a great man was done at random, and of strong personal individuality. It enhances the value of the books to those who like to study Ruskin as well as his subject, but it seriously interferes with their power of conviction to others. flowerer, the author is him- self aware that much of what he states is necessarily reasoned opinion only, and not demonstrable argument; and he cautions the reader to bear as much in mind.

We now proceed to give a hasty summary of the topics treated in the new volume of Modern Painters.

The first chapter is on "the received opinions touching the 'grand style.' " Reynolds's position that written poetry and the grand style deal with the invariable, plain narrative and the low style with nature as mo- dified by accident, is controverted; and poetry, whether in words or in form and colour, is defined as "the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions.' Chapter II. "Of Realization," suggest, though not withouttlemur, whether realization, were it only possible, would not be the highest of all art in proportion to the subjects with which it should deal. Chapter III. "Of the real nature of greatness of style," places this greatness—first, in sincere and wise choice of noble subject; second, in combining as much beauty as possible consistently with the truth of the subject ; third, in sincerity, or the inclusion of the largest possible quan- tity of truth in the most perfect possible harmony ; and fourth, in in- vention. The corruption of the first essential is the superseding of ex- pression by technical excellence' or vice versa ; the corruption of the second is the sacrifice of truth to beauty. The third leads to three co- rollaries,—that great art is generally distinct, generally large in masses and scale, and always delicate, only the delicacy is to be estimated ac- cording to the distance of the work from the eye. This last corollary is vigorously insisted upon by Mr. Ruskin; and, if we concur in his broad And philosophic but certainly not current acceptation of the word "de- licacy," we shall agree with him. The False Ideal is examined as reli- gious and profane; the True Ideal as purist, naturalist, and grotesque. The False is traced mainly to an " abuse of the imagination, in allowing it to find its whole delight in the impossible and untrue"; ; and both the pas- sionate or Angelican, and the philosophic or Raphaelesque religious ideals, are found deficient, now in completeness, now in sincerity. Indeed, Turner and the English Pfreraphaelites are said to he laying the foundation of the only true sacred art that has ever existed. The profane ideal of modem times is itself created, rather than affected, by the pursuit of the false ideal ; and, not being believed in, "could of course have no help from the virtues nor claim on the energies of men." The Purist Ideal meets stern but tender justice, great as is the author's personal predilection for its highest embodiment, as in Angelico. He arrives at "the general principle that the Purist Ideal, though in some measure true, in so far as it springs from the true longings of an earnest mind, is yet necessarily in many things deficient or blameable, and always an indication of some degree of weakness in the mind pursuing it" The Naturalist Ideal, concern- ing itself "simply with things as they are," is proclaimed the highest; but here the subject becomes so large that we cannot stop even to name the principal features of it. Truth of Grotesque, as contrasted with falsehood, is illustrated by a mediseval and a classic griffin; the essence of the argument being that the first of these fabulous beings is imagined at once concrete and vital by the artist, the second compounded and manufactured. The chapter on Finish reaches the conclusion that all real finish is additional truth, and therefore right. "The Use of Pictures" is a difficult subject, and forms a chapter full of qualification, and which readers will be apt to qualify further for themselves : it takes up the question where the chapter on Realization left it; and the upshot of it, as far as this can bc condensed into a single axiom is that the use of pictures is to present truths as seen in their due subordination by a great mind, and, by the inevitable imperfections of art, to leave freer scope than nature does for the spectator's imagination. Here occurs some- thing like a division of the matter treated in this volume.

The succeeding division is an inquiry into Landscape in its various phases, terminating where Turner begins. The novelty of modern land- scape—.its entire unlikeness to anything before produced by men, and the introduction which it thus indicates of some new element of thought —is declared with decision; and a distinction is affirmed in the present deficiency of positive faith in God, the indifference to personal beauty, the decay of the warlike spirit, and interest, before unknown, in the abstract nature of things. The next chapter considers, under the name of "the pathetic fallacy," the tendency, so marked in modern litera- ture, of colouring external nature according to the varying emotion of the writer. (Mr. RuAkin, it should be premised, uses poetical literature and art, on system, as mutually illustrative.) This question is handled with masterly rigour: the conclusion being, that the pathetic fallacy, when sincere, is a mark of poetic temperament, but that the order of mind which rises superior to it, and, even under the influence of passion, will still look on things as they are, is yet higher,—the only limitation being in cases of such an overwhelming nature that unmoved self- possession would amount to insensibility. Then follow chapters on Classical Landscape, chiefly traced through Homer, and in which Nature is found to be constantly regarded from the point of view of human adaptability, without what we call the feeling for the picturesque; on Mediteval Landscape, traced in early art and in Dante, with its love of fields, flowers, and orderliness, and its antipathy to and consequent ignorance of rocks and clouds; and on Modern Landscape, traced in Walter Scott, in whom Mr. Ruskin finds a quite peculiar sadness in his regard of Nature and sympathy with her aspects as independent of himself. This chapter bristles especially with matter for controversy, extending to the very selection of Scott as a representative of the modern view of Nature, rather, for instance, than Wordsworth or Tennyson. The "moral of land- scape," after much candid analysis, and acute but we think far from conclusive comparison of authors in whom the love of external nature has been intense and subordinate, is summed up thus- " I think we cannot doubt of our main conclusion, that, though the 0- sence of the love of nature is not an assured condemnation,Ra presence is

an invariable sign of goodness of heart and justness of moral perception, though by no means of mond practice ; that in proportion to the degree in which it el felt, will probably be the degree in which all nobleness and beauty of character will also be felt; that when it is originally absent from any mind, that mind is in many other respects hard, worldly, and degraded; that where, having been originally present, it is repressed by art or education, that repression appears to have been detrimental to the person suffering it; and that wherever the feeling exists, it acts for good on the character to which it belongs, though, as it may often belong to characters weak in other respects, it may carelessly be mistaken for a source of evil in them."

The final chapter is on the Teachers, that is the pictorial models, so far as he had models, of Turner: but it closes with a few considerations on the present war,—extraneous certainly, and winding up in a strain so high-wrought as not to be free from the appearance of artificiality. We may add, that in some other passages, such as those on the True and False Griffins, and on the growth of leaves, Mr. Ruskin falls into the op- posite fault of style —a good-humoured familiarity with his reader which

trenches on the wilfully babyish.

Such, though but barely glanced at after all, are the contents of this third volume. Collateral but marked points are the still-increasing energy with which Pfreraphaelitism is upheld, and the reprobation of German art and metaphysics. In other respects, we do not feel that we can add much to what has been said above and aforetime. To insist upon Ruskin's eloquence and literary merit at the present day, were no more needed than to solicit attention to Carlyle's vigour or Macaulay's copiousness. The volume is one of the fullest, ablest, and most arduous in its range of inquiry, which Mr. Ruskin has written. It is also, we think, one of the most impregnable in its broad principles' wherever a more positive test than individual opinion can be brought to bear upon the matter. It differs from the previous portions of the work by being illustrated with a variety of plates and figures, in almost all of which the author has had a hand. In some there is a thinness of handling, partly doubtless belonging to the design, partly perhaps to the engraver: the delicacy of drawing, and on occasion the vigour of effect, are, as in former instances, remarkable.