BOOKS.

ART AND MORALITY.* [SECOND NOTICE.]

La a former article we pointed out some of the eccentricities of criticism into which Mr. Ruskin has been betrayed by his contempt for that precision of thought which moves with leaden foot. We shall now look at the ethical claims which Mr. Ruskin makes for Art. The task is made the more easy by the lucidity and brevity of his own statement :— " All right human song is the finished expression, by ark of the joy or grief of noble persons, for right causes. And accurately, in propor- tion to the rightness of the cause, and purity of the emotion, is the possi- bility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost money. And with absolute precision, from highest to lowest, the fineness of the possible art is an index of the moral purity and majesty of the emotion it expresses. You may test it practically at any instant. Question with yourselves respecting any feeling that has taken strong possession of your mind. Could this be sung by a master, and sung nobly, with a true melody and art ?' Then it is a right feel- ing. Could it not be sung at all, or only sung ludicrously? It is a base one. And that is so in all the arts ; so that with mathematical precision, snbjeot to no error or exception, the art of a nation, so far as it exists, is an exponent of its ethical state."

Last week, when unfolding De Maistre's doctrine of Papal Infallibility, we showed how the fallacy of his own reasoning was vividly revealed by the very brightness of his own rhetoric ; and Mr. Ruskin, whose mastery over language is more potent even than that of De Maistre, does the like good service to the &lima of his reasoning by the flood of verbal light which flows from his pen. The passage which we have quoted is as vicious in point of logic as it is admirable in point of lucidity. It is a congeries of fallacies. But, being the fallacies of genius, they throw more light on the ethical side of art than the sound reasoning of less gifted men. Negatively, the passage is so full of instruction and of high guidance that it tells, with a clearer note than a volume of dull commentary, what art does for morality, what morality does for art, and what index the art of a people gives to the compass and the quality of its moral tone.

• itraures on Art, deltotrat kfire,the University of Oxford in Hilary Term, liPib By John Ruskin, M.A. Orford: Clarendon Press. 1870. In a certain sense, Art is unquestionably the utterance by sound, by form, or by word, of more or less noble emotions; and, other things being equal,the nobility of the art might be exactly measured by the nobility of the emotions to which it gives voice. Thus the art of Greece would have worn an additional nobleness of mien, if, while the morality of Athens had been more exalted, the artistic conditions which nourished the genius of Phidias and Praxiteles had been left untouched. But it would be equally true and equally meaningless to say, that Mr. Gladstone would have done a greater work of statesmanship for England, if, to to all his power of brain and his love of work, nature had added the capacity of toiling for twenty-three hours a day, and the cer- tainty of living to the age of a hundred and twenty. Nature does not mould such prodigies in these unpatriarchal and unheroic days. Nature is so grudging, that she forces the man who would be a great administrator to cast aside the hope of being also a great athlete. And, just as a Gladstone would unfit himself for the task of con- ducting a Land Bill through Committee of the whole House by attempting to rival a Captain Barclay, of Ury, in the feat of walking a thousand miles in a thousand successive hours, so the art of Greece would have withered, or never have burst into flower, if the Greeks had sought to rival the the austere morality of the Hebrews. In some degree, the art of Athens was noble be- cause her morality was low. Athenian life was a sunny, tin- anxious, careless, Pagan life ; unguided by any high code of duties, unvexed by the dread of a future which should demand the discipline of self-denial ; without a thought, or even a com- prehension, of that purity to which the Hebrew legislators pointed with unfailing finger, and which formed the central man- date in the ethics of Israel. Greek life was a life of the exchange, the academy, the circus, the bath. It was a breezy, open-air life, which guarded the body from disease and the mind from morbidity ; which habituated the intelligence to delight in the subtlety of the Socratic dialectics, and which hourly placed before the sculptor consummate models of human beauty. Undisturbed by the fierce promptings of religious zeal, the mind naturally turned with sunny complacency to the worship of that beauty which was written everywhere, on sky, on sea, on hill-side, and the forms of men and women. No conditions could have been better for the growth of the art which expresses itself by form. Even the positive immorality of Athenian society was of such a nature as to quicken the perception of statuesque beauty. And thus, partly because Athens was unmoral, and partly because she was immoral, she raised the greatest school of statuary that the world has ever seen, or ever can see. The last distinctive quality for which a censor would have looked in the chief home of art, is precisely that nobility of moral sentiment to which Mr. Ruskin makes art an index. If Greece had fallen under the sway of Moses, her political, her social, and moral life would have been strung up to a new intensity ; unimagined vistas of duty would have been opened before her thinkers and legislators ; her literature would have exchanged much of its sunny cheerfulness for some of the gloom that lies like a pall on the page of Isaiah and of Ezekiel ; she would have been a land of hermits as well as of dialecticians, of fanaticism as well as of song ; an unaccustomed burden of weari- ness and misery would have fallen on her soul, and with the new discipline of sorrow would have come a new nobility of life. But the change would have ruffled the serenity of her asthetic nature, and, we repeat, have ruined her art. Had the Greeks been better men, their art would have been worse. Their art owes much of its perfection to the fact that their moral nature was partly stunted and partly diseased.

Mr. Ruskin may, indeed, reply that it wears the lineaments of mathetic nobility only in so far as it follows the lines of nobility in morals ; that it does not draw its beauty from grossness ; and that in the degree to which it is gross it is also bad. But the truth remains, that the artistic perception and artistic skill of Greece were nourished by the very lowness of her ethical code, by her lack of high aims, by her freedom from all aspirations after moral good, by her inability even to conceive a Hebrew tone of purity, by the fact that she lived without God and died without hope. And, moreover, it is misleading to say that "accurately in proportion to the rightness of the cause, and purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the fine art." It is misleading to say that "a maiden may sing of her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost money." Art is nourished less by purity of emotion than by intensity. The emotion of a maiden who sings of her lost love may not be pure or noble ; it may be the very reverse ; but if it be intense it is a fit subject for song. The emotion of a miser who mourns over his lost money may, on the other hand, be brig- fiten• ed. with flashei of purity and igibility if, as all misers

more Or less do, he look beyond his mere gold to the power, position, fame, love, happiness which it can win for himself; and to the like array of good which it can win for others. Thus Ills emotion becomes intense, linked with many human interests, many passions, many sources of weal and woe. It becomes a subject for Art. Nay, so earthly is even the artistic nature, that its full power of song, or form, or colour is often drawn forth only by themes which are tainted by earthly

grossness. Often genius can string its creations only on the thread of what is more or less sensual, and even impure. It was

so with Boccaccio and Chaucer, in some measure with Titian, in great measure with Rtibens, and in a melancholy degree with Byron and Heine. On a plane of morality which is essentially ignoble those men often sang or painted with a power to which we cannot deny the attribute of fine or noble. And it is not true that if they had been better men they would have been better artists. It is of no avail to reply, as Mr. Ruskin does, that " all good has its origin in good, never in evil." The marvellous beauty of Heine's prose and verse comes, of course, from what was good in the man's nature,—from his tenderness, his sympathy with suffer- ing, his passionate love for the people, his hatred of the despotism exercised by priest or king, his righteous contempt for sacerdotal claims to exercise dominion over the souls of men. But such was the taint of impurity in Heine's nature, that he seemed driven by an irresistible impulse to make the artistic works of his hands half foul and half pure; he seemed to catch artistic fire at the impulse of guilty passion ; he seemed to be shorn of half his power when living in an atmosphere of purity; and if Heine's moral sense had been more keen, the splendour of his wit and song would have been less bright. EvenMr. Ruskin admits that the greatest painters have not been men of saintliest life. The most beautiful characters in the history of art are, not the men of grandest faculty, not the Buonarottis and the Rubenses, but the Fra Angelicos. And the work of the gentle

Dominican shows how beauty of nature and height of aim may

enfeeble rather than strengthen the artistic arm. Such men feel that beauty is a poor thing compared with goodness, and art a mere bagatelle in comparison with right action ; and hence they strive, at whatever risk, to make their pencil teach. Fra Angelico's pictures are painted litanies. They bear the saintly token of the oratory ; they seem to have been painted at the impulse of prayer, and to the accompaniment of heavenly song. And, so exquisite was the genius of the Florentine friar, that the faces of his saints will, as separate studies, win the homage of devotees and students throughout all time for their depth and parity of visual expression. Nevertheless, the artistic power of Fra Angelico's arm was crippled by its didactic aim. He sacrificed the proportions of artistic beauty to the nobler ends of his Church. Not, indeed, until the spirit of religious zeal had been transmuted into the spirit of Paganism by the revival of secular learning, the uprise of physical science, and the study of the Greek antiques did the art of Italy become really great. The art of Titian and Raphael pictures Christian story with a Pagan disregard of literal truth and a Pagan worship of beauty. Just asFra Angelico sacrificed his art to his creed, so Da Vinci and Titian sacrificed all religious or moral aims to perfection of beauty ; they worked at the dictate of as Pagan a spirit as that which guided Phidias or Praxiteles ; and, un- fettered by moral or dogmatic shackles, they painted with such grandeur and breadth and truth as by comparision to reduce the work of Fra Angelico to an insignificance and barbarism for which we cannot account even by the inferiority of his faculty and the priority of his coming.

Mr. Ruskin's error culminates in the assertion that "the Art of a nation, so far as it exists, is an exponent of its ethical state." Had he studied morals with a fraction of the care which he hail bestowed on art, he would have hazarded no such theory.

The ethical state of a nation is denoted by the degree of conformity between its written or unwritten code of

duties and its acts. The literature and the religion of a people may present a high standard of duty, and yet its spiritual teachers may be vile, its political leaders corrupt, its

family life impure, its daily history a vivid token of its disregard

for the sacredness of property and life. Such a nation can be re- deemed from the stigma of immorality by no purity in its formal teaching. On the other band, the moral code of a people may, like

that of the Hebrews, be narrow and sanguinary in comparison with that of modern days; and yet, like the Hebrews, the nation itself may present so large a measure of fulfilment, so small a breach between

the mandate of the lawgiver and the obedience of the people, that in a limited sense the nation may be accounted moral. The morality of a country must be measured, in the main, by the rightness of its acts ; but in the sphere of morals all that oven the

purest art can reveal is the power to cherish right emotions or right ideas of duty. If the songs and pictures of a nation be in- stinct with a spirit of purity and piety, we are justified in con- cluding that the nation itself sees the rectitigle of pure and pious deeds ; but we should hazard a signally false conclusion did we infer, that the goodness or nobility of its written or spoken senti- ments offered a true index of its ethical state. Moral beauty flourishes in poetry, rhetoric, or painting long after it has vanished from life. And still more misleading were the inference, that the moral purity or elevation written on a work of art attests the moral purity or nobility of the artist himself. The power to express in word or form what is best in human nature denotes the gift of a high dramatic faculty, but not necessarily rectitude of life. Sterne and Burns, Byron and Heine, represent a crowd of men who, after revealing a rich capacity for meanness, self-indulgence, and revolting vice, can then represent with incomparable power and truth the tenderest feelings of pity for suffering, the most ex- alted passion of reverence and love for purity or heroism. Nor do such men thus convict themselves of hypocrisy. The richness of their artistic nature, their compass of soul, and that nobility of sentiment which can scarcely be eradi- cated from minds of high mental gifts, give them the keenest insight into the most tender and best feelings of humanity, and enable them to live in the seclusion of the study such a life of goodness and heroism as they depict. They are faithful friends and exemplars of austere purity, martyrs and heroes, so long as they live in an ideal atmosphere, free from the pomps and vanities of the real world, free from the whisperings of selfishness and passion. If only life had no temptations, they would be the most perfect types of humanity that earth has ever seen. The lEolian harps of humanity, they give voice to the music of every breeze blown by purity or passion. Keats said that in his moments of keenest inspiration he felt himself to be an unconscious instrument of song, destitute of power to fashion his melody, and forced to utter the note that was breathed across its strings. And thus it happens that, laying down that pen of purity and heroism which he has been wielding with perfect sincerity, Byron can instantly plunge into revolting excesses of vice, or treat the woman whom he has sworn to love and protect with a heartlessness and brutality which give him a foremost place in the hierarchy of the despicable.

With brilliant faculty and noble sincerity of aim, Mr. Ruskin has striven to show that Art has a moral as well as an osthetic function ; and, in a certain limited sense, the claim is just. But that sense is so limited as to warrant the moralist in leaving art out of account as a special weapon for the enforcement of duty. Art is neither moral nor immoral, but unmoral. In the moralist it inspires as much fear as hope. If, on the one hand, art is the flower of civilization, and if the lack of art robs society of its highest refinement and culture, on the other hand, nothing more quickly loosens the moral fibre of a people than a surrender of its energies to the fascinations of the studio. Among men not absolutely vicious, perhaps the poorest creature presented by this poverty-stricken earth is the man who wastes his life in going from gallery to gallery on the outlook for the dainties of form and colour ; who fancies that life is an affair of Raphaels and Tintorets ; who is too refined not to recoil in disgust from the tumult of the market-place and the senate; who fancies that it is a mark of culture to evince a contempt for the latest triumph of physical science, for the philosophical speculation which shall determine the future shape of theological doctrine, for the details of the political measure which shall mould the destinies of millions. When Goethe excused himself for not being troubled about the invasion of Germany by the French, on the plea that he was an artist, and that the Olympian serenity of his soul would be disturbed by the rude breath of political life, he uttered a sentiment which all the magnificence of his intellect is powerless to redeem from the reproach that it is morally despicable ; and that, if taken as a rule of life, it would ensure the destruction of possessions in comparison with which all the art in all the world is only so much dust and ashes. Fichte, as superior to Goethe in nobility of soul as inferior to him in artistic gifts, acted a more grandly memorable part when, on the same occasion, he stopped his lectures on philosophy, and said to his students as he dismissed them to battle, "Gentlemen, these discourses will be resumed in a free country." Fichte knew that not art, and not even philosophy, but right action was the purifier of life, the one security for the heritages of civilization, the one great teacher of mankind. And to Mr. Ruskin, we cannot doubt, that fact becomes clearer day by day. His sense of its truth, we cannot doubt, is evinced by the eagerness with which he rushes away from the

field of art into that prosaic domain of political economy which formulates a series of the results that flow from the collective action of men. That sense, we cannot doubt, is reveal;id by his constant expressions of hunger for such a political and social revolution as would give England a Government paternal in its form and Roman in its strength ; a Government which, in primitive fashion, should fuse the moralist and the legislator into one. However erroneous may be his political schemes, they are dictated by an instinct as true as it is noble,—the instinct that not beauty of form, or nobility of written sentiment, but right action, is the great regenerator of life ; and seldom has that truth stood in greater need of eloquent enunciation than at the present time, when the wealth and idleness and barbaric thoughtlessness of England are threatening to find a refuge from real work in the emasculating dilettanteism of the studio.