IT is very easy to understand Mr. Charles Eliot Norton's

unwillingness to publish these letters. They are the record of a friendship extending over more than forty years, and it is most natural that the depth of their pathos, not seldom darkening into tragedy, should be more strongly impressive now, and as a whole, than when they were first written and received. Mr.

Norton has found it so :-

"In preparing them for the press," he says, "and reading them in a mass consecutively, after an interval of many years, they touch me even more deeply than when they came to mo one by one. Taken all together they form a tragic record of the per- plexities of a great and generous soul, the troubles of a tender heart, the spendthrift use and at last the failure of exceptional powers. Such genius, such high aim, such ardent yet often ill- directed effort, and such great yet broken achievement, such splendours sinking into such gloomy, it is a sorrowful story !"

It has always been impossible to read either Ruskin's works or any record of his life without feeling that he was, as Mr. Norton says, " altogether exceptional," and that " the measuring rod which serves for common men will not answer for him." He was a living contradiction : his life a series of strong convictions in religion, art, literature, which destroyed

each other, but which were thrust upon his disciples—always an admiring flock, if sometimes a puzzled and distracted one —with the insistent violence of a Hebrew prophet. Some of those disciples, one remembers very well, were plus royalistes que is roi, more infallible than the Pope, and their uncon- verted friends suffered a good deal under a scornful and arrogant positiveness which had not the master's convincing touch of genius, though it sometimes surpassed him, we fancy, in "persistent fixity of aim." At least, it required a good deal of strong language to make them throw their first idols into the fire and set up others at his command, for this was generally necessary, although he said that none of his true disciples would ever be "a Ruskinian." A curious instance of this change of attitude towards his early admirations has to do with Giotto, and it is the revelation of Ruskin's mind made in these newly published letters which enables us to quote this. Mr. Frederic Harrison, in the very interesting monograph published two or three years ago, dwells on Ruskin's devotion to Giotto as if it had never any qualifi- cation. In 1853 it had not, and no doubt it always existed; but such a statement as this is now proved to have been too strong : "Giotto is one of the few artists towards whom, in his long career as a critic for forty years in different opinions and moods, Ruskin never permits himself to utter a word of disparagement." Giotto remained in the first rank, but as a "realist," a painter of "human passion." In 1874 the new point of view is expressed in a letter to Mr. Norton. Giotto has ceased to be, for Ruskin, the first of religious painters, and this comes to pass at Assisi, where he is studying the " Poverty " :—

" It is fine, but on the whole I am greatly disappointed with Giotto, on close study—and on the contrary, altogether arnaved

at the power of Cimabue, before wholly unknown to me The Cimabue is a discovery to me at last I set myself on it on a bright day and upset Giotto from his pedestal in a minute or two's close look Giotto is a mere domestic gossip compared to Cimabue. . . . . . The Christ, St. Francis, and Charity, are all three total failures in the great Poverty fresco; and in the Charity, she herself and Fortitude are quite valueless ; while Obedience in the opposite one is monstrous."

These volumes of letters are a chronicle of Ruskin's mental history from 1855 till 1896, four years before his death. They thus take up his story where Prasterita leaves it, and are, in fact, an autobiography. It would be scarcely possible for any man, writing to another, to lay bare his • Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton. 2 vols. New York ; Houghton, Mifflin, and Co. [4 dolt. net.] heart and mind more completely than Ruskin does to his American correspondent. Every cloud, every ray of sunshine —and there never was a stormier or a more changing mental sky—finds its way through the pen'to his friend's sight. And perhaps all we knew of Ruskin had hardly prepared us for

the constancy, the comprehension, the patience and kindness and loyalty, required in the man who had the privilege of being his friend. Mr. Norton's words in his preface, already quoted, express the effect of these wonderful letters on his mind, and the way in which he wishes the modern world to regard them. His biographical notes throughout show the same generous delicacy, the same complete understanding which mixes pity with admiration and sets self and its natural claims on one side. We can well believe in the sweet attractiveness found in Ruskin by his intimate acquaintances ; Mr. Harrison bears strong witness to this, saying: " I have never known him, in full health, betrayed into a harsh word, or an ungracious phrase, or an unkind judgment, or a trace of egotism." But these letters, it must be confessed, are often quite amazing in their harshness, ungraciousness, arro- gance, and egotism. Sometimes they might have been written with set purpose to break off a friendship. There are things said in them, notably about the time of the American War, which an ordinary man would have found difficult to pardon.

But the two men loved each other—never did a correspon- dence show that great fact more plainly—and the outcome of it is that while we regard Ruskin with fresh wonder and pity, Mr. Norton takes an even higher place than before, as a man ideal in friendship and a mind of singular charm. Ruskin added to his other marks of genius that of knowing how to choose a friend.

If these letters deepen, as they certainly do, our under.

standing of Ruskin's complex nature, showing how much excuse there was for the extravagances of that strange brain, they cannot in any way, we think, be said to heighten out admiration for his character or his genius. Leaving out of count his peculiarities as a friend, which the loyalty of his friends, if it does not justify them, deprives of any real sting and makes simply surprising and sad, we cannot help quoting a few utterances which prove Ruskin to have been what some of us always felt him to be, an impossible leader• to follow whole-heartedly. His views on political economy may have been right to some great extent and in advance of his time ; his ideas on art, though far from infallible, may have been worthy of much respect; and his generosity and public spirit were certainly beyond all praise. But how could sane minds commit their faith to a man whose frankest speech in his letters, even more than in his published works, showed an egotism and self-conceit so enormous as to shadow

all his finer qualities ? Fascinating as these letters are to read, their one subject is Himself, his own troubles, his own work, his own knowledge : from beginning to end it is I.

With some charming exceptions, they are full of bitterness, and it is indeed a lucky contemporary who gains any words of praise :-

" But when I accuse Mill of being the root of nearly all immediate evil among us in England, I am in earnest—the man being looked up to as the greatest thinker' when he is in truth an utterly shallow and wretched segment of a human creature, incapable of understanding Anything in the ultimate conditions of it, and countenancing with an unhappy fortune, whatever is fatallest in the popular error of English mind." ' "I came yesterday on a sentence of Ste. Beuve's, which put me upon writing this letter (it is be who is your favourite critic, is it not ?) 'Phidias et Raphael faisaient admirablement les divinites, et n'y croyaient plus.' Now, this is a sentence of a quite incurably and irrevocably shallow person—of one who knows everything—who is exquisitely keen and right within his limits, sure to be fatally wrong beyond them."

"Thanks for reference to Boutmy It is very good, and suggestive from its French point of view, but very narrow and shallow. It is most interesting in the utter incapability of the Frenchman to penetrate the solemnity of Greek thought I think when you see what I am doing, even now, for Oxford this year, you will admit it to be of more value than any existing statement of Greek style ; and that while other people could, and will, do as good or better work than I in mediaeval study, no one but I could ha"e put true life into those dead Greek forms."

Six years later he says—but that is nothing—" You know the Middle Ages are to me the only ages." Sometimes, of course,

his splendid, ill-used intellect goes straight to the right point, as here:—

"Lowell's Dante' is very good; but thd entire school of you

moderns judge hopelessly out, of these older ones, because you never admit the possibility of their knowing what we don't. The moment you take that all-knowing attitude, the heavens are veiled. Lowell speaks of Dante as if Dante were a forward schoolboy, and Lowell his master."

"I wonder when you will begin to understand me a little," Ruskin says in 1876, in the very mid-way of their

friendship. It is certain that then, and through his sad later years, and now and always, no erratic and unhappy genius ever had, or will have, a friend of more perfect sympathy and understanding than Ruskin possessed in Mr. Charles Eliot Norton.