BOOKS.

JOHN RUSKIN.*

Ws cannot but believe that the genius of whom Mr. Frederic Harrison writes in this entirely interesting, though some- what hurriedly prepared, volume of the " English Men of Letters " Series was a man whose life cannot be ade- quately dealt with in the presence of his contemporaries. Many years must have passed away before some great critic and biographer can attempt to realise the meaning of the spiritual and mental agonies that lay behind the work of one of the most wonderful minds of the nineteenth century. The private life of an author is not the business of his own time, but, in so far as its drama and its tragedies afford a key to that inner workshop of life in Which the author toiled, it is the business of posterity. Standing in that inner room, many things mn be understood that the world laughed at, many things can be learnt that will help the world at large. Therefore any and every Life of John Ruskin written now must be in a sense a failure. Yet one thing is clear enough. Personal unhappiness lay behind all the work of the second half of his literary days. He was born on February 8th, 1819, and was a " Scot of the Scots." His ancestors were of the most singularly varied type. " Who could have nnagieed," says Mr. Harrison, "that the child of these ealln 3', reckless, stern, jovial men of pleasure, men of con- science, and men of toil—of these plodding tradesmen and of these daring spirits—would be the author of Modern Painters, of Per; and Unto this Last?" His "father was a man of singular prudence, patience, practical talent, conventional views of life, and fine taste. The mother was a woman of great power, in- domitable will, harsh nature, and an almost saturnine religion."

• John Baskin. By Frederic Harrison. "En,glisia Men of Letters." London: Macoullan and Co. [BB. net.]

His father died at the age of seventy-nine, when John was forty-six. In December, 1871, " his mother died at the age of ninety, infirm in body, nearly blind, but still resolute in spirit, and mistress of her home" :— "The relations between John and his parents were amongst the most beautiful things that dwell in my memory. Towering as he did by his genius above his parents, who neither understood nor sympathised with his second career (dating from Unto this Last), he invariably behaved towards them with the most affectionate deference. He submitted without a murmur to the rule of the house, which, on the Sabbath day, covered his beloved Turners with dark screens. This man, well past middle life, in all the renown of his principal works, who for a score of years had been one of the chief forces in the literature of the century, con- tinued to show an almost childlike docility towards his father and his mother, respecting their complaints and remonstrances, and gracefully submitting to be corrected by their worldly wisdom

and larger experience Intellectually the father was the very antithesis of the son. He was strongest where his brilliant son was weakest. Those were moments when the father seemed the stronger in sense, breadth, and hold on realities. And when John was turned forty, his father still seemed something of his tutor, his guide, his support."

When we realise this, and keep in mind the ceaseless travelling

through England and on the Continent that was done in the company of his father and mother, an important part of the forces working within him becomes visible. The man to whom the hearth is an altar must, if he be a poet, be torn with divine discontent at sight of the miseries of the outer world. The other all-important forces in Ruskin's life are to be found in the disappointments that he encountered in love. There can be no doubt that he was extraordinarily sensitive to feminine charm. At the age of seventeen he was deeply in love with Adele Domecq, the daughter of his father's

partner, and though his affection was entirely un- requited, her marriage in 1840 to Baron Duquesne was a great shock. He next fell in love with Charlotte Lock- hart, the granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott, and " again fell into despondency and sickness" at his failure to win her heart. On April 10th, 1848, he married Miss Gray, the

daughter of old family friends in Perthshire. This marriage lasted six years, and was nullified in 1854. "Neither the marriage, nor the nullification of it," says Mr. Harrison. "seriously affected his habits or his books." In 1872 Miss Rose la Touche refused, on the ground of religious differences. to be his wife, and on the same ground even declined to see him on her deathbed three years later. " There can be no doubt about the bitter despair in which this clouded Ruskin's later life." He yearned for intimate companionship. The

quality and balance of his work greatly depended upon it. It is remarkable that it was during his married life that he produced much of his best work. The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Stones of Venice, the defence of Pre- Raphaelitism, the "Lectures on Architecture and Painting,"

and the notes on the Giotto frescoes belong to this period. The Ruskin of 1860 who turned from art to social problems was the man who had suffered beyond measure, and who was determined to give others the happiness that he himself had missed. It is surely incorrect to say that his marriage, and its unhappy end, had not affected his habits or his books. We cannot doubt that it revolutionised his nature and his work.

We are still so near to John Ruskin, so personally familiar with the ridicule that he deliberately courted by the gross exaggeration of phrase and principle with regard to economic questions in which he indulged, that it is difficult to draw oneself apart even yet and regard independently his influence upon the age. Yet that influence is imperishable. The little boy of the year 1825 who spent all his time build- ing from his solitary box of bricks and poring for ever upon the patterns and flowers of the carpets (fearful creations they were, we doubt not) in his home was destined to revolutionise (or shall we say re-create ?) taste in England, to bring beauty into the home as the necessary accessory of true usefulness, to state the principles that underlie all art, and to show (with a degree of truth scarcely yet recognised) the relationship of art and social economics,—the science of social life. When ,in

May, 1843, " A Graduate of Oxford " published the first volume of his Modern Painters he in reality sounded a "trumpet-call to painters to fling aside the tradi- tion of the Academies, to go humbly to Nature, rejecting

nothing, selecting nothing, scorning nothing." "The recog- nised organs of criticism," we are told, " were hostile and contemptuous." The return to Nature had naturally little of attraction for a school of painting and of art criticism that had survived the successful assaults that SCott,Byren, Shelley, and Wordsworth had made upon artificiality and formalism in literature. The extension of that movement to the realm of art and applied art was inevitable, and Ruskin's was the hand chosen to complete the Renaissance. Whether Ruskin fully realised—at any rate at first—the immense importance of the principles he laid down we may doubt. In his own work he realised it fully enough. He went "back to Nature," in the supreme meaning of that term, with his superb prose- pictures. He interpreted Nature and made himself at one with the spirit of the scene. But in the application of his views to the work of others he was hampered. He boldly defended the Pre-Raphaelites, though their work was not so much a return to Nature as a return to the Renaissance revolt in painting, first visible in Cimabne, from the decrepit Byzantine formalism. It was no more a return to Nature than the Newlyn school, or, in poetry, certain early poems of Words- worth, are a return to Nature. Each and all are natural- ism, while Ruskin aimed really at the seeing of Nature with an inward and moral as well as an outward eye.

The study of Titian, Veronese, Bellini, Perugino, Angelico, Ghirlandajo, and finally Tintoretto, after the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters, would, one would have thought, have brought this home to him ; but he seems to have worked back to Giotto, and not forward from the forerunners of Raphael Therefore after he had reached Giotto in 1853 he was still in the position, astonishing as we venture to think

it was, to admire and praise in his Notes on the Pictures of the Year the work of the Engli.sh Pre-Raphaelites. The gap between " Giotto and the Primitives" and Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites was great enough; but probably only Ruskin

could have moved freely, without a sense of intense discord, from the latter school once more to Titian and the great colourists, and to the real nubility of Itubens.

We must pass from Modern Painters (concluded with its fifth volume in 1860); from the. Seven Lamps of Truth,

Beauty, Power, Sacrifice, Obedience, Labour, and Memory; from those stones of Venice that "taught the laws of con- structive art, and the dependence of all human work or edifice For its beauty, on the happy life of the workman"; from Ruskin, the great prose writer and formulator of the principles of art; to Ruskin, the saviour of society. The "superior person" (we believe that he still exists, and that John Ruskin in

a great measure is responsible for his existence) has long been in the habit of scoffing at the political economy of the sage of Coniston, and doubtless much of the 'lrOth and foam of his social ideas is as offensive to pure reason' as is the average conversation of the " superior person" hiinself. Unfor- tunately Ruskin, not being a frequenter of society, contracted the habit of conversing in print, and allowed ,ideas of the conversational character to attain the permanence of type.

But clear away the foam, and in his social economy we get an immense proportion of the social ideas which we all fancy that the London County Council has been kind, enough to invent for us since 1889. Mr. E. T. Cook in his admirable Life in the Dictionary of National Biography has .put the net result of Ruskin's economic teaching with valuable clear- ness :- " Gradually Ruskin's work made itself felt—especially for its insistence upon the importance of the .biological. factor in all economic questions ; and his writings have powerfully contributed to that recasting of economic doctrine which, is still in progress.

His principal points were : a system of national educa- tion, the organisation of labour, the establishment of govern- ment training schools, old-age pensions (for 'soldiers of the ploughshare as well as of the sword'.), and the provision of decent homes for the working classes. It requires some effort to realise that this was the programme which forty years ago was howled out of the magazines.

The truth Seems to be that Ruskin was as anxious for the return to Nature (in the tree sense cif the phrase, and not in Rousseau's knee) in social matters as in strt.. The iron logic of J. S. Mill seemed to him as unreal as the earpet patterns of his boyhood. He could not believe in a political economy that excluded the statesman and the poet from the producing forces of the universe. And he was right, 'while Mill, with his strictly' conditioned ntilitarianitnn, wrong:" That is to-day freely; admitted. 'howevef,' sincerely' Sympathise with Ruskin in the horror he must hide felt when Mr.

Harrison persistently reminded him " in public and in pivott that most of his social doctrines had been anticipated by Auguste Comte,"—a name that occurs with totally unnecessary frequence in this compact and instructive volume. We may say, too, that Mr. Harrison hardly seem, to realise how great an intellect Ruskin possessed, how vast were his stores of accurate knowledge on a multitude of sub.. jects, how truly scientific an observer he was. To call this great seer " the self-taught, desultory, impulsive student of poetry and the arts" is to show a considerable inappreciation of facts; while to speak of the titles of his books as purpose. less is unjust. We should have thought that the meaning. of Sesame and Lilies was both beautiful and clear.

We think, nevertheless, that Mr. Harrison has given to ii e reading public a volume worthy of his able pen, awl one that on the whole does justice to the great master of style who will probably share with De Quincey the credit of proving to later ages what the nineteenth century could do in the way of prose. Mr. Harrison, moreover, brings vividly before our eyes the searcher after truth, who peered through Nature for the principles of art and life ; and he makes us love the unselfish and tender-hearted man who through the stress and storm of eighty years never lost the tempestuous, rebellious, and loving heart of a child.