BOOKS.

RUSKIN.* IT is yet too soon to take a complete measure of the work and achievement of Ruskin. The embers are still alight of some of the artistic controversies in which he took part, and his remarkable figure has not yet receded far enough into the distance for a dispassionate survey to be possible. Neverthe- less the documents needful for a final review are being given us in the most complete form. In thern earlier volumes of this scholarly edition are collected a number of essays written when their author was quite young. Many of these youthful works are of no intrinsic value. At the same time, we often get a sidelight thrown by them upon the mind of the writer. Take, for instance, a very early study of the comparative merits of painting and music. In this paper we see a habit of mind which is to be traced throughout Ruskin's life. It is the habit of bolstering up with high moral reasons and lofty arguments his personal point of view, which was often that of either prejudice or ignorance. From the essay in question it is quite obvious that Ruskin had no acquaintance with anything but the most insignificant musical compositions. But his self-confidence assures him that what be knows of music is all that is worth knowing. With great works of

painting be was more familiar, and so inevitably this art seemed to him the greater. Nothing therefore remained but to con- struct arguments based on his fancied knowledge of the facts. Of course in later years the inconclusiveness of the reasoning was more difficult of detection from the great subtlety and eloquence of Ruskin's style. But the fact remains that there was always the tendency for the personal likes and dislikes of the author to be magnified into moral right and wrong. An example of this may be found in the constant disparagement of Constable. So well expressed is the abuse— for it is nothing more—that in reading it we feel at first per- suaded that it is true. But when we reflect a little, and look at the pictures instead of reading about them, the argument falls to the ground. Constable was not searching for quite the same things in Nature as Turner; but his search was as deep and as earnest.

But with all his limitations Ruskin was a great man. If we disagree with many of his conclusions, we are fascinated by the beauty and sincerity of the writer's intellect, and the nobility of his ideas. In him there was nothing mean, and he burned with a lofty desire to show the world what he held to be the truth about life and art.

In the edition before us the editors have given by way of preface to each volume what practically amounts to a Life of Ruskin during the time he was writing whatever is reprinted. These biographical notes include letters - and other matter, and are always interesting. From the glimpses we get of the author from various points of view, no less than in that wonderfully engrossing work Praeterita, it seems not unreasonable to describe Ruskin as possessing an inspired suburban mind,—the soaring imagination of the poet is so often united to a rigid and narrow-minded outlook on life, a great intelligence trammelled by the belief that any point of view but its own must be wrong. In trying to take stock of the dominating characteristics of Ruskin's mind we are struck by the union of the moral, scientific, and poetical qualities. The purely aesthetic sense seems but little developed. He is never

" Contented if he may enjoy The things that others understand?'

Beauty must be explained, and it must be shown to have a meaning and a .use. Figure pictures must teach, and land- scapes help us to comprehend Nature. Neither can stand alone by their innate loveliness. It has been truly said that the Preraphaelite movement in England was more a moral and religious than an artistic revival. Certainly in the ease of Ruskin, the prophet of the Preraphaelites, this was so. Out of this attitude grew his intolerance of any art that could not be made to agree with his theories, because such disagreement seemed to him to constitute moral delinquency. Hence all the lamentable absurdities of the Whistler trial. On this occasion the limitations of the great man were most • The Works of John Ruskin. Library Edition. Edited by E. T. Cook and

painfully evident. That Whistler in the plane of art was as earnest a searcher after truth as he was himself seems never to have occurred to Ruskin as possible.

The editors have given us a number of reproductions of Ruskin's drawings. Many of these are of the greatest

beauty. It seems strange that he should have drawn so little when he was able to do so much and so well. The drawing of the "Grande Chartreuse" is a landscape of high order. The likeness to Turner is no doubt evident, but there is originality too.

The great work of Ruskin's life was his advocacy of Fulmer. It is, of course, beyond the facts to hold that before the appearance of Ruskin, Turner was not appreciated.

The great fortune made by the painter proves how wide his reputation had been for many years. Nevertheless, Ruskin saw the peculiar greatness of Turner, and by the magic of his writing enabled the world to understand more fully the scope and complexity of this great artistic intelligence. In the twelfth volume of this new edition is to be found the story of the Turner bequest to the nation. The record of Ruskin's labours in trying to secure decent treatment for the vast mass of splendid water-colour drawings and sketches is completely told by Mr. E. T. Cook. As was to be expected, the record is one of struggles with obscurantist officials and an indifferent public. There seems no doubt that the terms of Turner's will have never been carried out to this day, for no special gallery shows the whole collection. The oil paintings are huddled together, plastering the walls of the room in which they are hung. So closely packed are they that no one picture can produce its full effect, and many are invisible from the height at which they are hung. But the treatment of the water-colours is still worse. Ruskin gave his services and devoted his time to classifying, naming, and mounting these treasures left by Turner. To secure proper treatment of the drawings, he was obliged himself to give a case to put some of them in. No one else could have done the work so well, for no one else had the special know- ledge. The least the Government and the Trustees of the

National Gallery should have done was to have given him a free hand, and to have carried out his plans. One thing the

authorities did do, and that was to pile these priceless water- colours in a heap under a tarpaulin while the roof of the Gallery was being repaired. Wet came in upon them, and Ruskin had his labours increased by having to remove the mildew which naturally resulted from this monstrous treat- ment. To this day a vast number of drawings are hidden away in eleven tin boxes. Apparently they are not thought worthy of frames by the official world.

Ruskin was before all things an intense lover of natural beauty, and he seems often to imply that landscape pictures are only good in so far as they represent Nature accurately and literally. But man does not seem to be among the natural objects in which he delighted. Splendid eloquence and passionate beauty of language describe the movements of clouds and the repose of the mountains. Such words are seldom found to interpret the human body. Hence it is that Michelangelo is described as showing "the adapt- ability of limbs to awkward positions." But the limits of absurdity are reached when he says that Michelangelo " bandaged the heads" of his figures as "a cheap means of getting over a difficulty too great for his patience,"—that of painting the hair. Those who have mounted a scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, and have seen the work of the master face to face, know the stupid folly of this libel. No one who has seen any part of the wondrous vault close at hand can fail to be struck by the marvellous delicacy of the work. There is no virtuosity, there is no cleverness, but inscrutable beauty everywhere, born of passionate though patient labour. It was this wrong-beaded attitude towards Michelangelo that made Burne-Jones lose his early faith in Ruskin's teaching.

But Ruskin, before his theories had accumulated and his prejudices hardened, was able to judge truly of Michel- angelo. We like to remember that splendid passage in the second volume of Modern Painters in which the writer seems to penetrate the depths of the inspiration of the great Florentine. We make no excuse for quoting the passage, for it is among the most beautiful things that this great literary artist ever wrote:— " Yet Mino stopped at the human nature ; he saw the soul, but No man's soul is alone; Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the hand ; the light or the fear of the Spiritual things that move beside it may be seen on the body ; and that bodily form with Buonarotti, white, solid, distinct, material, though it be, is invariably felt as the instrument or the habita- tion of some infinite, invisible power. The earth of the Sistine Adam that begins to burn ; the woman embodied burst of Adora- tion from his sleep ; the twelve great torrents of the Spirit of God that pause above us there, urned in their vessels of clay ; the waiting in the shadow of futurity of those through whom the Promise and Presence of God went down from the Eve to the Mary, each still and fixed, fixed in his expectation, silent, foreseeing, faithful, seated each on his stony throne, the building stones of the Word of God, building on and on, tier by tier, to the Refused one the head of the corner ; not only these, not only the troupe of terror torn up from the earth by the four-quartered winds of the Judgment, but every fragment and atom of stone that he ever touched became instantly inhabited by what makes the hair stand up and the words be few : the St. Matthew, not yet disengaged from his sepulchre, bound hand and foot by his grave clothes, it is left for us to loose him ; the strange spectral wreath of the Florence Pieth, casting its pyramidal, distorted shadow, full of pain and death, among the faint purple lights that cross and perish under the obscure dome of Sta. Maria del Fiore; the white lassitude of joyous limbs, panther-like, yet passive, fainting with their own delight, that gleam among the Pagan formalisms of the Uffizzii, far away, separating themselves in their lustrous lightness as the waves of an Alpine torrent do by their dancing from the dead stones, though the stones be as white as they ; and finally, and perhaps more than all, those four ineffable types, not of darkness nor of day—not of morning nor evening, but of the departure and the resurrection, the twilight and the dawn of the souls of men—together with the spectre sitting in the shadow of the niche above them ; all these, and all else that I could name of his forming, have borne, and in themselves retain and exercise the same inexplicable power—inexplicable because proceeding from an imaginative perception almost superhuman, which goes whither we cannot follow, and is where we cannot come ; throwing naked the final, deepest root of the being of man, whereby he grows out of the invisible, and holds on his God home."

VICTIMS OF THE SCAFFOLD.*

Mn. BLEACKLEY has thrown away a good opportunity. He has made an interesting selection of " victims " who perished on the scaffold. He has studied their careers with much diligence, and he has not disdained to marshal his authorities, and to compile scholarly bibliographies, though his subjects, in the estimation of most men, fall below the dignity of history. For all this we thank him ; but we regret the more that be has spoiled his work by much vulgar writing and false sentiment. He has borrowed his rhetoric both from Carlyle and the daily papers ; be assumes to know far more than the chap-books of the time tell him ; and he has a habit of nicknaming the persons of whom he writes—as, for instance, "the incorruptible calico printer "- which gives his narrative a most inappropriate flippancy. But, worse still, he looks upon his victims from a false point of view. He is not so much interested in their achieve- ments as sorry for their fate. He always holds a brief for the defence, and forgets that it is the criminal's business to play the game and take his punishment like a man. For prosecutors and Judges Mr. Bleackley has nothing but abuse. He appears to think that they are wilfully responsible for the laws which they help to administer. The Judge who condemned Ryland is described as "the big- brained, lady-whipping Buller " ; and a similar prejudice is constantly warping Mr. Bleackley's opinion. But he reserves his most violent anger for the first three Georges, upon whom he lays the full blame for every criminal hanged during their reigns. When the Perreaus properly suffered at the scaffold it is thus that Mr. Bleackley comments upon their fate: "Yet no qualms disturbed the tranquil conscience of King George, who believed be was doing the Lord's work in banging men and women for paltry theft." He does not understand that it was no part of the King's business either to change the law or to set it at naught. It was not his fault that by a Draconian Code men and women were hanged for theft. If this was wrong, as unquestionably it was, Mr. Bleackley might abuse the Parliament and the public opinion in England as much as he liked ; but be cannot with reason reproach a King who could do no more than exercise the pre- rogative of mercy with the approval of his Ministers. Had the people of England felt as strongly about the matter as Mr. Bleackley, they would have clamoured for redress. But the • Sons Distinguishad Victims of the Scaffold. By Rorace Bleackley. London : Segall Paul, Trench, and Co. Lies. 6d. net. j Criminal Code was not revised until Edward Gibbon Wakefield had written a sensational pamphlet, and Mr. Bleackley would have been wiser to discover the facts than to throw his censure wildly about. However, there is one Monarch whom he can honestly praise,—George IV. "The only one of the four," says he, "who was a gentleman, a scholar, or a man of artistic taste, the only one whose foolish egoism did not embroil the country in a costly and bloody war, was also the only one with a merciful heart." That is how history is written by the indiscreet, and it is fortunate for Mr. Bleackley that when he comes down to the criminals of his choice he is on surer ground.

In spite, then, of some faults of judgment and taste, there is much good reading between the covers of Mr. Bleackley's book. The sad story of Mary Blandy, for instance, is well worth telling again. Miss Blandy was the daughter of a lawyer at Henley-on-Thames, and since her father was reported wealthy, there were many suitors for her hand. Among them was William Henry Cranston, the younger son of a Scottish Peer, whose rank early dazzled Miss Blandy, but to whom the objection might be urged that he was married already. The objection, fatal to others, seemed light enough to Cranston himself, for he declared that he was on the eve of getting a divorce, and it was certainly not his fault that he did not get it. Meanwhile he paid assiduous court to Miss Blandy, until the father's patience was tried beyond endurance, and Cranston was driven from the house. Then it was that the Scot began to meditate revenge, and to devise a plan which would remove the old father from his path. He sent Mary Blandy from Scotland a present of table-linen, tog ether with some "Scotch pebbles." The gift seems harm- less enough ; but with it came some white arsenic labelled "The Powder to clean the pebbles with." After the arrival of the white pebbles the health of old Blandy got worse and worse, until he died, with all the symptoms of arsenical poisoning. Dr. Addington asked the dying man whom he suspected. "A poor love-sick girl," he replied. Mary herself gave the doctor a perfectly simple explanation, which may also have been true. "I received the powder," said she, "with a present of Scotch pebbles. He had wrote on the paper that held it, 'The Powder to clean the pebbles with.' He assured me that it was harmless, and that if I would give my father some of it now and then, a. little and a little at a time, in any liquid, it would make him kind to him and to me." Mary Blandy was arrested, tried in the Divinity School at Oxford, and condemned to death. She protested her innocence unto the last, and, whether she was guilty or not, the worse culprit of the two escaped. For of Cranston's guilt there could be no doubt, even if he bad not made a full and free confession when be had fled beyond the pale of justice. After lying awhile in hiding, he crossed to France, and did not survive the death of Mary Blandy for many weeks.

There is some excuse for Mr. Bleackley's sorrow over the fate of William Wynne Ryland. For Ryland was a most accomplished engraver as well as a daring forger. He was, moreover, one who had acquired great wealth by the exercise of his craft, and there was no reason why he should ever have felt the pinch of poverty. But extravagance and gambling can accomplish much, and on April 3rd, 1783, it was announced in the Morning Chronicle that Ryland stood charged "on suspicion of forging the acceptance of two bills of exchange for payment of £7,114, with intent to defraud the United East India Company." From the first it was evident that escape was impossible for the reckless engraver, and nothing but his talent could have justified a pardon. The pardon, however, was not granted, only a respite that be might finish a few plates, and on September 3rd he was hanged at Tyburn. No doubt be would have acknow- ledged that he had played his hand in the game of life and lost it. But never, being an artist and a man of the world, would he have endured to hear the foolish homily upon butchery and mercy which Mr. Bleackley has pronounced over his grave.

In the case of Henry Fauntleroy Mr. Bleackley has again spoiled his opportunity. Nothing was needed but a straight- forward narrative ; yet we get pages of inapposite rhetoric, which even Pierce Egan, whose biography of the forger is still the best, would have scorned. The story is interesting enough of itself, and we can easily imagine the excitement of London when it heard that Fauntleroy, the gentlemanly banker of Berners Street, was arrested for forgery. For Fauntleroy was nothing if not gentlemanly. There was nobody about town so correct as he. Nor did his demeanour change when he was on trial for his life. Never once during his imprison- ment did he permit a slang word to cross his lips,—this fact Egan records with an inexpressible wonderment. But he, who had been trusted by hundreds, was guilty of a series of daring and profitable forgeries ; and though be hoped for the best—that is, that he would not be found out—he had a perfect knowledge of the law, and received no greater punishment than be deserved. His peculiar distinction was his respect- ability, which one does not expect in a criminal, and his is the most discreet portrait in Mr. Bleackley's gallery. In con- clusion, those who are curious in the byways of history will find not a little to interest them in Mr. Bleackley's book, which is far better in matter than manner, and which needs nothing so much as a thorough pruning from beginning to end.