THE

METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW.

OCTOBER, 1860.

ART. I.-JOHN RUSKIN.

Modern Painters. By a Graduate of Oxford. Vols. I, II, III, IV and V. London: Smith, Elder, & Co. New York: John Wiley.

Seven Lamps of Architecture. By the Author of "Modern Painters." London: Smith, Elder, & Co. New York: John Wiley.

Stones of Venice: Vol. I. Foundations. Vol. II. Sea Stories. Vol. III. The Fall. By the Author of "Modern Painters." London: Smith, Elder, & Co. New York: John Wiley.

The Two Paths. By the Author of "Modern Painters." London: Smith, Elder, & Co. New York: John Wiley.

Pre-Raphaelites. By the Author of "Modern Painters." London: Smith, Elder, & Co. New York: John Wiley.

Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds. By the Author of "Modern Painters." London: Smith, Elder, & Co. New York: John Wiley.

Economy of Art. By the Author of "Modern Painters." London: Smith, Elder, & Co. New York: John Wiley.

Elements of Drawing. By the Author of "Modern Painters." London: Smith, Elder, & Co. New York: John Wiley.

IN the year 1843 a work appeared in England entitled "Modern Painters," by a Graduate of Oxford. The title was unattractive, the theme not less so. The apparent vanity of the author, in his ncm de plume, did not strengthen their weakness. Yet in spite of these defects, which seemed to shut it out alike from the masses and the elect, it ran through four large editions within five years, and was read by every class with equal astonishment, if not with equal admiration. It provoked bitter assaults upon its doctrines and descriptions from the scathed artists, and introduced a new life, with all its fluctuations, into the domain of art.

The secret of its success lay partly in the beauty and vigor of its style, partly in its bold criticisms on the great masters of art, old and new, but chiefly in its new and thrilling descriptions of the phenomena and laws of nature. It has the honor of opening the FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XII.-34

world of art to the world of readers. To them this province had been previously closed. Whatever privileges had been accorded to them as admirers of the works of artists, the laws of art, though universal and patent to every eye, had never before been developed. Vitruvius or Fuseli, Reynolds or Angelo, whoever had discoursed upon this theme, had failed to see its high origin in nature, and wide relations to all her offspring of science and letters. The literature of art he must be said to have founded. Whoever now enters this field must learn his tactics and wield his arms, if they would win his honors.

John Ruskin, the author of the work, was the son of a London merchant, in which city he was born in 1819. He graduated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1843, when he took the Newdegate prize for English poetry. The same year, when not twenty-five years old, he issued the first volume of the "Modern Painters." It was designed as a defense of Turner, the famous landscape artist, whose works had been the butt of ridicule among artists and connoisseurs. He meant to compass the defense within the little limits and life of a pamphlet, but he soon saw that the only way to carry him triumphantly through the contest was to bring him and all his rivals, cotemporaneous or antecedent, to that nature which they professed to follow, and test their professions in the light of her realities. To do this it was necessary to know what they were set to copy. But when he looked at the canons of the school he found none of her divine decrees recorded there. All was musty, weak, erroneous, human. His paramount duty, therefore, evidently was, to bring the artist home to nature, to show him her whom he must love and worship, must study and obey, if he would have any of the offspring of his own genius adorned and strengthened with her immortal beauty and life.

It is in this department of investigation that he rises from the critic to the seer, from the reformer of art to the revealer of nature, from the transient, if brilliant, fame of the advocate and pamphleteer, to the enduring post of a philosopher and lawgiver. Here, too, is where the students of diviner mysteries find a place for him beside the explorers of the word of God. The book of nature, the elder, but not the better brother of the book of revelation, will be always reverently read by every lover of their Author. And if there is one who has had access to her secret chambers, has grasped her inmost life, or dwelt wisely and reverently upon the loveliness of that "body fitly joined together, and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part," it is our duty and privilege to follow him on these great paths of thought, to gaze with him on her new revelations of truth and beauty, and to feel with him the fullness of her glory, strength, and joy.

Ruskin has, perhaps unconsciously, shaped himself according to the form and pressure of the age. Its ruling passion has wrought in him, though in a manner and to ends unusual. That passion is to search into nature, to know the knowable in her every part and particle. The rise of many sciences of nature within the past century, the wondrous growth which those have seen that led a feeble and contemptuous existence before, mark the currents on which the present thoughts of the race are swept. Man has at last found the key to these mysteries, and he cannot rest till he explores every private cabinet and gloats over every hidden gem. He maps the surface of earth and ocean, so that the whole globe is as familiar to him as his garden. He drops his plummet among the stars, and draws from those untraveled depths their eternal secrets. He enters the abysses of earth and sea, and drags forth to the garish light of our day the treasures which myriads of ages have there stored up. He weighs the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance. He turns water to fire, fire to ice, rock to air, and all to unseen elements, in whose new combinations he creates new atmospheres, new seas, new worlds. Poetry and philosophy, language and letters, theology and politics, all other modes of mental activity, play a secondary part in the great intellectual drama of to-day. Natural science has the chief role. Humboldt is called the greatest man of the age only because he most perfectly plays this part. His associates, Cuvier, Linnæus, La Verrier, Agassiz, hold the supreme rank among men only because they best represent the passion of the hour. They are the kings of the laboratory and the observatory, and these are the thrones of present dominion. But this force, like every other in nature, is one-sided. It cannot truly live without its counterforce. This scrutiny of nature is unnatural. If carried forward without check it would soon slay the form it worships. Its devotion involves the murder of its idol. For natural science as popularly understood is but the dissection of nature. The world without is anatomized by the world within. That lovely, living form is stretched upon the table of the operator. She is flayed, her flesh is stripped from her bones, her nerves are laid bare, her throbbing heart and brain are coolly taken from their living couches, and cleft in a spirit that is usually utterly careless, if not ignorant, of their real life, and is only anxious to learn their material constitution. She is perfect only when she hangs, a skeleton, in her idolater's cabinet. This ceaseless contemplation of nature in her unnatural forms is apt to breed in the student a contempt for the exquisite and wondrous life that she really possesses, as the physician, by his constant study of the dissevered body, is tempted to despise that body

and deny its glory and immortality. It goes farther, and breeds in him a contempt for the Creator of that unfathomable beauty.

But no great force works without its fellow. The centrifugal generates the centripetal. The progress, popularity, and power of this school of culture is attended by a corresponding progress, popularity, and power in its cognate, yet hostile school. Against these lovers of her rent robes and elemental forms are set those who detect and declare her perfection of beauty. These draw all hearts to worship her living, those to study her dead. Poets and artists are the chief ministers at this altar. They hold the mirror up to visible nature. Hence, as one class are casting her into the retort and calcining her in the crucible, the other are prostrating themselves in her sublime temple before her unchanged though everchanging beauty. The last century witnessed the beginning of this revival. Burns and Cowper were its forerunners in poetry, Reynolds and Gainsborough in art. Wordsworth and Turner, the greatest seers of nature, with attendant suns, soon followed. In all culture, European and American, this spirit soon revealed itself, until finally the masses caught the flame, and to-day, journeys for the observation of her scenic forms, and imaginative portrayals of them in poetry and painting, are only equaled by explorations of her elemental secrets.

Ruskin is therefore a child of the age. The spirit that rules others rules him. But, unlike others, he unites these hostile opposites. He is at once the chemist and the artist. His eye is both that of the poet and the anatomist, now in fine phrensy rolling, and now coolly searching through all the living fibers of the spirit it adores; enraptured with

"The light that never was on sea or land,

The inspiration and the poet's dream,"

and never losing that lesser light of scientific statement which this must obey if it would flow into forms and colors, on canvas, in stone. In him, more than in any other man of the age, these two contraries are balanced, and the resultant force sweeps his soul along the perfect orbit.

Two questions we shall try to answer: What are his contributions to the stock of human knowledge? and, What is the spirit in which he has made them?

This limitation will necessarily exclude much that he has written. The burning wrath wherewith he consumes all baseless pretensions and pretenders, the process of refining the great names of art in his critical crucible, whereby he either melts them into nothing, or separates from them the false and meretricious, and replaces them on their shrines, lesser yet greater men, for the higher, because wiser,

reverence of their worshipers; the vivid descriptions of great paintings and buildings, which almost recompense us, in their splendor of word-painting, for the absence of the objects themselves; these and other admirable thoughts that flood his works must pass unnoticed. If what we restrain ourselves to will but inspire any one to go and drink at these sweet, full fountains, our work is accomplished. We shall follow somewhat the order of his publications, and glance at a few of the new facts and laws he has uttered in each. The first volume of "Modern Painters" opens with a discourse on the nature of Ideas conveyable by art. After a preliminary statement in what greatness of art consists, he says:

"I think that all the sources of pleasure, or of any other good to be derived from works of art, may be referred to five distinct heads:

"I. Ideas of Power. The perception or conception of the mental or bodily powers by which the work has been produced.

"II. Ideas of Imitation.

something else.

"III. Ideas of Truth.

The perception that the thing produced resembles

The perception of faithfulness in a statement of facts by the thing produced.

"IV. Ideas of Beauty. The perception of beauty, either in the thing produced or in what it suggests or resembles.

"V. Ideas of Relation. The perception of intellectual relations in the thing produced, or in what it suggests or resembles."-Vol. i, p. 13.

Of these the three last are dwelt upon with especial fullness, as being the centers of life to all the rest. Each is nothing without Truth. They are not artistic nor natural without Beauty. They have no real greatness without great intellectual Relations, that is, unless they mean something great, and show forth their meaning.

He plunges almost instantly into the thick of the conflict, laying down in these strong words the absolute necessity of truth:

"Nothing can atone for the want of truth; not the most brilliant imagination, the most playful fancy, the most pure feeling, (supposing that feeling could be pure and false at the same time,) not the most exalted conception, nor the most comprehensive grasp of intellect, can make amends for the want of truth, and that for two reasons: first, because falsehood is in itself revolting and degrading; and secondly, because nature is so immeasurably superior to all that the human mind can conceive, that every departure from her is a fall beneath her, so that there can be no such thing as an ornamental falsehood. All falsehood must be a blot as well as a sin, an injury as well as a deception." -Vol. i, p. 47.

The rest of the volume is devoted to a discussion of ideas of truth, first considering those general truths common to all objects of nature which are productive of what is usually called in the language of art, "effect;" that is to say, "truths of tone, general color, space, and light; and then investigating the truths of specific form and color in the four great component parts of landscape: sky, earth, water, and vegetation."