A FRENCH ESTIMATE OF RUSKIN.

BY J. ERNEST PHYTHIAN,

HOSE of us who were wont to look out eagerly for

THOS

new volume, lecture, or letter of Ruskin, have often. a difficulty in realising that he is still living, so deep is the silence that has fallen on his closing years. He is himself an illustration of his own saying, that death is a period, sometimes long, happiest when short, but a period always. In dreams we often meet those who have passed away, and wonder that they are still living, but unhesitatingly accept the fact. The confusion of dreamland is almost reproduced in waking hours, when, in the case of one who has played such a prominent part in earlier years, existence is prolonged so far beyond the period of energetic life.

But the close of his activity has by no means meant the close of his influence, for Ruskin holds a place amongst those whom we consider as primarily students and men of letters, but who have also exercised an immediate effect on practical life. His activity has been diverse, touching life at many points. As the writer, whose estimate of him we are about to consider, says: "This thinker is a man of action. If he holds a flower, he also bears a sword, like the pious knights of the middle ages whom we see in the paintings of the early masters, adoring

THE MANCHESTER QUARTERLY. No. LXV., JANUARY, 1898.

the Virgin, in ecstasy, between two battles. And this feature marks him out clearly from the art critics and lake-poets, satisfied when they have done the salons or praised Nature, without any concern about improving the one or preserving the other. Ruskin has felt this concern. Every time he has put forth an idea, a pamphlet, a book, like the soldier who discharges his weapon from afar, he has gone into the thick of the fight to see what has become of his idea, to follow it up with his own strength, and, if we may be allowed the phrase, to grapple closely with facts."

The critic of Ruskin, upon whose estimate of him we enter in this paragraph, is M. Robert de la Sizeranne, already known by a volume on contemporary English Art, in which, also, we read much of Ruskin and his influence on the pre-Raphaelite movement. He was led to a close study of Ruskin by chance evidences of his great practical influence on this side of the Channel.

"Several years ago," he tells us, "being in Florence on the 7th of March, the festival of St. Thomas Aquinas, I wished to study in the cloister of the greatest of Dominican churches-Santa Maria Novella-the frescoes of Memmi and Gaddi, in which we see the triumph of St. Thomas, and his areopagus of the seven celestial and the seven terrestial sciences. It seemed to me that no better day could be chosen for an attempt to realise what this man had been as a disciplinary of thought. Then, again, a splendid sun was shining over the domes of the City of Flowers, and sunshine is indispensable for the deciphering of all these figures of apostles, allegorical beasts, dogs of the Lord worrying the wolves of heresy, philosophers-from Boëthius, who locks like a leper, to Tubal Cain, who looks like an ourang-outang. Wishing to be alone, I was there by nine o'clock in the morning. The cloister was empty. The freshness of the monastic solitude made strolling to and fro delightful. Through the old fourteenth century arcade shone the green grass which, lasting not long, is ever being renewed. The sacristan, watchful and cute, had fastened the door with a vast array of bolts. The bells rang out in full volley; then all again was silence. I paced for some time the footway of tombs bordering the green cloister, when, drawing near to the Spanish chapel, I heard the beginning and growth of a gentle sound of words, of reading, as of a prayer. Had I been forestalled? Already I distinguished in the luminous shade silhouettes of girls, with Giottesque profiles, in white

veiled travelling hats, and carrying handfuls of mimosas.

They were

crowded together before the Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas. One of them read

'Optavi et datus est mihi sensus,

Invocavi et venit in me spiritus sapientiæ,

Et præposui illam regnis et sedibus."

Then the voice took up an English text, of which the sense was as follows: 'I prayed, and the spirit of wisdom came upon me, the σopia, or Santa Sophia, to whom the first great Christian temple was dedicated. This higher wisdom, governing by her presence all earthly conduct, and, by her teaching, all earthly art, Florence tells you, she obtained only by prayer.'

"For long she read thus, passing from the most eloquent remarks on the place of discipline in human thought to the most minute criticism of the fingers or hair of such or such figure in the fresco, noting the re-paintings, studying the pose of heads, the folds of robes, contrasting the calm of Rhetoric with the extravagant gestures of the talkers in the streets of Florence, 'who make lips of their fingers, and hope, insanely, to drag by vociferation whatever they would have out of man and God.'

"The audience listened intently, manoeuvring with the precision of a Prussian regiment to bring themselves before such or such a figure, following the indications of the thin book bound in red and gold. At times the voice rose as if in invocation. The distant sound of an organ accompanied it in undertone. Breaths of flower-perfumed air passed like incense. The golden mimosas, touched by rays of sunlight, shone in their hands like tapers. I saw that these travellers stood on the sepulchral stone of the Spanish Ambassadors which has given the chapel its name. What they were reading seemed like a sheaf of flowers come to life from a dead past. What were this book, this unknown office, the priest of this religion of Beauty? The sacristan, come round that way, tossed me the name: 'Ruskin !'"

Another year our author was staying in an English house, enjoying a rest, after an Economical Congress in London. Here, amid talk of machinery used for so many things which in earlier days were works of art, serviettes were pointed out, made of Langdale linen, and a coat, made of St. George's Guild cloth. And when he asked who founded this guild? who was the Titan or madman who sought thus to make his century retrace its steps? he was given again the name heard in the green cloister: "Ruskin!" "There was a man, then, quite close to us, across the Channel, who had won sufficient empire over British minds to awaken them to the ecstasies of the early

painters, and to impose upon them his own boldly reactionary conception of life, of style, of economics, and even of clothing." He learned more of Ruskin, of the vast sales of his books, of pirated editions in the Far West, of Ruskin Societies in London, Manchester, Glasgow, and Liverpool; of artists engraving his drawings, writers telling the story of his life, culling from his books "Ruskiniana," "Birthday Books," "Guides to Museums." Mr. Frederic Harrison had proclaimed him "the most brilliant living genius of England, the most inspiring soul yet among us;" and the head-master of a London girls' school had declared, at a school festival, that "the nineteenth century would only be famous in the future because Ruskin had written in it."

Whatever Ruskin might be, our author concluded that at any rate an art critic must take account of him; so he set himself to read Ruskin and everything he could find written about him. Not only this, but, he tells us, "I followed the path the master had trod. In Switzerland, at Florence, Venice, Amiens, by the Rhine or the Arno, wherever he had worked, I worked after him, repeating at times the sketches from which were drawn his theories and illustrations, waiting the effects of sunlight which he had prescribed, and watching in some sort on the eternal monuments the fugitive shadows of his thoughts. Then I waited, before writing, until, after several years, this system lay before me, not in its delightful complexity, but in its broad outlines, like the Alpine ranges he loved. so well. Near to they seem a chaos; but as we retire from them they unite to form upon the horizon a faint blue line-a line that is a world."

It is the estimate of Ruskin thus formed that we have to consider in this paper. One danger M. de la Sizeranne has incurred is evident from the close of the paragraph

just quoted. It is no easy task to systematise Ruskin, and when you have got your system, it is too apt to be Ruskin no longer. And, though the book strikes us as the best attempt of the kind made hitherto, the system is still something less than the man.

The full title of the book is "Ruskin and the Religion of Beauty." What has been quoted already is sufficient to show that the author does not mistake Ruskin for a mere æsthete, a worshipper of sensuous beauty; for such an one as was Tennyson's builder of the Palace of Art, ere he awoke to the deeper needs of his being. The beauty is a vital-we may say a spiritual, a divine-beauty; and its cult is not an exclusive one. Beauty is claimed as an essential element in the religion which alone can satisfy all the aspirations and complete the development of the human soul.

The book begins with a character sketch; then we have an examination of the writings; and thirdly, an analysis of Ruskin's thought, æsthetic and social.

Much of the success of a writer who endeavours to give an account of Ruskin the thinker, depends upon his understanding of Ruskin the child and the man. Much of what at first sight appears of greatest importance in the writings becomes of much less moment when we trace it home to mistakes and narrowness in his early training. "Modern Painters" must be read in the light of the "Oxford Lectures" if Ruskin is to be understood.

On the whole, M. de la Sizeranne's character-sketch is a good one. The early development of Ruskin's powers of observation, his enthusiasm for natural beauty ("my eyes leap out of my head" was his own account of the impressions of a visit to Croydon), his father's love of literature and art, his mother's evangelical convictions, her detestation of the Pope and the theatre, and her love of flowers, her