Chapter XIV: Part 14

Years ago, Henry Edward Manning was one of the brilliant lights of the English Protestant Church. Just twenty years back he was appointed to the high place of Archdeacon of Chichester, having also, according to the manner in which the English State Church rewards its dignitaries, more than one other ecclesiastical appointment at the same time. Dr. Manning had distinguished himself highly during his career at the University of Oxford. His father was a member of the House of Commons, and Manning on starting into life had many friends and very bright prospects. Nothing would have been easier, nothing seemingly would have been more natural than for him to tread the way so plainly opened before him, and to rise to higher and higher dignity, until at last perhaps the princely renown of a bishopric and a seat in the House of Lords would have been his reward. But Dr. Manning's career was cast in a time of stress and trial for the English State Church. I have described briefly in a former article the origin, growth, and effects of that remarkable movement which, beginning within the Church itself and seeking to establish loftier claims for her than she had long put forward, ended by convulsing her in a manner more troublous than any religious crisis which had occurred since the Reformation. Dr. Manning's is evidently a nature which must have been specially allured by what I may be allowed to call the supernatural claims put forward on behalf of the Church of England. He was of course correspondingly disappointed by what he considered the failure of those claims. As Coleridge says that every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist, so it may perhaps be said that every man is born with a predisposition to lean either on natural or supernatural laws in the direct guidance of life. I am not now raising any religious question whatever. What I say may be said of members of the same sect or church--of any sect, of any church. One man, as faithful and devout a believer as any, is yet content to go through his daily duties and fulfil his career trusting to his religious principles, his insight, and his reason, without requiring at every moment the light of spiritual or supernatural guidance. Another must always have his world in direct communion with the spiritual, or it is no world of faith to him. Now it is impossible to look in Dr. Manning's face without seeing that his is one of those sensitive, spiritual, I had almost said morbid natures, which can find no endurable existence without a close and constant communion with the supernatural. Keble, Newman, Time and the Hour, called out for the assertion of the claim that the Church of England was the true heir of the apostolic succession. Such a nature as Manning's must have delightedly welcomed the claim. But the mere investigation sent, as I have already explained, one Newman to Catholicism and the other to Rationalism. Dr. Manning, too, felt compelled to ask himself whether the Church could make good its claim, and whether, if it could not, he had any longer a place within its walls. The change does not appear to have come so rapidly to fulfilment with him as with John Henry Newman. Dr. Manning seems to me to have a less aggressive temperament than his distinguished predecessor in secession. There is more about him of the quietist, of the ecstatic, so far as religious thought is concerned, while it is possible that he may be a more practical and influential guide in the mere policy of the church to which he belongs. There is an amount of scorn in Newman's nature which sometimes reminds one of Pascal, and which I have not observed in Dr. Manning or in his writings. I cannot imagine Dr. Manning, for example, pelting Charles Kingsley with sarcasms and overwhelming him with contempt, as Dr. Newman evidently delighted to do in the famous controversy which was provoked by the apostle of Muscular Christianity. I suppose therefore that Dr. Manning clung for a long time to the faith in which he was bred. But his whole nature is evidently cast in the mould which makes Roman Catholic devotees. He is a man of the type which perhaps found in Fenelon its most illustrious example. I think it is not too much to say that to him that light of private judgment which some of us regard as man's grandest and most peculiarly divine attribute, must always have presented itself as something abhorrent to his nature. I am judging, of course, as an outsider and as one little acquainted with theological subjects; but my impression of the two men would be that Dr. Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church in obedience to some compulsion of reason, acting in what must seem to most of us an inscrutable manner, and that Dr. Manning never would have been a Protestant at all if he had not believed that the Protestant Church was truly all which its rival claims to be.

Dr. Manning in fact did not leave the Church. The Church left him. He had misunderstood it. It became revealed at last as it really is, a church founded on the right of private judgment, and Manning was appalled and turned away from it. Something that may almost be called accident brought home to his mind the true character of the Church to which he belonged. Many readers of "The Galaxy" may have some recollection of the once celebrated Gorham case in England--a case which I shall not now describe any further than by saying that it raised the question whether the Church of England can prescribe the religion of the State. Had the Church the right to decide whether certain doctrine taught by one of its clergy was heretical, and to condemn it if so declared? In England, Church and State are so bound up together, that it is practically the State and not the Church which decides whether this or that teaching is heresy or true religion. A lord chancellor who may be an infidel, and two or three "law lords" who may be anything or nothing, settle the question in the end. We all remember the epigram about Lord Chancellor Westbury, the least godly of men, having "dismissed Hell with costs," and taken away from the English Protestant "his last hope of damnation." The Gorham case, twenty years ago, showed that the Church, as an ecclesiastical body, had no power to condemn heresy. This, to men like Stuart Mill, appears on the whole a satisfactory condition of things so long as there is a State Church, for the plain reason which he gives--namely, that the State in England is now far more liberal than the Church. But to Dr. Manning the idea of the Church thus abdicating its function of interpreting and declaring doctrine was equivalent to the renunciation of its right to existence. He strove hard to bring about an organized and solemn declaration and protest from the Church--a declaration of doctrine, a protest against secular control. He became the leader of an effort in this direction. The effort met with little support. The then Bishop of London did indeed introduce a bill into the House of Lords for the purpose of enacting that in matters of doctrine, as distinct from questions of mere law, the final decision should rest with the prelates. Dr. Manning sat in the gallery of the House of Lords on that memorable night. The Bishop of London wholly failed. The House of Lords scouted the idea of liberal England tolerating a sort of ecclesiastical inquisition. Every one admitted the anomalous condition in which things then were placed; but few indeed would think of enacting a dogma of infallibility in favor of the bishops of the Church. Lord Brougham spoke against the bill with what Dr. Manning himself admits to be plain English common sense. He said the House of Lords through its law peers could decide questions of mere ecclesiastical law, and the decisions would carry weight and authority; but neither peers nor bishops could in England decide a question of doctrine. Suppose, he asked, the bishops were divided equally on such a question, where would the decision be then? Suppose there was a very small majority, who would accept such a decision? Or even suppose there was a large majority, but that the minority comprised the few men of greatest knowledge, ability, and authority, what value would attach to the judgment of such a majority? The bill was a hopeless failure. Dr. Manning has himself described with equal candor and clearness the effect which the debate had upon him. He mentally supplemented Lord Brougham's questions by one other. Suppose that all the bishops of the Church of England should decide unanimously on any doctrine, would any one receive the decision as infallible? He was compelled to answer, "No one." The Church of England had no pretension to be the infallible spiritual guide of men. Were she to raise any such pretension, it would be rejected with contempt by the common mind of the nation. Hear then how this conviction affected the man who up to that time had had no thought but for the interests and duties of the English Church. "To those," he has himself told us, "who believed that God has established upon the earth a divine and therefore an unerring guardian and teacher of his faith, this event demonstrated that the Church of England could not be that guardian and teacher."

While Dr. Manning was still uncertain whither to turn, the celebrated "Papal aggression" took place. Cardinal Wiseman was sent to England by the Pope, with the title of Archbishop of Westminster. All England raged. Earl Russell wrote his famous "Durham Letter." The Lord Chancellor Campbell, at a public dinner in the city of London, called up a storm of enthusiasm by quoting the line from Shakespeare, which declares that

Under our feet we'll stamp the cardinal's hat.

Protestant zealots in Stockport belabored the Roman Catholics and sacked their houses; Irish laborers in Birkenhead retorted upon the Protestants. The Government brought in the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill--a measure making it penal for any Catholic prelate to call himself archbishop or bishop of any place in England. Let him be "Archbishop Wiseman" or "Cardinal Wiseman, Archbishop of Mesopotamia," as long as he liked--but not Archbishop of Westminster or Tuam. The bill was powerfully, splendidly opposed by Gladstone, Bright, and Cobden, on the broad ground that it invaded the precincts of religious liberty; but it was carried and made law. There it remained. There never was the slightest attempt made to enforce it. The Catholic prelates held to the titles the Pope had given them; and no English court, judge, magistrate, or policeman ever offered to prevent or punish them. So ludicrous, so barren a proceeding as the carrying of that measure has not been known in the England of our time.

Cardinal Wiseman was an able and a discreet man. He was calm, plausible, powerful. He was very earnest in the cause of his Church, but he seemed much more like a man of the world than Newman or Dr. Manning. There was little of the loftily spiritual in his manner or appearance. His bulky person and swollen face suggested at the first glance a sort of Abbot Boniface; he was, I believe, in reality an ascetic. The corpulence which seemed the result of good living was only the effect of ill health. He had a persuasive and an imposing way. His ability was singularly flexible. His eloquence was often too gorgeous and ornamental for a pure taste, but when the occasion needed he could address an audience in language of the simplest and most practical common sense. The same adaptability, if I may use such a word, was evident in all he did. He would talk with a cabinet minister on terms of calm equality, as if his rank must be self-evident, and he delighted to set a band of poor school children playing around him. He was a cosmopolitan--English and Irish by extraction, Spanish by birth, Roman by education. When he spoke English he was exactly like what a portly, dignified British bishop ought to be--a John Bull in every respect. When he spoke Italian at Rome he fell instinctively and at once into all the peculiarities of intonation and gesture which distinguish the people of Italy from all other races. When he conversed in Spanish he subsided into the grave, somewhat saturnine dignity and repose of the true Castilian. All this, I presume, was but the natural effect of that flexibility of temperament I have attempted to describe. I had but slight personal acquaintance with Cardinal Wiseman, and I paint him only as he impressed me, a casual observer. I am satisfied that he was a profoundly earnest and single-minded man; the testimony of many whom I know and who knew him well compels me to that conviction. But such was not the impression he would have left on a mere acquaintance. He seemed rather one who could, for a purpose which he believed great, be all things to all men. He impressed me quite differently from the manner in which I have been impressed by John Henry Newman and by Archbishop Manning. He reminded one of some great, capable, worldly-wise, astute Prince of the Church of other generations, politician rather than priest, more ready to sustain and skilled to defend the temporal power of the Papacy than to illustrate its highest spiritual influence.

The events which brought Cardinal Wiseman to England had naturally a powerful effect upon the mind of Dr. Manning. It was the renewed claim of the Roman Church to enfold England in its spiritual jurisdiction. For Dr. Manning, who had just seen what he regarded as the voluntary abdication of the English Church, the claim would in any case have probably been decisive. It "stepped between him and his fighting soul." But the personal influence of Cardinal Wiseman had likewise an immense weight and force. Dr. Manning ever since that time entertained a feeling of the profoundest devotion and reverence for Cardinal Wiseman. The change was consummated in 1851, and one of the first practical comments upon the value of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act was the announcement that a scholar and divine of whom the Protestant Church had long been especially proud had resigned his preferments, his dignities, and his prospects, and passed over to the Church of Rome. I cannot better illustrate the effect produced on the public mind than by saying that even the secession of John Henry Newman hardly made a deeper impression.

Dr. Manning, of course, rose to high rank in the church of his adoption. He became Roman of the Romans--Ultramontane of the Ultramontanes. On the death of his friend and leader, Cardinal Wiseman, whose funeral sermon he preached, Henry Manning became Archbishop of Westminster. Except for his frequent journeys to Rome, he has always since his appointment lived in London. Although a good deal of an ascetic, as his emaciated face and figure would testify, he is nothing of a hermit. He mingles to a certain extent in society, he takes part in many public movements, and he has doubtless given Mr. Disraeli ample opportunity of studying his manner and bearing. I don't believe Mr. Disraeli capable of understanding the profound devotion and single-minded sincerity of the man. A more singular, striking, marvellous figure does not stand out, I think, in our English society. Everything that an ordinary Englishman or American would regard as admirable and auspicious in the progress of our civilization, Dr. Manning calmly looks upon as lamentable and evil-omened. What we call progress is to his mind decay. What we call light is to him darkness. What we reverence as individual liberty he deplores as spiritual slavery. The mere fact that a man gives reasons for his faith seems shocking to this strangely-gifted apostle of unconditional belief. Though you were to accept on bended knees ninety-nine of the decrees of Rome, you would still be in his mind a heretic if you paused to consider as to the acceptance of the hundredth dogma. All the peculiarly modern changes in the legislation of England, the admission of Jews to Parliament, the introduction of the principle of divorce, the practical recognition of the English divine's right of private judgment, are painful and odious to him. I have never heard from any other source anything so clear, complete, and astonishing as his cordial acceptance of the uttermost claims of Rome; the prostration of all reason and judgment before the supposed supernatural attributes of the Papal throne. In one of the finest passages of his own writings he says: "My love for England begins with the England of St. Bede. Saxon England, with all its tumults, seems to me saintly and beautiful. Norman England I have always loved less, because, although majestic, it became continually less Catholic, until the evil spirit of the world broke off the light yoke of faith at the so-called Reformation. Still I loved the Christian England which survived, and all the lingering outlines of diocese and parishes, cathedrals and churches, with the names of saints upon them. It is this vision of the past which still hovers over England and makes it beautiful and full of the memories of the kingdom of God. Nay, I loved the parish church of my childhood and the college chapel of my youth, and the little church under a green hillside where the morning and evening prayers and the music of the English Bible for seventeen years became a part of my soul. Nothing is more beautiful in the natural order, and if there were no eternal world I could have made it my home." To Dr. Manning the time when saints walked the earth of England is more of a reality than the day before yesterday to most of us. Where the ordinary eye sees only a poor, ignorant Irish peasant, Dr. Manning discerns a heaven-commissioned bearer of light and truth, destined by the power of his unquestioning faith to redeem perhaps, in the end, even English philosophers and statesmen. When it was said in the praise of the murdered Archbishop of Paris that he was disposed to regret the introduction of the dogma of infallibility, Archbishop Manning came eagerly to the rescue of his friend's memory, and as one would vindicate a person unjustly accused of crime, he vindicated the dead Archbishop from the stigma of having for a moment dared to have an opinion of his own on such a subject. Of course, if Dr. Manning were an ordinary theological devotee or fanatic, there would be nothing remarkable in all this. But he is a man of the widest culture, of high intellectual gifts, of keen and penetrating judgment in all ordinary affairs, remarkable for his close and logical argument, his persuasive reasoning, and for a genial, quiet kind of humor which seems especially calculated to dissolve sophistry by its action. He is an English gentleman, a man of the world; he was educated at Oxford with Arthur Pendennis and young Lord Magnus Charters; he lives at York Place in the London of to-day; he drives down to the House of Commons and talks politics in the lobby with Gladstone and Lowe; he meets Disraeli at dinner parties, and is on friendly terms, I dare say, with Huxley and Herbert Spencer; he reads the newspapers, and I make no doubt is now well acquainted with the history of the agitation against Tammany and Boss Tweed. I think such a man is a marvellous phenomenon in our age. It is as if one of the mediaeval saints from the stained windows of a church should suddenly become infused with life and take a part in all the ways of our present world. I can understand the long-abiding power of the Catholic Church when I remember that I have heard and seen and talked with Henry Edward Manning.

Dr. Manning is not, I fancy, very much of a political reformer. His inclinations would probably be rather conservative than otherwise. He is drawn toward Gladstone and the Liberal party less by distinct political affinity, of which there is but little, than by his hope and belief that through Gladstone something will be done for that Ireland which to this Oxford scholar is still the "island of the saints." The Catholic members of Parliament, whether English or Irish, consult Archbishop Manning constantly upon all questions connected with education or religion. His parlor in York Place--not far from where Mme. Tussaud's wax-work exhibition attracts the country visitor--is the frequent scene of conferences which have their influence upon the action of the House of Commons. He is a devoted upholder of the doctrine of total abstinence from intoxicating drinks; and he is the only Englishman of real influence and ability, except Francis Newman, who is in favor of prohibitory legislation. He is the medium of communication between Rome and England; the living link of connection between the English Catholic peer and the Irish Catholic bricklayer. The position which he occupies is at all events quite distinctive. There is nobody else in England who could set up the faintest claim to any such place. It would be superfluous to remark that I do not expect the readers of "The Galaxy" to have any sympathy with the opinions, theological or political, of such a man. But the man himself is worthy of profound interest, of study, and even of admiration. He is the spirit, the soul, the ideal of mediaeval faith embodied in the form of a living English scholar and gentleman. He represents and illustrates a movement the most remarkable, possibly the most portentous, which has disturbed England and the English Church since the time of Wyckliffe. No one can have any real knowledge of the influences at work in English life to-day, no one can understand the history of the past twenty years, or even pretend to conjecture as to the possibilities of the future, who has not paid some attention to the movement which has Dr. Manning for one of its most distinguished leaders, and to the position and character of Manning himself.

JOHN RUSKIN.

Any one who has visited the National Gallery in London must have seen, and seeing must have studied, the contrasted paintings placed side by side of Turner and of Claude. They will attract attention if only because the two Turners are thus placed apart from the rooms used as a Turner Gallery, and containing the great collection of the master's works. The pictures of which I am now speaking are hung in a room principally occupied by the paintings of Murillo. As you enter you are at once attracted by four large pictures which hang on either side of the door opposite. On the right are Turner's "Dido Building Carthage," and Claude's "Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba." On the left are a "Landscape with the Sun Rising" by Turner, and "The Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca" by Claude. Nobody could fail to observe that the pictures are thus arranged for some distinct purpose. They are in fact placed side by side for the sake of comparison and contrast. They are all eminently characteristic; they have the peculiar faults and the peculiar merits of the artists. In the Claudes we have even one of those yellow trunks which are the abomination of the critic I am about to speak of, and one might almost suppose that the Queen of Sheba was embarking for Saratoga. I do not propose to criticise the pictures; but in them you have, to the full, Turner and Claude.

Now in the contrast between these pictures may be found, symbolically at least, the origin and motive of John Ruskin's career. He sprang into literary life simply as a vindicator of the fame and genius of Turner. But as he went on with his task he found, or at least he convinced himself, that the vindication of the great painter was essentially a vindication of all true art. Still further proceeding with his self-imposed task, he persuaded himself that the cause of true art was identical with the cause of truth, and that truth, from Ruskin's point of view, enclosed in the same rules and principles all the morals, all the politics, all the science, industry, and daily business of life. Therefore from an art-critic he became a moralist, a political economist, a philosopher, a statesman, a preacher--anything, everything that human intelligence can impel a man to be. All that he has written since his first appeal to the public has been inspired by this conviction--that an appreciation of the truth in art reveals to him who has it the truth in everything. This belief has been the source of Mr. Ruskin's greatest successes and of his most complete and ludicrous failures. It has made him the admiration of the world one week, and the object of its placid pity or broad laughter the next. A being who could be Joan of Arc to-day and Voltaire's Pucelle to-morrow would hardly exhibit a stronger psychical paradox than the eccentric genius of Mr. Ruskin commonly displays. But in order to understand him, or to do him common justice--in order not to regard him as a mere erratic utterer of eloquent contradictions, poured out on the impulse of each moment's new freak of fancy--we must always bear in mind this fundamental faith of the man. Extravagant as this or that doctrine may be, outrageous as to-day's contradiction of yesterday's assertion may be, yet the whole career is consistent with its essential principles and belief.

Ruskin was singularly fitted by fortune to live for a purpose; to consecrate his life to the cause of art and of what he considered truth. As everybody knows, he was born to wealth so considerable as to allow him to indulge all his tastes and whims, and to write without any regard for money profit. I hardly know of any other author of eminence who in our time has worked with so complete an independence of publisher, public, or paymaster. I do not suppose Ruskin ever wrote one line for money. Some of his works must have brought him in a good return of mere pounds and shillings; but they would have been written just the same if they had never paid for printing; and indeed the author is always spending money on some benevolent crotchet. He was born in London, and he himself attributes much of his early love for nature to the fact that he was "accustomed for two or three years to no other prospect than that of the brick walls over the way," and that he had "no brothers nor sisters nor companions." I question whether anybody not acquainted with London can understand how completely one can be shut in from the pure face of free nature in that vast city. In New York one can hardly walk far in any direction without catching glimpses of the water and the shores of New Jersey or Long Island. But in some of the most respectable middle-class regions of London, you might drudge away or dream away your life and never have one sight of open nature unless you made a regular expedition to find her. Ruskin speaks somewhere of the strange and exquisite delight which the cockney feels when he treads on grass; and every biographical sketch of him recalls that passage in his writings which tells us of the first thing he could remember as an event in his life--his being taken by his nurse to the brow of one of the crags overlooking Derwentwater, and the "intense joy, mingled with awe, that I had in looking through the hollows in the mossy roots over the crag into the dark lake, and which has associated itself more or less with all twining roots of trees ever since." Ruskin travelled much, and at a very early age, through Europe. He became familiar with most of the beautiful show-places of the European Continent when a boy, and I believe he never extended the sphere of his travels. About his early life there is little to be said. He completed his education at Oxford, and, more successful than Arthur Pendennis, he went in for a prize poem and won the prize. He visited the Continent, more especially Switzerland and Italy, again and again. He married a Scottish lady, and the marriage was not a happy one. I don't propose to go into any of the scandal and talk which the events created; but I may say that the marriage was dissolved without any moral blame resting on or even imputed to either of the parties, and that the lady afterwards became the wife of Mr. Millais. Since then Mr. Ruskin has led a secluded rather than a lonely life. His constitution is feeble; he has as little robustness of _physique_ as can well be conceived, and no kind of excitement is suitable for him. Only the other day he sank into a condition of such exhaustion that for a while it was believed impossible he could recover. At one time he used to appear in public rather often; and was ready to deliver lectures on the ethics of art wherever he thought his teaching could benefit the ignorant or the poor. He was especially ready to address assemblages of workingmen, the pupils of charitable institutions for the teaching of drawing. I cannot remember his ever having taken part in any fashionable pageant or demonstration of any kind. Of late he has ceased to show himself at any manner of public meeting, and he addresses his favorite workingmen through the medium of an irregular little publication, a sort of periodical or tract which he calls "Fors Clavigera." Of this publication "I send a copy," he announces, "to each of the principal journals and periodicals, to be noticed or not at their pleasure; otherwise, I shall use no advertisements." The author also informs us that "the tracts will be sold for sevenpence each, without abatement on quantity." I doubt whether many sales have taken place, or whether the reference to purchase in quantity was at all necessary, or whether indeed the author cared one way or the other. In one of these printed letters he says: "The scientific men are busy as ants, examining the sun and the moon and the seven stars; and can tell me all about them, I believe, by this time, and how they move and what they are made of. And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they move nor what they are made of. I can't move them any other way than they go, nor make them of anything else better than they are made." This might sound wonderfully sharp and practical, if, a few pages on, Mr. Ruskin did not broach his proposition for the founding of a little model colony of labor in England, where boys and girls alike are to be taught agriculture, vocal music, Latin, and the history of five cities--Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, and London. This scheme was broached last August, and it is rather soon yet even to ask whether any steps have been taken to put it into execution; but Mr. Ruskin has already given five thousand dollars to begin with, and will probably give a good deal more before he acknowledges the inevitable failure. Ruskin lives in one of the most beautiful of London suburbs, on Denmark Hill, at the south side of the river, near Dulwich and the exquisite Sydenham slopes where the Crystal Palace stands. Here he indulges his love of pictures and statues, and of rest--when he is not in the mood for unrest--and nourishes philanthropic schemes of eccentric kinds, and is altogether about the nearest approach to an independent, self-sufficing philosopher our modern days have known. Of his life as a private citizen this much is about all that it concerns us to hear.

Twenty-eight years have passed away since Mr. Ruskin leaped into the critical arena, with a spring as bold and startling as that of Edward Kean on the Kemble-haunted stage. The little volume, so modest in its appearance, so self-sufficient in its tone, which the author defiantly flung down like a gage of battle before the world, was entitled "Modern Painters: their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters. By a Graduate of Oxford." I was a boy of thirteen, living in a small provincial town, when this book made its first appearance, but it seems to me that the echo of the sensation it created still rings in my ears. It was a challenge to all established beliefs and prejudices; and the challenge was delivered in the tones of one who felt confident that he could make good his words against any and all opponents. If there was one thing that more than another seemed to have been fixed and rooted in the English mind, it was that Claude and one or two other of the old masters possessed the secret of landscape painting. When, therefore, this bold young dogmatist involved in one common denunciation "Claude, Gaspar Poussin, Salvator Rosa, Ruysdael, Paul Potter, Cavaletto, and the various Van-Somethings and Koek-Somethings, more especially and malignantly those who have libelled the sea," it was no wonder that affronted authority raised its indignant voice and thundered at him. Affronted authority, however, gained little by its thunder. The young Oxford graduate possessed, along with genius and profound conviction, an imperturbable and magnificent self-conceit, against which the surges of angry criticism dashed themselves in vain. Mr. Ruskin, when putting on his armor, had boasted himself as one who takes it off; but in his case there proved to be little rashness in the premature fortification. For assuredly that book overrode and bore down its critics. I need not follow it through its various editions, its successive volumes, its amplifications, wherein at last the original design, the vindication of Turner, swelled into an enunciation and illustration of the true principles of landscape art. Nor do I mean to say that the book carried all its points. Far from it. Claude still lives, and Salvator Rosa has his admirers, among whom most of us are very glad to enroll ourselves; and Ruskin himself has since that time pointed out many serious defects in Turner, and has unsaid a great deal of what he then proclaimed. But if the Oxford graduate had been wrong in every illustration of his principal doctrine, I should still hold that the doctrine itself was true and of inestimable value, and that the book was a triumph. For, I think, it proclaimed and firmly established the true point of view from which we must judge of the art of painting in all its departments. In plain words, Ruskin taught the English public that they must look at nature with their own eyes, and judge of art by the help of nature. Up to the publication of that book England, at least, had been falling into the way of regarding art as a sort of polite school to which it was our duty to endeavor to make nature conform. Conventionality and apathy had sunk apparently into the very souls of men and women. Hardly one in ten thousand ever really saw a landscape, a wave, a ray of the sun as it is. Nobody used his own eyes. Every one was content to think that he saw what the painters told him he saw. Ruskin himself tells us somewhere about a test question which used to be put to young landscape painters by one who was supposed to be a master of the craft: "Where do you put your brown tree?" The question illustrates the whole theory and school of conventionality. Conventionality had decreed first that there are brown trees, and next that there cannot be a respectable landscape without a brown tree. Long after the teaching of Ruskin had well-nigh revolutionized opinion in England, I stood once with a lover of art of the old-fashioned school, looking on one of the most beautiful and famous scenes in England. The tender autumn season, the melancholy woods in the background, the little lake, the half-ruined abbey, did not even need the halo of poetic and romantic association which hung around them in order to render the scene a very temptation, one might have thought, to the true artist. I suggested something of the kind. My companion shook his head almost contemptuously. "You could never make a picture of that," he said. I pressed him to tell me why so picturesque a scene could not be represented somehow in a picture. He did not care evidently to argue with ignorance, and he even endeavored to concede something to my untutored whim. "Perhaps," he began with hesitation, "if one were to put a large dark tree in there to the left, one might make something of it. But no" (he had done his best and could not humor me any further), "it is out of the question; there couldn't be a picture made out of _that_." How could I illustrate more clearly the kind of thing which Ruskin came to put down and did put down in England?

Of course Mr. Ruskin was never a man to do anything by halves, and having once laid down the canon that nature and truth are to be the guides of the artist, he soon began to write and to think as if nature and truth alone were concerned. He seemed to have taken no account of the fact that one great object of art is simply to give delight, and that however natural and truthful an artist may be, yet he is to bear in mind this one purpose of his work, or he might almost as well let it alone. Nature and truth are to be his guides to the delighting of men; to show him how he is to give a delight which shall be pure and genuine. A single inaccuracy as to fact seems at one time to have spoiled all Mr. Ruskin's enjoyment of a painting, and filled him with a feeling of scorn and detestation for it. He denounces Raphael's "Charge to Peter," on the ground that the apostles are not dressed as men of that time and place would have been when going out fishing; and he makes no allowance for the fact, pointed out by M. Taine, that Raphael's design first of all was to represent a group of noble, serious men, majestic and picturesque, and that mere realism entered little into his purpose. It may seem the oddest thing to compare Ruskin with Macaulay, but it is certain that the very kind of objection which the former urges against the paintings of Raphael the latter brings forward against one of the poems of Goldsmith. "What would be thought of a painter," asks Macaulay, "who would mix January and August in one landscape, who would introduce a frozen river into a harvest scene? Would it be a sufficient defence of such a picture to say that every part was exquisitely colored; that the green hedges, the apple trees loaded with fruit, the wagons reeling under the yellow sheaves, and the sunburned reapers wiping their foreheads, were very fine; and that the ice and the boys sliding were also very fine? To such a picture the 'Deserted Village' bears a great resemblance." Now it would indeed be an incomprehensible mistake if a painter were to mix up August and January as Macaulay suggests, or to depict the apostles like a group of Greek philosophers, as in Ruskin's opinion Raphael did. But I venture to think that even the extraordinary blunder mentioned in the first part of the sentence would not necessarily condemn a picture to utter contempt. It was a great mistake to make Dido and Iulus contemporaries; a great mistake to represent angels employing gunpowder for the suppression of Lucifer's insurrection; a great mistake to talk of the clock having struck in the time of Julius Caesar. Yet I suppose Virgil and Milton and Shakespeare were great poets, and that the very passages in which those errors occur are nevertheless genuine poetry. Now Ruskin criticises Raphael and Claude on precisely the principle which would declare Virgil, Milton, and Shakespeare worthless because of the errors I have mentioned. The errors are errors no doubt, and ought to be pointed out, and there an end. Virgil was not writing a history of the foundation of Carthage. Shakespeare was not describing the social life of Rome under Julius Caesar. Milton was not a gazetteer of the revolt of Lucifer and his angels. Mr. Ruskin might as well dispose of a sculptured group of Centaurs by remarking that there never were Centaurs, or of the famous hermaphrodite in the Louvre by explaining that hermaphrodites of that perfect order are unknown to physiology. The beauty of color and contour, the effect of graceful grouping, the reach of poetic imagination, the dignity of embodied thought, outlive all such criticism even when in its way it is just, for they bear in themselves the vindication of their existence. But Ruskin's criticism is the legitimate result of the cardinal error of his career--the belief that the morality of art exactly corresponds with the morality of human life; that there is a central law of right and wrong for everything, like Stephen Pearl Andrews's universal science, of which when you have once got the key you can open every lock--which is the solving word of every enigma, the standard by which everything is finally to be judged. I need not show how he followed out that creed and gave it a new application in "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" and the "Stones of Venice." In these masterpieces of eloquent declamation, the building of houses was brought up to be tried according to Mr. Ruskin's self-constructed canons of aesthetic and architectural morality. No one, I venture to think, cares much about the doctrine; everybody is carried away by the eloquence, the originality, and the feeling. Later still Mr. Ruskin applied the same central, all-pervading principle to the condemnation of fluttering ribbons in a woman's bonnet. The stucco of a house he set down as false and immoral, like the painting of a meretricious cheek. His aesthetic transcendentalism soon ceased to have any practical influence. It would be idle to try to persuade English house-builders that the attributes of a building are moral qualities, and that the component parts of a London residence ought to symbolize and embody "action," "voice," and "beauty." It may be doubted whether a single architect was ever practically influenced by the dogmatic eloquence of Mr. Ruskin. In fact the architects, above all other men, rebelled against the books and scorned them. But the books made their way with the public, who, caring nothing about the principles of morality which underlie the construction of houses, were charmed by the dazzling rhetoric, the wealth of gorgeous imagery, the interesting and animated digressions, the frequent flashes of vigorous good sense, and the lofty thought whose only fault was that which least affected the ordinary reader--its utter inapplicability to the practical subject of the books.

It was about the year 1849 that that great secession movement in art broke out to which its leaders chose to give the title of pre-Raphaelite. The principal founder of the movement has since been almost forgotten as an artist, but has come into a sort of celebrity as a poet--Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With him were allied, it is almost needless to say, the two now famous and successful painters, Holman Hunt and Millais. Decidedly that was the most thriving controversy in the world of art and letters during our time. It was the only battle of schools which could tell us what the war for and against the Sturm-und-Drang school in Germany, the Byron epoch in England, the struggle of the Classicists and Romanticists in France, must have been like. The pre-Raphaelite dispute has long ceased to be heard. Years ago Mr. Ruskin himself, the prophet and apostle of the new sect, described the defection of its greatest pupil as "not a fall, but a catastrophe." Rossetti's sonnets are criticised, but not his paintings. "Are not you still a pre-Raphaelite?" asked an inquisitive person lately of the sonneteer. "I am not an 'ite' of any kind," was the answer; "I am an artist." John Everett Millais is among the most fortunate and fashionable painters of the day. Those who saw his wonderful "Somnambulist" in last season's exhibition of the London Royal Academy would have found in it little of the harsh and "crawling realism" which distinguished the "Beauty in Bricks Brotherhood," as somebody called the rebellious school of twenty years ago. A London comic paper lately published a capital likeness of Mr. Millais, handsome, respectable, tending to stoutness and baldness, and described the portrait as that of the converted pre-Raphaelite. The progress of things was exactly similar to that which goes on in the English political world so often. A fiery young Radical member of Parliament begins by denouncing the Government and the constitution. He wins first notoriety, and then, if he has any real stuff in him, reputation; and then he is invited to office, and he takes it and becomes respectable, wealthy, and fashionable; and his rebellion is all over, and the world goes on just as before. Such was, so far as individuals are concerned, the course of the pre-Raphaelite rebellion; undoubtedly the movement did some good; most rebellions do. It was a protest against the vague and feeble generalizations and the vapid classicism which were growing too common in art. Ruskin himself has happily described the generalized and conventional way of painting trees and shrubs which was growing to be common and tolerated, and which he says was no less absurd than if a painter were to depict some anomalous animal, and defend it as a generalization of pig and pony. Anything which teaches a careful and rigid study of nature must do good. The pre-Raphaelite school was excellent discipline for its young scholars. Probably even those of Millais's paintings which bear on the face of them least evident traces of that early school, might have been far inferior to what they are, were it not for the slow and severe study which the original principles of the movement demanded. The present interest which the secession has for me is less on its own account than because of the vigorous, ingenious, and eloquent pages which Ruskin poured forth in its vindication. He gave it meanings which it never had; found out truth and beauty in its most prosaic details such as its working scholars never meant to symbolize; he explained and expounded it as Johnson did the meaning of the word "slow" in the opening line of the "Traveller," and in fact well-nigh persuaded himself and the world that a new priesthood had arisen to teach the divinity of art. But even he could not write pre-Raphaelitism into popularity and vitality. The common instinct of human nature, which looks to art as the representative of beauty, pathos, humor, and passion, could not be talked into an acceptance of ignoble and ugly realisms. It may be an error to depict a Judean fisherman like a stately Greek philosopher; but error for error, it is far less gross and grievous than to paint the exquisite heroine of Keats's lovely poem as a lank and scraggy spinster, with high cheek bones like one of Walter Scott's fishwives, undressing herself in a green moonlight, and displaying a neck and shoulders worthy of Miss Miggs, and stays and petticoat that bring to mind Tilly Slowboy.

The pre-Raphaelite mania faded away, but Ruskin's vindication endures; just as the letters of Pascal are still read by every one, although nobody cares "two copper spangles" about the controversy which provoked them. Mr. Ruskin's mental energy did not long lie fallow. Turning the bull's-eye of his central theory upon other subjects, he dragged political economy up for judgment. Who can forget the whimsical sensation produced by the appearance in the "Cornhill Magazine" of the letters entitled "Unto this Last"? I need not say much about them. They were a series of fantastic sermons, sometimes eloquent and instructive, sometimes turgid and absurd, on the moral duty of man. They had literally nothing to do with the subject of political economy. The political economists were talking of one thing, and Mr. Ruskin was talking of another and a totally different thing. The value of an article is what it will bring in the market, say the economists. "For shame!" cries Mr. Ruskin; "is the value of her rudder to a ship at sea in a tempest only what it would be bought for at home in Wapping?" So on through the whole, the two disputants talking on quite different subjects. Mr. Ruskin might just as reasonably have interrupted a medical professor lecturing to his class on the effects and uses of castor oil, by telling him in eloquent verbiage that castor oil will not make men virtuous and nations great. Nobody ever said it would; but it is important to explain the properties of castor oil for all that. It would be a grand thing of course if, as Mr. Ruskin prayed, England would "cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom they first arose," and leave "the sands of the Indus and the adamant of Golconda" to "stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash from the turban of the slave." This would be ever so much finer than opening banks, making railways (which Mr. Ruskin specially detests), and dealing in stocks. But it has nothing to do, good or bad, with the practical exposition of the economic laws of banking and exchange. It is about as effective a refutation of the political economist's doctrines as a tract from the Peace Society denouncing all war would be to a lecture from Von Moltke on the practical science of campaigning. But Mr. Ruskin never saw this, and never was disconcerted. He turned to other missions with the firm conviction that he had finished off political economy, as a clever free-thinking London lady calmly announced a few years back to her friends that she had abolished Christianity. Then Mr. Ruskin condemned mines and factories, railways and engines. With all the same strenuous and ornate eloquence he passed sentence on London pantomimes and "cascades of girls," and the too liberal exposure of "lower limbs" by the young ladies composing those cascades. Nothing is too trivial for the omniscient philosopher, and nothing is too great. The moral government of a nation is decreed by the same voice and on the same principles as those which have prescribed the length of a lady's waist-ribbon and the shape of a door-scraper. The first Napoleon never claimed for himself the divine right of intermeddling with and arranging everything more complacently than does the mild and fragile philosopher of Denmark Hill. Be it observed that his absolute ignorance of a subject never deters Mr. Ruskin from pronouncing prompt judgment upon it. It may be some complicated question of foreign, say of American politics, on which men of good ability, who have mastered all the facts and studied the arguments on both sides, are slow to pronounce. Mr. Ruskin, boldly acknowledging that until this morning he never heard of the subject, settles it out of hand and delivers final judgment. Sometimes his restless impulses and his extravagant way of plunging at conclusions and conjecturing facts lead him into unpleasant predicaments. He delivered a manifesto some years ago upon the brutality of the lower orders of Englishmen, founded on certain extraordinary persecutions inflicted on his friend Thomas Carlyle. Behold Carlyle himself coming out with a letter in which he declares that all these stories of persecution were not only untrue, but were "curiously the reverse of truth." Of course every one knew that Ruskin believed them to be true; that he half heard something, conjectured something else, jumped at a conclusion, and as usual regarded himself as an inspired prophet, compelled by his mission to come forward and deliver judgment on a sinful people.