would be learned, which can be learned in no other manner. As the history of states is generally written, the greatest and most momentous revolutions seem to come upon them like supernatural inflictions, without warning or cause. But the fact is, that such revolutions are almost always the consequences of moral changes, which have gradually passed on the mass of the community, and which ordinarily proceed far before their progress is indicated by any public measure. An intimate knowledge of the domestic history of nations is therefore absolutely necessary to the prognosis of political events. narrative, defective in this respect, is as useless as a medical treatise which should pass by all the symptoms attendant on the early stage of a disease and mention only what occurs when the patient is beyond the reach of remedies.

A

A historian, such as we have been attempting to describe, would indeed be an intellectual prodigy. In his mind, powers scarcely compatible with each other must be tempered into an exquisite harmony. We shall sooner see another Shakespeare or another Homer. The highest excellence to which any single faculty can be brought would be less surprising than such a happy and delicate combination of qualities. Yet the contemplation of imaginary models is not an unpleasant or useless employment of the mind. It cannot indeed produce perfection; but it produces improvement, and nourishes that generous and liberal fastidiousness which is not inconsistent with the strongest sensibility to merit, and which, while it exalts our conceptions of the art, does not render us unjust to the artist.

IX

RUSKIN

RUSKIN:

THE IMPASSIONED CRITIC

M

ATTHEW ARNOLD once spoke of poetry as "a criticism of life."

He

might better have called it a personal interpretation of life. In the sense that Mr. Arnold used the word criticism, the writings of all the great essay writers have been essentially criticisms of life. Bacon's was an analytic criticism, Swift's a satirical criticism, Lamb's a loving criticism, and so on. But all these writers chose for the most part subjects which they could only illustrate, or which they might use as a vehicle for conveying their own personality or their view of life to the reader. When the subject itself is the centre of the writer's interest, and he seriously wishes to analyze or illustrate it, he becomes a critic in the modern technical sense of the word.

Ruskin was from beginning to end essentially a critic. He first undertook in his "Modern Painters" to illustrate and analyze certain phases of modern painting. To accomplish his object fully he must present by description the things of which he wishes to speak, or he must present by means of descriptions certain objects which he

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wishes to use for purposes of illustration. It was the vividness of these incidental descriptions that first attracted attention to Ruskin's style and gave him the name "prose poet." To create "prose poems," however, was farthest from his own thought, and we should fail to understand these purple patches (purpureus pannus, in the language of Horace), such, for example, as the description of Turner's "Slave Ship" at the end of the chapter on "Sea-painting," should we separate them from their practical use of incidental illustration. Ruskin wrote these highly colored bits almost unconsciously,1 we must believe, and simply for the reason that he was passionately interested in his subject. Being a man of passionate devotion, he wrote with passion. Had he been a mere seer of pictures, he would have been a poet; but as he was a thinker, and his mind had an analytic turn, he became a true critic, though none the less passionate because he wrote criticism instead of poetry.

Ruskin began as a young man with art criticism and the criticism of architecture. His real interest was in nature and the effect of art on human nature. His study of the whole problem of the action of art on humanity and humanity on art led him at last to look into the conditions which made human beings blind to art. As was always the case with him, he entered upon this

1 We find the same picturesque language in his note-books, intended merely for his own personal reference.