Charles Lamb, on The Productions of Modern Art,' and 'The Genius and Character of Hogarth.' In Wilkie's letters there is the same strain of thinking; nor, when true art criticism is spoken of, should some old papers in Fraser's Magazine' be forgotten, which bore the now well-known signature of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. What good can be said of the academicians' lectures of Barry and the fluent Opie, with their worship of the Caracci-or of the fanciful Fuseli? It may be our own fault, but neither do we find ourselves much instructed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, either in his lectures, or in his special criticisms on the great pictures of the Continent. He is always sound, so far as he goes; he is generous and hearty in his estimates, seeing the best of everything; but, partly from his own habit of mind, partly because our modern analysis was a stranger to his age, he seems to have rested at the outward form-never to have penetrated to the soul of art. Later critics-too proud to learn of Ruskin-have not much improved matters. Kugler is declamatory, and restlessly inquisitive after hidden meanings; Waagen is hard, unenthusiastic, and technical.

Now

Much may be said both for and against technicalities. It were mere folly to denounce them altogether; but after all their main value consists in this, that they conduce to brevity. They are a sort of formula; and, like all formulæ, can only be understood by the initiated. Therefore their use should be confined to occasions when the initiated alone are addressed; in all writing intended for the unprofessional public, they should be carefully avoided. Their place can easily be supplied by two or three additional words of plain English; and prolixity is better than obscurity. We may be uncharitable, but we suspect that the inveterate use of them arises from a desire to seem learned. we have the less patience with this folly, because art has suffered from it severely. People have been led to believe that in order, not to judge of a picture, but even to understand the principles by which a picture should be judged, it is necessary to get up' a whole vocabulary of hard words. Accordingly the public have turned away from the matter altogether, and have surrendered themselves up to guides too often unworthy. Since the days of Goldsmith, the art critic has been a good deal of a humbug: his trick, of course, being 'to say the painter might have done better had he done his best, and to praise the works of Pietro Perugino. To this day, why are popular notices of pictures in our best papers expressed in a mysterious jargon? It is not so with their literary articles. In them ideas are conveyed in plain English; it is not thought necessary to obscure the meaning by hard grammatical terms. The public understand what is said, and are instructed by it. Hence they are able to form literary

Absence of Technicalities in his Writings.

5

judgments for themselves, and they have confidence in these judgments. But the public has little confidence in its judgments with regard to pictures. And, indeed, the less it has the better; because its judgments are formed upon no principle, and are utterly worthless. But what is the reason of this? Not, surely, that a picture is harder to understand than a book. No; but the reason is rather this, that the public have never been taught to comprehend painting, because for years and years almost all criticism on pictures has been so expressed as to be quite unintelligible. To understand pictures is not easy; to criticise them worthily, is very hard; but neither difficulty is simplified by all ideas regarding them being communicated in an unknown tongue. The first great excellence which we admire in Mr Ruskin, is his freedom from all this wretched affectation. He has written the most profound art criticism in the English language; and he has so written it, that any man of ordinary education can readily discern his meaning. This has not arisen from ignorance; on the contrary, here, as elsewhere, simplicity has flowed from knowledge. It certainly seems rather odd to notice, as a special merit in an author, the fact that he knows his subject. But the truth is, that with regard to this particular subject, such merit is by no means very common. It has been possessed by very few of the writers who are so fond of darkening what counsel they have by the use of long words. And, indeed, on any subject, knowledge such as Mr Ruskin's is rare. We may dispute the soundness of his judgments; but we cannot dispute the extent and the accuracy of his knowledge. He has seen, we believe, every great picture in Europe, and he has studied each one with as much minuteness as if he had never seen any other. And at the same time, with an avoidance of pedantry which deserves high praise, he has confined his minuter criticism, so far as was possible, to well-known pictures-more particularly to works in the Dulwich and National Galleries. His readers are, therefore, the better able to comprehend him, while at the same time they reap the benefit of his more extended experience. It is hardly necessary to say that such experience has not been gained without hard and constant labour. Writers who labour to depreciate Mr Ruskin should pause with reverence, if they have any reverence in them, before such a passage as the following:

The winter was spent mainly in trying to get at the mind of Titian; not a light winter's task; of which the issue, being in many ways very unexpected to me (the reader will find it partly told towards the close of this volume), necessitated my going in the spring to Berlin, to see Titian's portrait of Lavinia there, and to Dresden to see the Tribute Money, the elder Lavinia, and girl in white, with the flag fan. Another portrait, at Dresden, of a lady in a dress of rose and gold, by me un

heard of before, and one of an admiral, at Munich, had like to have kept me in Germany all summer.'-Modern Painters, vol. v., Preface, p. viii.

Surely such a simple, unaffected picture of conscientious work must command our respect. The reward has been that, on art, Mr Ruskin never speaks without authority. It is lamentable to think how many opinions he has expressed on other subjects, to the formation of which he has devoted no similar toil.

Nor are Mr Ruskin's qualifications limited to a knowledge of pictures. From his thorough knowledge of technical details, we might expect to find that Mr Ruskin was himself an artist, as well as the great critic of art; and so, in truth, we find it to be. Never, we should think, before was book so written and so illustrated by one man. It would be, of course, unjust minutely to criticise Mr Ruskin's powers as an artist; because he uses those powers only to illustrate his teaching-his drawings are all in subordination to his words. He has used them as means only-to bring out fully some excellence in Turner; to show some curious wonders of rock, or leaf, or moss; to catch some aspect, more lovely than common, of earth, or sea, or air. Yet the most inexperienced observer cannot fail to see proofs of a capacity which would have made him a great painter had he not been a great poet. Every one will mark his delicacy and accuracy of drawing, his deep feeling of colour, his laborious truth, and the thought which breathes through all. His drawings of Venice are grand in their light and shade, and bold even to audacity in their strict fidelity to fact. What sacredness, and awe, and tenderness of heavenly radiance in The Rocks of Arona. What strength of the hills is seen exultant in the Buttresses of the Alps.' And, in a different style, how are our minds possessed by serenity and quiet enjoyment, as we look on 'Peace, and the 'Moat of Nuremburg. The patient and various labour of Mr. Ruskin is astonishing. He will accurately follow out the traceries of the richest architecture; he will render lovingly the markings of the smallest wild-flower; and then he passes, seemingly without effort, to the Cloud Flocks' or the 'Sunset on Monte Rosa.' Indeed his descriptions of the aspects of the sky are hardly more abounding in truth and beauty than his drawings of them. He is, what some wit called Turner, the very Prince of the Power of the Air. With equal truth he gives us the clouds now sweeping in stormy grandeur; now calmly floating, like angels' wings, in the far distance of the higher heaven; now clustering in gorgeous pomp around the sunset; now lying dark against the fading orange of the evening sky. And in all this there is a quietness and freedom from exaggeration which does not always pervade Mr Ruskin's writings. There is, undoubtedly,

His Observation of Nature.

7

a literalness and want of abandonment in the drawings, which would be a drawback, but that it is appropriate to their position as illustrations. Their end is merely to enforce what is said; and this they do plainly and forcibly, yet with exceeding beauty. The combination gives to Mr Ruskin's books a completeness quite their own. The desire of the eye is fulfilled. By these drawings and etchings, Mr Ruskin has not only made us understand his own writings better, but has done more for art than all the Art Unions that ever existed.

He

Next among Mr Ruskin's qualifications for his task must be mentioned his wonderfully minute observation of nature. has watched her in her every aspect: he is familiar with every detail of her working. And yet, with his careful noting of particulars, he has never lost sight of the poetry of nature as a whole. His is not the spirit of the botanist who pulls to pieces a weed in a ditch, blind to the expanse of beauty which lies spread out before him. Take, for instance, the conclusion of the chapter on the 'Truth of Clouds,' in vol. i.: the knowledge therein displayed, of the various effects of sky, must have cost years of study; yet we are never allowed to dwell unduly on any detail, but are filled and exalted by the grandeur of the panorama which the power of real eloquence makes visible to the eye of the imagination-the procession of the clouds over the face of the heavens from early morning, through stormy noon, through evening in tempest, through the serenity of midnight, until sunrise comes round again. Not only does he love nature with exceeding love, but he invests her with personality, and half dreams that his love can be returned. Quaint, perhaps, but very beautiful, is his fancy that nature must have grieved over the neglect of mankind in the rude olden times.

'For in like manner the whole of Nature only shone hitherto for man between the tossing of helmet-crests; and sometimes I cannot but think of the trees of the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, in that imperfect life of theirs, as they opened their innocent leaves in the warm spring-time, in vain for men; and all along the dells of England her beeches cast their dappled shade only where the outlaw drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; and by the sweet French rivers their long ranks of poplar waved in the twilight, only to show the flames of burning cities, on the horizon, through the tracery of their stems; amidst the fair defiles of the Apennines, the twisted olive trunks hid the ambushes of treachery; and on their valley meadows, day by day, the hills which were white at the dawn were washed with crimson at sunset.'-Modern Painters, vol. v., p. 5.

By how long an intercourse this sympathy with nature has been fostered, with what patient labour this knowledge of her secrets has been acquired, is shown by the chapter on the

'Truth of Water,' in vol. i. We have there quotations given from diaries at Venice and at Geneva, in which the various phenomena of water are marked down and discussed-how a sky is reflected in blue, while the hulls of vessels on the same sea are reflected in pale sea-green, their orange masts reflected in the same colour, white and red stripes round their gunwales neglected by the water altogether-why one boat throws a shadow, and another throws no shadow at all. Unwearied observation, notebooks filled with sketches of water-effects taken on the spot, with remarks on their peculiarities-such has been Mr Ruskin's way of working; and it is a way of working which entitles a man to speak with some decision. In his own words, his secret is 'watchfulness, experience, affection, and trust in nature.' No other man living, we think, could have written the section on 'Leaf Beauty' with which the fifth volume opens. The following exquisite passage on pines exemplifies both the characteristics of which we have spoken-the observation, and the deep feeling:—

'Then note, further, their perfectness. The impression on most people's minds must have been received more from pictures than reality, so far as I can judge;-so ragged they think the pine; whereas its chief character in health is green and full roundness. It stands compact, like one of its own cones, slightly curved on its sides, finished and quaint as a carved tree in some Elizabethan garden; and instead of being wild in expression, forms the softest of all forest scenery; for other trees show their trunks and twisting boughs: but the pine growing either in luxuriant mass or in happy isolation, allows no branch to be seen. Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or down to the very grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there is nothing but green cone and green carpet. Nor is it only softer, but in one sense more cheerful than other foliage; for it casts only a pyramidal shadow. Lowland forest arches overhead, and chequers the ground with darkness; but the pine, growing in scattered groups, leaves the glades between emerald-bright. Its gloom is all its own; narrowing into the sky, it lets the sunshine strike down to the dew. And if ever a superstitious feeling comes over me among the pineglades, it is never tainted with the old German forest fear; but is only a more solemn tone of the fairy enchantment that haunts our English meadows; so that I have always called the prettiest pine-glade in Chamouni, "Fairies' Hollow." It is in the glen beneath the steep ascent above Pont Pelissier, and may be reached by a little winding path which goes down from the top of the hill; being, indeed, not truly a glen, but a broad ledge of moss and turf, leaning in a formidable precipice (which, however, the gentle branches hide) over the Arve. An almost isolated rock promontory, many-coloured, rises at the end of it. On the other sides it is bordered by cliffs, from which a little cascade falls, literally, down among the pines, for it is so light, shaking itself into mere showers of seed pearl in the sun, that the