His Interpretations of Pictures.

9

pines don't know it from mist, and grow through it without minding. Underneath, there is only the mossy silence, and above, for ever, the snow of the nameless Aiguille.'-Modern Painters, vol. v., pp. 84, 85.

Perfect familiarity with the best pictures, a thorough practical knowledge of art, clearly defined principles of truth and goodness, an understanding of nature probably unequalled— these qualifications go a long way to make a competent art critic. Mr Ruskin adds to them a command of language which has certainly never been surpassed by any writer of English prose. Wielding such an instrument, he can adequately expound to readers all that his discerning eye can see in the great masterpieces of art. His power of interpreting pictures is astonishing. As a general rule, no writing is less effective than what is called word-painting. It is for the most part unsatisfactoryfailing altogether to convey any adequate conception of the original. But it is not so in the hands of Mr Ruskin. His fervid imagination enables him to realize, his abounding style enables him to express, the whole meaning of the painter. Not indeed perfectly, but yet in no small degree, the picture is brought before the reader. Such are the descriptions of "The Slave Ship,' of the 'Baptism' and of the 'Crucifixion' by Tintoret, and of the Massacre of the Innocents' by Raphael. We can imagine no more instructive task than to take a good engraving of any picture which Mr Ruskin has thus handled, and to compare it carefully, point by point, with the eloquent explanation. Any one who did this once or twice conscientiously, would thereby gain more real knowledge of art than by listlessly wandering round dozens of galleries. The instances we have alluded to have been often quoted before. We prefer to give, in illustration of what we have said, a few sentences by Mr Ruskin on the St Barbara and the St Elisabeth in the Pinacothek of Munich :

'I do not know, among the pictures of the great sacred schools, any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically expressive of the need of the heart that conceived them. Not ascetic, nor quaint, nor feverishly or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities of thought. Only entirely true-entirely pure. No depth of glowing heaven beyond them, but the clear, sharp sweetness of the northern air: no splendour of rich colour, striving to adorn them with better brightness than that of the day: a gray glory, as of moonlight without mist, dwelling on face and fold of dress;-all faultless-fair. Creatures they are, humble by nature, not by self-condemnation; merciful by habit, not by tearful impulse; lofty without consciousness; gentle without weakness; wholly in this present world, doing its work calmly; beautiful with all that holiest life can reach, yet already freed from all that holiest death can cast away.'-Cornhill Magazine, vol. i., p. 328.

His descriptions of scenery are not less celebrated. We select two, certainly, we think, among the best, and also interesting from the contrast. The first is a Highland, the second an Italian, landscape.

'I was reading but the other day, in a book by a zealous, useful, and able Scotch clergyman, one of these rhapsodies, in which he described a scene in the Highlands to show (he said) the goodness of God. In this Highland scene there was nothing but sunshine, and fresh breezes, and bleating lambs, and clean tartans, and all manner of pleasantness. Now a Highland scene is, beyond dispute, pleasant enough in its own way; but, looked close at, has its shadows. Here, for instance, is the very fact of one, as pretty as I can remember— having seen many. It is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by jutting rocks and broad flakes of nodding fern. From one side of it to the other winds, serpentine, a clear brown stream, drooping into quicker ripple as it reaches the end of the oval field, and then, first islanding a purple and white rock with an amber pool, it dashes away into a narrow fall of foam under a thicket of mountainash and alder. The autumn sun, low but clear, shines on the scarlet ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves, which, fallen here and there, when the breeze has not caught them, rest quiet in the crannies of the purple rock. Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket, the carcass of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, lies nearly bare to the bone, its white ribs protruding through the skin, raven-torn; and the rags of its wool still flickering from the branches that first stayed it as the stream swept it down. A little lower, the current plunges, roaring, into a circular chasm like a well, surrounded on three sides by a chimney-like hollowness of polished rock, down which the foam. slips in detached snow-flakes. Round the edges of the pool beneath, the water circles slowly, like black oil; a little butterfly lies on its back, its wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly quivering; a fish rises, and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I can just see, over a knoll, the green and damp turf roofs of four or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by a few ill-set stepping-stones, with here and there a flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight; and at the turn of the brook I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog-a picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving. I know them, and I know the dog's ribs also, which are nearly as bare as the dead ewe's; and the child's wasted shoulders, cutting his old tartan jacket through, so sharp are they.'-Modern Painters, vol. v., pp. 210, 211.

'Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light. Let the reader imagine himself for a moment withdrawn from the sounds and motion of the living world, and sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plain. The earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly, for its substance is white, hollow, and carious,

Descriptions of Scenery.

11

like the dusty wreck of the bones of men. The long knotty grass waves and tosses feebly in the evening wind, and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that lift themselves to the sunlight. Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around him, as if the dead beneath were struggling in their sleep; scattered blocks of black stone, four-square, remnants of mighty edifices, not one left upon another, lie upon them to keep them down. A dull purple poisonous haze stretches level along the desert, veiling its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose rents the red light rests, like dying fire on defiled altars. The blue ridge of the Alban Mount lifts itself against a solemn space of green, clear, quiet sky. Watch-towers of dark clouds stand stedfastly along the promontories of the Apennines. From the plain to the mountains, the shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt into the darkness, like shadowy and countless troops of funeral mourners, passing from a nation's grave.'-Ib., vol. i., Preface, pp. xxxvii, xxxviii.

And, in a grander style than either, combining truth of teaching with truth of description :

'Whatever beauty there may result from effects of light on foreground objects, from the dew of the grass, the flash of the cascade, the glitter of the birch trunk, or the fair daylight hues of darker things (and joyfulness there is in all of them), there is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks with a deeper feeling of the beautiful, the light of the declining or breaking day, and the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watch-fires in the green sky of the horizon; a deeper feeling, I say, not perhaps more acute, but having more of spiritual hope and longing, less of animal and present life, more manifest, invariably, in those of more serious and determined mind (I use the word serious, not as being opposed to cheerful, but to trivial and volatile), but, I think, marked and unfailing even in those of the least thoughtful dispositions. I am willing to let it rest on the determination of every reader, whether the pleasure which he has received from these effects of calm and luminous distance be not the most singular and memorable of which he has been conscious; whether all that is dazzling in colour, perfect in form, gladdening in expression, be not of evanescent and shallow appealing, when compared with the still small voice of the level twilight behind purple hills, or the scarlet arch of dawn over the dark troublous-edged sea.'-Ib., vol. ii., p. 38.

Yet Mr Ruskin's writing has faults, and serious ones. When we first noticed 'Modern Painters,' we remarked 'a tendency to overdo, a certain redundance, an accumulation of words and images; and we expressed a fear that these faults might go further. We are sorry to say that this fear proves to have been well founded. These faults have grown upon Mr Ruskin, and that to a very painful degree. The Highland scene which we quoted above is to be found in the fifth volume of 'Modern Painters; but, with few exceptions, all the finest specimens of his writing are to be gathered from his earlier works.

Latterly, his redundancy has become tedious; the disproportion of his style to his subjects almost ludicrous. Formerly, his eloquence was called forth only by the wonders of art, or the stupendous effects of nature; now, it is poured forth profusely and indiscriminately on all things. He writes of every subject in the same grandiose strain. No one can read his rhapsodies at the beginning of the fifth volume, about the 'slow-fingered, constanthearted lichens,' the 'sacrifices, gloriously sustained, of poor dying sprays,' and 'the gentle law of respect observed by the leaves of the aspen,' without a strong feeling of the grotesque coming over him. They are far worse than even Wordsworth's overpraised lines: To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'

We refrain from quoting them, for it is no pleasure to laugh at a man like Mr Ruskin. But all this is very mischievous. There is more harm in it than any mere blemish in literary art. It is untrue. No man can live through the world concerning himself up to this pitch about lichens, and buds, and 'dying sprays.' He would become totally unfit for better duties if he did. Such exaggeration can only lead to unreality; and it leads Mr Ruskin into unreality many and many a time. His style gallops off with him into the merest verbiage and incoherence. Magnificent as is the language in the chapter On the Two Boyhoods,' it is very much sound and fury, signifying vastly little. Even in the description of Venice, at the beginning, the ideas are completely obscured by the glory of the words. Like Tarpeia, they are crushed beneath the weight of ornament. The ear is filled with sound; but no picture is presented to the mind. If the reader will contrast this passage with some of the descriptions in the earlier volumes,―as, for instance, with that of the Campagna, quoted above, he will not fail, we think, to perceive the wide distinction between powerful representation and vague fine writing. And when we come to the following description of the world of Turner's boyhood, Cimmerian darkness falls upon us at least, utterly:

A goodly landscape this, for the lad to paint, and under a goodly light. Wide enough the light was, and clear; no more Salvator's lurid chasm on jagged horizon, nor Durer's spotted rest of sunny gleam on hedgerow and field; but light over all the world. Full shone now its awful globe, one pallid charnel-house,-a ball strewn bright with human ashes, glaring in poised sway beneath the sun, all blindingwhite with death from pole to pole,-death, not of myriads of poor bodies only, but of will, and mercy, and conscience; death, not once inflicted on the flesh, but daily fastening on the spirit; death, not silent or patient, waiting his appointed hour, but voiceful, venomous; death with the taunting word, and burning grasp, and infixed sting.'— Modern Painters, vol. v., p. 301.

General Ignorance of Pictures.

13

Deep thinking and beautiful expression may, of course, be found even in volume v. ; for when did Mr Ruskin write a whole volume without thinking deeply, and expressing his thoughts beautifully? But, for the most part, the thought is shallow and exaggerated, and the style detestable. We could select passage after passage, harsh and uncouth, in which Carlyle has been feebly echoed. Nay, a hint seems occasionally to have been borrowed from Alexander Dumas or Mrs Marsh; and short, ungainly sentences stand abruptly dotted over the page, trying to look emphatic. The whole thing is like an inflated and incoherent sermon. Such spasmodic writing, with the affected titles of the chapters, will, of course, be admired by the uneducated and the ignorant, but is quite unworthy of Mr Ruskin. In short, this unlucky volume reminds us of nothing so much as those Annuals, or 'Gift-Books,' in which beautiful engravings are accompanied, and made ridiculous, by the verses of Ladies of Quality.

We have hitherto been considering only Mr Ruskin's qualifications as an art critic. So far as we have gone, these have appeared of the highest order. But defects not a few have been urged against him; and foremost among all the charges has ever been the charge of dogmatism. Now, at this particular time, we would readily forgive dogmatism much greater than that of Mr Ruskin. In all branches of English literature, really sound criticism-a conscientious endeavour to see things as they really are is exceedingly rare. With regard to art, it is almost unknown; and the absurdity is, that the public seems to suppose that it has no application there. Nothing is more common than remarks of this sort: 'It may or may not be a good picture, but I like it.' Nor do people appear to be aware that, when they indulge in such observations, they are making great fools of themselves. On the contrary, they really believe that there is no room for judginent as to pictures, but that they are to be liked or disliked according to the dictates of mere caprice. Hence, for example, we have Frederika Bremer declaring Raphael's Madonnas soulless and lifeless' compared with the large Murillo in the Louvre; and, still worse, Mrs H. Beecher Stowe disparaging the Sistine Madonna. As if such opinions proved anything at all, except the ignorance and bad taste of those who entertain them. The vanity of Mrs Stowe would, of course, think even her ignorance capable of enlightening the world on anything or everything; but Miss Bremer would never probably have said anything about this subject, had she not been led away by the prevailing idea that the world is bound to accept 'likings' or 'dislikings' as intelligent art criticism. It would be much better were it generally admitted that pictures form no exception to the rule, that people should only talk of what they understand; that a man