The Publication of Books. 1875.
A Mistaken Review. 1875.
The Position of Critics. 1875.
Coventry Patmore's "Faithful for Ever." 1860.
"The Queen of the Air." 1871.
The Animals of Scripture: A Review. 1856.
"Limner" and "Illumination." 1854.
Notes on a Word in Shakespeare. 1878. (Two Letters.)
The Merchant of Venice. 1880.
Recitations. 1880.

[Pg 162]
[Pg 163]

VI.

LITERARY CRITICISM.

To the Editor of "The World."

Sir: I am very grateful for the attention and candor with which you have noticed my effort to introduce a new method of publishing.

Will you allow me to explain one or two points in which I am generally misunderstood? I meant to have asked your leave to do so at some length, but have been entirely busy, and can only say, respecting two of your questions, what in my own mind are the answers.

I. "How many authors are strong enough to do without advertisements?"

None: while advertisement is the practice. But let it become the fashion to announce books once for all in a monthly circular (publisher's, for instance), and the public will simply refer to that for all they want to know. Such advertisement I use now, and always would.

II. "Why has he determined to be his own publisher?"

I wish entirely to resist the practice of writing for money early in life. I think an author's business requires as much training as a musician's, and that, as soon as he can write really well, there would always, for a man of worth and sense, be found capital enough to enable him to be able to print, say, a hundred pages of his careful work; which, if the public were pleased with, they would soon enable him to print more. I do not think young men should rush into print, nor old ones modify their books to please publishers.

III. And it seems to me, considering that the existing excellent books in the world would—if they were heaped together in great towns—overtop their cathedrals, that at any age a man should think long before he invites his neighbors to listen to his sayings on any subject whatever.

What I do, therefore, is done only in the conviction, foolish, egotistic, whatever you like to call it, but firm, that I am writing what is needful and useful for my fellow-creatures; that if it is so, they will in due time discover it, and that before due time I do not want it discovered. And it seems to me that no sound scholar or true well-wisher to the people about him would write in any other temper. I mean to be paid for my work, if it is worth payment. Not otherwise. And it seems to me my mode of publication is the proper method of ascertaining that fact. I had much more to say, but have no more time, and am, sir, very respectfully yours,

John Ruskin.

To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."

Sir: The excellent letters and notes which have recently appeared in your columns on the subject of reviewing lead me to think that you will give me space for the statement of one or two things which I believe it is right the public should know respecting the review which appeared in the Examiner of the 2d of this month (but which I did not see till yesterday), by Mr. W. B. Scott, of Mr. St. J. Tyrrwhitt's "Letters on Landscape Art."

1. Mr. Scott is one of the rather numerous class of artists of whose works I have never taken any public notice, and who attribute my silence to my inherent stupidity of disposition.

2. Mr. Scott is also one of the more limited and peculiarly unfortunate class of artists who suppose themselves to have great native genius, dislike being told to learn perspective, and prefer the first volume of "Modern Painters," which praises many third-rate painters, and teaches none, to the following volumes, which praise none but good painters, and sometimes admit the weakness of advising bad ones.

3. My first acquaintance with Mr. Scott was at the house of a gentleman whose interior walls he was decorating with historic frescos, and whose patronage I (rightly or wrongly) imagined at that time to be of importance to him. I was then more good-natured and less conscientious than I am now, and my host and hostess attached weight to my opinions. I said all the good I truly could of the frescos, and no harm; painted a corn-cockle on the walls myself, in reverent subordination to them; got out of the house as soon afterwards as I could, and never since sought Mr. Scott's acquaintance further (though, to my regret, he was once photographed in the same plate with Mr. Rosetti and me). Mr. Scott is an honest man, and naturally thinks me a hypocrite and turncoat as well as a fool.

4. The honestest man in writing a review is apt sometimes to give obscure statements of facts which ought to have been clearly stated to make the review entirely fair. Permit me to state in very few words those which I think the review in question does not clearly represent. My "Elements of Drawing" were out of print, and sometimes asked for; I wished to rewrite them, but had no time, and knew that my friend and pupil, Mr. Tyrrwhitt, was better acquainted than I myself with some processes of water-color sketching, and was perfectly acquainted with and heartily acceptant of the principles which I have taught to be essential in all art. I knew he could write, and I therefore asked him to write, a book of his own to take the place of the "Elements," and authorized him to make arrangements with my former publisher for my wood-blocks, mostly drawn on the wood by myself.

The book is his own, not mine, else it would have been published as mine, not his. I have not read it all, and do not answer for it all. But when I wrote the "Elements" I believed conscientiously that book of mine to be the best then attainable by the public on the subject of elementary drawing. I think Mr. Tyrrwhitt's a better book, know it to be a more interesting one, and believe it to be, in like manner, the best now attainable by the British public on elementary practice of art.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
John Ruskin.
Brantwood, Jan. 10.

To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."

Sir: I see you are writing of criticism;[152] some of your readers may, perhaps, be interested in hearing the notions of a man who has dabbled in it a good many years. I believe, in a word, that criticism is as impertinent in the world as it is in a drawing-room. In a kindly and well-bred company, if anybody tries to please them, they try to be pleased; if anybody tries to astonish them, they have the courtesy to be astonished; if people become tiresome, they ask somebody else to play, or sing, or what not, but they don't criticise. For the rest, a bad critic is probably the most mischievous person in the world (Swift's Goddess of Criticism in the "Tale of a Tub" seems what need be represented on that subject[153]), and a good one the most helpless and unhappy: the more he knows, the less he is trusted, and it is too likely he may become morose in his unacknowledged power. A good executant, in any art, gives pleasure to multitudes, and breathes an atmosphere of praise, but a strong critic is every man's adversary—men feel that he knows their foibles, and cannot conceive that he knows more. His praise, to be acceptable, must be always unqualified; his equity is an offence instead of a virtue; and the art of correction, which he has learned so laboriously, only fills his hearers with disgust.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
John Ruskin.
Brantwood, Jan. 18.

To the Editor of "The Critic."

Sir: I do not doubt, from what I have observed of the general tone of the criticisms in your columns, that, in candor and courtesy, you will allow me to enter protest, bearing such worth as private opinion may, against the estimate expressed in your last number of the merits of Mr. C. Patmore's new poem.[154] It seems to me that you have read it hastily; and that you have taken such view of it as on a first reading almost every reader of good but impatient judgment would be but too apt to concur with you in adopting—one, nevertheless, which, if you examine the poem with care, you will, I think, both for your readers' sake and Mr. Patmore's, regret having expressed so decidedly.

The poem is, to the best of my perception and belief, a singularly perfect piece of art; containing, as all good art does, many very curious shortcomings (to appearance), and places of rest, or of dead color, or of intended harshness, which, if they are seen or quoted without the parts of the piece to which they relate, are of course absurd enough, precisely as the discords in a fine piece of music would be if you played them without their resolutions. You have quoted separately Mr. Patmore's discords; you might by the same system of examination have made Mozart or Mendelssohn appear to be no musicians, as you have probably convinced your quick readers that Mr. Patmore is no poet.

I will not beg of you so much space as would be necessary to analyze the poem, but I hope you will let me—once for all—protest against the method of criticism which assumes that entire familiarity and simplicity in certain portions of a great work destroy its dignity. Simple things ought to be simply said, and truly poetical diction is nothing more nor less than right diction; the incident being itself poetical or not, according to its relations and the feelings which it is intended to manifest—not according to its own nature merely. To take a single instance out of Homer bearing on that same simple household work which you are so shocked at Mr. Patmore's taking notice of, Homer describes the business of a family washing, when it comes into his poem, in the most accurate terms he can find. "They took the clothes in their hands; and poured on the clean water; and trod them in trenches thoroughly, trying who could do it best; and when they had washed them and got off all the dirt, they spread them out on the sea-beach, where the sea had blanched the shingle cleanest."[155]

These are the terms in which the great poet explains the matter. The less poet—or, rather, man of modern wit and breeding, without superior poetical power—thus puts the affair into dignified language:

Now, to my mind, Homer's language is by far the most poetical of the two—is, in fact, the only poetical language possible in the matter. Whether it was desirable to give any account of this, or anything else, depends wholly on the relation of the passage to the rest of the poem, and you could only show Mr. Patmore's glance into the servant's room to be ridiculous by proving the mother's mind, which it illustrates, to be ridiculous. Similarly, if you were to take one of Mr. George Richmond's perfectest modern portraits, and give a little separate engraving of a bit of the neck-tie or coat-lappet, you might easily demonstrate a very prosaic character either in the riband-end or the button-hole. But the only real question respecting them is their relation to the face, and the degree in which they help to express the character of the wearer. What the real relations of the parts are in the poem in question only a thoughtful and sensitive reader will discover. The poem is not meant for a song, or calculated for an hour's amusement; it is, as I said, to the best of my belief, a finished and tender work of very noble art. Whatever on this head may be the final judgment of the public, I am bound, for my own part, to express my obligation to Mr. Patmore, as one of my severest models and tutors in use of English, and my respect for him as one of the truest and tenderest thinkers who have ever illustrated the most important, because commonest, states of noble human life.[156]

I remain, Sir, yours, etc.,
J. Ruskin.
Denmark Hill.

To the Editor of "The Asiatic."

Sir: I am obliged and flattered by the tone of your article on my "Queen of the Air" in your last number, but not at all by the substance of it; and it so much misinterprets my attempt in that book that I will ask your leave to correct it in main points.[157] The "Queen of the Air" was written to show, not what could be fancied, but what was felt and meant, in the myth of Athena. Every British sailor knows, that Neptune is the god of the sea. He does not know that Athena is the goddess of the air; I doubt if many of our school-boys know it—I doubt even if many of our school-masters know it; and I believe the evidence of it given in the "Queen of the Air" to be the first clear and connected approximate proof of it which has yet been rendered by scientific mythology, properly so called.

You say, "I have not attempted to explain all mythology."

I wonder what you would have said of me if I had? I only know a little piece of it here and there, just as I know a crag of alp or a bend of river; and even what I know could not be put into a small octavo volume. Nevertheless, I should have had another such out by this time on the Apolline Myths, and, perhaps, one on the Earth-Gods, but for my Oxford work; and shall at all events have a little more to say on the matter than I have yet said—and much need there is—when all that has yet been done by "scientific" mythology ends in the assertion made by your reviewer, that "mythology is useful mainly as a storehouse for poets, and for literary men in want of some simile or metaphor to produce a striking effect."

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
John Ruskin.
May 18, 1871.

Among the various illustrated works which usually grace the beginning of the year, has appeared one which, though of graver and less attractive character than its companions, is likely to occupy a more permanent place on the library shelves. We allude to "Illustrations of Scripture, by an Animal Painter," a work which, whatever its faults or weaknesses, shows at least a singular power of giving reality and interest to scenes which are apt to be but feebly, if at all, brought before the mental vision, in consequence of our familiarity with the words which describe them. The idea of the work is itself sufficiently original. The animals are throughout principal, and the pathos or moral of the passage to be illustrated is developed from its apparently subordinate part in it. Thus the luxury and idolatry of the reign of Solomon are hinted behind a group of "apes and peacocks;" the Deluge is subordinate to the dove; and the healing of the lunatic at Gennesareth to the destruction of the herd of swine.

In general, to approach an object from a new point of view is to place it in a clearer light, and perhaps the very strangeness of the treatment in some cases renders the subject more impressive than it could have been made by any more regular method of conception. But, at all events, supposing the studies of the artist to have been chiefly directed to animals, and her power to lie principally in seizing their character, she is to be thanked for filling her sketches of the inferior creatures with so much depth of meaning, and rendering the delineation even of an ape, or a swallow, suggestive of the most solemn trains of thought.

As so suggestive, without pretence or formalism, these drawings deserve a place of peculiar honor in the libraries of the young, while there are also some qualities in them which fit them for companionship with more elaborate works of art. The subject of "Lazarus" is treated with a courage and tenderness which say much for the painter's imagination, and more for her heart; and the waste of waters above which the raven hovers is expressed, though rudely, yet in a way which tells of many an hour spent in watching the play of the evening light upon the movement of the wearied sea. It is true that most of the compositions are weakened by a very visible contempt, if not ignorance, of the laws which regulate the harmonies of shade, as well as by a painful deficiency in the drawing. Still there is a life and sincerity in them which are among the rarest qualities in art; and one characteristic, very remarkable in the works of a person described in the text (we doubt not, much against her will) as an "accomplished lady"—we mean the peculiar tendency to conceptions of fearfulness, or horror, rather than of beauty. The camel, for instance, might, we should have thought, as easily, and to many persons much more pleasingly, have illustrated the meeting of Rebekah with the servant of Abraham, as the desolation of Rabbah; and the dog might as gracefully have been brought forward to remind us of the words of the Syro-Phoenician woman, as to increase the horror of the death of Jezebel. There are curious evidences of a similar disposition in some of the other plates; and while it appears to us indicative of the strength of a mind of no common order, we would caution the fair artist against permitting it to appear too frequently. It renders the series of drawings in some degree repulsive to many persons, and even by those who can sympathize with it might sometimes be suspected of having its root in a sublime kind of affectation.

We have spoken of these studies as drawings. They are, in fact, as good, being photographic facsimiles of the original sketches. The text is copious, and useful as an elucidation of the natural history of Scripture.

(To the Editor of "The Builder.")

I do not usually answer objections to my written statements, otherwise I should waste my life in idle controversy; but as what I say to the workmen at the Architectural Museum is necessarily brief, and in its words, though not in its substance, unconsidered, I will answer, if you will permit me, any questions or cavils which you may think worthy of admission into your columns on the subject of these lectures.

I do not know if the Cambridge correspondent, whose letter you inserted last week, is more zealous for the honor of Cary, or anxious to detect me in a mistake. If the former, he will find, if he take the trouble to look at the note in the 264th page of the second volume of the "Stones of Venice," that Cary's reputation is not likely to suffer at my hands.[160] But the translation in the instance quoted is inadmissible. It does not matter in the least whence the word "limner" is derived. I did not know when I found fault with it that it was a corruption of "illuminator," but I knew perfectly that it did not in the existing state of the English language mean "illuminator." No one talks of "limning a missal," or of a "limned missal." The word is now universally understood as signifying a painter or draughtsman in the ordinary sense, and cannot be accepted as a translation of the phrase of which it is a corruption.

Touching the last clause of the letter, I should have thought that a master of arts of Cambridge might have had wit enough to comprehend that characters may be illegible by being far off, as well as by being ill-shaped; and that it is not less difficult to read what is too small to be seen than what is too strange to be understood. The inscription on the Houses of Parliament are illegible, not because they are in black letters, but because, like all the rest of the work on that, I suppose, the most effeminate and effectless heap of stones ever raised by man, they are utterly unfit for their position.

J. Ruskin.

Julius CÆsar, II. i. 103-4.

I.
Brantwood, Coniston, Lancashire.

My dear Furnivall: Of course, in any great writer's word, the question is far less what the word came from, than where it has come to. Fret means all manner of things in that place; primarily, the rippling of clouds—as sea by wind; secondarily, the breaking it asunder for light to come through. It implies a certain degree of vexation—some dissolution—much order, and extreme beauty. I have myself used this word substantively, to express the rippled edge of a wing-feather. In architecture and jewellery it means simply roughening in a decorative manner.[162]

Ever affectionately yours,
J. Ruskin.

Dear Furnivall: Your kind letter comes to me here, and I must answer on this paper, for, if that bit of note is really of any use to you, you must please add this word or two more in printing, as it wouldn't do to let it be such a mere fret on the vault of its subject. You say not one man in 150 knows what the line means: my dear Furnivall, not one man in 15,000, in the 19th century, knows, or ever can know, what any line—or any word means, used by a great writer. For most words stand for things that are seen, or things that are thought of; and in the 19th century there is certainly not one man in 15,000 who ever looks at anything, and not one in 15,000,000 capable of a thought. Take the intelligence of this word in this line for example—the root of the whole matter is, first, that the reader should have seen what he has often heard of, but probably not seen twice in his life—"Daybreak." Next, it is needful he should think what "break" means in that word—what is broken, namely, and by what. That is to say, the cloud of night is Broken up, as a city is broken up (Jerusalem, when Zedekiah fled), as a school breaks up, as a constitution, or a ship, is broken up; in every case with a not inconsiderable change of idea and addition to the central word. This breaking up is done by the Day, which breaks—out, as a man breaks, or bursts out, from his restraint in a passion; breaks down in tears; or breaks in, as from heaven to earth—with a breach in the cloud-wall of it; or breaks out, with a sense of outward—as the sun—out and out, farther and farther, after rain. Well; next, the thing that the day breaks up is partly a garment, rent, more than broken; a mantle, the day itself "in russet mantle clad"—the blanket of the dark, torn to be peeped through—whereon instantly you get into a whole host of new ideas; fretting as a moth frets a garment; unravelling at the edge, afterwards;—thence you get into fringe, which is an entirely double word, meaning partly a thing that guards, and partly a thing that is worn away on the ground; the French Frange has, I believe, a reminiscence of f?ass? in it—our "fringe" runs partly toward frico and friction—both are essentially connected with frango, and the fringe of "breakers" at the shores of all seas, and the breaking of the ripples and foam all over them—but this is wholly different in a northern mind, which has only seen the sea

Break, break, break, on its cold gray stones,—

and a southern, which has seen a hot sea on hot sand break into lightning of phosphor flame—half a mile of fire in an instant—following in time, like the flash of minute-guns. Then come the great new ideas of order and time, and

and so the timely succession of either ball, flower, or dentil, in architecture: but this, again, going off to a totally different and still lovely idea, the main one in the word aurifrigium—which rooted once in aurifex, went on in Etruscan work, followed in Florence into a much closer connection with frigidus—their style being always in frosted gold (see the dew on a cabbage-leaf or, better, on a gray lichen, in early sunshine)—going back, nobody knows how far, but to the Temple of the Dew of Athens, and gold of MycenÆ, anyhow; and in Etruria to the Deluge, I suppose. Well, then, the notion of the music of morning comes in—with strings of lyre (or frets of Katharine's instrument, whatever it was) and stops of various quills; which gets us into another group beginning with plectrum, going aside again into plico and plight, and Milton's

"Play in the plighted clouds"

(the quills on the fretful porcupine are all thought of, first, in their piped complexity like rushes, before the standing up in ill-temper), and so on into the plight of folded drapery, and round again to our blanket. I think that's enough to sketch out the compass of the word. Of course the real power of it in any place depends on the writer's grasp of it, and use of the facet he wants to cut with.

I have no doubt that whatever Mr. Irving has stated that I said, I did say. But in personal address to an artist, to whom one is introduced for the first time, one does not usually say all that may be in one's mind. And if expressions, limited, if not even somewhat exaggerated, by courtesy, be afterwards quoted as a total and carefully-expressed criticism, the general reader will be—or may be easily—much misled. I did and do much admire Mr. Irving's own acting of Shylock. But I entirely dissent (and indignantly as well as entirely) from his general reading and treatment of the play. And I think that a modern audience will invariably be not only wrong, but diametrically and with polar accuracy opposite to the real view of any great author in the moulding of his work. So far as I could in kindness venture, I expressed my feelings to that effect, in a letter which I wrote to Mr. Irving on the day after I saw the play; and I should be sincerely obliged to him, under the existing circumstances, if he would publish the whole of that letter.

My dear Sir:[164] I am most happy to assure you, in reply to your interesting letter of the 12th, that I heard your daughters' recitations in London last autumn, with quite unmixed pleasure and the sincerest admiration—nor merely that, but with grave change in my opinions of the general value of recitations as a means of popular instruction. Usually, I like better to hear beautiful poetry read quietly than recited with action. But I felt, in hearing Shelley's "Cloud" recited (I think it was by Miss Josephine) that I also was "one of the people," and understood the poem better than ever before, though I am by way of knowing something about clouds, too. I also know the "Jackdaw of Rheims" pretty nearly by heart; but I would gladly come to London straightway, had I the time, to hear Miss Peggy speak it again. And—in fine—I have not seen any public entertainment—for many a long year—at once so sweet, so innocent, and so helpful, as that which your children can give to all the gentle and simple in mind and heart.—Believe me, my dear Sir, faithfully, and with all felicitation, yours,

J. Ruskin.