Modern Painters, vol. i. Second edition.——Modern Painters, vol. ii.——The Seven Lamps of Architecture.——The Stones of Venice.——Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds. By John Ruskin, M.A.

On the publication of the first volume of Mr Ruskin's work on Modern Painters, a notice appeared of it in this Magazine. Since that time a second volume has been published of the same work, with two other works on architecture. It is the second volume of his Modern Painters which will at present chiefly engage our attention. His architectural works can only receive a slight and casual notice; on some future occasion they may tempt us into a fuller examination.

Although the second volume of the Modern Painters will be the immediate subject of our review, we must permit ourselves to glance back upon the first, in order to connect together the topics treated by the two, and to prevent our paper from wearing quite the aspect of a metaphysical essay; for it is the nature of the sentiment of the beautiful, and its sources in the human mind, which is the main subject of this second volume. In the first, he had entered at once into the arena of criticism, elevating the modern artists, and one amongst them in particular, at the expense of the old masters, who, with some few exceptions, find themselves very rudely handled.

As we have already intimated, we do not hold Mr Ruskin to be a safe guide in matters of art, and the present volume demonstrates that he is no safe guide in matters of philosophy. He is a man of undoubted power and vigour of mind; he feels strongly, and he thinks independently: but he is hasty and impetuous; can very rarely, on any subject, deliver a calm and temperate judgment; and, when he enters on the discussion of general principles, shows an utter inability to seize on, or to appreciate, the wide generalisations of philosophy. He is not, therefore, one of those men who can ever become an authority to be appealed to by the less instructed in any of the fine arts, or on any topic whatever; and this we say with the utmost confidence, because, although we may be unable in many cases to dispute his judgment—as where he speaks of paintings we have not seen, or technicalities of art we do not affect to understand—yet he so frequently stands forth on the broad arena where general and familiar principles are discussed, that it is utterly impossible to be mistaken in the man. On all these occasions he displays a very marked and rather peculiar combination of power and weakness—of power, the result of natural strength of mind; of weakness, the inevitable consequence of a passionate haste, and an overweening confidence. When we hear a person of this intellectual character throwing all but unmitigated abuse upon works which men have long consented to admire, and lavishing upon some other works encomiums which no conceivable perfection of human art could justify, it is utterly impossible to attach any weight to his opinion, on the ground that he has made an especial study of any one branch of art. Such a man we cannot trust out of our sight a moment; we cannot give him one inch of ground more than his reasoning covers, or our own experience would grant to him.

We shall not here revive the controversy on the comparative merits of the ancient and modern landscape-painters, nor on the later productions of Mr Turner, whether they are the eccentricities of genius or its fullest development; we have said enough on these subjects before. It is Mr Ruskin's book, and not the pictures of Claude or Turner, that we have to criticise; it is his style, and his manner of thinking, that we have to pass judgment on.

In all Mr Ruskin's works, and in almost every page of them, whether on painting, or architecture, or philosophy, or ecclesiastical controversy, two characteristics invariably prevail: an extreme dogmatism, and a passion for singularity. Every man who thinks earnestly would convert all the world to his own opinions; but while Mr Ruskin would convert all the world to his own tastes as well as opinions, he manifests the greatest repugnance to think for a moment like any one else. He has a mortal aversion to mingle with a crowd. It is quite enough for an opinion to be commonplace to insure it his contempt: if it has passed out of fashion, he may revive it; but to think with the existing multitude would be impossible. Yet that multitude are to think with him. He is as bent on unity in matters of taste as others are on unity in matters of religion; and he sets the example by diverging, wherever he can, from the tastes of others.

Between these two characteristics there is no real contradiction; or rather the contradiction is quite familiar. The man who most affects singularity is generally the most dogmatic: he is the very man who expresses most surprise that others should differ from him. No one is so impatient of contradiction as he who is perpetually contradicting others; and on the gravest matters of religion those are often found to be most zealous for unity of belief who have some pet heresy of their own, for which they are battling all their lives. The same overweening confidence lies, in fact, at the basis of both these characteristics. In Mr Ruskin they are both seen in great force. No matter what the subject he discusses,—taste or ecclesiastical government—we always find the same combination of singularity, with a dogmatism approaching to intolerance. Thus, the Ionic pillar is universally admired. Mr Ruskin finds that the fluted shaft gives an appearance of weakness. No one ever felt this, so long as the fluted column is manifestly of sufficient diameter to sustain the weight imposed on it. But this objection of apparent insecurity has been very commonly made to the spiral or twisted column. Here, therefore, Mr Ruskin abruptly dismisses the objection. He was at liberty to defend the spiral column: we should say here, also, that if the weight imposed was evidently not too great for even a spiral column to support, this objection has no place; but why cast the same objection, (which perhaps in all cases was a mere after-thought) against the Ionic shaft, when it had never been felt at all? It has been a general remark, that, amongst other results of the railway, it has given a new field to the architect, as well as to the engineer. Therefore Mr Ruskin resolves that our railroad stations ought to have no architecture at all. Of course, if he limited his objections to inappropriate ornament, he would be agreeing with all the world: he decides there should be no architecture whatever; merely buildings more or less spacious, to protect men and goods from the weather. He has never been so unfortunate, we suppose, as to come an hour too soon, or the unlucky five minutes too late, to a railway station, or he would have been glad enough to find himself in something better than the large shed he proposes. On the grave subject of ecclesiastical government he has stepped forward into controversy; and here he shows both his usual propensities in high relief. He has some quite peculiar projects of his own; the appointment of some hundreds of bishops—we know not what—and a Church discipline to be carried out by trial by jury. Desirable or not, they are manifestly as impracticable as the revival of chivalry. But let that pass. Let every man think and propose his best. But his dogmatism amounts to a disease, when, turning from his own novelties, he can speak in the flippant intolerant manner that he does of the national and now time-honoured Church of Scotland.

It will be worth while to make, in passing, a single quotation from this pamphlet, Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds. He tells us, in one place, that in the New Testament the ministers of the Church "are called, and call themselves, with absolute indifference, Deacons, Bishops, Elders, Evangelists, according to what they are doing at the time of speaking." With such a writer one might, at all events, have hoped to live in peace. But no. He discovers, nevertheless, that Episcopacy is the Scriptural form of Church government; and, having satisfied his own mind of this, no opposition or diversity of opinion is for a moment to be tolerated.

"But how," he says, "unite the two great sects of paralysed Protestants? By keeping simply to Scripture. The members of the Scottish Church have not a shadow of excuse for refusing Episcopacy: it has indeed been abused among them, grievously abused; but it is in the Bible, and that is all they have a right to ask.

"They have also no shadow of excuse for refusing to employ a written form of prayer. It may not be to their taste—it may not be the way in which they like to pray; but it is no question, at present, of likes or dislikes, but of duties; and the acceptance of such a form on their part would go half way to reconcile them with their brethren. Let them allege such objections as they can reasonably advance against the English form, and let these be carefully and humbly weighed by the pastors of both Churches: some of them ought to be at once forestalled. For the English Church, on the other hand, must," &c.

Into Mr Ruskin's own religious tenets, further than he has chosen to reveal them in his works, we have no wish to pry. But he must cease to be Mr Ruskin if they do not exhibit some salient peculiarity, coupled with a confidence, unusual even amongst zealots, that his peculiar views will speedily triumph. If he can be presumed to belong to any sect, it must be the last and smallest one amongst us—some sect as exclusive as German mysticism, with pretensions as great as those of the Church of Rome.

One word on the style of Mr Ruskin: it will save the trouble of alluding to it on particular occasions. It is very unequal. In both his architectural works he writes generally with great ease, spirit, and clearness. There is a racy vigour in the page. But when he would be very eloquent, as he is disposed to be in the Modern Painters, he becomes very verbose, tedious, obscure, extravagant. There is no discipline in his style, no moderation, no repose. Those qualities which he has known how to praise in art he has not aimed at in his own writing. A rank luxuriance of a semi-poetical diction lies about, perfectly unrestrained; metaphorical language comes before us in every species of disorder; and hyperbolical expressions are used till they become commonplace. Verbal criticism, he would probably look upon a very puerile business: he need fear nothing of the kind from us; we should as soon think of criticising or pruning a jungle. To add to the confusion, he appears at times to have proposed to himself the imitation of some of our older writers: pages are written in the rhythm of Jeremy Taylor; sometimes it is the venerable Hooker who seems to be his type; and he has even succeeded in combining whatever is most tedious and prolix in both these great writers. If the reader wishes a specimen of this sort of modern antique, he may turn to the fifteenth chapter of the second volume of the Modern Painters.

Coupled with this matter of style, and almost inseparable from it, is the violence of his manner on subjects which cannot possibly justify so vehement a zeal. We like a generous enthusiasm on any art—we delight in it; but who can travel in sympathy with a writer who exhausts on so much paint and canvass every term of rapture that the Alps themselves could have called forth? One need not be a utilitarian philosopher—or what Mr Ruskin describes as such—to smile at the lofty position on which he puts the landscape-painter, and the egregious and impossible demands he makes upon the art itself. And the condemnation and opprobrium with which he overwhelms the luckless artist who has offended him is quite as violent. The bough of a tree, "in the left hand upper corner" of a landscape of Poussin's, calls forth this terrible denunciation:—

"This latter is a representation of an ornamental group of elephants' tusks, with feathers tied to the ends of them. Not the wildest imagination could ever conjure up in it the remotest resemblance to the bough of a tree. It might be the claws of a witch—the talons of an eagle—the horns of a fiend; but it is a full assemblage of every conceivable falsehood which can be told respecting foliage—a piece of work so barbarous in every way that one glance at it ought to prove the complete charlatanism and trickery of the whole system of the old landscape-painters.... I will say here at once, that such drawing as this is as ugly as it is childish, and as painful as it is false; and that the man who could tolerate, much more, who could deliberately set down such a thing on his canvass, had neither eye nor feeling for one single attribute or excellence of God's works. He might have drawn the other stem in excusable ignorance, or under some false impression of being able to improve upon nature, but this is conclusive and unpardonable."—(P. 382.)

The great redeeming quality of Mr Ruskin—and we wish to give it conspicuous and honourable mention—is his love of nature. Here lies the charm of his works; to this may be traced whatever virtue is in them, or whatever utility they may possess. They will send the painter more than ever to the study of nature, and perhaps they will have a still more beneficial effect on the art, by sending the critic of painting to the same school. It would be almost an insult to the landscape-painter to suppose that he needed this lesson; the very love of his art must lead him perpetually, one would think, to his great and delightful study amongst the fields, under the open skies, before the rivers and the hills. But the critic of the picture-gallery is often one who goes from picture to picture, and very little from nature to the painting. Consequently, where an artist succeeds in imitating some effect in nature which had not been before represented on the canvass, such a critic is more likely to be displeased than gratified; and the artist, having to paint for a conventional taste, is in danger of sacrificing to it his own higher aspirations. Now it is most true that no man should pretend to be a critic upon pictures unless he understands the art itself of painting; he ought, we suspect, to have handled the pencil or the brush himself; at all events, he ought in some way to have been initiated into the mysteries of the pallet and the easel. Otherwise, not knowing the difficulties to be overcome, nor the means at hand for encountering them, he cannot possibly estimate the degree of merit due to the artist for the production of this or that effect. He may be loud in applause where nothing has been displayed but the old traditions of the art. But still this is only one-half the knowledge he ought to possess. He ought to have studied nature, and to have loved the study, or he can never estimate, and never feel, that truth of effect which is the great aim of the artist. Mr Ruskin's works will help to shame out of the field all such half-informed and conventional criticism, the mere connoisseurship of the picture gallery. On the other hand, they will train men who have always been delighted spectators of nature to be also attentive observers. Our critics will learn how to admire, and mere admirers will learn how to criticise. Thus a public will be educated; and here, if anywhere, we may confidently assert that the art will prosper in proportion as there is an intelligent public to reward it.

We like that bold enterprise of Mr Ruskin's which distinguishes the first volume, that daring enumeration of the great palpable facts of nature—the sky, the sea, the earth, the foliage—which the painter has to represent. His descriptions are often made indistinct by a multitude of words; but there is light in the haze—there is a genuine love of nature felt through them. This is almost the only point of sympathy we feel with Mr Ruskin; it is the only hold his volumes have had over us whilst perusing them; we may be, therefore, excused if we present here to our readers a specimen or two of his happier descriptions of nature. We will give them the Cloud and the Torrent. They will confess that, after reading Mr Ruskin's description of the clouds, their first feeling will be an irresistible impulse to throw open the window, and look upon them again as they roll through the sky. The torrent may not be so near at hand, to make renewed acquaintance with. We must premise that he has been enforcing his favourite precept, the minute, and faithful, and perpetual study of nature. He very justly scouts the absurd idea that trees and rocks and clouds are, under any circumstances, to be generalised—so that a tree is not to stand for an oak or a poplar, a birch or an elm, but for a general tree. If a tree is at so great a distance that you cannot distinguish what it is, as you cannot paint more than you see, you must paint it indistinctly. But to make a purposed indistinctness where the kind of tree would be very plainly seen is a manifest absurdity. So, too, the forms of clouds should be studied, and as much as possible taken from nature, and not certain general clouds substituted at the artist's pleasure.

"But it is not the outline only which is thus systematically false. The drawing of the solid form is worse still; for it is to be remembered that, although clouds of course arrange themselves more or less into broad masses, with a light side and a dark side, both their light and shade are invariably composed of a series of divided masses, each of which has in its outline as much variety and character as the great outline of the cloud; presenting, therefore, a thousand times repeated, all that I have described as the general form. Nor are these multitudinous divisions a truth of slight importance in the character of sky, for they are dependent on, and illustrative of, a quality which is usually in a great degree overlooked—the enormous retiring spaces of solid clouds. Between the illumined edge of a heaped cloud and that part of its body which turns into shadow, there will generally be a clear distance of several miles—more or less, of course, according to the general size of the cloud; but in such large masses as Poussin and others of the old masters, which occupy the fourth or fifth of the visible sky, the clear illumined breadth of vapour, from the edge to the shadow, involves at least a distance of five or six miles. We are little apt, in watching the changes of a mountainous range of cloud, to reflect that the masses of vapour which compose it are linger and higher than any mountain-range of the earth; and the distances between mass and mass are not yards of air, traversed in an instant by the flying form, but valleys of changing atmosphere leagues over; that the slow motion of ascending curves, which we can scarcely trace, is a boiling energy of exulting vapour rushing into the heaven a thousand feet in a minute; and that the topling angle, whose sharp edge almost escapes notice in the multitudinous forms around it, is a nodding precipice of storms, three thousand feet from base to summit. It is not until we have actually compared the forms of the sky with the hill-ranges of the earth, and seen the soaring alp overtopped and buried in one surge of the sky, that we begin to conceive or appreciate the colossal scale of the phenomena of the latter. But of this there can be no doubt in the mind of any one accustomed to trace the forms of cloud among hill-ranges—as it is there a demonstrable and evident fact—that the space of vapour visibly extended over an ordinarily clouded sky is not less, from the point nearest to the observer to the horizon, than twenty leagues; that the size of every mass of separate form, if it be at all largely divided, is to be expressed in terms of miles; and that every boiling heap of illuminated mist in the nearer sky is an enormous mountain, fifteen or twenty thousand feet in height, six or seven miles over in illuminated surface, furrowed by a thousand colossal ravines, torn by local tempests into peaks and promontories, and changing its features with the majestic velocity of a volcano."—(Vol. i. p. 228.)

The forms of clouds, it seems, are worth studying: after reading this, no landscape-painter will be disposed, with hasty slight invention, to sketch in these "mountains" of the sky. Here is his description, or part of it, first of falling, then of running water. With the incidental criticism upon painters we are not at present concerned:—

"A little crumbling white or lightly-rubbed paper will soon give the effect of indiscriminate foam; but nature gives more than foam—she shows beneath it, and through it, a peculiar character of exquisitely studied form, bestowed on every wave and line of fall; and it is this variety of definite character which Turner always aims at, rejecting as much as possible everything that conceals or overwhelms it. Thus, in the Upper Fall of the Tees, though the whole basin of the fall is blue, and dim with the rising vapour, yet the attention of the spectator is chiefly directed to the concentric zones and delicate curves of the falling water itself; and it is impossible to express with what exquisite accuracy these are given. They are the characteristic of a powerful stream descending without impediment or break, but from a narrow channel, so as to expand as it falls. They are the constant form which such a stream assumes as it descends; and yet I think it would be difficult to point to another instance of their being rendered in art. You will find nothing in the waterfalls, even of our best painters, but springing lines of parabolic descent, and splashing and shapeless foam; and, in consequence, though they may make you understand the swiftness of the water, they never let you feel the weight of it: the stream, in their hands, looks active, not supine, as if it leaped, not as if it fell. Now, water will leap a little way—it will leap down a weir or over a stone—but it tumbles over a high fall like this; and it is when we have lost the parabolic line, and arrived at the catenary—when we have lost the spring of the fall, and arrived at the plunge of it—that we begin really to feel its weight and wildness. Where water takes its first leap from the top, it is cool and collected, and uninteresting and mathematical; but it is when it finds that it has got into a scrape, and has farther to go than it thought for, that its character comes out; it is then that it begins to writhe and twist, and sweep out, zone after zone, in wilder stretching as it falls, and to send down the rocket-like, lance-pointed, whizzing shafts at its sides sounding for the bottom. And it is this prostration, the hopeless abandonment of its ponderous power to the air, which is always peculiarly expressed by Turner....

"When water, not in very great body, runs in a rocky bed much interrupted by hollows, so that it can rest every now and then in a pool as it goes long, it does not acquire a continuous velocity of motion. It pauses after every leap, and curdles about, and rests a little, and then goes on again; and if, in this comparatively tranquil and rational state of mind, it meets with any obstacle, as a rock or stone, it parts on each side of it with a little bubbling foam, and goes round: if it comes to a step in its bed, it leaps it lightly, and then, after a little splashing at the bottom, stops again to take breath. But if its bed be on a continuous slope, not much interrupted by hollows, so that it cannot rest—or if its own mass be so increased by flood that its usual resting-places are not sufficient for it, but that it is perpetually pushed out of them by the following current before it has had time to tranquillise itself—it of course gains velocity with every yard that it runs; the impetus got at one leap is carried to the credit of the next, until the whole stream becomes one mass of unchecked accelerating motion. Now, when water in this state comes to an obstacle, it does not part at it, but clears it like a racehorse; and when it comes to a hollow, it does not fill it up, and run out leisurely at the other side, but it rushes down into it, and comes up again on the other side, as a ship into the hollow of the sea. Hence the whole appearance of the bed of the stream is changed, and all the lines of the water altered in their nature. The quiet stream is a succession of leaps and pools; the leaps are light and springy and parabolic, and make a great deal of splashing when they tumble into the pool; then we have a space of quiet curdling water, and another similar leap below. But the stream, when it has gained an impetus, takes the shape of its bed, never stops, is equally deep and equally swift everywhere, goes down into every hollow, not with a leap, but with a swing—not foaming nor splashing, but in the bending line of a strong sea-wave, and comes up again on the other side, over rock and ridge, with the ease of a bounding leopard. If it meet a rock three or four feet above the level of its bed, it will neither part nor foam, nor express any concern about the matter, but clear it in a smooth dome of water without apparent exertion, coming down again as smoothly on the other side, the whole surface of the surge being drawn into parallel lines by its extreme velocity, but foamless, except in places where the form of the bed opposes itself at some direct angle to such a line of fall, and causes a breaker; so that the whole river has the appearance of a deep and raging sea, with this only difference, that the torrent waves always break backwards, and sea-waves forwards. Thus, then, in the water which has gained an impetus, we have the most exquisite arrangement of curved lines, perpetually changing from convex to concave, following every swell and hollow of the bed with their modulating grace, and all in unison of motion, presenting perhaps the most beautiful series of inorganic forms which nature can possibly produce."—(Vol. i. p. 363.)

It is the object of Mr Ruskin, in his first volume of Modern Painters, to show what the artist has to do in his imitation of nature. We have no material controversy to raise with him on this subject; but we cannot help expressing our surprise that he should have thought it necessary to combat, with so much energy, so very primitive a notion that the imitation of the artist partakes of the nature of a deception, and that the highest excellence is obtained when the representation of any object is taken for the object itself. We thought this matter had been long ago settled. In a page or two of QuatremÈre de Quincy's treatise on Imitation in the Fine Arts, the reader, if he has still to seek on this subject, will find it very briefly and lucidly treated. The aim of the artist is not to produce such a representation as shall be taken, even for a moment, for a real object. His aim is, by imitating certain qualities or attributes of the object, to reproduce for us those pleasing or elevating impressions which it is the nature of such qualities or attributes to excite. We have stated very briefly the accepted doctrine on this subject—so generally accepted and understood that Mr Ruskin was under no necessity to avoid the use of the word imitation, as he appears to have done, under the apprehension that it was incurably infected with this notion of an attempted deception. Hardly any reader of his book, even without a word of explanation, would have attached any other meaning to it than what he himself expresses by representation of certain "truths" of nature.

With respect to the imitations of the landscape-painter, the notion of a deception cannot occur. His trees and rivers cannot be mistaken, for an instant, for real trees and rivers, and certainly not while they stand there in the gilt frame, and the gilt frame itself against the papered wall. His only chance of deception is to get rid of the frame, convert his picture into a transparency, and place it in the space which a window should occupy. In almost all cases, deception is obtained, not by painting well, but by those artifices which disguise that what we see is a painting. At the same time, we are not satisfied with an expression which several writers, we remark, have lately used, and which Mr Ruskin very explicitly adopts. The imitations of the landscape-painter are not a "language" which he uses; they are not mere "signs," analogous to those which the poet or the orator employs. There is no analogy between them. Let us analyse our impressions as we stand before the artist's landscape, not thinking of the artist, or his dexterity, but simply absorbed in the pleasure which he procures us—we do not find ourselves reverting, in imagination, to other trees or other rivers than those he has depicted. We certainly do not believe them to be real trees, but neither are they mere signs, or a language to recall such objects; but what there is of tree there we enjoy. There is the coolness and the quiet of the shaded avenue, and we feel them; there is the sunlight on that bank, and we feel its cheerfulness; we feel the serenity of his river. He has brought the spirit of the trees around us; the imagination rests in the picture. In other departments of art the effect is the same. If we stand before a head of Rembrandt or Vandyke, we do not think that it lives; but neither do we think of some other head, of which that is the type. But there is majesty, there is thought, there is calm repose, there is some phase of humanity expressed before us, and we are occupied with so much of human life, or human character, as is then and there given us.

Imitate as many qualities of the real object as you please, but always the highest, never sacrificing a truth of the mind, or the heart, for one only of the sense. Truth, as Mr Ruskin most justly says—truth always. When it is said that truth should not be always expressed, the maxim, if properly understood, resolves into this—that the higher truth is not to be sacrificed to the lower. In a landscape, the gradation of light and shade is a more important truth than the exact brilliancy (supposing it to be attainable,) of any individual object. The painter must calculate what means he has at his disposal for representing this gradation of light, and he must pitch his tone accordingly. Say he pitches it far below reality, he is still in search of truth—of contrast and degree.

Sometimes it may happen that, by rendering one detail faithfully, an artist may give a false impression, simply because he cannot render other details or facts by which it is accompanied in nature. Here, too, he would only sacrifice truth in the cause of truth. The admirers of Constable will perhaps dispute the aptness of our illustration. Nevertheless his works appear to us to afford a curious example of a scrupulous accuracy or detail producing a false impression. Constable, looking at foliage under the sunlight, and noting that the leaf, especially after a shower, will reflect so much light that the tree will seem more white than green, determined to paint all the white he saw. Constable could paint white leaves. So far so well. But then these leaves in nature are almost always in motion: they are white at one moment and green the next. We never have the impression of a white leaf; for it is seen playing with the light—its mirror, for one instant, and glancing from it the next. Constable could not paint motion. He could not imitate this shower of light in the living tree. He must leave his white paint where he has once put it. Other artists before him had seen the same light, but, knowing that they could not bring the breeze into their canvass, they wisely concluded that less white paint than Constable uses would produce a more truthful impression.

But we must no longer be detained from the more immediate task before us. We must now follow Mr Ruskin to his second volume of Modern Painters, where he explains his theory of the beautiful; and although this will not be to readers in general the most attractive portion of his writings, and we ourselves have to practise some sort of self-denial in fixing our attention upon it, yet manifestly it is here that we must look for the basis or fundamental principles of all his criticisms in art. The order in which his works have been published was apparently deranged by a generous zeal, which could brook no delay, to defend Mr Turner from the censures of the undiscerning public. If the natural or systematic order had been preserved, the materials of this second volume would have formed the first preliminary treatise, determining those broad principles of taste, or that philosophical theory of the beautiful, on which the whole of the subsequent works were to be modelled. Perhaps this broken and reversed order of publication has not been unfortunate for the success of the author—perhaps it was dimly foreseen to be not altogether impolitic; for the popular ear was gained by the bold and enthusiastic defence of a great painter; and the ear of the public, once caught, may be detained by matter which, in the first instance, would have appealed to it in vain. Whether the effect of chance or design, we may certainly congratulate Mr Ruskin on the fortunate succession, and the fortunate rapidity with which his publications have struck on the public ear. The popular feeling, won by the zeal and intrepidity of the first volume of Modern Painters, was no doubt a little tried by the graver discussions of the second. It was soon, however, to be again caught, and pleased by a bold and agreeable miscellany under the magical name of "The Seven Lamps;" and these Seven Lamps could hardly fail to throw some portion of their pleasant and bewildering light over a certain rudimentary treatise upon building, which was to appear under the title of "The Stones of Venice."

We cannot, however, congratulate Mr Ruskin on the manner in which he has acquitted himself in this arena of philosophical inquiry, nor on the sort of theory of the Beautiful which he has contrived to construct. The least metaphysical of our readers is aware that there is a controversy of long standing upon this subject, between two different schools of philosophy. With the one the beautiful is described as a great "idea" of the reason, or an intellectual intuition, or a simple intuitive perception; different expressions are made use of, but all imply that it is a great primary feeling, or sentiment, or idea of the human mind, and as incapable of further analysis as the idea of space, or the simplest of our sensations. The rival school of theorists maintain, on the contrary, that no sentiment yields more readily to analysis; and that the beautiful, except in those rare cases where the whole charm lies in one sensation, as in that of colour, is a complex sentiment. They describe it as a pleasure resulting from the presence of the visible object, but of which the visible object is only in part the immediate cause. Of a great portion of the pleasure it is merely the vehicle; and they say that blended reminiscences, gathered from every sense, and every human affection, from the softness of touch of an infant's finger to the highest contemplations of a devotional spirit, have contributed, in their turn, to this delightful sentiment.

Mr Ruskin was not bound to belong to either of these schools of philosophy; he was at liberty to construct an eclectic system of his own;—and he has done so. We shall take the precaution, in so delicate a matter, of quoting Mr Ruskin's own words for the exposition of his own theory. Meanwhile, as some clue to the reader, we may venture to say that he agrees with the first of these schools in adopting a primary intuitive sentiment of the beautiful; but then this primary intuition is only of a sensational or "animal" nature—a subordinate species of the beautiful, which is chiefly valuable as the necessary condition of the higher and truly beautiful; and this last he agrees with the opposite school in regarding as a derived sentiment—derived by contemplating the objects of external nature as types of the Divine attributes. This is a brief summary of the theory; for a fuller exposition we shall have recourse to his own words.

The term Æsthetic, which has been applied to this branch of philosophy, Mr Ruskin discards; he offers as a substitute Theoria, or The Theoretic Faculty, the meaning of which he thus explains:—

"I proceed, therefore, first to examine the nature of what I have called the theoretic faculty, and to justify my substitution of the term 'Theoretic' for 'Æsthetic,' which is the one commonly employed with reference to it.

"Now the term 'Æsthesis' properly signifies mere sensual perception of the outward qualities and necessary effects of bodies; in which sense only, if we would arrive at any accurate conclusions on this difficult subject, it should always be used. But I wholly deny that the impressions of beauty are in any way sensual;—they are neither sensual nor intellectual, but moral; and for the faculty receiving them, whose difference from mere perception I shall immediately endeavour to explain, no terms can be more accurate or convenient than that employed by the Greeks, 'Theoretic,' which I pray permission, therefore, always to use, and to call the operation of the faculty itself, Theoria."—(P. 11.)

We are introduced to a new faculty of the human mind; let us see what new or especial sphere of operation is assigned to it. After some remarks on the superiority of the mere sensual pleasures of the eye and the ear, but particularly of the eye, to those derived from other organs of sense, he continues:—

"Herein, then, we find very sufficient ground for the higher estimation of these delights: first, in their being eternal and inexhaustible; and, secondly, in their being evidently no meaner instrument of life, but an object of life. Now, in whatever is an object of life, in whatever may be infinitely and for itself desired, we may be sure there is something of divine: for God will not make anything an object of life to his creatures which does not point to, or partake of himself,"—[a bold assertion.] "And so, though we were to regard the pleasures of sight merely as the highest of sensual pleasures, and though they were of rare occurrence—and, when occurring, isolated and imperfect—there would still be supernatural character about them, owing to their self-sufficiency. But when, instead of being scattered, interrupted, or chance-distributed, they are gathered together and so arranged to enhance each other, as by chance they could not be, there is caused by them, not only a feeling of strong affection towards the object in which they exist, but a perception of purpose and adaptation of it to our desires; a perception, therefore, of the immediate operation of the Intelligence which so formed us and so feeds us.

"Out of what perception arise Joy, Admiration, and Gratitude?

"Now, the mere animal consciousness of the pleasantness I call Æsthesis; but the exulting, reverent, and grateful perception of it I call Theoria. For this, and this only, is the full comprehension and contemplation of the beautiful as a gift of God; a gift not necessary to our being, but adding to and elevating it, and twofold—first, of the desire; and, secondly, of the thing desired."

We find, then, that in the production of the full sentiment of the beautiful two faculties are employed, or two distinct operations denoted. First, there is the "animal pleasantness which we call Æsthesis,"—which sometimes appears confounded with the mere pleasures of sense, but which the whole current of his speculations obliges us to conclude is some separate intuition of a sensational character; and, secondly, there is "the exulting, reverent, and grateful perception of it, which we call Theoria," which alone is the truly beautiful, and which it is the function of the Theoretic Faculty to reveal to us. But this new Theoretic Faculty—what can it be but the old faculty of Human Reason, exercised upon the great subject of Divine beneficence?

Mr Ruskin, as we shall see, discovers that external objects are beautiful because they are types of Divine attributes; but he admits, and is solicitous to impress upon our minds, that the "meaning" of these types is "learnt." When, in a subsequent part of his work, he feels himself pressed by the objection that many celebrated artists, who have shown a vivid appreciation and a great passion for the beautiful, have manifested no peculiar piety, have been rather deficient in spiritual-mindedness, he gives them over to that instinctive sense he has called Æsthesis, and says—"It will be remembered that I have, throughout the examination of typical beauty, asserted our instinctive sense of it; the moral meaning of it being only discoverable by reflection," (p. 127.) Now, there is no other conceivable manner in which the meaning of the type can be learnt than by the usual exercise of the human reason, detecting traces of the Divine power, and wisdom, and benevolence, in the external world, and then associating with the various objects of the external world the ideas we have thus acquired of the Divine wisdom and goodness. The rapid and habitual regard of certain facts or appearances in the visible world, as types of the attributes of God, can be nothing else but one great instance (or class of instances) of that law of association of ideas on which the second school of philosophy we have alluded to so largely insist. And thus, whether Mr Ruskin chooses to acquiesce in it or not, his "Theoria" resolves itself into a portion, or fragment, of that theory of association of ideas, to which he declares, and perhaps believes, himself to be violently opposed.

In a very curious manner, therefore, has Mr Ruskin selected his materials from the two rival schools of metaphysics. His Æsthesis is an intuitive perception, but of a mere sensual or animal nature—sometimes almost confounded with the mere pleasure of sense, at other times advanced into considerable importance, as where he has to explain the fact that men of very little piety have a very acute perception of beauty. His Theoria is, and can be, nothing more than the results of human reason in its highest and noblest exercise, rapidly brought before the mind by a habitual association of ideas. For the lowest element of the beautiful he runs to the school of intuitions;—they will not thank him for the compliment;—for the higher to that analytic school, and that theory of association of ideas, to which throughout he is ostensibly opposed.

This Theoria divides itself into two parts. We shall quote Mr Ruskin's own words and take care to quote from them passages where he seems most solicitous to be accurate and explanatory:—

"The first thing, then, we have to do," he says, "is accurately to discriminate and define those appearances from which we are about to reason as belonging to beauty, properly so called, and to clear the ground of all the confused ideas and erroneous theories with which the misapprehension or metaphorical use of the term has encumbered it.

"By the term Beauty, then, properly are signified two things: first, that external quality of bodies, already so often spoken of, and which, whether it occur in a stone, flower, beast, or in man, is absolutely identical—which, as I have already asserted, may be shown to be in some sort typical of the Divine attributes, and which, therefore, I shall, for distinction's sake, call Typical Beauty; and, secondarily, the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of functions in living things, more especially of the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man—and this kind of beauty I shall call Vital Beauty."—(P. 26.)

The Vital Beauty, as well as the Typical, partakes essentially, as far as we can understand our author, of a religious character. On turning to that part of the volume where it is treated of at length, we find a universal sympathy and spirit of kindliness very properly insisted on, as one great element of the sentiment of beauty; but we are not permitted to dwell upon this element, or rest upon it a moment, without some reference to our relation to God. Even the animals themselves seem to be turned into types for us of our moral feelings or duties. We are expressly told that we cannot have this sympathy with life and enjoyment in other creatures, unless it takes the form of, or comes accompanied with, a sentiment of piety. In all cases where the beautiful is anything higher than a certain "animal pleasantness," we are to understand that it has a religious character. "In all cases," he says, summing up the functions of the Theoretic Faculty, "it is something Divine; either the approving voice of God, the glorious symbol of Him, the evidence of His kind presence, or the obedience to His will by Him induced and supported,"—(p. 126.) Now it is a delicate task, when a man errs by the exaggeration of a great truth or a noble sentiment, to combat his error; and yet as much mischief may ultimately arise from an error of this description as from any other. The thoughts and feelings which Mr Ruskin has described, form the noblest part of our sentiment of the beautiful, as they form the noblest phase of the human reason. But they are not the whole of it. The visible object, to adopt his phraseology, does become a type to the contemplative and pious mind of the attribute of God, and is thus exalted to our apprehension. But it is not beautiful solely or originally on this account. To assert this, is simply to falsify our human nature.

Before, however, we enter into these types, or this typical beauty, it will be well to notice how Mr Ruskin deals with previous and opposing theories. It will be well also to remind our readers of the outline of that theory of association of ideas which is here presented to us in so very confused a manner. We shall then be better able to understand the very curious position our author has taken up in this domain of speculative philosophy.

Mr Ruskin gives us the following summary of the "errors" which he thinks it necessary in the first place to clear from his path:—

"Those erring or inconsistent positions which I would at once dismiss are, the first, that the beautiful is the true; the second, that the beautiful is the useful; the third, that it is dependent on custom; and the fourth, that it is dependent on the association of ideas."

The first of these theories, that the beautiful is the true, we leave entirely to the tender mercies of Mr Ruskin; we cannot gather from his refutation to what class of theorists he is alluding. The remaining three are, as we understand the matter, substantially one and the same theory. We believe that no one, in these days, would define beauty as solely resulting either from the apprehension of Utility, (that is, the adjustment of parts to a whole, or the application of the object to an ulterior purpose,) or to Familiarity and the affection which custom engenders; but they would regard both Utility and Familiarity as amongst the sources of those agreeable ideas or impressions, which, by the great law of association, became intimately connected with the visible object. We must listen, however, to Mr Ruskin's refutation of them:—

"That the beautiful is the useful is an assertion evidently based on that limited and false sense of the latter term which I have already deprecated. As it is the most degrading and dangerous supposition which can be advanced on the subject, so, fortunately, it is the most palpably absurd. It is to confound admiration with hunger, love with lust, and life with sensation; it is to assert that the human creature has no ideas and no feelings, except those ultimately referable to its brutal appetites. It has not a single fact, nor appearance of fact, to support it, and needs no combating—at least until its advocates have obtained the consent of the majority of mankind that the most beautiful productions of nature are seeds and roots; and of art, spades and millstones.

"Somewhat more rational grounds appear for the assertion that the sense of the beautiful arises from familiarity with the object, though even this could not long be maintained by a thinking person. For all that can be alleged in defence of such a supposition is, that familiarity deprives some objects which at first appeared ugly of much of their repulsiveness; whence it is as rational to conclude that familiarity is the cause of beauty, as it would be to argue that, because it is possible to acquire a taste for olives, therefore custom is the cause of lusciousness in grapes....

"I pass to the last and most weighty theory, that the agreeableness in objects which we call beauty is the result of the association with them of agreeable or interesting ideas.

"Frequent has been the support and wide the acceptance of this supposition, and yet I suppose that no two consecutive sentences were ever written in defence of it, without involving either a contradiction or a confusion of terms. Thus Alison, 'There are scenes undoubtedly more beautiful than Runnymede, yet, to those who recollect the great event that passed there, there is no scene perhaps which so strongly seizes on the imagination,'—where we are wonder-struck at the bold obtuseness which would prove the power of imagination by its overcoming that very other power (of inherent beauty) whose existence the arguer desires; for the only logical conclusion which can possibly be drawn from the above sentence is, that imagination is not the source of beauty—for, although no scene seizes so strongly on the imagination, yet there are scenes 'more beautiful than Runnymede.' And though instances of self-contradiction as laconic and complete as this are rare, yet, if the arguments on the subject be fairly sifted from the mass of confused language with which they are always encumbered, they will be found invariably to fall into one of these two forms: either association gives pleasure, and beauty gives pleasure, therefore association is beauty; or the power of association is stronger than the power of beauty, therefore the power of association is the power of beauty."

Now this last sentence is sheer nonsense, and only proves that the author had never given himself the trouble to understand the theory he so flippantly discards. No one ever said that "association gives pleasure;" but very many, and Mr Ruskin amongst the rest, have said that associated thought adds its pleasure to an object pleasing in itself, and thus increases the complex sentiment of beauty. That it is a complex sentiment in all its higher forms, Mr Ruskin himself will tell us. As to the manner in which he deals with Alison, it is in the worst possible spirit of controversy. Alison was an elegant, but not a very precise writer; it was the easiest thing in the world to select an unfortunate illustration, and to convict that of absurdity. Yet he might with equal ease have selected many other illustrations from Alison, which would have done justice to the theory he expounds. A hundred such will immediately occur to the reader. If, instead of a historical recollection of this kind, which could hardly make the stream itself of Runnymede look more beautiful, Alison had confined himself to those impressions which the generality of mankind receive from river scenery, he would have had no difficulty in showing (as we believe he has elsewhere done) how, in this case, ideas gathered from different sources flow into one harmonious and apparently simple feeling. That sentiment of beauty which arises as we look upon a river will be acknowledged by most persons to be composed of many associated thoughts, combining with the object before them. Its form and colour, its bright surface and its green banks, are all that the eye immediately gives us; but with these are combined the remembered coolness of the fluent stream, and of the breeze above it, and of the pleasant shade of its banks; and beside all this—as there are few persons who have not escaped with delight from town or village, to wander by the quiet banks of some neighbouring stream, so there are few persons who do not associate with river scenery ideas of peace and serenity. Now many of these thoughts or facts are such as the eye does not take cognisance of, yet they present themselves as instantaneously as the visible form, and so blended as to seem, for the moment, to belong to it.

Why not have selected some such illustration as this, instead of the unfortunate Runnymede, from a work where so many abound as apt as they are elegantly expressed? As to Mr Ruskin's utilitarian philosopher, it is a fabulous creature—no such being exists. Nor need we detain ourselves with the quite departmental subject of Familiarity. But let us endeavour—without desiring to pledge ourselves or our readers to its final adoption—to relieve the theory of association of ideas from the obscurity our author has thrown around it. Our readers will not find that this is altogether a wasted labour.

With Mr Ruskin we are of opinion that, in a discussion of this kind, the term Beauty ought to be limited to the impression derived, mediately or immediately, from the visible object. It would be useless affectation to attempt to restrict the use of the word, in general, to this application. We can have no objection to the term Beautiful being applied to a piece of music, or to an eloquent composition, prose or verse, or even to our moral feelings and heroic actions; the word has received this general application, and there is, at basis, a great deal in common between all these and the sentiment of beauty attendant on the visible object. For music, or sweet sounds, and poetry, and our moral feelings, have much to do (through the law of association) with our sentiment of the Beautiful. It is quite enough if, speaking of the subject of our analysis, we limit it to those impressions, however originated, which attend upon the visible object.

One preliminary word on this association of ideas. It is from its very nature, and the nature of human life, of all degrees of intimacy—from the casual suggestion, or the case where the two ideas are at all times felt to be distinct, to those close combinations where the two ideas have apparently coalesced into one, or require an attentive analysis to separate them. You see a mass of iron; you may be said to see its weight, the impression of its weight is so intimately combined with its form. The light of the sun, and the heat of the sun are learnt from different senses, yet we never see the one without thinking of the other, and the reflection of the sunbeam seen upon a bank immediately suggests the idea of warmth. But it is not necessary that the combination should be always so perfect as in this instance, in order to produce the effect we speak of under the name of Association of Ideas. It is hardly possible for us to abstract the glow of the sunbeam from its light; but the fertility which follows upon the presence of the sun, though a suggestion which habitually occurs to reflective minds, is an association of a far less intimate nature. It is sufficiently intimate, however, to blend with that feeling of admiration we have when we speak of the beauty of the sun. There is the golden harvest in its summer beams. Again, the contemplative spirit in all ages has formed an association between the sun and the Deity, whether as the fittest symbol of God, or as being His greatest gift to man. Here we have an association still more refined, and of a somewhat less frequent character, but one which will be found to enter, in a very subtle manner, into that impression we receive from the great luminary.

And thus it is that, in different minds, the same materials of thought may be combined in a closer or laxer relationship. This should be borne in mind by the candid inquirer. That in many instances ideas from different sources do coalesce, in the manner we have been describing, he cannot for an instant doubt. He seems to see the coolness of that river; he seems to see the warmth on that sunny bank. In many instances, however, he must make allowance for the different habitudes of life. The same illustration will not always have the same force to all men. Those who have cultivated their minds by different pursuits, or lived amongst scenery of a different character, cannot have formed exactly the same moral association with external nature.

These preliminaries being adjusted, what, we ask, is that first original charm of the visible object which serves as the foundation for this wonderful superstructure of the Beautiful, to which almost every department of feeling and of thought will be found to bring its contribution? What is it so pleasurable that the eye at once receives from the external world, that round it should have gathered all these tributary pleasures? Light—colour—form; but, in reference to our discussion, pre-eminently the exquisite pleasure derived from the sense of light, pure or coloured. Colour, from infancy to old age, is one original, universal, perpetual source of delight, the first and constant element of the Beautiful.

We are far from thinking that the eye does not at once take cognisance of form as well as colour. Some ingenious analysts have supposed that the sensation of colour is, in its origin, a mere mental affection, having no reference to space or external objects, and that it obtains this reference through the contemporaneous acquisition of the sense of touch. But there can be no more reason for supposing that the sense of touch informs us immediately of an external world than that the sense of colour does. If we do not allow to all the senses an intuitive reference to the external world, we shall get it from none of them. Dr Brown, who paid particular attention to this subject, and who was desirous to limit the first intimation of the sense of sight to an abstract sensation of unlocalised colour, failed entirely in his attempt to obtain from any other source the idea of space or outness; Kant would have given him certain subjective forms of the sensitive faculty, space and time. These he did not like: he saw that, if he denied to the eye an immediate perception of the external world, he must also deny it to the touch; he therefore prayed in aid certain muscular sensations from which the idea of resistance would be obtained. But it seems to us evident that not till after we have acquired a knowledge of the external world can we connect volition with muscular movement, and that, until that connection is made, the muscular sensations stand in the same predicament as other sensations, and could give him no aid in solving his problem. We cannot go further into this matter at present.[6] The mere flash of light which follows the touch upon the optic nerve represents itself as something without; nor was colour, we imagine, ever felt, but under some form more or less distinct; although in the human being the eye seems to depend on the touch far more than in other animals, for its further instruction.

But although the eye is cognisant of form as well as colour, it is in the sensation of colour that we must seek the primitive pleasure derived from this organ. And probably the first reason why form pleases is this, that the boundaries of form are also the lines of contrast of colour. It is a general law of all sensation that, if it be continued, our susceptibility to it declines. It was necessary that the eye should be always open. Its susceptibility is sustained by the perpetual contrast of colours. Whether the contrast is sudden, or whether one hue shades gradually into another, we see here an original and primary source of pleasure. A constant variety, in some way produced, is essential to the maintenance of the pleasure derived from colour.

It is not incumbent on us to inquire how far the beauty of form may be traceable to the sensation of touch;—a very small portion of it we suspect. In the human countenance, and in sculpture, the beauty of form is almost resolvable into expression; though possibly the soft and rounded outline may in some measure be associated with the sense of smoothness to the touch. All that we are concerned to show is, that there is here in colour, diffused as it is over the whole world, and perpetually varied, a beauty at once showered upon the visible object. We hear it said, if you resolve all into association, where will you begin? You have but a circle of feelings. If moral sentiment, for instance, be not itself the beautiful, why should it become so by association. There must be something else that is the beautiful, by association with which it passes for such. We answer, that we do not resolve all into association; that we have in this one gift of colour, shed so bountifully over the whole world, an original beauty, a delight which makes the external object pleasant and beloved; for how can we fail, in some sort, to love what produces so much pleasure?

We are at a loss to understand how any one can speak with disparagement of colour as a source of the beautiful. The sculptor may, perhaps, by his peculiar education, grow comparatively indifferent to it: we know not how this may be; but let any man, of the most refined taste imaginable, think what he owes to this source, when he walks out at evening, and sees the sun set amongst the hills. The same concave sky, the same scene, so far as its form is concerned, was there a few hours before, and saddened him with its gloom; one leaden hue prevailed over all; and now in a clear sky the sun is setting, and the hills are purple, and the clouds are radiant with every colour that can be extracted from the sunbeam. He can hardly believe that it is the same scene, or he the same man. Here the grown-up man and the child stand always on the same level. As to the infant, note how its eye feeds upon a brilliant colour, or the living flame. If it had wings, it would assuredly do as the moth does. And take the most untutored rustic, let him be old, and dull, and stupid, yet, as long as the eye has vitality in it, will he look up with long untiring gaze at this blue vault of the sky, traversed by its glittering clouds, and pierced by the tall green trees around him.

Is it any marvel now that round the visible object should associate tributary feelings of pleasure? How many pleasing and tender sentiments gather round the rose! Yet the rose is beautiful in itself. It was beautiful to the child by its colour, its texture, its softly-shaded leaf, and the contrast between the flower and the foliage. Love, and poetry, and the tender regrets of advanced life, have contributed a second dower of beauty. The rose is more to the youth and to the old man than it was to the child; but still to the last they both feel the pleasure of the child.

The more commonplace the illustration, the more suited it is to our purpose. If any one will reflect on the many ideas that cluster round this beautiful flower, he will not fail to see how numerous and subtle may be the association formed with the visible object. Even an idea painful in itself may, by way of contrast, serve to heighten the pleasure of others with which it is associated. Here the thought of decay and fragility, like a discord amongst harmonies, increases our sentiment of tenderness. We express, we believe, the prevailing taste when we say that there is nothing, in the shape of art, so disagreeable and repulsive as artificial flowers. The waxen flower may be an admirable imitation, but it is a detestable thing. This partly results from the nature of the imitation; a vulgar deception is often practised upon us: what is not a flower is intended to pass for one. But it is owing still more, we think, to the contradiction that is immediately afterwards felt between this preserved and imperishable waxen flower, and the transitory and perishable rose. It is the nature of the rose to bud, and blossom, and decay; it gives its beauty to the breeze and to the shower; it is mortal; it is ours; it bears our hopes, our loves, our regrets. This waxen substitute, that cannot change or decay, is a contradiction and a disgust.

Amongst objects of man's contrivance, the sail seen upon the calm waters of a lake or a river is universally felt to be beautiful. The form is graceful, and the movement gentle, and its colour contrasts well either with the shore or the water. But perhaps the chief element of our pleasure is all association with human life, with peaceful enjoyment—

Or take one of the noblest objects in nature—the mountain. There is no object except the sea and the sky that reflects to the sight colours so beautiful, and in such masses. But colour, and form, and magnitude, constitute but a part of the beauty or the sublimity of the mountain. Not only do the clouds encircle or rest upon it, but men have laid on it their grandest thoughts: we have associated with it our moral fortitude, and all we understand of greatness or elevation of mind; our phraseology seems half reflected from the mountain. Still more, we have made it holy ground. Has not God himself descended on the mountain? Are not the hills, once and for ever, "the unwalled temples of our earth?" And still there is another circumstance attendant upon mountain scenery, which adds a solemnity of its own, and is a condition of the enjoyment of other sources of the sublime—solitude. It seems to us that the feeling of solitude almost always associates itself with mountain scenery. Mrs Somerville, in the description which she gives or quotes, in her Physical Geography, of the Himalayas, says—

"The loftiest peaks being bare of snow gives great variety of colour and beauty to the scenery, which in these passes is at all times magnificent. During the day, the stupendous size of the mountains, their interminable extent, the variety and the sharpness of their forms, and, above all, the tender clearness of their distant outline melting into the pale blue sky, contrasted with the deep azure above, is described as a scene of wild and wonderful beauty. At midnight, when myriads of stars sparkle in the black sky, and the pure blue of the mountains looks deeper still below the pale white gleam of the earth and snow-light, the effect is of unparalleled sublimity, and no language can describe the splendour of the sunbeams at daybreak, streaming between the high peaks, and throwing their gigantic shadows on the mountains below. There, far above the habitation of man, no living thing exists, no sound is heard; the very echo of the traveller's footsteps startles him in the awful solitude and silence that reigns in those august dwellings of everlasting snow."

No one can fail to recognise the effect of the last circumstance mentioned. Let those mountains be the scene of a gathering of any human multitude, and they would be more desecrated than if their peaks had been levelled to the ground. We have also quoted this description to show how large a share colour takes in beautifying such a scene. Colour, either in large fields of it, or in sharp contrasts, or in gradual shading—the play of light, in short, upon this world—is the first element of beauty.

Here would be the place, were we writing a formal treatise upon this subject, after showing that there is in the sense of sight itself a sufficient elementary beauty, whereto other pleasurable reminiscences may attach themselves, to point out some of these tributaries. Each sense—the touch, the ear, the smell, the taste—blend their several remembered pleasures with the object of vision. Even taste, we say, although Mr Ruskin will scorn the gross alliance. And we would allude to the fact to show the extreme subtilty of these mental processes. The fruit which you think of eating has lost its beauty from that moment—it assumes to you a quite different relation; but the reminiscence that there is sweetness in the peach or the grape, whilst it remains quite subordinate to the pleasure derived from the sense of sight, mingles with and increases that pleasure. Whilst the cluster of ripe grapes is looked at only for its beauty, the idea that they are pleasant to the taste as well steals in unobserved, and adds to the complex sentiment. If this idea grow distinct and prominent, the beauty of the grape is gone—you eat it. Here, too, would be the place to take notice of such sources of pleasure as are derived from adaptation of parts, or the adaptation of the whole to ulterior purposes; but here especially should we insist on human affections, human loves, human sympathies. Here, in the heart of man, his hopes, his regrets, his affections, do we find the great source of the beautiful—tributaries which take their name from the stream they join, but which often form the main current. On that sympathy with which nature has so wonderfully endowed us, which makes the pain and pleasure of all other living things our own pain and pleasure, which binds us not only to our fellow-men, but to every moving creature on the face of the earth, we should have much to say. How much, for instance, does its life add to the beauty of the swan!—how much more its calm and placid life! Here, and on what would follow on the still more exalted mood of pious contemplation—when all nature seems as a hymn or song of praise to the Creator—we should be happy to borrow aid from Mr Ruskin; his essay supplying admirable materials for certain chapters in a treatise on the beautiful which should embrace the whole subject.

No such treatise, however, is it our object to compose. We have said enough to show the true nature of that theory of association, as a branch of which alone is it possible to take any intelligible view of Mr Ruskin's Theoria, or "Theoretic Faculty." His flagrant error is, that he will represent a part for the whole, and will distort and confuse everything for the sake of this representation. Viewed in their proper limitation, his remarks are often such as every wise and good man will approve of. Here and there too, there are shrewd intimations which the psychological student may profit by. He has pointed out several instances where the associations insisted upon by writers of the school of Alison have nothing whatever to do with the sentiment of beauty; and neither harmonise with, nor exalt it. Not all that may, in any way, interest us in an object, adds to its beauty. "Thus," as Mr Ruskin we think very justly says, "where we are told that the leaves of a plant are occupied in decomposing carbonic acid, and preparing oxygen for us, we begin to look upon it with some such indifference as upon a gasometer. It has become a machine; some of our sense of its happiness is gone; its emanation of inherent life is no longer pure." The knowledge of the anatomical structure of the limb is very interesting, but it adds nothing to the beauty of its outline. Scientific associations, however, of this kind, will have a different Æsthetic effect, according to the degree or the enthusiasm with which the science has been studied.

It is not our business to advocate this theory of association of ideas, but briefly to expound it. But we may remark that those who adopt (as Mr Ruskin has done in one branch of his subject—his Æsthesis) the rival theory of an intuitive perception of the beautiful, must find a difficulty where to insert this intuitive perception. The beauty of any one object is generally composed of several qualities and accessories—to which of these are we to connect this intuition? And if to the whole assemblage of them, then, as each of these qualities has been shown by its own virtue to administer to the general effect, we shall be explaining again by this new perception what has been already explained. Select any notorious instance of the beautiful—say the swan. How many qualities and accessories immediately occur to us as intimately blended in our minds with the form and white plumage of the bird! What were its arched neck and mantling wings if it were not living? And how the calm and inoffensive, and somewhat majestic life it leads, carries away our sympathies! Added to which, the snow-white form of the swan is imaged in clear waters, and is relieved by green foliage; and if the bird makes the river more beautiful, the river, in return, reflects its serenity and peacefulness upon the bird. Now all this we seem to see as we look upon the swan. To which of these facts separately will you attach this new intuition? And if you wait till all are assembled, the bird is already beautiful.

We are all in the habit of reasoning on the beautiful, of defending our own tastes, and this just in proportion as the beauty in question is of a high order. And why do we do this? Because, just in proportion as the beauty is of an elevated character, does it depend on some moral association. Every argument of this kind will be found to consist of an analysis of the sentiment. Nor is there anything derogatory, as some have supposed, in this analysis of the sentiment; for we learn from it, at every step, that in the same degree as men become more refined, more humane, more kind, equitable, and pious, will the visible world become more richly clad with beauty. We see here an admirable arrangement, whereby the external world grows in beauty, as men grow in goodness.

We must now follow Mr Ruskin a step farther into the development of his Theoria. All beauty, he tell us, is such, in its high and only true character, because it is a type of one or more of God's attributes. This, as we have shown, is to represent one class of associated thought as absorbing and displacing all the rest. We protest against this egregious exaggeration of a great and sacred source of our emotions. With Mr Ruskin's own piety we can have no quarrel; but we enter a firm and calm protest against a falsification of our human nature, in obedience to one sentiment, however sublime. No good can come of it—no good, we mean, to religion itself. It is substantially the same error, though assuming a very different garb, which the Puritans committed. They disgusted men with religion, by introducing it into every law and custom, and detail of human life. Mr Ruskin would commit the same error in the department of taste, over which he would rule so despotically: he is not content that the highest beauty shall be religious; he will permit nothing to be beautiful, except as it partakes of a religious character. But there is a vast region lying between the "animal pleasantness" of his Æsthesis and the pious contemplation of his Theoria. There is much between the human animal and the saint; there are the domestic affections and the love they spring from, and hopes, and regrets, and aspirations, and the hour of peace and the hour of repose—in short, there is human life. From all human life, as we have seen, come contributions to the sentiment of the beautiful, quite as distinctly traced as the peculiar class on which Mr Ruskin insists.

If any one descanting upon music should affirm, that, in the first place, there was a certain animal pleasantness in harmony or melody, or both, but that the real essence of music, that by which it truly becomes music, was the perception in harmony or melody of types of the Divine attributes, he would reason exactly in the same manner on music as Mr Ruskin does on beauty. Nevertheless, although sacred music is the highest, it is very plain that there is other music than the sacred, and that all songs are not hymns.

Chapter v. of the present volume bears this title—Of Typical Beauty. First, of Infinity, or the type of the Divine Incomprehensibility.—A boundless space will occur directly to the reader as a type of the infinite; perhaps it should be rather described as itself the infinite under one form. But Mr Ruskin finds the infinite in everything. That idea which he justly describes as the incomprehensible, and which is so profound and baffling a mystery to the finite being, is supposed to be thrust upon the mind on every occasion. Every instance of variety is made the type of the infinite, as well as every indication of space. We remember that, in the first volume of the Modern Painters, we were not a little startled at being told that the distinguishing character of every good artist was, that "he painted the infinite." Good or bad, we now see that he could scarcely fail to paint the infinite: it must be by some curious chance that the feat is not accomplished.

"Now, not only," writes Mr Ruskin, "is this expression of infinity in distance most precious wherever we find it, however solitary it may be, and however unassisted by other forms and kinds of beauty; but it is of such value that no such other forms will altogether recompense us for its loss; and much as I dread the enunciation of anything that may seem like a conventional rule, I have no hesitation in asserting that no work of any art, in which this expression of infinity is possible, can be perfect or supremely elevated without it; and that, in proportion to its presence, it will exalt and render impressive even the most tame and trivial themes. And I think if there be any one grand division, by which it is at all possible to set the productions of painting, so far as their mere plan or system is concerned, on our right and left hands, it is this of light and dark background, of heaven-light and of object-light.... There is a spectral etching of Rembrandt, a presentation of Christ in the Temple, where the figure of a robed priest stands glaring by its gems out of the gloom, holding a crosier. Behind it there is a subdued window-light seen in the opening, between two columns, without which the impressiveness of the whole subject would, I think, be incalculably diminished. I cannot tell whether I am at present allowing too much weight to my own fancies and predilections; but, without so much escape into the outer air and open heaven as this, I can take permanent pleasure in no picture.

"And I think I am supported in this feeling by the unanimous practice, if not the confessed opinion, of all artists. The painter of portrait is unhappy without his conventional white stroke under the sleeve, or beside the arm-chair; the painter of interiors feels like a caged bird unless he can throw a window open, or set the door ajar; the landscapist dares not lose himself in forest without a gleam of light under its farthest branches, nor ventures out in rain unless he may somewhere pierce to a better promise in the distance, or cling to some closing gap of variable blue above."—(P. 39.)

But if an open window, or "that conventional white stroke under the sleeve," is sufficient to indicate the Infinite, how few pictures there must be in which it is not indicated! and how many "a tame and trivial theme" must have been, by this indication, exalted and rendered impressive! And yet it seems that some very celebrated paintings want this open-window or conventional white stroke. The Madonna della Sediola of Raphael is known over all Europe; some print of it may be seen in every village; that virgin-mother, in her antique chair, embracing her child with so sweet and maternal an embrace, has found its way to the heart of every woman, Catholic or Protestant. But unfortunately it has a dark background, and there is no open window—nothing to typify infinity. To us it seemed that there was "heaven's light" over the whole picture. Though there is the chamber wall seen behind the chair, there is nothing to intimate that the door or the window is closed. One might in charity have imagined that the light came directly through an open door or window. However, Mr Ruskin is inexorable. "Raphael," he says, "in his full, betrayed the faith he had received from his father and his master, and substituted for the radiant sky of the Madonna del Cardellino the chamber wall of the Madonna della Sediola, and the brown wainscot of the Baldacchino."

Of other modes in which the Infinite is represented, we have an instance in "The Beauty of Curvature."

"The first of these is the curvature of lines and surfaces, wherein it at first appears futile to insist upon any resemblance or suggestion of infinity, since there is certainly, in our ordinary contemplation of it, no sensation of the kind. But I have repeated again and again that the ideas of beauty are instinctive, and that it is only upon consideration, and even then in doubtful and disputable way, that they appear in their typical character; neither do I intend at all to insist upon the particular meaning which they appear to myself to bear, but merely on their actual and demonstrable agreeableness; so that in the present case, which I assert positively, and have no fear of being able to prove—that a curve of any kind is more beautiful than a right line—I leave it to the reader to accept or not, as he pleases, that reason of its agreeableness which is the only one that I can at all trace: namely, that every curve divides itself infinitely by its changes of direction."—(P. 63.)

Our old friend Jacob Boehmen would have been delighted with this Theoria. But we must pass on to other types. Chapter vi. treats of Unity, or the Type of the Divine Comprehensiveness.

"Of the appearances of Unity, or of Unity itself, there are several kinds, which it will be found hereafter convenient to consider separately. Thus there is the unity of different and separate things, subjected to one and the same influence, which may be called Subjectional Unity; and this is the unity of the clouds, as they are driven by the parallel winds, or as they are ordered by the electric currents; this is the unity of the sea waves; this, of the bending and undulation of the forest masses; and in creatures capable of Will it is the Unity of Will, or of Impulse. And there is Unity of Origin, which we may call Original Unity, which is of things arising from one spring or source, and speaking always of this their brotherhood; and this in matter is the unity of the branches of the trees, and of the petals and starry rays of flowers, and of the beams of light; and in spiritual creatures it is their filial relation to Him from whom they have their being. And there is Unity of Sequence," &c.—

down another half page. Very little to be got here, we think. Let us advance to the next chapter. This is entitled, Of Repose, or the Type of Divine Permanence.

It will be admitted on all hands that nothing adds more frequently to the charms of the visible object than the associated feeling of repose. The hour of sunset is the hour of repose. Most beautiful things are enhanced by some reflected feeling of this kind. But surely one need not go farther than to human labour, and human restlessness, anxiety, and passion, to understand the charm of repose. Mr Ruskin carries us at once into the third heaven:—

"As opposed to passion, changefulness, or laborious exertion, Repose is the especial and separating characteristic of the eternal mind and power; it is the 'I am' of the Creator, opposed to the 'I become' of all creatures; it is the sign alike of the supreme knowledge which is incapable of surprise, the supreme power which is incapable of labour, the supreme volition which is incapable of change; it is the stillness of the beams of the eternal chambers laid upon the variable waters of ministering creatures."

We must proceed. Chapter viii. treats Of Symmetry, or the Type of Divine Justice. Perhaps the nature of this chapter will be sufficiently indicated to the reader, now somewhat informed of Mr Ruskin's mode of thinking, by the title itself. At all events, we shall pass on to the next chapter, ix.—Of Purity, or the Type of Divine Energy. Here, the reader will perhaps expect to find himself somewhat more at home. One type, at all events, of Divine Purity has often been presented to his mind. Light has generally been considered as the fittest emblem or manifestation of the Divine Presence,

But if the reader has formed any such agreeable expectation he will be disappointed. Mr Ruskin travels on no beaten track. He finds some reasons, partly theological, partly gathered from his own theory of the Beautiful, for discarding this ancient association of Light with Purity. As the Divine attributes are those which the visible object typifies, and by no means the human, and as Purity, which is "sinlessness," cannot, he thinks, be predicted of the Divine nature, it follows that he cannot admit Light to be a type of Purity. We quote the passage, as it will display the working of his theory:—

"It may seem strange to many readers that I have not spoken of purity in that sense in which it is most frequently used, as a type of sinlessness. I do not deny that the frequent metaphorical use of it in Scripture may have, and ought to have, much influence on the sympathies with which we regard it; and that probably the immediate agreeableness of it to most minds arises far more from this source than from that to which I have chosen to attribute it. But, in the first place, if it be indeed in the signs of Divine and not of human attributes that beauty consists, I see not how the idea of sin can be formed with respect to the Deity; for it is the idea of a relation borne by us to Him, and not in any way to be attached to His abstract nature; while the Love, Mercifulness, and Justice of God I have supposed to be symbolised by other qualities of beauty: and I cannot trace any rational connection between them and the idea of Spotlessness in matter, nor between this idea nor any of the virtues which make up the righteousness of man, except perhaps those of truth and openness, which have been above spoken of as more expressed by the transparency than the mere purity of matter. So that I conceive the use of the terms purity, spotlessness, &c., on moral subjects, to be merely metaphorical; and that it is rather that we illustrate these virtues by the desirableness of material purity, than that we desire material purity because it is illustrative of those virtues. I repeat, then, that the only idea which I think can be legitimately connected with purity of matter is this of vital and energetic connection among its particles."

We have been compelled to quote some strange passages, of most difficult and laborious perusal; but our task is drawing to an end. The last of these types we have to mention is that Of Moderation, or the Type of Government by Law. We suspect there are many persons who have rapidly perused Mr Ruskin's works (probably skipping where the obscurity grew very thick) who would be very much surprised, if they gave a closer attention to them, at the strange conceits and absurdities which they had passed over without examination. Indeed, his very loose and declamatory style, and the habit of saying extravagant things, set all examination at defiance. But let any one pause a moment on the last title we have quoted from Mr Ruskin—let him read the chapter itself—let him reflect that he has been told in it that "what we express by the terms chasteness, refinement, and elegance," in any work of art, and more particularly "that finish" so dear to the intelligent critic, owe their attractiveness to being types of God's government by law!—we think he will confess that never in any book, ancient or modern, did he meet with an absurdity to outrival it.

We have seen why the curve in general is beautiful; we have here the reason given us why one curve is more beautiful than another:—

"And herein we at last find the reason of that which has been so often noted respecting the subtilty and almost invisibility of natural curves and colours, and why it is that we look on those lines as least beautiful which fall into wide and far license of curvature, and as most beautiful which approach nearest (so that the curvilinear character be distinctly asserted) to the government of the right line, as in the pure and severe curves of the draperies of the religious painters."

There is still the subject of "vital beauty" before us, but we shall probably be excused from entering further into the development of "Theoria." It must be quite clear by this time to our readers, that, whatever there is in it really wise and intelligible, resolves itself into one branch of that general theory of association of ideas, of which Alison and others have treated. But we are now in a condition to understand more clearly that peculiar style of language which startled us so much in the first volume of the Modern Painters. There we frequently heard of the Divine mission of the artist, of the religious office of the painter, and how Mr Turner was delivering God's message to man. What seemed an oratorical climax, much too frequently repeated, proves to be a logical sequence of his theoretical principles. All true beauty is religious; therefore all true art, which is the reproduction of the beautiful, must be religious also. Every picture gallery is a sort of temple, every great painter a sort of prophet. If Mr Ruskin is conscious that he never admires anything beautiful in nature or art, without a reference to some attribute of God, or some sentiment of piety, he may be a very exalted person, but he is no type of humanity. If he asserts this, we must be sufficiently courteous to believe him; we must not suspect that he is hardly candid with us, or with himself; but we shall certainly not accept him as a representative of the genus homo. He finds "sermons in stones," and sermons always; "books in the running brooks," and always books of divinity. Other men not deficient in reflection or piety do not find it thus. Let us hear the poet who, more than any other, has made a religion of the beauty of nature. Wordsworth, in a passage familiar to every one of his readers, runs his hand, as it were, over all the chords of the lyre. He finds other sources of the beautiful not unworthy his song, besides that high contemplative piety which he introduces as a noble and fit climax. He recalls the first ardours of his youth, when the beautiful object itself of nature seemed to him all, in all:—

Our poet sounds all the chords. He does not muffle any; he honours Nature in her own simple loveliness, and in the beauty she wins from the human heart, as well as when she is informed with that sublime spirit

Sit down, by all means, amongst the fern and the wild-flowers, and look out upon the blue hills, or near you at the flowing brook, and thank God, the giver of all this beauty. But what manner of good will you do by endeavouring to persuade yourself that these objects are only beautiful because you give thanks for them?—for to this strange logical inversion will you find yourself reduced. And surely you learned to esteem and love this benevolence itself, first as a human attribute, before you became cognisant of it as a Divine attribute. What other course can the mind take but to travel through humanity up to God?

There is much more of metaphysics in the volume before us; there is, in particular, an elaborate investigation of the faculty of imagination; but we have no inducement to proceed further with Mr Ruskin in these psychological inquiries. We have given some attention to his theory of the Beautiful, because it lay at the basis of a series of critical works which, partly from their boldness, and partly from the talent of a certain kind which is manifestly displayed in them, have attained to considerable popularity. But we have not the same object for prolonging our examination into his theory of the Imaginative Faculty. "We say it advisedly," (as Mr Ruskin always adds when he is asserting anything particularly rash,) we say it advisedly, and with no rashness whatever, that though our author is a man of great natural ability, and enunciates boldly many an independent isolated truth, yet of the spirit of philosophy he is utterly destitute. The calm, patient, prolonged thinking, which Dugald Stewart somewhere describes as the one essential characteristic of the successful student of philosophy, he knows nothing of. He wastes his ingenuity in making knots where others had long since untied them. He rushes at a definition, makes a parade of classification; but for any great and wide generalisation he has no appreciation whatever. He appears to have no taste, but rather an antipathy for it; when it lies in his way he avoids it. On this subject of the Imaginative Faculty he writes and he raves, defines and poetises by turns; makes laborious distinctions where there is no essential difference; has his "Imagination Associative," and his "Imagination Penetrative;" and will not, or cannot, see those broad general principles which with most educated men have become familiar truths, or truisms. But what clear thinking can we expect of a writer who thus describes his "Imagination Penetrative?"—

"It may seem to the reader that I am incorrect in calling this penetrating possession-taking faculty Imagination. Be it so: the name is of little consequence; the Faculty itself, called by what name it will, I insist upon as the highest intellectual power of man. There is no reasoning in it; it works not by algebra, nor by integral calculus; it is a piercing Pholas-like mind's tongue, that works and tastes into the very rock-heart. No matter what be the subject submitted to it, substance or spirit—all is alike divided asunder, joint and marrow, whatever utmost truth, life, principle, it has laid bare; and that which has no truth, life, nor principle, dissipated into its original smoke at a touch. The whispers at men's ears it lifts into visible angels. Vials that have lain sealed in the deep sea a thousand years it unseals, and brings out of them Genii."—(P. 156.)

With such a wonder-working faculty man ought to do much. Indeed, unless it has been asleep all this time, it is difficult to understand why there should remain anything for him to do.

Surveying Mr Ruskin's works on art, with the knowledge we have here acquired of his intellectual character and philosophical theory, we are at no loss to comprehend that mixture of shrewd and penetrating remark, of bold and well-placed censure, and of utter nonsense in the shape of general principles, with which they abound. In his Seven Lamps of Architecture, which is a very entertaining book, and in his Stones of Venice, the reader will find many single observations which will delight him, as well by their justice, as by the zeal and vigour with which they are expressed. But from neither work will he derive any satisfaction if he wishes to carry away with him broad general views on architecture.

There is no subject Mr Ruskin has treated more largely than that of architectural ornament; there is none on which he has said more good things, or delivered juster criticisms; and there is none on which he has uttered more indisputable nonsense. Every reader of taste will be grateful to Mr Ruskin if he can pull down from St Paul's Cathedral, or wherever else they are to be found, those wreaths or festoons of carved flowers—"that mass of all manner of fruit and flowers tied heavily into a long bunch, thickest in the middle, and pinned up by both ends against a dead wall." Urns with pocket-handkerchiefs upon them, or a sturdy thick flame for ever issuing from the top, he will receive our thanks for utterly demolishing. But when Mr Ruskin expounds his principles—and he always has principles to expound—when he lays down rules for the government of our taste in this matter, he soon involves us in hopeless bewilderment. Our ornaments, he tells us, are to be taken from the works of nature, not of man; and, from some passages of his writings, we should infer that Mr Ruskin would cover the walls of our public buildings with representations botanical and geological. But in this we must be mistaken. At all events, nothing is to be admitted that is taken from the works of man.

"I conclude, then, with the reader's leave, that all ornament is base which takes for its subject human work; that it is utterly base—painful to every rightly toned mind, without, perhaps, immediate sense of the reason, but for a reason palpable enough when we do think of it. For to carve our own work, and set it up for admiration, is a miserable self-complacency, a contentment in our wretched doings, when we might have been looking at God's doings."

After this, can we venture to admire the building itself, which is, of necessity, man's own "wretched doing?"

Perplexed by his own rules, he will sometimes break loose from the entanglement in some such strange manner as this:—"I believe the right question to ask, with respect to all ornament, is simply this: Was it done with enjoyment—was the carver happy while he was about it?" Happy art! where the workman is sure to give happiness if he is but happy at his work. Would that the same could be said of literature!

How far colour should be introduced into architecture is a question with men of taste, and a question which of late has been more than usually discussed. Mr Ruskin leans to the introduction of colour. His taste may be correct; but the fanciful reasoning which he brings to bear upon the subject will assist no one else in forming his own taste. Because there is no connection "between the spots of an animal's skin and its anatomical system," he lays it down as the first great principle which is to guide us in the use of colour in architecture—

"That it be visibly independent of form. Never paint a column with vertical lines, but always cross it. Never give separate mouldings separate colours," &c. "In certain places," he continues, "you may run your two systems closer, and here and there let them be parallel for a note or two, but see that the colours and the forms coincide only as two orders of mouldings do; the same for an instant, but each holding its own course. So single members may sometimes have single colours; as a bird's head is sometimes of one colour, and its shoulders another, you may make your capital one colour, and your shaft another; but, in general, the best place for colour is on broad surfaces, not on the points of interest in form. An animal is mottled on its breast and back, and rarely on its paws and about its eyes; so put your variegation boldly on the flat wall and broad shaft, but be shy of it on the capital and moulding."—(Lamps of Architecture, p. 127.)

We do not quite see what we have to do at all with the "anatomical system" of the animal, which is kept out of sight; but, in general, we apprehend there is, both in the animal and vegetable kingdom, considerable harmony betwixt colour and external form. Such fantastic reasoning as this, it is evident, will do little towards establishing that one standard of taste, or that "one school of architecture," which Mr Ruskin so strenuously insists upon. All architects are to resign their individual tastes and predilections, and enrol themselves in one school, which shall adopt one style. We need not say that the very first question—what that style should be, Greek or Gothic—would never be decided. Mr Ruskin decides it in favour of the "earliest English decorated Gothic;" but seems, in this case, to suspect that his decision will not carry us far towards unanimity. The scheme is utterly impossible; but he does his duty, he tells us, by proposing the impossibility.

As a climax to his inconsistency and his abnormal ways of thinking, he concludes his Seven Lamps of Architecture with a most ominous paragraph, implying that the time is at hand when no architecture of any kind will be wanted: man and his works will be both swept away from the face of the earth. How, with this impression on his mind, could he have the heart to tell us to build for posterity? Will it be a commentary on the Apocalypse that we shall next receive from the pen of Mr Ruskin?

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