book which seems to me to be far more deeply founded in its criticism of art than any other that I have met with . . . written with great power and eloquence' (Collingwood, p. 94) 'For a critic to be so much of a poet,' wrote Mrs. Browning, 'is a great thing.' Sydney Smith said it was ' a work of transcendent talent, presented the most original views, and the most elegant and powerful language, and would work a complete revolution in the world of taste' (Prat. ii. ch. ix.) Dearer to Ruskin than the praises of the great world was the delight of his parents. On New Year's day his father bought for him Turner's picture of 'The Slaver,' 'well knowing how to please me. The pleasures of a new Turner to me nobody ever will understand.'
The young author was not lured by praise into hurried production ; nor was the success of the first volume of 'Modern Painters' a decisive point in his career. He was still giving much of his best effort to drawing, with steadily increasing skill, and to the geological and mineralogical studies, in which to the end he keenly delighted. He set to work to continue his studies in art, but it was still an open question which was to be the main work of his life. In 1844 he went with his parents to Switzerland, and studied mountains at Chamouni and Zermatt. At the Simplon they met James David Forbes [q. v.], whose viscous theory of glaciers Ruskin afterwards defended with great warmth. On his way home he spent some time in Paris, studying old masters at the Louvre. Next year he went abroad without his parents, but attended by a valet and Couttet the guide. At Macugnaga, where he spent some weeks, he devoted himself to close study of Shakespeare, 'which led me into fruitful thought, out of the till then passive sensation of merely artistic or naturalist life.' Other writers to whom Ruskin professed himself mainly indebted were Dante, George Herbert, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. From Macugnaga he went to Pisa, Lucca, and Venice, and to this tour he attributes a turning point in his life and work. At Lucca he was profoundly impressed by the recumbent statue of Ilaria di Caretto (described in Modern Painters, vol. ii. sec. i. chap, vii., and in The Three Colours of Preraphaelitism). Beside this tomb he 'partly felt, partly A'owed, that his life must no longer be spent only in the study of rocks and clouds.' At Venice (whither J. D. Harding accompanied him) they went one day to see the then unknown and uncared-for Tintorets in the Scuola di San Rocco. It was a revelation, and decided the current of Ruskin's life. 'But for that porter's opening I should,' he said, 'have written the "Stones of Chamouni" instead of the "Stones of Venice," and I should have brought out into full distinctness and use what faculty I had of drawing the human face and form with true expression of their higher beauty. ... I felt that a new world was opened to me, that I had seen that day the art of man in its full majesty for the first time ; and that there was also a strange and precious gift in myself enabling me to recognise it.' With this conviction Ruskin returned home in the autumn of 1845 to Denmark Hill, whither his parents had removed in 1843 to a large house with spacious grounds, and proceeded to write out a second volume of 'Modern Painters.' The enlargement of its scope was at once obvious. Instead of a defence of the moderns, we heard now the praise of the ancients. Whereas the closing paragraphs of Ruskin's first volume are an exhortation to truth in landscape, those of the second are a hymn of praise to 'the angel-choirs of Angelico, with the flames on their white foreheads waving brighter as they move, and the sparkles streaming from their purple wings like the glitter of many suns upon a sounding sea.' The second volume, published in April 1846, confirmed and established Ruskin's fame, for though published anonymously the authorship was by this time an open secret. This treatise, though marred by a narrowness of temper and by some other faults, mercilessly exposed by the author himself in his notes to a revised edition in 1882, occupies a central place in Ruskin's system. It sets forth the spiritual as opposed to the sensual theory of art. It expresses what he elsewhere calls 'the first and foundational law respecting human contemplation of the natural phenomena under whose influence we exist, that they can only be seen with their properly belonging joy, and interpreted up to the measure of proper human intelligence, when they are accepted as the Avork and the gift of a Living Spirit greater than our own.' The author's acute analysis of the functions of imagination in art, and his descriptions, often not accurate in detail, but always original and suggestive, of pictures by the Florentine masters and Tintoret, added to the attraction of the volume. In style it bears evident traces of an imitation of Hooker, whom Ruskin had been urged by Osborne Gordon to study.
The completion of 'Modern Painters' was interrupted for ten years by various studies and by domestic circumstances. In
