of clouds, piled up in mountainous cumuli, or fleecy and floating, or dishevelled and streaming like the locks of the Graiæ. 'Modern Painters' contains some self-contradictions. It was not a treatise written at one time. It embodies the development of its author's ideas from his seventeenth to his forty-first year. But 'in the main aim and principle of the book there is,' says Ruskin, 'no variation from its first syllable to its last. It declares the perfectness and eternal beauty of the work of God; and tests all work of man by concurrence with, or subjection to that.' In its immediate purpose—the defence of Turner—'Modern Painters' is 'the most triumphant vindication of the kind ever published.' It has been called also 'the only book in the language which treats to any purpose of what is called æsthetics' (Mr. Leslie Stephen in National Review, April 1900). In its critical remarks upon painters its appreciations will survive, but many of its depreciations were exaggerated, and no longer stand. Apart from any more particular thesis the book is a sustained rhapsody on the beauty and wonder of nature, the dignity of art, and the solemnity and mystery of life. 'I venerate Ruskin,' said George Eliot after reading the later volumes of 'Modern Painters,' 'as one of the great teachers of the age. He teaches with the inspiration of a Hebrew prophet.' In style, no less than in matter, 'Modern Painters' shows many differences, and reveals the author's increasing mastery over the resources of language. It has been most admired for its descriptive passages, and these have indeed in prose never been surpassed. The only objection that can be urged against them is Matthew Arnold's that Ruskin 'tries to make prose do more than it can perfectly do.' Ruskin himself was of that opinion. The great poets, he said, did in a line what he did less perfectly in a page. But the book is memorable for much else than its word-paintings. Tennyson was once asked to name the six authors in whom the stateliest English prose was to be found. He replied, 'Hooker, Bacon, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, De Quincey, Ruskin.' But there are many notes in 'Modern Painters.' Its author's style had command of pathos, fancy, humour, irony, as well as stateliness and sonorous diction. The position attained by Ruskin by this work was recognised by a distinction conferred upon him in 1858, an 'honorary studentship' of Christ Church.
The last three volumes of 'Modern Painters' excited additional interest, and in their first edition command additional value, from the beautiful plates, executed mostly from Ruskin's own drawings by the best engravers of the day. Ruskin never cared to assert his own artistic gifts, and no adequate exhibition of his drawings was held in his lifetime. In 1878 he exhibited a few of his own landscapes along with his Turners at the Fine Art Society, and he was an occasional exhibitor at the Old Water-colour Society, of which he was elected an honorary member in 1873. Some of his drawings are in public collections—the St. George's Museum at Sheffield and the Ruskin Drawing School at Oxford. A loan exhibition was held at the Fine Art Society's rooms in February 1901. He was an artist of real though restricted talent. He seldom attempted, and never successfully mastered, the use of oil-colours. He was, as he says himself, deficient in power of invention and design. (A painted window at the east end of Sir Gilbert Scott's church at Camberwell was designed partly by Ruskin, and he designed a window for the Oxford Museum.) He had no skill in the representation of the human form, though he could copy the figure well (e.g. his copy of Carpaccio's St. George at Sheffield). But his architectural drawings are incomparable in their kind, and some of his landscapes are as good as Turner's. The amount of his artistic production is astonishing, when we consider it as only a by-work of his life. It may be said that he was the most literary of artists and the most artistic of critics. What he claimed for himself was only such skill as to prove that he knew what the good qualities of drawing are. But many of his landscapes and architectural studies are as poetical as the passages of written words which accompany them. Ruskin is probably the only man who has described the same scenes with so large a measure of success in prose and verse and drawing. (For illustrated articles on Ruskin as an artist, see Scribner, December 1898; Studio, March 1900.)
With the completion of 'Modern Painters' begins a new period in Ruskin's literary life. He was then forty, and had finished the work by which he is popularly known as a writer of art. He now embarked on a new career. The title of his Manchester lectures in 1857, 'The Political Economy of Art,' was significant. Economics were henceforth to take the place of art. But it was not so much a change as a development. Ruskin's æsthetic criticism was coloured throughout by moral considerations. 'Yes,' said his father, after one of Ruskin's lectures on art, 'he should have been a bishop.' And Ruskin himself had proclaimed the moral basis of
