to Mr. Ruskin's "theological bias" on this ground. Both science and art reveal the truth in different ways, and the truth only is from God. Art, according to Mr. Ruskin, is religion, and has to do with "the feelings of love, reverence, or dread, with which the human mind is affected by its conceptions of spiritual being."
The true artist therefore, as Mr. E. T. Cook, one of the ablest of Mr. Ruskin's commentators, points out, is necessarily a man of true religion. "The world of Beauty," he says, "is like the Beryl in Rossetti's ballad—
"None sees here but the pure alone."
That such has in fact been the case is the burden of all Mr. Ruskin's books on the history of artists and art schools. It is the decadence of the art of architecture, corresponding with a decay of vital religion, that he finds written on the "Stones of Venice," the clearness of early faith that he finds reflected in the brightness of the pictures of Florence; the gladness of Greek religion that gives for him the sharpness to "the Plough-share of Pentelicus."
Art, therefore, according to Ruskin, cannot be the handmaid of immorality and vice; it is only false art which thus degrades itself. Mr. Ruskin does not believe in the doctrine of art for art's sake, but in that of art for man's sake and God's sake. This is what he says on the dependence of ideas of beauty on purity of mind. "It is necessary to the existence of an idea of beauty that the sensual pleasure which may be its basis should be accompanied first with joy, then with love of the object, then with the perception of kindness in a superior intelligence, finally, with thankfulness and veneration towards the intelligence itself; and as no idea can be at all considered as in any way an idea of beauty until it be made up of these emotions any more than we can be said to have an idea of a letter, of which we perceive the perfume and the fair writing, without understanding the contents of it, or intent of
