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There is, however, a difference in the extent of the chromatic scale. Whilst the humming-bird partakes in its colors of the whole of the spectrum from the violet to the red, passing through green, those of the butterfly prefer the more refrangible ones from green to violet, passing through blue. The admirable lilac shade of the Morpho menelas and the Morpho cypris is well known, and the wings of these butterflies have been used by the jewellers, carefully laid under a thin plate of mica, and made into ornaments. A bright green is not uncommon, but the metallic red is rare, excepting in a beautiful butterfly of Madagascar, closely allied to one found in India and Ceylon. The latter has wings of a velvet black with brilliant green spots; in the former, these give place to a mark of fiery red.

There is the same difference between the metallic hues of creatures endowed with flight and the iris shades of fishes, that there is between crystallized bismuth and the soft reflections of the changing opal. To have an idea of the richness of the fish, it is only necessary to see a net landed filled with shad or other bright fish. It is one immense opal, with the same transparency of shade seen through the scales, which afford the only means of imitating pearls. It is due, however, not to the scales, but to extremely thin layers lying below the scales under the skin and round the blood-vessels, which look like so many threads of silver running through the flesh. Réaumur first noticed and described them; sometimes their form is as regular as that of a crystal, and of infinitesimal size and thickness. The art of the makers of false pearls is to collect these plates in a mass from the fish, and make a paste of them with the addition of glue, which is pompously named "Eastern Essence." This is put inside glass beads, and gives them the native whiteness of pearls.

Many observations have been made lately by our naturalists as to the defence which color supplies to animals: hares, rabbits, stags, and goats possess the most favorable shade for concealing them in the depths of the forest or in the fields. It is well known that when the Volunteer corps were enrolled, and the most suitable color for the riflemen was discussed, it was supposed to be green. Soldiers dressed in different shades were placed in woods and plains, to try which offered the best concealment. Contrary to expectation, that which escaped the eyes of the enemy was not green, but the fawn color of the doe. Among hunting quadrupeds, such as the tiger, the leopard, the jaguar, the panther, there is a shade of skin which man has always been anxious to appropriate for his own use. The old Egyptian tombs have paintings of the negroes of Sudan, their loins girt with the fine yellow skins for which there is still a great sale. All the birds which prey upon the smaller tribes, and fishes like the shark, are clothed in dead colors, so as to be the least seen by their victims.

There is an animal which, for two thousand years, has excited the curiosity and superstition of man by its change of color that is, the chameleon. No reasonable observation was ever made upon it, until Perrault instituted some experiments in the seventeenth century. He observed that the animal became pale at night, and took a deeper color when in the sun, or when it was teased; whilst the idea that it took its color from surrounding objects was simply fabulous. He wrapped it in different kinds of cloth, and once only did it become paler when in white. Its colors were very limited, varying from gray to green and greenish brown."

Little more than this is known in the present day: under our skies it soon loses its intensity of color. Beneath the African sun, its livery is incessantly changing; sometimes a row of large patches appears on the sides, or the skin is spotted like a trout, the spots turning to the size of a pin's head. At other times, the figures are light on a brown ground, which a moment before were brown on a light ground, and these last during the day. A naturalist speaks of two chameleons which were tied together on a boat in the Nile, with sufficient length of string to run about, and so always submissive to the same influences of

ex

light, etc. They offered a contrast of color, though to a certain degree alike; but when they slept under the straw chair which they chose for their domicile, they were actly of the same shade during the hours of rest- -a fine seagreen that never changed. The skin rested, as did the brain. so that it seemed probable that central activity, thought, will, or whatever name is given, has some effect in the change of color. The probability is, that as they become pale, the pigment does not leave the skin, but that it is collected in spheres too small to affect our retina, which will be impressed by the same quantity of pigment when more extended.

It is undoubtedly the nerves which connect the brain with organs where the pigment is retained. By cutting a nerve, the coloring matter is paralyzed in that portion of the skin through which the nerve passes, just as a muscle is isolated by the section of its nerve. If this operation is performed on a turbot in a dark state, and it is thrown into a sandy bottom, the whole body grows paler, excepting the part which cannot receive cerebral influence. The nerves have, in general, a very simple and regular distribution: if two or three of these are cut in the body of the fish, a black transversal band following the course of the nerve will be seen; whilst, if the nerve which animates the head is thus treated, the turbot growing paler on the sand, keeps a kind of black mask, which has a very curious effect.

These marks will remain for many weeks, and what may be called paralysis of color has been remarked in conse quence of illness or accident. Such was seen in the head of a large turbot, the body being of a different color. It was watched, and died after a few days, evidently of some injury which it had received. The subject offers a field of immense inquiry: the chemical and physical study of pigments, the conditions which regulate their appearance, their intensity, and variations under certain influences; the want of them in albinos, and the exaggerated develop ment in other forms of disease. To Mr. Darwin, in Eng land, and to M. Ponchet, in France, the subject is indebted for much research, which will no doubt be continued as occasion offers.

MR. RUSKIN'S RECENT WRITINGS.

BY LESLIE STEPHEN.

THE world is out of joint. The songs of triumph over peace and progress which were so popular a few years ago have been quenched in gloomy silence. It is difficult even to take up a newspaper without coming upon painful forebodings of the future. Peace has not come down upon the world, and there is more demand for swords than for ploughshares. The nations are glaring at each other distrustfully, muttering ominous threats, and arming themselves to the teeth. Their mechanical skill is absorbed in devising more efficient means of mutual destruction, and the growth of material wealth is scarcely able to support the burden of warlike preparations. The internal politics of states are not much more reassuring than their external relations. If the republic triumphs in France and Spain it is not because reason has supplanted prejudice, but because nobody, except a few Carlists or Communists, believes enough in any principles to fight for them. In the promised land of political speculators, the government of the country is more and more becoming a mere branch of stockjobbing. Everywhere the division between classes widens instead of narrowing; and the most important phe nomenon in recent English politics is that the old social bonds have snapped asunder amongst the classes least accessible to revolutionary impulses.

Absorbed in such contests, we fail to attend to matters of the most vital importance. The health of the popula tion is lowered as greater masses are daily collected in huge cities, where all the laws of sanitary science are stu diously disregarded. Everywhere we see a

generation

growing up sordid, degraded, and devoid of self-respect. The old beauty of life has departed. A laborer is no longer a man who takes a pride in his work and obeys a code of manners appropriate to his station in life. He restlessly aims at aping his superiors, and loses his own solid merits without acquiring their refinement. If the workman has no sense of duty to his employer, the employer forgets in his turn that he has any duty except to grow rich. He complains of the exorbitant demands of his subordinates, and tries to indemnify himself by cheating his equals. What can we expect in art or in literature from such a social order except that which we see? The old spontaneous impulse has departed. Our rising poets and artists are a puny generation, who either console themselves for their impotence by masquerading in the clothes of their predecessors or take refuge in a miserable epicureanism which calls all pleasures equally good and prefers those sensual enjoyments which are most suited to stimulate a jaded appetite. Religion is corrupted at the core. With some it is a mere homage to the respectabilities; with others a mere superstition, which claims to be pretty but scarcely dares even to assert that it is true; some revolt against all religious teaching, and others almost openly advocate a belief in lies; everywhere the professed creeds of men are divorced from their really serious speculations.

Those who would apply a remedy to these evils generally take one of two lines: they propose that we should humbly submit to outworn authority, or preach the consoling gospel that if we will let everything systematically alone things will somehow all come right. As if things had not been let alone! When we listen to the pedants and the preachers of the day, can we not sympathize with Shakespeare's weariness

Of art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly doctor-like controlling skill, And simple faith miscalled simplicity, And captive good attending captive ill? "Tired of all these," where are we to find consolation? Most of us are content, and perhaps wisely, to work on in our own little spheres and put up with such results as can fall to the share of a solitary unit in this chaotic world. We may reflect, if we please, that there never was a time since the world began at which evil was not rampant and wise men in a small minority; and that somehow or other we have in the American phrase "worried through" it, and rather improved than otherwise. There are advantages to be set against all the triumphant mischiefs which make wise men cry out, Vanitas Vanitatum! and enthusiasts may find a bright side to the more ominous phenomena and look forward to that millennium which is always to begin the day after to-morrow. We have cultivated statistics of late, and at least one of our teachers has thought that the new gospel lay in that direction; but we have not yet succeeded in presenting in a tabular form all the good and all the evil which is to be found in the world, and in striking a balance between them. The problem is too complex for most of us; and it may be as well to give it up, and, without swaggering over progress or uselessly saddening ourselves over decay, do our best to swell the right side of the account. Most men, however, judge according to temperament. The cheerful philosopher sees in the difference between the actual state of the world and the ideal which he can frame for himself, a guarantee for the approach of a better day. The melancholy philosopher sees in the same contrast a proof of the natural corruption of mankind. He puts the golden age behind instead of before; and, like his rival, attributes to the observation of external events what is merely the expression of his own character.

No one, at any rate, will deny that the clouds are thick enough to justify many gloomy prognostications.

Take a

man of unusual if not morbid sensibility, and place him in the midst of the jostling, struggling, unsavory, and unreasonable crowd; suppose him to have a love of all natural and artistic beauty, which is outraged at every moment by the prevailing ugliness; a sincere hatred for all the meanness and imposture too characteristic of modern life; a determination to see things for himself, which involves an

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antipathy to all the established commonplaces of contented respectability; an eloquence and imaginative force which transfuses his prose with poetry, though his mind is too discursive to express itself in the poetical form; and a keen logical faculty, hampered by a constitutional irritability which prevents his teaching from taking a systematic form; let him give free vent to all the annoyance and the indignation naturally produced by his position, and you will have a general impression of Mr. Ruskin's later writings. One seems almost to be listening to the cries of a man of genius, placed in a pillory to be pelted by a thick-skinned mob, and urged by a sense of his helplessness to utter the bitterest taunts that he can invent. Amongst the weaknesses natural to such a temperament is the disposition to attach an undue value to what other people would describe as crotchets ; and amongst Mr. Ruskin's crotchets are certain theories which involve the publication of his works in uch a manner as to oppose the greatest obstacles to their circulation. It is due partly to this cause, and partly to the fact that people do not like to be called rogues, cheats, liars, and hypocrites, that Mr. Ruskin's recent writings, and especially his " Fors Clavigera," the monthly manifesto in which he denounces modern society, have not received the notice which they deserve. The British public is content to ticket Mr. Ruskin as an oddity, and to pass by with as little attention as possible. And yet the "Fors Clavigera " (the meaning of the title may be found in the second number) would be worth reading if only as a literary curiosity. It is a strange mixture of autobiographical sketches, of vehement denunciation of modern crimes and follies, of keen literary and artistic criticism, of economical controversy, of fanciful etymologies, strained allegories, questionable interpretations of history, and remarks upon things in general, in which passages of great force and beauty are curiously blended with much that, to say the least, is of inferior value, and in which digression is as much the rule as in "Tristram Shandy" or Southey's "Doctor." Even Mr. Ruskin's disciples seem at times to be a little puzzled by his utterances, and especially by a certain receipt for making a "Yorkshire Goose Pie," which suddenly intrudes itself into one of his numbers, and may or may not cover a profound allegory. Nothing would be easier, and nothing would be more superfluous, than to ridicule many of the opinions which he throws out, or to condemn them from the point of view of orthodox science or political economy. It seems to be more desirable to call attention to the strength than to the weakness of teaching opposed to all current opinions, and therefore more sure to be refuted than to gain a fair hearing. When a gentleman begins by informing his readers that he would like to destroy most of the railroads in England and all the railroads in Wales, the new town of Edinburgh, the north suburb of Geneva, and the city of New York, he places himself in a position which is simply bewildering to the ordinary British mind. Without claiming to be an adequate interpreter, and still less an adequate critic, of all his theories, I may venture a few remarks upon some of the characteristic qualities of "Fors" and others of his recent writings.

Mr. Ruskin, as I have said, is at war with modern society. He sometimes expresses himself in language which, but for his own assurances to the contrary, might be taken for the utterance of furious passion rather than calm reflection. "It seems to be the appointed function of the nineteenth century," he says, "to exhibit in all things the elect pattern of perfect folly, for a warning to the furthest future." The only hope for us is in one of the "forms of ruin which necessarily cut a nation down to the ground and leave it, thence to sprout again, if there be any life left for it in the earth, or any lesson teachable to it by adversity." And after informing his Oxford hearers that we are, in the sphere of art at any rate, "false and base," absolutely without imagination and without virtue," he adds that his language is not, as they may fancy, unjustifiably violent, but "temperate and accurate except in short-coming of blame." Indeed, if Mr. Ruskin's habitual statements be well founded, the world has become well nigh uninhabitable by decent people. Lot would be puzzled to

66

discover a residue of righteous men sufficient to redeem us from speedy destruction. In the preface to a collected edition of his works, he tells us that in his natural temper he has sympathy with Marmontel; in his "enforced and accidental temper, and thoughts of things and people, with Dean Swift."

No man could make a sadder avowal than is implied in a claim of sympathy with the great man who now rests where his heart is no longer lacerated by sava indignatio. Neither, if one may correct a self-drawn portrait, can the analogy be accepted without many deductions. Swift's misanthropy is very different in quality from Mr. Ruskin's. It is less "accidental," and incomparably deeper. Misanthropy, indeed, is altogether the wrong word to express the temper with which Mr. Ruskin regards the world. He believes in the capacity of men for happiness and purity, though some strange perversity has jarred the whole social order. He can believe in heroes and in unsophisticated human beings, and does not hold that all virtue is a sham, and selfishness and sensuality the only moving forces of the world. Swift's concentrated bitterness indicates a mind in which the very roots of all illusions have been extirpated. Mr. Ruskin can still cherish a faint belief in a possible Utopia, which to the Dean would have appeared to be a silly dream, worthy of the philosophers of Laputa. The more masculine character of Swift's mind makes him capable of accepting a view of the world which helped to drive even him mad, and which would have been simply intolerable to a man of more delicate fibre. Some light must be admitted to the horizon, or refuge would have to be sought in the cultivation of sheer cynical insensibility. Mr. Ruskin has not descended to those awful depths, and we should have been more inclined to compare his protest against modern life with the protest of Rousseau. old-fashioned declamations against luxury may be easily translated into Mr. Ruskin's language about the modern worship of wealth; and if he does not talk about an ideal "state of nature," he is equally anxious to meet corruption by returning to a simpler order of society. Both writers would oppose the simple and healthy life of a primitive population of peasants to the demoralized and disorganized masses of our great towns.

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Mr. Ruskin finds his "ideal of felicity actually produced in the Tyrol." There, a few years ago, he met " as merry and round a person as he ever desires to see: "he was tidily dressed, not in brown rags, but in green velveteen ; he wore a jaunty hat, with a feather in it, a little on one side; he was not drunk, but the effervescence of his thorough good humor filled the room all about him; and he could sing like a robin." Many travellers who have seen such a phenomenon, and mentally compared him with the British agricultural laborer, whose grievances are slowly becoming articulate, must have had some searchings of heart as to the advantages of the modern civilization. Is the poor cramped population of our fields, or the brutal population which heaves half-bricks at strangers in the mining districts, or the effete population which skulks about back slums and our casual wards, the kind of human article naturally turned out by our manufacturing and commercial industry?

The problem about which all manner of Social Science Associations have been puzzling themselves for a great many years essentially comes to this; and Mr. Ruskin answers it passionately enough. The sight and the sound of all the evils which affect the world is too much for him. "I am not," he says, "an unselfish person nor an evangelical one; I have no particular pleasure in doing good, nor do I dislike doing it so much as to expect to be rewarded for it in another world. But I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky, when there is any

which is seldom nowadays near London - has become hateful to me, because of the misery which I know of and see signs of when I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly." There is evil enough under the sun to justify any fierceness of indignation; and we should be less disposed to quarrel with Mr. Ruskin for cherishing

his anger than for squandering so valuable an article so rashly. He suffers from a kind of mental incontinence which weakens the force of his writing. He strikes at evil too fiercely and rapidly to strike effectually. He wrote the "Modern Painter," as he tells us in a characteristic preface to the last edition, not from love of fame, for then he would have compressed his writing, nor from love of immediate popularity, for then he would have given fine words instead of solid thought, but simply because he could not help it. He saw an injustice being done, and could not help flying straight in the faces of the evil-doers. It is easy to reply that he ought to have helped it. In that case the book might have become a symmetrical whole instead of being only what it is the book which, in spite of incoherence and utter absence of concentration, has done more than any other of its kind to stimulate thought and disperse antiquated fallacies.

But we must take Mr. Ruskin as he is. He might, perhaps, have been a leader; he is content to be a brilliant partisan in a random guerilla warfare, and therefore to win partial victories, to disgust many people whom he might have conciliated, and to consort with all manner of superficial and untrained schemers, instead of taking part in more systematic operations. Nobody is more sensible than Mr. Ruskin of the value of discipline, order, and subordination. Unfortunately the ideas of every existing party happen to be fundamentally wrong, and he is therefore obliged in spite of himself to fight for his own hand.

Men who revolt against the world in this unqualified fashion are generally subject to two imputations. They are eccentric by definition; and their eccentricity is generally complicated by sentimentalism. They are, it is suggested, under the dominion of an excessive sensibility which bursts all restraints of logic and common-sense. The worst of all qualifications for fighting the world is to be so thin-skinned as to be unable to accept compromise or to submit contentedly to inevitable evils. In Mr. Ruskin's case, it is suggested, the foundation of this exaggerated tone of feeling is to be found in his exquisite sense of the beautiful. He always looks upon the world more or less from an artistic point of view. Whatever may be our other claims to superiority over our ancestors, nobody can deny that the world has become ugly. We may be more scientific than the ancient Greeks; but we are undoubtedly mere children to them in art, or, rather, mere decrepit and effete old men. We could no more build a Parthenon or make a statue fit to be set by the Elgin marbles, than they could build ironclads or solve problems by modern methods of mathematical analysis. Indeed, our superiority in any case is not a superiority of faculty, but simply of inherited results. And thus, if the artistic capacities of a race be the fair measure of its general excellence, that which we call progress should really be called decay. have grown dim, and our hands have lost their cunning. Mere mechanical dexterity is but a poor thing to set against the unerring instinct which in old days guided alike the humblest workman and the most cultivated artist.

Our eyes

The point at issue appears in one of Mr. Ruskin's controversies. According to the Spectator, Mr. Ruskin wished the country to become poor in order that it might thrive in an artistic sense. "If," it said, "we must choose between a Titian and a Lancashire cotton-mill, then in the name of manhood and of morality give us the cotton-mill!" and it proceeded to add that only "the dilettantism of the studio" would make a different choice. Mr. Ruskin, that is, is an effeminate person who has so fallen in love with the glories of Venetian coloring and Greek sculpture that he would summarily sweep away all that makes men comfortable to give them a chance of recovering the lost power. Let us burn our mills, close our coal-mines, and tear up our railways, and perhaps we may learn in time to paint a few decently good pictures. Nobody in whom the artistic faculties had not been cultivated till the whole moral fibre was softened would buy good art at such a sacrifice.

Up to a certain point, I imagine that Mr. Ruskin would accept the statement. He does prefer Titians to cotton

1874.]

MR. RUSKIN'S RECENT WRITINGS.

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mills, and he does think that the possession of cotton-mills
is incompatible with the production of Titians. He hates
machinery as an artist; he hates the mechanical repetition
dry goods,"
of vulgar forms, whether in architecture or
which takes the place of the old work where every form
speaks of a living hand and eye behind it. He hates
steamboats because they come puffing and screaming, and
sending their whistles through his head like a knife when
he is meditating on the loveliness of a picture in the once
silent Venice. He hates railways because they destroy all
natural beauty. There was once a rocky valley between
Buxton and Bakewell, where you might have seen Apollo
and the Muses "walking in fair procession on the lawns of it,
and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags." But you
the stupid British public, to wit-thought that you
could make money of it; "you enterprised a railroad
through the valley you blasted its rocks away, heaped
thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The val-
ley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in
Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool
in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative proc-
ess of exchange; you fools everywhere." The beauty of
English landscape is everywhere defaced by coal-smoke,
and the purity of English streams defiled by refuse.
Meanwhile the perfection of the mechanical contrivance
which passes for art in England is typified by an ingenious
performance ticketed "No. 1" in the South Kensington
Museum. It is a statue in black and white marble of a
Newfoundland dog, which Mr. Ruskin pronounces to be,
accurately speaking, the "most perfectly and roundly ill-
done thing" which he has ever seen produced in art. Its
makers had seen "Roman work and Florentine work and
Byzantine work and Gothic work; and misunderstanding
of everything had passed through them as the mud does
through earthworms, and here at last was their wormcast
of a production." Mere mechanical dexterity has abso-
lutely supplanted artistic skill.

Well, you reply, we must take the good with the bad.
We give up the Newfoundland dog; but if steam-whistles
go through your head in Venice, and the railway drives
the gods from Derbyshire, you must remember that a num-
ber of poor Englishmen and Italians, who never cared
much for scenery or for pictures, enjoy a common-place
pleasure which they must else have gone without. In-
creased command of the natural forces means increased
comfort to millions at the cost of a little sentimental enjoy-
ment for thousands. But it is precisely here that Mr. Rus-
kin would join issue with the optimists. The lesson which
he has preached most industriously and most eloquently is
the essential connection between good art and sound mo-
rality. The first condition of producing good pictures or
statues is to be pure, sincere, and innocent. Milton's say-
ing that a man who would write a heroic poem must make
his life a heroic poem, is the secret of all artistic excellence.
A nation which is content with shams in art will put up
with shams in its religious or political or industrial life.
We bedaub our flimsy walls with stucco as our statesmen
hide their insincerity under platitude. If a people is vile at
heart, the persons who minister to its taste will write de-
graded poetry and perform demoralizing plays, and paint
The impu-
pictures which would revolt the pure-minded.
dent avowal that the spheres of art and morality should be
separate is simply an acceptance of a debased condition of
art. And therefore Mr. Ruskin's lectures upon art are apt
to pass into moral or religious discourses, as in works pro-
fessedly dealing with social questions he is apt to regard
the artistic test as final. The fact that we cannot produce
Titians is a conclusive proof that we must have lost the
moral qualities which made a Titian possible; whilst the
fact that we can produce a cotton-mill merely shows that
we can cheat our customers, and make rubbish on a gigan-
tic scale. An indefinite facility in the multiplication of
shoddy is not a matter for exulting self-congratulation.
The ugliness of modern life is not due to the disarrange-
ment of certain distinct æsthetic faculties, but the necessary
mark of moral insensibility. Cruelty and covetousness are
the dominant vices of modern society; and if they have

ruined our powers of expression, it is only because they
have first corrupted the sentiments which should be ex-
pressed in noble art.

The problem is probably more complex than Mr. Ruskin
is apt to assume. The attempt to divorce art from morality
is indeed as illogical and as mischievous as he assumes.
The greater the talent which is prostituted to express base
thoughts and gratify prurient tastes, the more it should ex-
cite our disgust; and the talent so misused will die out
amongst a race which neglects the laws of morality, or, in
other words, the primary conditions of physical and spirit-
ual health. The literature of a corrupt race becomes not
only immoral but stupid. And yet the art test is not quite
Ut-
so satisfactory as Mr. Ruskin seems at times to assume.
ter insensibility to beauty and the calmest acquiescence in
all manner of ugliness is not incompatible with morality
amongst individuals; or what would become of the Dis-
senters? Hymns which torture a musical ear may express
very sincere religious emotion. Of course, we are above
the Puritan prejudice which regarded all art as more or
less the work of the devil; but perhaps we are not, and
even the really artistic races were not much better than the
Puritans. Indeed, we should take but a sad view of the
world if we held that its artistic attainments always meas-
ured the moral worth of a nation.

No phenomenon in history is more curious than the shortness of the periods during which art has attained any high degree of perfection. There have been only two brief periods, says Mr. Ruskin, in which men could really make first-rate statues, and even then the knowledge was confined But if our inferiority in that to two very small districts. direction to the Greek and the Florentine artists proves that we are equally inferior in a moral sense, we must suppose that virtue is a plant which flowers but once in a thousand years. Probably students of history would agree that virtue was more evenly, and artistic excellence more unevenly distributed than we should have conceived possible. Many conditions, not hitherto determined by social philosophers, go to producing this rarest of qualities; and Mr. Ruskin seems often to exaggerate from a tacit assumption that men who cannot paint or carve must necessarily be incapable of speaking the truth, or revering love and purity.

Yet it is not to be denied that the test, when applied with due precaution, may reveal much of the moral characThe imbecility of our artistic efforts is ter of a nation. the index of an unloveliness which infects the national life. We cannot make good music because there is a want of harmony in our creeds, and a constant jarring between the various elements of society. Mr. Ruskin's criticisms of modern life are forcible, though he reasons too much from The shock which he receives from particular single cases. incidents seems to throw him off his balance. He practices the art of saying stinging things, of which the essence is to make particular charges which we feel to be true, whilst we are convinced that the tacit generalization is unfair. The whistle of the steamboat in Venice sets up such a condition of nervous irritability, that the whole world seems to be filled with its discordant strains.

Mr. Ruskin saw one day a well-dressed little boy leaning over Wallingford Bridge, and fancied that he was looking at some pretty bird or insect. Coming up to him, the little boy suddenly crossed the bridge, and took up the same attitude at the opposite parapet; his purpose was to spit from both sides upon the heads of a pleasure party in a "The incident may seem to you trivial," passing boat. says Mr. Ruskin to his hearers; and, in fact, most persons would have been content to box the little boy's ears, and possibly would have consoled themselves with the reflection that, at least, spitting upon Jewish gaberdines is no longer permitted by the police. Mr. Ruskin sees in it a proof of that absence of all due social subordination and all grace of behavior, which "leaves the insolent spirit and degraded senses to find their only occupation in malice, and their only satisfaction in shame." If the moral be rather too wide for this living fable, Mr. Ruskin has no difficulty in proving from other cases how deeply the ugliness of modern life is

rooted in moral insensibility. Here is another spitting scene. As he is drawing the Duomo at Pisa, Mr. Ruskin sees three fellows in rags leaning against the Leaning Tower and "expectorating loudly and copiously, at intervals of half a minute each, over the white marble base of it, which they evidently conceived to have been constructed only to be spit upon." Is their brutality out of harmony with the lessons taught by their superiors?

There is or was a lovely little chapel at Pisa, built for a shrine, seen by the boatmen as they first rose on the surge of the open sea, and bared their heads for a short prayer. In 1840 Mr. Ruskin painted it, when six hundred and ten years had left it perfect; only giving the marble a tempered glow, or touching the sculpture with a softer shade. In a quarter of a century the Italians have grown wiser, and Mr. Ruskin watched a workman calmly striking the old marble cross to pieces. Tourists are supposed to be more appreciative, and Mr. Ruskin travelled to Verona in a railway carriage with two American girls, specimens of the utmost result of the training of the most progressive race in the world. They were travelling through exquisite midsummer sunshine, and the range of Alps was clear from the Lake of Garda to Cadore. But the two American girls had reduced themselves simply to two "white pieces of putty that could feel pain;" from Venice to Verona they perceived nothing but flies and dust. They read French novels, sucked lemons and sugar, and their whole conversation as to scenery was at a station where the blinds had been drawn up. Don't those snow-caps make you cool?" No; I wish they did." Meanwhile, at Rome, the slope of the Aventine, where the wall of Tullus has just been laid bare in perfect preservation, is being sold on building leases. New houses, that is, will be run up by bad workmen, who know nothing of art, and only care for moneymaking; and whilst "the last vestiges of the heroic works of the Roman monarchy are being destroyed, the base fresco-painting of the worst times of the Empire is being faithfully copied, with perfectly true lascivious instinct, for interior decoration." Lust and vanity are the real moving powers in all this Italian movement. Are we much better in England?

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Mr. Ruskin was waiting a short time ago at the Furness station, which is so tastefully placed as to be the only object visible over the ruined altar of the Abbey. To him entered a party of workmen who had been refreshing themselves at a tavern established by the Abbot's Chapel. They were dressed in brown rags, smoking pipes, all more or less drunk, and taking very long steps to keep their balance in the direction of motion, whilst laterally securing themselves by hustling the wall or any chance passengers. Such men, as Mr. Ruskin's friend explained to him, would get drunk and would not admire the Abbey; they were not only unmanageable, but implied "the existence of many unmanageable persons before and after them nay, a long ancestral and filial unmanageableness. They were a fallen race, every way incapable, as I acutely felt, of appreciating the beauty of Modern Painters' or fathoming the significance of Fors Clavigera.' What are the amusements and thoughts of such a race, or even of the superior social layers? Go to Margate, a place memorable to Mr. Ruskin for the singular loveliness of its skies; and you may see or newspaper correspondents exaggerate a ruffianly crowd insulting the passengers who arrive by steamboat in the most obscene language or bathing with revolting indecency in a promiscuous crowd; or to Glasgow, and you will see the Clyde turned into a loathsome and stagnant ditch, whilst the poor Glaswegians fancy that they can import learning into their town in a Gothic case, costing £150,000, which is about as wise as to "put a pyx into a pigsty to make the pigs pious." Or take a walk in the London suburbs. There was once a secluded district with old country houses, and neatly kept cottages with tiled footpaths and porches covered with honeysuckle. Now it is covered with thousands of semi-detached villas built of rotten brick, held together by iron devices. What are the people who inhabit them? The men can write and cast accounts; they make their living by it. The women

read story books, dance in a vulgar manner, and play vulgar tunes on the piano; they know nothing of any fine art; they read one magazine on Sundays and another on weekdays, and know nothing of any other literature. They never take a walk; they cannot garden; the women wear false hair and copy the fashions of Parisian prostitutes; the men have no intellects but for cheating, no pleasures except smoking and eating, and "no ideas or any capacity of forming ideas of anything that has yet been done of great or seen of good in this world."

Truly, this is a lamentable picture, which we may, if we please, set 'down as wanton caricature or as a proof that poor Mr. Ruskin is but speaking the truth when he tells us, pathetically enough, of his constant sadness, and declares that he is nearly always out of humor. The exaggeration is to be lamented, because it lessens the force of his criticism. The remark inevitably suggests itself that a fair estimate of modern civilization is hardly to be obtained by the process of cutting out of our newspapers every instance of modern brutality which can be found in police reports, and setting them against the most heroic deeds or thoughts of older times. Bill Sykes may be a greater brute than the Black Prince; but there were Bill Sykeses in the days of the Black Prince, and perhaps a piece of one in the Black Prince himself. Mr. Ruskin, to speak logically, is a little too fond of the induction by simple enumeration in dealing with historical problems. The sinking of the London does not prove conclusively that Athenians built more trustworthy ships than Englishmen; and his declamations against the folly and wickedness of modern war, true enough in themselves, cannot make us forget all the massacres, the persecutions, the kidnappings, the sellings into slavery, the sacks of cities, and the laying waste of provinces, of good old times, nor convince us that Grant or Moltke are responsible for worse atrocities than medieval or classical generals. The complex question of the moral value of different civilizations is not to be settled offhand by quoting all the striking instances which an acute intellect combined with a fervid imagination and disturbed by an excessive irritability can accumulate in proof of human weakness. The brute survives in us, it is true, but isolated facts do not prove him to be more rampant than of old.

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To argue the question, however, would take me far beyond my limits and my knowledge. Rather let us admit at once that Mr. Ruskin has laid his hand upon ugly symptoms. We will not be angry with the physician be cause he takes too gloomy a view of them, but be grateful to anybody who will expose the evil unsparingly. simist is perhaps, in the long run, more useful than an optimist. The disease exists, whether we think of it as a temporary disorder caused by an unequal development, or as a spreading cancer, threatening a complete dissolution of the organism. Modern society may be passing through a grave crisis to a higher condition, or may be hastening to a catastrophe like that which overwhelmed the ancient world. It is in any case plain enough that the old will not gradually melt into the new, in spite of all the entreaties of epicurean philosophers, but will have to pass through spasms and dangerous convulsions. The incapacity to paint pretty pictures, to which we might submit with tolerable resignation, is indeed a proof of a wide-spread discord, which sometimes seems to threaten the abrupt dislocation of the strongest bonds. Can we explain the cause of the evil in order to apply such remedies as are in our power

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And here I come to that part of Mr. Ruskin's teaching which, to my mind, is the most unfortunate. There is a modern gospel which shows, as he thinks, plain traces of diabolic origin. His general view may be sufficiently indicated by the statement that he utterly abjures Mr. Mill's 'Liberty," and holds Mr. Carlyle to be the one true teacher of modern times. But Mr. Ruskin carries his teaching further. The pet objects of his antipathy are the political economists. He believes that his own writings on political economy are incomparably the greatest service which he has rendered to mankind, and to establish his own system is to annihilate Ricardo, Mill, and Professor Fawcett. To

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