Forty and fifty years ago this resplendent rhetoric, clothing as with a garment an appeal to the common intelligence of man, carried conviction wherever it was heard or known, and Ruskin became at once the idolized teacher of the day. As the successive volumes of "Modern Painters " came out each was hailed with a greater acclaim than its predecessor, and when the fifth and final volume was given to the world in 1860, by common consent, so far, at least, as the English-speaking world was concerned, Ruskin was seated in the most authentic chair of art criticism. How he fell from there will be shown later, but for at least a decade and a half, if not a few years longer, his position as teacher and critic was almost universally recognized, though assailed in some quarters. His opinion became the law, and to have Ruskin's support for any theory was to resolve that theory into accepted doctrine.

"Modern Painters" is, and was intended to be, the exploitation of Turner and his art. It might be called the "Turneriad." Turner was an old man when Ruskin first commenced to write about him, and he died in 1851 at the age of seventysix, but the work went on for nearly ten years longer. Turner himself said of Ruskin's appreciations of his art that "he knows a great deal

more about my pictures than I do. He puts things into my head, and points out meanings in them that I never intended." Undoubtedly Turner was one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, of English landscape painters, but it is one of the incomprehensible phases of human nature how a man of pure and elevated mind like Ruskin could in any degree tolerate a man such as Turner notoriously was. Ruskin, in all his works, and more particularly in "Modern Painters," is constantly preaching to his readers purity of thought, nobility of soul and charity to all men. Turner was the grossest and most sensual of men, and an incorrigible miser. He loved his art with passionate intenseness, but he loved with even a greater passion the money it brought him. Every sketch, every drawing, every perfected work had its money value to him, and he rarely if ever gave away the slightest work of his hands. There is little or no record of the least generosity on his part during his long life toward any one. A few spasmodic acts of kindness are recorded of him, but they proceeded from whim rather than from native goodness. He was a hard, miserly, solitary man, never married, inhospitable, living in mysterious places, and often under an assumed name. He owned a house in

Queen Anne street, but it was black with dirt and terribly out of repair. It is doubtful if any one ever saw the inside of his studio-certainly no rival artist ever saw him use his pencil. He was as mysterious about his methods in art as a conjurer.

How such a person, so sordid and so low, living in squalor, and taking pleasure at times in the lowest forms of vice and dissipation, could have accomplished such greatness in art is another of the mysteries pertaining to that complex microcosm called man. Morally he was one of the most imperfect of human beings, and yet he was a nearly perfect artist. To his transcendent natural gifts as a painter he added the most strenuous labor and industry. He possessed a marvelous eye for color, which was also Titian's gift. Mr. Ruskin writes: "Other painters had rendered the golden tones and blue tones of the sky; Titian especially the latter in perfection. But none had dared to paint-none seems to have seen-the scarlet and the purple. " And at another place he says that in representing the glare of sunlight Turner surpassed even Claude. But the intense color of his pictures did not always please the critics, and Thackeray, in one of his critical reviews of the Royal Academy exhibition, while praising in

of

the highest terms the "Fighting Temeraire Turner, says that some of his other performances are quite incomprehensible to him, "since he has forsaken nature, or attempted (like your French barbers) to embellish it."

O ye gods! Why will he not stick to copying her majestical countenance, instead of daubing it with some absurd antics and fard of his own? Fancy pea-green skies, crimsonlike trees and orange and purple grass-fancy cataracts, rainbows, suns, moons and thunderbolts—shake them well up, with a quantity of gamboge; and you will have an idea of a fancy picture by Turner. It is worth a shilling alone to go and see "Pluto and Proserpina." Such a landscape! such figures such a little red-hot coal-scuttle of a chariot! As Nat Lee sings:

"Methought I saw a hieroglyphic bat
Skim o'er the surface of a slipshod hat;
While to increase the tumult of the skies,
A damned potato o'er the whirlwind flies."

If you can understand these lines you can understand one of Turner's landscapes.

In another article he satirically speaks of Turner as," a great and awful mystery."

But it is worth everybody's while to read "Modern Painters," no matter whether or no one agrees with Mr. Ruskin about Turner's supernal excellence. We can all agree about the charm and beauty of Mr. Ruskin's prose.

RUSKIN,

AS POLITICAL ECONOMIST.

MR. RUSKIN's "Modern Painters,"

"Stones

of Venice" and "Seven Lamps of Architecture” did much to establish true canons of art in painting and architecture. The English world was educated not only as to what they should admire, but why they should admire it, and it was just in the condition when it most sadly needed the instruction. After some hesitation and protest Ruskin was accepted as the one chief critic and teacher of the day, despite some apparent oddities and crankeries in his conclusions. He had formulated his opinions so splendidly that his rhetoric convinced where his logic did not, and for well-nigh twenty years he sat in the highest seat of art criticism.

Then two things happened, both of which have been consolidated under the term Ruskinism. The first of these was that having been elected to the chair of criticism, he assumed a dictatorship.