Does Ruskin, as a critic, hold that his early methodwhich continued to be Turner's method to the end-was artistically right, and the method he subsequently pursued artistically wrong? Or does he believe that the second method is intrinsically sound, and, with genius enough, might produce nobler art than the first?

A good deal might be said on each side of this very important question. A debater who chose to maintain that Ruskin views art as fundamentally a thing of memory and transcript might buttress his case by formidable arguments. He might quote the many passages in which Ruskin declares art to be the expression of man's delight in the works of God, apparently overlooking or denying the deeper truth, that art is the expression of man's delight in his own work, and of his incapacity to be completely satisfied with any work of nature. He might refer to Ruskin's vehement patronage of the Preraphælites, a coterie infected, beyond question, though not in the persons of all its members, with the deadly heresy of literalism. He might dwell upon Ruskin's insatiable demand for accuracy-a demand which has strengthened with his years; upon his habit of laying much stress on truth, and saying comparatively little of beauty; upon that chapter in Modern Painters in which he speaks of a series of windows opening on lovely Alpine landscapes, and seems to suggest that, if these views could be transferred, line for line and tint for tint, to canvas, they would be superlative works of art. But the maintainer of the opposite hypothesis-namely, that Ruskin recognises the supremacy of imagination in art, and looks upon nature as but furnishing the materials of artistic creation-might also bring into the field an imposing array of arguments. While insisting upon fidelity to nature, Ruskin has always reserved his highest praise for imagination. Those of the Preraphaelites whom he liked best have handled nature imagi

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natively, and few more imaginative pictures could be named than Millais's Autumn Leaves and Hunt's Light of the World. When the Preraphælites, as a school, failed in imagination, he threw them off. Turner, whom he exalts above all landscape painters, never, as I said before, executed a literal transcript from nature in his life. Even in that ticklish tenth chapter in the third volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin teaches that there is something in art which nature does not possess a subtle element derived from humanity; that imagination has a creative function;" and that "the substantial presence even of the things which we love the best will inevitably and for ever be found wanting in one strange and tender charm, which belonged to the dreams of them."

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The second of these answers to our question is, I think, correct. Ruskin has strained the resources of language to give emphasis to his inculcation of truth to fact and fidelity of representation; but this is because he holds that imagination feeds on fact, not on fancy, on truth, not on falsehood; and whenever he is called upon to discriminate between the materials with which art works, and the powers of invention and imagination which breathe into these materials a new life, he assigns the throne to the last. Ruskin has himself warned us that "useful truths" are eminently biped," and we must be on our guard against concluding that, because he vehemently claims attention to one of the two legs of a truth, he is denying the existence of the other. His practical procedure as a critic of pictures accords with the position that he owns the supremacy of imagination in art. We may talk on theory for weeks, and yet attain to no certainty that we know each other's meaning, until we exemplify it by specification of instances. Ruskin has denied to recent landscapes by Brett and Millais the name of works of art, on the ground of their lack of imagination. There is no doubt that, as executive draughtsmen, Brett

and Millais are among the most consummate of their time, and if literal transcript from nature were Ruskin's idea of perfect art, he would have been in ecstasies over their work. For my part, I see more imagination in Brett's rock and sea and in Millais's hill and field than suffices to entitle them, in my opinion, to be classed as works of art; but all the more convincing on this account, as evidence that Ruskin is no literalist in art, is his estimate of them as mere illustrations in topography or natural history.

One other question as to the nature of Ruskin's teaching must be faced. What is to be the governing principle in the education of artists? Is imagination, in the scholar as well as in the master, in the young artist as well as in the old, to be allowed to touch nature with the transforming or transfiguring sceptre of sovereignty? Ruskin's answer to this question must, I fear, be allowed to be negative. "From young artists," he says, "nothing ought to be tolerated but bona fide imitation of Their duty is neither to choose, nor compose, nor imagine, nor experimentalise; but to be humble and earnest in following the steps of nature, and tracing the finger of God. They should go to

nature.

nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth. Then, when their memories are stored and their imaginations fed, and their hands firm, let them take up the scarlet and the gold, give the reins to their fancy, and show us what their heads are made of." If this, which was written many years ago, means only that students and young artists-nay, artists of every age-ought to work from nature constantly and faithfully, that conscious invention in young men is generally conceit

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or insolence, that imagination cannot work without materials, and that, in the logical order, accumulation of materials comes before the imaginative use of them, I assent to it, every word; and this is, perhaps, all that Ruskin would now affirm. But appealing to the studies of Leonardo da Vinci on the one hand, and to the studies and sketches of Turner on the other, I am quite sure that the art-student works imaginatively from the first, works imaginatively even when he is gathering the materials for invention, and can never, except at the risk of stifling his imagination, break himself to slavish imitation. Above all, he must, from the first, learn to reject. Unless he rejects decisively, promptly, by art-instinct, he will either execute fac-similes of little bits of nature all his life, or will wrestle with nature on a large scale, and, like the man that wrestled with God, will go a cripple to his grave. Of all the lessons-and they are not to be numbered-derivable from Turner's course as a student, none, I think, is more impressive or more important than the magnificent ease, the absolute decision, with which he takes from nature what he wants, and lets the rest alone. I cannot but believe that if Turner had not been an imaginative student, he would never have been an imaginative master. Students who work in their youth as slaves will not take up the scarlet and the gold at all. Having forced themselves for ten or twenty years to draw as botanists or as fac-simile makers, they will find imagination stiff and cold, her dead hand capable, indeed, of manufacture, but powerless to create.

It was, then, I must conclude, fatal to Ruskin's prospects as an artist, that "serious botanical work," and a frenzy of admiration for grass blades and Alpine-rose bells, made him break the neck of his imagination; but with deliberate and entire acquiescence, I note his remark, “The power of delineation natural to me only became more accu

rate." It has not only been exquisitely accurate in transcript from nature, but has been guided by a poetically tender and delicate choice of natural objects to be delineated, and almost all that it has yielded us is beautiful. Ruskin's "Wild strawberry blossom, one of the weeds of such a rock, painted as it grew," is a ravishing glimpse of "nature's naked loveliness." It would have made Shelley weep for joy. The pale, tiny flower, frail in its whiteness, unites in simple harmony with the green and grey and russet-ruby in leaf, crag, tendril, making up a gem of beauty which we take to ourselves at once and for ever, to wear next the heart "for fear our jewel tine." Not with the pen alone, but with the brush and the pencil, has Ruskin been a revealer of nature's sweet and subtle beauty; and his productions, if not in the strict sense works of art, are precious and unique.