absent. Turner executed not one literal transcript from nature in his life.

Ruskin, in his earliest drawings, walked in the same track with Turner. Nothing ever interested me more in connection with art than the discovery of this fact. I had seen, previously to last summer, many of the drawings made by Ruskin after he was grown up; and from these I had absolutely convinced myself that, in his maturity, he had worked on a quite different method from Turner's; but the drawings of his boyhood I first saw in Bond Street last year; and it was for me a revelation, startling in its suddenness, yet infinitely corroborative of my fundamental opinions respecting both Turner and Ruskin, to find that, until he reached a certain stage in his development, Ruskin had worked on the principles of Turner. So much alike, or akin, is there in their early drawings, that Ruskin thinks it necessary to guard himself against the suspicion of copying. "It might easily be thought," he says, "that I was partly imitating Turner's sketches in the foregoing series. But I never saw a Turner sketch till 1842." No idea of conscious imitation on Ruskin's part would have occurred to me; his drawings bear, quite distinctly, the stamp of his own genius and personality; but they are akin to Turner's in this, that they are not mere transcripts from nature, or records of fact, but imbued with the appropriating, transforming, vitalizing spirit of art.

What, then, is the reason why Ruskin did not grow into an artist whose achievement, as a whole, might bear comparison with that of Turner? The answer is distinctly given in these drawings. Ruskin abandoned the path along which Turner, steadily advancing, rose upward until he reached the summit of the mountain. At a point indicated in these drawings, a point on which he himself lays his finger, Ruskin struck into a path of his own, and has since, with indomitable energy, been scaling precipices of shingle, grasping here a tuft of star-like flowers, there a jut of purple rock, but never striking again

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into the only path that could lead to the heights of art. cumstances which he could not overrule contributed to this result. His friends "were minded" to make him a poet, a bishop, or a member of Parliament. His heart, moreover— and this is a cardinal point-was divided between geology and art. The artistic impulse and the scientific impulse being generically different-belonging to contrasted types of mind— are practically irreconcilable, except when the strength of both is mediocre. Science killed art in Goethe. When he wrote the first part of Faust, he was a mighty dramatic artist; when he wrote the second, he was a philosopher and man of science: to pass from the one part to the other is to sail from the river Jordan into the Dead Sea. Ruskin in his youth desired to put his "whole strength into drawing and geology." It is profoundly to be regretted that he was not allowed to do so; in that case he would probably have been the greatest artist that ever was a great geologist, and the greatest geologist that ever was a great artist: but it is in the highest degree improbable that, with allegiance divided between art and science, he would have been so great an artist as Turner. At all events, I am able to point to early work of Ruskin's which, in method, was sound; to point, on the other hand, to work of which the method was fatal to art production; and to specify approximately the time when, and the immediate occasion why, the change took place.

His Stirling drawings of 1838 are true art-work. The boy looks upon the landscape; thrills with its beauty; resolves to make a picture of it; shows his castle standing out boldly against the sky; takes from nature what he wants; puts the sign-manual of his own invention on everything; and is glad and proud in what, with all its imperfection, is his own, and a work of art. The "Study outside the south gate of Florence," marked "25. R. (B.)" in the exhibition of last summer, seems to have been executed about four years later than the drawings

of Stirling Castle; and in it the change is complete. In all the work of Turner that ever I saw-in all the work of Leonardo, of Titian, of Claude, of Rembrandt, nay, of Gainsborough, of Constable, of any and every man that has gained high distinction in art-I never saw one like this. The subject is a great group of tree-stems and foliage; the drawing, executed. in sepia, attests a strength of hand and a truth of graphic touch transcending, I have no doubt, by a great deal, what he was capable of when he executed the Stirling Castle; but now, vehement in passionate realization, he strives to set down evcry fact in the scene before him, every tree-stem with its markings, every leaf with its lines and lights. In the drawing there is proof of splendid power; but the whole is scattered, incomplete, without unity, without end. The work is not a picture. Ruskin no longer paints his impression of what he sees; no longer puts forth a reverent hand to God's quarry, and takes of its stones to rear his cottage, small, it may be, yet his own, and to be regarded by him with honorable pride: he attempts to tear up and carry with him the quarry itself, to exhaust, on his paper, the truth of nature, a thing which no man will do, were he Hercules and Samson in one; a thing which no man can persistently attempt to do, without destroying his power to produce works of art.

The date of the change I take to have been 1842. In that year, Ruskin tells us, he formed a "resolute determination" to have " ever so small a bit" of his work "right," "rather than any quantity wrong." This, of course, would have been unobjectionable if by "right" he had meant right in relation to the requirements of his picture as a whole, right in the sense in which alone rightness can be predicated of any part of a work of art. But I cannot look at that drawing of the trees at Florence without seeing that what he meant by "right" was literal accordance with the facts of nature; and, since nature is inexhaustible by human hand, he who resolves to have

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every bit of his picture right in this sense will paint bits of nature, and no pictures, all the days of his life. "Serious botanical work," adds Mr. Ruskin, "began that same year in the Valley of Chamouni, and a few careful studies of grass-blades and Alpine-rose bells ended my Proutism and my trust in drawing things out of my head, forever." The grass-blades were very exquisite, the Alpine-rose bells very beautiful, but the price of them was too great.

"I have always felt," said Ruskin in one of his Mornings in Florence," that, with my intense love of the Alps, I ought to have been able to make a drawing of Chamouni, or the vale of Cluse, which should give people more pleasure than a photograph; but I always wanted to do it as I saw it, and engrave pine for pine, and crag for crag, like Albert Dürer. I broke my strength down for many a year, always tiring of my work, or finding the leaves drop off, or the snow come on, before I had well begun what I meant to do. If I had only counted my pines first, and calculated the number of hours necessary to do them in the manner of Dürer, I should have saved the available drawing-time of some five years, spent in vain effort. But Turner counted his pines, and did all that could be done for them, and rested content with that." He refers elsewhere in pathetic terms to another of his drawings "colored only in a quarter of it before the autumn leaves fell—then given up— cut into four-now pasted together again to show how it was meant to be."

Does Ruskin, as a critic, hold that his early method-which 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 impor tant 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 pre-Raphaelites, 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 recognizes 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 pre-Raphaelites whom he liked best have handled nature imaginatively, and few more imaginative pictures could be named than Millais's Autumn Leaves and Hunt's Light of the World. When the pre-Raphaelites, 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 func