CHAPTER XX

THE TEACHING OF RUSKIN

To arrive at an estimate of Ruskin's temperament is easy; of the nature and scope of his teaching and philosophy much may be said. In his art criticism we have seen that Ruskin lays down the great principle that sincerity is the mainspring of the artist's energy, and the burden of his message is truth. It may be said that such a definition precisely expresses his own temper. But this is by no means an inclusive definition. He insists also with Keats, that truth is beauty, beauty is truth; and that the true artist, while not ignoring the facts of ugliness, will feel his passion going out perpetually toward the fairest forms and richest aspects of things. And it follows still further, that if truth is beauty, then falsehood is ugliness; and wherever there exist things that are repulsive and disgusting, it is because of some outrage on truth, or some fundamental error which an exacter conception of truth would have prevented.

It needs no great wit to see that such a conclusion as this involves every species of social and moral question. Let it be applied in the direction of art itself, and we perceive at once that where we have a weakly sensational or a morally degraded art-where we have even less than this, an art which is not indeed a moral offence, but is artificial and mechanical, destitute of high imagination and feeling, wrong in its ideals and misguided in its

methods-it is simply because of a fault or deficiency in the artist. What is that fault? It is lack of truth and nobleness of moral temper. The greatest artists have not always been good or religious men, but they have been noble-minded men. Their more perfect vision of beauty is the natural result of their profounder love of truth. The lower school of Dutch art is denounced by Ruskin on this very ground; it lacks beauty entirely because the artists lacked the fine sense of truth. They can paint the coarse revels of the tavern with a certain gross realism, but if they had been less of tavern roysterers themselves, they would have had higher visions of truth, and so would have painted things that were beautiful instead of things that are repulsive. It was because they had no thoughts that give them any noble pleasure, that they relied on sensation rather than imagination for the materials of their art. On the other hand, the great Italian masters were men of a noble moral temper; they saw the higher aspects of truth, and for that reason they also reached a peculiarly noble ideal of beauty. Bad art, therefore, means either a bad age or an ignobly minded artist; or it may mean both-an age that is itself too gross to attain any high vision of truth, or to desire it, and an artist who is the product of his age, and acts in conformity with it.

Under one of Fra Angelico's pictures is inscribed the sentence, "Painted at rest, praying." Those who look at the picture are scarcely in need of such an explanation. There is an infinite peace and spiritual fervor in the picture; it seems to have captured in its rich color a radiance that is not of this world, and it is the expression not merely of the great technical qualities of the artist, but also of the devoutness of his soul, and the virile purity and reach

of his imagination. And this is not an inapt illustration of the truth that Ruskin enforces continually in his art teaching. To produce a great picture, it is necessary not merely for the artist to prepare his canvas, but to prepare himself. If a picture is not great, it is because the artist lacks moral and spiritual fiber; and no knowledge of technique, or laborious dexterity of hand, can cover this deficiency. Beauty of a mechanical or tumultuous kind there may be, but never the highest form of beauty without the noblest passion for truth.

Let this principle be applied to the general aspects of national life, and it is equally penetrative and infallible. Let it be assumed that English cities of the manufacturing type are squalid and repulsive; that they have no fine order or regulated beauty of arrangement; that they have no noble public buildings; or if they have them, they are hidden away behind grimy ranges of mean tenements, so that their total effect cannot be realized or discoveredand it will be found that this outward ugliness is the natural witness to a general contempt of truth. It is generally assumed that Ruskin's violently expressed censure of the ignoble grime of manufacturing towns springs from a violent hatred of manufacture. On the contrary, he himself has established manufactures, and praises with Carlyle the great "captains of industry." But what he says is, that there is no natural association between manufacture and ugliness, and there need be none. If there be a notorious violation of beauty, it is because there has been a notorious contempt for truth. What truth? The truth that man lives not by bread alone; that the soul has claims as well as the stomach; that to make money is in itself the ignoblest of pursuits; and that where money is

made by the sacrifice of men, it is more wicked than war, because more deliberately cruel. If there had been any due and real sense of the claims of the soul, as infinitely superior to the claims of the stomach, England would not have permitted her manufactures to thrive by the destruction of all that refines and ennobles those by whose toil this enormous wealth is created. If English cities are ugly, if there is not one of them, nor altogether, capable of giving so much delight to the eye as the meanest medieval Italian town could furnish, it is because we have been too absorbed in the ignoble haste to be rich to care for anything but the condition of our bank-books. It is not manufactures that are wrong, but the spirit in which they are conducted. Those who administer them have notoriously departed from truth in the essential methods of their administration. They have not sought to provide an honest article for an honest wage. They have had no pride in their work, but only a base pleasure in its rewards. They have not asked, "Is this thing that I have made as sound and efficient a thing as it is possible for me to produce?" but "Have I produced something that will pay, and something calculated cunningly to deceive the eye, so that I may obtain a larger payment for it than I have justly earned or have any right to expect?" No wonder manufacturing towns are ugly and squalid when they are governed and created by men of this spirit; how could you reasonably expect them to be beautiful? There has

been a contempt for truth, and there is a corresponding contempt for beauty. Before England can be a land of beautiful cities, it must be renewed in its ideals, and must regain that reverence for truth which it has lost.

The only final strength is rightness, says Ruskin; and

excellence, whether of art or of character, can only be achieved by an unswerving fidelity to right. A contempt of beauty means more than a lack of æsthetic taste in a man's nature: it means necessarily a contempt of right, since beauty is the concrete final expression of rightness. Venice rose from the sea in stern yet exquisite grandeur of form, because the race that laid its stones deep in the shallow waters of the lagoons were for centuries a great and noble race, disciplined into strenuous hardihood by the nature of their perilous position, virtuous by their passion for liberty, great in soul by their reverence for truth. The period of their decline is marked in the cotruption of their architecture, and the dream of beauty lessens as the people wax debased. It is useless, says

Ruskin, to ask for men like Tintoret or churches like St. Mark's in a day when manufacture prospers by jugglery, and trade is an organized deceit; we ask for the blossom on the tree, forgetting that its stem is cut, and its root withered. You will get sound workmanship in no department of life when honesty and truth have ceased to command respect; and since beauty is rightness, you will not get beauty either. The jerry-builder is simply the natural and inevitable product of an avaricious and corrupt age. He is the parasite of a decaying civilization, at once springing from the decay and propagating it. Had Venice been built by men whose one passion was money, and whose one evil gift was a minute and absolute mastery of the art of cheating, we should have had a stucco St. Mark's, which long ago had sunk unregretted in the tides from which it rose. An unstable people does not build stable and enduring works, but after its kind, unstable erections, only meant to last as long as money can be