No doubt, when another Byron writes another "Corsair," he will eschew such miscalled poetic terms

as,

my tablets, Juan, hark!"

Men don't talk about tablets in real life, except for tombstones. The rhyme will run

"John! d'ye hear? go, fetch my memorandum book!” So, a more consistent Wordsworth will not write

"But in her worst pursuits I ween!"

People don't "ween" in real life. The present word is "I think: " if certain influences carry it, we shall say "I calculate," “I calculate,” or perhaps, " I guess." “I

Language is character whether of pen or pencil art and manners are character all the hypocrisy in the world, notwithstanding. He was no posturemonger who wrote "bad manners are bad morals.”*

Sweeping Revolutions in Art and Poetry have a further meaning

"Abeunt studia in mores.”

Let me repeat a question already asked, as it is here again suggested by Wordsworth, "What do we mean by Nature?" Will "Peter Bell" retain his title to a share in it, if he grow upwards to Sir Philip Sydney? or is Sir Philip Sydney to vindicate his "nature" by growing downwards to Peter Bell? Are we all to forget Lady Rachael Russell and Margaret Godolphin, and go and learn nature amongst milkmaids, clod-polls, and sturdy beggars? There is one 66 plain fact" some plain-spoken

* Paley.

THE QUESTION RENEWED-WHAT IS NATURE? 299

theorists have made no count of. Millions of human beings, in every age and country, no sooner emerge from the companionship of cows and donkeys, but they begin to adopt, in various ways, but with uniformity of instinct, what some are pleased to call artificial manners and modes of speech. Now, either such phenomena are the evolving of certain dispositions we mean, or should mean, by the word "nature:" or they are superinduced, foreign, intruded from some other quarter. If the latter, it were well to give us some insight into the uniformity of the process. If the former, we may dispense with much vapouring about "nature," as but another expression of a certain Chinese practice with children's feet.

CHAP. XXVII.

VINDICATION OF THE COURSE OF INQUIRY. - PERSONAL CRITICISM

HOW FAR UNAVOIDABLE.

UNAVOIDABLE.-SELF-CONTRADICTION

SERTED AUTHORITY. INSTANCES.

CONSEQUENCES OF ITS SUCCESS.

FATAL TO AS

THE ONLY CONSISTENCY.

Ir will, of course, be said that I have taken an invidious view of the works we have been engaged with; selecting everywhere what I dissented from, and leaving all besides without a word of notice.

The reply is very simple. As I said in the very outset, my subject is not Mr. Ruskin, but Pre-Raffaellitism. Cut out of his eloquent writings all I understand by that term, and few would go beyond myself in admiration of the remainder.

It must be distinctly remembered, also, that MY OBJECT IS, IN THE STRICTEST SENSE, A DEFENSIVE ONE. Had Pre-Raffaellitism appeared either as a peculiarity or a preference; had it been simply said that the Old Masters were good and great in their way, but times are changed, and men with not a tythe of Salvator's endowments would blush for inadvertencies everywhere traceable in his finest. works; had, I say, anything like this been the drift of Mr. Ruskin's writings, we had been spared a heap of uncomfortable adjectives: there might have remained occasion of preference; there could have been none for disputing facts.

OUR OBJECT DEFENSIVE

AUTHORITY. 301

He has adopted a different course, and must take the consequences. By pushing beyond all wholesome or legitimate limits the demands of science, and by converting artistic criticism into a moral impeachment, he has not only disturbed our enjoyment of ancient Art, but wounded our sense of justice, and compelled, I might say, a fight for decent standing room in the commonwealth of the liberal Arts.

It is this, as well as the inconvenience of more extended researches, that has provoked some searching questions as to the issue of his own arguments on his own terms. I have never lain at catch; nor strained exuberances of expressions into responsible statements. It had been pleasanter to follow a writer, at once so ingenious and so eloquent, with the reins on the neck. But that writer is a Revolutionist. When we find, therefore, his principles expressed in language as paradoxical as it appears uncalled for, we are irresistibly moved to handle it as, perhaps, otherwise we should not have done.

There is another necessity. Mr. Ruskin lays direct claim to prescriptive authority. He tells his Edinburgh hearers, " I did not come here to tell you my belief, or my conjectures : I came to tell you the truth, which I have given fifteen years of my life to ascertain." * In the third volume of "Modern Painters," he asks, "What people would think if Faraday were to talk of his belief that iron had an

* Edin. Lect. p. 180.

affinity for oxygen.* Special claims demand special

treatment.

I shall not stop to discuss such assertions as that "the words' sublime and beautiful' do not express a generic distinction; " that "the terms objective and subjective' are two of the most objectionable words ever coined; " that "the boughs of every bramble bush are imaginatively arranged-so are those of every oak and cedar, but it does not follow that there is imaginative sympathy between oak and cedar; "§ or that "everything that nature does isimaginative." | Nor will I even anatomise such metaphysical statements as the following

"Dante's Centaur Chiron, dividing his beard with his arrow before he can speak, is a thing that no mortal would ever have thought of if he had not actually seen the Centaur do it. They might have composed handsome bodies of men and horses in all possible ways, through a whole life of pseudo-idealism, and yet never dreamed of any such thing. But the real living Centaur actually trotted across Dante's brain, and he saw him do it." (Modern Painters, pt. iv. chap. iv. § 6.)

This is given as an instance of "the life of faith." We must suppose, therefore, that Dante believed in the Centaur, that faith became sight, and the impossible a real thing. I leave such things to our mutual Readers.

There is another order of phenomenon, which I shall not apologize for handling. Were Mr. Ruskin's sentences less sententious, there might be less re

"Modern Painters," vol iii. Preface p. vii. † Ibid. pt. i. sec ii. chap. iii. Ibid. pt. iv. chap. xii. § 1. § Ibid. pt. iii. sec. ii. chap. ii. § 21. || Ibid.