VOL. XXXVIII.

DECEMBER, 1902.

No. 6.

THE RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION OF JOHN RUSKIN. I. THE WITNESS.

SOME day, some one, or many, will do for Ruskin what he undertook to do for the painter Turner. Ruskin wrote Modern Painters in order to justify the art of Turner; to show, namely, that, in landscape painting, Turner easily and far surpassed all his modern compeers, and still more easily, all the older masters in this particular field of art, but not the yet more ancient historical painters. The biographers of Ruskin have evidently not been able to comprehend him-not even Collingwood, who loved him and knew him best; and since some of them pull down with one hand what they build with the other, seeming more bent on contesting his views rather than adequately representing them, giving thus a contradictory composition as the result of their labors, we may not hope to form from their story any true concept of the great master.

All--biographers and really competent readers-give him singular praise, while administering the usually undeserved discipline of blame. "One of the greatest of great men of all ages," proclaims Mrs. Meynell. "One of the greatest masters of prose in English literature, and one of the dominant influences of the Victorian era,' asserts Mr. Frederic Harrison, his latest biographer. "An acknowledged chief among the chiefs of literature, the foremost name in modern English literature strictly so called," declares the Oxford University Herald. "Resuscitator of the art of the fourteenth century, precursor of social democracy, the Shakespeare of the nineteenth century," adds the review, La Papaute et les Peuples.

All this is more nearly or more literally true than many of Ruskin's readers and admirers would perhaps be willing to admit. That Rus

kin was great in literature and art no one will deny. But yet, how many of his most enthusiastic disciples can say with truth that they have caught all the rare and subtle music of his speech; his rigid, analytical clearness; his exquisite choice of words and turn of

thought; his delicate play of wit and sarcasm and fancy; his lustrous imagery, so rich and exhaustless, yet, as ornament in his own beloved Gothic art, never added for its own sake, but restrained and deepened by a scientific splendor.

He was great as an art critic-one of the greatest of all time, and standing amongst his fellows as Saul amongst the men of Israel; but great not because original, as it has been said, but because, with great natural ability, he was a profound and constant student. Art unveiled for him her inner sanctuary; it was a revelation in more senses than one. It revealed the great past of the years of Europe's transformation, and raised him above the unprincipled selfishness of a time which, in its halting education, has nothing but contempt for the gigantic Middle Ages. While the world worshipped him and listened, he felt he was out of tune with it; and his voice and pen turned to plead the cause of the wronged, the debased and the poor. Here, too, his theories were in advance of his age; but the world has since taken them up and acted upon them.

One of the most significant and interesting lessons from the life of Ruskin is that of his religious evolution. He was brought up in an intense bigotry, which grew with his years. But the deceit was finally dispelled; and although he never entered the Catholic fold, he became the pioneer and apostle of the Catholic revival. Sir Walter Scott has often received the credit of being one of the first to help in dissipating the dense dark cloud of Anglo-Saxon fanaticism against the ancient religion of the race. But there is a greater than Sir Walter here. At Oxford, he "attracted," says Mr. Harrison, "more attention and exerted a greater influence than perhaps ever fell to the lot of any academic professor of that age." And here he made "pictures and painters mere texts for a religious and metaphysical propaganda; his chair a pulpit for a Neo-Christianity or PaleoCatholicism of his own invention." As he came to understand better Catholic truth, he fearlessly proclaimed it. He recanted the falsehoods in which he had been educated; and his ethical or spiritual growth keeping pace with the intellectual, he ascended at intervals to the level of the saints, doing, by the light of a dim and wavering ray, as much as could have been done without having crossed the mystic bar which pacifies the haven from the deep.

II. HIS EARLY TRAINING.

By origin, early training, habits of life, taste, character and associations, Ruskin was Scottish, says his biographer, Mr. Collingwood.

He was born in London of Scottish parents. There was a strain of Gaelic blood-certainly from the mother's side, probably also from that of the father-intermingled with Norman and English.. "His mother's gloomy Calvinism was tempered with a benevolence quite as uncommon." She kept the training of the boy in her own hands, and his training was strictly Evangelical. As soon as he was able to read, his mother gave him regular morning lessons in Bible-reading, and in reciting the Scotch paraphrases of the Psalms. In this way she went over the whole Bible, Levitical Law and all, from Genesis to Revelation, and began again when she came to the end. His first teacher, after he had left the tutorship of his mother, was Dr. Andrews, a Nonconformist minister. At the age of fifteen he was sent to the day-school of Rev. Thomas Dale, in Grove Lane, Peckham. His parents' intention was that he should enter the Protestant ministry, a purpose in which they persevered, and to which apparently John consented, until he wrote the first volume of Modern Painters, at the age of twenty-four. Although his Latin prose was, it seems, poor, his divinity, philosophy and mathematics enabled him to obtain his B. A. at Oxford; but "the divinity," we are told by Collingwood, "by which is meant Bible knowledge, was thoroughly learnt from his mother's early lessons." This divinity was atrociously narrow and bitterly anti-Catholic. But he lived to intensely regret and utterly retract what he calls his "morbid violence of passion and narrowness of thought"; to atone for "the presumption and narrowness caused by having been bred in the Evangelical schools, and which now fill me with shame and distress in reading Modern Painters." (1) In his preface to a new edition in 1873, he says that "the substance of the metaphysical and religious speculation is only justifiable on the ground of its absolute honesty." (2)

III. THE BITTERNESS OF RUSKIN'S PREJUDICE.

The change in Ruskin's mental attitude towards the Catholic religion could scarcely have been more radical than it was. The blindness, and, we may say, ferocity, of his earlier bigotry are almost inconceivable in so great a man; or conceivable only on the ground that his mind was thus sedulously poisoned from childhood.

No one knew better than Ruskin the debasement of modern art; no one could trace more accurately the steps of its decay. He

(1) See notes to Frondes Agrestes. The Mershon Co., New York.

(2) Modern Painters. Belford, Clark & Co., New York. Preface to new edition (1873) P. 51.

admitted that "Calvin and Knox and Luther and their flocks, with all the hardest-headed and truest-hearted faithful in Christendom, thus spurned away the spurious art, and all art with it"; (1) yet he taught, at first, that it was the Protestantism in the mediaval Church which was the source of its artistic greatness; whereas its Popery, in art as in everything else, was utterly depraved. He wrote in the appendix to the Stones of Venice: "So far from Romanism now producing anything greater in art, it cannot even preserve what has been given to its keeping. I know of no abuse of precious inheritance half so grievous, as the abuse of all that is best in art, wherever the Romanist priesthood get possession of it." "It is of the highest importance, in these days, that Romanism should be deprived of the miserable influence which its pomp and picturesqueness have given it over the weak sentimentalism of the English people." This he believes to be the basest of all motives of sympathy with the Church of Rome. Other motives there were of "infinite fatuity for the unhappy persons whom they had betrayed-fatuity self-inflicted and stubborn in resistance to God's Word and man's reason.

Fatuity to seek for unity of a living body of truth and trust in God with a dead body of lies and trust in wood, and thence to expect anything else than plague and consumption by worms undying." He would naturally expect that English travelers, "beholding the condition of the states in which the Papal religion is professed," would, being "the most enlightened section of a great Protestant nation," "have been animated with some desire to dissipate the Roman errors, and to communicate the better knowledge which they themselves possessed.”

Strangely enough he finds Catholic countries gloomy, even in their pleasantest places. The gloom is manifested in the frequent mementoes of death and damnation—"a love of horror," "an imbecile revelling in terror." "I may generally notice," he writes in Vol. IV of Modern Painters, "that the degree in which the peculiar feeling we are endeavoring to analyze is present in any district of Roman Catholic countries may be almost accurately measured by the quantity of blood represented on the crucifixes." In his Stones of Venice, he is glad to be able to append, not without deliberation, his tolerant father's program for regulating "Roman Catholic ignorance and Protestant toleration" in matters political: "Too late (after Catholic Emancipation) we discover that a Roman Catholic is wholly incapable (1) Vol. III, page 73.