ART. III.-Modern Painters. Vol. V. By John Ruskin, M. A., London: Smith, Elder & Co.

Homer and the Homeric Age. 3 Vols. M. P. London: J. H. & J. Parker.

By W. E. Gladstone,

3. History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. 4 Vols. By James Anthony Froude. London: J. W. Parker.

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4. History of Friedrich the Second, called Frederick the Great. Vols. I. & II. By Thomas Carlyle. London: Chapman & Hall. T first glance it will seem as though it were absolutely impossible that the writers, whose names head this article, should have any thing in common. And it will be as well if we at once confess, that we have no hope either of forging any new links between the subjects of which they have treated, or of propounding any novel theory of the universe, which may embrace them all. But the most cursory reader of their recent works must have been struck by one peculiarity, which he cannot deny to any of them. However interesting the book, however numerous and beautiful the new views of things which it may have disclosed to him, however great the pleasure he has derived from its perusal, yet, in the majority of cases, he closes it with convictions diametrically opposed to those which the author had hoped to produce in his mind, or at best, he rises with heavy doubts upon the very point which it was the main object of the work to establish conclusively. The banks of the river were perfect, but it has ended in a quicksand, or, worse, in space pur et simple. For instance, there is no work on art, Modern or Ancient, at all comparable with the five volumes to which Ruskin has affixed the title of Modern Painters. They present a somewhat formidable appearance, but are in point of fact, entirely free from any technicalities that may not be understood by the merest tyro. They are full of original and subtle criticism not only on pictures, but on poetry also; nor can any body read them without acquiring both facts and principles, whereby he may be enabled to turn what critical power he may be gifted with, to better account than the supercilious detection of spots in the sun, which is the common criterion of taste. Above all, they open a man's eyes to what may be called the laws of external form-the laws which regulate the variety of shapes and colours taken by clouds, rocks, trees, the earth and every common sight.' These laws, again, are given in no dry scientific definitions, but are derived, traced and illustrated, not from pictures only, but from our own everyday experience. And lastly, Ruskin's language, though at times undoubtedly marred by an absence of self-restraint, and then defaced by an extra

vagance verging upon rant, yet is at once copious, perspicuous, and distinguished by an eloquence all its own.

Such and so agreeable is the road-beautified and diversified in every imaginable way by the genius of its designer. Yet it is only the road; and what is the goal towards which its maker conceives it to be but the means of conducting those who may be tempted to tread it? There are few to whom it would not be a mortification to know, that most people look on them as being only accidentally of any use in the world; that if they were successful in their intentions they would be a nuisance, or do positive harm, but that, thanks to the fact that their intentions are of far too chimerical a nature ever to be realized, or to obtain any dangerous number of partizans, their exertions and struggles towards those intentions can be looked at per se, and may be thus indirectly beneficial or not, as the case may be. Our deep sense of the obligations owed by the world generally to Ruskin, has already been expressed, and the fruit of his lessons is to be seen in the great pictures that have been produced in England during the last ten years. Yet we should be inclined to retract what we have said in praise of the work, were it possible to conceive the world generally abandoning its common sense and adopting the faith, which, after all, it is Ruskin's main object to preach in it. This creed contains two clauses. "I believe in TurnerI abjure all England else," is perhaps the shortest mode of conveying it. No painter was ever equal to Turner: but alas! he was an Englishman of the nineteenth century, not a Venetian of the fourteenth. And great as he was, he could but paint, thwarted and dwarfed by the degraded tone of thought, feeling and taste, prevalent in English society. Hence his shortcomings as an artist-hence his penurious habits-hence his lonely and miserable life. The failure and unhappiness of so great a man does but point the moral with treble force, that, if we do not at once change our whole mode and manner of life, if we do not dismiss men-servants from an employ so degrading to the male sex, if we do not forthwith pull our old houses down and erect gothic edifices in their room,* if we do

This was the original proposition. It appears to have struck our author afterwards that it was rather too expensive to be practical. For (if we remem. ber right) it is argued in the Edinburgh Lectures.-" If we cannot do this, we can do something-we can build gothic porches to our doorways." Ruskin could never defend an architectural incongruity like this on Esthetic grounds. But by a most gross misapplication of a Scriptural text, he reminds his hearers that they will be thus affording shelter to the poor. Even self complacency has its limits and we have never yet met a man who would feel the glow of charity upon him, on the ground, that, when stepping in to his dinner, he had left a beggar provided with a roof in his porch.

not spend our money on their outsides, instead of selfishly making ourselves comfortable in their interior; above all, if we do not utterly and from our hearts abjure the blasphemous science of political economy, and in its stead adopt and act upon such views as were lately promulgated in certain papers, which saw strange light in the Cornhill Magazine, we may no longer hope that any good thing will come forth from England. Turner himself saw and felt this. The age had bound him too ' in its benumbing round.' And he gave clear expression to the bitterness of his feelings, in what to common eyes is a very beantiful landscape-The garden of the Hesperides-but which really is a grand yet melancholy allegory-The Assumption of the Dragon, in lieu of the Virgin-deciphered by Ruskin, and the key to which he now bestows on the nation. Perhaps the riddle did not present much difficulty to the man, of whose fancy it is the pure invention.

We have no liking for quotations, yet, lest we should be accused of exaggerating or distorting our author's views, we are compelled to take a few from the volume of the work published during the last year. All acquainted with other works of his, will at once be aware that these might be multiplied ad infinitum. 'So far as in it lay, this century has caused every one of its 'great men, whose hearts were kindest and whose spirits most perceptive of the work of God, to die without hope-Scott, Keats, 'Byron, Shelley, Turner. Great England of the Ironheart now, 'not of the Lionheart; for these souls of her children, an account 'may perhaps be one day required of her.'

All his failure and error, deep and strange, came of his faith'lessness-faithlessness or despair-the despair which has been 'shown to be characteristic of this present century, most sor'rowfully manifested in its greatest men, but existing in an in'finitely more fatal form in the lower and general mind.' Part IX. Chapter 12, p. 4.

Or again. 'I had no conception of the absolute darkness 'which has covered the national mind in this respect' (the relation of God to man,) until I came into collision with persons engaged in the study of economical or political questions.' Vol. V. page 348.

The greatest man of our England in the first half of the 19th century, in the strength and hope of his youth, perceives 'this to be the thing he has to tell us of utmost moment, con'nected with the Spiritual World. *** Here in England is ' our great spiritual fact for ever interpreted to us, the Assumption of the Dragon. No St. George any more to be heard ' of! This child, born on St. George's day, can only make maniMARCH, 1861.

fest the Dragon, not slay him. The fairy English queen once thought to command the waves, but it is the Sea-dragon that 'commands her valleys. Of old, the Angel of the sea ministered ' to them, but now the Serpent of the sea.' Part IX. Chapter 10, H. 25.

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So far, we have only quoted passages of prophetic denunciation; the following, though not a whit more absurd, may be more certain of provoking a smile. He is speaking of the clouds, but cannot resist the chance of an allusion to his theory.

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But when the storm is more violent they are tossed into fragments, and magnificent revolving wheels of vapour are 'formed, broken, and tossed into the air, even as the grass is tossed in the hay field from the toothed wheels of the mowing machine, (perhaps, in common with all other inventions of the kind, likely to 'bring more evil upon men than ever the Medusa-cloud did, and turn them more effectually into stone.)' Vol. V. page 147.

We are not among those who consider that Ruskin has set Turner on a pinnacle one inch too high above other landscape painters: we sympathize with his indignation in finding, in the catalogue of the Royal Academy for 1859, Calcott and Claude described as Turner's equals. We have already given a very inadequate expression to our admiration of the book in its parts. But what it is our present object to draw attention to, is the strangeness of the purpose to which our author desires those parts to be subservient. The above is a correct statement of the whole drift of the work, and it militates so strongly against common sense, that it is almost a waste of words to encounter it. Ruskin labours, and as no other man could labour: but he seems to leave to others the privilege of reaping the fruit of his labours. The conclusion which most people would draw from a perusal of the book, is that great works have been painted and produced during this much abused century. We have already hinted, that the appeal to any picture painted by Turner, is not in the slightest degree justified by fact. Ruskin's interpretation both of that fable of the Hesperides, and of some others, is as far fetched as any in Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients; with this difference, that Bacon's are professedly fanciful. He never ascribed to primitive ages the pregnant subtleties of his own brain: whereas Ruskin can write concerning the fables of the Medusa, Pegasus, Danae and the Danaids. Few of us have thought, in watching its career across on our mossy hills, or listening to the murmur of the springs, that the chief masters of the human 'imagination owed, and confessed that they owed, the force of 'their noblest thoughts, not to the flowers of the valley nor the 'majesty of the hill, but to the flying cloud." (Vol. V. part VII

Chapter 4.) We would add that any appeal to Turner's life in the same cause is a wrong, both to the men and to the country which he adorned. He lived through and past obloquy into wealth; and that wealth was a substantial proof that there was appreciation of his powers. He found fit audience though few. Ruskin has been rather the popularizer and analyzer than the discoverer of his genius. And he died fulfilling the darling object of his life, presenting his country with a noble heirloom in a gallery of his own works, and bequeathing a sum larger than the Clive Fund to the foundation of a like institution for English Artists. Whether he was personally happy or not, is a question with which we have nothing to do. Even Ruskin will hardly find English Society guilty of determining those points in a man's temper, which go to the making up of private happiness. All we would insist upon is, that the contemplation of his course leads ordinary people to a conclusion, again precisely opposed to that drawn from it by Ruskin. For assuredly in his case, this vile soul-benumbing nineteenth century did afford its opportunities for a great painter to lead a noble life; nor was anything found in it to prevent those opportunities being pushed and used to the utmost.

But there are other sinners in the same direction and on the same scale, and amongst them we must include even Gladstone. That it has been a labour of love to him to compose his three volumes on Homer, and that he has spared no pains to render them as exhaustive as possible, is evident to anybody who may read the work. The first contains a treatise on the ethnology of the races to whom, and of whose ancestors Homer sang. This we would rather treat of in connexion with the third, which contains, in the first place, an admirably drawn contrast between Greece and Troy as exhibited in the Iliad, and, in the second place, (what we must consider as the most valuable portion of the work,) a criticism on Homer as a poet, and on the use made of him by succeeding generations of poets. The second volume is entitled, the Religion of the Homeric age, and in it is included by far the subtlest analysis of Greek Divinities, as exhibited by Homer, that has yet appeared. For Gladstone shows, on the one hand, more discriminative power than Colonel Mure, and, on the other, more imagination--we mean more power of truly appreciating the poet's view,-than Grote. But here our sympathy must end. The analysis is admirable: but what is the aim of the analyzer? He has analyzed Homeric Mythology, believing that he thereby proves, that in it are to be found clear traces of two great revealed traditions ;-the tradition of a Trinity, and the tradition of a Redeemer.