Book 7 — MR RUSKIN'S WORKS. (continued 2)

Our poet sounds all the chords. He does not muffle any; he honours Nature in her own simple loveliness, and in the beauty she wins from the human heart, as well as when she is informed with that sublime spirit

Sit down, by all means, amongst the fern and the wild-flowers, and look out upon the blue hills, or near you at the flowing brook, and thank God, the giver of all this beauty. But what manner of good will you do by endeavouring to persuade yourself that these objects are only beautiful because you give thanks for them?—for to this strange logical inversion will you find yourself reduced. And surely you learned to esteem and love this benevolence itself, first as a human attribute, before you became cognisant of it as a Divine attribute. What other course can the mind take but to travel through humanity up to God?

There is much more of metaphysics in the volume before us; there is, in particular, an elaborate investigation of the faculty of imagination; but we have no inducement to proceed further with Mr Ruskin in these psychological inquiries. We have given some attention to his theory of the Beautiful, because it lay at the basis of a series of critical works which, partly from their boldness, and partly from the talent of a certain kind which is manifestly displayed in them, have attained to considerable popularity. But we have not the same object for prolonging our examination into his theory of the Imaginative Faculty. "We say it advisedly," (as Mr Ruskin always adds when he is asserting anything particularly rash,) we say it advisedly, and with no rashness whatever, that though our author is a man of great natural ability, and enunciates boldly many an independent isolated truth, yet of the spirit of philosophy he is utterly destitute. The calm, patient, prolonged thinking, which Dugald Stewart somewhere describes as the one essential characteristic of the successful student of philosophy, he knows nothing of. He wastes his ingenuity in making knots where others had long since untied them. He rushes at a definition, makes a parade of classification; but for any great and wide generalisation he has no appreciation whatever. He appears to have no taste, but rather an antipathy for it; when it lies in his way he avoids it. On this subject of the Imaginative Faculty he writes and he raves, defines and poetises by turns; makes laborious distinctions where there is no essential difference; has his "Imagination Associative," and his "Imagination Penetrative;" and will not, or cannot, see those broad general principles which with most educated men have become familiar truths, or truisms. But what clear thinking can we expect of a writer who thus describes his "Imagination Penetrative?"—

"It may seem to the reader that I am incorrect in calling this penetrating possession-taking faculty Imagination. Be it so: the name is of little consequence; the Faculty itself, called by what name it will, I insist upon as the highest intellectual power of man. There is no reasoning in it; it works not by algebra, nor by integral calculus; it is a piercing Pholas-like mind's tongue, that works and tastes into the very rock-heart. No matter what be the subject submitted to it, substance or spirit—all is alike divided asunder, joint and marrow, whatever utmost truth, life, principle, it has laid bare; and that which has no truth, life, nor principle, dissipated into its original smoke at a touch. The whispers at men's ears it lifts into visible angels. Vials that have lain sealed in the deep sea a thousand years it unseals, and brings out of them Genii."—(P. 156.)

With such a wonder-working faculty man ought to do much. Indeed, unless it has been asleep all this time, it is difficult to understand why there should remain anything for him to do.

Surveying Mr Ruskin's works on art, with the knowledge we have here acquired of his intellectual character and philosophical theory, we are at no loss to comprehend that mixture of shrewd and penetrating remark, of bold and well-placed censure, and of utter nonsense in the shape of general principles, with which they abound. In his Seven Lamps of Architecture, which is a very entertaining book, and in his Stones of Venice, the reader will find many single observations which will delight him, as well by their justice, as by the zeal and vigour with which they are expressed. But from neither work will he derive any satisfaction if he wishes to carry away with him broad general views on architecture.

There is no subject Mr Ruskin has treated more largely than that of architectural ornament; there is none on which he has said more good things, or delivered juster criticisms; and there is none on which he has uttered more indisputable nonsense. Every reader of taste will be grateful to Mr Ruskin if he can pull down from St Paul's Cathedral, or wherever else they are to be found, those wreaths or festoons of carved flowers—"that mass of all manner of fruit and flowers tied heavily into a long bunch, thickest in the middle, and pinned up by both ends against a dead wall." Urns with pocket-handkerchiefs upon them, or a sturdy thick flame for ever issuing from the top, he will receive our thanks for utterly demolishing. But when Mr Ruskin expounds his principles—and he always has principles to expound—when he lays down rules for the government of our taste in this matter, he soon involves us in hopeless bewilderment. Our ornaments, he tells us, are to be taken from the works of nature, not of man; and, from some passages of his writings, we should infer that Mr Ruskin would cover the walls of our public buildings with representations botanical and geological. But in this we must be mistaken. At all events, nothing is to be admitted that is taken from the works of man.

"I conclude, then, with the reader's leave, that all ornament is base which takes for its subject human work; that it is utterly base—painful to every rightly toned mind, without, perhaps, immediate sense of the reason, but for a reason palpable enough when we do think of it. For to carve our own work, and set it up for admiration, is a miserable self-complacency, a contentment in our wretched doings, when we might have been looking at God's doings."

After this, can we venture to admire the building itself, which is, of necessity, man's own "wretched doing?"

Perplexed by his own rules, he will sometimes break loose from the entanglement in some such strange manner as this:—"I believe the right question to ask, with respect to all ornament, is simply this: Was it done with enjoyment—was the carver happy while he was about it?" Happy art! where the workman is sure to give happiness if he is but happy at his work. Would that the same could be said of literature!

How far colour should be introduced into architecture is a question with men of taste, and a question which of late has been more than usually discussed. Mr Ruskin leans to the introduction of colour. His taste may be correct; but the fanciful reasoning which he brings to bear upon the subject will assist no one else in forming his own taste. Because there is no connection "between the spots of an animal's skin and its anatomical system," he lays it down as the first great principle which is to guide us in the use of colour in architecture—

"That it be visibly independent of form. Never paint a column with vertical lines, but always cross it. Never give separate mouldings separate colours," &c. "In certain places," he continues, "you may run your two systems closer, and here and there let them be parallel for a note or two, but see that the colours and the forms coincide only as two orders of mouldings do; the same for an instant, but each holding its own course. So single members may sometimes have single colours; as a bird's head is sometimes of one colour, and its shoulders another, you may make your capital one colour, and your shaft another; but, in general, the best place for colour is on broad surfaces, not on the points of interest in form. An animal is mottled on its breast and back, and rarely on its paws and about its eyes; so put your variegation boldly on the flat wall and broad shaft, but be shy of it on the capital and moulding."—(Lamps of Architecture, p. 127.)

We do not quite see what we have to do at all with the "anatomical system" of the animal, which is kept out of sight; but, in general, we apprehend there is, both in the animal and vegetable kingdom, considerable harmony betwixt colour and external form. Such fantastic reasoning as this, it is evident, will do little towards establishing that one standard of taste, or that "one school of architecture," which Mr Ruskin so strenuously insists upon. All architects are to resign their individual tastes and predilections, and enrol themselves in one school, which shall adopt one style. We need not say that the very first question—what that style should be, Greek or Gothic—would never be decided. Mr Ruskin decides it in favour of the "earliest English decorated Gothic;" but seems, in this case, to suspect that his decision will not carry us far towards unanimity. The scheme is utterly impossible; but he does his duty, he tells us, by proposing the impossibility.

As a climax to his inconsistency and his abnormal ways of thinking, he concludes his Seven Lamps of Architecture with a most ominous paragraph, implying that the time is at hand when no architecture of any kind will be wanted: man and his works will be both swept away from the face of the earth. How, with this impression on his mind, could he have the heart to tell us to build for posterity? Will it be a commentary on the Apocalypse that we shall next receive from the pen of Mr Ruskin?