1

proceeds in his walk-whistling. A sick and sorrowful poet, meeting the same creature, pauses-watches, follows, irritates it-takes a strange pleasure in looking into its eyes, and hearing it hiss; and measuring the concentric circles of its prepared coil. Presently it uncoils itself and glides away. The youth watches the waving of the long grass over its body-proceeds to wade through said long grass for half an hour after it, half fascinated and wishing to be bitten. Goes home, and dreams of it, intensified into a fiery serpent by his mistress's last frown-rises utterly ill and miserable, and writes 'Lamia.'1 Perhaps a thing as much worth doing as all that the farmer did in his cheerful walk-besides that the poet knows thenceforward more about vipers than the farmer ever did, or ever will. Much good may it do to the poet! whether really do good either to him or to us, I leave, not ironically, but as myself unable to form judgment in the matter, to my reader's consideration; being certain only of this, that such a question can only be raised, and poetry at all brought into questionable balance with turnips, when said poetry is of the best kind, and the mind thus spent in visions of first-rate power. Unless the resulting work, 'Lamia,' or 'Christabel' or what else it may be, be well finished in its own way, the young or old visionary had far better have concurred at once in the farmer's views on the subject of vipers, thrown the beast over the hedge, and set himself to plough, or thresh, for the rest of the day.

"It will follow from these general considerations, that so far as a mind of pure make, and powerful imagination is either (1) affected by a noble, but doubtful and faithless compassion for the agony of the world—or (2) by remorse for carnal sin, and by weakness of body, it will be liable to fits of fear, and correspondent visions of terrible things, which will also probably be intense, animated and acute, in proportion both to the vigour of its invention, and to its own intrinsic hatred of all death and evil; the things which have the nature of either, or 'the body of this death' 2 appearing more ghastly and vivid to the man in proportion to the separation of his own noble nature from them; and thus, unless we could find great men with no moral failing, and subject to no bodily distress, we must be prepared to find them occasionally creating pieces of horror in their work, which at first sight it will be difficult to distinguish from the perpetual and base horror of wicked men. If we do not find them doing this, unless as I said, we supposed them perfect and like the angels, we may be sure they are disguising something from us-hiding their fear, and not speaking from their hearts-in other words, that they are verily not great men, though we thought them so.

"Thus Correggio and Reynolds, both as great, considered with respect to the absolute pictorial faculty, as Titian, or Veronese, are yet subject to certain affectations and insufficiencies in their modes of perceiving objects. Correggio sees too exclusively its softness-Reynolds too exclusively its grace and breadth, both of them exaggerate shadows and curves, and in other modes into which I need not enter, seek wilfully something other than the fact. Hence we find, as far as I know, no true terror in any of their designs. Still less in any of those of Raphael

[Cf. Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvi. § 34, where Keats is spoken of as “sad because sickly."]

2 [Romans vii. 24.]

or Poussin, who were still more wilfully conventional. Attempts at the representation of terrible things may sometimes be forced upon such men, as in Raphael's Satan, in the St. Michael of the Louvre, and Poussin's Dragon in his St. Margaret. It will be the main object of this section to show how inferior all such artificial terrors are to the true work of the Naturalist. We come then, so far as we see at present, to the conclusion that while a continual delight in terrible subjects is an infallible sign of a man's being weak and wicked, the occasional dwelling upon ghastliness is an essential characteristic of great naturalist painters, at certain times of their lives, caused in them first by their compassion -secondly, by their sin; and thirdly, by their search for facts.'

There are other MSS. given by Ruskin to Mr. Allen in the same bundle that contained the material for vol. ii. already described. The sheets for the most part contain mere notes and memoranda, though they include the first drafts of discussions on Mountain Sculpture-a subject afterwards treated in the fourth volume of Modern Painters. The notes include jottings made on reading Byron's Childe Harold and the Clouds of Aristophanes; notes on Abstraction and on Chiaroscuro; the beginning of a paper on the Fall of Man; and some memoranda of sunsets and reflections in water; several other sheets are taken up with notes on Sir Charles Bell's Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting, a work first published in 1806. Bell died in 1842, and Murray had asked Ruskin to write a notice of his works on their artistic side for the Quarterly Review. He accordingly took the book with him on his foreign tour in 1845. "I stipulated for a back seat," he writes to his father in describing the journey from Tonbridge to Dover (April 2), “and got one-opposite a very fine specimen of a blackguard, with his cap over one eye, and a bandage for a shirt collar. I studied him very carefully, and at last sketched him on the margin of Bell's Expressions, while we stopped at Ashford, thus obtaining a valuable addition to the illustrations of the work." The notes show that Ruskin studied the work very carefully, but after some weeks he gave up the idea of writing the article for the Quarterly. "I enclose a letter," he writes to his father from Florence (June 15)," which you will not like to forward, but I can't help it. It explains itself: there is, however, another reason which I cannot give Murray, that on reading Sir C. again and again, I find it loose in plan and often to my notions wrong, and Murray told me he wanted as favourable a review as possible to serve the widow, and I can't write what I don't think." One result of this abandoned Quarterly article remains in vol. ii. of Modern Painters, in the shape of frequent references (seven in all) to Bell's works.

(II.) The Hilliard MS. This is the MS. of the volume in its penultimate form, and is followed by the text, apart from the author's final corrections. Parts of it are wanting; viz., sec. i. chs. i.-vi. (§ 1); ch. xv. 5-7; sec. ii. $9-11, and from 18 of ch. iv. to the end. The MS. is of 1846, and contains none of the later matter.

This MS. bears evidence similar to that in the case of the previous volume, of the great and minute care taken by the author in revision. The instances of alterations given in footnotes to the text (e.g. pp. 190, 248, 258) are typical of similar revision throughout the volume.

1 [In the Royal Gallery at Turin.]

With this MS. are a few other sheets containing material for chapters or portions of chapters afterwards discarded. One of these appears to have been an amplification of §§ 8-11 of the present ch. i. of the volume, dividing that form and those activities of art which are the subject of the theoretic faculty from the art which is "subservient" and "useful" (see § 8, p. 33). In this connection there is an interesting passage on Historical Art-"art historically useful, the preserver of things lost and found":

[11.] "And here we have to make a distinction between two functions of historical art commonly so called. Once, some time ago, when I was rashly using the word historical in the way it is so frequently applied to the higher branches of theoretic art, an intelligent amateur asked me suddenly for an instance of a good truth-telling, practically useful, historical picture of some important fact, not taken from the Scripture histories. I have a most acute recollection of the puzzled pause that followed. Vague images swimming before me of quaint, tapestry-like, nameless panoramas of impossible fortifications, with people in blue coats and silver lace and cocked hats capering on the top of a round hill in the foreground, and when these faded away, nothing left but a black, ignoble, inevitable well of vacancy, with the names of Benjamin West and Horace Vernet1 in phosphoric horror at the bottom of it. It is indeed singular to reflect how little historical information we owe to painting, for that which is commonly called historical is little more than realization of some isolated fact of what is known and conceived from books, and even of this, there is but little by great hands, except from the Scripture histories. Allegorical representations, triumphal processions, general types of victory or peace,—the time and costume often utterly neglected by the painter, or episodes which exhibit the human emotions under circumstances peculiar to no time, though peculiar in themselves, and for the understanding of which we must refer to written history,—this is all that art of any standing or dignity has done with respect to the past actions of men. Of informative art we have next to nothing, for the simple reason that artists are too apt to paint the things of past time, which they must invent, instead of things of present time which they might know. They hardly call the latter historical, and yet it is the only historical painting worth having. Is Thucydides a worse historian than Mitford, fresh from his command in 2 What would we give now for the roughest sketch of the battle of Platea-done on the instant, and on the spot. It would be worth rather more than the ideals of David in the Louvre.

"Besides the delight of exercising the imagination which brings the painter constantly back to the past, there is a reason 3 in the nature of his art itself. Informative historical art must be of a low kind-to map out the divisions of an army in motion, to clear away the smoke of the battle and let the eye perceive the relations of its troops,relations which in the battle itself could not be discerned-to labour

[For a reference to Vernet in this connection, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. vii. § 18.]

3

2 [Left blank in the MS. The missing word is Thrace (Thuc. iv. 104).]

[i.e., for the preference of past to present history, or for the avoidance of informative historical art altogether.]

out details of costume, and dwell on the features of mean faces, this is not work for a great painter; he cannot submit to it, nor ought he, for this may be done by inferior hands. His business is to seize the moments of mightier interest, to dwell on the passion and the powers which are the roots and movers of all history, and which are common to all time. A picture of the battle of Austerlitz gives no idea, no information whatever about the battle; it is a picture of Napoleon and [? (word indecipherable)], both agitated by noble emotion-it is the conception of an instant which may perhaps be as well conceived and rendered a thousand years hence as now; it is not historical but theoretic.

"Art, therefore, as the recorder of events has hitherto done almost nothing, and can never do much. To be valuable at all, it must be true in everything-true in those passing, finite, contemptible circumstances which, as contrary to the great general truths of nature, the good artist must reject, and even supposing this painful truth attained, a model and a map are better story-tellers still. The model of the battle of Waterloo gave a clearer knowledge of it than all the pictures ever painted.

"But art as the recorder of character, as the exhibition of the root and moving powers of history, has done everything. More history may be written on a forehead than on sixty feet of canvas. Every earnest and loving statement of what is leading, influential, foundational in the men and things immediately present and about the artist, of their heart and inner nature, as it manifests itself in instructive, not assumed, peculiarity, is historical in the highest sense, and invaluable to future ages."

With these remarks on historical art, may be compared passages in Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 21, and ch. vii. §§ 17-19.

Another additional chapter in the Hilliard MS. discusses the question of ideal character in landscape, and makes reference to the point of specific realisation "already explained in the preface," i.e. in the preface to the second edition of vol. i. The chapter seems to have been intended for insertion in that volume; it forestalls the enumeration, and begins the examination, of the six qualities of "typical beauty" discussed in the present volume (chs. v.-x.).

(III.) The Brantwood MS.

There are preserved at Brantwood some unpublished portions of Modern Painters contained in two small blue copy-books, not in Ruskin's hand. One of these is noted by him (in his later hand) on the cover thus:-" Part of unpublished old Modern Painters; very valuable." This note-book contains (i.) some notes on Ideas of Relation. These will be printed in Vol. VII., (vol. v. of Modern Painters). (ii.) Some notes on Terror. These are printed above, pp. 378-381. (iii.) The other copy-book (in the same hand) contains "Notes on a Painter's Profession as ending Irreligiously." These are printed in the next Appendix.

II

AN ADDITIONAL CHAPTER

BEING "NOTES ON A PAINTER'S PROFESSION AS ENDING IRRELIGIOUSLY"

[THIS chapter, as it now stands, is much later in date than the second volume of Modern Painters, for it refers to the fourth volume of that book, and also to the Stones of Venice (see § 11). It appears, however, to be a contribution to the discussion of questions raised in the second volume (sec. i. ch. xv. § 5, p. 210), and there reserved for subsequent treatment. The additional chapter is, therefore, appropriate in this place, and its inclusion here is convenient owing to the greater thickness of the later volumes. The MS. from which it is printed is described above, p. 383. The paragraphs are here numbered for convenience of reference.]

1. The first point which I would wish the reader to mark in this review is the inseparable connection of beauty with truth. We have seen that exactly in proportion as painters thirsted for truth, and were stern, laborious, undivided, and untempted in the pursuit of it—just in that proportion their sense of beauty was quickened, and their power over it confirmed. We have also seen that all beauty is typical of divine attributes, and of moral principles: it might therefore seem that no eagerness in its pursuit was blameable.

But here we are met by grave facts and difficult questions. It is, indeed, simply to be stated, and easily comprehended, that when the truth is sought first and beauty afterwards, all is wrong: when vice versa, all is right. But there is more.

2. And first let us consider the bearing of the pursuit of beauty, as intensely followed out by a great painter, on what is commonly called "religion.”

Taking a broad view of the religions of the world, they may be mostly defined under these two heads. (1) Efforts to propitiate a supernatural being, either beloved for the nobleness of its own nature, or supposed to possess power over the events of our own lives; and this effort at propitiation is generally accompanied (but not necessarily so) with the other form of religion. (2) Efforts of the human mind, when discontented with its state of existence here, or with the shortness of that state, to assure itself of a better or more enduring state of existence hereafter.

The efforts at propitiation (1) with an uncertain and feeble attempt at realization at futurity (2), constitutes most heathen religions:-the attempt at realization of futurity, with uncertain and feeble efforts at propitiation, constitutes most of the spurious forms of Christianity-the two conditions of mind