Among the undertakings announced as under consideration was the engraving of many of the works of art mentioned by Ruskin in his second volume-such as "the architecture and sculpture of the Spina Chapel at Pisa" (see p. 39), "the pulpit in S. Andrea at Pistoja" (p. 300), "the frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli in the chapel of the Riccardi Palace at Florence" (p. 320), and "the works of Tintoretto in the Scuola di San Rocco at Venice" (pp. 268, 270, 272, 274). The water-colour copies of works of art made for the Society, and reproduced by it in chromolithography, were on its dissolution presented to the National Gallery. The reader who examines the collection there will see how many of the works to which Ruskin called attention in this volume were selected by the Society for record.1

Nor was the volume less successful in establishing the fame of Tintoret. It has been well pointed out that Ruskin had come to Venice in a right mood to appreciate the sweep and grandeur of Tintoretto's genius. "Fresh from the stormy grandeur of the St. Gothard, he found the lurid skies and looming giants of the Visitation, or the Baptism, or the Crucifixion, reechoing the subjects of Turner as 'deep answering to deep.""2 Between Turner and Tintoret there is, indeed, both spiritual and technical affinity. "Greater imagination, a grander impressionism and conception, and a more burning zeal, rather than a faithful adherence to the traditions of the schools, was Tintoretto's message to the ages." It was the message that Turner also conveyed, and there is reason for thinking that in the mighty Venetian he had recognised a kindred spirit. It was part of Ruskin's mission to reveal the genius of both painters to the modern world. He justly claims, in the Epilogue to this volume and elsewhere," that he disclosed the supremacy of Tintoret, who had fallen almost into neglect until

1

3

e.g., Fra Angelico's frescoes in S. Marco, and Ghirlandajo's in S. Maria Novella. For Ruskin's testimony to the work of the Society, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. v. §6, and Ariadne Florentina, § 244. For it he wrote two monographs-Giotto and his Works in Padua and Monuments of the Cavalli Family.

2 W. G. Collingwood's Life of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 104. Compare Ruskin's letter to Burne-Jones below, p. 356.

3 J. B. Stoughton Holborn's Tintoretto, 1903, p. 90.

4 "Samuel Rogers used to tell the following story. He was on his way to Italy immediately after the peace that followed the downfall of Napoleon, and he met several artists returning from that country. The first was Sir Thomas Lawrence, and Rogers put the question to him, 'What do you think the finest picture you have seen in Italy?' After slight hesitation, he replied, The Miracle of St. Mark, by Tintoretto.' Rogers then said, 'The next painter I met was Turner, and I put the same question to him. Without a moment's hesitation he said, "Tintoretto (Reminiscences of Frederick Goodall, R.A., 1902, p. 37).

Epilogue, § 13, p. 355; Præterita, i. ch. ix. §§ 183-184; Fors Clavigera, Letters 61

and 67.

That is, among critics and the general public. That artists appreciated Tintoret we have already seen. The following tribute by Etty may be added. Writing

this volume and the third of The Stones of Venice were published. In this respect, as also in winning better recognition for the school of Fra Angelico, the second volume of Modern Painters assuredly did not miss its mark. Ruskin refers in The Stones of Venice-with "astonishment and indignation "-to the notice of Tintoret in Kugler's Handbook of Painting, then and for many years to come the recognised authority in such matters. The note added to later editions of the Handbook is significant of the efficacy of Ruskin's championship:

"The remarks in the text upon Tintoretto have been retained, although they do scant justice to that great master, whose works are now better known and more fully understood and appreciated in England, principally through the eloquent writings of Mr. Ruskin. It may be asserted with confidence that no painter has excelled him in nobility and grandeur of conception, and few in poetic intention." 2

To like effect testifies Mr. W. M. Rossetti :—

"The writer who has done by far the most to establish the fame of Tintoret at the height which it ought to occupy is Professor Ruskin in his Stones of Venice and other books; the depth and scope of the master's power had never before been adequately brought out, although his extraordinary and somewhat arbitrarily used executive gift was acknowledged." 8

Mr. Charles Eliot Norton has well said that the chapters in this volume on Imagination, with their "illustrations of the theme drawn from the works . . . of Tintoret, the artist endowed above all others with imaginative power," . . . "form an unrivalled text-book for the student of the nobler qualities of the art. This section of the book," he adds, "in its setting forth of the function of the imaginative faculty in pictorial art, may well be compared with Wordsworth's Prefaces in their study of the same faculty as displayed in poetry. Wordsworth's and Ruskin's treatises are mutually complementary; and they afford a body of doctrine admirably fitted to enlighten, enlarge, and elevate the understanding of to Lawrence from Venice in 1823, he says: "You, I am sure, must have been much struck with the Tintorets here; in the Academy, Ducal Palace, etc.; his Last Judgment, Crucifixion, small St. Agnes. What a glorious group that is we see at the foot of the Cross! Really, for composition, for pathos, appropriate and harmonious combination of hues, and great executive power, I have never seen it excelled, rarely equalled. The poetry of his Last Judgment, the hues, the teeming richness of composition,-figures whirled in all possibilities of action and foreshortening,-excite astonishment at his powers that does not easily subside" (Alexander Gilchrist's Life of Etty, i. 169).

1 Introductory remarks to Venetian Index.

2 Fifth edition, 1887, ii. p. 612.

3 Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th ed., xx. p. 611.

* See below, p. 299, where Ruskin himself refers to Wordsworth's Preface.

the reader in its appreciation of the work and worth of the most precious and loftiest of human powers.

3

To trace the effect of the volume in what was to Ruskin its main purpose and function—namely, its theory of the spiritual quality of beauty-admits of no such precise measurement. Like the first volume, it influenced deeply many of the best minds of the day. It preached the dignity of art, and in doing so it struck many a responsive chord in artists of high purpose, and—like the many other utterances from the same pen which succeeded it-contributed something to elevate the standards of production and taste.5 But other ideas and ideals of art arose in later days, and Ruskin came to doubt whether the theory of its spiritual quality and function had left much mark upon the world.

Ruskin's feelings in this matter must be referred to in some detail, in order to explain the subsequent history of the second volume. This follows in the main that of Modern Painters generally, as already told." The second volume was reprinted in 1848, 1851, 1856, and 1869; it was included, of course, in the new edition of 1873.7 He was averse from the republication of the book, and was especially out of humour with this second volume. He had outgrown its theological standpoint; he was ashamed of its sectarian narrowness; and he was displeased by its affectations of style. Hence, when contemplating a revised series of his

1 Introduction to the "Brantwood edition" of the separate issue of Modern Painters, vol. ii., New York, 1891, pp. ix.-x.

2 See Vol. III. pp. xxxvii.-xli.

3 See especially sec. i. ch. i. § 2, p. 26.

"There is a passage in the second volume of Modern Painters [sec. i. ch. xv. $12, p. 217], Theoria the Service of Heaven,' which I have chanted to myself in many a lonely lane, and which interprets many thoughts I have had" (Letters of James Smetham, p. 7).

5 The testimony of the leading journal in an article on the day following Ruskin's death, is worth recording in this connection. "He constructed an ideal for the artist as well as an ideal of art. He showed the artistic profession that it has a mission like the pulpit. He inculcated upon it self-respect because its art is worthy of respect. If sometimes he bade the public look in a picture gallery for qualities it had no particular right to seek for there, he obliged it at least to use its eyes and test its judgment. Artists have not been tender in their retorts upon their critic. They may be excused for a sense of hurt at his frequent caprices, and at his unmeasured severity. They must not be unmindful that they owe the fuller recognition of their title to public admiration and public patronage in no small degree to the blaze of glory with which his meteoric pen has invested their whole vocation. Every painter has risen in stature by virtue of John Ruskin's vindication of the heights to which English art must, and English artists may, aspire" (Times, Jan. 22, 1900).

See Vol. III. pp. xlvi.-1.

7 For particulars of the separate editions, see Bibliographical Note below, p. liii.; for editions of the complete work, Vol. III. pp. lviii.-lxi.

8 See, e.g., Fors Clavigera, Letter 76, and, in this volume, notes of 1883 on pp. 61, 110, 199.

Works in 1870-1871, he excluded the second volume of Modern Painters from its scope.1 Subsequently, however, he selected that very volume for separate and special republication. What caused Ruskin to change his mind was, firstly, the rise of the so-called æsthetic craze, with which by the ignorant he was sometimes himself connected; and, next, the constraint he felt to reinforce the system of "natural philosophy and natural theology," which he had accepted as the basis of his teaching and which had come to be assailed on so many sides. He had intended, he says, "never to have reprinted the second volume of Modern Painters;” but “I find now," he added, "that the general student' has plunged into such abysses, not of analytic, but of dissolytic,-dialytic-or even diarrhoeic— lies, belonging to the sooty and sensual elements of his London and Paris life, that however imperfectly or dimly done, the higher analysis of that early work of mine ought at least to be put within his reach; and the fact, somehow, enforced upon him, that there were people before he lived, who knew what 'æsthesis' meant, though they did not think that pigs' flavouring of pigs'-wash was ennobled by giving it that Greek name: and that there were also people who knew what vital beauty meant, though they did not seek it either in the model-room, or the Parc aux Cerfs." 2 To the same effect, is the note added in 1883 to the first chapter of this volume (see p. 35), in protest against the "æsthetic" folly "which in recent days has made art at once the corruption, and the jest, of the vulgar world." Similarly, Ruskin felt impelled to republish his second volume as a protest against "so many baseless semblances of philosophy," and a vindication of the Faith "in the creating Spirit, as the source of Beauty."

3

Accordingly in 1882 Ruskin prepared, and in the following year published, a new and revised edition of this second volume. Particulars of it will be found in the Bibliographical Note (p. liv.), and all matter added in it is incorporated in this edition-see the Preface (pp. 3-9); the Introductory Note to the second section (pp. 219–222); the author's footnotes -distinguished by the addition of "[1883] "passim; and the Epilogue (pp. 343-357). Ruskin had come to feel, then, in the end that he had builded better than he knew, and that the volume, which he had thought of discarding, might yet be of special value in its time. "Looking back," he said at Oxford of Modern Painters, "I find that though all its Turner work was right and good, the essential business of the book was quite beyond that, and one I had never thought of. I had been as a faithful scribe, writing words I knew not the force of or final intent. I find now 1 See Sesame and Lilies, 1871, Preface, § 2.

2 Love's Meinie (1881), § 130.

3 Deucalion (ii, ch. ii. "Revision," §§ 1-4), published in 1883.

the main value of the book to be exactly in that systematic scheme of it which I had despised, and in the very adoption and insistence upon the Greek term Theoria, instead of sight or perception, in which I had thought myself perhaps uselessly or affectedly refined.” 1

The text of the volume is that last revised by the author, i.e., that of the edition of 1883. The re-numbering of chapters adopted in that edition has, however, for reasons stated below (p. lv.), not been adopted here; and one or two notes, which were omitted in that edition (published, as we have seen, for special purposes), have been restored (see pp. 37, 97, 131). One or two mistakes left uncorrected in the 1883 edition, but marked in Ruskin's own copy, have here been rectified (see pp. 146, 152). All the editions have been collated, and the variations are noted. The second volume was not, however, so largely revised by the author as was the first; so that the number of substantial and interesting variations, here noted underneath the text, is fewer, while that of minor variations, consigned to an appendix (pp. 396-399), is proportionately larger in this volume than in its predecessor.

The manuscripts, etc., of this volume to which the editors have had access are voluminous and interesting. They are fully described in Appendix I. (pp. 361-383). They fall under three heads: (1) materials for the first draft of the volume, and (2) the MS. of the volume in its published form. Several additional passages from the former source, and one from the latter, are printed in the Appendix; they were carefully written, and were discarded by the author not as inadequate, but owing to changes in the scheme of the volume. Particular attention may be called to a beautiful description of a storm at Chamouni (pp. 363-365), and to the notes for a chapter or chapters on Terror as an element of the Sublime (pp. 371-378). Ruskin's careful preservation of his first draft enables us also to trace with more or less precision the stages through which the volume passed on its way to final publication. The later MS. is also described in the Appendix (pp. 381-383); it has been further used in the annotation of the text, in order to illustrate the author's habits of revision and compression (see, e.g., pp. 36, 218). When "the MS." is referred to in notes on the text, it means, unless otherwise stated, this later MS. (3) Thirdly, an additional chapter (pp. 384-389), and some "Supplementary Notes" (pp. 378-381) are here printed from MSS. preserved by Ruskin at Brantwood (see p. 383).

1 Second lecture of the course "Readings in Modern Painters" (Nov. 8, 1877).