l-ease and irritation with which Ruskin seems to tear
down the gargoyles of Amiens or the marbles of Venice, as things of
which Europe is not worthy; and take them away with him to a really
careful museum, situated dangerously near Clapham. Many of the great men
of that generation, indeed, had a sort of divided mind; an ethical
headache which was literally a "splitting headache"; for there was a
schism in the sympathies. When these men looked at some historic
object, like the Catholic Church or the French Revolution, they did not
know whether they loved or hated it most. Carlyle's two eyes were out of
focus, as one may say, when he looked at democracy: he had one eye on
Valmy and the other on Sedan. In the same way, Ruskin had a strong right
hand that wrote of the great mediaeval minsters in tall harmonies and
traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and
feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen
away--and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners.
Many of their contemporaries were the same. The sea of Tennyson's mind
was troubled under its serene surface. The incessant excitement of
Kingsley, though romantic and attractive in many ways, was a great deal
more like Nervous Christianity than Muscular Christianity. It would be
quite unfair to say of Ruskin that there was any major inconsistency
between his mediaeval tastes and his very unmediaeval temper: and minor
inconsistencies do not matter in anybody. But it is not quite unfair to
say of him that he seemed to want all parts of the Cathedral except the
altar.

As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the
extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is
like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of
the long bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his
ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight
as a bullet. There is no Victorian writer before him to whom he even
suggests a comparison, technically considered, except perhaps De
Quincey; who also employed the long rich rolling sentence that, like a
rocket, bursts into stars at the end. But De Quincey's sentences, as I
have said, have always a dreamy and insecure sense about them, like the
turret on toppling turret of some mad sultan's pagoda. Ruskin's sentence
branches into brackets and relative clauses as a straight strong tree
b