facts, in explaining their origin and unfolding their effects, his
guidance is least valuable. We may more safely ask him _what_ than
_why_. His influence on English art has been great at the instant:
whether it will be permanent is doubtful. At one time it was said that
without having read his books one could tell by an inspection of the
Royal Academy walls what Mr. Ruskin had written in the past year. Now,
the most notable exponents of his teaching, whether consciously so or
not, are on the one hand the shining lights of the Grosvenor
Gallery--hierophants of mysticism and allegory and symbolism and
painted souls and moral beauty expressed in the flesh, copying Ruskin's
_Botticelli_ line for line, forgetting that what was naivete in him, and
in him admirable, because all before him had done so much less well,
becomes to-day in them the direst affectation, is reprehensible in them
because many before them have done so much better. On the other hand, we
have a naturalistic throng which follows Mr. Ruskin's precepts when he
overweights the other side of the scale and says that art should "never
exist alone, never for itself," never except as "representing a
true"--defined as actually-existing--"thing or decorating a useful
thing;" when he declares that every attempt by the imagination to "exalt
or refine healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it." Mr. Ruskin
bade men "go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her
laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to
penetrate her meaning, _rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and
scorning nothing_;" and Mr. Hamerton was literally obeying him when he
exiled himself for five years in a hut on an island in a bleak Scotch
lake to learn faithfully to portray the shores of that single lake. Was
it thus that Titian studied in his youth, and learned how, years after
in Venice, to paint the chestnuts and the hills of Cadore a
thousand-fold more artistically and more truly, because more abstractly
and more ideally, than could all the "pre-Raphaelite" copyists of
to-day? Thus we see the two extremes of Mr. Ruskin's teaching--see him
at one time exalting imagination and feeling over the pictorial part of
art, at another degrading art into the servilest copying.

Observers may disagree as to whether these cognate
things--self-consciousness in the artist, aesthetic philosophizing in the
critic, and the taste for a literary rather than a pictorial value