to its terrors and its bewilderment. He preached silence and
seclusion to men of activity, energy to men of contemplation. He was
furious, whatever humanity did, whether it slept or waked. His message
is the message of the booming gale, and the swollen cataract. Yet in
his diaries and letters, what splendid perception, what inimitable
humour, what rugged emotion! I declare that Carlyle's thumbnail
portraits of people and scenes are some of the most admirable things
ever set down on paper. I love and admire the old furious,
disconsolate, selfish fellow with all my heart; though he was a bad
husband, he was a true friend, for all his discordant cries and groans.
Then there is Rossetti--a man who wrote a few incredibly beautiful
poems, and in whom one seems to feel the inner fire and glow of art.
Yet many of his pictures are to me little but voluptuous and wicked
dreams; and his later sonnets are full of poisonous fragrance--poetry
embroidered and scented, not poetry felt. What a generous, royal
prodigal nature he had, till he sank into his drugged and indulgent
seclusion! Here then are three great souls. Ruskin, the pure lover of
things noble and beautiful, but shadowed by a prim perversity, an
old-maidish delicacy, a petulant despair. Carlyle, a great, rugged, and
tumultuous heart, brutalised by ill-health, morbidity, selfishness.
Rossetti, a sort of day-star in art, stepping forth like an angel, to
fall lower than Lucifer. What is the meaning of these strange
catastrophes, these noble natures so infamously hampered? In the three
cases, it seems to be that melancholy, brooding over a world, so
exquisitely designed and yet so unaccountably marred, drove one to
madness, one to gloom, one to sensuality. We believe or try to believe
that God is pure and loving and true, and that His Heart is with all
that is noble and hopeful and high. Yet the more generous the
character, the deeper is the fall! Can such things be meant to show us
that we have no concern with art at all; and that our only hope is to
cling to bare, austere, simple, uncomforted virtue? Ought we to try to
think of art only as an innocent amusement and diversion for our
leisure hours? As a quest to which no man may vow himself, save at the
cost of walking in a vain shadow all his days? Ought we to steel our
hearts against the temptation, which seems to be implanted as deep as
anything in my own nature--nay, deeper--to hold that what one calls
ugliness and bad ta