and fissured church steeples, a place containing
nothing of any interest: so also in this case, when we have finally
reached our paltry conclusion that this painter of saints was no saint
himself, we must admit to ourselves that to arrive at this conclusion
was scarcely our real object; even as while travelling through this
country of Perugino we make our guide confess that what, in all this
expedition, we were meant to see and enjoy, was not the paltry,
deceptive hill-top village, but the sere-brown oakwoods, tinged russet
by the sun, the grey olive hills through which we have slowly ascended,
and the glimpses of undulating grey-green country and distant wave-blue
mountains which we have had at every new turn of our long and up-hill
road.

RUSKINISM.

THE WOULD-BE STUDY OF A CONSCIENCE

I give a place to the following pages, because, for all the difference
of form, this essay is of the same sort, has had the same kind of
origin, as the so seemingly incongruous studies with which it is bound
up. For this also is the rough putting together of notes made at
various times and in various phases of study; it is a series of
self-questionings and answers, of problems, perhaps only half-formulated
and half-solved, which have arisen round one man, one artist, one art
philosophy, even as in the adjoining essays they have arisen around some
one statue, or song, or picture; self-questionings and problems, these
present ones, not of aesthetic right and wrong suggested by a given work
of art, but of moral fitness and unfitness suggested by the doubts, the
divisions, the mistakes, by the comprehension (or, if you prefer, the
misapprehension) of the conscience of perhaps the greatest and strangest
artist of our days.

* * * * *

John Ruskin stands quite isolated among writers on art. His truths and
his errors are alike of a far higher sort than the truths and errors of
his fellow-workers: they are truths and errors not of mere fact, nor of
mere reasoning, but of tendency, of moral attitude; and his philosophy
is of far greater importance than any other system of aesthetics,
because it is not the philosophy of the genius, evolution or meaning
of any art or of all art, but the philosophy of the legitimacy or
illegitimacy of all and every art. In the case of every other writer
on art the evils due to a false system are, in proportion to the great
interests of our lives and of the life around,