creation of beauty and the destruction of evil; and of
these two halves each has been warped; of these two missions each has
been hampered; warped and hampered by the very nobility of the man's
nature: by his obstinate refusal to compromise with the reality of
things, by his perpetual resistance to the evidence of his reason, by
his heroic and lamentable clinging to his own belief in harmony where
there is discord, in perfection where there is imperfection. There are
natures which cannot be coldly or resignedly reasonable, which, despite
all possible demonstration, cannot accept evil as a necessity and
injustice as a fact; which must believe their own heart rather than
their own reason; and when we meet such natures, we in our cold wisdom
must look upon them with pity, perhaps, and regret, but with admiration
and awe and envy. Such a nature is that of John Ruskin. He belongs, it
is true, to a generation which is rapidly passing away; he is the almost
isolated champion of creeds and ideas which have ceased even to be
discussed among the thinking part of our nation; he is a believer
not only in Good and in God, but in Christianity, in the Bible, in
Protestantism; he is, in many respects, a man left far behind by the
current of modern thought; but he is, nevertheless, and unconsciously,
perhaps, to himself, the greatest representative of the highly developed
and conflicting ethical and aesthetical nature which is becoming more
common in proportion as men are taking to think and feel for themselves;
his is the greatest example of the strange battles and compromises which
are daily taking place between our moral and our artistic halves; and
the history of his aspirations and his errors is the type of the inner
history of many a humbler thinker and humbler artist around us.

When, nearly forty years ago, Ruskin first came before the world with
the wonderful book--wonderful in sustained argument and description,
and in obscure, half crazy, half prophetic utterances--called _Modern
Painters_, it was felt that a totally new power had entered the region
of artistic analysis. It was not the subtle sympathy with line and
curve, with leaf and moulding, nor the wondrous power of reproducing
with mere words the depths of sky and sea, the radiancies of light and
the flame and smoulder of cloud; it was not his critical insight nor
his artistic faculty which drew to him at once the souls of a public so
different, in its universality, fro