m the small eclectic bands which
surround other aestheticians; it was the feeling, in all who read his
books, that this man was giving a soul to the skies and seas; that he
was breathing human feeling into every carved stone and painted canvas;
that he was bidding capital and mosaic, nay, every rudest ornament hewn
by the humblest workman, to speak to men with the voice of their own
heart; that for the first time there had been brought into the serene
and egotistic world of art the passion, the love, and the wrath of
righteousness. He came into it as an apostle and a reformer, but as
an apostle and a reformer strangely different from Winckelmann and
Schlegel, from Lessing and Goethe. For, while attacking the architecture
of Palladio and the painting of Salvator Rosa; while expounding the
landscapes of Turner and the churches of Verona, he was not merely
demolishing false classicism and false realism, not merely vindicating
a neglected artist or a wronged school: he was come to sweep usurping
evil out of the kingdom of art, and to reinstate as its sole sovereign
no human craftsman, but God himself.

God or Good: for to Ruskin the two words have but one meaning. God and
Good must receive the whole domain of art; it must become the holy of
holies, the temple and citadel of righteousness. To do this was the
avowed mission of this strange successor, haughty and humble, and tender
and wrathful, of the pagan Winckelmann, of the coldly serene Goethe. How
came John Ruskin by this mission, or why should his mission differ so
completely from that of all his fellows? Why should he insist upon the
necessity of morally sanctifying art, instead of merely aesthetically
reforming it? Why was it not enough for him that artistic pleasure
should be innocent, without trying to make it holy? Because, for
Ruskin's nature, compounded of artist and moralist, artistic engagement
was a moral danger, a distraction from his duty--for Ruskin was not the
mere artist, who, powerless outside his art, may, because he can only,
give his whole energies to it; he was not the mere moralist who,
indifferent to art, can give it a passing glance without interrupting
for a moment his work of good; he felt himself endowed to struggle for
righteousness and bound to do so, and he felt himself also irresistibly
attracted by mere beauty. To the moral nature of the man this mere
beauty, which threatened to absorb his existence, became positively
sinful; while he knew