that evil was raging without requiring all his
energies to quell it, every minute, every thought diverted from the
cause of good was so much gain for the cause of evil; innocence, mere
negative good, there could not be, as long as there remained positive
evil. Thus it appeared to Ruskin. This strange knight-errant of
righteousness, conscious of his heaven endowed strength, felt that
during every half-hour of delay in the Armida's garden of art, new
rootlets were being put forth, new leaves were being unfolded by the
enchanted forest of error which overshadowed and poisoned the earth,
and which it was his work to hew and burn down; that every moment of
reluctant farewell from the weird witch of beauty meant a fresh outrage,
an additional defiling of the holy of holies to rescue which he had
received his strong muscle and his sharp weapons. Thus, refusing to
divide his time and thoughts between his moral work and his artistic,
Ruskin must absolutely and completely abandon the latter; if art seemed
to him not merely a waste of power, but an absolute danger for his
nobler side, there evidently was no alternative but to abjure it for
ever. But a man cannot thus abandon his own field, abjure the work for
which he is specially fitted; he may mortify, and mutilate and imprison
his body, but he cannot mortify or mutilate his mind, he cannot imprison
his thoughts. John Ruskin was drawn irresistibly towards art because he
was specially organised for it. The impossible cannot be done: nature
must find a vent, and the artistic half of Ruskin's mind found its way
of eluding the apparently insoluble difficulty: his desire reasoned, and
his desire was persuaded. A revelation came to him: he was neither to
compromise with sin nor to renounce his own nature. For it struck him
suddenly that this irresistible craving for the beautiful, which he
would have silenced as a temptation of evil, was in reality the call
to his mission; that this domain of art, which he had felt bound to
abandon, was in reality the destined field for his moral combats,
the realm which he must reconquer for God and for Good. Ruskin had
considered art as sinful as long as it was only negatively innocent: by
the strange logic of desire he made it positively righteous, actively
holy; what he had been afraid to touch, he suddenly perceived that he
was commanded to handle. He had sought for a solution of his own doubts,
and the solution was the very gospel which he was to