Giottesque and even the pre-Giottesque artists, who
left out of their work all except the absolutely essential and typical
traits, Ruskin sanctified their conventionalism as the result of
preference for the merely spiritual and morally interesting portion of
the subject. The fact that the over refinement of the idealists of the
16th century ended in insipidity because it was due to a general organic
decline in the art, and that the rudeness of the conventional artists of
the 14th century possessed a certain nobility because it was merely a
momentary incapacity in a rapidly progressing art; this fact, and with
it the knowledge that the development and decline of every art is due to
certain necessities of general change, all that explains the life of any
and every art, completely escapes Ruskin on account of his explanation
by moral motives. In this way Ruskin has constructed a whole system of
artistic ethics, extremely contradictory and, as we have remarked,
bearing as great a resemblance to the text book, full of _distinguos_
and _directions of the intention_ of one of Pascal's Jesuits as a very
morally pure and noble work can bear to a very base and depraved one.
And throughout this system scattered fragmentarily throughout his
various books, every artistic merit or demerit is disposed of as a
virtuous action or a crime; the moral principle established for the
explanation of one case naturally involving the prejudgment of another
case; and the whole system explaining by moral delinquencies the
artistic inferiority of a given time or people, and, on the other hand,
attributing the moral and social ruin of a century or a nation to the
artistic abominations it had perpetrated. The arrangements of lintels
and columns, the amount of incrustation of coloured marble on to brick,
the degree to which window traceries may be legitimately attenuated and
curled, the value of Greek honeysuckle patterns as compared with Gothic
hedge-rose ornaments, all these and a thousand other questions of mere
excellence of artistic effect, are discussed on the score of their
morality or baseness, of their truthfulness, or justice, or humility;
and Ruskin's madness against any kind of cheating or deception goes
to the length, in one memorable passage in the _Seven Lamps of
Architecture_, of condemning Correggio's ceiling of St. Paolo at Parma
because, as real children might be climbing in a real vine trellise
above our heads, there is possibility o