d, are equivalent to
sin and corruption in the moral--this sophisticated sense of morality,
originally intended to sanction all that which in art is sanctioned by
its mere innocence and delightfulness, has at length destroyed the very
artistic system which it was to sustain. For the divine elements of
justice, and mercy, and honour, cannot be wasted in this world;
entrapped and imprisoned in order to consecrate by their presence the
already holy, rendered sterile and useless among those artistic things
with which they have no concern, they have at last sought for their
field of action, for their legitimate objects, and have burst forth,
shattering the whole edifice of art philosophy in which they were
enclosed, mere useless talismans. And it has come home to Ruskin, once
and again, that this virtue thus expended upon cornices and lintels,
upon lines and colours, while evil raged outside, is no virtue: that
this sanctified art is not holy; that, direct our intentions as we may,
think of God as much as we like, we cannot make art one whit the less
passive and egotistic; it has come home to him, and with the noble
candour of doubt which is his logical weakness and his moral strength,
he has confessed that he had never known one man really and exclusively
devoted to mere moral good, who cared for art at all. The elaborate
system of ethical aesthetics, the ingeniously far-fetched explanations of
physical beauty by moral excellence, the triumphant decision that art is
the kingdom of God, has, after all and at last, failed to redeem the
beautiful in the eyes of Ruskin. He has seen a ragged creature die of
starvation on a dung heap; and all the cathedrals of Christendom, all
the resplendent Turners and saintly Giottos in the world have seemed to
him black and hideous. He has argued and stormed, and patched up once
more his tattered theories, and talked more than ever of beauty being
virtue, and its appreciation religion, and God being in all fair
things; but all this latter talk has been vain; into the midst of art
discussions have for ever crept doubts whether art should be at all. The
placid paradise of art, whose every flower and grass blade is a generous
thought, whose every fruit is a noble action, where every bubbling of
waters and every bird's song is a hymn to the goodness of God, has
become suspicious to its own creator now that he realises by what it
is surrounded; to live in this sweet and noble impossible paradise,
w