here beauty is the mere visible expression of virtue, while the foul
world-swamp is stealthily being eaten into, washed away, absorbed by the
surrounding flood of hell: is this not a sin, this quiet dwelling in
holiness, and a worse sin than any being committed in the darkness and
jostle below?

In this way has Ruskin, one of the greatest thinkers on art and on
ethics, made morality sterile and art base in his desire to sanctify the
one by the other. Sterile and base, indeed, only theoretically: for the
instinct of the artist and of the moralist has ever broken out in noble
self-contradiction, in beautiful irrelevancies; in those wonderful,
almost prophetic passages which seem to make our souls more keen towards
beauty and more hardy for good. But all this is incidental, this which
is in reality Ruskin's great and useful work. He has made art more
beautiful and men better without knowing it--accidentally, without
premeditation, in words which are like the eternal truths, grand and
exquisite, which lie fragmentary and embedded in every system of
theology; the complete and systematic is worthless and even dangerous,
for it is false; the irrelevant, the contradictory, is precious, because
it is true to our better part. Ruskin has loved art instinctively,
fervently, for its own sake; but he has constantly feared lest this love
should be sinful or at least base. Like Augustine, he dreads that the
Devil maybe lurking in the beautiful sunshine; lest evil be hidden in
those beautiful shapes which distract his thoughts from higher subjects
of good and God; he trembles lest the beautiful should trouble his
senses and his fancy, and make him forget his promises to the Almighty.
He perceives that pleasure in art is more or less sensuous and selfish;
he is afraid lest some day he be called upon to account for the moments
he has not given to others, and be chastised for having permitted his
mind to follow the guidance of his senses; he trembles and repeats the
praise of God, the anathema of pride, he mumbles confused words about
"corrupt earth"--and "sinful man,"--even while looking at his works of
art, as some anchorite of old may instinctively have passed his fingers
across his beads and stammered out an _Ave_ when some sight of beauty
crossed his path and made his heart leap with unwonted pleasure. Ruskin
must tranquillize his conscience about art; he must persuade himself
that he is justified in employing his thoughts about it; an