s life been the
staunchest of Sir Walter's devotees), a passionate lover of Gothic
architecture both at home and abroad, and early drawn both to the
romantic nature-painting of Turner and the gorgeous colouring of the
early Italian schools, Mr. Ruskin heralded Art with a passion of which
eighteenth century "gusto" had had no notion. But he was by no means
satisfied with heralding Art alone. Anathematising at once the doctrine
that utility is beauty--that beauty is utility he would always have
cheerfully admitted--and the doctrine that the beautiful is not
necessarily connected either with utility, with goodness, or with truth,
he from the first and to the last has endeavoured to work ethics and
aesthetics into a sort of single texture of warp and woof respectively,
pushing his endeavours into the most multiform, the most curious, and it
must be owned sometimes the most grotesque ramifications and
extremities. But he was not satisfied with this bold attempt at the
marriage of two things sometimes deemed hostile to, and generally held
to be independent of, one another. He must needs be bolder still, and
actually attempt to ally with Art, if not to subject to her, the
youngest, the most rebellious, and, as it might seem, the most
matter-of-fact and utilitarian of all the sciences--that of Political
Economy. As we have seen, he had brought the subjects together in
lectures pretty early in his career, and he developed the combination
further in the eccentric book called _Unto this Last_, originally
published in the _Cornhill Magazine_ as noted above. In this AEsthetics
and Economics combined took a distinctly Socialist turn; and as England
was under the very fullest dominion of the Liberal middle-class regime,
with its belief in _laissez-faire_ and in supply-and-demand, Mr. Ruskin
was not a little pooh-poohed. It would be improper here to attack or to
defend his views, but it is part of the historian's duty to say that,
for good or for ill, they have, though in forms different from his and
doubtless by no means always meeting his approval, made constant
headway, and that much legislation and still more agitation on the
extreme Liberal side, and not there only, may be said to represent, with
very slight transformation, Ruskinian doctrine applied, now and then, to
very anti-Ruskinian purposes.

With regard to aesthetics proper, it might be contended, without too much
rashness, that the history of Ruskinism has not been differe