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Against Mill's "liberty" and Carlyle's "strength" and Ruskin's "nature," he set up a new presence and entity which he called "culture," the disinterested play of the mind through the sifting of the best books and authorities. Though a little dandified in phrase, he was undoubtedly serious and public-spirited in intention. But Arnold was not only right but highly valuable.
Marcus Huish, who had shown great friendliness and generosity in providing prints for the Sheffield museum, was now proposing to hold an Exhibition of Mr. Ruskin's "Turners" at the Fine Art Galleries in New Bond Street, it was necessary to arrange the exhibits and to prepare the catalogue.
Ruskin's teaching see him at one time exalting imagination and feeling over the pictorial part of art, at another degrading art into the servilest copying.
There is a solemn stateliness about Ruskin's descriptions of the mountains, which in the last passage of the chapter on The Mountain Gloom rises to the impassioned cadences of the prophet. He could tolerate no irreverent spirits in the sanctuary of the mountain. Leslie Stephen's remark that the Alps were improved by tobacco smoke became a profanity.
What a little way, I thought, has all Ruskin's fire and eloquence made in driving into people so great a truth, a truth so fertile of consequences!
Ruskin's "reverence for nature" would make of every landscape painter is a failure in appreciation than to have shown which it would be better for him as a critic never to have been born. It seems hardly fanciful to say that the depreciation of Claude by Mr. Ruskin, who is a landscape painter himself, using the medium of words instead of pigments, is, so to speak, professionally unjust.
It was he who proposed and carried out the exhumation, reluctantly consented to, of Rossetti's manuscript poems from his wife's grave, in October, 1869; for which curious service to literature let him have the thanks of posterity. But he was hardly the man to carry out Ruskin's secret charities, and long before he had lost Rossetti's confidence he had ceased to act as Ruskin's secretary.
One other figure must not be forgotten, Nurse Anne, who had come from the Edinburgh home, and remained always with them, John's nurse and then Mrs. Ruskin's attendant, as devoted and as censorious as any old-style Scotch servant in a story-book. The year 1829 marked an advance in poetical composition. To this are appended, among other pieces, fair copies of "Skiddaw," and "Derwentwater."
Some system such as Ruskin's, with powerful local legislation, could not fail to end the trouble which is at the present moment making a tremendous drain on the pockets of the law-abiding citizen of this country, in that system of workhouses, which besides being subversive of the very idea of home-life amongst our poor, degrades the non-worker, and rankles as a lasting shame in the hearts of those whom misfortune alone has driven to that last resource of the unfortunate.
A sample of John Ruskin's early lessons in drawing, described by him in letters to his father, may be not without interest. On February 20, 1832, he writes: "... You saw the two models that were last sent, before you went away. Well, I took my paper, and I fixed my points, and I drew my perspective, and then, as Mr. Runciman told me, I began to invent a scene.
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