RUSKIN'S EDINBURGH LECTURES.*

On the morning of the day of Mr. Ruskin's first Lecture, there might be seen, pacing from end to end of Queen-street, Edinburgh, a grave Southron, evidently intent on some searching scrutiny of the goodly buildings in that fair long street. The Southron was unmistakably a chield amang them takin' notes, and perhaps to prent 'em. His eye was fixed on the first-floor windows, and not to be distracted from its intentness of gaze till the last house in the series was reached and examined. What could be his mission? Evidently he was a man of business, and one who knew how to go about it in a business-like way, steadily devoting his energies for the time being to the work before him, whatever that might be. A sonsie face might meet his eye at this or that window in the protracted course of his survey, but not to make him swerve from his purpose, or falter in his allegiance. Well might the piqued owner of the sonsie face marvel at the man and his mission, and become extra piqued to discover who the one and what the other could be.

If she went that day-as, being young, civilised, and inquisitive, she was sure to do to Mr. Ruskin's first Lecture on Architecture and Painting, delivered at the Philosophical Institution in that very street, her curiosity would be speedily set at rest. Enter the Oxford Graduate, and lo! the mysterious inquisitor of the morning. So the first part of the problem is solved. But what could he be "glowering" at, in that strange, stern fashion, this morning? Hardly has he begun his lecture ere this remainder of the problem is solved too.

Speaking of the kind of window all but universal in the New Townviz., a massy lintel of a single stone, laid across from side to side, with bold square-cut jambs-in fact, the simplest form it is possible to buildMr. Ruskin allows to it the merit of being "manly and vigorous," and even dignified in its utter refusal of ornament, but "cannot say it is entertaining." He then continues: "How many windows precisely of this form do you suppose there are in the New Town of Edinburgh ?"

Here the shrewd damosel catches an inkling of the meaning of that morning scrutiny. Of course, he was counting the windows! And by his last abrupt sentence it would seem that on this numerical errand he has perambulated the whole New Town-has been toiling at "dot and carry one" all the way from St. Bernard's-crescent to Leith-walk-has left no lintel untold in Charlotte-square or Moray-place, in Heriot-row or Royal-circus, in Doune-terrace or Bellevue-crescent, in the intricacies of Stockbridge and the barony of Broughton. But he qualifies, and she finds she has been too hasty in her inferences.

For he goes on to say: "I have not counted them all through the town, but I counted them this morning through this very Queen-street, in which your hall is; and on the one side of that street, there are of these windows, absolutely similar to this example, and altogether devoid of any relief by decoration, six hundred and seventy-eight.' The computation includes-with severe conscientiousness it is added-York-place

* Lectures on Architecture and Painting, delivered at Edinburgh in November, 1853. By John Ruskin. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1854.

and Picardy-place (which are but a continuation of Queen-street), but takes no account of any window which has mouldings. The items are all "ditto ditto" of that not very entertaining single-stone lintel, and the total is six hundred and seventy-eight.

It has commonly been thought that we were paying Edinburgh a high compliment when speaking of her as the MODERN ATHENS. The only doubt was, whether the compliment was not misplaced and extravagant. But, by Mr. Ruskin's philosophy, so far as architecture is concerned, it is no honour, but the reverse, to be thus Hellenised. Greek he cannot away with. The Modern Athens invites him to come and lecture to the Modern Athenians. He goes; accurately counts six hundred and seventy-eight windows of Greek type in one of her streets; and tells her she ought to be ashamed of herself.

Before thus abusing her pride of place, however, he adroitly seeks a favourable hearing by a few flattering words on the lustre of the Firth of Forth, the rugged outline of the Castle Rock, and the historical charm of the Canongate. Nay, even of the New Town he declares, that so far as he is acquainted with modern architecture, he is aware of no streets which, in simplicity and manliness of style, or general breadth and brightness of effect, equal those of this division of the Scottish capital. But he soon turns to criticism of another sort, and produces his "little account" of 678 ut suprà. "And your decorations," he adds, "are just as monotonous as your simplicities. How many Corinthian and Doric columns do you think there are in your banks, and post-offices, institutions, and I know not what else, exactly like one another?" And then he proceeds to enforce the claims of Gothic, with a fervour and an exclusiveness that, to prejudiced Modern Athenians, must have made him seem a Goth with a vengeance.

In his Gothic proselytism he lays stress, with his wonted ingenuity and eloquence, on Nature's suggestion and sanction of the Gothic type. He bids us gather a branch from tree or flower, and mark how every one of its leaves is terminated, more or less, in the form of the pointed arch, and to that form owes its grace and character. And he argues from what we see in the woods and fields around us, that as they are evidently meant for our delight, and as we always feel them to be beautiful, we may assume that the forms into which their leaves are cast are indeed types of beauty, not of extreme or perfect, but average beauty. "And finding that they invariably terminate more or less in pointed arches, and are not square-headed, I assert the pointed arch to be one of the forms most fitted for perpetual contemplation by the human mind; that it is one of those which never weary, however often repeated; and that therefore, being both the strongest in structure, and a beautiful form (while the square head is both weak in structure, and an ugly form), we are unwise ever to build in any other." Whatever be the worth of this argument from the forms of Nature, it is at the least a one-sided induction-drawn from one department of Nature only. It is a little curious, for instance, to find the lecturer, further on, denouncing the supposition that when Sir Walter Scott wrote about

Each purple peak, each flinty spire

of the Trosachs, he was describing what existed in fact. Hear the

interpreter of the Gothic in nature. "There is not a single spire or pinnacle from one end of the Trosachs to the other. All their rocks are heavily rounded, and the introduction of the word 'spire' is a piece of inaccuracy in description, ventured merely for the sake of the Gothic image." The italics are Mr. Ruskin's own, but they serve our turn too.

He counsels the New Town to set about de-Hellenising itself with all convenient speed. The denizens of Drummond-place and Randolphcrescent and the "lave," may indeed fear, and, as he tells them, must expect at first that there will be difficulties and inconsistencies in carrying out the new, the Gothic, style; but these will soon be conquered, he assures them, if too much is not attempted at once. "Do not be afraid of incongruities," he says," do not think of unities of effect" [almost the only thing Edinburgh architects have thought of, and about the last they will be willing to surrender to the Goth]. "Introduce your Gothic line by line and stone by stone; never mind mixing it with your present architecture; your existing houses will be none the worse for having little bits of better work fitted to them; build a porch, or point a window, if you can do nothing else; and remember that it is the glory of Gothic architecture that it can do anything. . . . . Only be steadily determined that, even if you cannot get the best Gothic, at least you will have no Greek; and in a few years' time,-in less time than you could learn a new science or a new language thoroughly,—the whole art of your native country will be reanimated." With much that the lecturer contends for, in his general defence of Gothic and defiance of Greek, we heartily concur --and incidentally we may express our thanks for his just strictures on the bad building of the day, in the parts concealed by paint and plaster, and "the strange devices that are used to support the long horizontal cross beams of our larger apartments and shops, and the framework of unseen walls." We own to some fellow-feeling in his opinion of the vastly-lauded St. George's Church-or, as he irritatingly describes it, to men and women born and bred in sight of and reverence for it, one of your most costly and most ugly buildings, the great church with the dome, at the end of George-street. I think I never saw a building with a principal entrance so utterly ghastly and oppressive; and it is as weak as it is ghastly. The huge horizontal lintel above the door is already split right through." His satire is legitimately directed, too, against the leonine ornamentation of the Royal Institution, carefully finished off at the very top of the building, "just under its gutter," where such "most delicate and minute pieces of sculpture" have the finest prospect of being out of sight, out of mind. "You cannot see them in a dark day, and perhaps may never, to this hour, have noticed them at all. But there they are: sixty-six finished heads of lions, all exactly the same; and therefore, I suppose, executed on some noble Greek type, too noble to allow any modest Modern to think of improving upon it." And here the lecturer amused his auditors by a diagram, the work of Mr. Millais, representing in most piquant contrast one of these impossible heads of noble Greek type, and the actual head of a tiger in the Gardens at Broughton, no lion being available in that collection. A copy of the drawing forms the frontispiece, and a very taking one, of this volume of lectures, to enable all to compare a piece of true, faithful, and natural work with "the Grecian sublimity of the ideal beast," as perpetuated by the traditions of the Renaissance.

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But when Mr. Ruskin begins to rhapsodise about the religious superiority of medieval day-labourers, and the souls killed by and buried under "your Greek stones," we follow at a very humble distance, with wandering steps and slow. This slaughter of the innocents, many will think, out-Herods Herod. "These square stones," the lecturer solemnly affirms, as he dilates on the "tyranny" of Greek architecture, "are not prisons of the body, but graves of the soul; for the very men who could do sculpture like this of Lyons* for you are here! still here, in your despised workmen: the race has not degenerated; it is you who have bound them down, and buried them beneath your Greek stones. There would be a resurrection of them, as of renewed souls, if you would only lift the weight of these weary walls from off their hearts." There is wholesome truth, and truth much needed if not much in request, at the bottom of this doctrine; but why word it in such questionable phrase? People who might otherwise mark, learn, and inwardly digest, now only read; and those who might turn down the page to think, now turn over the page with a smile, or perchance toss aside the book with a sneer.

Having discussed Architecture in his two opening lectures, in the third Mr. Ruskin comments on Turner and his Works. He bates not a jot of his hero-worship as time goes on. Turner is still to him all that ever he was, and perhaps more. "I did not come here," says Mr. Ruskin to his Edinburgh listeners,-"I did not come here to tell you of my belief or my conjectures; I came to tell you the truth which I have given fifteen years of my life to ascertain, that this man, this Turner, of whom you have known so little while he was living among you, will one day take his place beside Shakspeare and Verulam, in the annals of the light of England.

"Yes," he iterates: "beside Shakspeare and Verulam, a third star in that central constellation, round which, in the astronomy of intellect, all other stars make their circuit. By Shakspeare, humanity was unsealed to you; by Verulam, the principles of nature; and by Turner, her aspect. All these were sent to unlock one of the gates of light, and to unlock it for the first time. But of all the three, though not the greatest, Turner was the most unprecedented in his work. Bacon did what Aristotle had attempted; Shakspeare did perfectly what Eschylus did partially; but none before Turner had lifted the veil from the face of nature; the majesty of the hills and forests had received no interpretation, and the clouds passed unrecorded from the face of the heaven which they adorned, and of the earth to which they ministered."

All this is far above our capacity. Turner we admire most warmly, in our purblind way; but this new leash of Representative Men it puzzles us to comprehend. It is consolatory, certainly, to find the admission that Turner was not the greatest of the three-although the sequel goes to cancel that admission. We can fancy the stare of people of old-fashioned notions and unread hitherto in John Ruskin, at meeting with this passage about Shakspeare and Bacon having forerunners, but Turner none.

*Referring to the elaborate façade of the cathedral of Lyons, illustrated by a drawing of an angle of one of the pedestals, a "minute fragment," no larger "than a schoolboy could strike off in wantonness with a stick," but exquisitely filled up with graceful and thoughtful composition.

Shakspeare, they will say (poor souls, in their naïve obtuseness),-if Shakspeare came after Eschylus, and if Bacon came after Aristotle, did not Turner come after certain painters who may at least be supposed to stand in the same, or in a corresponding, relation to him, as did the son of Euphorion to "sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's Child," and the Stagyrite to the English Chancellor? Was there never a Salvator to limn such things as "the hills and forests ?" never a Claude to record glimpses of the face of heaven, whose beauty makes us glad?

Salvator and Claude, it is time for these amiable dullards to know, are nehushtan in the Oxford Graduate's code of worship. "Claude embodies the foolish pastoralism, Salvator the ignorant terror, and Gaspar the dull and affected erudition" of a weak and vicious age. After Titian and the Titianesque period of "great ancient landscape," "you have a great gap, full of nonentities and abortions; a gulf of foolishness, into the bottom of which you may throw Claude and Salvator, neither of them deserving to give a name to anything."* "The Claude and Salvator painting was like a scene in a theatre, viciously and falsely painted throughout, and presenting a deceptive appearance of truth to nature; understood, so far as it went, in a moment, but conveying no accurate knowledge of anything, and, in all its operations on the mind, unhealthy, hopeless, and profitless."

As to the man Turner, of whom the lecturer discourses with genial and reverent kindness, it is pleasant to read an éloge so different to what tradition and anecdotage have accustomed us to suppose feasible. We hope the spirit of the "apology" is as true as it is tender, and are sure the peroration is as tender as it is true.

The Pre-Raphaelites are the subject of the fourth and last lecture. The chief part of it is occupied with an exposition of the historical relations of religion and art. It includes some disdainful strictures on so-called "historical painting." The only historical painting which Mr. Ruskin will hear of, under that name, is such as those artists produce who give us the veritable things and men they see, and not draughts of imaginative composition. What fools we should have thought the Italians, thinks Mr. Ruskin, had they, instead of painting contemporary poets, popes, and politicians, left us nothing but imaginary portraits of Pericles and Cimon. Wilkie, he contends, was an historical painter, when he painted what his keen eye had seen in the homes and haunts of his own land. But when Haydon and others begin to preach about the grand historical and classical school, and "poor Wilkie must needs travel to see the grand school, and imitate the grand school,"-forthwith poor Wilkie, that was a true historical painter in esse, but weakly proposed himself as a grand historical painter in posse, was ruined-became a "lost mind." That grand school is charged with the ruin of other fine artists. Etty studied in it, and then "went to the grave, a lost mind." Flaxman,

*Pastoralism is the descriptive title by which Mr. Ruskin distinguishes the Claude and Salvator period from the three preceding ones of Giotto, Leonardo, and Titian, and the subsequent "grand climacteric" of Joseph Mallord William Turner. He makes it out to be essentially one with the false pastoralism of our "literature of the past century"-of which "the general waste of dulness" was relieved, he says, only by a few pieces of true pastoral, like the Vicar of Wakefield and-by a curious anachronism he adds-Walton's "Angler."