take you to questions of religion or art or social evils or autobiography. In a letter to Carlyle in 1855 he humorously declares that he is reading German metaphysics, poetry, political economy, cookery, music, geology, dress, agriculture, horticulture, and navigation all at once, which, as he observes, 'takes time.' No human intellect, one might add, performing such rapid flights from topic to topic, could ever get any of them fairly worked out. A letter from an unnamed friend, which he published in the Fors Clavigera, suggests a partial explanation. 'You can,' said this frank critic, 'see an individual concrete fact better than any man of the generation; but an invisible fact, an abstraction, … you have, I fancy, been as incapable of seeing as of seeing through a stone wall.' With necessary deductions from the judgment of a candid friend there is, I fancy, much truth in this. Ruskin was too much absorbed in the individual and concrete to be a good system-monger. Intellectually, he resembles a short-sighted man to whom every detail is so abnormally vivid in turn that he forgets the whole. He has to make his theories—if theories he must have—not by patient induction, but by flashes of intuition. His theory of the beautiful simply
