But when Mr. Ruskin begins to rhapsodise about the religious superiority of mediæval 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, "sire not prisons of the body, but graves of the soul; for the very men who could do sculpture like this of Lyons[1] for you are here! still here, in your despised workmen: the race has not degenerated; it is yon 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 m%ht 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 ail that ewer 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 Æschylus 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. If
- ↑ Referring to the elaborate facade 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.
