What John Ruskin has done in a prosaic, commercial, and Philistine age,
in teaching the world to love and study the Beautiful, in opening to it
the hidden mysteries and delights of art, and in inciting the passion
for taking pleasure in and even possessing embodiments of it, that age
owes to the great prose-poet and enthusiastic author of "Modern
Painters." Neither before nor since his day has literature known such a
passionate and luminous exponent of Nature's beauties, such an
inculcator in men's minds of the art of observing her ways and methods,
or one who has given the world such deep insight into what constitutes
the true and the beautiful in art. For these things, and for opening new
worlds of instruction and delight to his age in the realm of art,
heightened by the charm of his marvellous prose, we can readily pardon
Ruskin for his weaknesses and perverseness,--for his dogmatisms, his
fervors, and ecstasies, his exaggerations of praise and blame, and even
for the missionary propagation of his often unsound economic gospel,
valuable though it may be in illustrating and enforcing morality in its
aesthetic aspect. Despite his enemies, and all that the critics have
said contradicting his theories, Ruskin was a surprise and a revelation
to his time. In not a little of all that he said and did, it is true, we
cannot concur; nor can we fail to see the errors he fell into through
his want of reserve and his headlong haste to say and do the things he
said and did; nevertheless, he was a great and inspiring teacher in
things that appeal to our sense of the beautiful, and earnest in his
zeal to raise men's intellectual and moral standard of life. Like most
enthusiasts and geniuses, he had, now and then, his hours of reaction,
waywardness, and gloom; but there was much that was noble and ennobling
in the man, as well as rich and fructifying in his thought. Even in his
social and moral exhortations, tinctured as they are with medievalism,