said it. He could be, and in his later work he usually was, strong
and clear; but the old picturesqueness and exuberance of passion were
with him still. The public discovered that it enjoyed Ruskin's
denunciations of machinery much as it had enjoyed his descriptions of
mountains, and, without obviously mending its ways, called loudly for
more. Lecture-rooms were crowded and editions exhausted by the ladies
and gentlemen of England, whose nerves were pleasantly thrilled with a
gentle surprise on being told that they had despised literature, art,
science, nature, and compassion, and that what they thought upon any
subject was "a matter of no serious importance"; that they could not
be said to have any thoughts at all--indeed, no right to think.[19]
The fiercer his anathemas, the greater the applause; the louder he
shouted, the better he pleased. Let him split the ears of the
groundlings, let him out-Herod Herod,--the judicious might grieve, but
all would be excitedly attentive. Their Jeremiah seemed at times like
to become a jester,--there was a suggestion of the ludicrous in the
sudden passage from birds to Greek coins, to mills, to Walter Scott,
to millionaire malefactors,--a suggestion of acrobatic tumbling and
somersault; but he always got a hearing. In lecturing to the students
of a military academy he had the pleasing audacity to begin:

"Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that many of you came
unwillingly to-night, and many of you in merely contemptuous
curiosity, to hear what a writer on painting could possibly say,
or would venture to say, respecting your great art of war";[20]

after which stinging challenge, one has no doubt, any feeling of
offense was swallowed up in admiration of the speaker's physical
courage.