Ruskin. To the former, brief reference has already been made. In the
work then quoted from, one truth has prominence above all others: that
with the will's acceptance of happiness as the aim of life begins the
true degradation of humanity; and that then alone true life dawns upon
man when truth and right begin to stand out as the first objects of his
regard. Never since has Carlyle's strong rough grasp relaxed its hold of
this truth; and howsoever in later works, in what are intended as
biographical illustrations of it, he may seem to confuse mere strength
and energy with righteousness of will, and thence to confound outward and
visible success with vital achievement, that strength and energy are
always in his eyes, fighting or enduring against some phase of the many-
headed hydra of wrong.

Of Ruskin it seems almost superfluous to speak. They have read him to
little purpose who have not felt that all his essays and criticisms in
art, all his expositions in social and political science, are essentially
unified by one animating and pervading truth: the truth that to man's
moral relations, or, in other words, the developing and perfecting in him
of that Divine image in which he is made,--all things else, joy, beauty,
life itself, are of account only to the degree in which they are
consciously used to subserve that higher life. His ultimate standard of
value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political
relations, is referred, is--not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous,
sentimental, or aesthetic, but--the measure in which may thereby be
trained up that higher life of humanity. Art is to him God's minister,
not when she is simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature in
such forms and phases as shall tend to bring man nearer to moral truth,
beauty, and purity. The Ios and Ariadnes of the debased Italian schools,
the boors of Teniers, the Madonnas of Guido, are truer to one phase of
nature than are Fra Angelico's angels, or Tintoret's Crucifixion. But