husband's house, not over his mind. Ah, no! the true rule is just the reverse of that; a true wife, in her husband's house, is his servant; it is in his heart that she is queen. Miud here appears to be identical with heart. But in the other book we had been told this : “Speaking broadly, a man ought to know any language or science he learns, thoroughly-while a woman ought to know the same language, or science, only in so far as may enable her to sympathise in her husband's pleasures, and in those of his best friends.” 2

Then follows some sophistry about the difference between limited knowledge and superficial knowledge: the woman is to know “with exquisite accuracy so far as she reaches,” which means, I suppose, that she is to know the Greek alphabet, or the conjugations, with exquisite accuracy, in order to sympathise with her husband's views on corrupt passages in Æschylus; and to know a botany primer with exquisite accuracy, in order to share in discussions on the relations of fossil flora. To these sentimental follies the answer lies ready in Mill : it is a gross presumption on the part of any man, nay, on the part of any woman, to lay down what is forever to be done, and what not to be done, by all women. Who are you, forsooth, that the human race is to live by your directions? And if your directions, moreover, are admittedly always changing, who can be sure that any one of them is ever right for anybody?

Ruskin is, so far as my reading goes, the most self-contradictory writer who ever lived. He stultifies bimself as vehemently as Carlyle, and for the same fundamental reason, that he is just a talking temperament; but he meddles with far more matters than Carlyle did, and dogmatises proportionally. In his art criticism be has a first principle for every day of the year

hour of the day : pictures and practices are for ever being praised or blamed under general laws set up for that occasion only. At one time he will denounce as unworthy all writing for money: at another he will present as model lives those of Shakspere and Scott, who systematically wrote to make money. In the earlier Lectures on Art he lays it down that the highest subject for the artist is

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the human face and figure : in a later lecture he pooh-poohs figure. painting as being within the reach of anybody, and sets up landscape as the really difficult and noble work. But he contradicts himself in the same book, sometimes in the same chapter, sometimes in the same page.

One result of his temper is that his criticisms of individuals are often outrageously unjust. He forbids Harriet Martineau's books to the pupils who surrender to him their docile judgments, "not because she is an infidel”—he admits Voltaire freely because “his voice is mighty among the ages ”—“but because she is a vulgar and foolish one." Yet he goes on to admit that some of her writing in “Deerbrook” is entirely admirable ; and he proceeds thus to excuse his abuse :

“I use the word vulgar here in its first (!) sense of egoism, not of selfish. ness, but of not seeing one's own relations to the universe. Miss Martineau plans a book, afterwards popular, and goes to breakfast, ‘not knowing what a great thing had been done.' So Mr. Buckle dying, thinks onlyhe shall not finish his book. Not at all whether God will ever make up His."

The memory of Harriet Martineau, who, whatever might be her natural exultations over her successes, was one of the sanest of writers in her self-estimate, will survive such an attack, from a man whose notions of his own relation to the universe have reached heights of extravagance seldom attained in black-onwhite. But the attack on Buckle calls for a warmer reprobation. Had I read it without knowing its author, without knowing it was made by a mouthpiece of passionate caprice, I should have been disposed to call it the most meanly ungenerous impeachment I ever saw in secular literature. And the most malignant of priests, one would think, would have scrupled so to handle the pathetic cry of the dying scholar who left his work undone.

It all comes of lack of patience and lack of care for consistency, which two lacks are correlative to the prophetic temper of overweening self-confidence and the self-worship which poses as Theism,

Fors Clavigera, New Series, Letter 3, vol. viii., 1878, p. 76, nr.

The worst of it all is that the genius seems to be correlative with the unwisdom; that the man has his eloquence and his dazzling flashes of insight on condition of a prophetic fury which will not stay to reconsider ; that the command of language rests on an over-balance of that faculty, which keeps him chronically at the mercy of verbal allurements, leading him into those etymological mysticisms over which Arnold shrugged his shoulders; and that the burning moral earnestness is bound up with the primitive habit of theosophy which he acquired at his mother's knee, so keeping him to the last a possessed Scripturalist, turning to the old Hebrew literature, genuine and forged, for principles of present conduct, as Cromwell's pikemen did. With such an all-round lack of security for good judgment, no child of impulse can miss giving men occasional stones for bread and occasional poison for medicine. At times Ruskin seems to have triumphed over the darker human passions, and to have attained to hating war and judicial murder; but anon he warms with the old evil fires, and presents you with an execrable homily on the nobleness of true war as a means of deciding which is the best man—save the mark !—which has “the strongest arm and the steadiest heart," as if these meant the best heart or the wisest head ; and again you will have pæans to the hangman that might have made Carlyle feel his occupation gone.

VIII.

The name of Carlyle brings us to a final and comparative summing-up of these friends. They greatly admired each other, Carlyle mixing his admiration with criticism, Ruskin mostly observing the discipular attitude. What had they then in common? Nothing at all of the love of art which was Ruskin's point of departure. Carlyle contemned art, and derided its devotees, while Ruskin's doctrine is well summed up by himself in the admirable

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Life of Sterling, part ii., ch. vii. ; Carlyle-Emerson Correspondence, i., 148 ; Emerson's English Traits, ch. xvi.

formula : "Life without Industry is Guilt; Industry without Art is Brutality.” And Ruskin has written of Mr. Froude, Carlyle's other leading disciple, that one of his “deadly disadvantages " is that he has 6 no knowledge of art nor care for it.” 1 The main bond of union between the two writers, as we said before, in studying Carlyle, is just the spirit of hostility to modern developments, which in both of them led to a profoundly fallacious exaltation of the Middle Ages. This being so, we must say of Ruskin, somewhat as we said of Carlyle, that his value lies in his stimulant energy, his power of disturbing vulgar complacency, and confronting human selfishness with bigher motives and urgent menaces. Both men do this while themselves wilful egoists and prone to egregious error ; whence the Nemesis of disregard and refutation which follows them. But if we compare the amounts of their really effective criticism of the life around them, the penetrating power of their exposition, and above all, the range of their active relation to life, we must, I repeat, give Ruskin the higher place. He could not possibly go more profoundly wrong than Carlyle, though he might commit himself oftener; and if in some respects Carlyle sees human things more truly, his hold of that which lay immediately under his eyes is less prehensile than Ruskin’s. In fine, the disciple has improved on the master as regards the task of awakening the age to its practical needs; and if the result exhibits itself too slowly to satisfy his passionate insistence, it is none the less in process. When the spirit of science comes to grapple resolutely with the tasks which have hitherto been undertaken by the enthusiasts, the prophets, the zealots, it will be found that none of them all has more potently prepared the way than this wayward genius, with his thunderbolts of eloquence and scorn, and his undying passion for the better life. He will not live to see the transformation he has thus furthered, but his name and his work shall not be forgotten.

1 Fors Clavigera, New Series, Letter 4, March 21, 1880, p. 114.

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In all the criticisms of life we have surveyed thus far, with the exception of Mill's, it has lain on the face of the matter that the critics have passed large judgments on relatively little knowledge, and have been much more prone to sum up the universe than to ascertain what it consists of. Carlyle not only abominated the scientific study of human affairs, but, with a presumption hard to associate with real superiority of mind, cast senseless scorn at those ideas in natural science which were revolutionising human thought under his eyes. Emerson, far more sanely receptive to new knowledge, was himself, as we saw, one of the most discontinuous, or, as Mr. Birrell calls him, "non-sequacious," of thinkers; and helped us rather with tonic sentences and bracing elevation of spirit than with connected views of human affairs. Arnold, again, though he did not realise that extremity of scientific ignorance which his father was willing to see combined with a proper zeal for Christian and political philosophy, was influenced by science only so far as a man of liberal culture in these days cannot help being; and continued to the end, with obstinate suavity, to see life with the eyes of a man of letters, finding the best culture to lie in “ the best that has been thought and said " by writers whose thinking had not been very hard, and remaining convinced that only the talismanic virtue of certain ancient sayings and examples can keep mankind on the right road in conduct. 1 Finally, Ruskin, though he has flashed his electric light into natural as into social science, is, as we have seen, essentially a

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