INTRODUCTION xvii

Builder says, as if he had just found it out, ‘Why, if Mr. Ruskin is right, we are all in the wrong.’ It seems to me then that it would be useful to add the passage which I send herewith, four pages and a bit, to the passage which gives an account of the Index.”

The conclusion of the whole matter is stated also in chapter iv., of which the immediate purpose is to apply the moral of the Renaissance “Fall” to “dangerous tendencies in the modern mind.” In the course of this chapter Ruskin states very clearly what may be said to be the kernel of all his teaching upon art-”that art is valuable or otherwise, only as it expresses the personality, activity, and living perception of a good and great human soul” (p. 201), and again, “all art is great, good, and true only so far as it is distinctively the work of manhood in its entire and highest sense.” In architecture, the principle has those social applications which are discussed in the second volume: unless the craftsman be an artist, there can be no vital architecture.¹ In painting, the principle carries us straight to whatever is true in the doctrines of “impressionism.” Art, if it photographs, is not, says Ruskin, art in the highest sense at all; it only becomes so when it gives the artist’s impressions-when the man’s soul “stands forth with its solemn ‘Behold, it is I’” (p.203). Yet it is often supposed, by careless readers or by critics who take their knowledge of Ruskin at second-hand, or from isolated snippets, that he regards the function of the painter as that of a merely receptive and reproducing mirror. Ruskin himself was not unprepared for the misrepresentation; not every reader takes the pains to correlate various passages, and sometimes Ruskin emphasised one side of a truth, and sometimes another. Among the MS. sheets relating to The Stones of Venice there are some which bear directly on this subject, and which may be given here, as showing how the book connected itself in his mind with other portions of his writings. The sheets seem to have been an alternative draft for a part of the chapter (iv.) now under discussion:-

“I believe it has been acutely felt by all men who have ever devoted themselves to the elucidation of abstract truth, that exactly in proportion to the scope, depth, and importance of any given principle was the difficulty of so expressing it as that it should not be capable of misapprehension, and of guarding it against certain forms of associated error. This is especially the case with the principles of religious faith which are so universally dependent upon two opposite truths (for truths may be and often are opposite though they cannot be contradictory), that it is physically impossible so to express them in brief form

¹ See Vol. X.ch. vi.

XI. b

[Version 0.04: March 2008]