122 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

because the feeling is reactionary; and, in this phase of it, common to the diseased mind as well as to the healthy one. A man dying in the fever of intemperance will cry out for water, and that with a bitterer thirst than a man whose healthy frame naturally delights in the mountain spring more than in the wine cup. The water is not dishonoured by that thirst of the diseased, nor is nature dishonoured by the love of the unworthy. That love is, perhaps, the only saving element in their minds; and it still remains an indisputable truth that the love of nature is a characteristic of the Christian heart, just as the hunger for healthy food is characteristic of the healthy frame.

In order to meet this new feeling for nature, there necessarily arose a new school of landscape painting.¹ That school, like the literature to which it corresponded, had many weak and vicious elements mixed with its noble ones; it had its Mrs. Radcliffes and Rousseaus, as well as its Wordsworths; but, on the whole, the feeling with which Robson drew mountains, and Prout architecture, with which Fielding draws moors, and Stanfield sea-is altogether pure,

Furnivall of May 22, 1855 (given in the privately-printed Letters from John Ruskin to F. J. Furnivall, 1897, and reprinted in a later volume of this edition). In the same letter is a reference to Dumas, who is also mentioned in Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvii. § 7, and vol. iv. ch. xix. § 16. For George Sand, see ibid., vol. iii. ch. xvii. §§ 7, 27; the letter to Furnivall above cited; and Fors Clavigera, Letter 83.]

¹ [At this point Ruskin seems to have read some illustrative passages, for the MS. here inserts:-

“In order that you may have a perfectly clear idea of the distinction on which I have to insist, I will first read to you two passages, from two poets, both great poets, one of the pastoral time, the other of the present time-I mean Pope and Tennyson. I do not mean to disparage Pope: a greater man in many respects never lived, but he lived at the unnatural period; and while his descriptions of men are admirable, his descriptions of scenery are contemptible.

“Now, just the distinction which there is between this worthless description of Pope and the noble one of Tennyson, exists between the Claudesque landscape and the modern landscape. Observe, it is not the distinction between all Pope and all Tennyson, but between descriptive Pope and descriptive Tennyson. The description of Pope is utterly worthless, so is all landscape of the Claude and Poussin school. The description of Tennyson is always more or less noble, so is all landscape of the modern school.”

The MS. does not indicate what passages Ruskin selected; the piece of Pope may have been the lines from his Pastorals quoted in Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xii. § 15. For Ruskin’s appreciation of Tennyson’s descriptive powers, see Two Paths, Appendix I.]

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