behind all these feminine traits there is the no less feminine quality of passionate love of justice, flecked, on occasions of personal implication, with acts of great injustice; there is a general inexhaustible tenderness, with occasional instances of absolute cruelty. Any present judgment of him as a whole is difficult if not impossible, because there are in him several different individuals, and the perspective in which we now see them makes of his position, as an art teacher, the dominant element of his personality; whereas, in my persuasion, his art teaching is in his own nature and work subordinate to his moral and humanitarian ideals. He always saw art through a religious medium, and this made him, from the beginning, strain his system of teaching and criticism to meet the demand of direct truth to nature, the roots of his enthusiasm and reverence being not in art but in nature and in her beneficial influence on humanity.

Of Ruskin the writer, aside from the art critic, it is surely superfluous for me to say anything: for mastery of our language, the greater authorities long ago have given him his place; the multitude of petty critics and pinchbeck rhetoricians who pay him the tribute of tawdry imitation is the ever-present testimony to his power and masterhood. Probably no prose writer of this century has had so many choice extracts made from his writings,-passages of gorgeous description, passionate exhortation, pathetic appeal, or apostolic denunciation; and certainly no one has so moulded the style of all the writers of a class as he, for there scarcely can be found a would-be art critic who does not struggle to fill his throat with Ruskin's thunders, so that a flood of Ruskin-and water -threatens all taste and all study of art.

Description à la Ruskin has become a disease of the literature of the generation, and your novelist coolly stops you in the crisis of his story to describe a sunset in two or three pages which, when all is said, compare with Ruskin as a satyr with Hyperion.

Ruskin obstinately bent all his conclusions and observations to his doctrines-what he wanted to see he saw, nothing else.

He wanted to see truth in Turner's drawings, and he made his truth accordingly. I can but regard his influence on modern landscape painting as pernicious from beginning to end, and coinciding as it did with the advent of a great naturalistic and, therefore, anti-artistic tendency in all branches of study, it was even more disastrous than it would have been in ordinary circumstances.

But Ruskin's true position is higher than that of art critic in any possible development. It is as a moralist and a reformer and in his passionate love of humanity (not inconsistent with much bitterness, and even unmerited, at times, to individual men) that we must recognize him. His place is in the pulpit, speaking largely and in the unsectarian sense.

Truth is multiform, but of one essence, and, such as he sees it, he is always faithful to it. I have taken large exception to his ideas and teachings in respect to art because I feel that they are misleading. His mistakes in art are in some measure due to his fundamental mistake of measuring it by its moral powers and influence, and the roots of the error are so deeply involved in his character and mental development that it can never be uprooted. It is difficult for me (perhaps for any of his contemporaries) to judge him as a whole, because, besides being his contemporary and a sufferer by what I now perceive to be the fatal error of his system, I was for so many years his close personal friend, and because, while I do not agree with his tenets and am obliged by my own sense of right to combat many of his teachings, I still retain the personal affection for him of those years which are dear to memory, and reverence the man as I know him; and because I most desire that he should be judged rightly, as a man who for moral greatness has few equals in his day, and who deserves an honor and distinction which he has not received, and in a selfish and sordid world will not receive, but which I believe time will give him,-that of being one who gave his whole life and substance to the furtherance of what he believed to be the true happiness and elevation of his fellow-men. Even were he the sound art critic so many people take him to be, his real nature rises above that office as much as humanity rises above art. When we wish to compare him with men of his kind, it must be with Plato or Savonarola rather than with Hazlitt or Hamerton. Art cannot be clearly estimated in any connection with morality, and Ruskin could never, any more than Plato or Savonarola, escape the condition of being in every fibre of his nature a moralist and not an artist, and as he advanced in life the ethical side of his nature more and more asserted its mastery, though less and less in theological terms.

He considers himself the pupil of Carlyle-for me he floats in a purer air than Carlyle ever breathed. As a feminine nature he was captivated by the robust masculine force of his great countryman, and there was in the imperial theory of Carlyle much that chimed with Ruskin's own ideas of human government. The Chelsean, regretfully looking back to the day of absolutism and brutal domination of the appointed king, was in a certain sense a sympathetic reply to Ruskin's longings for a firm and orderly government when he felt the quicksands of the transitional order of the day yielding under his feet, but in reality the two regarded Rule from points as far removed from each other as those of Luther and Voltaire. Carlyle's ideal was one of a Royal Necessity, an incarnate law indifferent to the crushed in its marchings and rulings,-burly, brutal, contemptuous of the luckless individual or the overtaken straggler; his Rule exists not for the sake of humanity, but for that of Order, as if

Order and Rule were called out for their own sake; he puffs into perdition the trivial details of individual men, closing accounts by ignoring the fractions. Ruskin loses sight of no detail, but calls in to the benefit of his Order and Rule every child and likeness of a child in larger form, full of a tenderness which is utterly human yet inexhaustible. Carlyle's ruler is like a Viking's god, his conception utterly pagan; Ruskin's is Christlike; Carlyle's word is like the mace of Charlemagne, Ruskin's like the sword of the Angel Gabriel; if Ruskin is notably egotistical, Carlyle is utterly selfish; if Ruskin dogmatizes like an Evangelist, Carlyle poses as a Prophet; and the difference, when we come to sum up all the qualities, moral, intellectual, and literary, seems to me to be in favor of Ruskin. Their ideals are similarly antithetical-Ruskin's lying in a hopeful future, an unattainable Utopia, perhaps, but still a blessed dream; Carlyle's in a return to a brutal and barren past, made forever impossible by the successful assertion of human individuality, and for whose irrevocability we thank God with all our hearts and in all hope of human progress. The public estimate has not overrated Ruskin, just as he had not overrated Turner, because the aggregate impression of power received was adequate to the cause; but in the one case as in the other the mistake has been relative, and consisted in misestimating the genius and attributing the highest value to the wrong item in the aggregate. I may be mistaken in my estimate of Ruskin, but I believe that the future will exalt him above it rather than depress him below it.

George William Bagby.

BORN in Buckingham Co., Va., 1828. DIED in Richmond, Va., 1883.

JUD. BROWNIN'S ACCOUNT OF RUBINSTEIN'S PLAYING.

[Miscellaneous Writings of Dr. George W. Bagby. 1884.]

"JUD, they say you heard Rubinstein play, when you were in New

York."

"I did, in the cool."

"Well, tell us about it."

"What! me? I might's well tell you about the creation of the world.” "Come, now; no mock modesty. Go ahead."

"Well, sir, he had the blamedest biggest, catty-cornedest pianner you ever laid eyes on; somethin' like a distractid billiard table on three legs. The lid was heisted, and mighty well it was. If it hadn't been he'd

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a-tore the intire insides clean out, and scattered 'em to the four winds of heaven."

"Played well, did he?"

"You bet he did; but don't interrup' me. When he first set down he 'peared to keer mighty little 'bout playin', and wished he hadn' come. He tweedle-leedled a little on the trible, and twoodle-oodle-oodled some on the base-just foolin' and boxin' the thing's jaws for bein' in his way. And I says to a man settin' next to me, s'I, 'what sort of fool playin' is that?' And he says, 'Heish!' But presently his hands commenced chasin' one 'nother up and down the keys, like a passel of rats scamperin' through a garret very swift. Parts of it was sweet, though, and reminded me of a sugar squirrel turnin' the wheel of a candy cage.

เ

"Now,' I says to my neighbor, 'he's showin' off. He thinks he's a-doin' of it; but he ain't got no idee, no plan of nuthin'. If he'd play me up a tune of some kind or other, I'd—'

"But my neighbor says Heish!' very impatient.

"I was just about to git up and go home, bein' tired of that foolishness, when I heard a little bird wakin' up away off in the woods, and callin' sleepy-like to his mate, and I looked up and I see that Ruben was beginnin' to take some interest in his business, and I set down agin. It was the peep o' day. The light come faint from the east, the breeze blowed gentle and fresh, some more birds waked up in the orchard, then some more in the trees near the house, and all begun singin' together. People begun to stir, and the gal opened the shutters. Just then the first beam of the sun fell upon the blossoms; a leetle more and it tetcht the roses on the bushes, and the next thing it was broad day; the sun fairly blazed; the birds sang like they'd split their little throats; all the leaves was movin', and flashin' diamonds of dew, and the whole wide world was bright and happy as a king. Seemed to me like there was a good breakfast in every house in the land, and not a sick child or woman anywhere. It was a fine mornin'.

"And I says to my neighbor, that's music, that is.
"But he glar'd at me like he'd like to cut my throat.

"Presently the wind turned; it begun to thicken up, and a kind of grey mist come over things; I got low-spirited d'rectly. Then a silver rain began to fall; I could see the drops touch the ground; some flashed up like long pearl ear-rings, and the rest rolled away like round rubies. It was pretty, but melancholy. Then the pearls gathered themselves into long strands and necklaces, and then they melted into thin silver streams running between golden gravels, and then the streams joined each other at the bottom of the hill, and made a brook that flowed silent except that you could kinder see the music, specially when the bushes on the banks moved as the music went along down the valley. I could

smell the flowers in the meadow. But the sun didn't shine, nor the birds sing; it was a foggy day, but not cold. The most curious thing was the little white angel boy, like you see in pictures, that run ahead of the music brook, and led it on, and on, away out of the world, where no man ever was-I never was, certain. I could see that boy just as plain as I see you. Then the moonlight come, without any sunset, and shone on the grave-yards, where some few ghosts lifted their hands and went over the wall, and between the black sharp-top trees splendid marble houses rose up, with fine ladies in the lit-up windows, and men that loved 'em, but could never get a-nigh 'em, and played on guitars under the trees, and made me that miserable I could a-cried, because I wanted to love somebody, I don't know who, better than the men with guitars did. Then the sun went down, it got dark, the wind moaned and wept like a lost child for its dead mother, and I could a got up then and there and preached a better sermon than any I ever listened to. There wasn't a thing in the world left to live for, not a blame thing, and yet I didn't want the music to stop one bit. It was happier to be miserable than to be happy without being miserable. I couldn't understand it. I hung my head and pulled out my hankerchief, and blowed my nose loud to keep from cryin'. My eyes is weak anyway; I didn't want anybody to be a gazin' at me a snivlin', and it's nobody's business. what I do with my nose. It's mine. But some several glared at me,

mad as Tucker.

"Then, all of a sudden, old Ruben changed his tune. He ripped and he rar'd, he tipped and tar'd, he pranced and he charged like the grand entry at a circus. 'Peared to me that all the gas in the house was turned on at once, things got so bright, and I hilt up my head, ready to look any man in the face, and not afeard of nothin'. It was a circus, and a brass band, and a big ball, all goin' on at the same time. He lit into them keys like a thousand of brick, he gave 'em no rest, day nor night; he set every livin' joint in me a-goin', and not bein' able to stand it no longer, I jumpt spang onto my seat, and jest hollered:

"Go it, my Rube !'

"Every blamed man, woman, and child in the house riz on me, and shouted, Put him out! Put him out!'

6

"Put your great-grandmother's grizzly grey greenish cat into the middle of next month!' I says. "Tech me if you dare! I paid my money, and you jest come a-nigh me.'

"With that, some several p'licemen run up, and I had to simmer down. But I would a fit any fool that laid hands on me, for I was bound to hear Ruby out or die.

"He had changed his tune again. He hopt-light ladies and tip-toed fine from eend to eend of the key-board. He played soft, and low, and