ne; the long struggle was
over, the struggle of one man to reduce the complexities of a national
life to an apostolic simplicity, to make it beautiful and good,

Till the high God behold it from beyond,
And enter it.

[1] _Praeterita_. He was born February 8, 1819.

[2] Ruskin himself quotes a not very brilliant specimen in _Modern
Painters_, III, in "Moral of Landscape."

[3] _Praeterita_, Sec. 53.

[4] _The Mystery of Life._

II

THE UNITY OF RUSKIN'S WRITINGS

[Sidenote: Diversity of his writings.]

Ruskin is often described as an author of bewildering variety, whose
mind drifted waywardly from topic to topic--from painting to political
economy, from architecture to agriculture--with a license as
illogical as it was indiscriminating. To this impression, Ruskin
himself sometimes gave currency. He was, for illustration, once
announced to lecture on crystallography, but, as we are informed by
one present,[5] he opened by asserting that he was really about to
lecture on Cistercian architecture; nor did it greatly matter what the
title was; "for," said he, "if I had begun to speak about Cistercian
abbeys, I should have been sure to get on crystals presently; and if
I had begun upon crystals, I should soon have drifted into
architecture." Those who conceive of Ruskin as being thus a kind of
literary Proteus like to point to the year 1860, that of the
publication of his tracts on economics, as witnessing the greatest
and suddenest of his changes, that from reforming art to reforming
society; and it is true that this year affords a simple dividing-line
between Ruskin's earlier work, which is sufficiently described by the
three titles, _Modern Painters, The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, and
_The Stones of Venice_, and his later work, chiefly on social subjects
such as are discussed in _Unto This Last, The Crown of Wild Olive_,
and _Fors Clavigera_. And yet we cannot insist too often on the
essential unity of this work, for, viewed in the large, it betrays one
continuous development. The seeds of _Fors_ are in _The Stones of
Venice_.

[Sidenote: Underlying idea in all his works.]

The governing idea of Ruskin's first published work, _Modern Painters,
Volume I_, was a moral idea. The book was dedicated to the principle
that that art is greatest which deals with the greatest number of
greatest ideas,--those, we learn presently, which reveal divine
truth; the office of the painter, we a