cal science is now beginning to
perceive. All things must be carried on upon the miraculous system of
Sunday school books, where planks of bridges give way from the cogent
mechanical reason that the little boys passing over them have just
been telling lies or stealing apples; God is for ever busy unbolting
trapdoors beneath the feet of the iniquitous and rolling stones down on
the heads of blasphemers. And this same necessity of condemning morally
a period whose artistic work in any particular line is aesthetically
worthless in Ruskin's judgment, not only leads him into the most absurd
misappreciation of the moral value of a time, but entirely forbids his
recognizing the fact that the decay of one art is frequently coincident
with, and in some measure due to, the efflorescence of another.
The independent development of painting required the decay of the
architecture of the middle ages, whose symbolical, purely decorative
tendency condemned painting to be a sort of allegorical or narrative
Arabesque; whose well defined arches might not be broken through by
daring perspective, whose delicate cornices might not enclose more than
a mere rigid and simply tinted mosaic, or mosaic-like fresco. When,
therefore, painting arose mature in the 16th century, architecture was
necessarily crumbling. But to Ruskin the 16th century, being the century
of bad architecture, is hopelessly immoral, and being immoral, its
painting, Raphael, Michel Angelo, Correggio, all except a few privileged
Venetians, must needs be swept away as so much rubbish; while the very
imperfect painting of the Giottesques, because it belongs to a time
whose morality must be high since its architecture is good, is
considered as the ideal of pictorial art. Again, Ruskin perceives that
the whole plastic art of the 18th century, architecture, sculpture, and
painting, are as bad as bad can be; the cause must necessarily be found
not in the inevitable decline of all plastic art since the Renaissance,
but in the fiendish wickedness of the 18th century, that abominable age
which first taught men the meaning of justice as distinguished from
mercy, of humanity as distinguished from charity: which first taught
us not to shrink from evil but to combat it. And thus, because
the 18th century is proved by its smirking furbelowed goddesses and
handkerchief-cravatted urns to be utterly, morally, abominable, the one
great art which flourished in this period, the glorious music of Bac