feet on the table. Doubtless the wine of
that prophecy was too strong even for the strong heads that carried it.
It made Ruskin capricious and despotic, Tennyson lonely and whimsical,
Carlyle harsh to the point of hatred, and Kingsley often rabid to the
ruin of logic and charity. One alone of that race of giants, the
greatest and most neglected, was sober after the cup. No mission, no
frustration could touch with hysteria the humanity of Robert Browning.

But though Ruskin seems to close the roll of the militant prophets, we
feel how needful are such figures when we consider with what pathetic
eagerness men pay prophetic honours even to those who disclaim the
prophetic character. Ibsen declares that he only depicts life, that as
far as he is concerned there is nothing to be done, and still armies of
"Ibsenites" rally to the flag and enthusiastically do nothing. I have
found traces of a school which avowedly follows Mr. Henry James: an idea
full of humour. I like to think of a crowd with pikes and torches
shouting passages from "The Awkward Age." It is right and proper for a
multitude to declare its readiness to follow a prophet to the end of the
world, but if he himself explains, with pathetic gesticulations, that
he is only going for a walk in the park, there is not much for the
multitude to do. But the disciple of Ruskin had plenty to do. He made
roads; in his spare moments he studied the whole of geology and botany.
He lifted up paving stones and got down into early Florentine cellars,
where, by hanging upside down, he could catch a glimpse of a Cimabue
unpraisable but by divine silence. He rushed from one end of a city to
the other comparing ceilings. His limbs were weary, his clothes were
torn, and in his eyes was that unfathomable joy of life which man will
never know again until once more he takes himself seriously.

Mr. Collingwood's excellent chapters on the art criticism of Ruskin
would be better, in my opinion, if they showed more consciousness of the
after revolutions that have reversed, at least in detail, much of
Ruskin's teaching. We no longer think that art became valueless when it
was first corrupted with anatomical accuracy. But if we return to that
Raphaelism to which he was so unjust, let us not fall into the old
error of intelligent reactionaries, that of ignoring our own debt to
revolutions. Ruskin could not destroy the market of Raphaelism, but he
could and did destroy its monopoly. We may go back