DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0154
142
JOHN RUSKIN.
difficulty that meets the reader with a very menace.
The title of this first lecture is “The Deteriorative
Powers of Conventional Art over Nations.” The
adjective “conventional” seems to mitigate the predi-
cate of this lecture; but there is no such mitigation
in the text, which declares roundly that from the
moment when a perfect picture is painted or a perfect
statue wrought within a State, that State begins to
derogate. Not only is the word “conventional”
omitted, but the word “perfect” seems to bar it out.
Then comes the tremendous contrast with which Ruskin
commands his readers and compels them to attend
to what shall follow. Thus it stands: India (then
lately guilty of the Mutiny and accused of more evil
than she had committed) is a nation possessed of
exquisite art, but given over to every infernal passion
—cruelty and the rest. Scotland is a nation full of
the dignity of virtue and possessed of no art whatever
except that of arranging lines of colour at right angles
in the plaid. Splendid are these pages, with their
nobility and temperance of diction in the statement
of what is most certainly a disastrous exaggeration.
They close with the assertion of a brief and absolute
opposition: “ Out of the peat cottage come faith,
courage, self-sacrifice, purity, and piety . . .; out of
the ivory palace come treachery, cruelty, cowardice,
idolatry, bestiality.” Who, nevertheless, in calmer
thought dare ratify such a sentence? “Piety”—alas!
“ Purity ”—alas, alas ! The judgment on the Hindoo
JOHN RUSKIN.
difficulty that meets the reader with a very menace.
The title of this first lecture is “The Deteriorative
Powers of Conventional Art over Nations.” The
adjective “conventional” seems to mitigate the predi-
cate of this lecture; but there is no such mitigation
in the text, which declares roundly that from the
moment when a perfect picture is painted or a perfect
statue wrought within a State, that State begins to
derogate. Not only is the word “conventional”
omitted, but the word “perfect” seems to bar it out.
Then comes the tremendous contrast with which Ruskin
commands his readers and compels them to attend
to what shall follow. Thus it stands: India (then
lately guilty of the Mutiny and accused of more evil
than she had committed) is a nation possessed of
exquisite art, but given over to every infernal passion
—cruelty and the rest. Scotland is a nation full of
the dignity of virtue and possessed of no art whatever
except that of arranging lines of colour at right angles
in the plaid. Splendid are these pages, with their
nobility and temperance of diction in the statement
of what is most certainly a disastrous exaggeration.
They close with the assertion of a brief and absolute
opposition: “ Out of the peat cottage come faith,
courage, self-sacrifice, purity, and piety . . .; out of
the ivory palace come treachery, cruelty, cowardice,
idolatry, bestiality.” Who, nevertheless, in calmer
thought dare ratify such a sentence? “Piety”—alas!
“ Purity ”—alas, alas ! The judgment on the Hindoo