462 APPENDIX, 14

than what would ordinarily be thought the artistic side of it. I must answer that, delightful as is that portion of Ruskin’s work which describes, analyses, and criticises art, old and new, yet this is not after all the most characteristic side of his writings. Indeed, from the time at which he wrote this chapter here reprinted, those ethical and political considerations have never been absent from his criticism of art; and, in my opinion, it is just this part of his work, fairly begun in The Nature of Gothic, and brought to its culmination in that great book Unto This Last, which has had the most enduring and beneficent effect on his contemporaries, and will have through them on succeeding generations. John Ruskin, the critic of art, has not only given the keenest pleasure to thousands of readers by his life-like description, and the ingenuity and delicacy of his analysis of works of art, but he has let a flood of daylight into the cloud of sham-technical twaddle which was once the whole substance of “art-criticism,” and is still its staple, and that is much. But it is far more that John Ruskin, the teacher of morals and politics (I do not use this word in the newspaper sense) has done serious and solid work towards that new birth of society, without which genuine art, the expression of man’s pleasure in his handiwork, must inevitably cease altogether, and with it the hopes of the happiness of mankind.

WILLIAM MORRIS.

KELMSCOTT HOUSE, HAMMERSMITH,

February 15th, 1892.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]