140. Thus far, the justice of the most careful criticism may gratefully ratify the applause with which the works of these three artists have been received by the British public. Rapidly I must now glance at the conditions of defect which must necessarily occur in art primarily intended to amuse the multitude, and which can therefore only be for moments serious, and by stealth didactic.

In the first place, you must be clear about Punch's politics. He is a polite Whig, with a sentimental respect for the Crown, and a practical respect for property. He steadily flatters Lord Palmerston, from his heart adores Mr. Gladstone; steadily, but not virulently, caricatures Mr. D'Israeli; violently and virulently castigates assault upon property, in any kind, and holds up for the general ideal of perfection, to be aimed at by all the children of heaven and earth, the British Hunting Squire, the British Colonel, and the British Sailor.

141. Primarily, the British Hunting Squire, with his family. The most beautiful sketch by Leech throughout his career, and, on the whole, in all Punch, I take to be Miss Alice on her father's horse;1-her, with three or four more young Dians, I had put in one frame for you, but found they ran each other too hard,-being in each case typical of what Punch thinks every young lady ought to be. He has never fairly asked how far every young lady can be like them; nor has he in a single instance endeavoured to represent the beauty of the poor.

On the contrary, his witness to their degradation, as inevitable in the circumstances of their London life, is constant, and for the most part, contemptuous; nor can I more sternly enforce what I have said at various times on that subject than by placing permanently in your schools ["Miss Alice" appears to be a slip for "Miss Ellen." See the sketch (entitled "Gone Away!") at p. 30 in vol. iii. of John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character from the Collection of Mr. Punch. Other " 'young Dians" may be seen at pp. 102, 181; and p. 152 of vol.

2

175; 1900, for instance, Queen of the Air, § 121 (Vol. XVIII. p. 401); Mornings in

Florence, 95 (Vol. XXIII. pp. 388-389); and Fiction, Fair and Foul, §§ 1-7 (Vol. XXXIV.).]

the cruelly true design of Du Maurier, representing the London mechanic with his family, when Mr. Todeson is asked to amuse "the dear creatures" at Lady Clara's garden tea.1

142. I show you for comparison with it, to-day, a little painting of a country girl of our Westmoreland type, which I have given to our Coniston children's school, to show our hill and vale-bred lassies that God will take care of their good looks for them, even though He may have appointed for them the toil of the women of Sarepta and Samaria, in being gatherers of wood and drawers of water.3

143. I cannot say how far with didactic purpose, or how far in carelessly inevitable satire, Punch contrasts with the disgrace of street poverty the beauties of the London drawing-room, the wives and daughters of the great upper middle class, exalted by the wealth of the capital, and of the larger manufacturing towns.

These are, with few exceptions, represented either as receiving company, or reclining on sofas in extremely elegant morning dresses, and surrounded by charming children, with whom they are usually too idle to play. The children are extremely intelligent, and often exquisitely pretty, yet dependent for great part of their charm on the dressing of their back hair, and the fitting of their boots. As they grow up, their girlish beauty is more and more fixed in an expression of more or less self-satisfied pride and practised apathy. There is no example in Punch of a girl in society whose face expresses humility or enthusiasm-except in mistaken directions and foolish degrees. It is true that only

[The drawing, called "Unsettled Political Convictions," appeared in Punch, October 16, 1880. The same drawing is referred to in Love's Meinie, § 136 (Vol. XXV. p. 128).]

[This painting cannot certainly be identified. Ruskin sent it to the school on November 4, 1881, and it is described in the log-book as "portrait of a little girl carrying a bundle of sticks." This may be a misdescription of the "Country Girl," by Gainsborough, reproduced as the frontispiece to Vol. XXII. Ruskin's gift to the school was only temporary; the picture, whatever it was, was subsequently withdrawn by him.]

[1 Kings xvii. 9, 10 (compare for Sarepta, Luke iv. 26); John iv. 7.] [For a reference to this passage, see Fors Clavigera, Letter 91 (Vol. XXIX. p. 442).]

in these mistaken feelings can be found palpable material for jest, and that much of Punch's satire is well intended and just.

144. It seems to have been hitherto impossible, when once the zest of satirical humour is felt, even by so kind and genial a heart as John Leech's, to restrain it, and to elevate it into the playfulness of praise. In the designs of Richter, of which I have so often spoken,' among scenes of domestic beauty and pathos, he continually introduces little pieces of play,-such, for instance, as that of the design of the "Wide, Wide World," in which the very young puppy, with its paws on its-relatively as young-master's shoulder, looks out with him over the fence of their cottage garden. And it is surely conceivable that some day the rich power of a true humorist may be given to express more vividly the comic side which exists in many beautiful incidents of daily life, and refuse at last to dwell, even with a smile, on its follies.

145. This, however, must clearly be a condition of future human development, for hitherto the perfect power of seizing comic incidents has always been associated with some liking for ugliness, and some exultation in disaster. The law holds-and holds with no relaxation-even in the instance of so wise and benevolent a man as the Swiss schoolmaster, Töpffer, whose death, a few years since,2 left none to succeed him in perfection of pure linear caricature. He can do more with fewer lines than any draughtsman known to me, and in several plates of his Histoire d'Albert, has succeeded in entirely representing the tenor of conversation with no more than half the profile and one eye of the speaker.

He generally took a walking tour through Switzerland, with his pupils, in the summer holidays, and illustrated his exquisitely humorous diary of their adventures with pen

1 [See above, pp. 285, 300, 339.]

2 [Rodolfe Töpffer (born at Geneva in 1799) died, however, in 1846. Histoire d'Albert was one of his latest works.]

His

H

sketches,' which show a capacity of appreciating beautiful landscape as great as his grotesque faculty; but his mind is drawn away from the most sublime scene, in a moment, to the difficulties of the halting-place, or the rascalities of the inn; and his power is never so marvellously exerted as in depicting a group of roguish guides, shameless beggars, or hopeless cretins.

146. Nevertheless, with these and such other materials as our European masters of physiognomy have furnished in portraiture of their nations, I can see my way to the arrangement of a very curious series of illustrations of character, if only I could also see my way to some place wherein to exhibit them.

I said in my opening lecture that I hoped the studies of the figure initiated by Mr. Richmond might be found consistent with the slighter practice in my own schools; and I must say, in passing, that the only real hindrance to this, but at present an insuperable one, is want of room. It is a somewhat characteristic fact, expressive of the tendencies of this age, that Oxford thinks nothing of spending £150,000 for the elevation and ornature, in a style as inherently corrupt as it is un-English, of the rooms for the torture and shame of her scholars,3 which to all practical purposes might just as well have been inflicted on them in her college halls, or her professors' drawing-rooms; but that the only place where her art-workmen can be taught to draw, is the cellar of her old Taylor buildings, and the only place where her art professor can store the cast of a statue, is his own private office in the gallery above.*

147. Pending the now indispensable addition of some

[For other references to the Voyages en Zigzag; ou, Excursions d'un Pensionnat des les Cantons Suisses et sur le revers Italien des Alpes (Paris, 1843; a second collected series, 1853), see Vol. XXV. p. 115 n.]

2 [See above, p. 268.]

[The New Examination Schools in the High Street, erected 1876-1882 from designs, in the Renaissance style, by T. G. Jackson, R.A. Compare below, p. 476.] [Compare the Introduction; above, p. lvi. The "Taylor Buildings," which contain the University Galleries as well as the Taylor Institution, are so called from the bequest of Sir Robert Taylor (1788).]

rude workroom to the Taylor galleries, in which study of the figure may be carried on under a competent master, I have lent, from the drawings belonging to the St. George's Guild, such studies of Venetian pictures as may form the taste of the figure-student in general composition,' and I have presented to the Ruskin schools twelve principal drawings out of Miss Alexander's Tuscan book, which may be standards of method, in drawing from the life, to students capable of as determined industry. But, no less for the better guidance of the separate figure class in the room which I hope one day to see built, than for immediate help in such irregular figure study as may be possible under present conditions, I find myself grievously in want of such a grammar of the laws of harmony in the human form and face as may be consistent with whatever accurate knowledge of elder races may have been obtained by recent anthropology, and at the same time authoritative in its statement of the effect on human expression, of the various mental states and passions. And it seems to me that by arranging in groups capable of easy comparison, the examples of similar expression given by the masters whose work we have been reviewing, we may advance further such a science of physiognomy as will be morally useful, than by any quantity of measuring of savage crania: and if, therefore, among the rudimentary series in the art schools you find, before I can get the new explanatory catalogues printed, some more or less systematic groups of heads collected out of Punch, you must not think that I am doing this merely for your amusement, or that such examples are beneath the dignity of academical instruction. My own belief is that the difference between the features of a good and a bad servant, of a churl and a gentleman, is a much more useful and interesting subject of inquiry than the gradations

2

1 [See Vol. XXI. p. 306 (in the "Long Cabinet ").] Ibid., p. 306 (the "Francesca Cabinet").]

3 [The new catalogues were never prepared. There is a bundle of cartoons from Punch in the Ruskin Drawing School (see Vol. XXI. p. 308), but Ruskin did not arrange or frame them.]