mounting as he proceeds, 'absolutely now at last we find ourselves
without sight of God in all the world!'
In another place Mr. Ruskin's old enemy, Salvator, receives more lenient
treatment than of yore. True, he still regards him as a lost spirit,
rendering Michelet's, 'Ce damne Salvator' tenderly as 'that condemned
Salvator.' But Mr. Ruskin now perceives in him the 'last traces of
spiritual life in the art of Europe, the last man to whom the thought of
a spiritual existence presented itself as a conceivable reality. All
succeeding men, however powerful,--Rembrandt, Rubens, Vandyck,
Reynolds,--would have mocked at the idea of a spirit. They were men of
the world, they are never in earnest, and they are never appalled. But
Salvator was capable of pensiveness, of faith, and of fear.' 'He would
have acknowledged religion had he seen any that was true, anything
rather than that baseness which he did see.' 'If there is no other
religion than this of popes and cardinals, let us to the robber's ambush
and the dragon's den.' 'A little early sympathy, a word of true
guidance, perhaps had saved him. What says he of himself? "Despiser of
wealth and of death." Two grand scorns; but, oh! condemned Salvator, the
question is not for man what he can scorn, but what he can love!' Again
further on,--'In Salvator you have an awakened conscience and some
spiritual power contending with evil, but conquered by it and brought
into captivity to it.' Generally there is in this last volume a
disposition to judge of the painter's art merits, especially in relation
to his faculty of imitation, with more kindness and respect than in the
earlier volumes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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