It is the fashion nowadays among a certain set of writers, who form the remainder of the band of "Æsthetes" who followed Wilde in his teachings, to decry Ruskin, though, in the beginning of Wilde's "Æsthetic" movement, Wilde was an ardent pupil of this great master of English prose. We do not now accept Ruskin's artistic criticisms as adequate to our modern needs. Much water has flowed under the bridge since the days when Ruskin wrote, and his peculiar temperament, while appreciating much that was beautiful and worthy to be appreciated, was at the same time blind to much that is beautiful and worthy to be appreciated. Ruskin's criticism on the painting of Whistler would not be substantiated by a single writer of to-day. At the same time, all Ruskin's philosophy of art--that is to say, æsthetics--is as true now as it ever was. Ruskin showed, as the experience of life and art has shown and always will show--show more poignantly and particularly in the case of Oscar Wilde than in any other--that art and morality cannot be divorced, and that if all art is immoral, then art ceases to exist. "I press to the conclusion," he said, at the end of his famous lecture on the relation of art to morals, "which I wish to leave with you, that all you can rightly do, or honourably become, depends on the government of these two instincts of order and kindness, by this great imaginative faculty, which give you inheritance of the past, grasp of the present, authority over the future. Map out the spaces of your possible lives by its help; measure the range of their possible agency! On the walls and towers of this your fair city, there is not an ornament of which the first origin may not be traced back to the thoughts of men who died two thousand years ago. Whom will _you_ be governing by your thoughts, two thousand years hence? Think of it, and you will find that so far from art being immoral, little else except art is moral; that life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality: and for the words 'good' and 'wicked,' used of men, you may almost substitute the words 'makers' and 'destroyers.' Far the greater part of the seeming prosperity of the world is, so far as our present knowledge extends, vain: wholly useless for any kind of good, but having assigned to it a certain inevitable sequence of destruction and of sorrow. Its stress is only the stress of wandering storm; its beauty the hectic of plague: and what is called the history of mankind is too often the record of the whirlwind, and the map of the spreading of the leprosy. But underneath all that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the midst of it, the work of every man, _qui non accepit in vanitatem animan suam_, endures and prospers; a small remnant or green bud of it prevailing at last over evil. And though faint with sickness, and encumbered in ruin, the true workers redeem inch by inch the wilderness into garden ground; by the help of their joined hands the