Reading Mr. Ruskin’s criticisms on Tintoret’s pictures in the Scuola di S. Rocco--on the Annunciation particularly--is very much like listening to a paper in a Browning Society. Perhaps the poet, perhaps the painter, did mean all that. It is manifestly impossible to prove they didn’t, inasmuch as death has removed them from any chance of interrogation. But by what mysterious and exclusive insight have Mr. Ruskin and the Browning student found it out? The interpretation is not suggested as feasible, it is asserted as a fact; though precisely how it has been reached we are not suffered to know. Many unkind and severe things have been said about judicial criticism, but Mr. Ruskin’s criticism is not judicial,--which infers an application of governing principles; it is dogmatic, the unhesitating expression of a personal sentiment. He shows you Giotto’s frescoes in the cloister of Santa Maria Novella; he pleads with you very prettily and charmingly to admire the Birth of the Virgin; he points out to you with rather puzzling precision exactly what the painter intended to imply by every detail of the work. This is pleasant enough; but suppose you don’t really care about the Birth of the Virgin when you see it; suppose you fail to follow the guiding finger that reveals to you its significance and beauty. What happens then? Mr. Ruskin retorts in the severest manner, and with a degree of scorn that seems hardly warranted by the contingency: “If you can be pleased with this, you can see Florence. But if not, by all means amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like; you can never see it.” So Florence with all its loveliness is lost to you, unless you can sufficiently sympathize with one small fresco. It would be as reasonable to say that all English literature is lost to you, unless you truly enjoy “Comus;” that all music is lost to you, unless you delight in “Parsifal.” It is the special privilege of ethical criticism to take this exclusive and didactic form; to bid you admire a thing, not because it is beautiful in itself, but because it has a subtle lesson to convey,--a lesson of which, it is urbanely hinted, you stand particularly in need. On precisely the same principle, you are commanded to cleave to Tolstoï, not because he has written able novels, but because those novels teach a great many things which it is desirable you should know and believe; you are bidden to revere George Meredith, not because he has given the world some brilliant and captivating books, but because these books contain a tonic element fitted for your moral reconstruction. If you do not sufficiently value these admirable lessons, then you are told, in language every whit as contemptuous as Mr. Ruskin’s, to amuse yourself, by all means, with Lever, and Gaboriau, and Jules Verne; for all higher fiction is, like the art of Florence, a sealed book to your understanding.