General Characteristics.—­Ruskin was a champion of the Pre-Raphaelite school of art.  He used his powerful influence to free art from its conventional fetters and to send people direct to nature for careful loving study of her beautiful forms.  His chief strength lies in his moral enthusiasm and his love of the beautiful in nature.  Like his master, Carlyle, Ruskin is a great ethical teacher; but he aimed at more definite results in the reformation of art and of social life.  He moralized art and humanized political economy.

Some of his art criticisms and social theories are fanciful, narrow, and sometimes even absurd.  He did not seem to recognize with sufficient clearness the fact that immoral individuals might produce great works of art; but no one can successfully assail his main contention that there must be a connection between great art and the moral condition of a people.  His rejection of railroads and steam machinery as necessary factors in modern civilization caused many to pay little attention to any of his social theories.  Much of the gospel that he preached has, however, been accepted by the twentieth century.  He was in advance of his time when he said in 1870 that the object of his art professorship would be accomplished if “the English nation could be made to understand that the beauty which is indeed to be a joy forever must be a joy for all.”

At the age of fifty-eight, he thus summed up the principal work of his life:—­

“Modern Painters taught the claim of all lower nature on the hearts of men; of the rock, and wave, and herb, as a part of their necessary spirit life... The Stories of Venice taught the laws of constructive Art, and the dependence of all human work or edifice, for its beauty, on the happy life of the workman. Under this Last taught the laws of that life itself and its dependence on the Sun of Justice; the Inaugural Oxford Lectures, the necessity that it should be led, and the gracious laws of beauty and labor recognized, by the upper, no less than the lower classes of England; and, lastly, Fors Clavigera has declared the relation of these to each other, and the only possible conditions of peace and honor, for low and high, rich and poor...”

Ruskin has written remarkable descriptive prose.  A severe English critic, George Saintsbury, says of Ruskin’s works “...they will he found to contain the very finest prose (without exception and beyond comparison) which has been written in English during the last half of the nineteenth century... The Stones of Venice ... is the book of descriptive prose in English, and all others toil after it in vain.”

Ruskin could be severely plain in expression, but much of his earlier prose is ornate and almost poetic.  The following description of the Rhone deserves to be ranked with the painter’s art:—­