(Go to Summary of Review by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, 'Ruskin and the Quarterly', Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, June 1856, pp. 353-361.)
What a strangely different life a painter's would be to what I have conceived it, if the art of painting were of such nature as this writer thinks; for I have been used to think a painter different from other men... different from common men in two things: first, in a power of eye and hand; they see things differently from common men, remember them longer... over their hand they have wonderful mastery, strange feeling in it rather, which they can more or less, according as they are good craftsmen, guide, but which also more or less guides them, I mean their thoughts; sometimes restraining them, sometimes leading and lighting them as rhymes and measures do a poet: in this then the painter differs from all other men. (p. 352)
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In spite of muddled argument, often suicidal, he really thinks that art is, on the whole, something to amuse people; it is good for something; even so, this great art, which may God keep from ever falling to that rank! Yet taken so, it seems to me that mere architecture or pretty pattern painting on room-walls, or other art not imitative, would have this advantage over elaborate imitative painting, that it would be infinitely easier... but how much below true art, with full power of imitation would these be? Art, whose aim was to use all its powers, increasing and ever to increase them, in telling as man to man what we find not out for ourselves; sternly restraining them from mere waste in the display of "cleverness"... putting truth before all things, before any beauty, any power of moving men's minds, any rhetoric of art that is... Yet it is dismally certain that on the whole, this is what the reviewer degrades the art of painting to; something which amuses men. (pp. 355-56)
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A great part of this review is spent in defence of Claude and the Poussins, and the Dutch painters, of whom I only wish to say this: that I myself, and I believe very many others were in no small ecstacy [sic] at discovering that we need no more admire these men, for we always deemed their pictures ugly and uninteresting at least, and doubted if they were true... and we did not love pictures, though we paid some reverence to them. Then this man, John Ruskin, rose, seeming to use like a Luther of the arts. (p. 359)
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Not easily, therefore, O Critic, will you get us to think you superior to this man, John Ruskin; not easily will you get us to believe that every little slip in observation through four great volumes makes a man wrong at once and for ever; not easily that every fierce word, fiercely scornful against shams, is spoken in mere malice and petty spite, utterly unaccountable, even in the lowest man. (pp. 359-60)