National Review, July 1856

(Go to Summary of review by George Richmond, 'Pictures and Picture-Criticism' National Review, July 1856, pp. 80-106.)

We have no means of knowing how far the early practice of these remarkable young painters [the Pre-Raphaelites] was prompted by Mr Ruskin's first volume. But from dates and internal evidence, we should be inclined to refer it mainly to the influence of that volume, which closed with a piece of advice involving the very essence of Ruskinism. In it he tells our young artists that 'they should go to nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thought but how best to penetrate her meaning; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing'.

Now Mr Ruskin assuredly was not the first teacher of art who had sent the young artist 'to nature'. That had been the universal direction of all the lecturers on painting since the foundation of the Academy. But the direction in their mouths had been coupled with stringent cautions. To 'select nothing' was the very last precept that would have been ventured on from an academic chair. When the academic professor sent his students to nature, he took care to insist on their first coming to him for spectacles through which to look at her... And if the student of our own day, when told to 'study nature', turned from the precepts of his teacher to his practice, he found himself in presence of a huge contradiction. Constable stood alone in the Academy as the sturdy champion of English landscape - neither gilt by the sun of Claude no embrowned by the twilight of Gaspar Poussin; and Constable's pictures hung unsold on the walls of his painting-room. Turner was beyond students' comprehension: the reverent wondered, the irreverent scoffed, before his mysterious canvasses. (pp. 84-83)

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In proportion as God's work is vaster and grander than man's, it exercises at once repulsion and attraction on those within the sphere of its influence... Whatever introduces law into its mighty maze, and furnishes a clue to its inner meaning, increases this attractive power, and diminishes that repulsive force. Mr Ruskin has, for some fourteen years past, aimed at this with a zeal that has been vouchsafed to few, a knowledge rarely equalled, an eloquence seldom surpassed, and an industry that has never faltered. He has shown the soul underlying the ribs of death in the laws that regulate delicate curvatures of the primal granite, the great heart that pulses in the ebbing and flowing of the sea, the love that clothes the meadows with delight, the unity that gives beauty to man and beast, to forest tree and wayside weed. In one word, he has preached God in the physical world, and proclaimed with a voice of power, that all which we worship in art and love in nature is typical of God's attributes - His infinity, His comprehensiveness, His permanence, justice, energy, and law. (pp. 83-84)

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His power has been that of a guide to nature. (p.84)

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Such, as it seems to us, in a broad and general way, is the work which Mr Ruskin has proposed to himself, and has in great measure achieved. But not from this point of view has he been judged. The Quarterly and the Edinburgh Reviews have opened their pages to two long articles in which Mr Ruskin is attacked with a fierceness which we had hoped was banished from respectable periodical literature. Throughout these papers he is assailed as an unsound theoriser about art and an untrustworthy critic of pictures... The bitter hostility of both the reviewers to the author of Modern Painters may explain their choice of the point of view from which they pass judgment on Mr Ruskin's teaching. As it was their aim to wound, they have selected the enemy's weakest points. It must be confessed that the Oxford graduate... lays himself singularly open to attacks which he provokes as much by his unmeasured praise of some painters as by his towering contempt and savage denunciation of others. Totally intent on the immediate subject of his chapter, he scorns any attempt at elaborate reconcilement of assertions which, read separately, contradict each other. The article in the Edinburgh Review is a string of such apparent contradictions, served up with a strong garnish of abuse. The article in the Quarterly is evidently by a superior hand, and in it there is an attempt at argument. But the argument is all directed against Mr Ruskin as a theorist about art; there is no reference to his functions, or his services, as an interpreter of nature... Now those who wish to do Mr Ruskin kindly justice must judge him, not as the propounder of a theory of art, but as the advocate of a particular discipline for the artist. (pp. 84-85)

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But to recognise this service of Mr Ruskin's did not suit the purpose of the Edinburgh and Quarterly reviewers. They took up their pens, not to judge, but to condemn - not to guide the public to a true and complete appreciation of the writer, but to damage and pain the man. These articles are the last workings of that old leaven of conventionalism which, in the earlier days of the same periodicals, gave sourness to Gifford's savage condemnation of Keats, and fermented in Jeffrey's contemptuous criticism of Wordsworth. We feel bound to protest, in the name of our craft, against the spirit which prompts such reviewing. It exhibits on the part of the writers the most odious faults which they charge against Mr Ruskin - malignity, unfairness, irreverence, and impertinence. Having entered this protest against these discreditable papers, we readily admit our agreement with much that is said incidentally in the Quarterly about the incompleteness of Ruskin's theory of art, and the unfairness of his way of judging pictures. (p. 85)

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The unsoundness of Mr Ruskin's analogy between 'painter' and 'poet' does not lie where the reviewer looks for it. It arises not from any essential distinction between the arts of painting and poetry, but from the difference in comprehensiveness of the word 'painter' and the word 'poet'. The language of pictures comprehends both the prose and the poetry of pictorial utterance, just as the language of words includes the prose and poetry of literature. The true analogy lies between 'picture-speaking man' and 'word-speaking man'... Raphael is a poet-painter, or painter-poet; Ostade is a prose-painter, or pictorial prosaist. (p.86-87)

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Man, with Mr Ruskin, is subordinate to the earth he inhabits. Mr Ruskin nowhere speaks as if he had either much love of men or much hope for them. Most human interests and occupations seem to him trivial, if not base and abominable. Only those faculties and acts of men which relate to worship appear to find a really congenial appreciation from Mr Ruskin. He is ever scornful of common pleasures and material progress, and he exhibits little feeling for the majesty and loveliness of form in man or woman. This incompleteness of sympathy is the great key to the aberrations of Mr Ruskin... But with incomplete sympathies Mr Ruskin unites uncommon intensity of feeling, great logical acuteness, singular command of illustration, rare eloquence of style, and a power of concentrating all these on the matter immediately in hand... This penetrative and illustrative faculty, exerted, as it is wont to be, on one thing at a time, throws a light on the object under observation so intense that for the moment nothing else is visible... It may be likened... to the ray of the electric light, so sharply defined that all beyond its pencil falls into depth of darkness, while the narrow spot on which it impinges, and the straight path in which it travels, are white with a brightness not their own. As you turn the lantern, this pencil shifts its direction without waning of its radiance, and so may be made to light up in turn every part of every object within its range of illumination. It may thus in time show all that is round about us; but to get our complete view we must take into account all the successive illuminations of the narrow and unwavering beam. This explains those seeming inconsistencies in Mr Ruskin's teaching of which the Edinburgh reviewer makes such triumphant use. Each apparently inconsistent statement is but that side of the truth on which Mr Ruskin's mind was concentrated for the moment. (pp. 87-88)

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Mr Ruskin's truth is the truth which the spirit and tendency of these times called for; and the force and felicity of style and variety of knowledge with which it has been urged by the Oxford graduate entitle him fairly to be called the Luther of painting. He is the asserter of that individualism which is in art what private judgment is in theology; and he has risen up against the popes and doctors of painting, as the Wittemberg monk rose up against the popes and doctors of the Church. He has already received the honours of persecution; and if some ancient academicians and connoisseurs had the aid of the secular arm to put down art-heresy, we might see the bulky volumes of Modern Painters blazing in Trafalgar Square, with Mr Ruskin perhaps beside the pile, in a san-benito of Pre-Raphaelite canvases, waiting his turn to feed the faggots. (p.93)

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