Blackwood's Magazine, December 1855

(Go to summary of review by Margaret Oliphant, 'Modern Light Literature - Art', Blackwood's Magazine, December 1855, pp. 702-17.)

To discuss our modern critics of art, and not to discuss Mr Ruskin, would be an impossibility; and the man who has so distinctly set his mark upon one branch of literature is no contemptible antagonist. (p.703)

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Notwithstanding, Mr Ruskin's claims to be considered among the foremost of our modern writers upon art are indisputable. He has made a very elaborate theory of the laws and principles of painting; he has slain outright the greater number of people, excepting wholly only Turner and various members of the water-colour society who have for a thousand years or so practised the same. He has written sundry books, full of detached passages of the most remarkable eloquence, and is himself a landscape-painter (in words) of singular power (p.704).

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Mr Ruskin's theory, moreover, has attained to years; and Modern Painters, buried under libraries of later books, no longer lies upon anybody's operating table, but has subsided into its appropriate shelf like any other harmless volume, and shakes the world no more. (p.704)

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We will let Mr Ruskin explain for himself what an 'idea of imitation' is:-

Whenever anything looks like what it is not, the resemblance
being so great as nearly to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable
surprise, an agreeable excitement of mind, exactly the same in its
nature as that which we receive from juggling. Whenever we per-
ceive this in something-produced by art, that is to say, whenever
the work is seen to resemble something which we know it is not,
we receive what I call an idea of imitation. Why such ideas are
pleasing, it would be out of our present purpose to inquire; we
only know that there is no man who does not feel pleasure in his
animal nature from gentle surprise, and that such surprise can be
excited in no more distinct manner than by the evidence that a
thing is not what it appears to be.' Now two things are requisite
to our complete and most pleasurable perception of this; first, that
the resemblance be so perfect as to amount to a deception; secondly,
that there be some means of proving at the same moment that it is
a deception. The most perfect ideas and pleasures of imitation are,
therefore, when one sense is contradicted by another, both bearing
as positive evidence on the subject as each is capable of alone; as
when the eye says a thing is round, and the finger says it is flat;
they are, therefore, never felt in so high a degree as in painting,
where appearance of projection, roughness, hair, velvet, &c. are given
with a smooth surface, or in wax-work, where the first evidence of
the senses is perpetually contradicted by their experience; but the
moment we come to marble, our definition checks us, for a marble
figure does not look like what it is not: it looks like marble, and
like the form of a man, but then it is marble, and it is the form
of a man. It does not look like a man, which it is not, but
like the form of a man, which it is. Form is form, bona fide and
actual, whether in marble or in flesh-not an imitation or resem
blance of form, but real form. The chalk outline of the bough
of a tree on paper, is not an imitation ; it looks like chalk and
paper-not like wood, and that which it suggests to the mind is
not properly said to be like the form of a bough, it is the form
of a bough. Now, then, we see the limits of an idea of imitation;
it extends only to the sensation of trickery and deception occasioned
by a thing's intentionally seeming different from what it is; and the
degree of the pleasure depends on the degree of difference and the
perfection of the resemblance, not on the nature of the thing
resembled. The simple pleasure in the imitation would be precisely
of the same degree (if the accuracy could be equal), whether the
subject of it were the hero or his horse. There are other collateral
sources of pleasure, which are necessarily associated with this, but
that part of the pleasure which depends on the imitation is the
same in both.
Ideas of imitation, then, act by producing the simple pleasure of
surprise, and that not of surprise in its higher sense and function,
but of the mean and paltry surprise which is felt in jugglery. These
ideas and pleasures are the most contemptible which can be received
from art[.]
Go to the passage in Modern Painters I

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He looks bravely in your face all the time... but... he has managed to slip the wicked weapon up his sleeve; and when you come to see him in full career against artistical honours and reputations, you will find out the value of these two sets of principles, and their newly-established antagonism. The knot of difficulty is cut in the most expeditious manner possible. When Mr Ruskin dislikes a picture, he calls all its truthfulness, Imitation - when it has the wonderful good fortune to please him, he receives all its imitation as Truth. (p. 705)

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Not very long very long ago the felicity of listening to a course of lectures delivered by Mr Ruskin was permitted to ourselves... In the course of his illustrations the lecturer exhibited an outline drawing of a figure bending a bow. It was by no means a handsome figure; and as we perfectly understood that it was intended we should laugh at it, we did laugh... then Mr Ruskin called upon us to remark those debased lines, the entire ignorance of grace, of nature, and of drawing exhibited in this unfortunate outline... This figure said the lecturer - and we perceived we were coming to a grand climax - this miserable instance of ignorance and falsehood in art, was a faithful transcript enlarged... of one of the figures in one of the most famous landscapes of - Claude Lorraine!... how delighted we were to put down Claude. (p.708)

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We believe it is a common enough idea to imagine Mr Ruskin a great authority and influence in art. We cannot for a moment consent that he is so. Mr Ruskin is a great writer; and if it pleased him to expatiate upon smoky chimneys instead of great pictures, we do not doubt for a moment that he could charm us into interest, and make grander 'effects' of smoke and flame, the fierce tricks of the fire-spirit, and the picturesque glimmers of the fireside light, than anything yet achieved by Mr Millais... but the majority of Mr Ruskin's admirers, to our thinking, admire and throng after him, not for, but despite of his principles in art... the real reputation of Mr Ruskin, which, so far as we are able to judge, is not founded upon any real wisdom or insight into the mysteries of art, but is a pure issue of the powers of literature, - a tribute, not to able theories or judicious investigation, or wise criticism, but to a wealth of language, and fulness of fancy - the gifts of the great writer -seldom before brought into vigorous exercise in this separate field. (p.708)

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Perhaps Mr Ruskin himself is not unaware of the unusual closeness of resemblance between his own remarks and the preceding observations of a man [A.W.Pugin] whom he does not hesitate to patronise with disdainful superiority. We recommend the volume [ Contrasts ] to his notice, if he does not know it; it is not a great literary composition like his own works, but it throws a suspicious shadow over some very glowing paragraphs of his, and cetainly exhibits a prior critic and an earlier insight than his own. (p.716)

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We feel sure that all who knew the Rev. John Eagles will agree with us when we say that a better specimen of the highly-accomplished old English clergyman and country gentleman could not be met with. (p.717)

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