120 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

91. It was in such a state of society that the landscape of Claude, Gaspar Poussin, and Salvator Rosa attained its reputation. It is the complete expression on canvas of the spirit of the time. Claude embodies the foolish pastoralism, Salvator the ignorant terror, and Gaspar the dull and affected erudition.

It was, however, altogether impossible that this state of things could long continue. The age which had buried itself in formalism grew weary at last of the restraint; and the approach of a new æra was marked by the appearance, and the enthusiastic reception, of writers who took true delight in those wild scenes of nature which had so long been despised.

92. I think the first two writers in whom the symptoms of a change are strongly manifested are Mrs. Radcliffe¹ and Rousseau;² in both of whom the love of natural scenery, though mingled in the one case with what was merely dramatic, and in the other with much that was pitifully morbid or vicious, was still itself genuine and intense, differing altogether in character from any sentiments previously traceable in literature. And then rapidly followed a group of writers, who expressed, in various ways, the more powerful or more pure feeling which had now become one of the strongest instincts of the age. Of these, the principal is

unknown, chemistry in its infancy, botany a mere catalogue of healing herbs, anatomy a catalogue of the muscles of the human frame, uncompared with those of animals. Archæology was occupied wholly with the remains and the histories of Greece and Rome, and the glorious cathedrals and abbeys of Scotland, England, and France were abandoned to desecration and neglect, or used as quarries of building materials.”

With § 90 should be compared Modern Painters, vol. iii., chs. xvi., xvii. In his latest lecture on landscape, 1884 (reported in E. T. Cook’s Studies in Ruskin, pp. 283-294, and included in a later volume of this edition), Ruskin illustrates his point from Evelyn’s Journal, which is quoted also in Præterita, ii. §§ 2-3, 76.]

¹ [Ann Ward Radcliffe (1764-1823) published A Sicilian Romance, 1790; The Romance of the Forest, 1791; The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794; and The Italian, 1797. It appears that she never saw the Italian scenery which she depicts, but she was devoted to English scenery, making a driving tour with her husband every other year; she was one of the first to celebrate the beauties of the English Lakes. For other references to her place in the literary history of the romantic movement, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvii. § 7.]

² [For Ruskin’s view of Rousseau, see passages collected in Vol. IX. p. xxiii.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]