INTRODUCTION li

by reference to his praise of Turner to convict Ruskin of inconsistency in supporting the Pre-Raphaelites. In preparing his later pamphlet Ruskin met this criticism boldly by placing Turner, as it were, among the Pre-Raphaelites, and Millais, the chief of the Brotherhood, as a Turnerian in posse. “I am very glad,” he wrote to his father (Les Rousses, August 11, 1851), “you are satisfied with the little pamphlet, and the de trop of Turner is a good fault, as people have been accusing me of changing my mind.” The critics were not, however, convinced. Thus the Daily News objected that it was inconsistent to admire both Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, between whose methods there were “striking dissimilarities,” and on this review Ruskin wrote:-

“Sunday, September 21 [1851].-I rather wonder at Daily News attacking Pre-Raphaelitism unless they have committed themselves by first attacking the pictures. They talk of my inconsistency because they cannot see two sides at once: all people are apparently inconsistent who have a wide range of thought, and can look alternately from opposite points. The most inconsistent of all books is the Bible-to people who cannot penetrate it.¹ Nevertheless, I should have thought the Daily News people had wit enough to get at the thread of the story in P.-R.; it is not so profound as all that.”

Other critics made the same objections, and it was no doubt with these in his mind that Ruskin in revising his Lectures on Architecture and Painting once more claimed Turner as “the first and greatest of the Pre-Raphaelites,” (see below, p. 159), and emphasised as the characteristic common to them all a love of sincerity as opposed to conventional ideas of a spurious beauty (§ 133, p. 158). To the same subject Ruskin returned in the third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters (1856), and the reader who desires, in connexion with the letters and pamphlets in the present volume, to have the point further elucidated, may be advised to refer to the passages of that book.²

remains, even on his own admissions, to condemn these unfortunate attempts, and that the mere expression of a difference of taste does not suffice to shake any of those established rules of art and criticism upon which such works have been tried and found wanting. It will give us great pleasure if we find next year that these young painters are able to throw off the monkish disguise in which they have been fooling, and stand forth as the founders of the illustrious school which our correspondent announces to the world.”

¹ For some remarks of Ruskin’s developing this idea, see Introduction to Vol. V.

² See especially Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. x. § 5, comparing with it vol. iv. ch. iv. § 8. It may be useful to add some further references to the Pre-Raphaelites in other passages of Ruskin’s writings. For general references, see Modern Painters,

[Version 0.04: March 2008]