lii INTRODUCTION

The pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism created some stir in artistic circles, and produced in the same year a reply by E. V. Rippingille, to whose magazine Ruskin had been a contributor (see Vol. III. p. 645).¹ A little later came a lecture by the Rev. Edward Young, to which Ruskin refers in this volume (below, p. 163 n.). Ruskin himself was well pleased with his own production, which (as he says in a letter) had given him much trouble to compose. “I have the pamphlet Pre-Raphaelitism,” he wrote to his father from Venice (September 11, 1851), “and think it reads excellently.” That was not the opinion of his old enemy in the Athenæum, which made merry over the alleged inconsistencies in the argument, and waxed especially worth over the “vaingloriousness” of the author’s Preface.² Ruskin’s father duly passed on this critical chastening to his son.

“It is quite true,” wrote Ruskin in reply (September 9), “that preface reads haughty enough; but, as you say, I cannot write with a modesty I do not feel. In speaking of art I shall never be modest any more. I see more and more every day that all over Europe people are utterly ignorant of its first principles, and more

vol. iii. ch. iii. § 9; ch. iv. § 23; ch. § 8 n.; ch. x. § 21; ch. xvi. § 10 n., § 26; Appendix i.; vol. iv. ch. ii. § 5 (on their morbid choice of subjects); ch. iv. § 2; vol. v. pt. vi. ch. v. § 2, § 5 (on their leaf painting); ch. x. § 8; pt. viii. ch. iii. § 5. The gradual advance of the school and its influence on the whole range of contemporary art are traced in successive issues of Academy Notes. The Letters to Chesneau (in a later volume of this edition) contain many references to the Brotherhood; and in his later period, Ruskin devoted some passages to them-Lecture i. in The Art of England, and The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism.

¹ See Bibliographical Note on p. 338, below. The following reviews, among others, of Pre-Raphaelitism appeared in the press: The Daily News, August 13, 1851; Builder, September 23, 1851; Economist, August 23, 1851 (pp. 933-934); Athenæum, August 23, 1851, No. 1243, p. 908; Leader, August 23, 1851 (pp. 803-804); Spectator, October 4, 1851 (a note to an article on Pre-Raphaelitism); Art Journal, November 1851 (pp. 285- 286); very bitter on the “conceit or craft” of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, and characterising Ruskin’s pamphlet as a “maundering medley”; Irish Quarterly Review, December 1851, vol. 1, pp. 740-762; Scotsman, January 3, 1852; Art Journal, September 1, 1854 (referred to in Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. x. § 5 n.); Fraser’s Magazine, June 1856, vol. 53, pp. 686-693 (an article entitled “Pre-Raphaelitism from Different Points of View,” “reviewing Ruskin’s pamphlet, and What is Pre-Raphaelitism, by John Ballantyne, A.R.S.A., 1856; the article is signed ‘A. Y.-R. S.’ “)

² The following are passages from the review in the Athenæum (pp. 908-909): The author, it said, has “betaken himself to satisfy us that hot and cold are one, that licence and formality are alike to be reverenced, and that with Turner-olatry as strongly professed by him as ever, the canonization of St. Millais and other Pre-Raphaelites is entirely compatible, and on every ground to be defended.” With regard to the Preface, the reviewer said: “Rarely has any oracle’s ego been stretched father in the demand for blind faith and acquiescence than in this pamphlet;-rarely has ego been more vainglorious. ... The cool and unhesitating assumption in all this of a commission ‘to bind and to loose’ is something to turn the authority, whatever it might otherwise have been worth, into ridicule.”

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