xl INTRODUCTION

But this very fact made the pupil shy of laying hands on his father Parmenides, “being well aware,” as he says, “that Lord Lindsay knew much more about Italian painting than I did.” This is a form of compunction which, if admitted, would make short work of the reviewer’s trade, and Ruskin put it aside with the further reflection-which, let us hope, other reviewers may with equal justice entertain-that “no one else was likely to do it better.” But Ruskin was by no means satisfied with his experience as a contributor to anonymous periodicals. He moved uneasily in the restraints imposed by the form, and his MS. was “laboured.” Then Lockhart, the editor, asked him to “cut out all his best bits,” and for prudential reasons excised a critical reference of some severity to Gally Knight, one of John Murray’s authors.¹ On the whole Ruskin was not greatly satisfied with this exercise; which, however, in some respects must have been thoroughly congenial. Lord Lindsay’s book, in its descriptive passages, went over ground with which Ruskin was thoroughly familiar. The Review gave him occasion (as the footnotes to it in this edition will show) to use many of the entries in his diaries, and to re-inforce many of the points already made in the second volume of Modern Painters. And although the Review is not in all respects one of his most characteristic pieces, yet here and there the real man flashes out through the constrained disguise of the impersonal reviewer. He is severe upon Lord Lindsay, it will be seen, for his system-mongering. He had tried the thing himself, in the first and second volumes of Modern Painters, and was already beginning to find it irksome. “Much time is wasted by human beings,” he afterwards wrote, “on establishment of systems; and it often takes more labour to master the intricacies of an artificial connection, than to remember the separate facts which are so carefully connected.”² It is worth noticing that Ruskin’s early admiration of Michael Angelo finds full and eloquent expression in this essay (see especially § 61), which indeed throughout reflects the temper and the point of view of the second volume of Modern Painters.

The Review of Eastlake’s History of Oil-Painting, which comes next in this volume, appeared in the Quarterly of March 1848. It is of particular interest as showing the study which Ruskin had given to the

¹ See Præterita, ii. ch. x. § 193; and compare the Preface to Academy Notes, 1856. Ruskin there refers to the two Reviews for the Quarterly here reprinted as if they were his only anonymous articles. He forgot the paper on Prout (see below, p. xlii.). Another anonymous review, of a very slight character, was contributed to The Morning Chronicle, January 20, 1855 (see Arrows of the Chace, 1880, ii. 250, and a later volume of this edition).

² Preface to Modern Painters, vol. iii. ; and see also Vol. III. pp. xlvii., 93 n.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]