Ruskin MP I Notes

Blackwood's Magazine, November 1856

(Go to Summary of J.B. Atkinson, Blackwood's Magazine, November 1856, 'Mr Ruskin and his Theories - Sublime and Ridiculous', pp. 503-527.)

This volume [ Modern Painters III], in short, fully sustains Mr Ruskin's well-earned reputation as a critic, a dogmatist, and an honest sophist, and as such is well calculated to instruct the wise, alarm the timid, and mislead the weak. (p.503)

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The man who is inconsistent may be honest, but he cannot be trustworthy. He may contradict what he has once upheld, reverse his decisions, show himself in each character, and as the successive partisan of opposing factions, brilliant, ingenious, and honest of purpose. But no one can ultimately maintain such a career without prejudice to his reputation. He will be sought after and listened to as the skilful advocate, but distrusted as the authoritative judge... As a public instructor he will be unsound - as a public leader, unsafe; he may, as we have said, instruct the wise, but he will assuredly confound the simple and mislead the weak. (p.517)

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The first volume of Modern Painters was written expressly to show, that the world had been wholly misguided in their admiration of Claude and Gaspar Poussin, and that Turner was the most truthful and the greatest of landscape artists. This, the third volume, seems specially designed to prove that mankind have been equally led astray in their reverence for Raphael, and that the English brethren... inherit the wisdom of the past and inspire the hopes of the future. It naturally has become the cause of some astonishment and cavil, that two schools which, to all outward seeming, would appear to occupy the opposing poles, have been deemed by Mr Ruskin worthy of the same superlative praise. (p.519)

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Both Mr Ruskin and his works prove themselves to possess specially the stamp and vitality of genius, in that extravagances, which would assuredly have annihilated an ordinary writer, throw around him and his speculations an alluring èclat. (p.523)