Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/106

 and he could often analyse his impressions so subtly, that I have seemed to myself (perhaps it was an illusion) to have really learnt something from his remarks.

Ruskin's theory suggested many difficulties—which, indeed, is the chief use of a theory. Contemporary critics condemned him and his clients, the Pre-Raphaelites, as 'realists.' He was taken to hold, that is, that the merit of a work of art was measurable entirely by the quantity of 'truth' which it contained. I fancy that the employment of the word 'truth,' when what is really meant is 'likeness,' leads to as many fallacies as any known misuse of language. It seems, in particular, to make a moral duty of what is a simple question of artistic method. In the Modern Painters he is constantly struggling against this interpretation, though he never gets the point quite clear. There is a difficulty in carrying out the theory consistently. The painter, it seems, is to give the facts pure and simple, but then it is just because the facts signify ideas. The greater the realism, though it may sound paradoxical, the greater the idealism. If, indeed, the 'love of nature'—the intense joy and awe which Ruskin and Wordsworth felt in their early days—be interpreted to mean that the natural