Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/436

418 again, "another naturally great man, with as true an eye for nature as Raphael,—he stumbles over the blocks of the antique statues—wanders in the dark valley of their ruins to the end of his days. He has left you a few outlines of muscular men straddling and frowning behind round shields. Much good may they do you! Another lost mind!" In the highway of his argument, the critic will have a larger following than in the "mazy error" of its byways.

The main Pre-Raphaelite principle he defines to be that of absolute, uncompromising truth in all that is done, obtained by wording everything, down to the most minute detail, from nature, and from nature only; or where imagination is necessarily trusted to, by always endeavouring to conceive a fact as it really was likely to have happened, rather than as it most prettily might have happened. He discriminates, of course, between the Brethren in their habits of adhesion to this principle, not all being equally severe in carrying it out. He allows that so long as they paint only from nature, however carefully selected and grouped, their pictures can never have the characters of the highest class of composition; but then he thinks any advance, from their present style into that of the great schools of composition, whether possible or not, is at this period certainly not desirable. He agrees that they are, as a body, characterised by a total insensibility to the ordinary and popular forms of artistic gracefulness, which occasionally renders their work comparatively impleasing; and looks forward to the eclecticism of the future to remedy this defect. But on the whole he maintains, that "with all their faults, their pictures are, since Turner's death, the best—incomparably the best—on the walls of the Royal Academy;" and that "such works as Mr. Hunt's Claudio and Isabella have never been rivalled, an some respects never approached, at any other period of art."

If we have not given specimens of the wise, and truthful, and eloquent passages which enrich this little volume, it is not from indifference or want of sympathy. It is a book so sure to be, sooner or later, in everybody's hands—a book that the frivolous must read in order to be au courant with the mere talk of the day, and that the thoughtful will ponder with very different motives and results—that a more detailed notice of it, in this place, and at this not very early period, were superfluous. Whether Mr. Ruskin judged well in aiding and abetting the current erase for public lectures, admits of a doubt: not so the ease and taste with which he adapted his method and style to the occasion. Our mistrust of the lecturing mania is, we know, quite unfashionable, laughable, priggish, "and all that;" but we own to a crotchety share in Elia's general "detestation" of lectures "as superficial and vapid substitutes for quiet reading:" yet Elia could go to hear Hazlitt and even Thelwall; and as our only acquaintance with this Ruskin course has been in the shape of "quiet reading," we have no present right to complain. Besides, the lecture-room is perhaps indispensable now-a-days to the man who would agitate, agitate, agitate—though at the risk of more haste, less speed; and Mr. Ruskin is an Agitator, of no vulgar but of a very decided type.