I believe the Liverpool Academy has, in its decisions of late years, given almost the first instance on record of the entirely just and beneficial working of academical system. Usually such systems have degenerated into the application of formal rules, or the giving partial votes, or the distribution of a partial patronage; but the Liverpool awards have indicated at once the keen perception of new forms of excellence, and the frank honesty by which alone such new forms can be confessed and accepted. I do not, however, wonder at the outcry. People who suppose the pre-Raphaelite work to be only a condition of meritorious eccentricity, naturally suppose, also, that the consistent preference of it can only be owing to clique. Most people look upon paintings as they do on plants or minerals, and think they ought to have in their collections specimens of everybody’s work, as they have specimens of all earths or flowers. They have no conception that there is such a thing as a real right and wrong, a real bad and good, in the question. However, you need not, I think, much mind. Let the Academy be broken up on the quarrels; let the Liverpool people buy whatever rubbish they have a mind to; and when they see, as in time they will, that it is rubbish, and find, as find they will, every pre-Raphaelite picture gradually advance in influence and in value, you will be acknowledged to have borne a witness all the more noble and useful, because it seemed to end in discomfiture; though it will not end in discomfiture. I suppose I need hardly say anything of my own estimate of the two pictures on which the arbitrament has arisen, I have surely said often enough, in good black type already, what I thought of pre-Raphaelite works, and of other modern ones. Since Turner’s death I consider that any average work from the hand of any of the four leaders of pre-Raphaelitism (Rosetti, Millais, Hunt, John Lewis) is, singly, worth at least three of any other pictures whatever by living artists.
John Ruskin.
[From “The Witness” (Edinburgh), March 27, 1858.]
GENERALIZATION AND THE SCOTCH PRE-RAPHAELITES.
To the Editor of “The Witness.”
I was very glad to see that good and firm defence of the pre-Raphaelite Brothers in the Witness[77] the other day; only, my dear Editor, it appears to me that you take too much trouble in the matter. Such a lovely picture as that of Waller Paton’s must either speak for itself, or nobody can speak for it. If you Scotch people don’t know a bit of your own country when you see it, who is to help you to know it? If, in that mighty wise town of Edinburgh, everybody still likes flourishes of brush better than ferns, and dots of paint better than birch leaves, surely there is nothing for it but to leave them in quietude of devotion to dot and faith in flourish. At least I can see no other way of dealing. All those platitudes from the Scotsman, which you took the pains to answer, have been answered ten thousand times already, without the smallest effect—the kind of people who utter them being always too misty in their notions ever to feel or catch an answer. You may as well speak to the air, or rather to a Scotch mist. The oddest part of the business is, that all those wretched fallacies about generalization might be quashed or crushed in an instant, by reference to any given picture of any great master who ever lived. There never was anybody who generalized, since paint was first ground, except Opie, and Benjamin West, and Fuseli, and one or two other such modern stars—in their own estimates,—night-lights, in fact, extinguishing themselves, not odoriferously at daybreak, in a sputter in the saucer. Titian, Giorgione, Veronese, Tintoret, Raphael, Leonardo, Correggio,—never any of them dreamt of generalization, and would have rejected the dream as having come by the horn gate,[78] if they had. The only difference between them and the pre-Raphaelites is, that the latter love nature better, and don’t yet know their artist’s business so well, having everything to find out for themselves athwart all sorts of contradiction, poor fellows; so they are apt to put too much into their pictures—for love’s sake, and then not to bring this much into perfect harmony; not yet being able to bridle their thoughts entirely with the master’s hand. I don’t say therefore—I never have said—that their pictures are faultless—many of them have gross faults; but the modern pictures of the generalist school, which are opposed to them, have nothing else but faults: they are not pictures at all, but pure daubs and perfect blunders; nay, they have never had aim enough to be called anything so honorable as blunders; they are mere emptinesses and idlenesses—thistledown without seeds, and bubbles without color; whereas the worst pre-Raphaelite picture has something in it; and the great ones, such as Windus’s “Burd Helen,”[79] will hold their own with the most noble pictures of all time.
Always faithfully yours,
J. Ruskin.
By the way, what ails you at our pre-Raphaelite Brothers’ conceits? Windus’s heart’s-ease might have been a better conceit, I grant you;[80] but for the conceits themselves, as such, I always enjoy them particularly; and I don’t understand why I shouldn’t. What’s wrong in them?