DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0028
16
JOHN RUSKIN.
emotion, of many . . . studies is concentrated and ex-
hibited by the aid of long-studied, painfully chosen
forms; idealised in the right sense of the word, not by
audacious liberty of that faculty of degrading God’s
works which man calls his ‘imagination,’ but by perfect
assertion of entire knowledge . . . wrought out with
that noblest industry which concentrates profusion into
point, and transforms accumulation into structure. . . .
There is . . . more ideality in a great artist’s selection
and treatment of roadside weeds and brook-worn pebbles
than in all the struggling caricature of the meaner mind,
which heaps its foreground with colossal columns, and
heaves impossible mountains into the encumbered sky.”
Those columns and those mountains get no respect
from any one at present, but it must not be forgotten
that the book before us was in part written to over-
throw them.
All this is from the later-written preface. We come
next to Modern Painters, Part I. Section i, the earliest
important page of one of the greatest authors of our
incomparable literature. It is a laborious page, in
great part filled by one sentence explaining that public
opinion can hardly be right upon matters of art until,
with the lapse of time, it shall have accepted guidance.
The same chapter declares war explicitly upon the “old
masters ” in landscape, and the reader has to add to the
names of Salvator Rosa, Gaspar Poussin, and Claude,
those of Cuyp, Berghem, Both, Ruysdael, Hobbema,
Teniers (in landscape), Paul Potter, Canaletto, “ and
the various Van somethings and Back somethings, more
especially and malignantly those wTho have libelled the
JOHN RUSKIN.
emotion, of many . . . studies is concentrated and ex-
hibited by the aid of long-studied, painfully chosen
forms; idealised in the right sense of the word, not by
audacious liberty of that faculty of degrading God’s
works which man calls his ‘imagination,’ but by perfect
assertion of entire knowledge . . . wrought out with
that noblest industry which concentrates profusion into
point, and transforms accumulation into structure. . . .
There is . . . more ideality in a great artist’s selection
and treatment of roadside weeds and brook-worn pebbles
than in all the struggling caricature of the meaner mind,
which heaps its foreground with colossal columns, and
heaves impossible mountains into the encumbered sky.”
Those columns and those mountains get no respect
from any one at present, but it must not be forgotten
that the book before us was in part written to over-
throw them.
All this is from the later-written preface. We come
next to Modern Painters, Part I. Section i, the earliest
important page of one of the greatest authors of our
incomparable literature. It is a laborious page, in
great part filled by one sentence explaining that public
opinion can hardly be right upon matters of art until,
with the lapse of time, it shall have accepted guidance.
The same chapter declares war explicitly upon the “old
masters ” in landscape, and the reader has to add to the
names of Salvator Rosa, Gaspar Poussin, and Claude,
those of Cuyp, Berghem, Both, Ruysdael, Hobbema,
Teniers (in landscape), Paul Potter, Canaletto, “ and
the various Van somethings and Back somethings, more
especially and malignantly those wTho have libelled the