DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0052
40
JOHN RUSKIN.
with the current of deliberate and intentional decision.
“I do not think,” said Socrates, “that any one who
should now hear us, even though he were a comic
poet, would say that I talk idly or discourse on
matters that concern me not ” •, but the comic, or more
properly the derisive, humour of English writers has
not forborne to accuse Ruskin of that which Socrates
had confidence would be forborne in his own regard :
to charge with vanity an inquiry that concerned man
and the honour of his works. And if the question
has been held so vain, what common contempt has
not mocked the answer framed in the too instant need
that a great mind had to be satisfied !
In preparation of his task of referring what we see
to be beautiful to what we believe to be Eternal,
Ruskin stays upon the old speculation as to the nature
of the beauty that so delights our discerning senses
as to cause us to refer the felicity to qualities of God.
Among attempted “ definitions ” of beauty (which are
descriptions rather than definitions) he does not cite
the scholastic sentence “ Splendour of Truth,” which
would have pleased him had he known it, but which
does not explain why the aspect of truth is only some-
times splendid; he does quote the vaguer “kind of
felicity” of Bacon, which fails to explain the kind.
“ Nothing is more common,” Ruskin says in the following
volume, “ than to hear people who desire to be thought
philosophical, declare that 1 beauty is truth ’ and ‘ truth
is beauty.’ I would most earnestly beg every sensible
JOHN RUSKIN.
with the current of deliberate and intentional decision.
“I do not think,” said Socrates, “that any one who
should now hear us, even though he were a comic
poet, would say that I talk idly or discourse on
matters that concern me not ” •, but the comic, or more
properly the derisive, humour of English writers has
not forborne to accuse Ruskin of that which Socrates
had confidence would be forborne in his own regard :
to charge with vanity an inquiry that concerned man
and the honour of his works. And if the question
has been held so vain, what common contempt has
not mocked the answer framed in the too instant need
that a great mind had to be satisfied !
In preparation of his task of referring what we see
to be beautiful to what we believe to be Eternal,
Ruskin stays upon the old speculation as to the nature
of the beauty that so delights our discerning senses
as to cause us to refer the felicity to qualities of God.
Among attempted “ definitions ” of beauty (which are
descriptions rather than definitions) he does not cite
the scholastic sentence “ Splendour of Truth,” which
would have pleased him had he known it, but which
does not explain why the aspect of truth is only some-
times splendid; he does quote the vaguer “kind of
felicity” of Bacon, which fails to explain the kind.
“ Nothing is more common,” Ruskin says in the following
volume, “ than to hear people who desire to be thought
philosophical, declare that 1 beauty is truth ’ and ‘ truth
is beauty.’ I would most earnestly beg every sensible