DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61290#0113
RUSKIN’S MONISM
85
and not the drama, of life, which was immanent in
the beginnings and revealed with the maturity of
the Pre-Raphaelite movement. It has been re-
marked by an astute critic that three of the greatest
writers of the Victorian age—Ruskin, Carlyle, and
Browning—have been ruined as thinkers by their
ignorance of the law of Evolution, with all that it
implies of waste and suffering, of sacrifice and con-
flict and loss. Ruskin’s philosophy of nature was
founded upon an old and discredited cosmogony ;
and however remote may have been the thought
of the Pre-Raphaelite painters from the purely in-
tellectual conclusions of physical and mental science
in the nineteenth century, however apart they may
have lived from theological and ethical controversy,
it can safely be said that no contemporary artist
save Tennyson, in poetry or painting, has imbibed
more completely that spirit of mystical and irre-
sponsible conflict with Nature which they drew from
the atmosphere of mediaeval romance. They under-
stood that he who returns to Nature, returns, as
another writer has bluntly expressed it, to a great
many ugly things. “ We need,” says Mr. Frederic
Harrison, “as little think the natural world all
beauty as think it all horror. It is made up of
loveliness and ghastliness, of harmony and chaos,
of agony, joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers
are blind and deaf to the waste and the shrieks
which meet the seeker after truth. What a mass
85
and not the drama, of life, which was immanent in
the beginnings and revealed with the maturity of
the Pre-Raphaelite movement. It has been re-
marked by an astute critic that three of the greatest
writers of the Victorian age—Ruskin, Carlyle, and
Browning—have been ruined as thinkers by their
ignorance of the law of Evolution, with all that it
implies of waste and suffering, of sacrifice and con-
flict and loss. Ruskin’s philosophy of nature was
founded upon an old and discredited cosmogony ;
and however remote may have been the thought
of the Pre-Raphaelite painters from the purely in-
tellectual conclusions of physical and mental science
in the nineteenth century, however apart they may
have lived from theological and ethical controversy,
it can safely be said that no contemporary artist
save Tennyson, in poetry or painting, has imbibed
more completely that spirit of mystical and irre-
sponsible conflict with Nature which they drew from
the atmosphere of mediaeval romance. They under-
stood that he who returns to Nature, returns, as
another writer has bluntly expressed it, to a great
many ugly things. “ We need,” says Mr. Frederic
Harrison, “as little think the natural world all
beauty as think it all horror. It is made up of
loveliness and ghastliness, of harmony and chaos,
of agony, joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers
are blind and deaf to the waste and the shrieks
which meet the seeker after truth. What a mass