Ruskin's criticism of art thus treats almost exclusively the representation of natural objects —a representation unmodified except upon con siderations moral or religious. In the place of asthetic standards he unblushingly substitutes on the one hand religious or ethical standards, and on the other hand standards which may be called °physical." In accordance with the first, he looks to art for a didactic content, for asser tions or statements as explicit as those of literature; commends this "literary" quality in pictures like Tintoretto's, whose real excellence lies elsewhere; and makes many excursions into the field of poetics and literary criticism: dis cussing at length, for example, that distinction which had exercised the romantic school of literary critics in the early 19th century— the distinction between Imagination and Fancy; discussing, again, in a celebrated passage, the 'Pathetic Fallacy" •f the poets, based as it is upon the assumption that men's moods have a sympathetic analogue and symbol in nature. Again, from Ruskin's assumption that nature is morally perfect arise his impatience of classi cal and Renaissance attempts to improve upon her by °idealization" or "generalization," and his inconsistent condemnation of Salvator Rosa and of the Dutch and Flemish realists because when they might have painted to edification, they chose to record "ugly" or "base" things.
In fact, ultimately even the religious and ethical standards fail to modify Ruskin's in sistence upon representation; he uses them rather, as in the cases just noted, to confirm his preferences, glorifying as accordant with the divine scheme whatever art appeals to him, and denouncing whatever art does not as tainted with sin. Likewise, though in his theoretical analysis he allows a considerable place to 'idealization" and °imagination"— once even speaking of "over-fidelity"— yet practically he is always minimizing their functions and ex plaining them away. It is with distinct relief, and with a certain unction and fervor, that he always returns to representation pure and simple, detailed and loving and humble, which after all is his religion of art.
This ultimate triumph of the "physical" criterion has several interesting results. En grossed in representation, Ruskin disregards or contemns abstract design and spatial pattern, and is almost insensible to Oriental art, which so largely depends upon these. Hence his later disparagement of Whistler and of "le Japon isme." Hence also his commendation of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, whose mediaevalist revolt against the Renaissance, and whose love of detailed naturalistic representation ("fore ground"), coincided with his own, but which he rather reinforced and championed than origi nated or even decisively influenced. Hence, finally, the net historical effect of 'Modern Painters' in making for sincerity and humility against the sentimentality, cockiness, prettiness, and emphase of contemporary British art.
These evils, thought Ruskin, were traceable, as has been suggested, to the Post-Raphaelites of the Renaissance tradition, with their sup posed tricks and insincerities and "rules of com position" and "practice of the schools." He must clear all that away, old masters and all especially the Bolognese eclectics, and Claude, Poussin, and Hobbema— and establish in their place nature and Turner. The underlying as
sumptions of his method have been shown; its most important and most bulky actual product remains to be mentioned: the remarkable col lection of observations of natural phenomena which Ruskin adduces to illustrate Turner's rich and various fidelity to nature. Large por tions of the first, third, fourth, and fifth volumes, are given to description, in word and in picture, of nature's endless phases — the effects of wind and mist, the structure of rocks and the radiation of light, the organization and appear ance of mountains, of clouds, of tree-trunks, boughs, and leaves, of waves and foam and reflections in water.
The reader who is interested in 'Modern Painters' for its place in Ruskin's life or for its own evolution in time as a piece of writing will of course read it as it was written; but if he approach it for pleasure he will be well advised to begin with the third volume. The first two volumes, to be sure, contain some of its most gorgeous passages — like the celebrated word-pictures of Aricia and of Turner's 'Slave Ship.' Yet these, after all, are purple patches; and the body of the text is undistinguished, or distinguished chiefly by a crude parallel structure in couplets — a parallelism often both forced in thought and actually bungled in exe cution. Ruskin's early fondness for inordi nately long sentences, again here, too often leads him to jumble into a single perfervid period the material that should have formed a paragraph: instead of ordering it from sentence to sentence into separate articulated stages of thought, he pours it all volubly out into one heavy lump of a sentence loosely glued together by and, but, for, only, as, so and so that.
But in the 10 years between the publication of the second and the publication of the third and the fourth volumes Ruskin's style under went a sobering and clarifying change. He had had much practice in writing— had meanwhile published 'Seven Lamps of Architecture' (1849), 'The Stones of Venice' (1851-53), (Pre-Raphaelitism) (1851), and 'Lectures on Architecture and Painting' (1854) ; and his ideas having gained acceptance, he now spoke with more of authority and plainness, and less of the hot rhetoric of controversy. Here also he virtually abandoned the dreary scholasticism of the aesthetic system he had so aridly set forth in the second volume. The reader, then, who plunges in medics res is more likely to reach at once the heart of (Modern Painters.' He will feel at once the essential nobility of a book which, often wilful and mistaken, is never mean and is often tonic. He will realize it as the outcome of many years' disinterested study both of nature and of painting, as a whole hearted appreciation of Turner, who would be great upon any theory however arid, and as a valuable collection of natural facts and appear ances, recorded by a loving observer, inde fatigable students, and exquisite draughtsman, whose wilfulness vanishes when he is face to face with nature. Here lie its real strength and lasting value: it will probably stand as a great apprecation of a very great painter and, as a veritable treasury of things observed.