Living Age Volume 225 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 Excerpt: ...ignoramus could see, was something much more than rhetoric. lt was an intellectual feat which becomes more surprising the more one thinks of it, The first volume, we remember, was not only written when he was twenty-three, but when he had had, in some respects, a singularly narrow education. Ruskin, we may note, was at Oxford during the most exciting period of the "movement." His ablest contemporaries were all going through the Newman fever. Ruskin seems never to have been aware that such a person as Newman existed. He amused hlmeelf with geology and botany, and seems to have been as blind as became the son of a sound Evangelical winemerchant to the very existence of any spiritual ferment. That might seem to prove that he cared nothing for intellectual speculations. Yet, within a year or two, he was writing a book of which it may be said that no work pro duced by an English author of the same period of life has ever done so Hindi to set people thinking in a fresh direction. The generous desire to do justice to Turner, which prompted the book, led, l suppose, to the most triumphant vindication of the kind ever published. ln any case the argument was so forcibly put as to fall like a charge of lyddite into the camp of the somnolent critics of the day. The book, whatever its errors, is, l fancy, the only one in the language which treats to any purpose of what is called aesthetics. 1t is amusing to notice what difficulty the young critic has in finding any previous authorities to confute. He goes back to Locke's essay, and Burke on the "Sublime and Beautiful," and Alison on "Taste," and the papers by Reynolds in Johnson's "ldler," which have also, as he remarks, the high sanction of their editor. ln truth, English specula...