The World's Best Essays, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Volume 9) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900) Jmong English prose writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, John Ruskin was scarcely equaled in the attractiveness of his style, and he was not equaled at all in the range of his thought and the variety of his productions. He is peculiarly identified with the second half of the century, for, with the exception of the first and minor edition of his "Modern Painters," nearly all his great works were published between 1849 and 1900. As an "art critic," he has had no equal among English writers. But it is with "art" as the expression of the whole idea impressed on humanity by nature that he deals, rather than with art in the limited sense in which it is generally understood. Students of any single art, as of painting or sculpture, are apt to dissent from his conclusions and to question the practical usefulness of his methods; and in the sense in which a professional painter criticizes technique, Ruskin is hardly to be classed as an art critic at all. He represents in England more nearly than any one else the larger view of art which Hegel in Germany did so much to make possible. It was from Car- lyle, however, rather than from any German master, that Ruskin received his most potent -inspiration. He may be called Carlyle's greatest pupil. Indeed in many things he is Carlyle's superior. His prose style shows traces of Carlyle's mannerisms, but it is more fluent, more melodious, and more persuasive, than that of Carlyle, whose intensity of expression is often more apt to excite admiration than to carry conviction. Like Carlyle, Ruskin was, in his political views, distrustful of freedom as a mode of progress. He defined his distrust in the assertion that men are only fit for freedom in the inverse ratio of their desire for it. In his later ...