Shakspeare, they will say (poor souls, in their naive obtuseness),—if Shakspeare came after Æschylus, and If Bacon came after Aristotle, did not Turner come after certain painters who may at least be supposed to stand in the same, or in a corresponding, relation to him, as did the son of Euphorion to "sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's Child," and the Stagyrite to the English Chancellor? Was there never a Salvator to limn such things as "the hills and forests?" never a Claude to record glimpses of the face of heaven, whose beauty makes us glad?
Salvator and Claude, it is time for these amiable dullards to know, are nehushtan in the Oxford Graduate's code of worship. "Claude embodies the foolish pastoral ism, Salvator the ignorant terror, and Gaspar the dull and affected erudition" of a weak and vicious age. After Titian and the Titianesgue period of "great ancient landscape," "you have a great gap, full of nonentities and abortions; a gulf of foolishness, into the bottom of which you may throw Claude and Salvator, neither of them deserving to give a name to anything."[1] "The Claude and Salvator painting was like a scene in a theatre, viciously and falsely painted throughout, and presenting a deceptive appearance of truth to nature; understood, so far as it went, in a moment, but conveying no accurate knowledge of anything, and, in all its operations on the mind, unhealthy, hopeless, and profitless."
As to the man Turner, of whom the lecturer discourses with genial and reverent kindness, it is pleasant to read an éloge so different to what tradition and anecdotage have accustomed us to suppose feasible. We hope the spirit of the "apology" is as true as it is tender, and are sure the peroration is as tender as it is true.
The Pre-Raphaelites are the subject of the fourth and last lecture. The chief part of it is occupied with an exposition of the historical relations of religion and art. It includes some disdainful strictures on so-called "historical painting." The only historical painting which Mr. Ruskin will hear of under that name, is such as those artists produce who give us the veritable things and men they see, and not draughts of imaginative composition. What fools we should have thought the Italians, thinks Mr. Ruskin, had they, instead of painting contemporary poets, popes, and politicians, left us nothing but imaginary portraits of Pericles and Cimon. Wilkie, he contends, was an historical painter, when he painted what his keen eye had seen in the homes and haunts of his own land. But when Haydon and others begin to preach about the grand historical and classical school, and "poor Wilkie must needs travel to see the grand school, and imitate the grand school,"—forthwith poor Wilkie, that was a true historical painter in esse, but weakly proposed himself as a grand historical painter in posse, was ruined—became a "lost mind." That grand school is charged with the ruin of other fine artists. Etty studied in it, and then "went to the grave, a lost mind." Flaxman,
- ↑ Pastoralism is the descriptive title by which Mr. Ruskin distinguishes the Claude and Salvator period from the three preceding ones of Giotto, Leonardo, and Titian, and the subsequent "grand climacteric" of Joseph Mallord William Turner. He makes it out to be essentially one with the false pastoralism of our "literature of the past century"—of which "the general waste of dulness" was relieved, he says, only by a few pieces of true pastoral, like the Vicar of Wakefield and—by a curious anachronism he adds—Walton's "Angler"
