Arrows of the Chace, vol. 1/2

63

That the critique was sufficiently bitter, may be gathered from the following portions of it: “These young artists have unfortunately become notorious by addicting themselves to an antiquated style and an affected simplicity in painting.... We can extend no toleration to a mere senile imitation of the cramped style, false perspective, and crude color of remote antiquity. We want not to see what Fuseli termed drapery ‘snapped instead of folded;’ faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated to skeletons; color borrowed from the jars in a druggist’s shop, and expression forced into caricature.... That morbid infatuation which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity, deserves no quarter at the hands of the public.”

64

A sacred picture (No. 518) upon the text, “And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends” (Zechariah xiii. 6). He had two other pictures in the Academy of 1850, namely, “Portrait of a gentleman and his grandchild” (No. 429), and “Ferdinand lured by Ariel” (No. 504)—Shakespeare, “Tempest,” Act ii. sc. 2.

65

See the next letter, p. 96. With regard to the religious tone of some parts of Mr. Ruskin’s early writings, it is worth noting that in the recent reissue (1880) of the “Seven Lamps of Architecture,” “some pieces of rabid and utterly false Protestantism … are cut from text and appendix alike.”—(Preface, p. 1; and see the note on one such omission on p. 19.) So again in the preface to the final edition of “Modern Painters,” issued in 1873, Mr. Ruskin stated that his objection to republishing unrevised the first two volumes of that work was that “they are written in a narrow enthusiasm, and the substance of their metaphysical and religious speculation is only justifiable on the ground of its absolute sincerity.”—See also “Sesame and Lilies,” 1871 ed., Preface, p. 2.

66

The pre-Raphaelite pictures exhibited in the Academy of this year, and referred to here and in the following letter, were the “Mariana” (No. 561) of Millais, “The Return of the Dove to the Ark” (No. 651), and “The Woodman’s Daughter” (No. 799), (see Coventry Patmore’s Poems, vol. i. p. 184—4 vol. ed., 1879), both also by Millais; the “Valentine receiving (rescuing?) Sylvia from Proteus” (No. 594), of Holman Hunt; and the “Convent Thoughts” (No. 493) of Mr. C. Collins, to which were affixed the lines from “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (Act i. sc. 1),

and the verse (Psalm cxliii. 5), “I meditate on all Thy works; I muse on the work of Thy hands.” The last-named artist also had a portrait of Mr. William Bennett (No. 718) in the Exhibition—not, however, alluded to in this letter. Mr. Charles Allston Collins, who was the son of William Collins, R.A., and the younger brother of Mr. Wilkie Collins, subsequently turned his attention to literature, and may be remembered as the author of “A Cruise upon Wheels,” “The Eye-Witness,” and other writings.

67

Compare “Modern Painters,” vol. i. p. 415, note, where allusion is made to the painters of a society which “unfortunately, or rather unwisely, has given itself the name of ‘Pre-Raphaelite;’ unfortunately, because the principles on which its members are working are neither pre- nor post-Raphaelite, but everlasting. They are endeavoring to paint with the highest possible degree of completion, what they see in nature, without reference to conventional established rules; but by no means to imitate the style of any past epoch.”