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The Complete Works of John Ruskin (v. 22)
The Complete Works of John Ruskin - v. 22 Author:John Ruskin 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: CHAPTER HI. OF THE REAL NATURE OF GREATNESS OF STYLE. § 1. I Doubt not that the reader was ill-satisfied with the conclusion arrived at in the last chapter... more ». That " great art" is art which represents what is beautiful and good, may not seem a very profound discovery; and the main question may be thought to have been all the time lost sight of, namely, " What is beautiful, and what is good ? " No ; those are not the main, at least not the first questions; on the contrary, our subject becomes at once opened and simplified as soon as we have left those the only questions. For observe, our present task, according to our old plan, is merely to investigate the relative degrees of the beautiful in the art of different masters ; and it is an encouragement to be convinced, first of all, that what is lovely will also be great, and what is pleasing, noble. Nor is the conclusion so much a matter of course as it at first appears, for, surprising as the statement may seem, all the confusion into which Reynolds has plunged both himself and his readers, in the essay we have been examining, results primarily from a doubt in his own mind as to the existence of beaiuty at all. In the next paper I alluded to, No. 82 (which needs not, however, to be examined at so great length), he calmly attributes the whole influence of beauty to custom, saying, that " he has no doubt, if we were more used to deformity than to beauty, deformity would then lose the idea now annexed to it, and take that of beauty; as if the whole world shall agree that Yes and No shouldREAL NATURE OF GREATNESS OF STYLE. 47 change their meanings. Yes would then deny, and No would affirm! " § 2. The world does, indeed, succeed—oftener than is, perhaps, altogether well for the world—in making Yes mean No, and No mean Yes. But ...« less