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Something on Ruskinism; with a "Vestibule" in Rhyme
Something on Ruskinism with a Vestibule in Rhyme 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: RUSKINISM. Where apology would partake of impertinence, it is better to dispense with it than to offer it. Most assuredly none is required for canvassing the ... more »merits and qualifications of one who appears to set himself up as an Oracle in all matters of Art—at least, has got the character of being such. Or, if such inquiry be at all presumptuous, Mr. Ruskin himself is the very last person in the world who can, with any sort of decency, complain of its presumptuousness, whatever his particular admirers may do; since he has presumed to utter a great many unjustifiable assertions, not only in a dictatorial tone, but in a very offensive and scornful manner. A modern Jupiter Tonans, he fulminates his thunderbolt epithets to fall upon and instantly crush entire styles and schools of architecture in one indiscriminate ruin, as if nothing less than their utter extermination could appease his wrath against them. He himself deals too much in the grand " qu'ilmeurt" style, and more than once has recourse to the despotic emphasis of, " Off with his head ! so much for Buckingham." After such fashion is it that he pronounces sentence, with most convenient brevity, upon our English Perpendicular as "detestable," and upon the whole of the artof the Renaissance, (taking that term in its most comprehensive signification,) as "pestilent!"1 How far that same thunderbolt sort of criticism may have contributed to Mr. Buskin's popularity, as a writer on art, it is not easy to determine. Some, perhaps, relish the fun of it, taking his bolts to be only mere bounce, and his popularity itself to be of rather popgun quality—mere vox et pree- terea nihil. If popular he really be, his popularity has been thrust upon him; for most assuredly he cannot be charged with having sought it by toadying to genera...« less