Word: ruskinism
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...husband and wife, and the juxtaposition of twittering romantic expectations and tragic neuroses. Reading Rose's work is like turning a valentine to find graffiti underneath: not a pleasant experience, but a compelling one. The couples could not have been better chosen. Each contains one famous waiter: John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, nee Marian Evans. Three of the unions were devoid of passion, one degenerated into widely publicized scandal, and the sole happy one was the most shocking of all. George Eliot dared to live with a man without the sanction...
...seemed an archaic figure, the last of the gentlemen aesthetes, a man who-as it was said after Civilisation went to air nearly 15 years ago-tended to discuss the Renaissance as though he had commissioned it. Yet no English writer since Roger Fry, perhaps not since John Ruskin, had more effect on the way a general public thought and felt about...
...critic can make people see, but he can encourage them to look, and that was Clark's mission. Of course, he was not another Ruskin; he was incapable of Ruskin's attachments and enmities, his biblical moralizing and the descriptive genius of his prose. Nor was Clark, being essentially a 19th century critic at work in the 20th, able to bring to his work the array of insights about perception and psychology that distinguished contemporaries like Ernst Gombrich or Adrian Stokes. Clark was a pre-Freudian and, though he was too wise to try to dismiss the sort...
...come to a matter of character. John Ruskin said that only a good man can make a good artist, but that notion is disproved all the time. Good teaching, however, is another matter. No one knows how virtuous a person Milton was, but the speculation becomes irrelevant when applied to Paradise Lost, which, like every work of art, assumed a life of its own as soon as it was finished. The writer let it go. But the teacher of Paradise Lost cannot let it go; he becomes its life. Whether he sees the work as a brilliant display of versification...
...Ruskin was intermittently mad during the last years of his long life (he died in 1900), and during his periods of sanity he liked to talk babytalk. His biographer is indulgent, however, and her tone seems correct. Ruskin's passion, after all, was to teach Truth, and not once in 80 years did he doubt-for a modern reader, this is the wonder-that he knew what Truth...