John Ruskin - Selections From the Works of John Ruskin

This we do not call Poetry, merely because it is not invented, but the true utterance of a real person. [Ruskin.]

The closing lines of Wordsworth's Childless Father .

Iliad , 1. 463 ff., 2. 425 ff.; Odyssey , 3. 455 ff., etc.

Iliad , 6. 468 ff.

1625-1713. Known also as Carlo delle Madonne.

Claude Gelée [1600-82], usually called Claude Lorrain, a French landscape painter and etcher.

Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters , tells how Giotto, when a student under Cimabue, once painted a fly on the nose of a figure on which the master was working, the fly being so realistic that Cimabue on returning to the painting attempted to brush it away.

Guercino's Hagar in the Brera gallery in Milan.

Gerard Dow [1613-75], a Dutch genre painter; Hobbima [1638-1709], a Dutch landscape painter; Walpole [1717-97], a famous English litterateur; Vasari [1511-74], an Italian painter, now considered full of mannerisms and without originality, mainly famous as author of The Lives of the Painters .

Giotto.

Purgatorio , 12. 31.

The Society of Painters in Water-Colours, often referred to as the Old Water-Colour Society. Ruskin was elected an honorary member in 1873.

Three short sections discussing the use of the terms "Objective" and "Subjective" have been omitted from the beginning of this chapter.

Holmes (Oliver Wendell), quoted by Miss Mitford in her Recollections of a Literary Life . [Ruskin.] From Astræa, a Poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College . The passage in which these lines are found was later published as Spring .

Kingsley's Alton Locke , chap. 26.

I admit two orders of poets, but no third; and by these two orders I mean the creative (Shakspere, Homer, Dante), and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson). But both of these must be first -rate in their range, though their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in quality no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind. There is quite enough of the best,—much more than we can ever read or enjoy in the length of a life; and it is a literal wrong or sin in any person to encumber us with inferior work. I have no patience with apologies made by young pseudo-poets, "that they believe there is some good in what they have written: that they hope to do better in time," etc. Some good! If there is not all good, there is no good. If they ever hope to do better, why do they trouble us now? Let them rather courageously burn all they have done, and wait for the better days. There are few men, ordinarily educated, who in moments of strong feeling could not strike out a poetical thought, and afterwards polish it so as to be presentable. But men of sense know better than so to waste their time; and those who sincerely love poetry, know the touch of the master's hand on the chords too well to fumble among them after him. Nay, more than this, all inferior poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched commonalty to good thoughts; and, in general, adds to the weight of human weariness in a most woful and culpable manner. There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary men, which have not already been expressed by greater men in the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more noble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than to invent poorer ones, wherewith to encumber temporarily the world. [Ruskin.]

Inferno , 3. 112.

Christabel , 1. 49-50.

"Well said, old mole! can'st work i' the ground so fast?"—[Ruskin.]

Odyssey , 11. 57-58.

It is worth while comparing the way a similar question is put by the exquisite sincerity of Keats:—

See Wordsworth's Peter Bell , Part I:—

Jude 13.

Kings xxiii, 18, and Hosea x, 7.

Iliad , 3. 243. In the MS. Ruskin notes, "The insurpassably tender irony in the epithet—'life-giving earth'—of the grave"; and then adds another illustration:—"Compare the hammer-stroke at the close of the [32d] chapter of Vanity Fair —'The darkness came down on the field and city, and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart. A great deal might have been said about it. The writer is very sorry for Amelia, neither does he want faith in prayer. He knows as well as any of us that prayer must be answered in some sort; but those are the facts. The man and woman sixteen miles apart–one on her knees on the floor, the other on his face in the clay. So much love in her heart, so much lead in his. Make what you can of it." [Cook and Wedderburn.]

The poem may be crudely paraphrased as follows:—