INTRODUCTION xxxvii

and Cockerell were both at work on Venice, I should not be; but the one works in India, the other in Greece.¹ No one is inclined to work here, but I.

So little true is it, then, that Ruskin was a professional word painter or popularity-hunting rhetorician. With him, as perhaps with all other masters of a noble style, the thing to be said came before the manner of saying it; though, to be sure, that also exercised in due place his most careful skill.

“I have aimed chiefly,” he says in the original preface to this volume, “at clear intelligibility; that any one, however little versed in the subject, might be able to take up the book, and understand what it meant forthwith.” In this aim the volume is eminently successful. To its accomplishment the author devoted the utmost care. There is not a page in the MS. which does not bear marks of his desire to clarify the turning of phrases, and to find the most simply appropriate words. But it is possible to be both clear and dull. Ruskin, however, could not be dull. Technical though most of the subject-matter is, the volume is redeemed from severity not merely by occasional passages of imaginative eloquence, but by originality of treatment and brightness of style. Nothing is taken for granted; the reader is at every stage brought down to the foundations and invited to exercise his own judgment, free from the authority or prejudices of the schools. And everywhere, too, the style, though restrained and simple, is instinct with vivacity and allusive interest. Ruskin was never pedestrian, though it may be admitted that he sometimes moved on stilts. The second volume of Modern Painters, for instance, is by no means free, as its author perceived,² from a certain affectation. With regard to the present volume, one of the least well-disposed of his contemporary critics had to admit that it was written “with great ease, spirit, and clearness. There is a racy vigour in every page.”³ Ruskin’s own criticism of the volume, on re-reading it at Venice, was given in a letter to his father (Sunday, Feb. 29, 1852) and may be allowed to stand:-

“Opened at [first] breakfast my Stones of Venice. It led me on, and I did not lay it down till near prayer time, and now I must finish my letter for the post. I find it a most interesting book-not at all dull-and it gives me a great impression of reserved power, on coming to it with a fresh ear. I am quite sure it will sell eventually.”

¹ For Fergusson, see below, p. 440; the reference here is to his Picturesque Illustrations of Ancient Architecture in Hindustan and other works on Indian antiquities. For Cockerell, see below, p. 430.

² See Vol. IV. pp. xliii.-iv.

³ Blackwood’s Magazine, September 1851, in the course of the article already mentioned (Vol. VIII. p. xxxix.).

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