INTRODUCTION xxi

well as all authority, and believing as dangerously in the infallibility of sense as the Formalist in the inviolability of his law, multitudes of our landscape painters have been led into some narrow field of unconnected and imperfect truth, whose limits they cannot overpass, and which they believe to be itself the Universe. Thus, for instance, Constable saw nothing in Nature but coolness; De Wint saw nothing but tone. Both might at first have seen more had they so chosen, but they were content to rest in their own truth, until every other truth was shut out from them, and they became for ever blind to all true form and all refined colour. And the greater number of the secondrate landscape artists of the present day are men of this class, perceiving only small truths, and for ever repeating their proclamations of them, incapable either of discovery or of progress. And this evil has been further complicated by their having proclaimed truth only in one way-that is, by imitation-and forgetting that, as there is an ultimate truth, which only the soul perceives, and there is an ultimate expression, which only the soul employs, very often the most thoughtful and expressive art must be that which is in one sense least like Nature; that is to say, symbolical or comprehensive instead of imitative. To all this kind of expression, in which the true early schools were unrivalled, the modern artist is either utterly dead, or only unconsciously and imperfectly sensitive; and therefore in all I have written it has been necessary for me to meet alternately two forms of opposition just as antagonistic to each other as to truth-one that of the Formalists, who despised Nature, and the other that of the lower and more ignorant Naturalists, who despised symbolism-and therewith the whole range of the magnificent thoughts opened in work of the early ages.”¹

Ruskin’s reason for discarding this passage (which has been put together from various unarranged sheets of MS.) was no doubt that it carried him somewhat far afield from the immediate subject in the fourth chapter of this volume of The Stones of Venice. In this complete edition of his works-in which one of the principal objects is to bring the whole body of his writings into orderly relations,², the passage is of importance and interest, as guarding the reader against misapprehension, and as showing how the two principal books of the author’s earlier time-namely, Modern Painters, volumes i. and ii., and The Stones of Venice-connected

¹The MS. continues: “The nature of the antagonism between the modern Naturalism and the ancient Symbolism will be best understood by carefully examining it in a single instance-,” and then breaks off. The instance in question-that of the treatment of the olive in art-is given in the text (see p. 206).

²See General Preface in Vol. I., p.x.

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