He represented what
was at first the Pre-Raphaelite School in painting, but afterwards a
much larger and looser Pre-Raphaelite School in poetry and prose. The
word "looser" will not be found unfair if we remember how Swinburne and
all the wildest friends of the Rossettis carried this movement forward.
They used the mediaeval imagery to blaspheme the mediaeval religion.
Ruskin's dark and doubtful decision to accept Catholic art but not
Catholic ethics had borne rapid or even flagrant fruit by the time that
Swinburne, writing about a harlot, composed a learned and sympathetic
and indecent parody on the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.
With the poets I deal in another part of this book; but the influence of
Ruskin's great prose touching art criticism can best be expressed in the
name of the next great prose writer on such subjects. That name is
Walter Pater: and the name is the full measure of the extent to which
Ruskin's vague but vast influence had escaped from his hands. Pater
eventually joined the Church of Rome (which would not have pleased
Ruskin at all), but it is surely fair to say of the mass of his work
that its moral tone is neither Puritan nor Catholic, but strictly and
splendidly Pagan.
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