That which, in spite of faults, gives Ruskin's art-criticism its superiority over all rivals is, in the first place, the fulness of knowledge whence it springs, and, in the second place, the magnificence of the style in which it finds expression. Ruskin's continental travels in early manhood gave him an acquaintance with the best models, such as could not otherwise be acquired. He was moreover himself an artist, capable of good and accurate, if not of great work, and aware of what is possible and what is not possible in art; and his steady confidence in the existence of an inner meaning and a serious purpose in all art worthy of the name saved him from the thinness of substance and the dilettante trifling too apt to be seen in writings of that class.
But it is, first of all, beauty of style that the name of Ruskin suggests. His prose has been lauded as the finest in the English language. The English language contains so much that the absolutely finest is not easy to discover; nor will men ever agree as to the relative merits of simple and of ornate styles. There is not a little to be said for Oliver Goldsmith, even as against John Ruskin. The latter writes what is known as 'poetic prose;' and in doing so, though he is no mere imitator, he follows in the footsteps of men like De Quincey, who sought to obtain by prose effects commonly associated with poetry. This was in part a reversion, but a reversion with a difference. The eighteenth century had evolved a clear, direct, simple structure of sentence, well adapted to appeal to the understanding. It was not unfitted too, as many passages in Addison and Steele and other acknowledged masters prove, for an appeal to the emotions. Nevertheless, this was its weak side; and just as the lucid, bright, highly intellectual verse of the eighteenth century gave place to poetry more emotional and more varied, so the prose of the eighteenth century had to receive its complement in a prose more ambitious in design, more complex in structure and richer in tone. It was romanticism overflowing, as it were, the bounds of verse. The change was not so much the introduction of something wholly new as the grafting of old tendencies on a new stock. The complex structure and involved harmonies and wealth of imagination which the new writers hungered for were to be found in the prose of Milton and of Jeremy Taylor. On the other hand, the type of sentence established by the eighteenth century writers was too sound to be set aside. It remained the basis, while the older magnificence and daring were brought back and wedded to it.