SOURCE: Wellek, René. “English Criticism.” In A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, Volume 3: The Age of Transition, pp. 86-149. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965.

In the following excerpt, Wellek describes John Ruskin's literary criticism, which is based on his aesthetic theories on modern painting.

John Ruskin (1819-1900)

Ruskin seems hardly to belong to a history of literary criticism. One can of course collect his opinions on poets and writers and come up with a body of pronouncements that, not unexpectedly, reflects the taste of the early Victorian age: Shakespeare is admired for his universality and objectivity; Wordsworth for his love of nature proclaiming the glory of God; Scott, “the greatest literary man whom that age produced,”¹ for his humanity, sanity, and landscape painting. Ruskin appreciated Tennyson and the two Brownings, and he supported and defended Dante Gabriel Rossetti both as a painter and poet. He was carried...