No artist can afford to use another man's eyes; still less, another man's brain and heart.

Ruskin, great as an exponent, was in no sense a master of artists; and if he cheered on the men, who, he believed, were the best of the time, it did not follow that he should be saddled with the responsibility of directing them.
The famous pamphlet on "Pre-Raphaelitism" of August, 1851, showed that the same motives of Sincerity impelled both the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren and Turner and, in a degree, men so different as Prout, old Hunt, and Lewis.

All these were opposed to the Academical School who worked by rule of thumb; and they differed among one another only in differences of physical power and moral aim.

Which was all perfectly true, and much truer than the cheap criticism which could not see beyond superficial differences, or the fossil theories of the old school.

But Pre-Raphaelitism was an unstable compound, liable to explode upon the experimenter, and its component parts to return to their old antithesis of crude naturalism on the one hand, and affectation of piety or poetry or antiquarianism, on the other.