Realism is not to blame as much as the want of art.

Dickens invests the lowest classes with romance he makes them so attractive that you regret you were not born a pauper.' Ruskin discusses other British authors as well as the French school: 'I think we shall find that the French realistic school (and its imitation in England & America) fails signally. Of the three, Dickens avowedly wrote for a 'purpose' - to remedy abuse of a specific character - to denounce foundling houses, charity schools and courts of chancery, but while he succeeded in mitigating or correcting many of these wrongs, he necessarily pushed his realism too far - to the detriment of his art. The three greatest English novelists - Thackeray, George Eliot, and Dickens were minute in their copies of human nature & precise in their character dissection. Now contemporary fiction must be subject to the same laws as past fiction, only its worth must vary according to the merits of the present novelists. But realism is not the sole end, nor even the chief end of artistic creations if it were, we should prize a photograph more than one of Turner's landscapes. We may very properly call it the natural - the human - element of a work of art, and no doubt it is this element which pleases us most in all masterpieces. We find it in the paintings of Raphael just as unmistakably as in those Meissonier or Duran. Ruskin begins, 'Realism in any work of art. A presumably complete and untitled essay, possibly unpublished, on realism in art and its relation to morals. Twelve 5' x 8' pages written on 3 folded leaves, stitched together at the vertical fold, not signed but completely in Ruskin's hand.

The seven lamps of architecture summary