IX

FREDERIC HARRISON

(1831)

RUSKIN AS MASTER OF PROSE

[Chapter II. of Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary Estimates, 1900.]

Is it indeed beyond hope that our generation should at last do entire justice to our brightest living genius, the most inspiring soul still extant amongst us, whilst he may yet be seen and heard in the flesh?

The world has long been of one mind as to the great charm in the writings of John Ruskin; it feels his subtle insight into all forms of beauty; and it has made familiar truisms of his central lessons in Art. But it has hardly yet understood that he stands forth now, alone and inimitable, as a supreme master of our English tongue; that as preacher, prophet (nay, some amongst us do not hesitate to say as saint), he has done more than as master of Art; that his moral and social influence on our time, more than his æsthetic impulse, will be the chief memory for which our descendants will hold him in honour.

Such genius, such zeal, such self-devotion, should have imposed itself upon the age without a dissentient voice; but the reputation of John Ruskin has been exposed to some singular difficulties. Above all, he is, to use an Italian phrase, uomo antico: a survival of a past age: a man of the thirteenth century pouring out sermons, denunciations, rhapsodies to the nineteenth century; and if Saint Bernard himself, in his garb of frieze and girdle of hemp, were to preach amongst us. in Hyde Park to-day, too many of us would listen awhile, and then straightway go about our business with a smile. But John Ruskin is not simply a man of the thirteenth cen

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tury: he is a poet, a mystic, a missionary of the thirteenth century romantic as was the young Dante in the days of his love and his chivalrous youth, and his Florentine rapture in all beautiful things, or as was the young Petrarch in the lifetime of his Laura, or the young Francis beginning to dream of a regeneration of Christendom through the teaching of his barefoot Friars.

Now John Ruskin not only is in his soul a thirteenth-century poet and mystic: but, being this, he would literally have the nineteenth century go back to the thirteenth: he means what he says he acts on what he means. And he defies fact, the set of many.ages, the actual generation around him, and still calls on them, alone and in spite of neglect and rebuffs, to go back to the Golden Ages of the Past. He would not reject this description of himself: he would proudly accept it. But this being so, it is inevitable that much of his teaching all the teaching for which he cares most in his heart - must be in our day the voice of one preaching

in the wilderness.

He claims to be not merely poet of the beautiful, but missionary of the truth; not so much judge in Art as master in Philosophy. And as such he repudiates modern science, modern machinery, modern politics — in a sense modern civilization as we know it and make it. Not merely is it his ideal to get rid of these; but in his own way he sets himself manfully to extirpate these things in practice from the visible life of himself and of those who surround him. Such heroic impossibilities recoil on his own head. The nineteenth century has been too strong for him. Iron, steam, science, democracy - have thrust him aside, and have left him in his old age little but a solitary and most pathetic Prophet, such as a John the Baptist by Mantegna, unbending, undismayed, still crying out to a scanty band around him — "Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand!"

I am one who believes most devoutly in the need of repentance, and in the ultimate, if not early, advent of a kingdom of the Beautiful and the Good. But like the world around me, I hold by the nineteenth century and not by the thirteenth : or rather I trust that some Century to come may find means of reconciling the ages of Steam and the ages of Faith, of combining the best of all ages in one. Unluckily, as do other prophets, as do most mystics, John Ruskin will have undivided allegiance. With him, it is ever all or none. Accept him and his lesson wholly, absolutely, without murmur or doubt — or he will have none of your homage.

And the consequence is that his devotees have been neither many, nor impressive. His genius, as most men admit, will carry him at times into fabulous extravagances, and his exquisite tenderness of soul will ofttimes seem to be but a second childhood in the eyes of the world. Thus it has come to pass that the grotesque side of this noble Evangel of his has been perpetually thrust into the forefront of the fight; and those who have professed to expound the Gospel of Ruskin have been for the most part such lads and lasses as the world in its grossness regards with impatience, and turns from with a smile.

As one of the oldest and most fervent believers in his genius and the noble uses to which he has devoted it, I long to say a word or two in support of my belief: not that I have the shadow of a claim to speak as his disciple, to defend his utterances, or to represent his thoughts. In one sense, no doubt, I stand at an opposite pole of ideas, and in literal and direct words, I could hardly adopt any one of the leading doctrines of his creed. As to mine, he probably rejects everything I hold sacred and true with violent indignation and scorn. Morally, spiritually, as seen through a glass darkly, I believe that his teachers and my teachers are essentially one, and may yet be combined in the greater harmony that is to be. But to all this I should despair of inducing him to agree, or even to listen with patience. He regards me, I fear, as an utterly lost soul, destined to nothing but evil in this world and the next. And did he not once long ago, in private communication and in public excommunication, consign me to outer darkness, and cover with indignant scorn every man and everything in which I have put my trust?

The world has long been of one mind, I have said, as to the beauty of Ruskin's writing; but I venture to think that even yet full justice has not been rendered to his consummate mastery over our English tongue: that it has not been put high enough, and some of its unique qualities have not been perceived. Now I hold that in certain qualities, in given ways, and in some rarer passages of his, Ruskin not only surpasses every contemporary writer of prose (which indeed is obvious enough), but he calls out of our glorious English tongue notes more strangely beautiful and inspiring than any ever yet issued from that instrument. No writer of prose before or since has ever rolled forth such mighty fantasias, or reached such pathetic melodies in words, or composed long books in one sustained strain of limpid grace.

any

It is indeed very far from a perfect style: much less is it in sense a model style, or one to be cultivated, studied, or followed. If any young aspirant were to think it could be imitated, better were a millstone hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea. No man can bend the bow of Ulysses: and if he dared to take down from its long rest the terrible weapon, such an one might give himself an ugly wound. Ulysses himself has shot with it wildly, madly, with preposterous overflying of the mark, and blind aiming at the wrong target. Ruskin, be it said in sorrow, has too often played unseemly pranks on his great instrument: is too often "in excess," as the Ethics put it, indeed he is usually "in excess"; he has used his mastery in mere exultation in his own mastery; and, as he now knows himself, he has used it out of wantonness rarely, but very rarely, as in The Seven Lamps, in a spirit of display, or with reckless defiance of sense, good taste, reserve of strength yet never with affectation, never as a tradesman, as a hack.

We need not enter here on the interminable debate about what is called "poetic prose," whether poetic prose be a legitimate form of expressing ideas. A good deal of nonsense has been talked about it; and the whole matter seems too much a dispute about terms. If prose be ornate with flowers of speech inappropriate to the idea expressed, or studiously affected, or obtrusively luscious - it is bad prose. If the language be proper to verse but improper to prose it is bad prose. If the cadences begin to be obvious, if they tend to be actually scanned as verses, if the images are remote, lyrical, piled over one another, needlessly complicated, if the passage has to be read twice before we grasp its meanings then it is bad prose. On the other hand, all ideas are capable of being expressed in prose, as well as in verse. They may be clothed with as much grace as is consistent with precision. If the sense be absolutely clear, the flow of words perfectly easy, the language in complete harmony with the thought, then no beauty in the phraseology can be misplaced — provided that this beauty is held in reserve, is to be unconsciously felt, not obviously thrust forward, and is always the beauty of prose, and not the beauty of verse.

It cannot be denied that Ruskin, especially in his earlier works, is too often obtrusively luscious, that his images are often lyrical, set in too profuse and gorgeous a mosaic. Be it so. But he is always perfectly, transparently clear, absolutely free from affected euphuism, never laboriously "precious," never grotesque, never eccentric. His besetting sins as a master of speech may be summed

up in his passion for profuse imagery, and delight in an almost audible melody of words. But how different is this from the laborious affectation of what is justly condemned as the "poetic prose" of a writer who tries to be fine, seeking to perform feats of composition, who flogs himself into a bastard sort of poetry, not because he enjoys it, but to impose upon an ignorant reader! This Ruskin never does. When he bursts the bounds of fine taste, and pelts us with perfumed flowers till we almost faint under their odour and their blaze of colour, it is because he is himself intoxicated with the joy of his blossoming thoughts, and would force some of his divine afflatus into our souls. The priestess of the Delphic god never spoke without inspiration, and then did not use the flat speech of daily life. Would that none ever spoke in books, until they felt the god working in their heart.

To be just, we should remember that a very large part of all that Ruskin treats concerns some scene of beauty, some work of fine art, some earnest moral exhortation, some indignant rebuke to meanness, wherein passionate delight and passionate appeal are not merely lawful, but are of the essence of the lesson. Ruskin is almost always in an ecstasy of admiration, or in a fervour of sympathy, or in a grand burst of prophetic warning. It is his mission, his nature, his happiness so to be. And it is inevitable that such passion and eagerness should be clothed in language more remote from the language of conversation than is that of Swift or Hume. The language of the preacher is not, nor ought it to be, the language of the critic, the philosopher, the historian. Ruskin is a preacher: right or wrong he has to deliver his message, whether men will stay to hear it or not; and we can no more require him to limit his pace to the plain foot-plodding of unimpassioned prose than we can ask this of Saint Bernard, or of Bossuet, of Jeremy Taylor or Thomas Carlyle.

Besides all this, Ruskin has shown that, where the business in hand is simple instruction, philosophical argument, or mechanical exposition, he is master of an English style of faultless ease, simplicity, and point. When he wants to describe a plain thing, a particular instrument for drawing, a habit of Turner's work, the exact form of a boat, or a tower, or a shell, no one can surpass him, or equal him, in the clearness and precision of his words. His little book on the Elements of Drawing is a masterpiece in lucid explanation of simple mechanical rules and practices. Præterita, Fors Clavigera, and the recent notes to reprinted works, contain