Selections From the Works of John Ruskin Part 7

Que sur mon front ce saphir etincelle: Vous me piquez, maladroite. Ah, c'est bien, Bien,--chere Anna! Je t'aime, je suis belle."

"Celui qu'en vain je voudrais...o...b..ier ...

(Anna, ma robe) il y sera, j'espere.

(Ah, fi! profane, est-ce la mon collier?

Quoi! ces grains d'or benits par le Saint-Pere!) II y sera; Dieu, s'il pressait ma main, En y pensant a peine je respire: Frere Anselmo doit m'entendre demain, Comment ferai-je, Anna, pour tout lui dire?...

"Vite! un coup d'oeil au miroir, Le dernier.--J'ai l'a.s.surance Qu'on va m'adorer ce soir Chez l'amba.s.sadeur de France."

Pres du foyer, Constance s'admirait.

Dieu! sur sa robe il vole une etincelle!

Au feu! Courez! Quand l'espoir l'enivrait, Tout perdre ainsi! Quoi! Mourir,--et si belle!

L'horrible feu ronge avec volupte Ses bras, son sein, et l'entoure, et s'eleve, Et sans pitie devore sa beaute, Ses dix-huit ans, helas, et son doux reve!

Adieu, bal, plaisir, amour!

On disait, Pauvre Constance!

Et l'on dansa, jusqu'au jour, Chez l'amba.s.sadeur de France.[65]

Yes, that is the fact of it. Right or wrong, the poet does not say.

What you may think about it, he does not know. He has nothing to do with that. There lie the ashes of the dead girl in her chamber. There they danced, till the morning, at the Amba.s.sador's of France. Make what you will of it.

If the reader will look through the ballad, of which I have quoted only about the third part, he will find that there is not, from beginning to end of it, a single poetical (so called) expression, except in one stanza. The girl speaks as simple prose as may be; there is not a word she would not have actually used as she was dressing.

The poet stands by, impa.s.sive as a statue, recording her words just as they come. At last the doom seizes her, and in the very presence of death, for an instant, his own emotions conquer him. He records no longer the facts only, but the facts as they seem to him. The fire gnaws with _voluptuousness_--_without pity_. It is soon past. The fate is fixed for ever; and he retires into his pale and crystalline atmosphere of truth. He closes all with the calm veracity,

They said, "Poor Constance!"

Now in this there is the exact type of the consummate poetical temperament. For, be it clearly and constantly remembered, that the greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties, acuteness of feeling, and command of it. A poet is great, first in proportion to the strength of his pa.s.sion, and then, that strength being granted, in proportion to his government of it; there being, however, always a point beyond which it would be inhuman and monstrous if he pushed this government, and, therefore, a point at which all feverish and wild fancy becomes just and true. Thus the destruction of the kingdom of a.s.syria cannot be contemplated firmly by a prophet of Israel. The fact is too great, too wonderful. It overthrows him, dashes him into a confused element of dreams. All the world is, to his stunned thought, full of strange voices. "Yea, the fir-trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying. 'Since thou art gone down to the grave, no feller is come up against us.'"[66] So, still more, the thought of the presence of Deity cannot be borne without this great astonishment.

"The mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands."[67]

But by how much this feeling is n.o.ble when it is justified by the strength of its cause, by so much it is ign.o.ble when there is not cause enough for it; and beyond all other ign.o.bleness is the mere affectation of it, in hardness of heart. Simply bad writing may almost always, as above noticed, be known by its adoption of these fanciful metaphorical expressions as a sort of current coin; yet there is even a worse, at least a more harmful condition of writing than this, in which such expressions are not ignorantly and feelinglessly caught up, but, by some master, skilful in handling, yet insincere, deliberately wrought out with chill and studied fancy; as if we should try to make an old lava-stream look red-hot again, by covering it with dead leaves, or white-hot, with h.o.a.r-frost.

When Young is lost in veneration, as he dwells on the character of a truly good and holy man, he permits himself for a moment to be overborne by the feeling so far as to exclaim--

Where shall I find him? angels, tell me where.

You know him; he is near you; point him out.

Shall I see glories beaming from his brow, Or trace his footsteps by the rising flowers?[68]

This emotion has a worthy cause, and is thus true and right. But now hear the cold-hearted Pope say to a shepherd girl--

Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade; Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade; Your praise the birds shall chant in every grove, And winds shall waft it to the powers above.

But would you sing, and rival Orpheus' strain, The wondering forests soon should dance again; The moving mountains hear the powerful call, And headlong streams hang, listening, in their fall.[69]

This is not, nor could it for a moment be mistaken for, the language of pa.s.sion. It is simple falsehood, uttered by hypocrisy; definite absurdity, rooted in affectation, and coldly a.s.serted in the teeth of nature and fact. Pa.s.sion will indeed go far in deceiving itself; but it must be a strong pa.s.sion, not the simple wish of a lover to tempt his mistress to sing. Compare a very closely parallel pa.s.sage in Wordsworth, in which the lover has lost his mistress:--

Three years had Barbara in her grave been laid, When thus his moan he made:--

"Oh, move, thou cottage, from behind yon oak, Or let the ancient tree uprooted lie, That in some other way yon smoke May mount into the sky.

If still behind yon pine-tree's ragged bough, Headlong, the waterfall must come, Oh, let it, then, be dumb-- Be anything, sweet stream, but that which thou art now."[70]

Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a water-fall to be silent, if it is not to hang listening: but with what different relation to the mind that contemplates them! Here, in the extremity of its agony, the soul cries out wildly for relief, which at the same moment it partly knows to be impossible, but partly believes possible, in a vague impression that a miracle _might_ be wrought to give relief even to a less sore distress,--that nature is kind, and G.o.d is kind, and that grief is strong; it knows not well what _is_ possible to such grief. To silence a stream, to move a cottage wall,--one might think it could do as much as that!

I believe these instances are enough to ill.u.s.trate the main point I insist upon respecting the pathetic fallacy,--that so far as it is a fallacy, it is always the sign of a morbid state of mind, and comparatively of a weak one. Even in the most inspired prophet it is a sign of the incapacity of his human sight or thought to bear what has been revealed to it. In ordinary poetry, if it is found in the thoughts of the poet himself, it is at once a sign of his belonging to the inferior school; if in the thoughts of the characters imagined by him, it is right or wrong according to the genuineness of the emotion from which it springs; always, however, implying necessarily _some_ degree of weakness in the character.

Take two most exquisite instances from master hands. The Jessy of Shenstone, and the Ellen of Wordsworth, have both been betrayed and deserted. Jessy, in the course of her most touching complaint says:--

If through the garden's flowery tribes I stray, Where bloom the jasmines that could once allure, "Hope not to find delight in us," they say, "For we are spotless, Jessy; we are pure."[71]

Compare with this some of the words of Ellen:--

"Ah, why," said Ellen, sighing to herself, "Why do not words, and kiss, and solemn pledge, And nature, that is kind in woman's breast, And reason, that in man is wise and good, And fear of Him who is a righteous Judge,-- Why do not these prevail for human life, To keep two hearts together, that began Their springtime with one love, and that have need Of mutual pity and forgiveness sweet To grant, or be received; while that poor bird-- O, come and hear him! Thou who hast to me Been faithless, hear him;--though a lowly creature, One of G.o.d's simple children that yet know not The Universal Parent, _how_ he sings!

As if he wished the firmament of heaven Should listen, and give back to him the voice Of his triumphant constancy and love; The proclamation that he makes, how far His darkness doth transcend our fickle light."[72]

The perfection of both these pa.s.sages, as far as regards truth and tenderness of imagination in the two poets, is quite insuperable. But of the two characters imagined, Jessy is weaker than Ellen, exactly in so far as something appears to her to be in nature which is not. The flowers do not really reproach her. G.o.d meant them to comfort her, not to taunt her; they would do so if she saw them rightly.

Ellen, on the other hand, is quite above the slightest erring emotion.

There is not the barest film of fallacy in all her thoughts. She reasons as calmly as if she did not feel. And, although the singing of the bird suggests to her the idea of its desiring to be heard in heaven, she does not for an instant admit any veracity in the thought.

"As if," she says,--"I know he means nothing of the kind; but it does verily seem as if." The reader will find, by examining the rest of the poem, that Ellen's character is throughout consistent in this clear though pa.s.sionate strength.[73]

It then being, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all respects that the pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that the dominion of Truth is entire, over this, as over every other natural and just state of the human mind, we may go on to the subject for the dealing with which this prefatory inquiry became necessary; and why necessary, we shall see forthwith.

[52] Three short sections discussing the use of the terms "Objective"

and "Subjective" have been omitted from the beginning of this chapter.

[53] Holmes (Oliver Wendell), quoted by Miss Mitford in her _Recollections of a Literary Life_. [Ruskin.] From _Astraea, a Poem delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale College_. The pa.s.sage in which these lines are found was later published as _Spring_.

[54] Kingsley's _Alton Locke_, chap. 26.

[55] I admit two orders of poets, but no third; and by these two orders I mean the creative (Shakspere, Homer, Dante), and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson). But both of these must be _first_-rate in their range, though their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in _quality_ no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind. There is quite enough of the best,--much more than we can ever read or enjoy in the length of a life; and it is a literal wrong or sin in any person to enc.u.mber us with inferior work. I have no patience with apologies made by young pseudo-poets, "that they believe there is _some_ good in what they have written: that they hope to do better in time," etc. _Some_ good! If there is not _all_ good, there is no good. If they ever hope to do better, why do they trouble us now? Let them rather courageously burn all they have done, and wait for the better days.

There are few men, ordinarily educated, who in moments of strong feeling could not strike out a poetical thought, and afterwards polish it so as to be presentable. But men of sense know better than so to waste their time; and those who sincerely love poetry, know the touch of the master's hand on the chords too well to fumble among them after him. Nay, more than this, all inferior poetry is an injury to the good, inasmuch as it takes away the freshness of rhymes, blunders upon and gives a wretched commonalty to good thoughts; and, in general, adds to the weight of human weariness in a most woful and culpable manner. There are few thoughts likely to come across ordinary men, which have not already been expressed by greater men in the best possible way; and it is a wiser, more generous, more n.o.ble thing to remember and point out the perfect words, than to invent poorer ones, wherewith to enc.u.mber temporarily the world. [Ruskin.]

[56] _Inferno_, 3. 112.

[57] _Christabel_, 1. 49-50.

[58] "Well said, old mole! can'st work i' the ground so fast?"--[Ruskin.]

[59] _Odyssey_, 11. 57-58.

[60] It is worth while comparing the way a similar question is put by the exquisite sincerity of Keats:--

He wept, and his bright tears Went trickling down the golden bow he held.

Thus, with half-shut, suffused eyes, he stood; While from beneath some c.u.mbrous boughs hard by With solemn step an awful G.o.ddess came, And there was purport in her looks for him, Which he with eager guess began to read Perplex'd, the while melodiously he said, _"How cam'st thou over the unfooted sea?"_

_Hyperion_, 3. 42.--[Ruskin.]

[61] See Wordsworth's _Peter Bell_, Part I:--

A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more.