MR. RUSKIN'S LITERARY STYLE.*
A FEW years ago, a little volume rose to the surface of the flood-tide of literature which has surged about the great Italian poet during the present century, entitled Dante Spiegato con Dante, wherein, we believe, passages of doubtful meaning are by some ingenious method confronted with others from the same poem of unimpeachable authenticity, with the result proclaimed triumphantly on the cover that Dante is explained by Dante. An author great enough to be studied • The Seven Lamps of Architecture. By John Ruskin, LL.D. Loudon : George Allen DVO.
individually and in all his writings—no sure test of greatness, we fear, as to the individual in the present day—is often his own best and most just commentator ; but we know of no case where, apart from his subject, the words and expressions of an author are so essential for an adequate description of his style of writing as in the case of Mr. Ruskin.
We have before us the new and cheaper edition of The Seven Lamps of Architecture, of the issue of which the less opulent of Mr. Ruskin's admirers have been long anxiously ex- pectant. It is a book which has come upon some in
the light of a revelation, the opening of a new world, and is thus spoken of by those not lightly roused to enthusiasm. Now it is within the power of many more to come under its charm, and we do not believe it has ceased to be potent, in spite of an increased taste for light current literature, and in spite of the petulant thrusts made at it by its author in the foot-notes which are here reprinted from the edition of 1880, and which, we suppose, represented then to his mind what he has somewhere beautifully called " the calm verdict of interposing years." This quotation. as associated in our own minds with the notes in question, having reference to subject, not style, need not be taken as an excep- tion to what we have urged above, that in matter of style, Ruskin is best described (unconsciously) by Ruskin.
Of conscious, often vituperative criticism on his earlier style of writing, however, we are also given full measure in the preface and notes of the present volume. In very few cases does it affect the quality of our admira- tion; but it is somewhat disturbing in the course of an impressive sentence or paragraph, to find a note calling it " useless sputter ;" or " very pretty, but, unfortunately, non- sense ;" or to have the language of the whole book referred to as " overlaid with gilding, and overshot too splashily and cascade fashion with gushing of words." The whole process is so very suggestive of having to brush away an importunate fly which persists in obscuring our vision of a beautiful land- scape ; and our difficulty is only increased by our reverence for Mr. Ruskin, which obliges us to examine into the nature of our small causes of annoyance, and to the finding of a decided amount of interest in them.
The passages where Mr. Ruskin's language is so fitly and yet so unconsciously descriptive of his own writing are very numerous. It seems that the beauties and wonders of Nature and Art which he has studied so long and so appreciatively have only changed their form in being uttered, and have, so to speak, been translated from one image of beauty to another in order that those whom Nature and works of Art do not move may be reached by the marvel of the language which describes them. To have been the medium of such a trans-
lation is a glory to which few have attained 1 Here in a few words he alludes directly to language itself. Speaking
of imitative ornament in architecture, he compares it to
"the extreme of grace in language ; not to be regarded at first, nor to be obtained at the cost of purpose, meaning,
force, or conciseness, yet, indeed, a perfection—the least of all perfections, and yet the crowning one of all—one which by itself, and regarded in itself, is a cox- combry, but is yet the sign of the most highly trained mind and power when it is associated with others." A piece of description which in its " extreme of grace" gains " mean- ing " and " force," occurs among many of like beauty in " The Lamp of Truth." Speaking of the transition in architecture, briefly styled, from the mass to the line, at a time when, after a period of sole concentration upon the openings or penetra- tions, the attention was diverted to the intervening tracery, as is the case in a window, until, after a pause of equal hold upon the mind, the tracery began in its turn altogether to usurp the whole attention of the architect, to its own detri- ment, he says, and the words have a marvellous descriptive force :—
" At the close of the period of pause, the first sign of serious change was like a low breeze, passing through the emaciated tracery, and making it tremble. It began to undulate like the threads of a cobweb lifted by the wind. It lost its essence as a structure of stone. Reduced to the slenderness of threads, it began to be considered as possessing also their flexibility. The architect was pleased with this his new fancy, and set himself to carry it out ; and in a little time, the bars of tracery were caused to appear to the eye as if they had been woven together like a net. This was a change which sacrificed a great principle of truth ; it sacrificed the expression of the qualities of the material ; and, however delightful its results in their first development, it was ultimately ruinous."
In explanation or definition, Mr. Ruskin's style is lucid and clear above everything,—take, for instance, his definition of the term " picturesque," which occurs in the sixth chapter. When dealing with the great moral and religious truths upon which he bases all his teaching, it is full of dignity and im- pressive fervour. Where he is moved to an indignation too great to find vent in petulant and explosive utterances, or too overmastering for the exquisite delicacy of his irony, the language of his wrath is keen and scathing, leading on, not unfrequently, to passages of a majestic sadness which have all the grandeur of a musical close. Such a one occurs at the end of the sixth chapter, and here even the accompanying foot-note can only wail in accordance : " No, indeed ! any more wasted words than mine throughout life, or bread cast on more bitter waters, I never heard of. This closing paragraph of the sixth chapter is the best, I think, in the book—and the vainest."
As might be expected from the great teacher and unfolder of the beauties of Nature, after which all Art can strive but feebly and be superior only in this, that to man it bears the impress of his fellow-man—an impress of doubtful worth, it would seem, and yet undeniable, as it ought to be—Mr. Ruskin's descriptions of Nature are the most perfect in language of all. The chapter twice before spoken of contains at its commencement a picture of Nature, and of the feeling of isolation awakened by Nature apart from human associa- tion, which for delicacy and splendour can, we think, hardly be equalled in all literature. Once read, it will not easily be forgotten. We cannot forbear from quoting the whole of it :—
" Among the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with peculiar gratitude, as having been marked by more than ordinary fulness of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura. It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness, of the Alps ; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be manifested in the earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in the rise of the long low lines of piny hills ; the first utterance of those mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly broken along the battlements of the Alps. But their strength is as yet restrained ; and the far-reaching ridges of pastoral mountain succeed each other, like the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet waters from some far off stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness pervading that vast monotony. The destructive forces and the stern expression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn. No frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures ; no splintered heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her forest; no pale, defiled, or furious rivers send their rude and changeful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams wind along their well-known beds ; and under the dark quietness of the un- disturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such company of joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the blessings of the earth. It was spring time, too; and all were coming forth in clusters crowded for very love ; there was room enough for all, but they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to be nearer each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star, closing every now and then into nebulae; and there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal processions of the Mois de Marie, the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy snow, and touched with ivy on the edges—ivy as light and lovely as the vine ; and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places; and in the more open ground the vetch, and comfrey, and mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst the golden softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on the edge of the ravine : the solemn murmur of its waters rose sud- denly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs ; and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above ; but with the fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own secluded and serious beauty ; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music ; the hills became oppres- sively desolate ; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory of the im- perishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue ; and the crests of the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joni, and the four-square keep of Granson."
Does not "the extreme of grace in language" here, united to " purpose, meaning, and force," become, though " the least of all perfections," " the crowning one of all " P
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