WHY MR. RTJSKIN FAILED AS A POET.

MISS THACKERAY gave one of her charming books the very unpromising title of " Miss Williams's Diva- gations." We can assign no better general reason why Mr. Ruskin failed as a poet, than by saying that the two heavy volumes of his poetry which Mr. G. Allen has just published, might properly be entitled Mr. Ruskin's Divagations.' There is really no wholeness in any one of these pieces of verse, no sign, that we have seen, in any one of them of having proceeded out of a vivid imaginative conception which filled his mind and heart, and which he was eagerly struggling to embody in words. And yet Mr. Ruskin, as we all know, is a great artist in speech. We could extract any number of pas- sages from his prose writings in which speech is used with the most consummate art, generally to call up some beautiful scene before the eye, sometimes to impress a true criticism on the mind, not unfrequently to satirise playfully or scornfully some weakness or worldliness of modern society. We open, for instance, his " Seven Lamps of Architecture," and find this passage in the chapter on " The Lamp of Memory,"— analysing the effect of the memory of the past on the im- pressions produced by a scene in the Jura,—a passage in which the splendour of the description almost rivals the magnificent vision which it seeks to realise for us :—" I came out presently on the edge of the ravine: the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly 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 en- deavoured, 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 oppressively 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 imperishable, 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 Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson." Or, again, we take up his " Modern Painters," and, opening it almost at random, we read this fine criticism on the Venetian school of painting :—" Separate and strong like Samson, chosen from its youth, and with the Spirit of God visibly resting on it,—like him it warred in careless strength, and wantoned in untimely pleasure. No Venetian painter ever worked with any aim beyond that of delighting the eye, or expressing fancies agreeable to himself, or flattering to his nation. They could not be either unless they were religious. But he did not desire the religion. He desired the delight. The Assumption ' is a noble 'picture, because Titian believed in the Madonna. But he did not paint it to make any one else believe in her. He painted it because he enjoyed rich masses of red and blue, and faces flushed with sunlight. Tintoret's Paradise' is a noble picture, because he believed in Paradise. But he did not paint it to make any one think of Heaven, but to form a beautiful termination for the hall of the Greater Council. Other men used their effete faiths and mean faculties with a high moral purpose. The Venetians gave their most earnest faith and the lordliest faculty, to gild the shadows of an antechamber or heighten the splendour of a holiday." Or, again, take this scornful description of the English worship of cruel energy and degraded toil con- tained in the criticism on Turner's picture of " The Garden of the Hesperides :"—" The greatest man of our England in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the strength and hope of his faith, perceives this to be the thing he has to tell us of utmost moment, connected with the spiritual world. In each city and country of past time, the master-minds had to declare the chief worship which lay at the nation's heart; to define it ; adorn it; show the range and authority of it. Thus in Athens we have the Temple of Pallas ; and in Venice The A ssumption of the Virgin ; ' here in England is our great spiritual fact for ever interpreted to us,—the Assumption of the Dragon. No St. George any more to be heard of ; no more dragon-slaying possible ; this child, born on St. George's day, can only make manifest the dragon, not slay him, sea-serpent as he is, whom the English Andromeda, not fearing, takes for her lord."

Now, in passages like these there is evidently the richest affluence of artistic speech, but it is not a kind of affluence that is at all disposed to keep within the strict laws of rhyme and rhythm, or to promote that distinct unity of effect which a poem requires. When we turn to Mr. Ruskin's poems, they are almost all divagations. They meander, and they meander with much less significance and continuity of purpose than his prose disquisitions, which, with all their wide offings, and their varied points of departure, and their splendid digres- sions, do generally converge to a definite point at last, and serve to impress some lessons or to proclaim some gospel. In his poetry it is not so ; there you see a good deal of Mr. Ruskin's gentle playfulness and of his mild caprice,—much more than of his evangelical zeal. His fairies and gnomes are the most arbitrary of beings ; his fancies have no real life in them ; his stories have no passion ; his musings no heart ; and even his descriptions no fire. For example, take this bit of vituperation against the sensuality and slothfulness of a mountain population, in which Mr. Ruskin appears to be quite in earnest, and yet expresses himself in language much more marked by caprice than by force :—

"Have you in heaven no hope—on earth no care—

No foe in hell—ye things of stye and stall, That congregate like flies, and make the air Rank with your fevered sloth—that hourly call The sun, which should your servant be, to bear Dread witness on you, with uncounted wane

And unregarded rays, from peak to peak

Of piny-gnomoned mountain moved in vain ?

Behold, the very shadows that ye seek For slumber, write along the wasted wall Your condemnation. They forgot not, they, Their ordered function, and determined fall, Nor useless perish. But you count your day By sins, and write your difference from clay In bonds you break, and laws you disobey. God ! who hast given the rocks their fortitude, The sap unto the forests, and their food And vigour to the busy tenantry Of happy, soulless things that wait on Thee, Hast Thou no blessing where Thou gav'st Thy blood ? Wilt Thou not make Thy fair creation whole ?

Behold and visit this Thy vine for good,—

Breathe in this human dust its living soul."

" Piny-gnomoned " is an affected phrase which, we suppose, tries to convey the idea that the shadows of the pine-trees on the mountain-side tell the height of the sun, much in the same way in which the shadows of the gnomon on a sun-dial tells the hour of the day. But that just shows how the fetters of verse appear to constrain Mr. Ruskin into attempting to express what he utterly fails to express. In the compara- tive freedom of his poetic prose, he would probably have given us a telling picture of the impressive effect of these natural sun-dials. He is more readable when he attempts less, and simply chats in rhyme, as in the following " rhyming letter : " "I hope you will not (moved by the delay

Of mine epistle to this distant day) Accuse me of neglect ; for if you do, I can retort an equal blame on you: For I, who in my study's height sublime See every wave of calmly passing time

Flow softly onward in one beaten track— My only journeys into town and back,— Horace or Homer, all I choose between,— Dulwich or Norwood my sole change of scene,—

Find every hour exactly like its brother, And scarce can tell the days from one another; And cannot find a single circumstance, As I review, with a reverted glance, The fast flown autumn months from end to end,

To fill a page, or interest ev'n a friend;

While you, whose distant wandering steps have trod

The blue lake's glittering shingle and the sod—

The short, crisp sod, which on the mountains high

Braves the unkindness of their cloudy sky,—

Whose velvet tuftings most I love to feel

Result elastic underneath my heel—

You, sir, I say, whose eye hath wandered o'er Bala's blue wave and Harlech's golden shore, And seen the sun declining towards the west Light the lone crags of Idris' triple crest, And watched the restless waters dash and swell By Pont y Mynach,—should have much to tell."

But even there, there is not only little poetry, but at least one bathos, the extraordinary flatness of saying that the writer loves to feel the velvet battings of the sod " result elastic" underneath his heel. No true poet could have used the word " result" in such a context.

The truth seems to be that, instead of feeling the rhythm of metre and rhyme a stimulus to his imagination, Mr. Ruskin found it a heavy fetter upon his imagination. His poetic prose delights in its rhetorical freedom. He loves to pile up touches, each of which adds to the total effect, very much as every line in a good drawing adds to the total effect ; and as a rule, the methods of rhetoric are not only not the methods of poetry, but are essentially different in kind from the methods of poetry. Rhetoric climbs, where poetry soars. Rhetoric takes long sweeps, where poetry concentrates its meaning in a single word. Rhetoric loves to use a little exaggeration, where poetry has a passion for the simplicity of absolute truth. Verse cramps the rhetorician and fires the poet. Mr. Ruskin's prose is, we admit, the very poetry of rhetoric, but his verse is very far from being the rhetoric of poetry. The fixed laws and restrained passion of verse do not suit his genius. He loves a freer hand, and less urgent need to strive for unity of effect. When he writes in verse, he becomes either trivial or unnatural, because he cannot well take those wide sweeps and cumulate so freely those minute effects which are the very materials of his art. He can chat in verse with a certain grace and playfulness. One of the best bits we have found in his verse is the description of the shattering and morally con- founding effect of a sneeze. But when he addresses himself to any task of higher passion, he needs plenty of elbow-room, for he cannot make up by intensity and concentration for the want of space wherein to wheel and charge, as it were, against the idols which he wishes to reprobate and denounce. Judged by his verse, Mr. Ruskin would seem to be a man without passion, and full of whimsical caprice. Judged by his prose, there is in him a higher and richer rhetoric than any English writer since Jeremy Taylor has held at his command.