[Sidenote: Sensuousness of his style.]
Many people regard the style of Ruskin as his chief claim to
greatness. If the time ever come when men no longer study him for
sermons in stones, they will nevertheless turn to his pages to enjoy
one of the most gorgeous prose styles of the nineteenth century. For a
parallel to the sensuous beauties of Ruskin's essays on art, one turns
instinctively to poetry; and of all the poets Ruskin is perhaps likest
Keats. His sentences, like the poet's, are thick-set with jeweled
phrases; they are full of subtle harmonies that respond, like a
Stradivarius, to the player's every mood. In its ornateness Ruskin's
style is like his favorite cathedral of Amiens, in the large stately,
in detail exquisite, profuse, and not without a touch of the
grotesque. It is the style of an artist.
[Sidenote: Ruskin's method of construction in description.]
A critical fancy may even discover in the construction of his finest
descriptions a method not unlike that of a painter at work upon his
canvas. He blocks them out in large masses, then sketches and colors
rapidly for general effects, treating detail at first more or less
vaguely and collectively, but passing in the end to the elaboration of
detail in the concrete, touching the whole with an imaginative gleam
that lends a momentary semblance of life to the thing described, after
the manner of the "pathetic fallacy." Thus it is in the famous
description of St. Mark's:[11] we are given first the largest general
impression, the "long, low pyramid of coloured light," which the
artist proceeds to "hollow beneath into five great vaulted porches,"
whence he leads the eye slowly upwards amidst a mass of bewildering
detail--"a confusion of delight"--from which there slowly emerge those
concrete details with which the author particularly wishes to impress
us, "the breasts of the Greek horses blazing in their breadth of
golden strength and St. Mark's lion lifted on a blue field covered
with stars." In lesser compass we are shown the environs of Venice,[12]
the general impression of the "long, low, sad-coloured line," being
presently broken by the enumeration of unanalyzed detail, "tufted
irregularly with brushwood and willows," and passing to concrete
detail in the hills of Arqua, "a dark cluster of purple pyramids." In
the still more miniature description of the original site of Venice[13]
we have the same method:
"The black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath
the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor
and fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the
tideless pools and the sea-birds flit from their margins with a
questioning cry."
[Sidenote: His love of color.]
Equally characteristic of the painter is the ever-present use of
color. It is interesting merely to count the number and variety of
colors used in the descriptions. It will serve at least to call the
reader's attention to the felicitous choice of words used in
describing the opalescence of St. Mark's or the skillful combination
of the colors characteristic of the great Venetians in such a sentence
as, "the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armor shot angrily under
their blood-red mantle-folds"[14]--a glimpse of a Giorgione.
[Sidenote: His love of prose rhythm.]
He is even more attentive to the ear than to the eye. He loves the
sentence of stately rhythms and long-drawn harmonies, and he omits no
poetic device that can heighten the charm of sound,--alliteration, as
in the famous description of the streets of Venice,
"Far as the eye could reach, still the soft moving of stainless
waters proudly pure; as not the flower, so neither the thorn nor
the thistle could grow in those glancing fields";[15]
the balanced close for some long period,
"to write her history on the white scrolls of the sea-surges and
to word it in their thunder, and to gather and give forth, in the
world-wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of the East, from
the burning heart of her Fortitude and splendour";[16]
and the tendency, almost a mannerism, to add to the music of his own
rhythm, the deep organ-notes of Biblical text and paraphrase. But if
we wish to see how aptly Ruskin's style responds to the tone of his
subject, we need but remark the rich liquid sentence descriptive of
Giorgione's home,
"brightness out of the north and balm from the south, and the stars
of evening and morning clear in the limitless light of arched
heaven and circling sea,"[17]
which he has set over against the harsh explosiveness of
"Near the south-west corner of Covent Garden, a square brick pit
or wall is formed by a close-set block of house to the back
windows of which it admits a few rays of light--"
the birthplace of Turner.
[Sidenote: His beauty of style often distracts from the thought.]
But none knew better than Ruskin that a style so stiff with ornament
was likely to produce all manner of faults. In overloading his
sentences with jewelry he frequently obscures the sense; his beauties
often degenerate into mere prettiness; his sweetness cloys. His free
indulgence of the emotions, often at the expense of the intellect,
leads to a riotous extravagance of superlative. But, above all, his
richness distracts attention from matter to manner. In the case of an
author so profoundly in earnest, this could not but be unfortunate;
nothing enraged him more than to have people look upon the beauties of
his style rather than ponder the substance of his book. In a passage
of complacent self-scourging he says:
"For I have had what, in many respects, I boldly call the
misfortune, to set my words sometimes prettily together; not
without a foolish vanity in the poor knack that I had of doing
so, until I was heavily punished for this pride by finding that
many people thought of the words only, and cared nothing for their
meaning. Happily, therefore, the power of using such language--if
indeed it ever were mine--is passing away from me; and whatever I
am now able to say at all I find myself forced to say with great
plainness."[18]
[Sidenote: His picturesque extravagance of style.]
But Ruskin's decision to speak with "great plainness" by no means made
the people of England attend to what he said rather than the way he
said it. He could be, and in his later work he usually was, strong
and clear; but the old picturesqueness and exuberance of passion were
with him still. The public discovered that it enjoyed Ruskin's
denunciations of machinery much as it had enjoyed his descriptions of
mountains, and, without obviously mending its ways, called loudly for
more. Lecture-rooms were crowded and editions exhausted by the ladies
and gentlemen of England, whose nerves were pleasantly thrilled with a
gentle surprise on being told that they had despised literature, art,
science, nature, and compassion, and that what they thought upon any
subject was "a matter of no serious importance"; that they could not
be said to have any thoughts at all--indeed, no right to think.[19]
The fiercer his anathemas, the greater the applause; the louder he
shouted, the better he pleased. Let him split the ears of the
groundlings, let him out-Herod Herod,--the judicious might grieve, but
all would be excitedly attentive. Their Jeremiah seemed at times like
to become a jester,--there was a suggestion of the ludicrous in the
sudden passage from birds to Greek coins, to mills, to Walter Scott,
to millionaire malefactors,--a suggestion of acrobatic tumbling and
somersault; but he always got a hearing. In lecturing to the students
of a military academy he had the pleasing audacity to begin:
"Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that many of you came
unwillingly to-night, and many of you in merely contemptuous
curiosity, to hear what a writer on painting could possibly say,
or would venture to say, respecting your great art of war";[20]
after which stinging challenge, one has no doubt, any feeling of
offense was swallowed up in admiration of the speaker's physical
courage.
[Sidenote: Influence of Carlyle upon Ruskin.]
[Sidenote: The unity of Ruskin's style.]
There can be little doubt that this later manner in which Ruskin
allowed his Puritan instincts to defeat his aestheticism, and indulged
to an alarming degree his gift of vituperation, was profoundly
influenced by his "master," Carlyle, who had long since passed into
his later and raucous manner. Carlyle's delight in the disciple's
diatribes probably encouraged the younger man in a vehemence of
invective to which his love of dogmatic assertion already rendered
him too prone. At his best, Ruskin, like Carlyle, reminds us of a
major prophet; at his worst he shrieks and heats the air. His high
indignations lead him into all manner of absurdity and self-contradiction.
An amusing instance of this may be given from _Sesame and Lilies_. In
the first lecture, which, it will be recalled, was given in aid of a
library fund, we find[21] the remark, "We are filthy and foolish enough
to thumb one another's books out of circulating libraries." His friends
and his enemies, the clergy (who "teach a false gospel for hire") and
the scientists, the merchants and the universities, Darwin and Dante,
all had their share in the indignant lecturer's indiscriminate abuse.
And yet in all the tropical luxuriance of his inconsistency, one can
never doubt the man's sincerity. He never wrote for effect. He may
dazzle us, but his fire is never pyrotechnical; it always springs from
the deep volcanic heart of him. His was a fervor too easily stirred and
often ill-directed, but its wild brilliance cannot long be mistaken for
the sky-rocket's; it flares madly in all directions, now beautifying,
now appalling, the night, the fine ardor of the painter passing into
the fierce invective of the prophet. But in the end it is seen that
Ruskin's style, like his subject-matter, is a unity,--an emanation from
a divine enthusiasm making for "whatsoever things are lovely,
whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are of good report."
[11] See p. 162.
[12] See p. 139.
[13] See p. 147.
[14] See p. 121.
[15] See p. 122.
[16] See p. 149.
[17] See p. 122.
[18] _The Mystery of Life_.
[19] _Sesame and Lilies_, "Kings' Treasuries," §§ 25, 31.
[20] _The Crown of Wild Olive_, "War."
[21] "Kings' Treasuries," § 32.