The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an entirely new style of
English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away,
the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and
there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were
the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all
the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us,
in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative
alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds.
This flamboyant style seems to have synchronised with the general
decline of reserve and ceremony in English life, and with the rise of the
modern familiar intimacy that leaves no privacy even to our thoughts.
Our grandfathers would have hesitated to have discussed at the
dinner-table, even after the ladies had withdrawn, what is now set
down for free debate at ladies' clubs, and canvassed in the correct
columns of the _Guardian_.
This new habit of mind and speech has affected our literature deeply
and diversely. In the hands of the really great masters such as Carlyle,
Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate revelations of the throbbings of their
hearts, and the direct and untrammelled appeal of their inmost souls
crying in the market-place, take forcible possession of our affections,
and bring them into closer touch with each one of us than was ever
possible with the older restrained writers.
But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the licence of
intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, and a
contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative, and redundancy;
and although the disappearance of reserve in modern writing may tend
to reduce all but the production of the great to a depressing state of
vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's hand, has unlocked for us the
doors of an Aladdin's palace! But even if the restraint of the ancient
writers has disappeared from the prose of our own times, all great
writing of necessity must now and always possess the quality of
simplicity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of nature about him
with the eyes of a visionary, and wrote of what he saw as one so
inspired as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed his glorious
outpourings in a raiment of perfect simplicity.
"This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance of the firmament;
and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of
these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate
Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 'The earth shook,
the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God,' 'He doth set
His bow in the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of every
drooping swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love. 'In them
hath He set a _tabernacle_ for the sun,' whose burning ball,
which, without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable
and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that
firmament surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by
mediatorial ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden
pavement is spread for his chariot wheels at morning; by the
firmament of clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill
with light at noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is
closed at evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of
the firmament his implacable light is divided and its separated
fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of
distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains
burn as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this
tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows
of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of His
own majesty to men, upon the _throne_ of the firmament.
"As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity,
we cannot behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the
Preserver of men those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place.
'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by
earth, for it is His footstool.'
"And all those passings to and fro of fruitful showers and
grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built
about the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening
thunders, and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to
deepen in our hearts the acceptance and distinctness and dearness
of the simple words, 'Our Father, Which art in heaven!'"
The description of the first approach to Venice before the days of
railways will always be cherished by those who admire Ruskin's work as
one of his most characteristic and memorable utterances:--
"In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
toil was rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate survey of
the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the
happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last
hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village,
where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its
valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty
perspective of the causeway, see, for the first time, the towers
of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of peaceful
and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the
railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent--in those days, I say, when there was something more to
be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
successive halting place than a new arrangement of glass roofing
and iron girder--there were few moments of which the recollection
was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that which, as I
endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought
him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open
lagoon from the canal of Mestre.
"Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this
direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of
the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly
disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange
rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of
the deep sea; for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could
at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water
which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north
and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the
east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of
black weed separating and disappearing gradually in knots of
heaving shoal under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed
it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so
calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the
Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of
Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of northern waves, yet
subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry
pallor into a field of burnished gold as the sun declined behind
the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named 'St
George of the Sea-weed.'
"As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the
traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low,
sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows;
but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Argua
rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright
mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill
extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning
with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded
the whole horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here and
there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its
snow into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the
barred clouds of evening one after another, countless, the crown
of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them,
to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and
on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as
the quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.
"And at last when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its
untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded
rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the
Indian Sea; when first upon the traveller's sight opened the long
ranges of columned palaces--each with its black boat moored at the
portal, each with its image cast down beneath its feet upon that
green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich
tessellation when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the
shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind
the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so
adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just
bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen,
the gondolier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!" struck sharp upon the ear, and
the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over
the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and
loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and when at
last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across
which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine
veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was
no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the
visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to
forget the darker truths of its history and its being, "Well
might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to
the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the
waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her
state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all
which in Nature was wild or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as
the waves and tempests--had been won to adorn her instead of to
destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty
which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the
hour-glass as well as of the sea."
It is now many years since I first saw Venice rising from the sea on a
September morning as I sailed towards it across the Adriatic from
Trieste; and as we glided closer and closer its loveliness was slowly and
exquisitely unveiled under the slanting beams of the early sun.
In all my wanderings over two hemispheres I remember no vision so
enchanting and unsurpassable! May you live to see it, Antony, before
the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its beauty.
Your loving old
G.P.
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