generous impulses cannot save from disaster a life that will not own a steady allegiance to duty. Still less need we admit that the greatness of the poet was due to the weakness of the man. On the contrary, his faults as a man are precisely the faults that shut him out from the little company of the very greatest poets. He lacked something of that moral earnestness, that calm elevation of spirit, that appreciation of the deepest truth which set a man highest among the immortal singers. His emotions, too, on which the lyric power depends, jaded by a life of irregular impulse soon lost something of their vernal purity; they kept the fire but lost the dew of youth. But while we need not forget these things, we may remember-nay, we must remember-how strait were the barriers within which fate had decreed this passionate nature should be confined, how long was his strug gle, and how much that was honest and noble and tender he kept in his life till the end. How much that was honest, I say, for even when he refused to do his duty, he would not deny it, nor excuse himself by confusing all distinction of right and wrong; how much that was noble,-noble scorn for meanness and injustice, noble admiration for courage. and independence and all the sturdy virtues of manhood; above all, how much that was tender in love for brother man and sister woman, in great charity for the sins and pity for the sorrows of our human lot.

And it is these virtues, shown alike in his life and in his song, that have so endeared his verse to all who know our English tongue.

No poet, I often think, has so enviable a fame as he. The verses dear alike to scholar and to peasant, the verses that speak the universal passions of the heart, and spring unbidden to the lips of all men in hours of sadness and in moments of the wildest mirth; the verses that are part of the household song of a race, sung by thousands who have not even learned to read them: such verses as these Robert Burns has written. And who else has written such? Let us think of him gratefully; whatever his failings, he was the most human of poets:

Through busiest street and loneliest glen Are felt the flashes of his pen ;

He rules 'mid winter snows, and when
Bees fill their hives;

Deep in the general heart of men
His power survives.

T

JOHN RUSKIN

HE last of the great generation of English men of letters who brightened the mid-nineteenth century is gone.1 John Ruskin is dead. He outlived all his eminent contemporaries in literature,-Carlyle, Arnold, Browning, Tennyson,-he outlived himself. For it was

Ruskin's hard fortune to see the decline of his own influence and to know that the writings of his later years, on which he himself laid most emphasis, were received by the public with indifference or sometimes with derision. He finished his work in discouragement more than ten years ago; his power began to decline, and he passed the last decade of life in pathetic silence and seclusion, slowly forgetting a world that seemed already to have forgotten him. But it is a matter of frequent observation that a great reputation gained during one generation is liable to temporary decline during the next. Public opinion and standards of taste slowly change; or men become used to the novel powers that surprised and charmed at first, and their attention is withdrawn to new aspirants for literary honors. After a time, however, these smaller men drop out of notice, while the true proportions of the great man's work grow more evident; a second and juster fame is accorded him, and he takes his place as a classic. So will it be, we are assured, with Mr. Ruskin. When the twentieth century shall have made up its verdict on the nineteenth, he will be accounted not as merely a brilliant erratic genius, but as one of the wisest teachers of his age and a master of English unsurpassed in any age.

The latter title to fame may be considered as already established. Even those who reject Ruskin's teachings ad

This paper was published as a commemorative essay at the time of Ruskin's death. See Prefatory Note, p. xi. [L. B. G.]

mit the wonderful charm of his style. His only rival for the foremost place as master of English prose in the nineteenth century is Thomas Carlyle. The manner of the two men was indeed very different. Carlyle wrote always with tremendous difficulty-language, as it were, torn out of him in an agony; and it seems still to bear the marks of those throes of composition. His speech is rugged, irregular, setting at naught all the rules of the smooth rhetorician; but no more valorous, hard-hitting English was ever written, and some of his best descriptive passages in The French Revolution have a lurid, imaginative vividness almost preternatural-like what we see in dreams. Ruskin's writing departs much less widely in structure from conventional standards, and shows greater mastery of the mechanics of the rhetorical art; yet it is no less original than Carlyle's, and it is far more spontaneous and opulent. His style has all those inner qualities which make writing noteworthy,-continuous and brilliant imagination, eager enthusiasm, and a rapidity of mental movement which gives to his most purely descriptive passages the constant play and glance of life. Then he has an undercurrent of humor, with a tinge of sarcasm, which in his later writings is often something more than a tinge, but which always gives pungency and piquancy to his style. Both Carlyle and Ruskin have often been charged with a lack of temperance; but the charge has more force against Carlyle than against Ruskin, and is much exaggerated in both cases; for temperance and chasteness are not universally virtues of style. In the statement of facts, indeed, precision is always the first requisite; but in the expression of emotion there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as precision. Nor is there any reason why prose writing should keep a pedestrian pace on the low levels of narrative and exposition; the loftier attitudes of emotion are not above the proper path of prose. But such impassioned prose cannot be cool and measured in manner; and, while it will always avoid the formal rhythm and cadence of verse, it will inevitably take on something of the charm of music and image which we commonly associate with poetry.

Now, of this impassioned prose Ruskin was the greatest master in our literature. No man since Jeremy Taylor has known how to write an English so rich in beautiful imagery or with such subtle and varied rhythmical effects. Yet his writing never suggests that artful elaboration which is inconsistent with earnestness. It is no such inflated and grandiose product as DeQuincey's bastard prose-poetry. Ruskin's luxuriance is always spontaneous, and his most elaborate passages seem naturally conformed at every point to the flexure of his thought or feeling. His style, though profuse, is never diffuse-which is a very different thing; for diffuseness usually proceeds from the fact that the writer has but few ideas and is trying to hammer them out as thin as possible, while profuseness comes from the abundance of illustrative or accessory ideas that come crowding thickly about a central thought and press for utterance. Nor did Ruskin's profusion ever betray him into carelessness. With all his wealth of diction, he would not throw away a word, he would not use a word at random. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about his language is the combination of exuberance with precision. He used to insist on this precision of phrase as one of the surest tests of literary eminence,1 and his own choice of words was always made with the greatest nicety. Even in his most gorgeous passages, when he might seem to be throwing the reins upon the neck of his rhetoric, his phrase will be found to be exquisitely fitted to the fact or the feeling. If you try to say the same thing more simply you will find that your expression is not only tame and colorless but really less accurate.

His mastery is probably seen best in some of his descriptive passages. Description, whether in prose or verse, is usually a weariness. Language is ill suited to render the charm of color or form. But sometimes the union of imagination and emotion with the rarest art can set before us in words a scene as vividly as any painter can picture it, and with a thrilling spiritual sense of its meaning such as no painter can ever give. Ruskin's work is full of such pas'See, for example, Sesame and Lilies, Lecture I.