brain can keep up the giddy pace; and for seven or eight lines more we are pelted with new images till we feel like landsmen caught in a sudden squall. And then how grand are the last ten lines "the human effort and sorrow going on perpetually from age to age"! down to that daring antithesis of the fishermen of Tyre and the fisherman of St. Peter's! I cannot call it a conceit: but it would have been a conceit in the hands of any one less sincere, less passionate, not so perfectly saturated with Biblical imagery and language.

I have dwelt upon this passage as a typical example of Ruskin's magnificent power over the literary instrument, of his intense sympathy, of his vivid imagination, and alas! also of his ungovernable flux of ideas and of words. It is by reason of this wilful megalomania and plethoric habit, that we must hesitate to pronounce him the greatest master of English prose in our whole literature: but it is such mastery over language, such power to triumph over almost impossible conditions and difficulties, that compel us to regard him as one who could have become the noblest master of prose ever recorded, if he would only have set himself to curb his Pegasus from the first, and systematically to think of his reader's capacity for taking in, as well as of his own capacity for pouring forth, a torrent of glowing thoughts.

As a matter of fact, John Ruskin himself undertook to curb his Pegasus, and, like Turner or Beethoven, distinctly formed and practised "a second manner." That second manner coincides with the great change in his career, when he passed from critic of art to be social reformer and moral philosopher. The change was of course not absolute; but whereas, in the earlier half of his life, he had been a writer about Beauty and Art, who wove into his teaching lessons on social, moral, and religious problems, so he became, in the later part of his life, a worker about Society and Ethics, who filled his practical teaching with judgments about the beautiful in Nature and in Art. That second career dates from about the year 1860, when he began to write Unto this Last, which was finally published in 1862.

I myself judge that book to be not only the most original and creative work of John Ruskin, but the most original and creative work in pure literature since Sartor Resartus. But I am now concerning myself with form: and, as a matter of form, I would point to it as a work containing almost all that is noble in Ruskin's written prose, with hardly any, or very few, of his excesses and

mannerisms. It is true, that, pp. 147-8, we have a single sentence of 242 words and 52 intermediate stops before we come to the pause. But this is occasional; and the book as a whole is a masterpiece of pure, incisive, imaginative, lucid English. If one had to plead the cause of Ruskin before the Supreme Court in the Republic of Letters, one would rely on that book as a type of clearness, wit, eloquence, versatility, passion.

From the publication of Unto this Last, in 1862, John Ruskin distinctly adopted his later manner. Two volumes of selections from Ruskin's works were published in 1893 by George Allen, the compilation of some anonymous editor. They are of nearly equal size and of periods of equal length. The first series consists of extracts between 1843 and 1860 from Modern Painters, Seven Lamps, Stones of Venice, and minor lectures, articles, and letters anterior to 1860. The second series, 1860-1888, contains selections from Unto this Last, Fors, Præterita, and the lectures and treatises subsequent to 1860. Now, it will be seen that in the second series the style is more measured, more mature, more practical, more simple. It is rare to find the purpurei panni which abound in the first series, or the sentences of 200 words, or the ostentatious piling up of luscious imagery, and tumultuous fugues in oral symphony. The "first state" of a plate by Ruskin has far richer effects and more vivid light and shade than any example of his "second state."

Alas! the change came too late too late in his life, too late in his career. When Unto this Last was finally published, John Ruskin was forty-three: he had already written the most elaborate and systematic of all his books those on which his world-wide fame still rests. He had long past il mezzo del cammin di nostra vita and even the middle of his own long life: his energy, his health, his hopes, were not what they had been in his glorious youth and early manhood: his mission became consciously to raise men's moral standard in life, not to raise their sense of the beautiful in Art. The old mariner still held us with his glistening eye, and forced us to listen to his wondrous tale, but he spoke like a man whose voice shook with the memory of all that he had seen and known, over whom the deep waters had passed. I am one of those who know that John Ruskin has told us in his second life things more true and more important even than he told us in his first life. But yet I cannot bring myself to hold that, as

1 [The middle of the highway of our life.]

magician of words, his later teaching has the mystery and the glory which hung round the honeyed lips of the "Oxford graduate.”

If, then, John Ruskin be not in actual achievement the greatest master who ever wrote in English prose, it is only because he refused to chasten his passion and his imagination until the prime of life was past. A graceful poet and a great moralist said:

"Prune thou thy words; the thoughts control

That o'er thee swell and throng:

They will condense within thy soul,

And change to purpose strong."

This lesson Ruskin never learned until he was growing gray, and even now he only observes it so long as the spirit moves him, or rather does not move him too keenly. He has rarely suffered his thoughts to condense within his soul. Far from controlling them, he has spurred and lashed them into fury, so that they swell and throng over him and his readers, too often changing into satiety and impotence. Every other faculty of a great master of speech, except reserve, husbanding of resources, and patience, he possesses in measure most abundant — lucidity, purity, brilliance, elasticity, wit, fire, passion, imagination, majesty, with a mastery over all the melody of cadence that has no rival in the whole range of English literature.

X

CHARLES LAMB

(1775-1834)

ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE

Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation.

[Published in 1811 in Hunt's Reflector.]

TAKING a turn the other day in the Abbey, I was struck with the affected attitude of a figure, which I do not remember to have seen before, and which upon examination proved to be a wholelength of the celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far with some good Catholics abroad as to shut players altogether out of consecrated ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalized at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed under this harlequin figure the following lines:

To paint fair Nature, by divine command,
Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,

A Shakespeare rose; then, to expand his fame
Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
Though sunk in death the forms the Poet drew,
The Actor's genius made them breathe anew;
Though, like the bard himself, in night they lay,
Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day:
And till Eternity with power sublime

Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time,
Shakespeare and Garrick like twin-stars shall shine,
And earth irradiate with a beam divine.

It would be an insult to my readers' understandings to attempt anything like a criticism on this farrago of false thoughts and nonBut the reflection it led me into was a kind of wonder, how from the days of the actor here celebrated to our own, it should have

sense.

1

been the fashion to compliment every performer in his turn, that has had the luck to please the town in any of the great characters of Shakespeare, with the notion of possessing a mind congenial with the poet's: how people should come thus unaccountably to confound the power of originating poetical images and conceptions with the faculty of being able to read or recite the same when put into words; or what connection that absolute mastery over the heart and soul of man, which a great dramatic poet possesses, has with those low tricks upon the eye and ear, which a player by observing a few general effects, which some common passion, as grief, anger, &c., usually has upon the gestures and exterior, can so easily compass. To know the internal workings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, the when and the why and the how far they should be moved; to what pitch a passion is becoming; to give the reins and to pull in the curb exactly at the moment when the drawing in or the slacking is most graceful; seems to demand a reach of intellect of a vastly different extent from that which is employed upon the bare imitation of the signs of these passions in the countenance or gesture, which signs are usually observed to be most lively and emphatic in the weaker sort of minds, and which signs can after all but indicate some passion, as I said before, anger, or grief, generally; but of the motives and grounds of the passion, wherein it differs from the same passion in low and vulgar natures, of these the actor can give no more idea by his face or gesture than the eye (without a metaphor) can speak, or the muscles utter intelligible sounds. But such is the instantaneous nature of the impressions which we take in at the eye and ear at a playhouse, compared with the slow apprehension oftentimes of the understanding in reading, that we are apt not only to sink the play-writer in the consideration which we pay to the actor, but even to identify in our minds in a perverse manner, the actor with the character which he represents. It is difficult for a frequent play-goer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S. Nor is this confusion incidental alone

1 It is observable that we fall into this confusion only in dramatic recitations. We never dream that the gentleman who reads Lucretius in public with great applause, is therefore a great poet and philosopher; nor do we find that Tom Davies, the bookseller, who is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any man in England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this tradition) was therefore, by his intimate friends, set upon a level with Milton.