DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0068
56
JOHN RUSKIN.
of the picturesque, by his sadness and lack of personal
faith, and so forth. But at the end of the argument we
shall not have been persuaded to take Scott to be a
poet possessed of the spirit of poetry. The essay, how-
ever, though a vain persuasion, is an excellent com-
mentary ; take the sentence, for example, which explains
how we have pleasure in Kingsley’s fallacious “ cruel
foam,” not because the words “ fallaciously describe
foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow.”
The chapter has been popular, for it reaches none of
the inner concentrations of thought that make Modern
Painters arduous reading to a real reader. The chapter
following, on “ Classical Landscape,” deals also with
poetry. To the question whether the modern with his
fancy does not see something in nature that Homer
could not see, Ruskin replies that the Greek had his
own feeling—that of faith and not of fallacy. “ He
never says the waves rage, or the waves are idle. But
he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the
waves, which rages, and is idle, and that he calls a god.”
Nor will Ruskin consent to have Homer’s Hera, cuffing
the contentious Artemis about the ears, too much inter-
preted. Let no one think to explain away “my real,
running, beautiful, beaten Diana, into a moon behind
clouds.” Happy too, by its phrase, in the finely
elaborate contrast of the antique and the modern spirit,
is this passage on the Greek and the gods:—
“To ask counsel of them, to obey them, to sacrifice
to them, to thank them for all good, this was well; but
JOHN RUSKIN.
of the picturesque, by his sadness and lack of personal
faith, and so forth. But at the end of the argument we
shall not have been persuaded to take Scott to be a
poet possessed of the spirit of poetry. The essay, how-
ever, though a vain persuasion, is an excellent com-
mentary ; take the sentence, for example, which explains
how we have pleasure in Kingsley’s fallacious “ cruel
foam,” not because the words “ fallaciously describe
foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow.”
The chapter has been popular, for it reaches none of
the inner concentrations of thought that make Modern
Painters arduous reading to a real reader. The chapter
following, on “ Classical Landscape,” deals also with
poetry. To the question whether the modern with his
fancy does not see something in nature that Homer
could not see, Ruskin replies that the Greek had his
own feeling—that of faith and not of fallacy. “ He
never says the waves rage, or the waves are idle. But
he says there is somewhat in, and greater than, the
waves, which rages, and is idle, and that he calls a god.”
Nor will Ruskin consent to have Homer’s Hera, cuffing
the contentious Artemis about the ears, too much inter-
preted. Let no one think to explain away “my real,
running, beautiful, beaten Diana, into a moon behind
clouds.” Happy too, by its phrase, in the finely
elaborate contrast of the antique and the modern spirit,
is this passage on the Greek and the gods:—
“To ask counsel of them, to obey them, to sacrifice
to them, to thank them for all good, this was well; but