‘MODERN PAINTERS’—THIRD VOLUME. 55
“Pathetic Fallacy.” This fallacy is a fiction (wanton,
fanciful, imaginative, or more purely passionate) in our
reading of natural things according to the feeling of our
own hearts. Obviously it is chiefly poetry that is here
in question; and the reader should understand that
Ruskin is not writing of poets who are no poets; he
admits two orders of poets, but no third, as doubtless a
musician would admit two orders of musicians—two
very arts of music, two muses—but no third; and he
places — agreeing therein with the greater number of
critics—one order higher than the other, as a musician
need not do in contemplating his own double-peaked
hill. Ruskin makes an admirable opposition of the
image without fallacy of Dante to the image with fallacy
of Coleridge; pausing for a moment (only a moment,
for the chapter is intended to treat chiefly of noble and
passionate fallacy) at the fallacy which is not poetic at
all because it is assigned, as by Pope, to the wrong
passion, and is cold. But I confess all this reasoning
on poetry seems to fail—not impotently, but with vital
effort, and because of some prohibition from the begin-
ning of the task—to fail to prove or even to demonstrate
anything we do not know, or to disprove anything we
feel. A whole chapter further on, for instance, shows
Walter Scott to be better than a sentimentalist, better
than a poet who works with difficulty, better than a poet
who is self-conscious, better as a poet-seer than a mere
poet-thinker, and moreover a thorough representative of
his time by his love of nature, of the past, of colour, and