On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and LiteratureRuskin, John
General
On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2): A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature
Ruskin, John
Art; Essays; Literature
So that, for instance, while Mr. Wordsworth, on a visit to town, being
an exemplary early riser, could walk, felicitous, on Westminster Bridge,
remarking how the city now did like a garment wear the beauty of the
morning; Byron, rising somewhat later, contemplated only the garment
which the beauty of the morning had by that time received for wear from
the city: and again, while Mr. Wordsworth, in irrepressible religious
rapture, calls God to witness that the houses seem asleep, Byron, lame
demon as he was, flying smoke-drifted, unroofs the houses at a glance,
and sees what the mighty cockney heart of them contains in the still
lying of it, and will stir up to purpose in the waking business of it,
"The sordor of civilization, mixed
With all the passions which Man's fall hath fixed."[87]
73. Fourthly, with this steadiness of bitter melancholy, there is joined
a sense of the material beauty, both of inanimate nature, the lower
animals, and human beings, which in the iridescence, color-depth, and
morbid (I use the word deliberately) mystery and softness of it,--with
other qualities indescribable by any single words, and only to be
analyzed by extreme care,--is found, to the full, only in five men that
I know of in modern times; namely, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Turner, and
myself,--differing totally and throughout the entire group of us, from
the delight in clear-struck beauty of Angelico and the Trecentisti; and
separated, much more singularly, from the cheerful joys of Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Scott, by its unaccountable affection for "Rokkes blak"
and other forms of terror and power, such as those of the ice-oceans,
which to Shakespeare were only Alpine rheum; and the Via Malas and
Diabolic Bridges which Dante would have condemned none but lost souls to
climb, or cross;--all this love of impending mountains, coiled
thunder-clouds, and dangerous sea, being joined in us with a sulky,
almost ferine, love of retreat in valleys of Charmettes, gulfs of
Spezzia, ravines of Olympus, low lodgings in Chelsea, and close
brushwood at Coniston.
74. And, lastly, also in the whole group of us, glows volcanic instinct
of Astraean justice returning not to, but up out of, the earth, which
will not at all suffer us to rest any more in Pope's serene "whatever
is, is right"; but holds, on the contrary, profound conviction that
about ninety-nine hundredths of whatever at present is, is wrong:
conviction making four of us, according to our several manners, leaders
of revolution for the poor, and declarers of political doctrine
monstrous to the ears of mercenary mankind; and driving the fifth, less
sanguine, into mere painted-melody of lament over the fallacy of Hope
and the implacableness of Fate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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