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writings of the Church show us that in the third century the epistles of James, Jude, Second Peter, Second and Third John, and the Revelation were held in doubt. If all these books were dropped out of our New Testament I do not think that anything essential to the Christian faith would be lost. But I should be very sorry to lose them, and would much prefer to add to our present canon the recently discovered 'Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,' the 'First Epistle of Clement' of Rome, and the Shepherd of Hermas.' Some of these were read as Scripture in the early Church, and harmed nobody."

D. "I do not think it profitable to continue this conversation. I reaffirm now what I said at the beginning, that I regard the propagation of such views as both damaging and dangerous. And I do not see how Dr. McGiffert can be a loyal Presbyterian and maintain such opinions as he has published to the world."

K. "As I am not a Presbyterian I shall not presume to say anything on that last particular. I am content to leave our conversation to the unbiased reflection of our mutual friend, Gerard. I think he must admit that the subjects we have been reviewing are eminently appropriate for learned and scholarly investigation, and are not above the reach of common people. I am ready always and everywhere to give a reason for my own opinions. Furthermore, I am persuaded that a sounder faith and a more intelligent piety will be propagated in the world by leaving such questions of biblical research to be determined by the individual conscience. Every intelligent Christian, who has any feeling of responsibility on such a matter, ought to examine these questions as faithfully as he would search the Scriptures themselves; for what is it all but a searching of the Bible itself?"

G. "Truly, my friends, you have both of you set me thinking in a new way. I believe I must study these matters for myself, for I certainly cannot follow both of you. I am resolved, however, to try and show the good sense of not saying much about these issues until I am sure I know what I am talking about."

14

Milton S. Terry

ART. III.—JOHN RUSKIN.

THE last of the great generation of English men of letters who brightened the mid-nineteenth century is gone. 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 admit the wonderful charm of his style. His only rival for the foremost place as master of English prose in this 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 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 former rhythm and cadence of verse, it will inevitably take on something of a 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 De Quincey's bastard prose-poetry. Ruskin's luxariance 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,* 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 passages. He had a minute and accurate observation, so that his description seems always exactly true. He had the keenest feeling for beauty everywhere, and especially for its analogies and suggestions-for those large spiritual truths of which beauty was to him the outward form and symbol; so that his description, even in its loftiest flights, seems never extravagant or labored, but only some expression of that emotion which, when sincere, cannot be exaggerated, since it is infinite in nature and therefore in its fullness ineffable. How shall a man exaggerate the peace of summer evenings or the solemnity of the star-sown midnight sky? But, beside all this, Ruskin had in almost unprece

*See, for example, the Sesame and Lilies.

dented degree that sense of form which alone can render feeling articulate. He chose his words, as we have said, with the utmost nicety; but he knew that the meaning of words in combination is indefinitely varied and intensified by their movement and music. In fact, such prose as Ruskin's illustrates, quite as well as music can, all the effects of tone and rhythm and cadence. His page is sprinkled thick with alliteration, assonance, and all subtle adaptations of sound to sentiment; yet the whole is wrought so spontaneously and is so brought into subservience to the dominant emotion that all these detailed felicities of art are lost in the total impression. The limits of this paper will not permit extended quotation, but we may be allowed a single passage. It will show the delicacy of Ruskin's art all the better that it is not one of his purple patches, but is descriptive of the most unobtrusive forms of vegetable life-mosses and lichens. Yet what microscopic nicety of observation and felicity of epithet are found in the quotation, what fine sense of emotional values, and what a solemn grace of movement-especially in the last paragraph, where the soft, open vowels and the slow-paced liquids and sibilants keep step with the gentle pathos of the thought and then die gradually away in the lingering cadence of the closing lines:

Meek creatures! the first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed softness its dintless rocks; creatures full of pity, covering with strange and tender honor the scarred disgrace of ruin-laying quiet fingers on the trembling stones to teach them rest. No words that I know of will say what these mosses are. None are delicate enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green-the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the rock-spirits could spin porphyry as we do glassthe traceries of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every fiber into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace. They will not be gathered, like the flowers, for chaplet or love-token; but of these the wild bird will make its nest, and the wearied child his pillow.

And, as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last gift to us. When all other service is vain, from plant and tree, the soft mosses and gray lichens take up their watch by the headstone. The woods, the blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses have done their part for a time, but these

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