deep, illimitable Sea.
1843
From Of the Pathetic Fallacy7
3 * 3
Now therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words8 quite out of our
way, we may go on at our ease to examine the point in question?namely, the
difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us;
and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence
of emotion, or contemplative fancy; false appearances, I say, as being entirely
unconnected with any real power of character in the object, and only imputed
to it by us. For instance?
The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mold
Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.9 This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift,
but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy
so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain
crocus?
It is an important question. For, throughout our past reasonings about art,
we have always found that nothing could be good or useful, or ultimately
pleasurable, which was untrue. But here is something pleasurable in written
poetry, which is nevertheless untrue. And what is more, if we think over our
favorite poetry, we shall find it full of this kind of fallacy, and that we like it
all the more for being so.
It will appear also, on consideration of the matter, that this fallacy is of two
principal kinds. Either, as in this case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of willful
fancy, which involves no real expectation that it will be believed; or else it is
a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time,
more or less irrational. Of the cheating of the fancy we shall have to speak
presently; but, in this chapter, I want to examine the nature of the other error,
that which the mind admits when affected strongly by emotion. Thus, for instance, in Alton Locke?
7. From vol. 3, part 4, chap. 12. In this celebrated being unfairly rigorous in pointing up the fallacy, chapter Ruskin shifts from discussing problems of and Ruskin himself falls into it often. See, e.g., his truth and realism in art to the same problems in reference to 'the guilty ship' in his discussion of literature. The term pathetic refers not to some-Turner's The Slave Ship, above. thing feebly ineffective but to the emotion (pathos) 8. The metaphysical terms objective and subjective with which a writer invests descriptions of objects as applied to lands of truth. and to the distortion (fallacy) that may result. 9. From 'Astraea' (1850), a poem by Oliver Wen- Poets such as Tennyson protested that Ruskin was dell Holmes.
.
MODERN PAINTERS / 132 3
They rowed her in across the rolling foam?
The cruel, crawling foam.1
The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attrib
utes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is
unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in
us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally
characterize as the 'pathetic fallacy.'
Now we are in the habit of considering this fallacy as eminently a character
of poetical description, and the temper of mind in which we allow it, as one
eminently poetical, because passionate. But, I believe, if we look well into the
matter, that we shall find the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of
falseness?that it is only the second order of poets who much delight in it.
Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of Acheron
'as dead leaves flutter from a bough,'2 he gives the most perfect image possible
