of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of
despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves: he makes no confusion of one with the other. But when Coleridge speaks of
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,3 he has a morbid, that is to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf: he fancies a
life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its powerlessness with choice,
its fading death with merriment, and the wind that shakes it with music. Here,
however, there is some beauty, even in the morbid passage; but take an
instance in Homer and Pope. Without the knowledge of Ulysses, Elpenor, his
youngest follower, has fallen from an upper chamber in the Circean palace,
and has been left dead, unmissed by his leader or companions, in the haste of
their departure. They cross the sea to the Cimmerian land; and Ulysses sum
mons the shades from Tartarus.4 The first which appears is that of the lost
Elpenor. Ulysses, amazed, and in exactly the spirit of bitter and terrified light
ness which is seen in Hamlet, addresses the spirit with the simple, startled
words: 'Elpenor! How earnest thou under the shadowy darkness? Hast thou
come faster on foot than I in my black ship?''5 Which Pope renders thus: O, say, what angry power Elpenor led
To glide in shades, and wander with the dead?
How could thy soul, by realms and seas disjoined,
Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind? I sincerely hope the reader finds no pleasure here, either in the nimbleness
of the sail, or the laziness of the wind! And yet how is it that these conceits6 are so painful now, when they have been pleasant to us in the other instances? For a very simple reason. They are not a pathetic fallacy at all, for they are put into the mouth of the wrong passion?a passion which never could possibly have spoken them?agonized curiosity. Ulysses wants to know the facts
1. From chap. 26 of Charles Kingsley's novel 4. In classical mythology the lowest region of the Alton Locke (1850). underworld. 2. Inferno (1321), 3.112, by Dante Alighieri 5. Odyssey (8th century B.C.E.), 11.51. The trans( 1265?1321). Acheron: one river of the classical lation by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was pub- underworld. lished in 1715-20. 3. Christabel (1816), 49-50, by Samuel Taylor 6. Extended poetic devices. Coleridge (1772-1834).
.
132 4 / JOHN RUSKIN
of the matter; and the very last thing his mind could do at the moment would
be to pause, or suggest in anywise what was not a fact. The delay in the first
three lines, and conceit in the last, jar upon us instantly, like the most frightful
discord in music. No poet of true imaginative power would possibly have writ
ten the passage. Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some sort, even
in our enjoyment of fallacy. Coleridge's fallacy has no discord in it, but Pope's has set our teeth on edge. 4 * *
1856
From The Stones of Venice
[THE SAVAGENESS OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE]1
I am not sure when the word 'Gothic' was first generically applied to the
architecture of the North; but I presume that, whatever the date of its original
usage, it was intended to imply reproach, and express the barbaric character
of the nations among whom that architecture arose. It never implied that they
were literally of Gothic lineage, far less that their architecture had been orig
inally invented by the Goths themselves; but it did imply that they and their
buildings together exhibited a degree of sternness and rudeness,2 which, in
contradistinction to the character of Southern and Eastern nations, appeared
like a perpetual reflection of the contrast between the Goth and the Roman
in their first encounter. And when that fallen Roman, in the utmost impotence
of his luxury, and insolence of his guilt, became the model for the imitation
of civilized Europe,3 at the close of the so-called Dark Ages, the word Gothic
