There was no muse of prose-but Herodotus, the first great prose writer of Greece, divided up his history among the sacred Nine, by way of modestly asserting that a perfect prose piece like his own had required for its perfection the inspiration of the whole sisterhood. And this gives us a hint that a battle lately waged, as to the true and proper merits of prose, is no more likely to end in victory for any one side, than a similar battle would as to the true and proper merits of poetry. While the Edinburgh Review very naturally looks to the performance of its own contributors-grammatical, sensible, lucid-as the ne plus ultra of the art, Mr. Charles Whibley, who has done so much to revive an interest in the Tudor translators, as naturally prefers something a little more picturesque in vocabulary, a little more elaborate in syntax, and a little less timid in trope. Those of us who do not theorize, and who cannot write, but are diligent and avid readers, may be disposed to think that style is very much a matter of eyesight, physical or imaginative, that a man can describe as much of a thing as he sees and no more, and that if one man's page has more color in it than another's, it is because his retina is more sensitive to color. Similarly for a man's thoughts. If he thinks, not as an individual, but as a member of some class or party, he will inevitably employ the traditional phrases in which the common ideas are clothed; but if he is an original, much more if he is an eccentric, like Sir Thomas Browne, or Charles Lamb, or Walter Pater, he will not even know the traditional phrases, but will have to shape his thoughts as best he may in any vocabulary he can get together; and his

rhythm will depend partly, of course, upon his choice of models and the delicacy of his ear, but also to a great extent upon whether he thinks rapidly, and can foresee his conclusion through a long array of subordinate clauses, or whether his ore has to be smelted seven times in the fire. I had a friend once who, if you suggested'in argument any proposition, would, as likely as not, reply: "True, but against that there are these ten things to be considered"-which he would proceed to enumerate with the precision of a catalogue. Needless to say, his written style, not unfamiliar to the public which reads newspapers, was of that classical and periodic structure whose end is known from the beginning, and the advance towards it made, not with tentative skirmishes, but in Lord Methuen's manner of attack-full front, and in column formation.

At the head of this conference I have written the familiar title of "The Tears of the Muses;" but I wish to employ it in the collective sense I have indicated for the tears of the whole college over certain prose writers, whose deaths, coming hard one upon another, have added a gloom to the gloomiest January in the memory of those born since the Crimea. Mr. Ruskin, it is true, the greatest of the four, had long been a ghost; but the actual passing of the last of the prophets could not but win a moment's tribute of respect even from the young England that had ceased to believe in him. "My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof." Mr. Blackmore also had done his work; but as long as he lived there was always hope that the hand that wrote "Lorna Doone," however "mattock-hardened,"

Mr.

would again resume its cunning. Dixon, on the contrary, was in the middle of his task, and at the height of his powers, and only at the beginning of his recognition. When the Laureateship was vacant and candidates were vying with each other in odes for the morning press, some one told me with great glee that he or his neighbor (I forget which) had met Mr. Swinburne on Putney Common, who had said oracularly, "They should appoint Canon Dixon," and passed on without explaining himself. I told my informant that I thought Dixon wasn't the man for the place; but I quite saw what Mr. Swinburne meant -namely, that Dixon had a skill in ode-building which certainly none of the competitors could pretend to. My informant, one of those omniscient people who will never confess to ignorance or own a blunder, said "Quite so;" but I fear, from the vivacity with which he told the tale, he had thought that Mr. Swinburne was making a cheap jest at the Church of England. So, again, I shall not easily forget the astonishment in Oxford when Mr. Dixon proposed himself as a candidate for the Professorship of Poetry at the time when Mr. Palgrave was appointed (1885). Oxford's satirist, the inimitable Mr. Godley, at once put his name into the concluding spondee of an hexameter, where the gravity of his position might lend emphasis to its own significance:

nec tua Palgravius nec Sacri Carminis auctor

quarto quoque die poscit suffragia Dixon.

It was not until last autumn that the University of Oxford, happening to take up Mr. Mackail's "Life of William Morris," to which Dixon had contributed fascinating reminiscences of his Oxford friend, recognized their quality and, turning to the four large volumes

of the "History of the Church of England" bearing Dixon's name, recognized in them the same quality, and gave him an honorary Doctor's degree. But Oxford cannot be blamed for its tardiness, seeing that the Church of England itself had not yet recognized Dixon, notwithstanding that its controversialists have long furnished themselves for war from his armory. If he had served the State as he had served his Church-but the character of the Church of England, as a nursing mother, has been written once for all by John Henry Newman. The fourth of our lost prosewriters calls for more tears than the rest, not because his achievement was greater (for it was far below theirs), but because his time was all before him. Mr. Steevens had powers that placed him easily at the head of the profession he adopted, but they would, undoubtedly, have carried him beyond special correspondence into work that need not have been ephemeral. He, too, like Ruskin, the "Oxford graduate," and Blackmore, a scholar of Exeter, and Dixon, scholar (afterwards honorary fellow) of Pembroke, owed his training to Oxford, for he was a scholar of Balliol; and, indeed, was in his year gazetted as proxime for the Hertford, the blue ribbon of the University in Latin scholarship.

In this Conference I propose to notice, in the writers I have mentioned, their several ways of using their pens to convey what they saw with their eyes, either actually or imaginatively. That many people use their eyes at all, and find anything to admire in natural landscape, they owe to Ruskin, who, under the guise of defending Turner's pictures, taught them to see in nature the form and the color that Turner had seen there and put upon his canvas. It is to this special pleader's necessity of insisting upon the Turneresqueness of nature that we must attribute the brilliant coloring of so many descriptive

passages in "Modern Painters." They are chosen deliberately for their color to open people's eyes. To this necessity is due also their partial failure. Ruskin wished to make his impression irresistible, to compel the purblind to see, and so he painted too much to the eye, instead of to the imagination. He accumulated detail upon the retina long after the optic nerves were exhausted. Hence, it is in the smaller pictures that his effects are most successful. for example, could exceed in beauty and in effect the following vignette of Murano?

What,

To the north, there is first the great cemetery wall, then the long stray buildings of Murano, and the island villages beyond, glittering in intense crystalline vermilion, like 80 much jewellery scattered on a mirror, their towers poised apparently in the air a little above the horizon, and their reflections, as sharp and vivid and substantial as themselves, thrown on the vacancy between them and the sea.

The effect of that description, it is hardly necessary to point out, depends largely upon the response of the imagination to the comparison with scattered jewels. Take for another example the well-known description of the Campagna in the Preface to the second edition of "Modern Painters:"

Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light. Let the reader imagine himself for a moment withdrawn from the sounds and motion of the living world, and sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plain. The earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly, for its substance is white, hollow, and carious, like the dusty wreck of the bones of men. The long knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in the evening wind, and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that lift them

selves to the sunlight. Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around him, as if the dead beneath were struggling in their sleep; scattered blocks of blackstone, foursquare, remnants of mighty edifices, not one left upon another, lie upon them to keep them down. A dull purple poisonous haze stretches level along the desert, veiling its spectral wrecks of massy ruins, on whose rents the red light rests like dying fire on defiled altars. The blue ridge of the Alban mount lifts itself against a solemn space of green, clear, quiet sky. Watchtowers of dark clouds stand steadfastly along the promontories of the Apennines from the plain to the mountains. The shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt into the darkness, like shadowy and countless troops of funeral mourners passing from a nation's grave.

That is painting to the imagination. By the suggestion of a vast valley of the shadow full of the dead and yet not sacred to them, and by a reference to its scattered stones in the words of the curse upon Jerusalem, imagination comes to the aid of the purely physical picture, and makes an indelible impression. The only marks of weakness in the passage are the prominent and excessive alliterations, which give it a certain air of constraint, though each example taken alone might be defended. But now, consider a passage where the painting appeals merely to the eye -the famous color passage about Clouds at Sunset:

We have been speaking hitherto of what is constant and necessary in nature, of the ordinary effects of daylight on ordinary colors, and we repeat again that no gorgeousness of the pallet can reach even these. But it is a widely different thing when nature herself takes a coloring fit, and does something extraordinary, something really to exhibit her power. She has a thousand ways and means of rising above herself, but incomparably the noblest manifestations of her capability

of color are those sunsets among the high clouds. I speak especially of the moment before the sun sinks when his light turns pure rose-color, and when this light falls upon a zenith covered with countless cloud-forms of inconceivable delicacy, threads and flakes of vapor, which would in common daylight be pure snow-white, and which give therefore fair field to the tone of light. There is then no limit to the multitude and no check to the intensity of the hues assumed. The whole sky from the zenith to the horizon becomes one molten mantling sea of color and fire; every black bar turns into massy gold, every ripple and wave into unsullied shadowless crimson and purple and scarlet, and colors for which there are no words in lapguage and no ideas In the mind-things which can only be conceived while they are visible-thé intense hollow blue of the upper sky melting through it all, showing here deep and pure and lightless, there modulated by the filmy formless body of the transparent vapor, till it is lost imperceptibly in its crimson and gold. (Mod. P. i. 2. 2.)

As we read we are lost in wonder at the beauty of the rhythm. It is absolutely faultless except for the accident of the rhyme between "white" and "light." And the impression left on the mind is just the impression Ruskin intended-namely, that Nature is a superb colorist. But it conveys no picture to the eye, which was Ruskin's more immediate intention. Take again such a set piece as that in the chapter upon "The Nature of Gothic" in the "Stones of Venice," which attempts to answer the question why the architecture of the south of Europe differs from that of the north. Ruskin begins by suggesting a contrast in physical character between northern and southern countries.

We know (he says) the differences in detail, but we have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them in their fulness. We

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know that gentians grow on the Alps and olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees on its migration, that difference between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun; here and there an angry spot of thunder, a gray stain of storm, moving upon the burning field, and here and there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes, but for the most part a great peacefulness of light; Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer to them, with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frank-incense, mixed among masses of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm that abate with their gray-green shadows.

It is too much. The idea of a bird'seye view of Europe was charming; so was the imagination of the golden promontories inlaying the hyaline; but to ask us to descend to earth again, just to get in the terraces and orangetrees, was an error in judgment, and it suggests the thought that if we are to notice the flowers through the whole breadth of Europe we shall be an unconscionable time on the journey; and, indeed, the eye is already bored, and wanders vaguely down the page and down the next, and refuses to go on with all that detail which it set out to avoid. And in this case it expressly misses nothing to the purpose, for the end of the journey is merely this reflection, admirably phrased, but requiring no more knowledge than the vague and all untravelled imagination could have compassed with its own resources:

Let us watch him with reverence as he sets side by side the burning gems, and smoothes with soft sculpture the jasper pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky, but not with less reverence let us stand by him when, with rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea, creatures of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that shade them.

It seems to me that an examination of Ruskin's descriptive passages leads to some such conclusion as this-that when his imagination was touched he could paint a picture which at once conveyed itself to the reader's imagination and lived there, a permanent possession; but that he had not the art of painting to the eye. As a consequence, when he tried to do so he was apt to over-labor his work and become tedious. Ruskin, perhaps, was too much of an analyst to be able to reproduce the superficial appearances of things. Still, the least successful of his descriptive passages served the purpose of enforcing on the British public the fact that there was something in the world to see, if it would only open its eyes and look about. As some sort of commentary on the distinction made above, it may be interesting to refer to a curious, self-revealing passage at the beginning of the sixth chapter of "The Seven Lamps of Architecture."

It was springtime, too, and all were coming forth in clusters, crowded for very love; there was room enough for all, but they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to be nearer each other. There was the wood-anemone star after star, closing

I

every now and then into nebulæ; and there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal processions of the Mois de Marie, the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy snow, and touched with ivy on the edges-ivy as light and lovely as the vine; and ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places; and in the more open ground, the vetch and comfrey and mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst the golden softness of deep, warm, amber-colored moss. came out presently on the edge of the ravine; the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs; and on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it was by gray cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings and with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above; but with the fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon it, when he endeavored, in order more strictly to arrive at the source of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the new continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music; the hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those ever-springing flowers and ever-flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colors of human endurance, valor, and virtue, and the