For this gift of expression was such as had never been seen before, and such as, for all the copying and vulgarising of it, has never been seen since. It is a commonplace of literary history that description, as such, is not common or far advanced in the earlier English prose. We find Gray, far on in the eighteenth century, trying to describe a sunrise, and evidently vexed at the little "figure it makes on paper." Then the tourists and the travellers of the end of that age made valiant but not always well directed efforts to induce "it" to make a figure on paper. Then came the experts or student-interpreters in ornate prose who have been mentioned. And then came Mr. Ruskin. "Never so before and never quite so since," must be the repeated verdict. The first sprightly runnings in these, as in other kinds, are never surpassed. Kingsley, an almost contemporary, Mr. Swinburne, a younger rival, have come near; others have done creditably in imitation; none have equalled, and certainly none have surpassed. Let the reader read the "Wave Studies" in the first volume of Modern Painters, more than fifty years old; the "Pine Forest in the Jura," almost forty; the "Angel of the Sea," fully thirty-five, and say, if he has any knowledge of English literature, whether there had been anything like any of these before. Shelley, perhaps, in some of his prose had gone near it. Shelley was almost as great a prose writer as he was a poet. No one else could even be mentioned.
Nor was it mere description, great as Mr. Ruskin is in that, which differentiated him so strongly. He is a bad arguer; but his arguments are couched in rhetoric so persuasive that the very critics who detect his fallacies would almost consent to forfeit the power of detecting, if they could acquire that of constructing, such delightful paralogisms. His crotchets of all sorts are sometimes merely childish, and not even always or very often original; for, like all fertile minds, he never could receive any seed of thought from another but it bore plant and fruit at once. But the statement of them is at its best so captivating that weaklings may pardonably accept, and strong men may justly tolerate, the worthless kernel for the sake of the exquisite husk. Few men have less of the true spirit of criticism than Mr. Ruskin, for in his enthusiasm he will compass sea and land to exalt his favourite, often for reasons which are perfectly invalid; and in his appreciation he is not to be trusted at all, having a feminine rather than a masculine faculty of unreasoned dislike. But praise or blame, argue or paralogise as he may, the golden beauty of his form redeems his matter in the eyes of all but those who are unhappy enough not to see it.
That his influence has been wholly good no one can say. There is scarcely a page of him that can be safely accepted on the whole as matter, and the unwary have accepted whole volumes; his form is peculiarly liable to abuse in the way of imitation, and it has actually been abused to nausea and to ridicule. But this is not his fault. There is so little subtlety about Mr. Ruskin that he can hardly deceive even an intelligent child when he goes wrong. There is so much genius about him that the most practised student of English can never have done with admiration at the effects that he produces, after all these centuries, with the old material and the old tools. He is constantly provocative of adverse, even of severe criticism; of half the heresies from which he has suffered—not only that of impressionism—he was himself the unconscious heresiarch. And yet the more one reads him the more one feels inclined almost to let him go uncriticised, to vote him the primacy in nineteenth-century prose by simple acclamation.
Richard (or as his full name ran), John Richard Jefferies, occupies, though an infinitely smaller and a considerably lower place than Mr. Ruskin's, yet one almost as distinctly isolated in a particular department of æsthetic description. The son of a farmer at Coate, in North Wiltshire, and born in November 1848, he began journalism at eighteen, and was a contributor to the North Wilts Herald till he was nearly thirty. Then he went to London, and in 1878 published some sketches (previously contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette) under the title of The Game-Keeper at Home. These, though not much bought, were very much admired; and Jefferies was encouraged to devote himself to work of the same kind, which he varied with curious and not very vigorous semi-philosophic speculations and attempts at downright novels (a kind which he had also tried in his youth). Unfortunately the peculiar sort of descriptive writing in which he excelled was not very widely called for, could hardly under the most favourable circumstances have brought in any great sums of money, and was peculiarly liable to depreciate when written to order. It does not appear that Jefferies had the rare though sometimes recorded power of accommodating himself to ordinary newspaper hack-work, while reserving himself for better things now and then; and finally, he had not been long in London before painful and ultimately fatal disease added to his troubles. He died in August 1887, being not yet forty. A burst of popularity followed; his books, The Game-Keeper at Home, Wild Life in a Southern Country, The Amateur Poacher, Round about a Great Estate, etc., none of which had been printed in large numbers, were sold at four or five times their published price; and, worst of all, cheap imitations of his style began to flood the newspapers. Nay, the yet later results of this imitation was that another reaction set in, and even Jefferies' own work was once more pooh-poohed.
The neglect, the over-valuation, and the shift back to injustice, were all examples of the evils which beset literature at the present time, and which the much-blamed critic is almost powerless to cause or cure. In other days Jefferies was quite as likely to have been insufficiently rewarded at first by the public; but he would then have had no temptation to over-write himself, or try alien tasks, and he would have stood a very good chance of a pension, or a sinecure, or an easy office in church or state, on one or other of which he might have lived at ease and written at leisure. Nothing else could really have been of service to him, for his talent, though rare and exquisite, was neither rich nor versatile. It consisted in a power of observing nature more than Wordsworthian in delicacy, and almost Wordsworthian in the presence of a sentimental philosophic background of thought. Unluckily for Jefferies, his philosophic background was not like Wordsworth's, clear and cheerful, but wholly vague and partly gloomy. Writing, too, in prose not verse, and after Mr. Ruskin, he attempted an exceedingly florid style, which at its happiest was happy enough, but which was not always at that point, and which when it was not was apt to become trivial or tawdry, or both. It is therefore certain that his importance for posterity will dwindle, if it has not already dwindled, to that given by a bundle of descriptive selections. But these will occupy a foremost place on their particular shelf, the shelf at the head of which stand Gilbert White and Gray.
Mr. Arnold, it has been said, abstained almost entirely from dealing with art. Mr. Ruskin, who has abstained from dealing with nothing, did not abstain from criticism of literature, but his utterances in it have been more than usually obiter dicta. Yet we must take the two together if we are to understand the most powerful influence and the most flourishing school of criticism, literary and other, which has existed for the last thirty years. This school may be said to halt in a way between purely literary and generally æsthetic handling, and when it can to mix the two. Most of its scholars—men obviously under the influence both of Arnold and of Ruskin, either in submission or in revolt, are alive, and we reason not of them. But, as it happens, the two most famous, one of whom was a prose writer, pure and simple, the other a copious artist in prose and verse, have died recently and call for judgment. These were Walter Horatio Pater and John Addington Symonds.
The first-named was born in 1839, and went to Oxford, where he was elected to a fellowship at Brasenose. He spent the whole of the rest of his life either at that college or in London, practising no profession, competing for no preferment, and for many years at least producing literature itself with extreme sparingness. It was in 1873 that Mr. Pater first collected a volume of Studies in the History of Renaissance, which attracted the keenest attention both as to its manner and as to its matter. The point of view, which was that of an exceedingly refined and carefully guarded Hedonism, was in a way and at least in its formulation novel. Mr. Pater did not meddle with any question of religion; he did not (though there were some who scented immorality in his attitude) offend directly any ethical prejudice or principle. But he laid it down explicitly in some places, implicitly throughout, that the object of life should be to extract to the utmost the pleasure of living in the more refined way, and expressly and especially the pleasure to be derived from education and art. The indebtedness of this both to the Arnoldian and Ruskinian creeds, its advance (in the main a legitimate advance) on the former, and its heretical deviation from the development of the latter, require no comment. But this propaganda, if so violent a word may be used, of Mr. Pater's placid creed, called to aid a most remarkable style—a style of the new kind, lavish of adjective and the mot de lumière, but not exceedingly florid, and aiming especially at such an arrangement of the clause, the sentence, and the paragraph, such a concerted harmony of cadence and symphony, as had not been deliberately tried before in prose. The effects which it produced on different tastes were themselves sufficiently different. Some found the purport too distasteful to give a dispassionate attention to the presentment; others disliked the manner itself as formal, effeminate, and "precious." But there were others who, while recognising the danger of excess in this direction, thought and think that a distinct and remarkable experiment had been made in English prose, and that the best examples of it deserved a place with the best examples of the ornater styles at any previous time and in any other kind.
Mr. Pater was not tempted by such popularity as his book received to hasten publication; indeed it was understood that after beginning to print a second collection of Essays, he became dissatisfied with them, and caused the type to be broken up. But the advance of so-called Æstheticism was too strong an invitation, and prepared for him too large and eager an audience, so that the last decade of his life saw several books, Marius the Epicurean, Imaginary Portraits, Appreciations, while others appeared posthumously. Of these the first-named is unquestionably the best and most important. Although Greek had been the indispensable—almost the cardinal—principle in Mr. Pater's own literary development, he had been so strongly affected by modern thought and taste, that he could hardly recover a dispassionate view of the older classics. Imaginary Portraits, an attempt at constructive rather than critical art, required qualities which he did not possess, and even made him temporarily forget his impeccable style: Appreciations, good in itself, was inferior to the first book. But Marius the Epicurean far excelled all these. It, too, took the form of fiction, but the story went for so little in it that deficiencies therein were not felt. The book was in effect a reconstruction, partly imaginative, but still more critical, of a period with which Mr. Pater was probably more in sympathy than with any other, even the Renaissance itself, to wit the extremely interesting and strangely modern period when classicism and modernity, Christianity and Paganism, touched and blended in the second century after Christ after the fashion revealed to us in the works of Apuleius most of all, of Lucian to some extent, and of a few others. Mr. Pater indeed actually introduced the philosopher-novelist of Madaura in the book, though he was not the hero; and his own peculiar style proved itself admirably suited to the period and subject, whether in description and conversation, or in such translation or paraphrase as that of the famous and exquisite Pervigilium Veneris.
For this style, however, in perfection we must still go back to the Studies of the Renaissance, which is what Mr. Arnold liked to call a point de repère. The style, less exuberant, less far-reaching and versatile, and, if any one pleases to say so, less healthy than Mr. Ruskin's, is much more chastened, finished, and exquisite. It never at its best neglects the difference between the rhythm of prose and the metre of verse; if it is sometimes, and indeed usually, wanting in simplicity, it is never overloaded or gaudy. The words are picked; but they are seldom or never, as has been the case with others, not only picked but wrenched, not only adjusted to a somewhat unusual society and use, but deliberately forced into uses and societies wholly different from those to which readers are accustomed. Above all, no one, it must be repeated, has ever surpassed, and scarcely any one has ever equalled Mr. Pater in deliberate and successful architecture of the prose-paragraph—in what may, for the sake of a necessary difference, be called the scriptorial in opposition to the oratorical manner. He may fall short of the poetic grandeur of Sir Thomas Browne, of the phantasmagoric charm of De Quincey at his rare best, of the gorgeous panoramas of Mr. Ruskin. But his happiest paragraphs are like flamboyant chantries, not imposing, not quite supreme in quality, but in their own kind showing wonderful perfection of craftsmanship.
Of the same school, though a less exact and careful practitioner in it, was John Addington Symonds, who was born in Bristol on the 5th of October 1840, and died at Rome on 19th April 1893. He was the son of a famous doctor whose name figures often in literary history, inasmuch as he made Clifton a frequent resort for persons of consumptive tendencies. Mr. Symonds himself lived there for a great part of his life. Unfortunately the disease which his father had combated revenged itself upon him; and it was only by spending the greater part of his later years at Davos that he staved it off as long as he did. Educated at Harrow and at Balliol, a Fellow of Magdalen, and succeeding tolerably young to an affluent fortune, Mr. Symonds was able to indulge his tastes, literary and other, pretty much as he chose. The result was fortunate in one way, unfortunate in another. He could hardly have made a living by literature, in which though an eager worker he was a thorough dilettante. But if he had been at less liberty to write what and howsoever he pleased, he might or rather would have been obliged to compress and chasten the extreme prolixity and efflorescence of his style.