The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

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.

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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

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).

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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