Ruskin?
Are there not in his books more and finer passages of descriptive
poetry--word-painting--call them what you will, than in any other
prose book in the English language?'
'Not a doubt of it, my dear Claude; but it will not do for every one
to try Mr. Ruskin's tools. Neither you nor I possess that almost
Roman severity, that stern precision of conception and expression,
which enables him to revel in the most gorgeous language, without
ever letting it pall upon the reader's taste by affectation or over-
lusciousness. His style is like the very hills along which you have
been travelling, whose woods enrich, without enervating, the grand
simplicity of their forms.'
'The comparison is just,' said Claude. 'Mr. Ruskin's style, like
those very hills, and like, too, the Norman cathedrals of which he is
so fond, is rather magnified than concealed by the innumerable
multiplicity of its ornamental chasing and colouring.'
'And is not that,' I asked, 'the very highest achievement of artistic
style?'
'Doubtless. The severe and grand simplicity, of which folks talk so
much, is great indeed; but only the greatest as long as men are still
ignorant of Nature's art of draping her forms with colour,
chiaroscuro, ornament, not at the expense of the original design, but
in order to perfect it by making it appeal to every faculty instead
of those of form and size alone.
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