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In our modern world, society has turned to a more rational, scientific approach to life while art has embraced absurdism and randomness, as either a symptom of the materialistic bent or in response to it. Often, what is now called “poetic” contains disjointed metaphors and random comparisons, as if putting two contradictory things together is enough. This is not true, according to the influential Victorian art critic John Ruskin, who warned of such debasement in poetry over 150 years ago.

Ruskin, in his extremely influential Modern Painters, argued for a new approach to art as a whole. It was his view that accuracy in art was superior to all other considerations, and art should reveal nature as it is.

However, he did not oppose the use of metaphor to convey intense emotion. Instead, he argued that symbolic language must be true on some level of human experience in order to properly convey beauty.

When it came to writing and poetry, Ruskin devoted Chapter XII of Part IV of his work to criticizing the attribution of human emotions and feelings to nature, an action he dubbed “The Pathetic Fallacy” (or false emotions). To Ruskin, the term denoted a type of personification, where the artist anthropomorphizes an aspect of nature to project his own feelings upon the external world. It represents a desire for a sympathetic nature, where the poet can more easily recognize himself within the context of the greater universe and lessen his emotional burden.

Ruskin begins by discussing the increased usage of the terms “objective” and “subjective,” to which he claims, “No words can be more exquisitely, and in all points, useless; and I merely speak of them that I may, at once and for ever, get them out of the way, and out of my reader’s.”

He continues by discussing the nature of sensation, focusing on the color “blue” and how it is appears only when observed. Thus, “the qualitites of things which thus depend upon our perception of them, and upon our human nature as affected by them, shall be called Subjective; and the qualities of things which they always have, irrespective of any other nature, as roundness or squareness, shall be called Objective. From these ingenious views the step is very easy to a farther opinion, that it does not much matter what things are in themselves, but only what they are to us; and that the only real truth of them is their appearance to, or effect upon, us.”

This last step in the human understanding of the world is the source of many problems that afflict the human experience, and Ruskin alludes to the limitations of Cartesian and Hume-derived philosophical systems, “From which position, with a hearty desire for mystification, and much egotism, selfishness, shallowness, and impertinence, a philosopher may easily go so far as to believe, and say, that everything in the world depends upon his seeing or thinking of it, and that nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees or thinks of.”

Ruskin is quick to move back from the philosophical position, stating that the color “blue” does not refer to a sensation but to the “power” of production, the aspect of the item that allows the sensation to be felt. Such a potential is a fundamental component of the item disconnected from the human experience. Thus, he says that a philosopher should not say “it is objectively so” but “it is so,” and the philosopher should not say “it is subjectively so” but “it seems so to me.”

After explaining the problem with these terms, he continues, “No, therefore, putting these tiresome and absurd words quite out of our way, we may go on at our ease to examine the point in question,–namely the difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy.”

His first example of a problem comes from Oliver Wendell’s lines of poetry (“The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould / Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold”), to which he says, “This is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much that having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus?”

This is his central dilemma: finding metaphors that are untrue yet still convey beauty. To approach an answer to his question, he breaks the problem down into two types of falsehoods: “Either, as in the case of the crocus, it is the fallacy of wilful 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.”

The second type is the “pathetic fallacy,” which he attributes to the “second order of poets” while the first is “eminently poetical.” Of the first type, he argues, “Thus, when Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of Acheron ‘as dead leaves flutter from a bough,’ 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.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, however, lacks Dante’s spirit, and his lines (“The one red leaf, the last of its clan, / That dances as often as dance it can”) contains 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.”

Ruskin is not opposed to Coleridge’s writing, and he adds, “Here, however, there is some beauty, even in the morbid passage.” The problem within Coleridge’s writing is nothing compared to the issues within Alexander Pope’s rendition of Homer’s Odyssey, which mixes contradictory emotions in a jarring manner. Of Pope, Ruskin claims,”No poet of true imaginative power could possibly have written the passage. Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some sort, even if our enjoyment of fallacy. Coleridge’s fallacy has no discord in it, but Pope’s has set our teeth on edge.”

Thus, there are limitations to the pathetic fallacy, and it must exist under the proper conditions: “The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy, is… that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them… and it is a more or less noble state, according to the force of the emotion which has induced it… it is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly, the intellect, and make it believe what they choose. But it is still a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions.”

From this argument, Ruskin derives four types of people: a person who perceives but does not feel (not poets), a person who perceives wrongly because of feeling (bad poets), a man who perceives correctly even though he feels (true poets), and a man so overwhelmed by emotion that his reason can never fully comprehend it (prophets).

Writers can move between these categories throughout their lives, but only greater men can obtain the highest levels because they can experience a greater level of emotions before they are overwhelmed. Ruskin, who views Dante among the greatest type, argues, “Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire command of himself, and can look around calmly, at all moments, for the image or the word that will best tell what he sees to the upper or lower world. But Keats and Tennyson, and the poets of the second order, are generally themselves subdued by the feelings under which they write, or, at least, write as choosing to be so; and therefore admit certain expressions and modes of thought which are in some sort diseased or false.”

However, Ruskins allows for some exception, “so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which induces it. An inspired writer, in full impetuosity of passion, may speak wisely and truly of ‘raging waves of the sea foaming out their own shame’; but it is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without thinking of ‘raging waves,’ ‘remorseless floods,’ ‘ravenous billows,’ etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the pure fact, out of which if any feeling comes to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.”

From here, Ruskin praises poetry that focuses on the facts, providing a clear image of what is taking place without fanciful metaphors. He then argues, “Now in this there is the exact type of the consummate poetical temperament. For, be it clearly and constantly remembered, that the greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties, acuteness of feeling, and command of it. A poet is great, first in proportion to the strength of his passion, and then, that strength being granted, in proportion to his government of it.”

Ruskin continues, “Passion will indeed go far in deceiving itself, but it must be a strong passion, not the simple wish of a lover to tempt his mistress to sing. Compare a very closely parallel passage in Wordsworth, in which the lover has lost his mistress.”

After quoting from Wordsworth’s “‘Tis said, that some have died for love,” he argues, “Here is a cottage to be moved, if not a mountain, and a waterfall to be silent, if it is not to hang listening; but with what different relation to the mind that contemplates them! here, in the extremity of its agony, the soul cries out wildly for relief, which at the same moment it partly knows to be impossible, but partly believes to be possible, in a vague impression that a miracle might be wrought to give relief even to a less sore distress,–that nature is kind, and God is kind, and that grief is strong: it knows not well what is possible to such grief.”

The power in Wordsworth’s line leads Ruskin to return to his summary of the pathetic fallacy, with praise to Wordsworth and Tennyson’s usage of it, as denoting a limitation in our understand. The problem is not poetry attributing aspects or feelings to nature that are false but when poets attribute emotions that contradict the reality of the situation and undermine their metaphor.

Ruskin concludes, “It then being, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all respects that the pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that the dominion of Truth is entire, over this, as over every other natural and just state of the human mind.”

Allowances can be made for a level of falseness only when there is great emotion that justifies it, but there still must be some alignment with reality. There is great power in conveying deep emotion while not projecting it onto nature, but there is still power in falling prey to the fallacy if it is warranted.

When understanding the pathetic fallacy, we should not fall prey to the idea that a “fallacy” is inherently wrong or useless. A fallacy is only false in a literal sense, and there can still be great metaphorical truth to be derived in what the fallacy reveals to the audience. It is a manifestation of emotions, of being, and allows us to see into the mind of the speaker. When flowers look sad or mocking to an individual, we can determine that the person is most likely suffering in some way and projecting their loathing onto nature. However, such projections only matter when there is a sorrow of such great proportions that it justifies it. Anything of a lesser quality becomes comical or melodramatic.

The greatest problem comes from disjointed imagery, including Ruskin’s example of Pope translating a factual question of Odysseus about a friend’s death in Homer into a drawn out metaphor that undermines any urgency in his question. No person suffering in such a manner would seek to prolong his agony of not knowing. By mixing the high and the low, poets trivialize their emotions and metaphors, which removes their beauty.

Throughout his essay, Ruskin does not bash the Romantic poets, as some later readers believe. Instead, he only analyzes a technique so heavily favored by them, revealing how it works or fails according to its own principles. Of course, Ruskin feels that Dante and Homer are among the greatest of poets, but their mastery does not diminish the beauty of the Romantics, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, who are mentioned directly.

Our modern era is dominated by poetry of the type that no longer cares about correct emotional power or factual credibility. Often, “poetic” imagery are two random ideas thrown into juxtaposition, or some abstract summary of an environment that is far from true. Some how, art became a reaction to a false understanding of Ruskin’s approach, embracing a caricature of “pathetic fallacy,” which leads to the very problem he warned against. But Ruskin’s analysis was not of a personal opinion but an expression of how the mind sees beauty, and this failure in our modern poetics coincides with the loss of widely recognized poems. If we want people to respect art again, we should return to Ruskin and realize that so much of modern “art” has contradicted our fundamental understanding of beauty.