to produce all manner of faults. In overloading his
sentences with jewelry he frequently obscures the sense; his beauties
often degenerate into mere prettiness; his sweetness cloys. His free
indulgence of the emotions, often at the expense of the intellect,
leads to a riotous extravagance of superlative. But, above all, his
richness distracts attention from matter to manner. In the case of an
author so profoundly in earnest, this could not but be unfortunate;
nothing enraged him more than to have people look upon the beauties of
his style rather than ponder the substance of his book. In a passage
of complacent self-scourging he says:

"For I have had what, in many respects, I boldly call the
misfortune, to set my words sometimes prettily together; not
without a foolish vanity in the poor knack that I had of doing
so, until I was heavily punished for this pride by finding that
many people thought of the words only, and cared nothing for their
meaning. Happily, therefore, the power of using such language--if
indeed it ever were mine--is passing away from me; and whatever I
am now able to say at all I find myself forced to say with great
plainness."[18]

[Sidenote: His picturesque extravagance of style.]

But Ruskin's decision to speak with "great plainness" by no means made
the people of England attend to what he said rather than the way he
said it. He could be, and in his later work he usually was, strong
and clear; but the old picturesqueness and exuberance of passion were
with him still. The public discovered that it enjoyed Ruskin's
denunciations of machinery much as it had enjoyed his descriptions of
mountains, and, without obviously mending its ways, called loudly for
more. Lecture-rooms were crowded and editions exhausted by the ladies
and gentlemen of England, whose nerves were pleasantly thrilled with a
gentle surprise on being told that they had despised literature, art,
science, nature, and compassion, and that what they thought upon any
subject was "a matter of no serious importance"; that they could not
be said to have any thoughts at all--indeed, no right to think.[19]
The fiercer his anathemas, the greater the applause; the louder he
shouted, the better he pleased. Let him split the ears of the
groundlings, let him out-Herod Herod,--the judicious might grieve, but
all would be excitedly attentive. Their Jeremiah seemed at times like
to become a jester,--there was a sug