Yet most humble writers will feel that if they try to
imitate Mr. Ruskin's eloquence they will pay the penalty of becoming
ridiculous. It is not every one who can with impunity compare Alps to
archangels. Tall talk is luckily an object of suspicion to Englishmen,
and consequently most writers, and especially those who frankly adopt
the sporting view of the mountains, adopt the opposite scheme: they
affect something like cynicism; they mix descriptions of scenery with
allusions to fleas or to bitter beer; they shrink with the prevailing
dread of Englishmen from the danger of overstepping the limits of the
sublime into its proverbial opposite; and they humbly try to amuse us
because they can't strike us with awe. This, too, if I may venture to
say so, is good in its way and place; and it seems rather hard to these
luckless writers when people assume that, because they make jokes on a
mountain, they are necessarily insensible to its awful sublimities. A
sense of humour is not incompatible with imaginative sensibility; and
even Wordsworth might have been an equally powerful prophet of nature if
he could sometimes have descended from his stilts.
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