III. GROTESQUE RENAISSANCE 153

highest and healthiest state which is competent to ordinary humanity appears to be that which, accepting the necessity of recreation, and yielding to the impulses of natural delight springing out of health and innocence, does, indeed, condescend often to playfulness, but never without such deep love of God, of truth, and of humanity, as shall make even its lightest words reverent, its idlest fancies profitable, and its keenest satire indulgent. Wordsworth and Plato furnish us with perhaps the finest and highest examples of this playfulness; in the one case, unmixed with satire, the perfectly simple effusion of that spirit

“Which gives to all the self-same bent,

Whose life is wise and innocent;”¹

-in Plato, and, by-the-by, in a very wise book of our own times, not unworthy of being named in such companionship, Friends in Council, mingled with an exquisitely tender and loving satire.²

§ 27. Secondly: The men who play necessarily. That highest species of playfulness, which we have just been considering, is evidently the condition of a mind, not only highly cultivated, but so habitually trained to intellectual labour that it can bring a considerable force of accurate thought into its moments even of recreation. This is not possible unless so much repose of mind and heart are enjoyed, even at the periods of greatest exertion, that the rest required by the system is diffused over the whole life. To the majority of mankind, such a state is evidently unattainable. They must,

¹ [Wordsworth; the last lines of a piece of 1803, beginning “Who fancied what a pretty sight.”]

² [Sir Arthur Helps published four series under this title, 1847-1859. Ruskin often refers to the book. Thus in Modern Painters, vol. iii. App. 3, he mentions Helps with Carlyle and Wordsworth as the authors to whom he owes most, and praises especially his “beautiful quiet English.” In the same volume Helps is cited with Plato and Carlyle as “a true thinker” (ch. xvi. § 28), and cf. vol. v. pt. ix. ch. iv. § 18 n.; ch. viii. § 15 n. Helps became a personal friend of Ruskin, and dedicated to him the second series of Friends in Council; see Eagle’s Nest, § 208. See also Crown of Wild Olive, § 102, Elements of Drawing, § 259, and Fors Clavigera, Letters 90, 94.]

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