The Ruling Passion

The Ruling Passion: Tales of Nature and Human Nature is a short-story collection by the American author, Presbyterian minister and Princeton University professor of English literature Henry van Dyke (1852–1933), published in 1901 by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York. The book opens with a prefatory "A Writer's Request of His Master" and an author's preface in which van Dyke sets out his literary creed: every life worth writing about is governed by a "ruling passion" that directs a person's choices like the pulse of a machine. This passion need not be love; it may be music, honor, justice, duty, compassion, or attachment to nature. He therefore deliberately places his characters on "nature's stage", choosing mostly plain, ordinary people so that their feelings show through without embellishment. The collection contains eight stories: "A Lover of Music", "The Reward of Virtue", "A Brave Heart", "The Gentle Life", "A Friend of Justice", "The White Blot", "A Year of Nobility" and "The Keeper of the Light". The settings lie mostly among the forests, river valleys and coasts of North America: the rural friendship between a violinist and a frail young woman, a lighthouse keeper's duty on an isolated island, and small parables of human life about justice, vanity and noble character. The prose is clear and restrained, in the style of late nineteenth-century American local-color writing and moral fable. This edition is the 1901 first edition, with illustrations by Walter Appleton Clark and a binding designed by Margaret Armstrong.