Introduction to Chapter 2 of the author's Ruskin's Poetic Argument: The Design of the Major Works, which Cornell University Press published in 1985. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Knowledge enormous makes a god of me. -- John Keats, Hyperion
uskin's letter to Osborne Gordon on the origins of Modern Painters I describes his new career in art criticism as an alternative to the ministry. His aim, he writes, was to communicate "the love and knowledge .... not of technicalities and fancies of men, but of the universal system of nature -- as interpreted and rendered stable by art." He then recalls that, on a Sunday in 1842, while traveling in Geneva, he read a hostile review of Turner:" It put me in a rage, and that forenoon in church (it's an odd thing, but all my resolutions of which anything is to come are invariably formed, whether I will or no, in church -- I scheme all thro' the litany) -- that forenoon, I say, I determined to write a pamphlet and blow the critics out of the water." But the pamphlet grew into "a complete treatise on landscape art." "Then came the question, what is the real end of landscape art? and then the conviction ... that it might become an instrument of gigantic moral power, and that the demonstration of this high function, and the elevation of the careless sketch or conventional composition into the studied sermon and inspired poem, was an end worthy of my utmost labour" (III, 665-666). The confusion in the final sentence is richly suggestive. Nothing can elevate a conventional composition to an inspired poem; Ruskin must have in mind the writing of his own treatise, his continuing hopes as an artist, or the effect of his prose on other modern painters. The sentence does convey with accuracy his newly discovered sense of moral and verbal power, which fuses the ecstatic emotions induced by landscape, the "swelling" that Burke attributes to ambition, and the moral
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aggressiveness of the inspired preacher. Ruskin's first book is at once a pamphlet to end all pamphlets and arguably the longest sermon in English, but the mingling, in the passage that I have quoted, of "composition," "sketch," and "poem" suggests that Ruskin, viewing paintings as sermons and language as paint, reconceives the experience of seeing as he revolutionizes the rhetorical modes that he mixes so surprisingly.
The golden-tongued preacher strikes out characteristically in passages like the summary attack on the Old Masters, which in the first edition immediately precedes Ruskin's introduction of Turner:
A man accustomed to the broad wild sea-shore, with its . . . eternal sensation of tameless power, can scarcely but be angered when Claude bids him stand still on some paltry chipped and chiselled quay, with porters and wheelbarrows running against him, to watch a weak, rippling, bound and barriered water.... A man accustomed to the grace and infinity of nature's foliage, with every vista a cathedral, and every bough a revelation, can scarcely but be angered when Poussin mocks him with a black round mass of impenetrable paint, diverging into feathers instead of leaves, and supported on a stick instead of a trunk. The fact is, there is one thing wanting in all the doing of these men, and that is the very virtue by which the work of human mind chiefly rises above that of the daguerreotype or calotype, or any other mechanical means that ever have been or may be invented, Love. There is no evidence of their ever having gone to nature with any thirst, or received from her such emotion as could make them ... lose sight of themselves; there is in them neither earnestness nor humility; there is no simple or honest record of any single truth; none of the plain words or straight efforts that men speak and make when they once feel. [III, 168-169]
Although Ruskin's endeavor, as he wrote to Gordon, was to reach "all classes," he describes the love of the sublime here in the language of class contempt: grand scenes and grand natures are set off against small minds and the activities of tradesmen. With naive literalness, the passage makes sublimity the spiritual symbol of bourgeois aspiration, the aspiration of the same class that found vicarious fulfillment in the grand gestures of Byron's romances. Then at an imperceptible point, the class polemic shifts to religious polemic. In addition to being puny and vulgar, the Old Masters are also a school of errors and falsehoods, while the sudden new generation of Englishmen, consummating the history of art forever, it would seem, stands as a group of heroes of Protestant history, endowed with Protestant virtues -- humility, earnestness, simplicity, and plain speaking, They are nature's gentlemen, whereas the conceited Continentals are the real vulgarians; and most important, they are "self-forgetful." Already in his career, Ruskin assoclates [35/36] "mechanical means" with the acts and products of a mind in selfisolation and "Love" with the acts and products of a mind that has lost itself in a greater whole. The core of constructive thought in the passage is that great art is not necessarily more or less accurate than bad art, but it invariably springs from an act of communion and bears recognizable traces of that communion in a kind of Wordsworthian overflow of speech, natural and spontaneous -- "the plain words ... that men speak ... when once they feel." But since bad art really has no audience, it can neither commune nor communicate.
And so for nearly six hundred pages more, polemic and rhapsody, praise and assault make themselves heard through one of the most mercurial voices a writer has ever fashioned for himself. The incongruities stem in part from the contradictions in the young man's heritage -- his parents' religion of piety and the religious intensity of their social ambitions -- which express themselves in the book as the paradox of sublime experience, the soul's losing itself in order to find itself, elevated and glorified. In other words, Ruskin studies the paradoxes of power in bourgeois Protestantism. But this feature of Ruskin's project is inseparable from the revolution in seeing that has been classically described by Graham Hough: "The neglected faculties must be released from their archaic existence in the unconscious and set free to function in the daylight. This is what Ruskin is trying to do for the sense of sight -- to release it from the bondage to utility and convention and to set it free to operate in its own way; he is vindicating the rights of the senses" (The Last Romantics, 12). This vindication takes the form of a new account of the aesthetic transaction, or what is really the same thing, a description of the world as it appears to the great artist -- to the man who has seen God's face.
Ruskin, John. Works ed. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn.39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Ruskin, John. The Ruskin's Family Letter ed. Van Akin Burd, 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Ruskin, John. The Diaries of John Ruskin ed. Joanne Evans and John Howard Whitehouse, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
Last modified December 2000