Section 3, 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.
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n a late preface to Modern Painters II, Ruskin acknowledges his theoretical debt to Aristotle by translating the passage he had earlier left in the original Greek: "And perfect happiness is some sort of energy of Contemplation, for all the life of the gods is (therein) glad; and that of men, glad in the degree in which some likeness to the gods in this energy belongs to them" (IV, 7). The quotation concludes Ruskin's central argument that men delight only in "whatever is a type or semblance of divine attributes" and that this delight "seems a promise of a communion ultimately deep, close, and conscious" with God (IV, 144). "Energy," not "contemplation," is the key term of Ruskin's dynamic Aristotelianism and of his paganized Christianity, for the complementary statements express the central idea of his early religious aesthetics,
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that the full visual experience of God's handiwork is eucharistic. His rendering of Aristotle underscores the relationship of Christian sacraments to older mythological materials: the eucharist and baptism, types of an ultimate communion and an everlasting life, are the fulfillment of the promise denied in Eden ("Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil"), now offered to the Christian in magnified but paradoxical terms-that the lowest will be exalted, that the last will be first, and that only the pure in heart shall see God.
When we add to this Ruskin's youthful enthusiasm for Shelley (we know that he read Prometheus Unbound, "The Sensitive Plant," "Julian and Maddalo ... .. Epipsychidion," and no doubt more during the first summer of his love for Aèle), it is not surprising that in Modem Painters i he should write the notorious passage that his critics immediately seized upon as blasphemous:
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The metaphor may be extravagant but is perfectly consistent with Ruskin's underlying pattern of imagery. These words bring to its climax a paragraph of praise for the lesser English artists, each of whom is described in ascending order, according to the range of natural phenomena he incorporates and so represents in paint. Turner, whose mind is coextensive with all of visible nature, appropriately takes the form of an intermediary between God and the material creation. Literally, his mastery of the elements means simply that he can paint any subject, but metaphorically, it means that enormous power has made a god of him. The same implication attends Ruskin's advice to young painters to begin by studying nature: they must first keep to quiet colors and be "humble and earnest in following" nature's steps, until such time as they may "take up the scarlet and the gold" and "give the reins to their fancy.... We will [then] follow them wherever they choose to lead" (III, 623-624). Literally, to take up the scarlet and gold means simply to begin using bolder colors; metaphorically, it means to become as the sun god. Once again, the Protestant ethic of deferral yields to pagan dreams of glory. What of Ruskin's own position as Turner's imitator in words? His belief that verbal language and visual language are differing "modes of Poetry" opens the way for his voice and Turner's to merge and for translation to become incorporation. Ruskin's role then parallels Turner's by analogy: Turner, having seen [48/49] God's face, speaks to men as Messenger and interpreter; Ruskin, having studied nature through Turner, speaks to men as Turner's champion and exponent. The Archangel passage may bear a hidden allusion to the second mission, since, in the Book of Revelations, the Angel of the Apocalypse is pictured bearing a scroll and saying to the prophet John, "Take it and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth" (Rev. 10:9).
In the metaphorical structure of the book, then, Turner is the type of the redeemed, that is, the seeing man, and is appropriately figured as a union of human and natural elements; he is also the personalized form of all that Ruskin, and therefore all that we, can love in nature and art -- a fiction similar to what Ruskin would later call a "companionable deity" in his study of Greek myths. The difficulty, of course, is that Ruskin's moral argument rests upon an antithesis between the Christian concepts of pride and humility, which leads him into deep perplexity. The power of the impersonal self, coming through surrender to God, also elevates Turner the man above all men. The book fails to distinguish between landscape feelings, which Ruskin's religious conscience would approve as a form of worship, and the experience of superiority over others, which his religious conscience would condemn as pride. As though recognizing this omission, Ruskin attacks the selfishness and vanity of the bad painters by allying himself with one greater than he and so falls into unconscious comedy -- Turner, of all people, becomes the type of artistic humility. Most obviously Ruskin's problem is the problem of the religious culture he inherited from his parents -- we have seen how the language of class contempt can shift quickly into a polemic on religious humility. But when, either in society or in art, does humility before God become pride before men? Can anyone consciously strive to be unself-conscious? Part of Ruskin's problem is semantic, or rather a confusion of artistic and social personality, with the result that the words "pride" and "humility" have force as polemical counters, not as critical terms. The epic voice of Homer, for example, neither has nor lacks pride, yet by describing the impersonality of art as a Christian virtue, Ruskin confuses formal characteristics and ethical values as well as spiritual virtues and social virtues -- in the latter sense "pride" and "humility" are close to the modern sense of "conceit" and "modesty." Moreover, "annihilation" was for Ruskin himself a delicious experience of visual self-forgetfulness, not the self-abnegation taught by the Scriptures. These contradictions are no doubt one reason he fell back so often on the fiction of Wordsworthian childhood, the only time when omnipotence can come through true unselfconsciousness.
Yet Ruskin's project is redeemed by the authenticity of the experience he had to communicate, however clumsily encapsulated in a polemical [49/50] structure, and by the language he invented for that purpose. His problem is to argue for a bardic theory of art and also to democratize sublime experience -- to defend Turner as an inspired prophet yet to spread his vision among "all classes of men." Ruskin risks bathos, but so did Wordsworth when he sought to construct a voice with double functions -- a voice conveying the elevation of the bard yet also speaking as a man to other men. 9 Ruskin knew Wordsworth's claim that poetic language is a spontaneous and unaffected overflow of powerful feeling, and he knew the sermonic speech of Wordsworth's Wanderer. The one voice is presumably artless, the other deliberately elevated, but we have seen that Ruskin is not sensitive to this distinction, and at any rate, Wordsworth had claimed that the language of unaffected passion could rise even in unlettered people to the dignity of poetry. And so Ruskin develops for Modern Painters I a mode at once "artless" and elevated, appropriate to the mediator who speaks to other humans of a high and privileged experience. This explanation would justify Ruskin's preparation for a reading audience of the diary passages he gathered for the book, themselves composed without thought of an audience though not indeed in complete spontaneity. In addition to the finished style we notice another, not wholly separable, voice, the oracular voice of Shelley. In a poem like the "Ode to the West Wind," Shelley dramatized the relationship of ode to oracular utterance by a language that achieves the oracular condition he demands of the wind as the source of his inspiration. The same excitement infuses Ruskinian descriptions. By fusing these influences into his own idiom, Ruskin becomes in the truest sense a preacher -- not because of his occasionally sanctimonious tone but because of the shifting multiplicity of his rhetorical gestures, now praising and castigating, now explicating and examining, now exhorting and praying. His finest "sermons" constitute his first permanent contribution to English literature, as a few examples suffice to show.
The best-known version of Ruskinian sublime simulates a burst of joyous, almost childlike energy, in which the words seem dictated by a force outside the viewer. The passage on Venice excerpted above is the first such moment in the book, which, following upon Turner's apotheosis as Angel of the Apocalypse, seems a veritable City of God:
That sky ... parting and melting through the chasms in the long fields of snow-white, flaked, slow-moving vapour . . . to the islanded rest of the Euganean hills. Do we dream, or does the white forked sail drift nearer, and nearer yet, diminishing the blue sea between us with the fulness of its [50/51] wings? It pauses now; but the quivering of its bright reflection troubles the shadows of the sea, those azure, fathomless depths of crystal mystery, on which the swiftness of the poised gondola floats double, its black beak lifted like the crest of a dark ocean bird, its scarlet draperies flashed back from the kindling surface, and its bent oar breaking the radiant water into a dust of gold. Dreamlike and dim, but glorious, the unnumbered palaces lift their shafts out of the hollow sea, -- pale ranks of motionless flame,their mighty towers sent up to heaven like tongues of more eager fire,their grey domes looming vast and dark, like eclipsed worlds, -- their sculptured arabesques and purple marble fading farther and fainter, league beyond league, lost in the light of distance. [III, 257]
Here Ruskin, like the Angel, seems to summon up all the elements at once and give them life. As readers have often noticed, he does not denote objects but instead renders them and their connections as energies even when they are generally motionless: the boat, for example, drifts, pauses, quivers, poises, lifts, flashes, and so on. The motion depicted is not hectic like a storm but tremendous in its variety-an ordinary day, so to speak, in the cosmos. Remarkably, the superflux of energy is counterbalanced by an even greater stress on essence, which Ruskin conveys by the characteristic grammatical device of linking indefinite nouns with definite adjectives in prepositional phrases: thus, not light or wings but "fullness of light," "fullness of wings"; not mysterious crystal but "crystal mystery"; not the gondola floating but the "poised swiftness" floating; not islands and hills but "islanded rest of the Euganean hills." Grammatically, things are subordinated to the ideas of things. The imitator gives us sails, clouds, hills, and light; Turner gives us fullness, mystery, rest, poised swiftness, making any scene not only the epitome of infinite energy but also the transience of infinite essence in concrete particulars, or in Coleridge's phrase, the translucence of the general in the specific.
Similes, which normally direct our attention away from the objects, serve here to intensify their presence. In a passage cited earlier, Ruskin describes Poussin's leaves as feathers and his trunk as a stick (the tree shrinks), whereas in nature, we are told, every bough is "a revelation." In the present passage, the crest of a boat is a bird's beak, its sides are draperies, and towers are tongues, but the effect is to expand the objects. Ruskin's similes work to expand or contract according to context, with the truly rendered object resembling something oversized or overenergized -- in this case we "see" enormous and therefore sublime birds, draperies, and tongues. In yet another example from elsewhere in the book, Ruskin compares bad and good depictions of lightning to "zigzag fortifications" and "dreadful irregularity of streaming fire" (III, 413). The first comparison shrinks lightning to something static and conventionalized, the second expands it to an energy or quality that is boundless because beyond size -- the actual phrase is more frightening [51/52] and Vivid than "fire that streams irregularly and dreadfully" because "irregularity" is indefinite (a point Ruskin makes himself in his next volume).
In perhaps the best-known word painting in the book, Ruskin's reading of The Slave Ship, similes and metaphors once again suggest the universal in the particular, this time by evoking a symbolic vision:
Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labours amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in the fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea. [III, 572]
This famous sentence is perhaps the book's most complete sinking of thought into sensuous description. As Elizabeth Helsinger observes, Ruskin here "guides the mind through a temporal process of imaginative association which is inseparable from a temporal experience of tracing formal visual relationships, especially of light and color"; the painting becomes "not just the occasion for mental process but the embodiment of it." (Helsinger, 189). The canvas as first beheld is a central burst of red and gold that diffuses itself into darkness and mist, while shadowy hieroglyphs of fish and men rise and fall in the chaos of foreground water. Ruskin brings order to this impression of incoherent energy, using a set of intricately connected clauses that march with fierce inevitability from object to object and from color to color in a gradual accumulation of moral signification. The three climactic clauses take "fearful hue" as their subject and disclose (along with a previous clause linking it with the ship) four separate activities of redness -- girding with condemnation, signing the sky, mixing its flood, and incarnadining the sea. The phrases unpack one by one the meanings concentrated by Turner into a single focus. Allusions mingle with specific denotations to create a fantasia on themes from the Apocalypse -- skies raining blood, seas burning, darkness of night, and the ocean that delivers up its dead, climactically linked with Macbeth's murders. Phrases like "condemnation," "flaming flood," and "sepulchral waves" are therefore cosmic in their generality, and "incarnadines the multitudinous sea" culminates this binding of the many and the one (many deaths and one redness), a binding which is of course the function of allegorical signs. The visible form of this union is the masts of the ship, which become the mark of its guilt (like Lady Macbeth's hand) and also the bond connecting the ship to the center of an elemental disturbance, [52/53] like a cause tied to its indefinitely radiating effects. Turner as Archangel here gives the last of his revelations, which is a visual antithesis of himself: the "red and gold" are here antithetical to the raiment of the prophet-painter, since the ship does not take on the colors of the sun but rather inbues the cosmos with its own bloodguilt and the shadow of its own death. Ruskin identifies the slaver only in a footnote, as though to keep a pious distance (the ship drops to the bottom of the page like its own cargo), and maintains a particularly endistanced rhetoric. The order of grammatically connected clauses imitates the inevitability and the tone of judgement by means of a regular rhythm in which nearly every word demands stress. In their effect the elegiac incantation and sermonic denunciation anticipate the famous beating waves at the beginning of The Stones of Venice.
The passage in the book that became the most popular during Ruskin's lifetime is also the most representative of his rapturous sermonic style. At the conclusion of the section on truth of skies, Ruskin bids the reader stand in the Alps for twenty-four hours beginning just before dawn, in order to observe the diurnal water cycle. Starting with the burning away of mists before the rising sun, the sentences move through a perpetually shifting symphony of light and mist and water, describing a circle from east to west to east again as the sun prepares for its second ascent. At each atmospheric phase, Ruskin punctuates his divisions with "Has Claude given this?" until at the end, the completion of the revelation is signaled by a sudden shift to supernatural imagery, the apotheosis of both gods of Nature: "until the whole heaven, one scarlet canopy, is interwoven with a roof of waving flame, and tossing, vault beyond vault, as with the drifted wings of many companies of angels: and then, when you can look no more for gladness, and when you are bowed down with fear and love of the Maker and Doer of this, tell me who has best delivered this His message unto men!" (III, 418-419). This is sublime preaching at its most deliberate-the repeated bidding and querying of an audience until the lesson is consummated, and the appearance of losing the self in an exalted subject. It imitates as well the form of the psalm by invoking the deity through his works and thereby overthrowing his rivals -- God's rivals, that is, and Turner's. For as divine Messenger, Turner shares the attributes of God and man. However bathetic the effect, Ruskin's incorporation of aesthetic polemic into religion consummates the general agon of his book, the conflict between the two spiritual states of light and darkness.
The language of this passage, and of the book as a whole, owes more to Shelley, finally, than to Wordsworth. The description of Venice is suffused with Shelleyan diction -- "liquid," "snow-white," "flaked," "azure," "crystal," "dim," "flamed," "fading" are examples -- and its sustained ecstasy of beholding imitates the protean energy of Shelley's "spontaneous gladness." This is the language the Wordsworthian child [53/54] might speak if he wrote poetry, and the broad project of Ruskin's sermonic style, touching as it does on ode, psalm, and apparently thoughtless inspiration, may be usefully understood as absorbing the child's hunger of delight into a disciplined seeing capable of renewing the energies of the adult too long buried beneath a weight of custom. The Alpine passage is particularly suggestive in this regard, since the vantage point is the same as that of Asia and Panthea in Prometheus Unbound immediately before they descend to the cave of Demogorgon. Asia's speech concludes as follows:
"Hark! the rushing snow!
The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass,
Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there
Flake after flake, in Heaven-defying minds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round
Shaken to their roots: as do the mountains now."
[III, ii 36-42]
Ruskin's psalm begins with "the flakes of light falling every moment faster and broader among the starry spires, as the wreathed surges break and vanish above them, and the confused crests and ridges of the dark hills shorten their gray shadows upon the plain" (III, 416). Although Ruskin is more paratactic here than Shelley (the repeated "and's" imitate the psalmist's naming as well as the preacher's rhythmic regularity), in general he has learned from Shelley how to merge grammatical with visual movement: both writers connect visual ideas by strings of similes and relative clauses, and both read particular elements of an ill-defined space that continually form and dissolve, veil and reveal, recreating the experience of beholding rather than the beheld objects themselves.
The odd connection between the earnest young Evangelical and the radical freethinker with the scandalous biography goes deeper than stylistic influence and the dreamy excitedness they shared by temperament. It extends to the characteristic structure of their visionary moments. At the close of Asia's speech, her comparison of the avalanche with "Heaven-defying minds" soon yields to a vision of "thin shapes within the mist" presaging a radical transformation of the human social spirit. At the climax of his peroration Ruskin sees the heavens fill with troops of angels in vaults that remind us of the palaces of Turner's Venice ("pale ranks of motionless flame, -- their mighty towers sent up to heaven like tongues of more eager fire"). Philosophically, of course, the passages are radically opposed: Shelley's natural imagery enacts the One Mind's power to refashion political and therefore phenomenal reality, whereas Ruskin's ode renders stable the "system of nature" in a reverent rather than a heaven-defying spirit. Yet Ruskin's mature aesthetics [54/55] is closer to Shelley than to any other romantic theorist, and this early passage shows why. For both men nature is the sum of affective possibility projected outward; for both human reality is the farthest reach of a poet-prophet's vision; for both metaphors appear to grow out of enraptured contemplation. Nature, that is, becomes supernatural, trembling into the image of human forms and human artifacts. It is an extraordinary move so late in a book on realistic landscape, pushing as it does beyond the limits of observable nature, perhaps even beyond the limits of painting. Ruskin makes no considered claim to the superiority of poetry over visual representation, yet his mature theory, as the present passage indicates, will attempt a comprehensive exploration of metaphor in the sister arts, an exploration that is at once a grammar of figurative connections in space and time and a vocabulary drawing upon both books of revelation, Nature and the Scriptures. Already in the second volume of Modern Painters he set himself to that attempt.
Helsinger, Elizabeth K. Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder. Camridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
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