Section2, Chapter 3, 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.
indicates a link to material not in the original print version. Ruskin's letter to Liddell sets out with striking frankness the nature of his task as he then saw it. His first book, he admits, was in the "pamphleteer" style: "There is a nasty, snappish, impatient, half-familiar [57/58] , half-claptrap web of young-mannishness everywhere.... I am going to try for better things; for a serious, quiet, earnest, and simple manner, like the execution I want in art." The new book will introduce a new subject as well as a new style:
As soon as I began to throw my positions respecting the beautiful into form, I found myself necessarily thrown on the human figure for great part of my illustrations; and at last, after having held off in fear and trembling as long as I could, I saw there was no help for it, and that it must be taken up to purpose.... I don't think, with my heart full of Fra Angelico, and my eyes of Titian, that I shall fall back into the pamphleteer style again.
But he adds immediately, "Don't suppose, however, with all this, that I am going to lose Turner." The chief problem he stresses is lack of knowledge: he had grown up well acquainted with "pure, wild, solitary, natural scenery" but not with "general or human knowledge" -- we may assume he also means acquaintance with human affections. He then asks Liddell where he can look, in Plato or elsewhere, for a theory of imagination, presumably to help him come to terms with the luminous visions of Fra Angelico, the Bellinis, and other Old Masters he had briefly seen in Venice and Paris (III, 668-670). In this self-portrait addressed to an intellectual mentor, Ruskin presents himself as a precocious youth about to become an earnest young man: he is bound to Turner by his boyish rambles in "pure, wild, solitary" landscape, but he denigrates his defense of that painter as both vulgar and immature -- a mistake he will not repeat after absorption in religious painters, which, he also implies, might ease him from the "fear and trembling" of considering the human figure. The experience that these painters provide might also bring him spiritual maturity (it would save him from the pamphleteer style) and would perhaps make good his youthful sacrifice of human experiences for knowledge of nature, but what then will become of the pleasures peculiar to the child?
Another, very different document would seem to point the way to one of the aims he expresses to Liddell -- the proof that "the principles of beauty are the same in all things, that its characters are typical of the Deity, and of the relations which in a perfect state we are to hold with him." In an oft-quoted fragment composed in 1843 or 1844 and apparently intended for the new work in progress, Ruskin recalls an evening spent by the fountain of the Brevent, a stream that flows into the Arve, when he experienced the coming of darkness and storm in overtly Apocalyptic terms: "It was as if the sun had been taken away from the world, and the life of the earth were ebbing away, groan by groan." Suddenly, in the midst of blackness, the clouds part, revealing the [58/59] upper peaks bathed in the fire of sunset: "the mighty pyramids stood calmly -- in the very heart of the high heaven -- a celestial city with walls of amethyst and gates of gold -- filled with the light and clothed with the Peace of God." Ruskin cries out in the ecstasy of complete submission to the Divine:
It was only then that I understood that to become nothing might be to become more than Man; -- how without desire -- without memory -- without sense even of existence -- the very sense of its own lost in the perception of a mightier -- the immortal soul might be held forever -- impotent as a leaf -- yet greater than tongue can tell -- wrapt in the one contemplation of the Infinite God.
The Beautiful, Ruskin concludes, belongs only to the types of God's attributes -- to anything that "can turn the human soul from gazing on itself ... and fix ihe spirit-in all humility -- on the types ofthat which is to be its food for eternity" (IV, 363-365).
The passage perfectly exemplifies the three-part movement of sublime experience as described by Thomas Weiskel: a period of intense anticipation, then an overburdening of the senses in which the relation of signifier to signified becomes indeterminate, then a return to a normal state of perception, leaving the "trace" of the experience in a metaphor (Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, 24-26). -- with an access of power in the beholder that typically follows upon such disruption of the subject-object relationship. And just as typically for Ruskin, the metaphor intensifies the mountain by hyperbole -- it becomes a City oversized and overlustrous. The prose differs from ecsatic passages in Modern Painters I in its infusion of Burkean fear, but in other ways it seems to form the perfect bridge between the Alpine psalm in the first book and the new interests facing Ruskin: by converting loss of self into a transfigured self, loss of time into a vision of eternity, and landscape ecstasy into symbolic vision, it sets forth in miniature the project of a comprehensive grammar of imagery for religious poetry and art and a fusion of natural and biblical typology. Finally, the haunting but unobtrusive image of the Brevent, the emblem, it would seem, of the viewer's persistent selfhood, combines with the extreme experience of weakness ("the life of the earth ... ebbing away") to suggest that Ruskin masters through endurance of terror his own dread of spiritual diminishment through time.
But the greatest interest of this passage for us lies in the fact that Ruskin never published it. We cannot know why he did not, but strong suggestions occur in certain poems of the early 1840s in which similar [59/60] images of solitary ecstasy appear in a radically unsatisfying light. The richest of these is "A Walk in Chamouni," possibly written in the same year as the Brevent fragment. The same imagery recurs but with an odd discontinuity, as though to suggest states of mind rather than scenes from a walking tour: we see first a bubbling brook, then a dark grove, then a gushing torrent, then the luminous aiguilles of the lower mountains, and finally, the higher peaks, rising "as pure as if the breath / Of God had called them newly into light, / Free from all stamp of sin, or shade of death." But the poem takes a surprising turn. Although the mountains are "inly bright," "Serene and universal as the night," they are "comfortless" and "cold" because removed from humanity -- "passionless and pure, but all unblest":
Corruption -- must it root the brightest birth?
And is the life that bears its fruitage best,
One neither of supremacy nor rest?
The dilemma is unmitigated: supremacy and rest belong only to the mountains, but life and gladness only to the earth. A subtler contradiction is suggested in the poem's oxymoronic imagery of time: old trees covered with white moss, for example, are "interwoven signs / Of dateless age and deathless infancy," and more startlingly, the "azure arch" from which springs the Arveron creates a moaning like the "angels' wail" after the Expulsion (II, 222-226). Purity and corruption, freshness and mourning, infancy and age, are oddly conjoined -- timelessly in the glade, painfully in the torrent and mountain -- in natural images that appear as emblems of the poet's own mixed state. Another poem, though of less interest, deepens these contradictions. In "The Arve at Cluse," Ruskin compares himself to a river "proud, / Impatient, and pollute" that has forgotten in "unhallowed rage" the pureness of its "mountain parentage"; for he, like the river, was born near Heaven yet has lost his "heritage of peace." The prayer is for a new baptism through seeing, a receiving of
The radiance of that world where all is stilled
In worship, and the sacred mountains build
Their brightness of stability in Heaven.
The remaining paradox, however, occurs in the lines, "I would not see/ Thy force less fatal, or thy path less free" (11, 236). In these and other examples, a lower world of vice, wrath, or agitated energy is pitted against an upper world of purity, serenity, and motionless strength, usually associated with a source or a fresh birth. (The best discussion of Ruskin's poetry that I have found is Wendell Stacy Johnson; see bibliography below). [60/61]
Such are the conflicts Ruskin brought with him on the Italian journey of 1845, a journey planned for purely scholarly purposes but which eventually confirmed him in a vocation that was at first still undefined. As his editors correctly note, he had not yet given up poetry or painting; but he had at least a tentative spiritual model in mind when he departed. The model was Herbert, as we know from an incident confirming that Ruskin had no intentions of abandoning his youthful religiosity before Italian sensuality. In a letter to his mother from Switzerland, he attacks the volume she put in his satchel (Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners) because the author's "morbid fancies" amount at times to "Pure insanity" -- in marked contrast, he observes, to Herbert: "There is as much difference between the writings & feelings of the two men as between the high bred, keen, severe, thoughtful countenance of the one -- and the fat, vacant, vulgar, boy's face of the other." And in a later letter he calls Bunyan's book dangerous, partly because "to people of a turn of mind like mine, but who have less stability of opinion, it would at once suggest the idea of all religion being nothing more than a particular phase of indigestion coupled with a good imagination & bad conscience"; Herbert, on the contrary, is "full of faith & love, regardless of himself, outpouring his affection in all circumstances & at all times, and never fearing, though often weeping" (Shapiro, 17-18, 33-34). Here Ruskin excoriates part of his own negative identity (and perhaps the "morbidity" he had suffered as a result of Adèle), taking the part of the Anglican gentleman against the Puritan tradesman, attacking his mother's religion while flattering her class prejudices, and repeating in religious terms his parents' own class ambitions. Most important, Ruskin has begun to distinguish his internalized ideals from his parents', at least from his mother's. We can hardly exaggerate his need at this time for a sense of steadiness and purity of mind and for a gentility of manner to match his gentility of privilege: what sounds like the making of a young prig *is also an attempt to overcome his own "snappish young-mannishness." Yet he displayed a great deal of morbidity and snappishness during the disturbing months that followed.
While fortifying himself with Herbertian asceticism and self-control, Ruskin soon discovered in Italy, after a few hesitations, sensuous rapture, an experience that mingled beauty and religious devotion similar to that which he had known in the mountains but now charged with human meaning. In Lucca, for example, was God's plenty: the jeweled facade of San Michele, the burning hills of Carrara and olive woods and vineyards, the dying flush of twilight off the eyes of Ilaria di Caretto in her eternal trance of repose, the candies burning in shrines to the Madonna, the clearness of the sky "something miraculous. No romance can be too high flown for it -- it passes fable." On Sundays he could choose between the music of the mass and the military bands, [61/62] sometimes blending ("everything comes on me like music"). In Pistoia he first mentions fireflies, mysteriously emblematic of all natural sanctity: "[They] flash, as you know, exactly like stars on the sea, and the impression to the eye is as if one were walking on water." Everywhere the spiritual seemed vivified in the senses, the senses made glorious in the spiritual. In Florence the Franciscans kept the best spice cellar in the city and managed also to combine work and worship. He spent a day reaping hay with them on the mount of Fiesole, then descended, once again, amid the gathering of fireflies in the dusk. But most remarkable in these early months of the tour were the frescoes in Lucca and in the Campo Santo of Pisa, whose images Ruskin experienced like living and actual presences: "I never believed the patriarchal history before, but I do now, for I have seen it.... one comes away, like the women from the Sepulchre, 'having seen a vision of angels which said that he was Alive."' In Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco in Pisa, three angels hover over Abram departing from Sodom, who "turns away, with his hands folded in entire faith & resignation, but with such a quivering distress about the lips and appeal for pity in the eye, that I have had the tears in mine over & over again while I was drawing it." A similar subject was the conversion of St. Ranieri: the saint is watching a circle of dancing maidens when the angel appears, and he accepts the sign -- "ungentlemanly in the extreme," Ruskin remarks half-jokingly (Shapiro, 55, 60, 85, 67-68, 65). There is no wonder that these subjects in particular -- a renunciation of the past for the future, and of the flesh for a spiritual calling-should have affected him so strongly.
But almost from the start, Ruskin's experience of human beings in Italy was as disturbing as his experience of art was exalting. In Lucca he saw a beggar drinking water from a font while at the same time the beggar's dog made water at the base of the font, prompting Ruskin to tell his father, "I cannot make up my mind whether the poetry or prose of life be its humbug, whether, seeing truly, there be most to feel, or most to laugh at .... [The scene] was a perfect epitome of Italy as she is. One hardly knows which hath upper hand in her, saint-beggaror beast" (Shapiro, 57-58). What begins as traveler's annoyances such as weather and delays and Jostling crowds builds into hysteria aimed chiefly at the restorers. Driven by a misguided hunger for "improvements," these people tear down old stonework, cover up frescoes with plaster, throw up gaslamps and interlace old cities with railroad bridges. The pitch and insistence of Ruskin's rage create the vision of an entire nation pillaging its past, destroying all it has of beauty and power and spirit. Italy, in short, is the picture of human time since the Fall.
It is also the image of Ruskin's own fear of losing the past, that is, the power of feeling, a fear repressed by his resolutions of religious earnestness. [62/63] He partly recognized this emotion is a letter to his father from Parma. John James (whose favorite authors were Byron and Scott) had complained that his son's latest verses lacked "the fervour & fury & passion of true poetry"; Ruskin responds that he is not surprised but "I do not think I have lost power. I have only lost the exciting circumstances. The life I lead is far too comfortable & regular, too luxurious, too hardening. I see nothing of human life, but waiters, doganiere -- & beggars. I . . . am subject to no species of excitement except that arising from art, which I conceive to be too abstract in its nature to become productive of poetry unless combined with experience of living passion." And so he has ended up "treating all distress more as picturesque than as real.... Yesterday, I came on a poor little child lying flat on the pavement in Bologna -- sleeping like a corpse -- possibly from too little food. I pulled up immediately -- not in pity, but in delight at the folds of its poor little ragged chemise over the thin bosom." As for poetry, "if I were again under such morbid excitement, I might write as strongly.... I believe however the time for it has past." And so, apparently, has the time for enjoying Italy: "All the romance of it is gone, and nothing that I see ever makes me forget that I am in the 19th century" (Shapiro, 142-143). The unconvincing incident of the sleeping child presumably shows that Ruskin has lost the power of charity and, more obscurely, the power of erotic excitement, which he must divert by sketching. Covertly, he reenacts the emotional repression following the loss of Adèle, the woman his father had forbidden him to marry, this time blaming the loss of the heart's affections on luxury and the habits of the critical intellect.
His aim at the present, he writes in another letter, is to preserve, in words and sketches, the beauty now vanishing beneath the chisels and plaster of the restorers. Then, surprisingly enough, he claims that he is unable even to enjoy a distant sight of the Appenines because they are not already familiar to him. In late July he acts out this second disillusionment in a series of letters from Alpine towns, which he visited in order to escape his anger and disgust with the cities of the plain and to do sketches for the Turner part of his book. "Here I am at last in my own country," he writes from the secluded and nearly inaccessible village of Macugnaga; it is "a perfect Paradise for feeling," the "realization of all my childs [sic] ideas of felicity." Yet even Macugnaga faits him as he realizes it is childhood and not a particular place that he longs for -- "the charm of early association, the home feeling that I have at Chamonix . . . for however childhood may suffer, it is a period of entire trust, hope, & insouciance, approaching nearer to a state of perfect felicity than any other of life.... I feel life going.... Life seems infinite to the child, and what he chooses not to do today he hopes to do tomorrow. Probably he does more, according to his strength, in this [63/64] way, than the man, who measures his time" (Shapiro, 160, 159, 161, 163). Once again he asserts his devotion to Turner and the pure, high pursuit of natural fact -- at the same time, significantly, taking up the study of Italian history.
Most of the emotional dialectic that determined the course of Ruskin's career is now in place. The exaltation of "life," the original and pure energy of being whose source is childhood, is weakened by ambivalent and agitated emotion, by the awareness of suffering and poverty and loss, by repression through mental labor, by the approach of death; but to remain in childhood is to cling to a dream valley whose timeless ease and solitude will also weaken the primal energy, which requires human love as well as the love of stones. Ruskin needed a conception of spiritual energy strong enough to embrace the entire human experience, including suffering and loss and the braving of death -- and he sought it in a theory of imagination that would explain the function of the human subject in art. Ruskin's last stop in Italy was Venice, the city he had associated with his lost love. He found Venice, as he expected, a sacrifice to decay, depredations, and railroads, but he also found what he had perhaps unconsciously been hoping for all along:
I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before by any human intellect as I was today, before Tintoret .... he lashes out like a leviathan, and heaven and earth come together .... And such a resurrection as there isthe rocks of the sepulchre crashed all to pieces & roaring down upon you, while the Christ soars forth into a torrent of angels, whirled up into heaven till you are lost ten times over. [Shapiro, 211-212]
From Turner to Tintoretto is but a small step: "Fresh from the stormy grandeur of the St. Gothard, he found the lurid skies and looming giants of the Visitation, or the Baptism, or the Crucifixion, re-echoing the subjects of Turner as 'deep answering to deep." (Collingwood, quoted in IV, x1v). The torrential energies are the same, except that the signs of them have changed. Ruskin of course already knew the giant forms of Michelangelo. The overwhelming response to Tintoretto depended on the precise moment in his mental history and on his claim to a personal discovery (confirmed, one assumes, by the parallel response of J. D. Harding, the painter, who accompanied him to Venice) -- but it depended on formal qualities as well. Comparing Tintoretto's Judgement with Michelangelo's, Ruskin wrote his father that even Michelangelo "cannot hurl figures into space as he does, nor did M Angelo ever paint space itself which would not look like a nutshell besides Tintoret's"; and in his notebook he wrote that, in Tintoretto but not in the older [64/65] painters, "no emotions are represented, nothing but the great sensation of re-awakened life," and that the scene, instead of being general or typical, is a definite "spot of earth" (IV, XXXVI). These baroque elements Tintoretto shares with the landscape sublime but not with Michelangelo. Leaving his background indefinite, Michelangelo achieves a statuesque energy in respose, removed from a particular moment or place; Tintoretto sacrifices serenity for a tumuttuous immediacy made possible because space and therefore time becomes itself an expressive element. The skewed angels, extreme closeups, exaggerated chiaroscuro, and forms that soar and tumble completely undermine the stability of Renaissance perspective space (as Turner's vortical compositions destroy the focal point), with the result that space, instead of existing "outside" the artist's imagination, becomes the expression of a mental energy that is almost physical.
For Ruskin and Harding, to behold such an art was to experience sublime annihilation: "Harding said that if he had been a figure painter, he never could have touched a brush again, and that he felt more like a flogged schoolboy than a man-and no wonder." But the next day Ruskin wrote his father that studying the painter again "made me feel bigger -- taken up into him as it were. I am in a great hurry now to try my hand at painting a real, downright, big oil picture" (Shaprio, 212-213). Ruskin's memory of the experience, printed as an addendum to the 1883 edition of Modern Painters II, is slightly different: "I, not having been at school so long as [Harding], felt only that a new world was opened to me, that I had seen that day the Art of Man in its full majesty for the first time; and that there was also a strange and precious gift in myself enabling me to recognize it, and therein ennobling, not crushing me. That sense of my own gift and function as an interpreter strengthed as I grew older" IV, 354). The letters are typical of the young Ruskin, still wishing to emulate every genius he encounters, while the memoir is typical of the elder Ruskin, disclaiming with unconscious egotism the young man's ambition. But the memory is undoubtedly correct in spirit: after months of copying the great painters and feeling his relative inadequacy, he eventually accepted a new relationship based not on competition but on difference -- his special gift as an interpreter. As he wrote in Modern Painters II, "The Love of the human race is increased by their individual differences, and the Unity of the creature ... made perfect by each having something to bestow and to receive . . . , humility in each rejoicing to admire in his fellow that which he finds not in himself, and each being in some respect the complement of his race" (IV, 183). His complete response to Tintoretto, then, parallels the experience at the fount of the Brevent: a sudden revelation, a temporary annihilation, then a return of selfhood strengthened and clarified, with the fountain itself corresponding to [65/66] the "precious gift." The original energy has not been lost. But never again would Ruskin repudiate all beauty mingled with "associations of humanity -- the exertion of human power -- the action of human mind."
Collingwood, R. G. The Life and Work of John Ruskin. London, 1893.
Johnson, Wendell Stacy J. "Memory, Landscape, Love: John Ruskin's Poetry and Poetic Criticism," Victorian Poetry 19 (1981), 19-34.
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.
Shapiro, Harold I. Ruskin in Italy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
Last modified December 2000