Section 5, Chapter 5, from "The Legend of Time: "Paradise of Cities"" from 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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oy whose grounds are true": Arnold's powerful phrase captures in an instant the vision toward which the energy of The Stones of Venice perpetually moves, as the sentence of a later writer captures the complex mixture of wrath and desire that motivates that energy: "On one of its sides, Victorian history is the story of the English mind employing the energy imparted by Evangelical conviction to rid itself of the restraints which Evangelicalism had laid on the senses and the intellect; on amusement, enjoyment, art; on curiosity, on criticism, on science" (Young, 5).
What joy does this book affirm? The simplest answer appears in the resurrected image of Wordsworthian childhood, pictured in Ruskin's conclusion as a kind of Franciscan pastoralism. The modern malaise, he writes, is a disorder in our faculty for delight. The child's pleasures are "true, simple, and instinctive," but the youth is apt to "abandon his [122/123] early and true delight for vanities." The English nation has done the same, first by laboring for ambition, second and chiefly by being ashamed of simple pleasures, "especially of the pleasure in sweet colour and form.... If we refuse to accept the natural delight which the Deity has thus provided for us, we must either become ascetics, or we must seek for some base and guilty pleasures to replace those of Paradise, which we have denied ourselves" (XI, 222-223). Carlyle electrified his readers by demanding that they become men; Ruskin here succors them by urging them to become good children but with characteristic equivocation. "Natural delight" and "pleasure in sweet colour and form" may possibly include sexuality (the phrases certainly describe the aestheticized eroticism of Ruskin's letters from Winnington for example), but the sentence seems by its thrust to separate all pleasures into the childlike and the guilty. This "Purist" reading of the book as a whole and of Gothic naturalism in particular is finally inadequate, since the Gothic retains characteristics of the childlike yet transcends the childlike precisely as it transcends Purism: it is the fullest possible development of the ego, able to claim kindred "with all that lives, triumphing, falling, or suffering."
The ambiguity derives from Ruskin's casting the Fall myth in the shape of an arc, the shape both of organic growth and of imperial history. On one hand the binary structure of the book makes the Renaissance Fall seem the fall from a childlike period of innocence, but on the other hand, the tripartite structure places the Gothic at the zenith of life, the place occupied by the blooming center of the foxglove. In one sense this structure hearkens back to the Immortality Ode, in which the mature poet, humanized by suffering, recaptures joy in a deeper, more comprehensive form. Yet Ruskin's narrative departs radically from the three-part structure of the Ode and of the romantic myth of imagination in general, since the book is cast in the form not of a crisis autobiography but of a sermon using the past as an object lesson. The result is that the mature stage, instead of following a fall into despondency and doubt, seems to grow organically from the first without ever really passing through suffering or doubt. But if this conception is more wishful than the Wordsworthian model, it is also more anxious, since it entertains the possibility of a permanent fall -- indeed, it invites the possibility, since the decay of Venice also imitates a natural cycle, perhaps an inevitable one. The Stones of Venice is therefore an immensely problematical book. Like Wordsworth, Ruskin asserts the priority of innocence, but his preaching stresses a search of the past for its meanings (in which archaeology is a kind of trope for introspection) rather than the educative meaning of suffering -- yet those meanings remain disturbingly ambiguous, since the stones everywhere bear the mark of the Fall. Both writers are occupied with the formation of a [123/124] mature soul, but Ruskin substitutes for active experience the experience of reading texts, of absorbing lessons from the symbols of art.
Yet art history is also autobiography, since the themes of the book reflect the movement of Ruskin's mind in the decade preceding its publication. We saw that after the emotional breakdown in college (which, as Ruskin viewed it, followed from the repression of grief through study), he threw himself into the writing of a book that enunciated his inherited beliefs -- Evangelicalism and Wordsworthian naturalism -- as earned positions: and in a sense they were earned, since the moral aesthetic was an attempt to fuse delight and piety in a way that would preserve the original energy of childhood. That project also affirmed the unity of his ambitions and his parents' desires, incidentally healing the breach that had temporarily opened up because of his love for Adèle. Ruskin's marriage seemed also to fulfill the mutual will, since marriage was expected of him. Yet his diary for 1847, complaining among other things of nameless forebodings and a "horror of great darkness," suggests that the forming of a new relationship obscurely threatened the continuity of past and present, reviving ancient and painful conflicts -- coincidentally, he was married the year of the Revolution in France and the day the Great Charter was delivered to Parliament.
The sufferings of his marriage were the first instance since his love for Adèle in which Ruskin could not ask his father for help; a second was the new form his career was taking. In 1850 he felt compelled to justify the sternness of his purpose in The Stones of Venice when his father complained that the first volume might seem tedious to readers. In 1851 he sent his father for approval three letters addressed to the Times on education, taxation, and representation that anticipate some of the radical proposals he printed some years later. His father suppressed them for fear of his son's reputation. The next year Ruskin wrote, "I began thinking over my past life, and...I saw I had always been working for myself in one way or another...or for my own aggrandisement and satisfaction of ambition; or else to gratify my affections in pleasing you and my mother, but that I had never really done anything for God's service" (X, xxxvii-xxxix). In the conclusion of his book he wrote: "If the sacrifice is made for man's admiration, and knowledge is only sought for praise, passion repressed or affected for praise, and the arts practised for praise, we are feeding on the bitterest [124/125] apples of Sodom" (XI, 222). These indirect reproaches occur at the same time as the letters to his father about buying Turners, letters that show how poignantly Ruskin depended on magical sources of strength and approval -- the flow of money, the flow of paintings. In order truly to affirm his legacy from his parents, that is, to identify the grounds of his justification through works, Ruskin had also to repudiate part of the parental will.
The Stones of Venice enacts this conflict by determining what must be preserved and what repudiated in the cultural heritage of Europe. In taking the step of championing Catholic art, Ruskin splits that art into an antithetical pair, the Gothic, which turns out to be the true and original form of Protestantism, and the Renaissance, which covertly traces a life-denying Puritanism to its source in Rome; Ruskin then becomes the true Protestant. This splitting and fusion characterize the entire work, which is therefore the most psychically overdetermined book Ruskin ever wrote. It offers itself only too readily for psychoanalytic interpretation. The major figures of Ruskin's unconscious life seem all to be here: the virginal bride or mother and the harlot wife, the punishing father, the manly hero, all bound together by the pervasive imagery of nourishment and castration, of union and expulsion. In terms of the plot of Marcolini, the hero and heroine consummate their love, only to be destroyed by villainous designs; but who, in both play and book, is this villain? Is Marcolini himself the Sphinx-Atropos and his bride tainted from the start?
The riddle of the Sphinx is unresolved in The Stones of Venice as well, and this is also the reason why the book can yield to no stable psychoanalytic reading. For each figure is both Ruskin and someone else in an ambiguous pattern of shifts and consolations that, however imperfectly, move toward a clear moral aim: the discovery of what in the psychic legacy must be absorbed and what repudiated in order to create a self strong enough to live. In symbolic terms at least, the answer is clear. The Renaissance is the spirit that denies. Cold, isolated, selfish, and ambitious, it resembles parts of Ruskin (which showed themselves in his treatment of Effie) and parts of an internalized father who can never be pleased; more generally, it is the punishing superego that persists historically as the death instinct, manifesting itself outwardly as pure aggressiveness and inwardly as decay. The Gothic, on the other hand, is the spirit that affirms, persisting historically as the life instinct. It resembles other parts of Ruskin and of an internalized approving conscience, manifesting itself as an original self-love capable of incorporating the world and regulating its internal economy as a wise father does his children. In the Gothic the child becomes father of the man, a man capable of fathering others in turn -- specifically, the oppressed -- just as, in religious terms, justified works are the spon [125/126] taneous overflow of justified faith. At the center of "The Nature of Gothic" and therefore of the book as a whole stands the modern worker, the devastated victim of a life-denying social system, whose sufferings must touch the hearts of Ruskin's readers before the lost past can revive. As a call to action the Gothic gives pulse to life in the present -- a source of strength to accept, to give, to flourish, and to create; the strength also to labor, to witness, and to live out an allotted length of days.
_____. Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows; Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought. Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Ricoeur, Paul. The Symboplism of Evil. Trans. Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967.
Rosenberg, John. The Darkening Glass. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
Ruskin, John. Works ed. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Ruskin, John. The Ruskin's Family Letters. 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.
Young, G.M. Victorian England, Portrait of an Age. London: Oxford University Press. 1936; reprint, 1960.
Last modified December 2000