Section 1, Chapter 6, 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. Note to-day in Bible reading the charge to Abraham, "Walk before me, and be thou perfect." It means "sincere" in marginal reading. In Matthew
I think means integer: loving all men; not only those who love us but loving wholly. Whence Sincerity and Integrity seem to make up the idea of perfection.
-- John Ruskin's diary, February 19, 1854
On June 3, 1849, Ruskin wrote in his diary at Vevay, "I walked up this afternoon to Bloney, very happy, and yet full of some sad thought; how perhaps I should not be again among these lovely scenes; as I was now and ever had been, a youth with his parents -- it seemed that the sunset of to-day sunk upon me like the departure of youth." The landscape seemed similarly dead and dreary until
I looked at it with the possession-taking grasp of the imagination -- the true one; it gilded all the dead walls, and I felt a charm in every vine tendril that hung over them. It required an effort to maintain the feeling; it was poetry while it lasted, and I felt that it was only while under it that one could draw, or invent, or give glory to, any part of such a landscape. I repeated, "I am in Switzerland" over and over again, till the name brought back the true group of associations, and I felt I had a soul, like my boy's soul, once again. I have not insisted enough on this source of all great contemplative art.
He continues: "I felt that the human soul was all -- the subject nothing. Not so, when I passed 'a little further on' past the low chapel that I drew last time I was here, with its neighboring gate, inscribed 'pense a ta fin' [sic]; and came down among the meadows, covered half a fathom deep with the emblem by which God suggests that thought." But the emblem of human transience leads Ruskin instead to an exultant meditation, which he later published as the prose ode to the grass in Modern [127/128] Painters III: "Bread that strengtheneth man's heart -- ah, well may the Psalmist number among God's excellences, 'He maketh grass to grow upon the mountains.'"(Diaries, II, 381-382.)
In the diary entry Ruskin twice overcomes the fear of death and the loss of the past by an effort of visual will, pictured in each case as a negotiation of energies between mind and nature. A few days later he noted that "an over-supply of food would only be an over-tax upon its energies. This crushing of the mind by overweight is finely given by Forbes."(Diaries, II, 385)Ruskin moves from "I felt that the human soul was all -- the subject nothing" to "this crushing of the mind by overweight" -- two extremes that may be mediated by means of the nutritional metaphor: food taken in proper amounts keeps energy from exhausting itself, just as Temperance or Wisdom is the right regulation of the soul's internal economy. In the first of the two recoveries, Ruskin appropriates the scene by repeating a magical phrase that brings past and present together; the lifeless objects become the true Switzerland again and the aging self becomes one with his "true" self, that is, his "boy's soul." (The phrase "I felt I had a soul, like my boy's soul, once again" leaves ambiguous whether there is a soul at all distinct from the boy's.) Whereas for Wordsworth the sense of self rests on historical continuity perceived through a record of changes, for Ruskin emotional associations magically induce a sudden canceling of time and change altogether, and the splendor in the grass returns unchanged. But the meditation also asserts the inadequacy of the imagination to sustain this ecstasy, since the trance is cut short by the rebuke "Pense à ta fin." Visual power, then, invites a double contradiction: the human soul is all, yet there is a power mighty enough to crush me; I have the power to invest objects with life, yet I am mortal. But Ruskin can return to Eden after all. The second recovery transcends both contradictions by substituting a typological reading for the romantic sublime. By inscribing associations onto the landscape -- the permanent associations provided by Scripture -- he converts the anxiety of visual power into prophetic praise. Death is denied because of the antithetical character of types: grass, the type of human perishability, is also the type of imperishable sustenance. The mountain solitudes, then, become a place of nurture, like home, and also a mount of vision; "Switzerland" becomes any lovely place where grass grows.
The visit to Chamonix in 1849 was Ruskin's first honeymoon, as it were, away from Effie, his wife on one year. We cannot fail to notice that the association of marriage with mortality underlies the desire expressed in the diary to cancel out the present. The relation between [128/129] nostalgia and inscription presents itself soon afterward in The Stones of Venice, where the desolated past, hallowed by nostalgic associations, becomes the present as soon as buildings can be read for their inscriptions -- the architectural analogues of Ruskin's discovery of grass as a divine hieroglyphic. But the ode to grass was to reappear in a later work, the work of a man sadder yet and wiser than the aging youth of 1849.
When Ruskin returned to Chamonix with his parents in 1854, he was once again flying from something he dreaded: the party left London in May, just after the scandal of the annulment had broken. The weeks that followed seem to have brought him a slow healing, the effects of spiritual and physical exercises, for the diary entries now look forward with subdued hope rather than backward with regret. "My father called me at half-past four this morning at Interlachen," he wrote in one place. "I was out as the clock struck five, and climbed as steadily as I could among the woods north of the valley, for an hour and a half, then emerging on the pure green pasture of the upper mountains.... I stood long, praying that these happy hours and holy sights might be of more use to me than they have been, and might be remembered by me in hours of temptation or mortification." "I hope to keep this day a festival for ever," he wrote in July, "having received my third call from God, in answer to much distressful prayer." "Every day here I seem to see further into nature, and into myself -- and into futurity." "How little I thought God would bring me here just now; and I am here, stronger in health, higher in hope, deeper in peace, than I have been for years." The entries record a rime of revaluation and rededication in language similar to that of conversion: he prays, for example, for "newness of life" and meditates on the "broken-hearted state" preceding spiritual rebirth (Diaries, II, 496-498). There is no wonder that when he returned to England the social landscape should have seemed reduced and desiccated and the self-repression necessary at Denmark Hill a kind of voluntary interment; yet he had also come home to his next chosen field of work. Humanized by deep distress, he had become freshly aware of the distress of human lives other than his own, even in the Alps that had been so hospitable to him. Soon afterward he plunged into a flood of activities, including teaching at the Working Men's College founded by F. D. Maurice, and he began his close and permanent friendship with Carlyle. The advice he gave a young painter upon his return is typical of his new dedication: "Though works are not the price of salvation, they are assuredly the way to it, and the only way.... Strive always to do -- acknowledge continually that it is Christ which worketh in you, [129/130] both to will and do" (XXXVI, 179-180). The theme also pervades the next two volumes of Modern Painters. In these remarkable books, which together comprise Ruskin's profoundest meditation on the evidences and implications of religious faith, he takes up once again the question of aesthetic expression and moral action, as regards not architecture alone but the totality of imaginative acts to which he now gives the name "landscape."
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Everyman Edition. London: Dent, 1967.
Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
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.
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Last modified December 2000