Poetry: A "Feeling for Reality"

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Section 2, 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.

odern Painters III comprises a set of efforts rather than a self-consistent thesis, but its aim is nevertheless consistent and clear: to prove that a person's work for the human good is also a duty to the God of nature and that the child's landscape hunger is the root and support of the adult's yearning for a perfected human community. The subtitle is "Of Many Things." Earlier commentators, not fully cognizant of the Ruskinian unity in multeity, have taken the description at face value, and indeed the separate topics, as topics, are remarkably heterogeneous. The potpourri begins with some chapters on theoretical matters, concluding with the well-known definition of the pathetic fallacy. Ruskin then proceeds to a history of Western landscape, eccentrically using poets rather than painters as examples -- Homer, Dante, and Scott chiefly -- and next attempts to determine the moral value of the landscape feeling by a tabulation of famous men, including Ruskin. Volume 3 ends by deferring for yet another volume the question of the ultimate value of landscape painting. As though to nod in the direction of his professed topic, Ruskin brings Turner into the final chapter, which simply surveys the landscape technique of the painters he studied most. The book is not only inconclusive; it persistently attacks the very position it ostensibly defends -- the moral efficacy of art -- and, even more impressively, the dogmatic procedure that Ruskin had made his own in the course of some half dozen volumes. The introduction justifies Ruskin's ten years' interruption of Modern Painters by claiming he has spent the time studying in order to "judge rightly" of art as one would "judge rightly" of a science: it is as absurd, he believes, to "speak hesitatingly about laws of painting" as it would be for "Mr. Faraday to announce in a dubious manner that iron had an affinity for oxygen, and to put the question to the vote of his audience" (V, 4-5). Yet the course of the book subtly compromises the claim by shifting from the eternal principles of artistic greatness to a consideration of artistic greatness as the expression of cultural and religious conditions; similarly, the "character" of his great artist changes from an imperson [130/131] al mental power to a distinct cultural personality, of which there are several possibilities -- the Greek, for example, or the great but disillusioned modern. By his close, Ruskin brings gravely into doubt the ultimate value of the landscape feeling, which had been his earliest qualification for judging art, and through that feeling has identified himself with men not of "the first order of intellect, but of brilliant imagination, quick sympathy, and undefined religious principle, suffering also usually under strong and ill-governed passions" (V, 360), and consequently (by implication) with the spirit of modern times -- its faithlessness, its melancholy, its uncertainty. Modern Painters III, then, is the first of Ruskin's books written, so to speak, in the present tense -- in a tentative, exploratory mode that dramatizes his own groping for the truth, his own efforts to define selfhood, not primarily as an abstract unity of spiritual energies (although his wish that it were one occupies part of the argument) but as a particular mode of being operating in a particular cultural milieu. It is a book, in short, about spiritual possibilities in an age without faith, and these Ruskin expresses through the unifying trope of seeing.

Most of Ruskin's books are better described in terms of some aspect of the human spirit than in terms of a particular subject. The economic writings, for example, are about the human being as a giving and producing creature; The Queen of the Air and the books on science, about a myth-making creature; Fors Clavigera about a creature that works and endures; and all of them, as Ruskin said about the books on art, bring "everything to a root in human passion or human hope" (VII, 257). But the books on art are specifically about "the very life of the man, considered as a seeing creature" (V, 177). And so the famous pronouncement, "To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, -- all in one" (V, 333) is the thesis of Modern Painters III, expressing the conceptual mode of an argument that considers human actions from the point of view of the primary copula of seer and seen. The moral life is a form of seeing, to be evaluated according to what appears on the visual field. Great art is the type of all noble human life, and the various subjects of painting, poetry, landscape, science, prophecy, and religion are variants of one another. Each activity is also the product of a human and a nonhuman contribution. In Ruskin's earlier phenomenology, the visual field is a factual presence primarily, organized by greater or lesser powers of visual conception yet undisturbed by the intrusion of irrelevant "fancies." Supernatural visions remain a special case, unclearly related to the seeing of a great landscape artist. In The Stones of Venice he used the analogy of textual interpretation to describe architecture as the fusion of God's works with the record of an artist's joy in receiving these works. Modern Painters III expands this cooper [131/132] ative activity to include all seeing, interpreting the visual field as itself an imaginative apprehension inscribed with both facts and fancies.⁴

This position comes clear in the chapter called "The Use of Pictures," which brings the theoretical section of the book to its climax and takes as its point of departure the question "Why paint at all if Nature is always greater than the work that imitates her?" Ruskin begins by relating how he once mistook the glass roof of a Swiss workshop for an unknown Alp. Since the roof and the Alp are nearly identical in visual fact, the greater emotional experience of the Alp must depend on something within the perceiver, which he calls the "penetrating, possession-taking power of the imagination" (V, 176). The emotion upon viewing the Alp depends, then, not only on ocular perception but also

on a curious web of subtle fancy and imperfect knowledge. First, you have a vague idea of its size, coupled with wonder at the work of the great Builder of its walls and foundations, then an apprehension of its eternity, a pathetic sense of its perpetualness, and your own transientness, as of the grass upon its sides; then, and in this very sadness, a sense of strange companionship with past generations in seeing what they saw.

After these "more solemn imaginations" will come thoughts of the Alpine "gifts and glories" -- rivers, fields, homesteads, and so forth -- and finally "strange sympathies with all the unknown of human life, and happiness, and death, signified by that narrow white flame of the everlasting snow, seen so far in the morning sky." You may not trace these mental images in your heart, he continues, "for there is a great deal more in your heart, of evil and good, than you ever can trace; they stir and quicken you for all that . . . and, observe, these [images] are nothing more than a greater apprehension of the facts of the thing" (V, 177-178). The "curious web," then, is not the working of the mind only because the rivers, valleys, and homesteads are also linked to the peak, from which they "flow"; the phrase "narrow white flame of the everlasting snow," moreover, attributes permanence and intensity to what is by nature cold and fleeting and therefore to the "gossamer" of thought as well, while at the same time recalling the biblical pillar of fire, the type of divine guidance. The everlasting flame stands for the vital copula of self and other, but in other ways, the landscape fulfills [132/133] the function of the ancient building in "The Lamp of Memory." As the building concentrates the sympathy and half constitutes the identity of nations, the Alpine valley -- and by extension the natural and human worlds in general -- do the same for the perceiver. Through a more comprehensive, more active apprehension of actuality, one knows a self beyond oneself yet centered in the self, otherwise unknowable in isolated introspection.

In one respect, Ruskin's mature epistemology marks a reconciliation with romantic tradition -- with the Wordsworthian fitting of mind to nature, or the Shelleyan: "My own, my human mind, which passively / Now renders and receives fast influencings, / Holding an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around." But in his chapter on the pathetic fallacy, Ruskin relegates Wordsworth to a secondary place among the poets. One reason is suggested by Ruskin's new treatment of the realistic imagination, an attention to factuality that he associates with a particular temperament different from Wordsworth's.

Ruskin wrote the first and third volumes of Modern Painters in the aftermath of unhappy love affairs, in each case using a stern devotion to facts as an antidote to distracting emotionalism. But in the earlier book, devotion to fact took the form of glad submissiveness, a "purity of heart" untroubled by memories of evil. In the third book, however, Ruskin tells us that the abuse of the imagination lies in shrinking from all unpleasant knowledge and taking refuge in "anything past, future, far off, or somewhere else, rather than in things now, near, and here"; but the honest use of imagination gives "full power and presence to the possible and true" (V, 71-72). The shift seems subtler than it really is, since Modern Painters III contains much familiar material -- the praise, for example, of the draftsman's minute attention to detail; but the repeated examples of trunks and branches carry a new connotation. "I cannot," he writes, "hold the beauty, nor be sure of it for a moment, but by feeling for that strong stem" (V, 149-150), the stem, that is, of truth. As in the exposition of Gothic, this image suggests strength and connectedness, but here the "hold on nature" implies a virile toughmindedness as well: the inspired man is a practical man, a manual laborer, and the naturalist aesthetic is at this point also an Antaean ethic.

But can mere works of the imagination give "full power and presence" to the actual? In his chapter on "Realization" (a word suggesting not representation only but also conceiving or bringing to life), Ruskin dwells on the passage in the Purgatorio describing the figured pavement on which the souls must tread in order to learn the lessons of pride. In Carey's translation, which Ruskin uses: "Dead, the dead, / The living seemed alive; with clearer view, / His eye beheld not, who beheld the [133/134] truth, / Than mine what I did tread on, while I went / Low bending." Ruskin comments, "Dante has here clearly no other idea of the highest art than that it should bring back, as a mirror or vision, the aspect of things passed or absent," that we might see them "as if the years of the world had been rolled back" (V, 38). These cantos, celebrating the revolutionary realism of Dante's friend Giotto, suggest also that to the eye of faith, the living as living and the dead as dead remain absolutely distinguished -- and this the souls in Purgatory learn when they tread, touching down, so to speak, on hard realities. (Elsewhere Dante likens the unrestrained intellect to a defenseless butterfly.) Not didactic lessons in stone but the clarity of moral knowledge, its concrete presence and humbling efficacy: this is Ruskin's moral theme in the first half of Modern Painters III, a clarity associated with a passionate intensity that he distinguishes absolutely from enthusiastic delusions.

The distinction informs the chapters that follow, comprising a whirlwind survey of modern art history that dramatizes the opposition between vanity and realism. The target of his attack, as usual, is a vaguely Frenchified leisure class, surrounded by looking glasses and painted Cupids, enticed by "giddy reveries of insatiable self-exaltation," "discontented dreams of what might have been or should be," "the enticement of ghostly joys" (V, 100-101). The artistic paradigm of this dissolution is Raphael, whom Ruskin condemns (out of party spirit, perhaps, with the new Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) by contrasting the scene of Christ's appearance to his disciples at Galilee as it really was with Raphael's treatment of related subjects: on one hand, the "wild, strange, infinitely stern, infinitely tender, infinitely varied veracities of the life of Christ," "the questioning wonder and fire of uneducated apostleship," the "feeble, subtle, suffering, ceaseless energy and humiliation of St. Paul"; on the other hand, "vapid fineries," "an antique mask of philosophical faces," "delicate grace, adopted from dancing nymphs and rising Auroras" (V, 82). This contrast departs importantly from The Stones of Venice, since Ruskin now blames the triumph of profane art on the pursuit of the religious ideal -- precisely the ideal he had once praised in Angelico. At its best, he writes, Raphaelesque art excites "religious dream or reverie," but the enjoyment of it is never more than a "graceful indulgence of those sensibilities which the habits of a disciplined life restrain in other direction. Such art is, in a word, the opera and drama of the monk" (V, 84) -- and from the opera and drama of the monk arise the opera and drama of a dissolute worldliness.

This historical myth represents a fresh attempt to grasp the spiritual possibilities of Ruskin's inherited Protestantism. His initial advocacy of landscape art enacted his submission to the parental will by wedding Evangelical impulses to a Wordsworthian myth of natural innocence. [134/135] In The Stones of Venice he split the tendencies of Protestantism into a life-denying Puritanism, which he called "Renaissance," and a life-affirming independence of character, which he called "Gothic." Now, in the first book written after the collapse of his marriage, he divides the religious impulse once again, this time into an instinctual repression that manifests itself as dreaminess and an active, practical, and courageous spirit that manifests itself as a religion of works. We cannot fail to notice in this split a searching self-criticism, for under the heading of monkish fantasies, Ruskin rolls into a single ball the tendency of art to feed the erotic impulses while appearing to transcend them, the affectation and luxury of the life in Venice, the worldly ideal his parents were more and more pressing upon him, and also, perhaps, the power of erotic idealization to blot out the realities of human sexual relationships. What is finally in question, of course, is the enterprise of art itself. Great art may be a consummate expression of moral realism, but Ruskin's argument suggests just as strongly that images are always but substitutes for realities -- the "realizing" power of Dante's figured pavements being impossible to mere human art. One means of meeting this problem is to imagine art as a form of activity and to repeat the old association of visual precision with moral clear-sightedness. In a footnote he remarks that he was saved from his own tendency to metaphysical abstraction by "use of my hands, eyes, and feet" (V, 334) -- that is, by mountain climbing and sketching. In another passage he imagines two people looking at a rapid: a modern German, who spends the rest of the day composing dialogues between "amorous water nymphs and unhappy mariners," and "the man of true invention, power, and sense," who "set[s] himself to consider whether the rocks in the river could have their points knocked off, or the boats upon it be made with stronger bottoms" (V, 100). Silly as it is, this illustration has profound implications, for the symbolic crossing is performed not by a painter but by a practical man whose invention, power, and sense have nothing to do with the aesthetic. Never has Ruskin's distrust of the beautiful "shadows" been so explicit. As a result, Modern Painters III constructs overarching schemata that include artistic activity within them: it is seeing, not art, that is poetry, prophecy, and religion all in one, and landscape, as he now defines it, is really the totality of a culture's mode of seeing, believing, and acting. At the same time, his incidental remarks hint at a profound incompatibility between the aesthetic and the active temperaments, a disjunction that signals a gradual but radical shift in Ruskin's conception of his own vocation. It suggests also the new influence on his moral thought of the man he called his second "earthly master."

arlyle is in a sense the unacknowledged guiding spirit of Modern Painters III, acting as a Scottish Virgil to Ruskin's Dantean project of [135/136] penitence and self-discovery. More than any other man, Carlyle embodied what Ruskin could affirm in his Scottish Evangelical heritage while providing the model of the practical man gifted with prophetic wisdom -- a union Ruskin dramatized in aesthetic terms as the reconciliation of the naturalist ideal and the symbolic grotesque. Amos, the earliest of the prophets, left his flocks in the hills and came down to give his thunderous warnings to a harlot city. Carlyle's career closely followed this prototype and so must have fascinated Ruskin, partly because Ruskin, like his own Turner in "The Two Boyhoods," reversed directions, moving from the harlot city to learn prophecy in the mountains. It makes sense, then, that Ruskin began his close association with the older man after coming down from the high places in 1854. At first sight they were temperamental opposites. Carlyle, Ruskin wrote, was "born in the clouds and struck by the lightning"; "a bottle of beautiful soda-water..., only with an intellect of ten-fold vivacity," Carlyle wrote of Ruskin -- and years later, "I get but little real insight out of him, though he is full of friendliness and aiming as if at the very stars; but his sensitive, flighty nature disqualifies him for earnest conversation and frank communication of his secret thoughts."(Quoted in XXXVI, XCV-XCVI. For Ruskin's letter to Carlyle acknowledging his influence, see XXXVI, 184.) The one man seemed all sincerity, earnestness, and tragic power, the other "ethereal," mercurial, perhaps not sincere enough. Yet as we have just seen, Ruskin profoundly needed an antidote to the "sensitive, flighty nature" that he had come to see as a tragic weakness, and of course, as Ruskin wrote early in their friendship, the two men seemed instinctively to think alike.

For example, in the essay "The Hero as Poet," Carlyle distinguishes the vates prophet from the vates poet in a Ruskinian way: "The one we may call a revealer of what we are to do, the other of what we are to love. But indeed these two provinces run into one another, and cannot be disjoined. The Prophet too has his eyes on what we are to love: how else shall he know what it is we are to do?" And in his study of Dante, he remarks (in the biblical diction that Ruskin also affected) that painting comes from "the essential faculty of him": "Find a man whose words paint you a likeness, you have found a man worth something"; for such a man has "sympathy in him to bestow on objects.... a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any object"(Carlyle, 314, 326). Like Ruskin in Modern Painters III, Carlyle makes the poet's seeing one aspect of a more general heroic quality that characterizes great men throughout the ages -- Mohammed, for example, or Dr. Johnson or Napoleon. That quality, of course, is sincerity. We will look later at Carlyle's specific [136/137] influence on Ruskin's radical politics, but it may be argued that the myth of sincerity, rather than political doctrine, is the most important of Carlyle's intellectual bequests to Ruskin, since it implies so many of the rest. This myth depends on a deep heart coterminous with the universe, on a penetrative vision that is the ocular equivalent of sincerity, and on hands that can wrestle with fact; such seeing and such wrestling are religion, "the thing," Carlyle writes in the lectures on hero worship, "a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relation to this mysterious Universe . . ., the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World." A "great, deep, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic," yet this quality is apt to be unconscious and involuntary, like inspiration: "he cannot help being sincere! The great Fact of Existence is great to him. Fly as he will, he cannot get out of the awful presence of this Reality." Even Napoleon was sincere in the moments when he had a "feeling for reality," an "instinct of Nature," those phrases being perhaps the most felicitous and succinct adumbration of the whole idea (Carlyle, 240, 280, 463; Landow on imagery of castaway and deluge, 312-315).

When Carlyle says that to the great man "the great Fact of Existence is great," he means also that the fact of a man's own existence is also great -- a man's, of course; the heroic ethic is reserved for males. But with this important limitation, Carlyle was nevertheless able to articulate for his age -- an age that felt the freedom of the self to be menaced by the new conditions of a secular and industrial society -- the possibility of a self radically and indeed absolutely independent of the social charade, a sentiment of being united with the purposive activity of will (Trilling, chap.3). The discovery of such a self is at the heart of Modern Painters III as well. In Ruskin's word painting of the disciples at Galilee, Christ stands in the morning sun while Peter approaches him: "And poor Simon, not to be outrun this time, tightens his fisher's coat about him, and dashes in, over the nets. One would have liked to see him swim those hundred yards, and stagger to his knees on the beach." In a poignant touch, Ruskin brings "first the Denier, and then the slowest believer, and then the quickest believer" to Christ, making the last the first, and then echoing First Corinthians: "They sit down on the shore face to face with Him" (V, 80). Like many of Ruskin's crossing images, this one suggests a sudden experience of redeemed selfhood so profound that an individual emerges from it as from a baptism, the sight cleansed, the body made strong. This is indeed to see face to face, to [137/138] grasp the stem of truth. Beside it the art of Raphael must seem but the "opera and drama of the monk," but how can any mere human image create the deep feeling for things as they are, that terrific self-creative swim that Carlyle called religion? Instead of providing an answer, Ruskin's argument circles questioningly upon itself. "Has religious art never been of any service to mankind?" he asks rhetorically. "I fear, on the whole, not." "More, I think, has always been done for God by a few words than many pictures, and more by few acts than many words" (V, 85, 86).

References

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