Section 5, Chapter 7, 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 later years Ruskin dated his unconversion, in terms that have remained convincing, to his discovery of Veronese's Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in 1858. In that memorable visit to Turin he encountered a "poor little wretch" preaching in a Waldensian chapel; a child on the beach ("half-naked, bare-limbed to above the knees, and beautifully-limbed, Iying on the sand like a snake" [XXXVI, 291]); the great Veronese and along with it, military music, ballets, and in short all the "gorgeousness of life which the world seems to be constituted to develop." Both his published accounts focus on the contrast between Protestant exclusivity and an inclusive celebration of the senses, making clear that through Veronese he was converted to a secular humanism more than adequate to replace the faith he had to abandon. (For a comparison of both, see Landow) The fruits of this discovery appear, among other places, in the defense of Venetian naturalism in Modern Painters V: "the painter saw that sensual passion in man was, not only a fact, but a Divine fact; the human creature, though the highest of the animals, was, nevertheless, a perfect animal, and his happiness, health, and nobleness depended on the due power of every animal passion, as well as the cultivation of every spiritual tendency" (VII, 296-297). His letters confirm the connection between art and healthy sensuality: "Nobody can be a great painter who isn't rather wicked-in a noble sort of way," he wrote Mrs. Browning (XXXVI, 292), [184/185] and on his return he wrote Norton that a great painter "mustn't be pious." In the same letter he adds that "at 39 one begins to feel a life of sensation rather too much for one" (XXXVI, 293) -- implying perhaps that it is a life of mere sensation, without the depth of emotional fulfillment, that can seem "too much." Although the incident is well known, more needs to be understood about Ruskin's reading of the painting itself.
Against an ornate, classical backdrop -- a central arch flanked by marble pillars and reclining statuary -- stand at least two dozen figures, encumbered by a wealth of clothing, jewels, gifts, and animals, the whole of which rises at the left along the steps of Solomon's throne. To study this rich sequence, Ruskin erected a scaffold in order to make copies (the painting was hung too high for easy viewing). A young American painter later recalled the advice Ruskin gave him in the gallery: "He said 'Watch me.' He than looked at the flounce in the dress of a maid of honour of the Queen of Sheba for five minutes, and then he painted one thread: he looked for another five minutes, and then he painted another thread. At the rate at which he was working he might hope to paint the whole dress in ten years" (XVI, X1). In addition to the maid of honor, with her gold and white brocade, Ruskin did the queen's dog and the maid's servant, a black woman bearing "two birds, one of gold and one of enamel, with ruby eyes, for a present to Solomon."9 For both of these he ordered frames for his father, with dimensions precisely indicated, thus possessing himself of portions of the painting.
Clearly enough, the picture represented for Ruskin the emblem of a perfect economy of the nobly animal and the nobly spiritual. Moving from right to left, we read the humans offering up the produce of the earth in tribute, that is, in sacrifice; moving from left to right, we follow the view of the God-like king downward through a chain of being, clear to the right corner, where the servant stands with her birds. Ruskin cannot but find it good. The king's court is the economy in miniature of a wise commercial nation, while the many animals allow the picture to mediate between the imagery of "The Nature of Gothic" and The Political Economy of Art. What makes this painting genuinely religious [185/186] for Ruskin is the typological function of Solomon. (He appears again, along with the queenly housewife of Proverbs, in Unto This Last, and then both appear as the pair of perfect rulers in Sesame and Lilies.) Solomon is the wise ruler of the earthly kingdom as Christ is of the heavenly. At the high point of the Hebrew state, he built both a temple and a commercial empire. For guidance he prayed to Wisdom and so united in one person both wealth and the wise use of wealth -- the two gifts that prompted the visit of the queen, when the two rulers exchanged emblems of their wealth. Cunningly, Veronese has placed a lion and an eagle beneath the king -- "types of the Divine and Human power in Christ" -- which led Ruskin to call the painter "full of mischief" and "full of dodges" (XVI, XXXIX). The dodge would be that this typological union of divine and human also represents the union of animal and spiritual in humans, so that Solomon's wisdom is, among other things, erotic wisdom.
Ruskin makes this clear by his own set of dodges. Having spent weeks copying the servant woman -- as though ostentatiously to proclaim the virtues of perfection and labor -- he spirited her off to Denmark Hill, where she was reinstalled with her glittering clothes. Clearly enough, fine dress has become yet another sign for the erotic, yet another attempt to find in external forms a magical resolution of his unconscious contradictions. We have discovered another dimension of Veronese's importance for him. In The Political Economy of Art he says that "true nobleness of dress [is] an important means of education, as it certainly is a necessity to any nation which wishes to possess living art, concerned with portraiture of human nature" (XVI, 52). A year later he made his first public allusion to the Veronese in the Cambridge Inaugural Address, the very lecture, we recall, that set out to show how "refinements of taste" accompany the downfall of nations and that used the uxorious Cardinal as an example. Ruskin here refers to Veronese to justify his own love for gold brocade: "You may, perhaps, be surprised at this; but . . . I share this weakness of enjoying dress patterns with all good students and all good painters" (XVI, 185). Clothing is the decoration of the body, as art is the decoration of the body of a [186/187] nation: both are means of placing value on something, and in art a means of affirming the body in a way nudity cannot do, that is, symbolically. Ruskin's copying the gold and white brocade seems to act out two analogies, that between loving and treasuring and that between studying (since noble dress is a "means of education") and mastery of the sensuous.
Thus, in the lecture condemning Cardinal Maurice, Ruskin professes himself a lover of dress patterns, not simply (if at all) to defend himself against the attractions of nudity but rather to defend a system of cultural signs that place determinate value on what otherwise is frighteningly indeterminate. Clothing, moreover, is the expression or container of the presence beneath: dressing, like sublimation, like art, like civilization itself, is a blending of expression and restraint, and so a form of Wisdom. As with Carlyle, a philosophy of clothing is ultimately a philosophy of symbols. In the natural world, of course, phenomena half reveal and half conceal the soul they shadow forth (grotesque awe is the terror of revelation, the fear especially that more will be revealed than the mind can bear), but color, which is adventitious and so the type of love, the sanctifying element of the creation, confers value by means of beauty in the same way clothing confers value to the human body. To put it differently, noble dress is the sign that body and spirit are sanctified together, or again that true wealth is the expression of life. This fitting of body and clothes is the structure, finally, of all symbolism in a healthy economy: the symbols of wealth are also the symbols of life. But in a debased economy, the symbols of wealth are false because divorced from life, so that false wealth is both a disorder of the symbolizing power and an erotic disorder in the national soul.
It will turn out that Ruskin's qualification for preaching political economy after fifteen years as an art critic is his trained experience of the sensuous, as opposed to the bad economist's habit of inhumane abstraction -- or, more precisely, Ruskin's trained experience in detecting universals embodied in the sensuous as signs, developed by this time into a skill in allegorical interpretation. In these same years, he also learned to read Turner allegorically, discovering in him a more disturbing form of Veronese's naughty "dodges." (Ruskin in fact took it upon himself to destroy a number of pornographic sketches discovered in the Bequest, a fact John Dixon Hunt has rightly associated with Ruskin's remarks about a great painter's wickedness.) It is as though Turner took upon himself the full burden of suffering and mortality for his times and the burden also of its dark sensuality; for the artist who appears at the climax of Modern Painters V does not present, like Veronese, a vision of the sensuous life integrated into the social life but an extreme vision of social and erotic disorder.
In the great meditation he called "The Two Boyhoods," Ruskin simultaneously [187/188] traces the careers of Giorgione and Turner, which reached a climax in an apocalyptic antithesis transcending all particular historical experience: the Heavenly City on the one hand, of which Venice was once the type, and on the other, an encompassing negative of the creation painted in imagery borrowed, as Elizabeth Helsinger has suggested, from Turner's The Angel in the Sun -- itself an ironic quotation, in all likelihood, of Ruskin's own figure of Turner as Archangel:
The unconquerable spectre still flitting among the forest trees at twilight; rising ribbed out of the sea-sand; -- white, a strange Aphrodite, -- out of the sea-foam; stretching its gray, cloven wings among the clouds; turning the light of their sunsets into blood.
Wide enough the light was, and clear . . . light over all the world. Full shone now its awful globe, one pallid charnel-house, -- a ball strewn bright with human ashes, glaring in poised sway beneath the sun, all blinding-white with death from pole to pole, -- death, not of myriads of poor bodies only, but of will, and mercy, and conscience; death, not once inflicted on the flesh, but daily fastening on the spirit; death, not silent or patient, waiting his appointed hour, but voiceful, venomous; death with the taunting word, and burning grasp, and infixed sting. [VII, 386-388]
The "English death" is a historical and a metaphysical condition, the condition of life searing and devouring itself, striking without warning or justice but again and again, at moments of despair and at the apparent fulfillment of earthly joys; it is the collapse of all meaning as well, the ultimate spread of the void across the heavens that also embodies, as Helsinger has shown, the pure destructiveness of the artistic will: "The defeat of hope . . . becomes progressively more terrible as the triumph of light and colour -- the triumph of the artist -- becomes more overwhelming. (Helsinger, 243) This series of contrasts, perhaps the most powerful Ruskin ever put forth, is a series only, not a final statement, cast in the form of visions necessary to the great artist in particular historical circumstances. They are the apocalyptic possibilities hovering about the London that is Ruskin's as well as Turner's, emblems of the psychic destruction and creation necessary to both Ruskin and his nation in the present moment of their crisis.
In their totalizing power, these visions tremble on the brink of the unimaginable; they require stabilizing in order for Ruskin to render articulate the relationship of art to social renewal. In the following chapters, the culmination of seventeen years' labor, Ruskin reads Turner's painting as an intricate allegory of England's fall that may be [188/189] read both diachronically and synchronically-as a myth and as a set of symbolic contradictions.12 In "The Nereid's Guard" he argues that Turner's The Garden of the Hesperides is a religious allegory because it paints English religion as industrial Mammonism: the Serpent of Greek myth has become the "British Madonna" governing an unhappy isle, a "paradise of smoke" (VII, 408). In the foreground of the painting, the Goddess of Discord takes one of the Hesperidean apples, while the nymphs recline in a grove to the right. The images form a pattern of charged anticipation before the fatal touch, which, like Eve's, will set in motion the whole doom of human history. In his interpretation of the painting, Ruskin ransacks his memory of half a dozen Christian and classical authors in order to provide each element with antithetical meanings expressing all the painful ambiguities of emotional experience. Thus Juno, "the housewives' goddess," represents "whatever good or evil may result from female ambition"; the apples, which are her gift from the earth, are either "the wealth of the earth, as the source of household peace and plenty" or "the source of household sorrow and desolation" (VII, 396). The Hesperides, or nymphs of the sunset, are daughters of Night and therefore sisters of Night's other progeny, the Fates; thus, they are "a light in the midst of a cloud; -- between Censure, and Sorrow, -- and the Destinies" (VII, 393). "For though the Hesperides in their own character, as the nymphs of domestic joy, are entirely bright . . . yet seen or remembered in sorrow, or in the presence of discord, they deepen distress." In fact, as Dido recalls them, they are an enchantress "who feeds the dragon" (VII, 406). Only the Dragon receives no pair of meanings: he is for Hesiod the type of "consuming (poisonous and volcanic) passions" and for Dante, "Pluto il gran nemico" -- "the demon of all evil passions connected with covetousness" (VII, 397, 400-401); Ruskin also associates him with Spenser's Garden of Mammon, where the Hesperidean apples grow. Against this darkness stand the nymphs, embodying bright color (which, according to Ruskin, Turner reintroduced into painting) which is also the type of love. Sexual love, "when true, faithful, well-fixed, is eminently the sanctifying element of human life: without it, the soul cannot reach its fullest height or holiness" (VII, 417). At last [189/190] Turner has come to "confess" the Hesperides; "but is it well? Men say these Hesperides are sensual goddesses, -- traitresses.... Nature made the western and the eastern clouds splendid in fallacy. Crimson is impure and vile; let us paint in black if we would be virtuous" (VII, 413). Linking the sober hues of academic painting with Puritanism and an industrial "paradise of smoke," Ruskin converts the fall story into a defense of the senses, as he had in The Stones of Venice, this time pitting noble sexual love against the Dragon of economic greed.
J. M. W, Turner, Apollo and Python, 1811.
[Not in print edition; click on picture for larger image. ]
"The Nereid's Guard" presents an allegory of the present crisis; the next chapter, "The Hesperid Aegle," presents an allegory of hope, this time by leaping through several early paintings of Turner to create a composite icon. In Turner's Apollo and Python, the god battles a serpent similar but not identical to the Nereid's guard. The Hesperidean dragon was a "treasure-guardian. This is the treasure-destroyer, -- where moth and rust doth corrupt -- the worm of eternal decay." The second painting therefore represents "the strife of purity with pollution; of life with forgetfulness; of love, with the grave . . ., the struggle of youth and manhood with deadly sin" (VII, 420). Interestingly, Apollo takes the name of his enemy once his conquest is completed ("he is by name, not only Pythian, the conqueror of death; -- but Paean, the healer of the people" [VII, 420]), an association that suggests a sanctifying of aggressive energies, or an absorption of destructive power for constructive use. The distinction between the two dragons appears to be that, as the treasure guardian is opposed to true wealth, the treasure destroyer is opposed to life -- they are illth and death -- and this point suggests that Ruskin has turned from the subject of sexual ambiguity to the ambiguous inherence of death in life and from a particular historical dilemma to a metaphysical conundrum. The leitmotif of this chapter is thus the nymph he names the Hesperid Aegle -- that is to say, redness, or "brightness of the sunset," the "colour which the sunbeams take in passing through the earth's atmosphere." As we might expect, he associates the type of Love with sacrifice: "colour generally, but chiefly the scarlet, used with the hyssop, in the Levitical law, is the great sanctifying element of visible beauty, inseparably connected with purity and life.... the fountain, in which sins are indeed to be washed away, is that of love, not of agony" (VII, 414-417).
These meanings, and several others, concentrate powerfully in the image of the Sybil Deiphobe, culled from two more paintings, which follows closely upon the account of Apollo and the Python to represent, at least by implication, the reward waiting upon the completion of heroic action. The closing sentences of the chapter read:
And though that scarlet cloud . . . may, indeed, melt away into paleness of night, and Venice herself waste from her islands as a wreath of wind [190/191] driven foam fades from their weedy beach; -- that which she won of faithful light and truth shall never pass away. Deiphobe of the sea, -- the Sun God measures her immortality to her by its sand. Flushed, above the Avernus of the Adrian lake, her spirit is still seen holding the golden bough; from the lips of the Sea Sybil men shall learn for ages yet to come what is most noble and most fair; and, far away, as the whisper in the coils of the shell, withdrawn through the deep hearts of nations, shall sound forever the enchanted voice of Venice. [Vll, 439-440]
The "scarlet cloud," specifically, is some frescoes of Giorgione from which Ruskin has engraved a female nude to head this chapter --a figure he names, arbitrarily, "The Hesperid Aegle" in order to combine the careers of Giorgione and Turner; but in fact she combines the careers of all artists in their eternal, half-won struggle against time. The Deiphobe of Greek myth represents a related idea: she has received from Apollo a grain of sand for every year of life (suggesting once again the color of sunlight through the earth's atmosphere), so that here dust -- as in so much of Ruskin's later work, an ambiguous emblem -- does not put the term to life but "measures her immortality." It is the mortal element but also, if seed, the promise of life. (The housewife Wisdom also bore a symbol of long life in her hand.) She is also Venice-no longer the fallen harlot of the earlier books but something closer to Blake's spiritual Jerusalem -- "a city and a woman," the emanation of Albion. The composite of nymph, Sybil, and sea city looks to the future in two ways: as a symbol of generativity (bearing the Golden Bough) and as a symbol of prophecy, whose whisper is no longer the waves that toll a warning but the whisper from Pandora's box.
According to Ruskin, Turner was without hope because for him the rose always gave way to the worm. The technique of this chapter is to overcome hopelessness by converting antithetical ideas into symbols of fusion. In this way the profound enigmas of experience can at least be faced -- the enigmas, in particular, of the inherence of mortality in sexuality, symbolized by the sunlight passing through the earth's atmosphere, and the inherence of death in the seed of generation, symbolized by the Sybil's handful of death. The emotional correlative of these symbols is the dominant mood of the chapter, the mood, so to speak, of elegiac hope akin to what Ruskin elsewhere calls the "majestic sorrow" of the Greeks (VII, 276). The chivalric imagery of the heroic combat and the pure woman (the conventional imagery, in Victorian times, of erotic deferral) permits Ruskin to convert the elegiac mood of The Stones of Venice -- the nostalgia for a thing possessed but not possessed because it has passed -- into qualified hope for a thing possessed but not possessed because it may be yet to come. In this way, he fuses [191/192] his own destiny with his nation's. Ruskin, looking backward toward sorrow and censure, may look forward also -- to the battle that can convert his own suffering and wrath into a healing energy (imitating the allegory of Apollo and Python) -- but with a hope compromised by the loss of youth and religion and other joys that may not come again; for his nation, the renunciation of opulence may bring about a "humble" but happier life spread unto the least. By so transfusing the goal of social action with erotic longing, "The Hesperid Aegle" becomes an avowal of hope, which must be deferred; of renunciation, on which any realistic hope must be based; and of the instinct for preciousness, which alone can bring hope to fruition in deeds. Death and loss are not now the punishment of sexuality, even though the two are somehow connected -- the mystery cannot be comprehended but can only be subdued by the concentrated gaze of majestic sorrow -- because the seed that bears life also bears time and the ultimate conclusion of time.
The last defense of art in Modern Painters begins with the statement: "What the final use may be to men, of landscape painting, or of any painting, or of natural beauty, I do not yet know" (VII, 423). What, then has Venice and all "She won of faithful light and truth" to do with the condition of England? "Thus far, however, I do know," he continues. The world must be delivered from three great types of asceticism -- monkish, military, and monetary. "A monk of La Trappe, a French soldier of the Imperial Guard, and a thriving mill-owner, supposing each a type, and no more than a type, of his class, are all interesting specimens of humanity, but narrow ones, -- so narrow that even all the three together would not make up a perfect man" (VII, 424). (We notice that the monk, the soldier, and the Captain of Industry are the three heroic figures in Past and Present, the book to which Unto This Last owes more than to any other.) This threefold deficiency, above all, relates to contentment:
There are, indeed, two forms of discontent: one laborious, the other indolent and complaining. We respect the man of laborious desire, but let us not suppose that his restlessness is peace, or his ambition meekness. It is because of the special connection of meekness with contentment that it is promised that the meek shall "inherit the earth." Neither covetous men, nor the Grave, can inherit anything; they can but consume. Only contentment can possess.
The most helpful and sacred work, therefore, which can at present be done for humanity is to teach people . . . not how "to better themselves" but how to "satisfy themselves." It is the curse of every evil nation and every evil creature to eat, and not be satisfied. The words of blessing are, that they shall eat and be satisfied. [VII, 426]
To this statement, the prospectus of all his social philosophy, Ruskin appends the following verse from Proverbs: "There are three things [192/193] that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is enough: the grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire, that saith not, It is enough!" The second and third of these terms are famished, the other two glutted, an arrangement that illuminates Ruskin's perception of Midas-like voracity, a starving desire that ever seeks the wrong objects to supply its hunger: the monk "loses" himself in vision or hope, the soldier "mortified" himself through destructive power, the merchant "mortifies" himself in "productive accumulation." Possession does not give content, however; "only contentment can possess." Near the opening of The Political Economy of Art, Ruskin had warned against a nation that "disdains to occupy itself in any sense with the arts of beauty and delight," since, as a result of this disdain, "the passions connected with the utilities of property become morbidly strong, and a mean lust of accumulation merely for the sake of accumulation, or even of labour merely for the sake of labour, will banish at last the serenity and the morality of life, as completely, and perhaps more ignobly, than even the lavishness of pride, and the likeness of pleasure" (XVI, 21). This is the legacy of Renaissance pride, the mysterious and willful turning away from the light that marks the central action of The Stones of Venice, yet nowhere in that book is it presented with such an inclusive range of social insight. Under such spiritual conditions, it is irrelevant to talk of art, for in a society of insatiable egos that "possess" all things as the grave, and that "consume" all things as the fire, art will also be swallowed up in death. But if humans can learn the true power of use, which is true wealth and which lies in meekness, then great art will become again the "type of human life," and beauty the type of the contentment that alone can truly love. In art, color is the type of love, and if, as Ruskin says, sexual love is properly the sanctifying element of human life, and if Mammonism is a disorder of the passions -- the worship of a Serpent Madonna that converts all passion into forms of avarice -- then a regenerated society will rest on a healthy reordering of sensual passions, an integration of the nobly animal and the nobly spiritual. The new Venice -- the prophetic whisper and the scarlet shadow of art -- takes the form of a woman's body.
Leon, Derrick. Ruskin, the Great Victorian. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1949).
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. New York: Columbia University Press. 1958.
Helsinger, Elizabeth. Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l982.
Last modified December 2000