Section 1, Chapter 8, 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. The dreams of childhood -- its airy fables; its graceful beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond; so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown, for then the least among them rises to the stature of a great Charity in the Heart . . .-- what had [Louisa] to do with these? Remembrances . . . of how, first coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, she had seen it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as itself: not a grim Idol, cruel and cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big dumb shape set up with a sightless stare, never to be moved by anything but so many calculated tons of leverage -- what had she to do with these? Her remembrances of home and childhood were remembrances of the drying up of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out. The golden waters were not there. -- Charles Dickens, Hard Times
In the opening pages of Hard Times, the novel Dickens dedicated to Carlyle, the sadistic relationship of machine to man is imitated by a teacher and his pupil. Commanded by Gradgrind to define a horse, Bitzer jerks up and responds, "Quadruped, graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye teeth, and twelve incisive," and so forth. The fragmented sentences and the enumerated teeth reflect the oral-sadistic style of Gradgrind, whose verbal explosions Dickens compares with those of "a cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts." Since this "teaching" is antithetical to feeding, Gradgrind acts out the biblical image of the father who gave his son stones for bread -- or, since the students are compared to pitchers, he fills them with boiling oil instead of water: "Say, good M'Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store thou shalt fill each jar brimful by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within -- or sometimes only maim him and distort him?" Bullets instead of seeds, drought instead of water, hollow vessel and maimed robber instead of a strong self -- of these unnatural substitutions Dickens builds his tragedy of blighted growth and forfeited paternity, the pattern [194/195] of which extends beyond the classroom into all of Coketown: the "mechanical apparatus" of Gradgrind's jaw and the "elephant" of mills are alike emblems of mechanical oppression, while the empty jars in the classroom connect with the abandoned coal pits and other instances of hollowness into a general image of Nature undermined -- the green fields made hungry as the grave. The Idol Reason, finally, blends into the Moloch machine of Coketown to form a single, horrific image devouring both child and workman alike. But weakness, not power, is the prevalent theme of this book. The factory is a "melancholy, monotonous elephant," and its opponent, a very frail thing, is the robber Fancy, which becomes for Dickens the guardian of morality and, finally, a synecdoche of the whole life of the Spirit.
We can only imagine the shock of recognition with which Ruskin must have read this book, for it contains the pattern of his own buried life. And it may have spurred him on to a boldly metaphorical style of attack in his own book on the Gradgrind system. In a well-known footnote to Unto This Last, Ruskin praises the essential "truth" of Dickens's method, which he likens to a "circle of stage fire"; but is not Ruskin's whole conception of political economists a mere caricature of vice, bereft of the novelists' license to fictionalize? In response to a letter suggesting that he moderate his language, he characteristically redoubled his attack, calling political economy the damnedest lie the Devil had invented, except for the "theory of Sanctification." "To this 'science' and to this alone (the professed and organised pursuit of Money) is owing all the evil of modern days. I say All.... It is the Death incarnate of Modernism" (XVII, lxxxii). These are the accents of the Carlylean prophet and of the centuries-old tradition of the sermon against Mammon, yet Ruskin's object is also John Stuart Mill and a very specific body of doctrine calling for specific refutation. The difficulty of Ruskin's contemporary audience remains our own. To simplify matters, we might call Unto This Last two books rather than one. On the one hand it is a contribution to social science -- an argument for interference from a benevolent government and an attack on the worst features of competitive capitalism, using the logic of the economists to subvert their own principles. On the other, it is a moral and metaphorical argument, fusing the language of romanticism and Evangelicalism into a vision of redemption in the face of damnation, the damnation occasioned by both the Devil's lies of Mammonism and [195/196] sanctification. The book may or may not therefore seem impractical. James Sherburne, for example, has stated unequivocally, "If Ruskin is sentimental and impractical, most forms of modern political and social organization are the same. For Ruskin outlines the shape of things to come more clearly than any other English thinker of the nineteenth century" (237). For most readers, however, the split persists, with the result that the book invites separate readings: the economist might choose to skim past the metaphors, the student of literature to skim past the logical arguments and practical proposals.
Ruskin would insist, of course, that the two must not be separated and that the attempt to separate them merely repeats the dissociation of sensibility -- the professed incompatibility of the rational and poetic modes of thought -- that lies behind the Devil's triumph over modern economic life. Ruskin's project is precisely to heal that breach by proposing (as he does from the beginning of his career to the end) a moral science, a partnership between passionate apprehension and analytical comprehension -- and that science must speak the language of affections, the language, that is to say, of symbols. Here lies the odd triumph of the book. In many ways Ruskin's vision of abundance for all had already become familiar in advanced Liberal thought. (We have only to consider the ideology of the Free Traders, or the conclusion of Mill's Principles or Political Economy, which envisions a freely expanding economy released of the hierarchical restraints so important to Ruskin.) Ruskin's contributions as an economist have been ably evaluated by others.3 I will look instead at his construction, in word and symbol, of a moral science. Here, as in so many other areas, his predecessor is Carlyle.
Sherburne, James. Ruskin, or, The Ambiguities of Abundance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Tennyson, G. B. Sartor Called "Resartus" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 266.
Last modified December 2000