Section 1, Chapter 9, 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. That depreciation of the purist and elevation of the material school is connected with much loss of happiness to me, and (as it seems to me) of innocence; nor less of hope.... It may be much nobler to hope for the advance of the human race only, than for one s own and their immortality; much less selfish to look upon one's self merely as a leaf on a tree than as an independent spirit, but it is much less pleasant.
-- John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton
In the 1860s Ruskin saw himself as a man in possession of an open secret. Although he swore a pledge to Mrs. La Touche never to write of it, his religious apostasy was well known to his friends. "I've become a Pagan, too"; he wrote Norton in 1862, "and am trying hard to get some substantial hope of seeing Diana in the pure glades; or Mercury in the clouds" (XXXVI, 426). This awakening to the cold, clear dawn of the Greeks, who were strong enough to accept the beauty of the earth by accepting its mortality also, he had presented to his readers in the final volume of Modern Painters:
And herein was conquest. So defied, the betraying and accusing shadows shrank back; the mysterious horror subdued itself to majestic sorrow. Death was swallowed up in victory. Their blood, which seemed to be poured out upon the ground, rose into hyacinthine flowers. All the beauty of earth opened to them; they had ploughed into its darkness, and they reaped its gold.... the fatal arrows rang not now at the shoulders of Apollo, the healer.... strangest comfort fill[ed] the trustful heart, so that they could put off their armour, and lie down to sleep,-- their work well done . . ., accepting the death they once thought terrible, as the gift of Him who knew and granted what was best. [VII, 276-277]
This facing down pervades Ruskin's social criticism as well. Steadily we have watched him center more and more preciousness in the works of human hands: the beauty of the earth awakes with the fading of the monk's dream, and the reformer, incorporating all human suffering [227/228] into the scope of his concern, converts the earth power into healing. Bad conscience becomes social conscience. But just as characteristically, the tragic humanism of this passage swerves into a lullaby, and the Good Shepherd steals upon the slumbering scene. Is the "forgetfulness of evil" but the good child's reward for facing a temporary unpleasantness? Henry James, visiting Denmark Hill in 1869, thought he saw in Ruskin the image of "weakness, pure and simple.... he has been scared back by the grim face of reality into the world of unreason and illusion, and. . . wanders there without a compass or guide -- or any light save the fitful flashes of his beautiful genius" (quoted in Leon, p. 421). This emotional paradox -- the acceptance of tragic humanism and the sensation of the child bereft and abandoned -- reflects the complex crisis Ruskin faced in the middle of his life's journey.
In 1861 Ruskin wrote to Carlyle, "The heaviest depression is upon me I have ever gone through; forms so strange and frightful -- and it is so new to me to do everything expecting only Death, though I see it is the right way -- even to play -- and men who are men nearly always do it without talking about it" (XXXVI, 382)."I... try to feel that life is worth having -- unsuccessfully enough," he wrote Norton; "I sometimes wish I could see Medusa." "I am still . . . tormented between the longing for rest and for lovely life, and the sense of the terrific call of human crime for resistance and of human misery for help -- though it seems to me as the voice of a river of blood which can but sweep me down in the midst of its black clots, helpless. What I shall do I know not -- or if dying is the only thing possible" (XXXVI, 450). "I've been nearly as hard put to it before, only I wasn't so old, and had not the great religious Dark Tower to assault, or get shut up in by Giant Despair. Little Rosie is terribly frightened about me, and writes letters to get me to come out of Bye-path Meadow -- and I won't.... as for that straight old road between the red brick walls, half Babel, quarter fiery furnace, and quarter chopped straw, I can't do it any more -- Meadow of some sort I must have, though I go no further" (XXXVI, 367).
Ruskin is right: he had been "nearly as hard put to it before," but with the solace of youth and religious faith to fall back on; now he had to give up both solaces. Each renunciation, in its way, was a declaration of mature independence, which finally rendered the tensions between his parents and himself unendurable. Earlier, he had been able to forge compromises between his wishes and the parental will that left [228/229] unchanged the appearance of subservience, a condition sanctioned by the high value placed by his culture on filial duty. But as the son reached his forties the controlling behavior of the elder Ruskins seemed increasingly eccentric, both to Ruskin's friends and to himself -- and he vacillated, frustrated by each possible solution and above all by the fact of his vacillation. The man who had scandalized England by his radical economics still submitted his writings to his father, a merchant, for approval; the man who defended the pagan acceptance of physical pleasure still asked his mother for permission to visit the theater. Wishing mightily for a "Roof" of his own, he continued to use the rooms he had occupied as a child; craving the affection of friends, he took solace in a girls' school, where he acted as resident tutor and substitute parent -- yet his own father forbade the children to visit Denmark Hill. At the middle of his life's road, Ruskin had a great deal of the child to cast off, yet to do so would have risked the release of overwhelming feelings -- loss, aggression, guilt -- that his nostalgia kept carefully in check. To use a modern idiom, he was facing a mid-life crisis. This idea has been trivialized by an almost immediate overexposure, yet we should not be blind to the important conception underlying it -- the degree to which we think of the self as a progress defined by cultural expectations and biological limits. Ruskin's experience of mid-life closely resembles the list of traits defined by recent researchers: a radical reconsideration of one's hopes and failings; a temporary revulsion from the career one has forged, which brands even substantial achievements as "mere" success; a gradual emergence of parts of the self previously repressed in the interest of that success -- in the case of men, a side of the self seen as feminine (Levinson, chap. 13). The transition is painful, according to the amount of unresolved "business" from the past, and to Ruskin the accumulation of past business seemed insuperable. Earlier he dealt with crises partly by suppression, partly by reaffirming through orthodox faith and natural piety the fiction of original, innocent energy developing painlessly toward maturity -- passing over, in other words, the moment posited by the autobiographical literature of his time as crucial and defined usually in terms of a religious crisis. The identifying mark of that crisis is the experience of the self in extremis, in need of radical renovation -- and that partial destruction of the old self could only feel like death. "Carlyle says I'm moulting, and I hope that's all," he wrote in 1863. "But it has been a good deal like dying" (XXXVI, 454). But of course as long as his parents remained in control he could confess no unconversion except through a social allegory.
Ruskin expressed many of the conflicts in a crucial letter to Norton [229/230] of 1861. He was tempted, he tells his friend, simply to bolt from his difficulties -- to live a life "like Veronese's" or to go "to Paris or Venice and breaking away from all modern society and opinion" -- the cities, significantly, that he associated with Adèle. But he did not do so.
Intense scorn of all I had hitherto done or thought, still intenser scorn of other people's doings and thinkings, especially in religion; the perception of colossal power more and more in Titian and of weakness in purism, and almost unendurable solitude in my own home, only made more painful to me by parental love which did not and never could help me, and which was cruelly hurtful without knowing it; and terrible discoveries in the course of such investigation as I made into grounds of old faith -- were all concerned in this: and it would have been, but for the pain which I could not resolve to give my parents.
And later he adds, "I've had my heart broken, ages ago, when I was a boy" (XXXVI, 356-357).
The conflict, first, is between the parental will and the possibility of emotional satisfaction, specifically sexual love. Ruskin's love for Adèle dramatized an opposition between emotional fulfillment and the compulsion to work and study, partly at his father's behest. In some form this conflict symbolically structured most of Ruskin's books. After the failure of his marriage, Ruskin's villain becomes a kind of effeminacy fueled by religious purism, which withdraws into lascivious fantasies. Finally it becomes a whole culture destroying and defiling itself by a compensatory and lustful avarice. The activity unifying all these perversions is the careless destruction of life, first symbolized by works of art, then by workers. This destruction consistently induces the most powerful emotions Ruskin expressed in print. Here his career parallels Dickens's in many respects, except that what Dickens expresses as identification through overwhelming pity Ruskin usually expresses as identification through overwhelming, helpless anguish -- an anguish over waste and loss and forfeiture that makes time itself a nightmare and drives him to equally strong longings for the personal and historical past.
These emotions arose not only from a stifled need to love but also from a stifled need for the power of self-affirmation that he associated with a father's precious giving. Clearly Ruskin wanted what no father could be -- an unfailing source of guidance and affection who would nevertheless not try to guide him-and surely some form of parental repudiation is necessary to every growing person. What made the Ruskins' relationship so anguishing was the particular combination of affection and restraint. A son showered with affection and hopes yet raised to satisfy parental vanity; a love that nourished him yet distrusted and controlled him; a cash arrangement that parodied the [230/231] emotional relationship by giving the son freedom while keeping him dependent: these paradoxes surface in the nightmarish imagery of Unto This Last -- the sons as harnessed beasts, the young men thrown into the furnace. His father, as Ruskin wrote to Acland after his father's death, "would have sacrificed his life for his son, and yet forced his son to sacrifice his life to him, and sacrifice it in vain" (XXXVI, 471). But was Ruskin sacrificed to controls or to an unattainable ideal? The letter to Norton cited above contains a characteristic list of might-have-beens:
had my father made me his clerk I might have been in a fair way of becoming a respectable Political Economist in the manner of
Here Ruskin sets a repellent image of complete obedience -- becoming another Mill as clerk in the wine trade -- beside apprenticeship to Turner, the ideal father he constructed out of his needs, who would magically communicate strength of selfhood to him without ever interfering with his life.
In December 1863, less than three months before his father's death, Ruskin's resentment broke to the surface in a letter essential to understanding his heart and mind in these years:
Men ought to be severely disciplined and exercised in the sternest way in daily life -- they should learn to lie on stone beds and eat black soup, but they should never have their hearts broken -- a noble heart, once broken, never mends -- the best you can do is rivet it with iron and plaster the cracks over -- the blood never flows rightly again. The two terrific mistakes which Mama and you involuntarily fell into were the exact reverse in both ways-you fed me effeminately and luxuriously to that extent that I actually now could not travel in rough countries without taking a cook with me! -- but you thwarted me in all the earnest fire of passion and life. About Turner you indeed never knew how much you thwarted me -- for I thought it my duty to be thwarted -- it was the religion that led me all wrong there; if I had had courage and knowledge enough to insist on having my own way resolutely, you would now have had me in happy health, loving you twice as much (for, depend upon it, love taking much of its own way, a fair share, is in generous people all the brighter for it), and [231/232] full of energy for the future -- and of power of self-denial: now, my power of duty has been exhausted in vain, and I am forced for life's sake to indulge myself in all sorts of selfish ways, just when a man ought to be knit for the duties of middle life. [XXXVI, 461]
Struggling to sort out the ambiguities of his past, Ruskin falls back on an explanation drawn from his parents' own beliefs -- that mental distress is a form of physical exhaustion. As he imagines it, the fire of life and passion, strengthened by early discipline, is infinite, like an abundant economy, but when thwarted, becomes feeble, like a scarce economy, requiring constant nurture. The thwarting concerning Turner refers, as we have seen, to the watercolors, which Ruskin took as magical emblems of the painter's moral power but which also would have represented his own autonomy in his chosen sphere of competence. In the last sentence he throws his guilt over self-indulgence back on his father, an unfair enough move that nevertheless suggests how he turned money, the inadequate medium of his father's affection, into a form of passive retaliation. And it suggests how an inexpiable burden of obligation forced him into what could seem a futile alternation between duty and self-indulgence rather than activities purposeful and fulfilling in themselves -- again like a false economy.
Consequently -- it is perhaps the most poignant statement of Ruskin's life-he claims he does not need love. He wrote Rossetti, "I am grateful for your love -- but yet I do not want love. I have had boundless love from many people during my life. And in more than one case that love has been my greatest calamity. I have boundlessly suffered from it. But the one thing, in any helpful degree, I have never been able to get, except from two women of whom I never see the only one I care for, is 'understanding.' " (Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, I, 49, quoted in Leon, 349). It is often remarked that Ruskin's early lack of companionship made the normal give and take of intimate friendship difficult for him, but it surely means as well that he knew no paradigm of love other than the inequalities inherent in the relationship of parent and child. At best this could be what he called "harmonious inequalities" in Unto This Last; at worst it could turn into the kind of repressiveness he showed as a husband. But possibly his need to control Effie and to refuse any real obligations to her partly reflected his own fear of the subservience and obligation he already experienced in his parents' love. The occasional remark in his letters, self-pitying but no doubt genuine, that he could not imagine people "caring" for him suggests a radical uncertainty about his parents' love despite his claim that he had too much of it-a doubt whether he could be loved for himself apart from what he produced as the instrument of his parents' [232/233] vanity. The alternative he excludes in the letter about love and understanding is love that is unconditional, yet many moments in his writings-in the description, for example, of sons as true wealth-seem to be the very emblem of love unconditional and inexhaustible. Another emblem, as I have suggested, is the fantasy of the childhood paradise that precedes the fall into loneliness, ambition, and insatiable need.
In the middle of his life Ruskin developed a new image of heart's desire. "I don't in the least know what might have been the end of it," he wrote Norton in the letter I have cited twice above, "if a little child (only thirteen last summer) hadn't put her fingers on the helm at the right time, and chosen to make a pet of herself for me" (XXXVI, 356-357). Ruskin had met Rose La Touche in 1858, when she was ten, though only gradually, it seems, did she attain a preeminent position in his affections. In 1866 he proposed to her and she asked to defer her answer until she came of age three years later. At that time her parents interposed, and Ruskin ultimately lost her, yet his desire for her, by this time obsessive, brightened and darkened the moments of his life, even after her death from brain fever in 1875. The idea of Rose -- for ultimately she lived more vividly and intensely for him as an idea than as a person -- in many ways repeated his earlier love for Effie and Adèle and also, perhaps, for his cousin Jessie, who had died with the first phase of his own childhood. Like Effie she was younger than he, which gave him the authority of years and the power to objectify and shape her as he wished; and like the others, she would have made an unsuitable match from his parents' point of view (even the match with Effie was opposed at first because of her relatively humble connections). But more than the others, Rose was to be the idol of his affections and, as Hunt has remarked, their "permanent focus." "I want. . . the sense that the creature whom I love is made happy by being loved: That is literally all I want," he wrote in 1866."I don't care that Rosie should love me: I cannot conceive such a thing for an instant -- I only want her to be happy in being loved" (quoted in Hunt, p.306). Treasuring her as he had learned to treasure works of art, he seemed in one sense to repeat the errors of his parents in their controlling yet indulgent idolatry of him, yet the new love is in another sense markedly different: Rose is charged with no ambitious expectations other than being a thing in herself, thus receiving in a peculiar form the unqualified love Ruskin could not give himself except vicariously -- she is in fact the vicarious object of his self-love, in particular of his own childhood as a timeless moment before love and duty, and the child's will and the parents' will, were irremediably divided. Possessing her Ruskin could repossess the perfect past in [233/234] his imperfect middle age, a joining that also reflects the doubleness with which he now began to view the world -- a place on one hand of courage, combat, and duty; a place, on the other, of timeless and careless felicity, the domain, also, of the aesthetic. Yet Ruskin never possessed her; the more she was removed from him, the more he craved her. Here again he reenacted the past as a repetition compulsion: year after agonizing year he reexperienced the ancient connection of love and loss, passion and absence, fulfillment and denial, until at last Rose invaded his dreams and fantasies, to find a permanent home there.
Most generally, Rose is the embodiment of the unbroken heart, the love anciently thwarted and longed for, the life started over again. Actually, Ruskin constructed two benevolent female symbols: one powerful, protecting and maternal, visualized as a goddess or some other emblematic figure; the other a child inhabiting a permanent paradise of childhood. In either case she brings the unfallen past into the fallen present; the logos once located in nature now appears as a sexual other, but only after the fall has been recognized. She is desire and therefore the self made determinate. Rose enters Ruskin's books of the 1860s and 1870s and is inseparable from them as their radiating center. She is the center, that is, of a mythopoeic construction of the world that mediates between the energies of nature and the persistence of the desired, human other -- a construction also of a language capable of interpreting all things as a continuous code of emblems. We turn now to Ruskin's theory of metaphor as it emerged in the context of his continuing interest in economics.
Helsinger, Elizabeth. Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982.
Hunt, John Dixon. The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin. New York: Viking, 1982.
Leon, Derrick. Ruskin, the Great Victorian. London: 1949.
Levinson, Daniel et al. The Seasons of a Man's life. New York: Knopf, 1978.
Last modified December 2000