Section 2, 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.
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have argued that Ruskinian economics requires metaphorical exposition, partly because wealth is itself a sign and partly because economic disorders are also disorders of the affections, a connection best expressed in multivalent symbols. The self is an economic system, the economy an affective system. The identity of an individual includes what that person is economically, by virtue of is or her labor, buying and spending, and participation in a social system.
The problem for such an economics would lie in the failure to recognize what social problems cannot be usefully conceived in terms of a collective psyche -- to recognize, in short, the limits of Platonism. Munera Pulveris enacts the breakdown in Ruskin's attempt to synthesize empirical and metaphorical language. These essays, first published in Frazer's magazine, continue to explore the problem of money and power begun in Unto This Last. Ruskin's thought remains genuinely utopian as long as he conceives of the state and the person as healthy [234/235] organisms, but once he follows Plato by comparing social hierarchies to emotional hierarchies, he shows himself completely unable to countenance rational social conflict or even a genuine balance of social interests. The rich he magically metamorphoses into a class of wise people and so avoids questioning the absolute sanctity of property rights. The subservience of the poor he then justifies along Carlylean lines, going so far as to repeat Carlyle's foolish argument for slavery in terms suggesting that slaves are for him merely symbols of psychic forces that must be repressed, just as in Unto This Last the oppression of workers was associated with psychic forces that needed to be liberated. Symbolic thinking here becomes a betrayal into abstraction, not a triumph over it. These essays are not altogether fruitless, yet they dramatize the limits of Ruskin's interest in political speculation. Consequently, the excursions into classical and biblical literature, which in the earlier book consummated the argument at several points, here seems an escape from the argument into a subject for which Ruskin had as yet no adequate means of expression. In the chapter on "Coin-Keeping," for example, he distinguishes between coin keepers or merchants and storekeepers or spenders -- between, that is to say, his father's mode of economic activity and his own -- but he seems unable to push this essentially psychological distinction toward a useful economic generalization. Instead he breaks suddenly into a reading of mythical images in Dante and the Greeks, each of which he interprets as an allegory of economic activity: Dante's Idol of Riches sings enchantingly, "but her womb is loathsome"; for Plato the Sirens are "phantoms of divine desire; singing . . . on the circles of the distaff of Necessity." Circe is the power of "frank, and full vital pleasure, which, if governed and watched, nourishes men" and "pure Animal life"; Scylla and Charybdis represent the "betraying demons" associated with "getting and spending"; and so forth (XVII, 212-213, 215). Again, in the following chapter, Ruskin interrupts his discussion of wise commerce to comment on Portia, whose speech on mercy he associates with the word "charity" and its many connotations.
The first of these excursions Ruskin prefaces with a well-known observation: "It is a strange habit of wise humanity to speak in enigmas only, so that the highest truths and usefullest laws must be hunted for through whole picture-galleries of dreams, which to the vulgar seem dreams only." What follows, he wrote in a late note, was itself at first a footnote but was "of more value than any other part of the book, so I have put it into the main text" (XVII, 208). Its importance is not at first evident, since the lessons Ruskin deduces from his interpretations are commonplace pieties. The point, rather, seems to lie in the linkage of vehicle and tenor: the images are generally sexual, the meanings economic (the word "charity" unites both realms). Specifically, the two [235/236] excursions appear to convert sexual ambivalence into a more tolerable form, first by associating it with true and false uses (of wealth and affection), then by splitting the female figure into the loathsome and unfulfilling on one hand and the pure and nourishing on the other. But throughout the book these two subjects -- sexual and material economics -- seem as disjoined as the two discourses Ruskin adopts to discuss them. The effect is rather like breaking through a surface of uncertain and frustrated argument into a freer, brightly colored space, a picture gallery of dreams. Many readers have found this disjunction to be a symptom of mental instability, but probably it is more useful to see it as a struggle toward a new language and an expanded region for that language. In the books that followed, Ruskin regained control over that language through two distinct genres: lectures like "Traffic" and "Of Kings' Treasuries," in which imagery once again adequately embodies an argument about social policy, and books like The Ethics of the Dust and The Queen of the Air, which take as their subject the development of myth.
The excursions, then, are indeed the most important parts of Munera Pulveris, not because of what they assert but because of the mythopoeic method they try to clarify. They give us the chance to pause and survey in general terms Ruskin's new way of reading the world as myth, which centers on a unit of meaning that is at once visual and verbal.
Throughout his volumes on art, Ruskin reads nature either as a set of organic unities or as a pattern of interconnections. These techniques develop into a polarity: on one hand, a theory of inspiration which, so to speak, shatters the ordinary metonymic relations among things and re-fuses them as symbols; on the other, a critical technique of reading surface features as though they were a "kind of maze or entanglement" (X, 163). The two procedures merge in a schema that we might call the Ruskinian unit of meaning. This unit is the concentration of related meanings and energies at a single point, which is not absolutely distinguishable from other points but acts as an emotional focus for interconnections that expand indefinitely throughout the human and natural world. Our fullest example so far is Dante's eagle, which concentrates words and images into a system of associations (the eagle of empire, the Holy Ghost, the light of the eye, society as an organism, and so forth, are the images; judge, lex, lego, rex, royal, and so forth, are the words); but word chains and image chains easily interact like cells exchanging genetic material, since all words are at bottom concrete (thus: holy/ helping, Holy Ghost, eagle, "healing in its wings"). Ruskin's innovation in this book is to treat verbal definitions exactly as he had treated visual phenomena before in an attempt to provide meanings that are organically related to real spiritual forces rather than the abstract definitions favored by empiricists. As Elizabeth Helsinger has ably shown, [236/237] Ruskin derived his theory of etymology from contemporary philology, particularly Richard Trench's Study of Words (Helsinger, 255ff), but of course the roots of that theory lie also in Carlyle and, before Carlyle, in the Coleridgean theory of symbol and myth.
Ruskin's clearest statement of procedure appears in a note to Munera Pulveris, added in 1871 as an addendum to his allegorical discussion of Charity: "The derivation of words is like that of rivers; there is one real source, usually small, unlikely, and difficult to find, far up among the hills; then, as the word flows on and comes into service, it takes in the force of other words from other sources, and becomes quite another word . . ., a word as it were of many waters, sometimes both sweet and bitter" (XVII, 292). The etymology of "charity" follows in the form of a miniature narrative: the word began with the Greek charis ("grace," "divine gift"), then became confused with the Latin carus, and finally was weakened by modern sanctimoniousness to a form of almsgiving that implies not "grace" but "disgrace" in the receiver. And yet, Ruskin concludes, "the political economy of a great state makes both giving and receiving graceful"; and the "blessedness" of the giver in the Christian aphorism promises the "bestowal upon us of that sweet and better nature, which does not mortify itself in giving" (XVII, 293). Words, then, like architecture, bear the moral record of a civilization, but must be periodically purged of excrescences so that the original meaning may stand forth as a genuine reinterpretation -- like doctrine in Newman's essay on development or like clothes in Carlyle's theory of historical institutions or indeed like the logos in any idealist philosophy that attempts to breach the contradiction between constancy and change. For Ruskin "divine gift" is the "true source" or Idea of Charity, which, rightly reinterpreted as true reciprocity of exchange, would revolutionize English economic life.
Ruskinian philology lets us see in more general terms the quarrel over definitions in "Ad Valorem." Empiricist definitions, we recall, are simply the customary acceptation of words: the terms of economic science refer only to observable instances, and generalizations are simply ways of classifying observable instances. Descriptive or empirical language is therefore analogous to money as a medium of exchange because money is a device for systematizing the exchange of labor and goods, just as empirical generalizations are ways of marshaling data into categories useful for specific purposes. But for Ruskin the real meaning may vary indefinitely from customary usage, just as the real meaning or "sign" of a given body of wealth may vary from its conventionally assigned monetary value. The key words of Ruskin's moral [237/238] science, then, are moral terms, referring to qualities or forces rather than to the observable instances that manifest them more or less adequately. In this sense his terms are analogous to money as a store of value -- a character of money that he stresses strongly. As a store of value, money concentrates labor into tangible form, creates social relationships, signifies indebtedness, and pledges future labor. More precisely, Ruskinian words are like gold coins, as they are for Trench, because they concentrate value historically insofar as one may read into them the record of their original significance, their subsequent usage, and their debasement. Words unite many waters, stamping with a dye the roar and flux of temporal experience. In words, as in precious coins, the numinous becomes numismatic.
Where do the real entities to which moral terms refer exist? They exist, first of all, as natural or physiological forces that are embodied in specific instances, just as a landscape painter embodies the energies of nature in concrete representations. We have seen already that Ruskin bases his key economic terms (value, wealth, and life) in physiological well-being; in his reading of art and literature, analogously, power, purity, heat, light, and life itself represent virtues. More accurately, they are virtues, containing physical and spiritual meaning together. It follows that empiricist terms, which merely abstract points of resemblance from classes of data, are inadequate to a true moral science since moral ideas must be felt, not observed. Ruskinian language, then, is a form of physiological idealism, a continuous struggle to join subject and object in every act of conception. The treatment of "value" in Unto This Last is a good example. In its primary signification the word denotes things. Food, water, and light, clean rooms and a warm hearth, pictures, the thrust and curl of the garden vine, are things that "avail towards life"; but in its secondary meaning (which is its primary etymological meaning) of "valor," "value" denotes a subjective state, an experience of fullness, self-possession, and command of resources. Wealth-life proves to be not only a prime instance of the union of subject and object (the phrase joins both in hieroglyphic juxtaposition) but the paradigmatic instance of it. Truly to possess things is to know things in their human aspect and to know the self as substantial, as infinitely capable of incorporating the world into a unity greater than the individual ego with its separate history. Wealth-life or true possession is also the condition of all knowledge. The analogous term for Coleridge is Reason, except that what for Coleridge is impassioned thinking becomes for Ruskin a physico-spiritual condition, grounded in the subjective experience of good health and "well"-being.
Ruskin expresses this epistemological priority through the fiction of primary inspiration, which he takes to be the ultimate origin of moral meaning. But in moments of inspired apprehension, physico-spiritual [238/239] forces appear as personifications. The entities to which moral terms refer exist, then, not only in the system of nature but also in groups of religious and mythological symbols that develop historically but may be read as a synchronous system that is in effect the legacy of human culture. The visionary eye recognizes the universe as animate and moral categories as personal, as groups of life energies, so to speak, so that to understand a virtue we must "stamp" its power with a human shape. In the case of Wisdom, if we contemplate rightly the lady in Proverbs, we will "spin out" from her numerous aspects of the primary idea as we would trace the associated meanings of a word, noticing, for example, her wealth, the products of her right and left hands, her womanliness, and so on. In Christian thought, of course, that paradigm is most clearly knowable through the Incarnation. According to The Stones of Venice, the early Christians did not need either to categorize or to define moral ideas, and for a very good reason:
They never cared to expound the nature of this or that virtue; for they knew that the believer who had Christ had all. Did he need fortitude? Christ was his rock: Equity? Christ was his righteousness: Holiness? Christ was his sanctification: Liberty? Christ was his redemption: Temperance? Christ was his ruler: Wisdom? Christ was his light: Truthfulness? Christ was the truth: Charity? Christ was love. [X, 368]
In Unto This Last Ruskin implicitly develops this point by using word associations to stress the divine elements of virtues, many of which have been secularized by use: for example, holiness/helpfulness (embodied in the Holy Ghost), provident/Providence, saving/salvation (through Christ's sacrifice), wisdom (through Solomon and other figures typical of Christ's rulership), and finally Life itself (Christ being the lord of Life as Satan, the paradigm of all the vices, is ruler over death). Thus Ruskin irradiates economy activity with the divine.6
Because Ruskin valorizes the "original" meanings of words that arise from visionary apprehension, etymology is ontology and therefore a criticism of modern life, providing the key for distinguishing true meanings from accrued false ones. For Carlyle (as for Shelley) words are polysemous in a relationship of meanings that is ultimately metaphorical. "An unmetaphorical style you shall in vain seek for," he writes in Sartor Resartus: "Is not your very Attention a Stretching-to?" (p.54.) But [239/240] for Ruskin the historical relationships of meaning in a word are not necessarily a relationship of primary concreteness to secondary abstraction. We need, for example, to recognize the "divine gift" in "charity," the "well" in "wealth," the "help" in "holy" and the "valor" in "valuable," but the substituted terms are not obviously more concrete than the concepts they redefine. They seem so, however, because the accepted or "tarnished" terms were in danger of becoming technical abstractions for the clergy and the economist. In Ruskin's hands, definition becomes, like preaching, an enhancement or reinterpretation of an original inscription, itself related to other inscriptions in ways complex enough to generate new combinations of thought. Creative definition allows us to envision the possible, not just to see the actual, as the pecus of Carlyle's grazier becomes the seed of the Rothschilds and the English national debt. Etymology combines history and prophecy.
Moral terms, then, concentrate the vague flux of historical experience into discrete and portable units -- magic emblems that when analyzed yield portions of the infinitely braided structure of the world. From this point of view, the imperfectly realized project of Munera Pulveris comes clearer. The true money or "gifts of the dust" in that book are verbal emblems; the mythological digressions are abrupt transitions from one form of meaning to another -- from the present, empiricist stage of meaning (when words simply describe observable instances and received values) to an original, metaphoric stage, when language expresses the union of subject and object. The late addendum on Charity, which joins the idea of charity with the image of an original source, acts as a miniature myth in addition to being an ontological example, since the stream image suggests how charity itself and the virtues in general are passed down from a divine source, like the meanings of words. By subsuming ideas of loving and giving under the Greek charis, Ruskin summarizes at a stroke his complex notion of original energy that takes the twin aspects of wealth and life, material abundance and erotic exuberance (and permits Ruskin to read sexual imagery from the classics as allegories of economics). Just as succinctly, it embodies the passionate logocentrism that dominates his thinking from the beginning of his career to the end -- the division of experience into the fullness of divine presence and the foulness of divine withdrawal. Every word is at first the Word incarnate. For Ruskin the recapture of the Word is also the recapture of original energy at its source -- a charismatic father, like Turner, capable of investing him with the earnest fire of passion and life, not a merchant-father caught in a struggle of almsgiving, implying disgrace in the receiver.
In 1840 Ruskin had planned a "new system of ethics in the form of a corrected and amplified Aristotle" (X, 374n). That intention never developed into a system at all but rather became a spiritual physiology, a [240/241] charismatic conception of the moral life. His leaps in Munera Pulverzs from the perplexities of economic theory into the world of religious myth are but examples of a larger leap, from the domain of practical ethical difficulties into a Platonic realm of powers and virtues that when absorbed would create the inward disposition sufficient for moral perfection. In many respects his idealism makes him a retrogressive figure in the history of moral ideas, a theorist who needed to preserve the logos in forms of social and aesthetic order, taking symbols for realities, and investing with magical powers books and pictures and phrases. But in other ways the late writings are the most modern of all -- in their very discordances, their almost self-confessed failure to cohere. After 1860 the unities of Ruskin's thought, centering on well-defined subjects explored in large volumes, appear to dissolve into heterogeneous concerns. More than before, he worked on many projects at once, gathering lectures, articles, and public letters together into books that seem fragments of a single, indefinitely evolving opus rather than complete works in themselves. The subject of that opus is myth, which, as Hunt observes, is the unifying center of Ruskin's otherwise aimless and harried ventures. In theory at least, myth is the code capable of describing all things in terms of a natural and cultural system and transforming them into emblems. But in the very act of mythopoeia, Ruskin seems to deny the possibility of coherence by gestures of willed playfulness that consort oddly with his dogmatic insistences. This serious play is a new mode in Ruskin's work to which we now turn.
Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. London: Everyman Edition , Dent, 1967.
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