A Crucial Turning Point in Ruskin's Aesthetics

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 5, Chapter 4, 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.

his passage has been rightly recognized as a crucial turning point in Ruskin's aesthetics. Pierre Fontaney, however, stresses Ruskin's apprehension of life in nature ra her than the power of association, arguing that the shift from the aesthetics of Modern Painters I to that of The Seven Lamps of Architecture is a shift in emphasis, not an inconsistency. The function of the passage, he writes, "does not consist (pace Professor Landow) in working out the preliminaries of some new (let alone incompatible) theory of beauty; indeed, it is about sublimity, life, and memory as much as beauty" ("Death and Champagnole: A Contribution to the Reading of The Seven Lamps of Architecture," University of Toronto Quarterly 13 [1974], 141). Fontaney is right to underscore the complexity of the passage, but surely Landow is right in arguing for a substantial change: the statement in the Brevent fragment is clearly incompatible, for example, with the attribution of Power to human agency in "The Lamp of Power,"

In a letter to Henry Acland, written while he was composing Modern Painters II, Ruskin gives a good glimpse of his struggle over the issue of associations (XXXVI, 59). The inherent qualities of things and our instinctive responses to them, Ruskin argues there, are distinguishable from emotional attitudes toward them based on a particular person's accidental associations, but there is also such a thing, he continues, as "constant association" (for example, the association of black with melancholy, which he assumes to be universal among all cultures), although even this he distinguishes from inherent beauty. Ultimately, "constant associations" give way in Ruskin's theory to the natural hieroglyphic and the universal symbols of natural myth. The problem, as Landow notes, rests in a confusion between beauty as a sensuous quality in an object and beauty as an emotional response based on knowledge or association (such as the perception that a flower bears the appearance of felicity), and this definition leads Landow to call the theory of Typical and Vital Beauty a "bifurcated" theory. My reading of the theory of penetrative imagination would suggest how the transition from the two positions that Fontaney attempts to reconcile (that beauty is independent of associations and that beauty depends on the presence of human associations in landscape) may be grasped visually as well as theoretically. In Modern Painters I, Ruskin (and the artist) enters the natural world, which is the visible form of the divine mind. In Modern Painters II, the artist enters the world of a human mind arid the viewer enters the world of the artist's mind, which resembles a landscape. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture, the viewer enters a building, which is the visible form of a human mind decorated with images of natural beauty, which become, as it were, the pleasant associations and memories of the human builder. In all cases mental power is viewed as a structure to be entered.

Last modified December 2000