Ruskin's "Death in the Garden"

Paul L. Sawyer, Professor of English, Cornell University

Footnote 19, Chapter 5, 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.

The example of the Revolutions of 1848 may also inform Ruskin's attack on the Renaissance, which bears close resemblance, once again, to Coleridge's treatment of the French Revolution in The Statesman's Manual. For Coleridge the revolution represented a final disorder on the social level of the proper relations between Reason, Religion, and Will. Reason, "as the science of All as the Whole, must be interpenetrated by a Power, that represents the concentration of All in Each," that is, by Religion. But when the two powers are separated (as in Eden, when Reason fell "in itself"), the first tends to visionary abstraction that appeals to base instincts in order to install a tyranny; the second tends to an idolatrous preoccupation with the particular: "Arm in arm with sensuality on one side and self-torture on the other, [it is] followed by a motley group of friars, faquirs, gamesters, mountebanks and harlots" (pp. 64-65).

Last modified December 2000