Footnote 4, Chapter 6, 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. [GPL]. In her discussion of Modern Painters III, Helsinger argues that the Ruskinian alternation between sublime viewing and picturesque or "excursive" viewing corresponds to modes of seeing in Wordsworth. Sublime seeing is an experience restricted to poets, but the excursive or traveler's mode (which dwells on intricacy and variety rather than on the sudden, unified effect of the eighteenth-century sublime) becomes for Ruskin a spectator's sublime available to all, since biblical prophecy and natural scenery can be interpreted as scripture. Thus, in Modern Painters III Ruskin criticizes Wordsworth the poet of imagination, but the "excursive" poet of The Excursion "continued to be Ruskin's guide" (Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, pp. 92-96).
Last modified December 2000