Footnote 6, 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.
A persuasive alternative account is given by J. Hillis Miller in "Myth as 'Hieroglyph' in Ruskin," Studies in the Literary Imagination 8 (1976), 15-18. Miller suggests that Ruskin struggled with the contradiction between the uniqueness of each individual fact and the need to establish unities, and he resolved the contradiction by grouping things according to metaphorical resemblance instead of subsuming them under general categories. "Ruskin's solution . . . is, then, a certain theory of myth. A myth for him, is a node, a knot, or interweaving of many branching figurative implications. A myth is the concentration of a great number of different facts in their resemblance" (p. 18).
Last modified December 2000