Footnote 8, 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.
Ruskin finally gives us no complete code, although we find the habit of giving emblematic names to shorter lists of things throughout his works and in his diaries as well. Robert Harbison comments: "The emblematic mind of the Middle Ages unaccountably revived, we may think, which embroiders even geology and botany till they become a wearable jewelry of sensation, invested with permanence by matching, triangular, pentagonal, or septagonal structure, his symbol systems assigning numerical values to whole groups of sensations which locate them in a new time outside earthly time, a sequence not imaginary like numbers because it is concrete, but not shifting like sensation because it is numbered." In the diaries even parts of days receive "asymmetrical, ragged, but ringing names": "[This] is the rigidity of non-descriptive names again, misleading concreteness which reassures without summoning up, like baby talk which is palpable, clear, and meaningless even to Ruskin, which preserves the things without their associations, as perhaps, contrary to expectation, certain kinds of symbols do, freeing a bit of experience from some of the mud which usually clings to it" (Deliberate Regression [New York: Knopf, 1980], 87-88). In my discussion I have stressed the power of emblems to join chains of association in an indefinitely expansible code, but truth is biped, as Ruskin was fond of saying, and emblems are also ways of arresting experience as discrete entities, ways of appropriating rather than describing. For geology as a "wearable jewelry of sensation," see Chapter 11, n. 6.
Last modified December 2000