Section 1, Chapter 11, of the author'sof 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. "There is a tradition respecting this statue, that a Venetian lady was once so fond of looking at her mirror, that she habitually carried one to church with her in her missal. One day as she was gazing into it she saw the reflection of her own face change into that of a death's-head, and was immediately turned into stone as she sate."
-- John Ruskin
"Neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh... for thou shalt be in league with the Stones of the Field."
-- Job 5:21, 22
uskin began his first lectures as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford in 1870. In 1871, the year also of his mother's death and the sale of his childhood home, he purchased Brantwood on Coniston Lake and proposed the establishment of an agricultural community to be called St. George's Guild, endowed with a tithe of his fortune and organized and publicized by him as its sole Master. These changes removed the external impediments of a decade earlier, when he was blocked by his parents' will and the problems of finding a roof of his own. With a home in the lakes, a podium for his ideas on art, and plans for a utopian community that might put at least some of his radical economics into practice, he was free fully to accept his vocation. Never before did he write so much nor intertwine his writings with such a multiplicity of projects, a multiplicity that has become the burden of his readers and his biographers. Without either the major insights or the dramatic turning points of his most creative years, the mass of writings from 1870 to the final breakdown of 1889 threatens to dissolve into a fathomless miscellany of fragmented and interrupted topics, while the projects and travels grow into compelled and repetitious busyness. His life also took on a new, tragic rhythm of sudden, debilitating attacks of illness alternating with periods of incomplete recovery. Faced with the [263/264] inexorable realities of illness and decline, he clung ever more resolutely to dreams of the past that provided intermittent shelter from his sense of failure and loss yet condemned him to an underlying solitude: even his most urgent projects, like Toby Shandy's, seem partly a private play, disguised recreations of older times and places. The wonder is not that Ruskin's late works are often disturbed and chaotic but that they contain so much that is genuinely innovative, challenging us to read them as new forms of utterance, new ways of interpreting and confessing experience.
Ruskin's passion for traveling and collecting, like his love for the rich and turbulent variety of Gothic, or the mosaiclike juxtapositions of the symbolic grotesque, fulfilled what John Dixon Hunt has called the idea of the world as museum. A museum, Ruskin remarked, is "neither a preparatory school, nor a peep show; but it may be made more delightful than either" (XXVI, 1); they are boxes of wonders and ways of teaching the world less as a system of classification than as an assemblage of paradigms. But a private collection would also be a gathering of memorabilia, a way, like landscape, of making the macrocosm coincide with the personal past: the "this is" becomes the "I am." The clutter of Denmark Hill, with its specimens of ferns and flowers and rocks, its manuscripts and books and paintings, became an even denser clutter at Brantwood, which Ruskin converted into a memorial by decorating it in his parents' taste and furnishing it with artifacts from the old home (a vindication, as Ruskin ironically remarked, of the associationist theory of beauty). But a more literal form of curatorship occupied him during these same years. At Oxford he set up four related series of drawings and paintings for use by his students; for the Guild museum at Sheffield he assembled minerals and other artifacts, as well as a series of translations he called "Bibliotheca Pastorum"; and for the British Museum at Kensington he arranged yet another geological series -- all of this accompanied by theoretical remarks on curatorship and original designs for display cabinets. And the books themselves, as Hunt points out, become display cases for receiving all of heaven and earth.1 As any subject potentially becomes any other subject, the "cases" become arbitrary subsections of a single, evolving opus, each topic (to change the metaphor) a strand in an infinite arabesque. Ruskin himself becomes the world of his books, giving himself to us in a flow of paintings and places, of memories and emblems and hopes. [264/265]
This new, informal intimacy is particularly characteristic of the books not drawn from Oxford lectures but composed rather of connected essays, reflections, or public letters that first appeared serially. Through these fragmentary public diaries, Ruskin accustoms himself to writing in the present tense, offering thoughts and impressions as they spin off spontaneously from his life activities and achieving in the process a continuous presence before a national audience. Space prevents me from considering more than a few works from Ruskin's later decades. I have chosen to focus on three. Deucalion and Fors Clavigera take the form of a polemical journal that includes occasional reminiscences of a carefully woven kind. From their shaped units Ruskin built Praeterita, the autobiography he wrote on the brink of night.
Ruskin's insatiable curiosity about the created world unified his adulthood as well as the multitudinous enthusiasms of his childhood. His first publication was an essay on the color of the Rhine. Later, while continuing his art lessons at Oxford he attracted the attention of several men of science, including William Buckland, geologist and divine, who had contributed to the Bridgewater Treatises. Modern Painters I set the young man in his career as an art critic rather than a geologist, yet the five volumes of his massive work contain hundreds of pages devoted to the characteristic energies of rocks and plants, of wind and wave. He considered these pages to be of scientific interest in their own right, for he retained to the end of his life the model of scientific inquiry he had learned as a youth -- an activity, predominantly, of description and classifying, possible at that time for the botanizing clergyman or the gentleman amateur exploring the Alps on foot. By the second half of the century, science had become almost exclusively the province of the professional experimentalist, who devised laboratory methods to explain what the senses alone could not perceive and the word poet could not describe. Yet Ruskin continued to collect and observe and describe, partly as diversion, partly as a serious contribution to science and the philosophy of science. Beginning in 1856 he published a number of notes and papers on such geological subjects as the banded formations of agates, the structure of the limestone Alps, and the varieties of silica. In the 1870s he began to draw his fragments together into books or book-length works in progress -- Deucalion, the geological diary; Proserpina, the book on flowers; the Oxford lectures on the relations of natural science to art; and other miscellaneous lectures, including the famous pair on The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth [265/266] Century. Merely the mention of these reminds us that Ruskin is the unique example in English of a romantic writer who laid claim to scientific originality.
The Stones of Venice and Modern
Painters IV contain an art critic's indirect responses to the "dreadful
hammers" of Lyell and the Higher Critics, both of whom specialized in legible
materials. The later scientific writings respond, sometimes directly, to
Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall
-- indeed, to the whole tendency of what Ruskin called "materialist science."
Some such response was integral to his entire enterprise. The belief in a religious
apprehension of nature -- an apprehension of which Saussure,
Wordsworth,
Turner, the Bible,
and the Greek poets, to say nothing of the pastimes and hopes of ordinary people
of goodwill, are but individual moments in a single articulation of praise --
requires for its completion some notice of purely empirical knowledge. But Ruskin
in his later years was hardly adequate, either by training or by temperament,
to that response. His technical contributions are minor, his philosophy of science
is reactionary, and his books are disturbed by private obsessions -- the same
that burst out in the psychotic episodes of 1878 and after. Nevertheless, Ruskinian
science does not deserve the almost complete neglect it has received. Its chief
interest lies in its character as drama -- a drama, first, of romantic nature
philosophy in a late encounter with scientific materialism and, second, of Ruskin's
struggle against overwhelming emotional chaos, fought out through his faith
in a sensuous language adequate to fixing and propitiating the created world.
But the late essays first require an understanding of Ruskin's thinking about
science as it evolved in the first thirty years of his career.
Modern Painters I presents nature as an infinity of divine thought which is humanly experienced as affective power, so that any good transcript of nature, such as a drawing, is necessarily both accurate and expressive. Far from suggesting a rivalry between science and art, as the romantics had conceived it, Ruskin denies the difference between them by assuming that the empirical investigator constitutes the model for the artist, since the man of science, by surrendering the self, achieves at once purity of heart and mastery of knowledge. This synthesis is in part a rejection of the romantic imagination in favor of virtues like watchfulness and sympathy, since imagination is for Ruskin the disturber, not the forger, of the bond between mind and nature. But by the 1850s he had to come to grips with the role of art in relation to imagination (the faculty that perceives what is not empirically present) and the role of science in relation to faith (the faculty that perceives God as not empirically present). Modern Painters III dramatizes in historical terms the broken harmonies of fact and fancy, thought and feeling, and truth and faith, with the aim once again of defining forms [266/267] of seeing that are both religious and true -- an art that is not fictional and a science that is not impious. Even so, Ruskin refuses to ally himself with Wordsworth's contempt for analysis, partly because of his own early interests, partly because of his continuing respect for the scientific sensibility. For Ruskin the modern mind is represented best by a feeling person, whose indulgence of essentially nostalgic emotion marks a departure from literal truth, and by the sturdy, practical man of facts, who is more likely than the other to become a benefactor of the race. The inspired visionary, on the other hand, transcends both: great poets like Homer and Dante produce the myths by which the apprehension of nature becomes morally and culturally significant, joining the circuit between the matter of art (God's works) and the moral perfection of human life. But this appears possible only in an age of faith. Can such myths survive in an age of science?
Ruskin turns to the traditional romantic resolution of this problem. In a well-known passage in The Friend, which Ruskin may have read and remembered, Coleridge distinguished between the faculty that perceives the inward principles of things and the faculty that perceives only the phenomenal manifestations of those principles. The first he calls reason, "that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves, as one with the whole"; the second he calls mere understanding, "that which presents itself when... we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to thought, death to life." Elsewhere he attacks the empirical sciences of the eighteenth century, particularly chemistry and taxonomy, precisely for missing the principle or essence of things; the chemist, for example, who "reduces the chemical process to the positions of atoms would doubtless thereby render chemistry calculable, but... he commences by destroying the chemical process itself, and substitutes for it a mote dance of abstractions" (IV, 520-521). The relationship of such passages to Ruskin's attack on secular rationalism is obvious enough, but Ruskin could not refute Lyell's theories, either in Coleridgean terms or in the kind of attack that Wilberforce was soon to launch on Darwin. Instead, Ruskin provides a somewhat tentative distinction in Modern Painters III between the science of essences and the science of aspects. The first, he writes, is useful in lifting the mind from "the first state of inactive reverie to the second of useful thought," but it is dangerous in that it "check[s] the impulses towards higher contemplation" and tends to "chill and subdue the feelings, and to resolve all things into atoms and numbers. For most men, an ignorant enjoyment is better than an informed one: it is better to conceive the sky as a blue [267/268] dome than a dark cavity, and the cloud as a golden throne than a sleety mist" (V, 386-387).
Nevertheless, the poignance of this formulation is manifest, since the claims of knowledge and feeling run counter to each other: "useful" knowledge, which has been a greater benefactor to the human race than all the artists and poets who ever lived, may deaden the feelings. If by "essences" Ruskin means simply the undiscernible objects of inquiry -- atomic processes, the magnitudes of space, the laws of physics -- then the two "sciences" may simply complement each other, as for Coleridge, but as yet he omits mention of the severer challenges of modern cosmology to faith. That is precisely the topic of the next volume -- but there, as it turns out, even the grimmest implications of modern science are no more disturbing than the present condition of humankind, as revealed to the compassionate and unaided eye. Consequently, both the geological chapters and the chapters on art drive toward a single, synthesizing idea -- the revelation of overwhelming human need, which becomes the basis for both a humane practical science and a genuine tragic art. Such an art can survive the loss of orthodox belief, which Ruskin relinquished himself, even though he maintained his faith in nature as a presence, mysterious and living.
But in the 1860s Ruskin launched an increasingly bitter attack on science. He did so because his theory of natural myth had not only a pragmatic basis (the greatest minds have perceived nature imaginatively, so that it "is" so for us necessarily) but also a scientific basis, as firm as the fundamentalist's belief in a seven-day creation. According to Ruskin, the life force is a scientific reality that is, at the very least, probable; and for this reason the science of aspects derives from the science of essence. In The Queen of the Air, nature bears two separate but complementary descriptions, very much as in contemporary descriptions of mental activity. (Mental activity is, on the one hand, a continuum of states of consciousness, from which we construct the necessary fictions of self, free will, and moral responsibility.) In this respect Ruskin's view is consistent with that of many nineteenth-century natural philosophers who assumed life to be a mystical, unanalyzable force and so took refuge in the biological sciences against the mechanistic assumptions of physics and chemistry. But Darwin's theory of natural selection effectively put the term to romantic vitalism. According to Darwin, species, instead of evolving by some innate drive or telos, develop according to random, purposeless factors similar to those that govern the inorganic world. Ruskin may not have read Darwin in this light, but there can be no doubt of his response to another contemporary theorist, John Tyndall, who in his celebrated Belfast Address of 1874 triumphantly proclaimed the unbroken continuity of organic and inorganic processes. According to Tyndall, the highest achievements of [268/269] the human spirit are theoretically deducible from molecular activity in the primal cloud of gases. Although Ruskin leaves us no direct testimony, it is at least likely that Tyndall's materialism catalyzed his decision to make modern science the object of a new attack on nineteenth century infidelity, continuous with his assault on political economy. As always, Ruskin's concern is less with the theories themselves than with the state of mind that would find in materialism an exclusive explanation of natural phenomena. This frame of mind, Ruskin believed, was hostile to the sanctity of life and the life of nature.
Tyndall appears peripherally in The Ethics of the Dust as the author of Heat, A Mode of Motion, a book that explained organic processes as the simple interaction of sunlight and complex molecules. In a lecture several years later, Tyndall fabricated an "artificial sky" by reproducing in a test tube the chemical processes occurring naturally in the atmosphere. In the introduction to The Queen of the Air, Ruskin juxtaposes Tyndall's "bit of sky more perfect than the sky itself" with a description of the Genevan Alps polluted by tourists, then concludes with an imprecation: "Ah, masters of modern science, give me back my Athena out of your vials, and seal, if it may be, once more, Asmodeus therein" (XIX, 292, 294). Asmodeus, in LeSage's novel, had escaped from a vial, very much like Satan in the garden, whom Milton compares with another, mythical Asmodeus. The allusions comprise the germ of a new Ruskinian fiction in which modern science, the latest incarnation of the spirit that denies, has despoiled the Swiss Eden and has rendered Eve captive. Ruskin broadened his attack two years later in the fifth letter of Fors Clavigera. There he refutes a botanist who had claimed in a lecture that there are, properly speaking, no such things as flowers -- only modified leaves. In a sense, Ruskin says, the lecturer is right ("There are no such things as Flowers -- there are only -- gladdened Leaves"), but he proceeds to turn his adversary on his head by showing that "leaf, and root, and fruit, exist, all of them, only -- that there may be flowers. [The lecturer] disregarded the life and passion of the creature, which were its essence. Had he looked for these, he would have recognized that in the thought of Nature herself, there is, in a plant, nothing else but its flowers" (XXVII, 84). In this Blakean antithesis between the truth of imagination, according to which there is nothing but the flower, and the false categories of "science," according to which there are no flowers at all, Ruskin closes his attack on two ideologies that specialize in denying the life and passion of the creature Man -- Darwinian biology, which sees man as "a transitional form of Ascidians and apes," and laissez-faire economics, which describes man's "constant instinct" as the "desire to defraud his neighbor" (XXVII, 84,95). But Ruskin also sets these doctrines on their heads: "The real fact is, that, rightly seen with human eyes, there is nothing else but [269/270] man; that all animals and beings beside him are only made that they may change into him; that the world truly exists only in the present of Man, acts only in the passion of Man" (XXVII, 84-85). The conflict here is not between scientific fact and pathetic fallacy, since Ruskin upholds vitalism, the theory that both individuals and species develop according to a teleological energy. The anthropomorphizing of the plant is an emotional "reading" of its inner life that is at least consonant with the biological fact, a procedure somewhat similar to Coleridge's nature philosophy in The Statesman's Manual. The botanist, of course, had a reading of his own that was fallacious, since he confused the lower term with the higher exactly as the political economist does (the flower is no more a mere leaf than man is a mere animal or a digestive mechanism). Ruskin's description is, finally, an accurate account of the flower's aspect for the human viewer, which is a part of scientific truth -- a truth possible when, as Coleridge writes, "we possess ourselves, as one with the whole," instead of separating subject and object in such a way that both become detached. The issue, then, is between good and bad science, that is, between two competing myths, only one of which makes place for the human -- the issue, as Ruskin says, between "savoir vivre" and "savoir mourir."
What, then, ought the scope of scientific investigation to be? The Oxford lectures on the relations of science to the arts, written half a year after the Fors letters, are frankly reactionary. In opposition to the tendency of contemporary thought, according to which scientific inquiry should be separate from religious belief; Ruskin asserts what is essentially the traditional Christian argument about the use of reason. Science, he writes, ought to be the activity of a peculiar wisdom or "sophia," "the faculty which recognizes in all things their bearing upon life"; the wise man ought "to know himself, and his place; to be content to submit to God without understanding Him; and to rule the lower creation with sympathy and kindness." Ruskin infers that there is no place in science for speculation or what he calls theory: "It is not the arrangement of new systems, nor the discovery of new facts, which constitutes a man of science; but the submission to an eternal system, and the proper grasp of facts already known" (XXII, 144, 150). For the worth of theory is to be judged not by some abstract standard of objective truth but by its human effect, and the effect Ruskin cites is a nation bent on converting its meadows into railroads and its skies into smoke, on producing munitions and artificial famines, on stoning birds in the woods and vivisecting dogs in laboratories, and on discovering monsters in the earth.
These multiple evils, all of them the progeny of infidelity, drive Ruskin into an autocratic pipe dream, a symbolic return of the green and golden past through the forcible reinstatement of the science he [270/271] had known as a youth -- the science of Saussure and Humboldt and Modern Painters I. Yet even here, his central intuitions partake of the romantic critique of secular rationalism at its most interesting. In the orthodoxy of modern naturalism, scientific truth is distinguishable, if not from the limitations of human perception, at least from the cultural assumptions of the observer, and also from technological uses. The restraint on these applications -- on nuclear weaponry, for example, or genetic engineering -- is a political and not a scientific problem. Ruskin, on the other hand, sees science as inextricably part of a nation's cultural life and insists that the organization of science, its technical applications, and even to some extent the model of the world that scientists present are cultural expressions. These are most clearly evident in the motive to power and the motive to abstraction. To prefer generalization to the description of particulars implies that the aim of science is intellectual mastery and therefore the expression of a culture's aggressivity. As Ruskin was quick to notice, the association of knowledge with aggressive prowess was very much a part of organized science among the Victorians. The controversies fought out in scientific journals could seem like an inflamed form of Mill's marketplace of ideas, and among the members of the Alpine Club, the peripatetic observer of old times was succeeded by amateur athletes testing themselves against the elements (Tyndall, for example, was a noted mountain climber).
These activities were for Ruskin expressions of industrial capitalism -- a response, as he puts it, to "the demand of a sensual economy for originality in science" (XXII, 146). In his critique of the Renaissance spirit and of the economic theory it spawned, abstraction is simply the mental reflection of the will to power: one severs oneself from the phenomenal world in order to dominate it; but the aesthetic apprehension of things (what Ruskin once called the theoretic faculty) marks the spirit's bonds of sympathy and communion. Ruskinian science, then, counters knowledge as aggressivity -- figured in The Eagle's Nest as a bird of prey -- with knowledge as sensuous meditation, the humility that conquers pride. The undertaking of course means a return to the project of Modern Painters I -- "wise art," as he tells his students, "is only the reflex or shadow of wise science" -- except that, instead of arguing for factual knowledge as a condition of genuine aesthetic response, he now argues for aesthetic response as a condition of genuine scientific knowledge. Even the scientist must read the world as articulate speech. Thus the reform of natural science, like the reform of economic science, must show itself verbally, in a language that transcends the distinction between subject and object by evoking things in their full sensuous actuality. Ruskin is ambiguous about the scope of this reform, which shifts with his temper and audience. At times the energy of his [271/272] attack on abstraction allies him with the Coleridgean critique of Western science. At other times, his project seems appropriately modest, a way of making nature study useful and delightful. Science, for example, should conserve rather than exploit, not only through the essentially mnemonic activity of intimate description but also through practical beneficence: the whole aim of Modern Painters IV, he wrote in retrospect, was to make a case for Alpine irrigation in order to prevent erosion and flooding. Science ought also to be an act of teaching and dissemination. In his popular writings, Ruskin proposes to make available for all some of the joy and even playfulness he had known as a child. To do so he argues, among other things, for illustrations that are beautiful and accurate, nomenclature as clear and descriptive as possible, and essays that describe the "human" as well as the natural qualities of an object -- the history of its uses and mythological associations. Much of the whimsy in these books comes from a deliberate questioning of the canons of seriousness, an attempt, as we have noticed earlier, to reconsider the whole category of play. What, he asks characteristically, directs the form of the leaf, making the fibers seek what they want "in woollen wrinkles rough with stings, or in glossy surfaces, green with pure strength, and winterless delight? There is no answer" (XIX, 378). From this perspective it is clear that the moral aesthetic is itself a defense of the play impulse as both expression and worship.
As has often been noted, Ruskin here anticipates, as dramatically as he anticipated anything, the ecology movement and the new forms of scientific journalism correlative to it. Like Ruskin, our contemporaries have tacitly reconceived science as a kind of attitude or interest rather than as a method of inquiry: key words like "environment," "ecology," and "conservation," with their connotations of nurture and cooperation, succeed the older paeans to technical progress and the virtue of intellectual curiosity. But just as obviously, Ruskinian science stands opposed to the essentially practical and cheerful spirit of the ecology movement. For him nature is not so much an ecosystem as a system of real Manichaean forces, whose appearances constitute a mythical structure similar, as it turns out, to a delusional system. As Ruskin's writings become increasingly obsessional, the term "literal" shifts from a phenomenological region, in which it refers to the invariability of human perception, to a region like that of the unconscious, where symbols become realities and thoughts become deeds. Just as, for the Evangelical, God must be recognized in order to be obeyed and Satan recognized in order to be defeated, so for Ruskin infidel science denies the existence of evil and the life of nature, only to discover diabolical forces in the form of monstrous bones and to assault the earth in a kind of rape. Forbidden knowledge now becomes the defilement of a literal mother and commerce with a literal devil. The system of nature, [272/273] sensuous, personal, and Manichaean, is the embodiment of the human soul; the system of scientific abstractions is the collapse of psychic structure, viewed as a release of primitive, destructive energy. To enter the haunted region of Ruskinian science is to enter the region of the grotesque -- the playing, sometimes fanciful and sometimes terrible, with an ultimate dread.
Ruskin coupled his two chief works of science by naming both after mythological personages -- Proserpina, the book on flowers, and Deucalion, the book on stones. The titles suggest that their subjects are to be conceptualized in terms of myth rather than theory. According to Proserpina, which I will consider only briefly, plants are creatures that strain upward toward the light and downward toward the dark, like the seasonal goddess of the underworld (and like Ruskin's own Rose, now banished to the shades). At the same time Ruskin proposes a half-serious revision of Darwin, considering species in their "aesthetic" rather than their genealogical relations. The whole book is a kind of grave tweaking of the Darwinian nose, although in another sense, the nose being tweaked is that of Linnaeus. Linnaeus had classified flowering plants according to the sexual characteristics of its flowers, a procedure Coleridge had criticized because it touched only on superficial traits and not on the "constitutive nature and inner necessity of sex itself."3
Ruskin, on the other hand, replaces Linnaeus' Latin names for families with English neologisms derived from girls' names -- a deliberately sportive gesture that has the serious purpose of connoting the "constitutive nature" of each family by anthropomorphizing them. He justifies his procedure, moreover, by the ruling dictum that the fruit and seed exist for the sake of the flower, not the flower for the sake of the fruit and seed: the flower, in other words, loses its sexual nature and gains an erotic one -- it is to be enjoyed aesthetically, in and for itself, and not as the means to a reproductive end. But since the seed also carries within it the germ of death, Proserpina conceives of biological species in terms of a timeless pattern of aesthetic relationships, as in Eden before the fall and not in terms of a process of death and procreation proceeding through geological time. Like The Ethics of the Dust, Proserpina presents the world from the perspective of innocence rather than from that of experience -- a looking glass world mirroring the real world of science and governed by the playful grotesque. (For a fuller study of the scientific works in general, see Alexander.) [273/274] Deucalion, on the other hand, belongs to a different order of seriousness, for here Ruskin turns to the genuine combats of science, evolving along the way an extended rumination on the process of time.
Alexander, Edward. "Ruskin and Science," Modern Language Review 64 (1969), 508-521.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Works. Ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Rosenberg, John. The Darkening Glass. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
Ruskin, John. Works. Ed. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Ruskin, John. The Ruskin's Family Letter. Ed. Van Akin Burd. 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973.
Ruskin, John. The Diaries of John Ruskin. Ed. Joanne Evans and John Howard Whitehouse. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
Last modified December 2000