Section 3, 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.
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n Modern Painters I, the Ruskinian speaker tests his equanimity before extreme occasions of elemental fury that never become uncanny because they are always legible: sublime experience is always the warning [283/284] or teaching of an Evangelical deity, even though the ecstasy of beholding arises from the terror of a potential indeterminacy. In the next volume, however, awe takes a slightly different form, arising from the possibility of fanciful associations repressed by the first volume's adherence to fact. The partially glimpsed serpent in Turner's Jason, for example, terrifies by its suggestion of the unseen, a terror that Ruskin links with the power of the deity and of the artist's overmastering intellect. But the artist's power is never quite overmastering, because it evokes and confirms a corresponding power in the viewer. Similarly, in the theory of the symbolic grotesque, Ruskin attributed sublime effects not to elemental phenomena in themselves but to those phenomena as signs of the unseen. Grotesque gaps and combinations are essentially a reshuffling of natural logic to reflect an underlying supernatural logic. This act of revealing follows the moment of dread at the ninth hour of the Apocalypse, the moment of uncanny recognition that things are not themselves but signifiers. I suggest that this thrilling dread is a person's own repressed desire experienced as alien -- figured as objects that do not move of their own will but in accord with some inscrutable intent.
Prophetic art, in which the terror and beauty of the creation are partially accommodated to distorted human speech, requires in the seer a correspondent power to withstand and absorb. The art of the great naturalists, in which human evil is recognized for the purpose of redeeming it, requires a similar power to withstand and absorb, which in "The Nature of Gothic" is figured as organic energy -- the prickly waywardness, rigidity, and exuberant redundance of vegetable growth. It is as though the inspired seer, having reconstituted his ego as the point of coherence in a landscape, may now reconstitute his ego as the point of coherence in the human community: in Christian terms, the believer, nourished by the true vine, absorbs Christ's power to suffer affirm, and triumph. But although the old Adam, who fell, is reborn in a religion of mercy, the old enemy survives. If the unfallen Venice represents the condition by which desire and the object of desire are merged, the Renaissance pride of knowledge is the condition in which desire chooses a false object.
Ruskin's conception of pride as repression derives partly, I have suggested, from biography -- from the loss of Adèle and from the emotional breakdown following the pressures of study at Oxford. The diary of those troubled months, which Ruskin divided into Head and Heart, reflects a deeper division with the family: the son, fusing his ambition with his parents', sacrificed his heart's deeper need -- and this sacrifice he called in his book knowledge, venomous and puffed up. But as repression can stifle desire only by distorting it, Renaissance knowledge is paradoxically both ascetic and debauched. Just as the loss [284/285] of Adèle repeated an earlier, unconscious loss, so the knowledge gained from the famous wedding night, we may speculate, revived an earlier, unconscious fear, the primal recognition that puts the term to the childhood Eden. According to Freud, the child infers from the sight of the female body the father's power to castrate. In the overdetermined symbol of the Renaissance spirit, sexual knowledge and the repression of desire -- the two threats to the primal union of object and desire -- fuse into a single principle of self-isolating separation, the activity of a castrated self that experiences itself and its creations as lifeless husks. The principle of separation is also the death brought by the serpent into the garden, since, as Ruskin says, the other name of separation is death. The Renaissance, terrified of its own mortality, constructs monuments to death in life, converting the garden that was into a whited sepulchre. Against that principle, Ruskin proposes a liberating sublimation, an erotic communal bonding that expresses itself in the exuberance of great architecture.
The exuberance is Gothic naturalism, the ego's attempt, as I have suggested, to reconcile through acceptance the primitive dichotomies that structure The Stones of Venice -- the antitheses of innocence and experience, purity and corruption, and communion and separation. The ego, in Norman O. Brown's phrase, must become strong enough to die; but this strength depends upon accepting the body and abandoning the unconscious attachment to the virgin mother, who binds the self to the infantile past through the terror of death viewed as separation. But the book retreats from this mature acceptance, because the horror of the corrupted city calls up its opposite, the fantasy of an unfallen, virginal spirit that guarantees her sons' greatness -- and this is the ideal that Ruskin secretly married while he was publicly pledged to Effie.
But in the final volumes of Modern Painters, Ruskin developed at last the image of an ego strong enough to die, strong enough, that is, to wrestle with the death instinct that now governs the world. In myth the serpent, a detached phallic animal who knows, embodies both the oedipal desire and the punishment of the desire. Both potent and impotent, both living and dead, it moves with a power uncannily its own yet not its own, like a machine -- or so it does in Ruskin's thought. In Ruskinian myth, history and cosmology fuse into a dialectic by which purity, the energized and radiant union of the parts of an organism, stands in prior relationship to corruption, the dissolution of parts following upon a withdrawal of divine energy. As an active agent, the principle of separation becomes the death instinct -- a blighted and serpentine vegetable growth, for example, or a filthy beast that divides and proliferates horribly. In Ruskin's reading of The Garden of Hesperides, the painting collapses history by juxtaposing the garden at the [285/286] moment of rupture against the dragon of the present -- the beast that seals off the valley and represents the culmination of human defilement through time. It is the "British Madonna," the final, lamialike transformation worked by the modern spirit upon the primary, natural union. But in a different allegory, Apollo triumphs over the Python by transforming the power of death into the power of healing. This and other examples suggest that life and death are set against each other not as separate principles but as transmutations of a simple, ambivalent force. Streams, for example, are pure when regulated but dragonlike -- torrential and sterile -- when not. The Hesperides, goddesses of twilight, are bright with the passing of the sun's rays through dust. The Sybil, holding the term of her life in a handful of dust, holds also her hope and promise. Death, acknowledged, is part of life.
In art the agency of these tragic affirmations is the noble grotesque, which Ruskin links to the acceptance of the fall through the imagery of the broken mirror. In Lacanian terms, the mirror stage, the fantasy of a unified ego presented in the image of a unified other, has been abandoned, but by presenting the brokenness of the human and natural condition, tragic art paradoxically presents the means to a new unity through connection, to be achieved temporally through purposive action. Apollo becomes the Pythean. In the primitive oedipal fantasy that this image expresses, the son absorbs the power and the knowledge of the serpent father, but the serpent as generative power is also the principle of mortality. We can now see the connection between the Python and Veronese's Solomon, who is also Christ and therefore the double-natured Griffin of the noble grotesque. Christ is the divinity who is also human, a god that triumphs and an animal that dies. Man, who is nobly human and nobly animal, becomes Christ. The ego strong enough to die is now free to redeem the broken world by converting illth into wealth -- the eternal and self-affirming energy embodied in objects of determinate desire. In Ruskinian economics, repression, or the death wish that starves, is converted into erotic creativity, which nourishes. Masturbation, symbolized in fecal images, and sexual love, symbolized in images of flowing and generation, provide the physiological substructure of a new utopian myth. For Ruskin capitalism is like a compulsive onanism that parodies childbirth by filthy self-reproduction yet obeys the laws of Victorian genital economy, which is finite and self-depleting. But the abundant economy, achieving the promise of an inexhaustible energy, also fulfills the primitive narcissistic fantasy of self-reproduction by converting the primitive self into an organic community.
The symbolic form of this community is a garden paradise ruled by a king and his queen. But Ruskin's own struggle with the Python was emotionally catastrophic, and the anima of the English utopia [286/287] remained shadowy and distant. In his private life he fell back upon the fantasy of a child world in which Rose, the image of determinate desire, also reconstituted the nostalgic denial of death and time. His courtship of Rose depended on a ceaseless propitiation of a new set of parental withholders. Mrs. La Touche he called Lacerta, the serpent; the children in The Ethics of the Dust are, fortunately, make-believe dragons who can devour the Lecturer only with their childlike attentions -- they have not yet seen the garden of after life, with its singing serpents, and so cannot become what they see. The little dragons (like the tiny chess queen that Alice holds in her hand) are a playful grotesque. Although Ruskin and the children are both parent and child, he is sole ruler. The garden, which is both present and past, is not so much preadolescent as pre-oedipal: what is banished is the castrated creature that can castrate, and what is denied is Turner's "hopeless" belief that there can be no rose without a worm. Yet that denial is only partial, because the child garden, like the pastoral, has meaning only in terms of what it excludes -- the principle of separation. By splitting the world into two perspectives, the perspectives of innocence and experience, Ruskin defines the condition in which there may be a rose without a serpent, but the acceptance of the serpent in experience requires the compensatory fantasy of the child secluded in innocence.
The Queen of the Air, on the other hand, represents the timelessness possible to the world of experience -- not the child garden but a prelapsarian Greece in which, as in the biblical Eden that Ruskin described in the letters to a college friend, death exists as part of a greater, dialectical harmony. In this book Ruskin reconstructs the dynamics of the Protestant sublime by imagining a feminized cosmos, personified by a deity of double aspect -- the gorgonlike punisher or warrior and the angelic maiden or guardian -- who also enters into generative union with an opposed power of pure matter, the dust into which the breath of life is breathed. Ruskin pairs his invocation to the bird, which we have examined above, with an equally beautiful invocation to the serpent, paradigm of the "earth-power":
A wave, but without wind! a current, but with no fall!... one soundless, causeless march of sequent rings, and spectral procession of spotted dust, with dissolution in its fangs, dislocation in its coils. Startle it; -- the winding stream will become a twisted arrow; -- the wave of poisoned life will lash through the grass like a cast lance.... It is a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of the earth. [XIX, 362-363]
The bird, like a pagan god, is a center of energy from which emanates the sacred diffusion of the elements; the serpent, by contrast, lacks a center or even a determinate self: the word painting robs it even of its [287/288] unity as an organism ("march of rings," "procession of dust"), for it is the antithesis of unity ("dissolution in its fangs, dislocation in its coils"). Unlike the bird, which generates many metaphors each of which captures its essence -- it is in this verbal sense the many in the one -- the serpent is an indeterminate thingness that can be known only as an anomalous version of something else, a hieroglyph that paradoxically embodies no Word. This is the necessary aspect of nature that is forever an It, never a Thou, forever evading propitiation and definition.
The Queen of the Air presents the cosmos as pattern and process but occupies no temporal dimension: it occupies in some sense the mythic past, but in another sense the timeless realm of imaginative activity. The third part of that book, however, shifts dramatically into a kind of disturbed diary that is also a curse on the present -- and this mode brings us, finally, to the Deucalion fragments of the 1870s, in which the world has been given over to the earth power, now seen as the active agent of fallen time. Ruskin's subtitle, Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves, and the Life of Stones, refers to the flood and the rocks of the Deucalion myth, but "lapse" and "life" are also metaphysical forces, the one working on the other as water corrodes rock and age corrodes the spirit. On his first page Ruskin says that the excitement of heart and brain, if "temperate, equable, and joyful," tends to "prolong, rather than depress, the vital energies. But the emotions of indignation, grief, controversial anxiety and vanity, or hopeless, and therefore uncontending, scorn, are all of them as deadly to the body as poisonous air or polluted water" (XXVI, 95). As Ruskin suffered more and more the strains of fear and disappointment, as well as the organic malady that eventually destroyed his mind, he projected more and more of his fears onto a single diabolical idea. There are those, he wrote in "Living Waves," who believe in "another Kosmos, mostly invisible, yet perhaps tangible, and to be felt if not seen" (XXVI, 344-345). Deucalion, as we have seen, describes the present cosmos in the form of a wave moving and arrested -- the babbling of the Yew, the ooze of treacle, the frozen flow of ice, the immobile ripples of stone, the sinister weaving of the serpent -- from the sweet to the bitter, from the waters of life to the sting of death. The description of glacial snow collapses time so that forty years back is also the newest fallen snow, but those pure crystals will drag themselves inexorably to the last doom. As the Time-Spirit was for Carlyle the Devil of this world, time becomes for Ruskin the principle of separation, like the railroad that defiles Venice and seals off the valley of Cluse. The phallic railroad -- for Turner as for Ruskin -- is a mechanical serpent, a human product that masters its creator and brings upon the civilization of which it is the material emblem the curse of masturbatory capitalism -- blindness, atrophy, pollution. [288/289] Capitalism, finally, is the legacy of the bad fathers, whose blessing turns helplessly into cursing: "And the fathers . . . prick the poison of the asp into their young blood, and sicken their eyes with blindness."
The serpentine woman, the castrated thing that can castrate, finds her counterpart, then, in the phallic machine, the soulless thing set over against nature, whose motive power is in some sense external and therefore inscrutable, like the uncanny. Symbolized in the train, the Time-Spirit is the agent of separation, not from the past only but also from nature, the infinite, organically cooperative system from which it revolts yet of which, in the form of the serpent, it is a part. The triumph of the machine in the social world corresponds to the triumph of ungovernable forces in the economy of the soul. When Apollo no longer has strength to absorb the Python, the serpent becomes the emblem of the ultimate horror of the diffuse and undetermined, the disintegration of the self. This, for Ruskin, is the agent of the Betrayal: what, then, is the agent of Redemption? Great myth, Ruskin wrote, is the product of a mind "conscious of certain facts relating to its fate or peace." Fate or peace: so much of his passage into age and so much of the rhythm of his last books rest on these poles. In Fors Clavigera, Fate is the goddess of this world, enforcing the law of a debased economy; in Deucalion the scarce economy becomes the law of nature. In both books, the will to endure is a ceaseless agon fought with the hope of some distant or perhaps merely symbolic redemption, but an underlying pessimism, metaphysical rather than merely political, suggests that time is redeemable only by some form of visionary escape that more and more asserts itself against the diminishing possibilities of moral action. That escape rests on a new mode of memory, an experience of the past as transcendent vision.
In 1887 Ruskin wrote to a scientific friend, "For everything I thought I knew of minerals... has been made mere cloud and bewilderment by... Judd's address at the Geological of planes of internal motion, etc., and all my final purposes of writing elementary descriptions of them -- broken like reeds." The fret of controversy gave way to resignation: "But, alas! I am not able any more but for the quiet of evening among the hills" (XXVI, lxiii-lxiv). The quiet of the hills at evening and Judd's planes of internal motion mark the distance attained in Ruskin's day between the two modes of perception, the sensuous and the analytical, that Ruskin had tried to synthesize as a geologist. The time was past when Saussure, Ruskin's "master in geology," could go to the Alps "as I desired to go myself, only to look at them, and describe them as they were, loving them heartily -- loving them, the positive Alps, more than himself, or than science, or than any theories [289/290] of science" (XV, 476). The fragments of Deucalion are the wreck of that older vision. And yet the book ends in something of a triumph of the romantic imagination -- a free-flowing prose poem on the forms of ice called "Bruma Artifex."
Like a diary entry, the chapter begins at a place and time -- the hill garden of Brantwood after the frost of March 9, 1879. Everywhere beneath his feet, Ruskin tells us, clods and particles of earth have been thrust aside by minute "thread-like crystals..., presenting every form usual in twisted and netted chalcedonies," but so small that the "fringes of needle-points" melt as one breathes on them. These "coiled sheaves, or pillared aisles" represent "ice-structure wholly of the earth, earthy" (XXVI, 348), but show no vestige of stellar crystallization, such as that on the surface of lakes. Ruskin's thought next moves to icicles, "compact, flawless, absolutely smooth," that enclose "living leaves" in "clear jelly" without disturbing "one fold or fringe" ("and the frozen gelative melts, as it forms, stealthily, serenely, showing no vestige of its crystalline power, pushing nowhere, pulling nowhere; revealing in dissolution, no secrets of its structure"), and then to other forms of ice -- to the "inelegant incrustations" of certain waterfalls and the "glass basket-making" of smaller cascades (XXXVI, 350-351). For the marvel of ice structure is that its formation, unlike that of other crystals, is infinitely variable: it can bind its units "into branches or weave them into wool; buttress a polar cliff with adamant} or flush a dome of Alp with light lovelier than ruby's" (XXVI, 353). Thus from the paths of Brantwood outward and outward, the scope of Ruskin's beholding expands, stopping only at the high Alps themselves. Suddenly, in the last page, he is describing a Greek coin, but at this point the reader of Ruskin does not need transitions, for it is clear that the embossed image of Olympian lightning is a fitting culmination to the chapter -- an emblem of the "distributed fire" that disturbs earth and sky and, in fact, "glows" through all of Creation. Ice, then, is not only an embodiment of mystery but also a manifestation of the divine artisanship and therefore one, in its ceaseless labor, with the Olympian lightning.
"Bruma Artifex" is a quiet masterpiece of Ruskin's late years, delighting as it instructs through a combination of precise description, undisturbed tone, and metaphorical language. As a personality, Ruskin refines himself out of existence, yet his voice remains everywhere, building with the gradually expanding kingdom of ice. The insidious movement of serpentine weaving finds its positive antithesis in the creative weaving of nature, another form of Athena's craft, and also in the tireless tracing of the observant imagination, acting here like the "silent ministry of frost" in Coleridge's poem. Ruskin has briefly achieved the miracle he predicted at the beginning of his book by converting a cold, dead landscape into a living world -- a world in which [290/291] the frozen element is revealed as sharing the same energy as the fire of Zeus. At the same time, the chapter resolves the tensions between age and youth set up in earlier chapters by revealing the survival of imaginative power in the winter of Ruskin's years. This it would seem, is the season farthest from the freshets of spring -- it has been, we notice, a late frost -- yet the crystal of ice is also the crystal of young streams, just as the last season of every year closes upon the new in full circle. Finally, in the last page of Deucalion, Ruskin finds the strongest symbol in his book of the organic vision of nature that never completely left him. The Olympian lightning, held by an invisible, divine hand, flows upward into waves of flame and downward into three petals, a kind of clasp upon two kingdoms in nature, the air and the earth, the light and the dark -- taking the form of a plant.
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