Introduction to Chapter 3 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. And for the sublime, -- if we consider what are the cares that occupy the passing day, and how remote is the practice and the course of life from the sources of sublimity, in the soul of Man, can it be wondered that there is little existing preparation for a poet charged with a new mission to extend its kingdom, and to augment and spread its enjoyments?
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uskin's is remarkable among romantic careers by beginning with an affirmation of Wordsworthian joy not as a child's unconscious condition but as a condition formulated in adulthood -- as an earned position. Modern Painters I banishes the poor, paltry self along with its sense of the past, even so much as a nostalgic sense, by constructing overwhelming experiences of seeing so immediate and unselfconscious that they are virtually prelmaginative. Although, for example, Ruskin associated Venice with Adèle, making the city a monument to the joy and anguish of the past, the Venice of the book is a burst of Turnerian light burning away, as it were, the "lurid, gloomy, plague-like oppression" of Canaletto and converting ships, buildings, and atmosphere into a chain of archetypes in an eternal present. Innocence requires forgetfulness.
In Modern Painters II Ruskin takes up the subject of maturity in a selfconscious way but tries to imagine the end of life as a continuous development from the beginning, a "philosophic calm" accruing from no experiences of loss or catastrophic self-education. In his first book, he says at one point, he had perhaps indulged a youthful preference for scenery that induces "wild, impetuous, and enthusiastic" emotions, ignoring what was "peaceful, humble, meditative, and solemn." Every age has its season: "We must advance, as we live on, from what is brilliant to what is pure, and from what is promised to what is fulfilled, and from what is our strength to what is our crown" (IV, 75). The first book had been a polemic proving that Turner could represent nature [56/57] truthfully. The second would be nothing less than a complete system of aesthetics based on the assumption of an instinct for beauty divinely implanted in the human heart. This instinct he calls the "theoretic faculty," a Greek version, so to speak, of the beatitude, "Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God." For more than two hundred pages Ruskin forges his way, adopting the elevated style of Hooker and ranging all beautiful objects under two categories -- "typical beauty," representing objects that manifest God's characteristic "modes of being," and "vital beauty," representing living objects that bear the appearance of a "felicitous fulfillment of function." True to his word, he tends to choose examples that are ordered and meditative rather than wild and impetuous. But as Ruskin approached the subject of vital beauty in Man, the one creature marked by a fall from its original state, he apparently put his work aside and embarked for Italy -- the first and most momentous of many such journeys without his parents.1
In one sense he made the journey in search of maturity. As late as October 1844, Ruskin wrote a letter to Henry Liddell quoting "Tintern Abbey" to suggest that he still viewed himself as a Wordsworthian child: "I am yet as much at my ease as I was ten years ago, leading still the quiet life of mere feeling and reverie,
'That hath no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye"' (III, 671).
These are hardly the words of a man ready to will himself away from what is "brilliant" and "promised." This letter and other unpublished writings from the same years clarify the emotional and intellectual difficulties facing Ruskin as man and writer, problems that were related and would await their symbolic solution in his discovery of Italian Renaissance painting.
Ruskin, John. Works. Ed. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Last modified December 2000