Section 3, 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.
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n the "Essay Supplementary" to the Preface of 1815, Wordsworth described the task of great poetry in his time as extending into regions of sublimity unexplored before, and he described also the audience, fit though few, capable of following him -- a group who, "never having suffered their youthful love of poetry to remit much of its force, have applied to the consideration of the laws of this art the best power of their understandings." These readers, if not already misguided, may acquire a new taste conferred upon them by the great and original poet, taste being itself a "power, of which knowledge is the effect." (Prose Works, III, 66, 82). Ruskin may have found in this essay the confirmation and perhaps also the literary model of his experience with Tintoretto. He had begun Modern Painters II by trumpeting other themes from Wordsworth in tones loud enough to set the teeth on edge. The opening blast is an Evangelical attack on an effeminate nation sunk in corrupt uses of pleasure, ignorant of the sublime kingdom of God's domain without. The times are Babylonian: "The Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends men to grass like oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power and peace" (IV, 30). His aim, on the other hand, is "to summon the moral energies of a nation to a forgotten duty, to display the use, force, and function of a great body of neglected sympathies and desires" (IV, 28). Every gesture here is conventional, particularly the attack on mechanism, although Ruskin manages at least one startling image: the railroads, a synecdoche for the war of commerce against nature, he compares to a "great net ... drawing and twitching the ancient frame and strength together, contracting all its various life, its rocky arms and rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating metropolis of manufactures" (IV, 30-31). This self-strangling, an active counterpart to the soul's sleep, contributes to a social portrait that is doubly paradoxical: the soul of the nation is both overfed and famished, at once softening into luxury and contracting into iron. Ruskin will deepen these paradoxes by 1860 into a profound critique of the English soul under industrialism, but here they seem shrill and irrelevant, particularly in the context of the hungry forties; 66/67]
and yet they certainly reflect the condition of Ruskin's own soul as he described it in Italy ("I do not think I have lost power .... The life I lead is far too comfortable and regular, too luxurious, too hardening"). When he returned from Italy, he took up again the defense of the "neglected sympathies and desires," this time in terms not of the landscape sublime but of the human sublime represented by Tintoretto and the powers he calls forth in his viewers.
The theory of imagination that dominates the second half of Modern Painters II divides hydralike into three heads, with their complementary forms of fancy: imagination associative, which brings particulars together into an organic composition; imagination penetrative, which grasps the indwelling principles of things as an organic unity; and imagination contemplative, which embodies indistinct ideas in distinct form in the manner of reverie and which is somewhat unclearly related to mystical vision. These heads look stable at first but quickly dissolve into associative clusters, by which Ruskin tried to join his recent readings in Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt with examples from Italian painting; the result is the kind of rich confusion that was to become characteristic of him, a confusion he calls in one passage an "undercurrent of meaning" which, when traced carefully, discloses an emotional rather than an intellectual unity. The details of Ruskin's theoretical exposition will not detain us; our concern will be with the undercurrent of meaning in the section on penetrative imagination, where the experience of Tintoretto bears its richest fruit.
Ruskin spoke of the imagination as an intuitive grasp or Anschauung of the essence of an object, a going out from the self that leaves its trace in metaphors, visual or verbal. In a letter from Milan, Ruskin had [67/68] drawn for his father four sketches of hailstones, showing how one flowerlike stone revealed "its beautiful internal structure" through stages of melting and how a second stone was really two fused fragments growing from a white crescent and circle that formed its "root" (Shapiro, 150). The hailstone may symbolize for us the object of the penetrative imagination, whose activity Ruskin describes in an uncontrolled stream of metaphor: it "ploughs aside" "crusts or ashes, or outward images of any kind ... .. plunges to the very central fiery heart .... gets within all fence, cuts down to the root, drinks the very vital sap of that it deals with"; it is a "piercing, pholas-like mind's tongue, that works and tastes into the very rock heart"; and so forth (IV, 250-251). The mind here is the ravisher, not God; having so drunk, the artist achieves a steadiness that transcends both agitation and passionlessness: "At the heart of things [the imagination] poises herself there, and is still, quiet, and brooding, comprehending all around her with her fixed look" (IV, 258).
The referent of these extravagant metaphors, as Ruskin made clear in a footnote of 1883, is the delineation of a hero's mind. The metaphors, in other words, transfer to the "art of man" the destruction of the subject-object relationship in sublime seeing and the reformation of the artist's identity in the "shape" of his creation. The most clotted passage in this exposition is for our purposes the central one. The imagination, Ruskin writes, is
the Open Sesame of a huge, obscure, endless cave, with inexhaustible treasure of pure gold scattered in it; the wandering about and gathering the pieces may be left to any of us, all can accomplish that; but the first opening of that invisible door in the rock is of the imagination only. [In] every word set down by the imaginative mind [is] an awful under-current of meaning.... if we choose to dwell upon it and trace it, it will lead us always securely back to that metropolis of the soul's dominion from which we may follow out all the ways and tracks to its farthest coasts. [IV, 252]
In this kaleidoscopic cluster (the rocky cave, depths, undercurrent, and metropolis all seem to recall "Kubla Khan," a favorite poem of Ruskin's), the cave door seems to suggest the viewer's first rapture of discovery, the country of the secure wisdom that follows upon tracing [68/69] the ramifications of meaning (the "word" meanwhile dissolves and metamorphoses into an "undercurrent" that may be traced); the cave imagery then reverses itself, and the viewer occupies a "soul's metropolis" from which he or she may safety voyage to regions opened up by the pioneering artist.
What would such an art look like? Ruskin's chief instances are his well-known inconographic readings of Tintoretto, with their sudden symbolic Juxtapositions (as in the Crucifixion, which depicts an ass eating withered palm-leaves), and Turner's Jason, in which only a few coils of the serpent are disclosed. In each case the painter induces "occult and far-sought sympathies in every minor detail" (IV, 262), a sudden apprehension of supernatural Presence that roils, as it were, like Leviathan, at the outermost edges of our seeing. In such cases, "the mind of the beholder is forced to act in a certain mode, and feels itself overpowered and borne away by that of the painter, and not able to defend itself, nor go which way it will"; but that response is not possible except to "a mind of some corresponding power" (IV, 259-262). The idiom of this last phrase is Wordsworthian (the parallel expressions in the "Essay " are "a co-operating power" and "a corresponding energy"), but the experience described throughout the section on Imagination Penetrative is no longer the sweet surrender and self-forgetful exaltation of the romantic sublime. As in Modern Painters I , the aesthetic transaction is immediate and intense, but the imagery of the theoretical exposition, like the embedded examples, draws upon the charged and violent oppositions of Tintoretto's baroque: subject, artist, and viewer present themselves through verbs of entering, devouring, and fusing, of being cast down and lifted up again. In short, Ruskin achieves his chief theoretical aim -- the justification of an "art of man" -- by transferring the structure of the Burkean sublime, along with much of the imagery of wild, desolate, and savage landscapes, to representations of the human soul "fearfully and wonderfully made," and this solution answers an emotional need as well as an intellectual problem. For the dominant spatial configuration of Ruskin's text is not the open skies and vistas of his first book but an enclosed space which, when entered, becomes infinite -- the Mind of Man, which Wordsworth called in the Prospectus to The Recluse "my haunt, and the main region of my song."
The "shape" of a sufficient selthood, which was the true object of Ruskin's travels in Italy, emerges most clearly in the climactic exposition of Michelangelo. Ruskin writes: "Mino stopped at the human nature; he saw the soul, but not the ghostly presences about it; it was reserved for Michel Angelo to pierce deeper yet, and to see the indwelling angels. No man's soul is alone; Laocöon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the hand ... that bodily form with Buonarotti ... is invariably felt as the instrument or the habitation of [68/69] some infinite, invisible power." The hailstones of Milan here become the human body with its angelic center by way of the unsculptured rock that for Michelangelo (as Ruskin notes) already contains the soul that "governs" the body of its chiseled surface. The angels, interestingly, are both the souls of particular bodies -- "some infinite, invisible power" that inhabits the flesh Oust as an indistinct energy inhibits a concrete shape in metaphor) -- and external presences, connecting the soul with a community by means of guidance or temptation. But the interfusion of human and spiritual also has a temporal dimension. The prophets and sibyls of the Sistine ceiling all gaze at the Last judgment, "silent, foreseeing, faithful," and so are caught by that gaze between a mortal and an immortal state, but Ruskin evokes the moment of resurrection most forcefully by juxtaposing the four allegorical statues in the Laurentian Chapel: "Ineffable types, not of darkness nor of day -- not of morning nor of evening, but of the departure and the resurrection, the twilight and the dawn of the souls of men" (IV, 280-282). Like the stunning fusions of Tintoretto's paintings of Christ, which juxtapose birth and burial, baptism and crucifixion, victory and agony, Ruskin's reading of the Laurentian figures fuses the comings and going of all human life. By this point, his hurried glimpses of Renaissance masters push his argument beyond the range of aesthetic theory toward religious vision, a visual oxymoron by which the mixed state of human life is mastered by transcendent hope. (That mastery is probably the aim, obscurely, of the temporal juxtapositions in "A Walk in Chamounix.") This is also the strength of the angelic center, the soul that knows it is never alone.
These pages provide in effect a corollary in the visual arts to Wordsworth's statement in the "Essay Supplementary" that great poetry produces an "accord of sublimated humanity, which is at once a history of the remote past and a prophetic enunciation of the remotest future" (Prose Works, III, 66). I have suggested that Ruskin drew from this essay a confirmation of his own vocation, both as critic and evangelist of art, by recognizing in himself a "power" continuous with the original energy of youth -- in this sense Wordsworth taught him, as he taught so many others, to feel. Details from Ruskin's theory of metaphor suggest that he also borrowed from a related Wordsworthian text, the Preface of 1815. There Wordsworth gives as an example of the abstracting and modifying power of imagination his own poem, "The Old Cumberland Beggar": "The stone," he writes, "is endowed with something of the power of life to approximate it to the sea-beast, and the sea-beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone" (Prose Works, III, 33). At the confluence of the [70/71] human and the natural rises, for Wordsworth, this particular figure of aged and devastated endurance. It is a dramatic instance of what M. H. Abrams has called Wordsworth's wish to produce "an egalitarian revolution of the spirit ... so that ... [his upper-class readers] may share his revelation of the equivalence of the souls, the heroic dimensions of common life, and the grandeur of the ordinary and the trivial in Nature" (117). But to Ruskin in the 1840s such a reading of Wordsworth could have made sense only if translated into conventional expressions of charity and humility. Characteristically, his own example of the abstracting and modifying imagination is a heroic figure from Milton: "Satan endowed with godlike strength and endurance in that mighty line, 'Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremoved'" (IV, 292). Ruskin's religion taught him that felicity had been forfeited with the Fall, but the competing religion to which he gave prior allegiance, the religion of romance, taught him to seek evidences of the first estate in a sensuous ideal -- a pursuit that committed him, in Italy at least, to extremes of ecstasy and disillusionment, since his overwhelmingly picturesque viewing of life excluded the actual and the ordinary as an interesting category. "As for the beauty of the inhabitants," he wrote from Macugnaga, his "Rasselas-valley," "poverty & labo[ur] set the same marks pretty fairly all over the world, & I haven't yet found the place where the ,village maidens' dress in satin, or the peasants in fancy jackets & conical hats" (Shapiro, 163). The note of self-irony is rueful nevertheless. But to experience the Cumberland beggar as neither a picturesque ornament nor an object of pity, rather to "confer being" on him, as Wordsworth does (The phrase appears in Trilling, 117) -- that is, as a fierce and tragic acceptance of human destiny -- is precisely to face the mortality that the romantic dream is designed to avoid.
It would be too much, of course, to expect such an acceptance from a young man brought up as Ruskin was, inexperienced, overprotected, and educated in a vulgar snobbery and a sanctimonious piety; nor can we expect of Modern Painters II what Ruskin expected of it in the ache of his ambition at twenty-six years -- a mature and coherent aesthetic theory. What that book presents is not intellectual or emotional maturity but a terrible need for love laboring to overcome a terrible fear of humans and a precociously acute response to art laboring to overcome an aesthetic detachment from experience by an intense communion with the symbols of art. These symbols, he believed, could provide the equivalent of spiritual experience because they summoned up within [71/72] him an imperishable corresponding power. The images of "sublimated humanity" he discovered in Tintoretto and Michelangelo, the images even of death and suffering and sacrifice, transcend ordinary humanity as surely as the romantic dream evades it, yet they point the way to the remarkable moral and intellectual development of the decade to come. The assurance of redemption depends upon the assurance of spiritual power -- the angelic presence within the body and accompanying the body; and from that strength follows an acceptance of growth and change, the exaltation of the humble, and the courage to confront death and loss.
Ruskin believed that in Venice in 1845 he accepted his mission as an interpreter. In fact he not only accepted that vocation; he had already transformed it. Historically, we can understand the emergence of Ruskinian art criticism as part of a general shift in English nonfiction prose that G. Robert Stange has called the shift from cognitive to expressionist writing (50). We can also understand it as a response to a new audience, the now-dominant urban middle class hungry for culture and guidance, with means to buy and travel. That class, consequently, brought about a revolution in the older relationship between artist and audience, partly because of its demand for reproductions. Photography played a crucial role in broadening the dispersion of culture. The new invention served Ruskin well in Venice when he needed records of architectural details, just as engravings, which are also reproduced mechanically, served him well as a complement to his own text -- and so did the Liber Studiorum itself. This collection of engravings from Turner, supervised by the artist as a means to reach a vast popular audience, strikingly illustrates the development described by Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." The relevance of this famous essay to an understanding of Ruskin lies in a pair of oppositions: the contradiction between the widespread use of reproduction made possible by an advanced capitalist mode of distribution and what Benjamin calls the "aura" of a work of art, its "authenticity" deriving from "its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be"; and a corresponding contradiction between the "appearance value" of a work and its "cult value," or in historical terms, the evolution of art from a religious object protected and even concealed by a priestly class to the extreme opposite, the sacrifice of that unique subject to a demand for mechanical reproductions. That sacrifice is for Benjamin a good thing, for it also overthrows an attachment to tradition and authority and to [72/73] such related concepts as "creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery." (Benjamin, 218-220, 221. See also Helsinger, 138).
The values Benjamin relegates to the old order are precisely the values Ruskin struggled to defend, yet Benjamin's conceptual oppositions illuminate a deep ambiguity in Ruskin's apostolic role as mediator between artist and audience. His own interpretations are a form of reproduction, substituting for the original object an experience that recurs with each act of reading, perhaps in one's own living room, a reproduction that may very likely outlast the object itself. Ruskin's method further violates the "aura" of individual works by subsuming them under veneral categories, such as "Truth of Skies," or by considering the complete works of Turner as a single disconnected commentary on the Book of Nature. The sublime genius is himself but an interpreter, great to the extent that he reveals a glory greater than his own. Yet the paradox of the genius at once exalted and erased simply exemplifies the larger paradox of Ruskin's own interpretations. For behind the verbal reproductions lies the sacred object, or at least its memory, which keeps the act of reading Ruskin incomplete and openended. The mediator is both the familiar guide near at hand and the voyager from afar. In the first volume, Turner is alive and well in London, but the Alps remain the cult objects, difficult of access yet not beyond the reach of a traveling audience; in the second volume the paintings themselves resemble cult objects in the special sense that they are little known, hard to find, and out of fashion. Insofar as the interpretation is a version and never a complete likeness, it cannot wholly usurp the aura of the ob ect. Thus the new art criticism affirms both cult value and appearance value, sanctifying the aesthetic object by rendering it homage yet tending also to displace it as an alternative expression, in a different medium' of an ultimate object of representation. This is the logos itself, the infinity of divine energy and human spirituality, whose manifestations must be at once rare and available to all.
Culture, the totality of all representations, is therefore both hierarchical and dispersible, just as Ruskin is himself both an evangelist of art and its specialized "priest." The experience of great art and of the natural sublime is on the one hand part of the human birthright, yet it must not on the other hand become too frequent, or art and nature would lose their aura or "novelty." Moreover, certain works of art -- buildings in particular -- are a social and not only an individual expression, so that their meaning depends precisely on their authenticity, their power to embody tradition and cultural authority. For both Ruskin [73/74] and Benjamin (rightly for one, wrongly for the other), sanctity reinforces adherence to the forms and structure of a conservative hierarchy. The paradoxes that Ruskin challenges a modern reader to face, in the phase of his career that we trace next, are, first, that the symbols sanctifying the authority of the past also embody the forms of radical social renewal and, second, that the remembrance that binds us to obedience binds us also to a reverence for all the works of human hands, visible signs of that great community of the tiving and the dead in the love of which alone we can find meaning in our own separate lives.
Abrams, M. H. "English Romanticism and the Spirit of the Age," in Romanticism and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. New York, Schocken Books, 1969.
Helsinger, Elizabeth K. Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
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.
Stange, G. Robert . "Art Criticism as a Prose Genre," in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
Trilling, Lionel. "Wordsworth and the Iron Time," in Wordsworth: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. M. H. Abrams, New York: Norton, 1970.
Wordsworth, William. Prose Works. ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Last modified December 2000