Section 3, Chapter 6, 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. 
he greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way" (V, 333). At stake in Ruskin's skepticism about art is the power of visual representations to induce dramatic spiritual renewal, and this doubt makes all the more urgent the question of religious experience in general. Not surprisingly, for the rest of Modern Painters III and the succeeding volume, Ruskin's attention shifts from painted artifacts to seeing and telling -- to the texts of great poets, to landscape unmediated by art or poetry, and to his own attempt to enliven what he sees in language that is impassioned and at times confessional. Here again, Ruskin evades the problem of visual representation by imagining both poetry and religion as unmediated, as occurring in the seer's visual field. The honest use of imagination gives "full power and presence to the possible and true," yet the "first" honest use of imagination is to present the supernatural truths of religion (V, 70, 72). For the Carlylean hero, the materials of action -- swords, plowshares, men waiting to be transformed into nations -- are no less apparent than the great facts of the Invisible and the Divine. Ruskin's new attempt to reconcile fact and symbol results in his mature theory of art as a form of prophetic inspiration, which is also a defense of the religious sensibility.
In his discussion of the grotesque in The Stones of Venice, Ruskin hit on the metaphor that reconciles factual truth and religious symbolism -- the mediating term of distortion; compare Hunt. And the fallen human soul, at its best," he writes, "must be as a diminishing glass, and that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe around it; and the wider the scope of its glance..., the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be, as the winds and vapours trouble the field of the telescope most when it reaches farthest" (XI, 181). In Modern Painters III he joins [138/139] several forms of imaginative expression under the single head of grotesque -- the art of fanciful, sometimes incongruous juxtapositions of ideas; the "irregular and accidental contemplation of terrible things"; and religious allegory, the product of divine madness or prophetic inspiration. The mental activity unifying these disparate expressions is, of course, the process of dreaming, which in its "lowest" form is simply the operation of the fancy ungoverned by the daytime censor -- and this statement explains why, for Ruskin, the grotesque is never entirely free of some taint of evil ("the imagination, when at play, is curiously like bad children, and likes to play with fire" [v, 181]). The distinction between fancies and genuine visions is that visions are involuntary and ungovernable, coming as a revelatory force from without. Just as clearly, the emphasis on evil and dread distinguishes visions from the serene contemplations of Angelico -- the passive seeing that, we have seen, cloisters itself from all disturbing elements and so degenerates into the opera and drama of the monk. The symbolic grotesque is the farthest possible range of comprehension balanced by a power of heart strong enough to bear the full, disintegrating weight of divine revelation: "The truly great man, on whom the Revelations rain till they bear him to the earth with their weight, lays his head in the dust, and speaks thence -- often in broken syllables" (XI, 180n). [139/140]
Similar distinctions are at the heart of Ruskin's famous critique of romanticism in "Of the Pathetic Fallacy," a chapter that begins with the question of the modern sentimental love of landscape and develops into a prelude to a survey of landscape through the ages -- of "landscape," that is, in the extended sense of religion conceived as a visual field. For Ruskin, the sentimental love of landscape has produced a class of poets who characteristically project their moods onto natural objects. These poets are related to epic poets and genuine religious prophets in an ascending scale of merit, which Ruskin defines according to a characteristic imbalance between the powers of thought and feeling. Poets of the "second type," who express emotions by animating natural objects, feel more strongly than they think and so perceive falsely. Poets of the first type think and feel strongly, but their power of mind is so great that they nevertheless perceive rightly -- and consistently. But since there are circumstances in which a person's reason ought to be overmastered, as in prophetic inspiration, there is yet another class of minds who "see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them" (V, 209) -- as when, for example, the prophets saw trees clapping their hands for joy, or four giant horsemen riding throught the sky. Always the great mind is "tender to impression at the surface" but possesses "a great centre of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the feeling, as it were, from afar off" (V, 210).
Ruskin's assumption that figures of speech are forms of seeing and that seeing is the inscription of a greater or lesser degree of feeling simply expands his dictum that true seeing is poetry, prophecy, and [140/141] religion at once. In the field of literary theory, this tenet produces extremely awkward results; his deep concern, however, is not with language but with imagining the nature of experience for a sensibility so powerful and centered that it can distinguish between temporary passions and the great, unchanging world without. Here as always, seeing is Ruskin's trope for experience in general. The clearest example is from Homer: "But them, already, the life-giving earth possessed, there in Lacedaemon, in the dear fatherland." Ruskin comments: "Though Castor and Pollux be dead, yet the earth is our mother still, fruitful, life-giving" (V, 213). Part of his point will be that the modern age has fallen into its "curious web of hesitating sentiment, pathetic fallacy, and wandering fancy" (V, 231) because it cannot believe the earth is life-giving and our mother -- it has no genuine mythical imagination. Pathetic fallacy is admissible in certain occasions as a figure of speech, but in another sense it is truly pathetic and fallacious because it expresses a wandering, hesitant, sentimental frame of mind. The best of the moderns are without center and without serenity. The great ages dealt with sorrow through a profound emotional connection with the physical world; the modern spirit, by contrast, mourns this lost connection as for a lost mother, and so develops the landscape feeling as a nostalgic compensation.Religion, then, is the fitting of the mind and nature, revealed as a form of visual inscription. What does nature look like to the person and the culture whose ego is strong enough to affirm this relationship? Ruskin now turns to his survey of Western poetry and art, beginning with the Greeks -- a very different nation indeed from the rigid systematizers of The Stones of Venice, for they have now come to represent the noble childhood of the religious imagination.11
According to Ruskin, Homer does not use the pathetic fallacy because he does not need to animate the waves artificially. For Homer there is a god in the water, yet he is not the same as the water. The elements scatter and perish, but the gods are indivisible and imperishable, taking from time to time a human form. This fact is not really a debasement of the idea of divinity, Ruskin says, since the Greeks always sense an "exaltation in the spiritual and immortal body; and of a power proceeding from the visible form through all the infinity of the element [141/142] ruled by the particular god." Ruskin insists on the literalness of this conception. When Diana goes to hunt with her nymphs in the woods, her action does not mean that the moon and stars have passed through the trees but rather that "there is a living spirit, to which the light of the moon is a body...and that this spirit sometimes assumes a perfect human form, and in this form, with real arrows, pursues and slays the wild beasts, which with its mere arrows of moonlight it could not slay." The deities are quite frankly "blue-eyed -- white-fleshed -- human-hearted" (V, 224-227) -- very much, we assume, like the White Lady. The Greeks, then, have reverence for all of nature, seeing no part of it as dead, yet they are unsentimental about it and make good practical use of the wood and the water; they are both more religious and less materialist than we because they believe that the spiritual inhabits matter and conversely that the elements are fields radiating from the human form divine. And such a religion is possible because of the Greeks' conception of themselves; their familiarity with the gods is a sign "not so much...of misunderstanding of the divine nature as of good understanding of the human. The Greek lived, in all things, a healthy, and, in a certain degree, a perfect, life." "Unhappy love, disappointed ambition, spiritual despondency..., had little power over the well-braced nerves, and healthy flow of the blood" (V, 230). Not surprisingly, the Greeks, at home in nature, cultivated the beautiful parts of the earth into gardens and groves, humanizing their landscapes as they had already humanized their gods. In this manner they created Arcadia.
Ruskin is here partaking in the code of the English schoolboy, who associated the heroes of his textbooks with athleticism -- the very life Ruskin had himself missed as a youth. But this callowness is only the mask of the larger meaning. As the moderns imagine God removed from lifeless nature, "upon a cloudy throne," they have similarly beclouded their minds and undervalued their physical selves, fancifully giving to nature the vitality they lack; they must project themselves. The tragedy of modern life is that humans cannot affirm themselves or nature -- the two failures are inseparable. The Greeks give to Diana the kind of body they have, which is also projection; the difference is that Diana is the image of an energy really in nature and the Greeks project from a center of affirmation -- they are godlike people. The Greek experience of nature is a healthy Narcissism; the Greeks' agriculture might be called an active contemplation of themselves.
For the first time Ruskin enters imaginatively into a human-centered and pre-Christian experience of the world. The anthropocentrism of the pathetic fallacy paints the world with human sorrows and desires, but the indulgence is based on deprivation, a projection from a re [142/143] pressed center. Putting the Greeks alongside the moderns and reasoning, with Ruskin, antithetically, we see that the pathetic fallacy is not so much a mental weakness as an ego weakness. And it is also a physical weakness -- a disorder of the stomach, as Ruskin conjectures at one point. Liberated by the chastity of beauty and muscle that the Victorians mistook for a release from repression, and surrounded by the erotic exuberance that is still the hope of post-Freudian romantics, Ruskin's Greeks are able cheerfully to labor, to battle, and to pass from the earth. But the modern restlessness is also a flight from death: the earth is not our life-giving mother.
In fact the modern spirit is peculiarly homeless -- a point Ruskin must have felt with particular clarity in the 1850s, living once again under his parents' roof yet no longer "at home." The formula he repeated at Vevay -- "I am in Switzerland" -- succeeded only for a moment in recapturing the vanished Switzerland that was his spiritual home. Consequently, Modern Painters III abounds in images of stable centers: the white flame of the Alp, with its garland of associations; the Greek gods, concentering the diffused element of which they are the embodiment; the soul of the "great man," incorporating within himself the still point of the turning world. And the book also abounds in images of homecoming -- Peter making for the opposite shore, Odysseus making for his island kingdom, and finally, in the climactic meditation on Dante, the Christian pilgrim who crosses a brook into the Earthly Paradise. Dante is for Ruskin's natural history of the imagination what the Gothic is for Venetian history -- the apex of the three-part movement that stands in opposition to the fallen present. Dante's Purgatory, similarly, is the shadowy analogue of Ruskin's own self-educative argument in Modern Painters III, which receives a symbolic resolution in the image of Matilda in the garden. Dante's Paradise, in turn, becomes the moment that gives meaning to the pattern of time, the spiritual reality of which the modern landscape love is but the insubstantial dream.
Ostensibly, Ruskin is reading Dante for evidence of how the most representative medieval mind viewed nature. In the course of that reading he pauses with the pilgrim by the wood surrounding the Earthly Paradise -- a wood that is "pathless," unlike the rigidly geometrical structure of hell, because (like the instinctive temperance of Gothic energy) "the perfectly purified and noble human creature, having no pleasure but in right, is past all effort and past all rule." The subsequent passage Ruskin calls the most important lines "in the whole circle of poetry": a little brook flows, bending the grass to the left, and on the other side is a pure maiden, singing and gathering flowers. She is Matilda, the type of the active life, as Beatrice is the type of the con [143/144] templative life. Earlier, Dante had been prepared for this encounter by his dream of Rachel and Leah, also types of the active and passive life. Leah speaks:
"for my brow to weave
A garland, these fair hands unwearied play;
To leave me at the
crystal mirror, here I decked me."
Bur Rachel stands all day before her glass, "charmed no less / Than I with this delightful task." The point Ruskin stresses is that the sisters are types of the unglorified active and contemplative life: Leah took pleasure in her own labor, but Matilda in the works of God, Rachel took pleasure in the sight of her own face, but Beatrice "in the sight of God's face." He continues: "The active life which has only the service of man for its end, and therefore gathers flowers . . . is indeed happy, but not perfectly so.... But the active life which labours for the more and more discovery of God's work, is perfectly happy, and is the life of the terrestrial paradise, being a true foretaste of heaven, and beginning on earth, as heaven's vestibule" (V, 275-279). Rachel and Leah belong ultimately to the dream of earthly life, but Matilda (who reflects the twofold personality of Christ in her eyes) mediates between this earth and eternity and represents "the expression of man's delight in God's work." Now, the Greek "contemplated his own beauty and the workings of his own mind," whereas the Christian "contemplated Christ's beauty and the workings of the mind of Christ" (V, 279-280).
The four images of seeing bring the whole second part of the book in place. In his discussion of the pathetic fallacy, Ruskin cited a sadistic ballad by Casimir Delavigne, in which a vain young woman of wealth named Constance, preparing herself at a mirror for a ball, is consumed by the "devouring" flames of her hearth. Constance is a good instance of how Ruskin's examples themselves form an interlocked argument, since Constance looks backward to the denunciation of French art, prurient and self-absorbed, and forward to the dream of Rachel and Leah. We may think of her as occupying the bottom of a scale of seeing, which ascends through Dante's two sisters to Matilda, and finally to Beatrice, who sees most widely of all -- God's face itself. This scale, of course, corresponds to the ranking of poets, beginning with those who use neoclassical personifications with complete coldness and ending with inspired prophets like Dante. The two scales resemble Plato's twice-divided line, also rising from illusion to contemplation of the divine, with the upper line representing Dante's division between earthly and heavenly. In Ruskinian terms the Earthly Paradise is the region of the Gothic, since the flowers in Matilda's hands correspond to [144/145] the Gothic "hold on nature" -- the decoration of space with sculptured leaves and garlands -- while Lethe corresponds to the acceptance of imperfection.
Ruskin's famous prose ode to grass -- a sermonic gloss on Dante's single lines describing the grass bending under the waves of Lethe -- at once enacts the process of visionary ecstasy and celebrates with Matilda the works of God's hands. Beginning with a single blade ("examine for a minute, quietly, its narrow sword-shaped strip of fluted green"), he builds the most ambitious of all the book's concentric garlands, piling image on image in an exultant breathlessness that stops only when he has converted the natural world into a pattern of Christian typology. From the single blade he moves first to the pastoral life and its associations ("The Fields!... All spring and summer is in them..., the power of all shepherd life and meditation"); then, from the peace and bounty of the familiar and near, he moves outward to the regions of prophecy: "Look up toward the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll silently into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines; and we may, perhaps, at last know the meaning of those quiet words of the 147th Psalm, 'He maketh grass to grow upon the mountains."' Then, after this apotheosis, the grass loses all specific location and becomes a moral type, literally words of God, the words being "cheerfulness" and "humility":
You roll it, and it is stronger the next day; you mow it, and it multiplies its shoots, as if it were grateful; you tread upon it, and it only sends up richer perfume. Spring comes, and it rejoices with all the earth, -- glowing with variegated flame of flowers, -- waving in soft depth of fruitful strength. Winter comes, and...it will not pine and mourn.... It is always green; and it is only the brighter and gayer for the hoar-frost. [v, 287-290]
The exposition concludes in a hurly-burly of biblical references and associations until Ruskin emerges with a complete description of grass in relation to the physical and spiritual life of man: it is the emblem of spiritual food (as manna is a foreshadowing of the true bread); a pledge that, for the Christian, glory is won through affliction and power through humility; the type of human life in its excellence and passing, since it is both enduring and beneficent; finally, a physical source of food, rest, and clothing.
By blanketing the habitable earth with the mark of divine beneficence, Ruskin defines the region of human interaction with nature, the Earthly Paradise prepared for humans by the Christian dispensation. But the movement of emotion in this passage -- from factual catalog to pathetic animation to typological seeing -- revises the doctrine of the pathetic fallacy, or at least presents it in a new light. For the faithless modern, the pathetic animation of nature is at best a consolation, at [145/146] worst a mere writing of one's inconstant and wistful moods upon the face of the world. But in Ruskin's Christian ode, meekness and joy are constant "characters" of the grass independent of the seer's mood, as are types themselves -- and types, as George Landow has noted, give uniform meaning to those natural symbols that we would otherwise animate, if at all, by whim (Landow, 415). Dante stands here for the supreme expression in Western literature of the typological tradition. Religion becomes the generalized form of prophetic seeing made available to the community of the faithful: by reenacting Dante's pilgrimage, Ruskin the pilgrim can also reenact the visions of Dante the prophet. But the symbolism of the Purgatory provides Ruskin with yet another purpose. Matilda, the type of the sanctified active life, leads Ruskin back to art (she represents "man's delight in God's works") and therefore to the Gothic, an art that is also labor, so that she reconciles symbolically the conflict between the active and the aesthetic life as well as that between faith and works. Singing in the garden, she represents not the pain of labor but the spiritual peace attendant upon it; in other words, by sanctified labor, the griefs and losses that to the modern are inexpiable are consummated by a release from guilt and a symbolic entry into that place where the original loss is restored. For Ruskin Christian joy remains ultimately more attractive than pagan joy, since in its drama of submission, repentance, and absolution, it also provides a myth of compassion. The whole drive of this chapter is toward self-fulfillment through works: Dante shows that love of nature is also love of humans because a single blade of grass speaks also of the human being's ultimate duty. Under the force of such joy, Modern Painters III now turns into narrative, an autobiography uttered in the present tense, even though the first person is not used. At its close, we enter with Ruskin into a place "where the grass of the earth was bowed down, in unity of direction, only by the soft waves that bore with them the forgetfulness of evil" (V, 293).
"Of Modern Landscape" descends from Eden into the wilderness of the modern world, that region from which God has withdrawn and left human vision clouded and human hands idle. Taking Scott as the greatest of the moderns and the exemplar of their characteristic experience of nature, Ruskin finds modern landscape to be cloudy and indistinct, the modern character faithless and melancholy. What then is the value of landscape -- of "landscape," that is, in the sense of a tender and sentimental love of flowers and brooks and hills? He pursues this question by tabulating data -- listing the names and comparing the characters of the great moderns who have and have not known the landscape feeling -- and then by offering the lovely, well-known ac [146/147] count of the visionary gleam as he knew it himself when a child in Scotland and then as he watched it fade with adulthood. But the overt connection of his experiences with the Immortality Ode implies a self-criticism, since he identifies himself with a poet of the second order. The landscape feeling, he continues, is "wholly a separate thing from moral principle, and may or may not be joined to strength of will, or rectitude of purpose" (V, 372). It is often, however, the saving grace of those characters that are otherwise morbid or weak in temperament. The account is balanced and sober, but since Ruskin had first appeared before the public to reveal God's face in the face of nature and to claim for landscape painting "gigantic moral power," the new modesty has the force of a dramatic reversal. That reversal, of course, does not stand unqualified. In the same chapter that damns with faint praise the "ruling passion" of his own life, the passion that led to his "chosen field of work," he asserts that the love of nature is "the most healthy element which distinctively belongs to us." Turner, the first great landscape painter, has established a "science of aspects" -- the science of things as they appear to humans -- which may restore to us the primordial vision that Baconian science, however honest its aims, has taken away: "It is better to conceive the sky as a blue dome than a dark cavity, and the cloud as a golden throne than a sleety mist" (V, 386-387). But the present book is at an end. "How far art is capable of helping us in such happiness we hardly yet know; but I hope to be able, in the subsequent parts of this work, to give some data for arriving at a conclusion in the matter" (V, 384). The vision arises in the distance, but the road before it remains clouded.
Is the quality of doubt in this book more impressive, finally, than its faith? To summarize briefly, its faith rests, first, on art as the union of heart and head. Children today, Ruskin notices, are generally discouraged from loving nature or learning to draw, so that the boy who can see is "passionate, erratic, self-willed, and restive against all forms of education; while your well-behaved and amiable scholars are disciplined into blindness and palsy of half their faculties" (V, 377). As in the Renaissance, head and heart are divorced, each repressed for the sake of the other -- which is a cause, as Ruskin surely recognized, of his own loss of landscape feeling. But the artist is a seeing-and-feeling creature, and Ruskin is trying through his myths of seeing to provide models for saving the emotions from extinction. A great school of art is metaphorical for a moral possibility: the great naturalist sees facts and so achieves resolution, common sense, and a sincere, strength-giving connection with the deep heart of things; the Greeks see themselves in the divine, and so live as gods, serenely, proudly, and courageously; the medievals, reading in nature the language of types, find triumph in their own sacrifice, and live confidently in the revelation of the Re [147/148] demption. Each way of seeing draws from Nature a power of Being gained by submission; the pathetic fallacy draws from Nature, as best, sympathy in grief. But art, second, is the unity of heart, head, and hand, so that each way of seeing leads back to the practical life. Modern Painters III struggles to bring together vision and works yet does not finally claim that great art by itself or the landscape feeling by itself can achieve this synthesis. A book that begins with an artist-centered aesthetic develops into an exploration of human-centered religion, ending not in a proof of God's existence but in a hypothesis about human greatness: that the perfectly centered human spirit may attain the unity of seeing, thinking, and doing that is true religion.
Such is the book's hope, but its mode of argument is tentative, dialectical, paradoxical. Paintings, we learn, are but shadows, and actions are stronger than pictures, yet the dawn of true religious art may be upon us. The landscape feeling belongs to the dreamy and irresolute, yet the love of nature is the best thing about us. The modern love of nature has ended in cloud worship, yet we shall see in nature God's face. Turner has founded a science of aspects, but it is not clear how far art can help us. Still, we need pursue these lights and shadows no farther: Ruskin does so for us in fearsome chiaroscuro in the very next volume, which proves to be the second phase of a single pulse, a single, immense meditation.
Hunt, John Dixon. "'Ut Picturs Poesis,' The Picturesque, and John Ruskin."Modern Language Notes. 93 (1978): 794-818.
Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
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