Footnote 6, 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. [GPL]. Ruskin's three-headed theory of imagination has been called conservative, since it revives the preromantic view of imagination as a picture-making faculty. His visual bias is probably inevitable, considering his training as an art critic, but it is also necessary if, as I have suggested, Ruskin's project is to construct a comprehensive grammar of visual and poetic imagery. His procedure is clumsy and confusing, but the following over-view briefly outlines his attempt. For Ruskin, the poet may present things all at once or may suggest them by the accumulation of images. The first case is simply pathetic fallacy (for example, "the rathe primrose, that forsaken dies"), which seems to prove that the penetrative imagination grasps the "inmost soul" of, for example, a flower. The additive examples are poetic descriptions of lips (some borrowed from Leigh Hunt's treatise), beginning with a direct description and ending with Hamlet's address to the lipless skull of Yorick: "Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?" "There," Ruskin remarks, "is the essence of lip" (IV, 255). There, one wants to interpose, is the essence of loss -- which is also one of the "undercurrents" of the book. The point is to overturn a theory of beauty based on mere association by a description of the imaginative act as a penetration to the essence of something, leaving associations afterward as a residue of integrated surface features, something like Coleridge's doctrine of expanded metaphor. For Ruskin on the imagination, see also W. David Shaw, "'The Very Central Fiery Heart': Ruskin's Theories of the Imagination," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 80 (1981), 199-255 (on Modern Painters II); Robert Hewison, John Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye, chap. 4; and Elizabeth Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, chap. 3. Shaw interestingly finds an epistemology corresponding to Ruskin's in John Grote's Exploratio Philosophica. Grote calls "attention" a way of conceiving entities as simultaneously natural and symbolic. Ruskin's conversion of "the mere seeing of a visual impression of sensation into a more enduring and mastered idea of sensation" -- the process I have called "deep seeing" -- is the visual analogue of Grote's faculty of attention (p. 2 19).
Last modified December 2000