Section 1, Chapter 10, 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. [Poetic] language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defense of Poetry
In one respect alone, Ruskinian play resembles the Decadent movement. The Decadents recognized in their search for images of determinate desire a kind of willful solipsism, a cultivated affectation that renounces the old insistences on ethical seriousness. Ruskinian play is also an implied admission, modern in spirit, that beliefs are but necessary fictions or incomplete figurations. It thereby renounces the quest for comprehensive meaning, but in other respects it is a solipsistic clinging to the childish, a refusal to countenance the deepening metaphysical chaos that more and more seemed to Ruskin the tragic meaning of the nineteenth century.
The Ethics of the Dust (1866), Ruskin's first complete book on mythology, aims at several audiences and as a result has had none. It is composed of a set of conversations between a lecturer and some children at a boardingschool, which usually concern elementary lessons in mineralogy. According to the first preface, the book is simply a stimulus to young readers to study minerals, but the second preface clarifies the book's relation to Ruskin's moral thought in general and to his study of myths in The Queen of the Air. In other words, the book is a set of Socratic dialogues held in a republic of girls, in which the philosopher [242/243] constructs fables that describe the world less than they induce the state of childlike wonder that for Ruskin is the basis of all moral and religious apprehension. For Ruskin personally the book represents a fresh start, taking as its literal setting Winnington Academy, his "second home" in the early 1860S.
In 1859 Margaret Bell, the principal of a girls' school in Cheshire, invited Ruskin to her academy in hopes that he would be a valuable resource for her pupils. He continued to visit Winnington for the greater part of the next decade, writing, lecturing on the Bible and geology, and even taking part in the dancing. The girls appear to have treated him with familiarity and affection, and he carried on a voluminous correspondence with a number of them, at the same time gradually developing his intimacy with the La Touche family of Dublin. As he described the school to his father, he might have been living in a tableau vivant, brilliantly colored: in the evening the drawing room is "brightly lighted with the groups of girls scattered round it", their dark costumes, contrasted with the table cloth, "gives the kind of light and shade one sees in the pictures of the Venetians"; dinner "is very like one of the pictures of a Marriage in Cana" (XVIII, lxiv-lxvi); the children blend with the flowers of the orchard, the ancient trees, the red brick "like porphyry in the clear sunlight after rain" (XXVIII, lxvii). One evening a pianist came to do variations, inevitably enough, on "Home, Sweet Home"; the notes were "a mist of rapidity," "a murmur of a light fountain, far away," with the girls gathered round, "the eyes all wet with feeling" (XVIII, lxx). The device of describing girls in purely aesthetic terms, characteristic of many earlier letters from Ruskin to his father, no doubt serves to neutralize erotic emotion but more importantly, perhaps, converts them into multivalent symbols. The references to porphyries, coral, chiaroscuro, and Veronese's Marriage convert Winnington into the unfallen Venice sacred to the memory of Adele and, ultimately, to the ideal of his own forfeited child self. As a visitant in this garden of girls, he could relive the sweet anguish of loss and possession, himself part and yet not part of the scene, at once the perfect father rounding out this picture of perfect childhood yet doomed to be only a visitant, a moment in the lives of some young strangers in their ineluctable progress toward adulthood. And feeling sadness and age, he can paradoxically affirm the actuality of the ideal, setting a timeless child world over against the world of time, which he now sometimes calls "fate." As he wrote his father in November 1863: "It is curious that I feel older and sadder, very much, in now looking at these young children . . . and they are so beautiful and so good, and I am not good, considering the advantages I've had, by any means. The weary longing to begin life over again, and the sense of fate for ever forbidding it, here or hereafter, is terrible" (XXXVI, 459). [243/244]
The aim of vicarious recapture is the aim of Ruskinian pedagogy, centering on the image of the pure stream and joining together interests that seem at first far removed from Winnington. One of his projects in the 1860S was to persuade the Italian peasants to irrigate the Alpine regions to prevent erosion and drought. His slogan was, "Every field its pond, every ravine its reservoir" (XIX, lvii). Torrents, he wrote in 1869, can be "not subdued -- but 'educated.' A torrent is like a human creature -- left to gain full strength in wantonness and rage, no power can any more redeem it; but watch the channels of every early impulse and fence them, and your torrent becomes the gentlest and most blessing of servants" (XIX, lvi).1 In the lecture "Verona and Its Rivers" (1870), he imagines a symbolic transformation as a real transformation: the Lombardic plain, properly irrigated, will become "one paradise..., cascades, docile and innocent as infants, laughing all summer long" (XIX, 448), exactly as Gluck had restored the Treasure Valley in a much earlier fantasy. This dominating metaphor of the child spirit as a stream gives a new pedagogical emphasis to Ruskinian moral philosophy. The position is stated most succinctly in "Fairy Stories," an introduction to Grimm's tales, which were reissued in 1868 and illustrated by Cruikshank. Ruskin's essay is essentially a romantic attack on Evangelicalism, arguing that fairy tales are superior to didactic stories because they appeal to the imagination, to the child's innate sense of good. For Ruskin, children require no punishing conscience -- and didactic tales merely internalize a punishing conscience, a sense of wickedness rather than a sense of well-being; instead, they require "any tradition of old time . . . animating for them the material world with inextinguishable life, fortifying them against the glacial cold of selfish science, and preparing them submissively, and with no bitterness of astonishment, to behold, in later years, the mystery . . . of the fates that happen alike to the evil and the good" (XIX, 235-236). Instead of enforcing precepts and warnings, fairy stories allow the child to internalize virtue, which is natural, a power like all the powers of the natural world when viewed imaginatively. True natural science is a moral science and therefore the basis of all moral education-and that is precisely the program of The Ethics of the Dust.
Ruskin's technique in these dialogues is to preface his little scientific [244/245] lectures with puzzles or fables that induce an emotional response, usually wonder or disgust. For this reason, of course, the lessons must be dramatized in the book, not compressed for Ruskin's readers as a textbook. The first discussion concerns two valleys that are in different respects imaginary: Sinbad's Valley of Diamonds, which is make-believe, and a second Valley of Diamonds, which the Lecturer claims really exists. The first is wholly invisible, and when one child makes herself "invisible" by hiding behind a chair, the Lecturer claims she is still lost there. The second is present but not visible as a valley -- it is, in other words, an allegory (as we are told in an appendix) of "the pleasures and dangers in the kingdom of Mammon, or the worldly wealth" (XVIII, 206). People crowd around the narrow entrance, struggling to enter (as through the eye of a needle, an allusion to Christ's figure in the parable of wealth and the kingdom of heaven). Inside are heaps of diamonds that glitter like dew beneath brambles with blossoms of silver and berries of ruby, a mountain, composed of golden ice, on top of which sits Mammon, and trees full of singing serpents. The valley, then, contains both pleasures and dangers, as the world does, for example, to Blake's Thel in a poem that Ruskin probably knew at this time. Thel's response is in fact imitated by the youngest child, who is frightened of the serpents; the Lecturer replies, "And as long as you were yourself (not that you could get there if you remained quite the little Florrie you are now), you would like to hear the serpents sing" (XVIII, 214). Once again, Ruskin's imagery weaves together connotations of lust and greed: "Pride, and lust, and envy, and anger, all give up their strength to avarice," as the Lecturer tells his adult readers (XVIII, 217). The play on various senses of "real" and "invisible" has the effect of violating these distinctions and also establishes Winnington as yet another valley, the valley of innocence, which communicates ambiguously with make-believe and the adult world: the latter, we notice, is invisible in the added sense that the eyes of childhood must not look there. Instead of explaining his allegory, the Lecturer presents an item from the Valley of Mammon -- two precious stones bound up in congealed gold dust, which the girls mistake (as innocence always does) for "a great ugly brown stone." Wealth, the Lecturer now explains, is either good or bad, according to use; generosity is natural to man, but covetousness is a disease, so that the covetous man becomes in the end "wholly inhuman, a mere ugly lump of stomach and suckers, like a cuttle-fish."
The conversation now takes a turn. Instead of resting in his condemnation of greed, the Lecturer talks about the chemical resemblance between charcoal and diamonds, until the girls demand a separate lecture from him on the subject of crystallization. The conversations [245/246] and fables that follow2 develop new sets of oppositions until it becomes clear to the girls what the student of Ruskin knows already from "The Law of Help" -- that "crystallization" is the chemical analogue to the absolute distinction in the moral life between purity and decay, affection and strife, life and death. But what then, the Lecturer asks- speaking still in chemical terms -- is life? When one of the children "answers" this question by walking across the room, the Lecturer replies that, for the scientists, she has exhibited only a "mode of motion," that is, heat, but a truer answer links life with passion, the power of inspiration: "I don't know what the philosophers call it; we know it makes people red, or white; and therefore it must be something, itself; and perhaps it is the most truly 'poetic' or 'making' force of all, creating a world of its own out of a glance, or a sigh: and the want of passion is perhaps the truest death, or 'unmaking' of everything; -- even of stones" (XVIII, 344-345). At one point the Lecturer reinforces the point by having the girls "crystallize" themselves, or create formations on the playground. This conversion of science into dance -- the movement of molecules dramatized as crinolines pressing themselves into triangles and squares -- is a moment of inspired bizarreness reminiscent of the Alice books. It nevertheless establishes the central analogy in the book: the girls are themselves crystals, the ultimate subjects of their own lessons and the apex of the natural world. Mythology, according to Coleridge, is "the apex and complement of all genuine physiology" (IV, 524); for the Ruskinian Lecturer, "You may at least earnestly believe, that the presence of the spirit which culminates in your own life, shows itself in dawning, wherever the dust of the earth begins to assume any orderly and lovely state" (XVIII, 346).
In deliberately destroying the Gradgrind distinction between the factual [246/247] and the fanciful, the adult and the childlike, and the objective and the subjective, Ruskin hopes to preserve the religious sensibility from the prosaic state of mind that is forced into atheism by scientific discoveries, like evolution. That state of mind is also Evangelical; the attack on scientific materialism is also an attack on Original Sin, the "wicked" propensity, as the Lecturer puts it, of considering oneself "dust." The Lecturer's moral injunctions systematically replace an ethic of earnestness with an ethic of enthusiasm, as Ruskin was also trying to do in his letters to Rose. The girls are told, for example, that self-sacrifice is in itself not a beautiful but a "mortifying" thing; that the monastic life is generally the source of vanity; that one must not examine oneself for faults; that the children are instinctively unselfish, not evil. In the unfallen garden of Winnington, the children are born into innocence, of which crystalline purity is, once again, the symbol: in girls and in stones, "All doubt and repenting, and botching, and retouching, and wondering what it will be best to do next, are vice, as well as misery" (XVIII, 264). The gerunds echo Ruskin's description to his father of his own heart (broken, mended, cracked, riveted with iron and plastered over), making clear that the aim of Ruskin's pedagogy is partly to extend the fantasy of an original purity, partly to reverse his parents' mistake of thwarting the fire and passion of life.
But that reversal bears a highly paradoxical relation to his own past, as a passage like the following, from "Fairy Stories," makes clear:
A child should not need to choose between right and wrong. It should not be capable of wrong; it should not conceive of wrong. Obedient, as bark to helm, not by sudden strain or effort, but in the freedom of its bright course of constant life; true, with an undistinguished, painless, unboastful truth, in a crystalline household world of truth; gentle, through daily entreatings of gentleness, and honourable trusts, and pretty prides of child-fellowship in offices of good; strong, not in bitter and doubtful contest with temptation, but in peace of heart, and armour of habitual right, from which temptation falls like thawing hail; self-commanding, not in sick restraint of mean appetites and covetous thoughts, but in vital joy of unluxurious life, and contentment in narrow possession, wisely esteemed. [XIX, 235]
What, in this haze of sugary words, is being described? If such a child existed, who could stand it? And what does a phrase like "crystalline household truth" mean? Ruskin has blurred and softened for public consumption the retroactive advice he gave his father: the wish for stone beds and black soup becomes "unluxurious life" and "narrow possession," while the "fire and energy of Life" become "vital joy" and "bright course of constant life." The attack on Evangelicalism becomes a repudiation of "strain or effort," "bitter and doubtful contest," "sick [247/248] restraint," "covetous thoughts." The contradictions Ruskin wishes away are embedded in the paradoxical couplings of words: the child is to be both obedient and free, strong but peaceful at heart, self-commanding but joyful and content. As always for Ruskin, the internal harmony of impulse and restraint implies a perfect external relationship as well -- the child is obedient "as bark to helm." In repudiating his parents' mistakes, Ruskin reproduces a child as placid and docile as his parents had wanted him to be, and he does so -- as in his social philosophy -- by denying conflict or uncertainty or compromise. When one of the children asks about the many "fearful difficulties" to be faced in "after life," the Lecturer need only advise prudence: "There is never any real doubt about the path, but you may have to walk very slowly" (XVIII, 267). But if virtue is an inner possession, and if it makes no mistakes and can afford no regrets, a person is left undefended against any possible failings; Original Sin is rejected at the cost of maintaining a belief in election, which implies a perfectionism as strict as the one Ruskin seems to reject. In this sense the sentimental dream of childhood is but a natural reflex from Puritanism.
There is no wonder that Ruskin overvalues the nursery virtues of pleasant demeanor. The sugared phrases that seem to give childhood its due ("offices of good," "armour of habitual right") in reality rationalize submission and reduce the range of moral action to a dollhouse scale, the only scale on which perfect behavior is attainable. Thus, in the chapter on "Home Virtues," the girls are told that their first "duties" are dancing, cooking, and wearing the dresses they sew for themselves. When chastised, they fold their hands and drop their eyes. At one point, "tidy" and "untidy" are substituted for "light" and "dark" as moral terms and seem, for the moment, to summarize the whole duty of girls. Ruskin's Winnington, in short, stands for a never-never land of harmony, before there ever broke out a contradiction between government and liberty, duty and desire, or the wishes of the parent and the child. Ruskin himself personifies the God of this world, who is also the Good Shepherd of Blake's Songs of Innocence: "God is a kind Father.... And we may always be sure, whatever we are doing, that we cannot be pleasing Him, if we are not happy ourselves" (XVIII, 290-291).
Obviously, Ruskin does not propose this ethic as the whole duty of man. In the chapter called "Crystal Virtues," crystals are pictured as brave males struggling against evil, like Apollo and the Python; elsewhere, the girls are shown the panorama of a mountainside with "agonized" marble, the emblem of creation "in travail," which they quite properly find terrible but are advised to accept with stoicism (the phrase from "Fairy Stories" is "submissively, and with no bitterness of astonishment"). In this regard The Ethics of the Dust simply repeats, for [248/249] children, the official morality of Womanhood, preached in Victorian pulpits, journals, and popular novels: women are to be chaste, pious, and passive, acting as an inflexible inspiration for those men who take upon themselves the dangers and rewards of moral aggression -- and who may be fallible so long as they ally themselves with the purity of a female other. Ruskin's little book illuminates at least one of the many causes of Victorian sexual ideology, the contradiction between competing conceptions of virtue. Ruskin's career fiercely alternates between self-assertiveness and the recoil of guilt. The aggression that he took to be his mature duty as a writer -- the indignation, the rage, the deliberate subversion of his parents' self-serving pieties -- brought upon him the very emotional turbulence that, he believed, polluted and depleted the pure energy that was his life, the principle of continuity. The very rebellion that was his salvation called forth the guilt that threatened his perdition. The Ethics of the Dust, and Ruskin's depiction of women in general, retreats from ethical confusion by dividing two ideas about virtue -- that it is heroic and that it is submissive -- between two separate races, men and women. Victorian sexual ideology does the same, partly no doubt in order to rationalize the discordance between Christian ideals of humility and charity and the energies required for success in a competitive economy. But in Ruskin's case the division relates more clearly to his internal conflict between obedience and rebellion. Specifically, the characters of the child world dramatize two idealizations of Ruskin's mother -- in himself as perfect teacher and in the children as perfect wives. Each figure fuses Ruskin with his mother and the present with the past, leaving Ruskin himself free of parental restraint. For the rest of his career the child world alternates with the "after life" of tragic heroism.
But the "little housewives" of The Ethics of the Dust must remain children for other reasons as well. The Lecturer is able to control them easily, dispensing gentle rebukes in a way to suggest he is half in love with their glistening eyes and flushes of shame; this tactic also permits him to reverse roles, pretending to submit helplessly to the children's teasing and ministrations. Since he is of "incalculable," that is to say, indeterminate, age, he may shrink and grow as the children grow and shrink, and we seem to see once again the boy Ruskin sharing his enthusiasms with a roomful of Adèles, this time captivated. Defined in this way, their love becomes unconditional, a mutual sharing that acts out the relations of crystalline structure and takes the place of sexuality. "I don't so much wonder," the Lecturer exclaims, "that people used to put up patiently with the dragons who took them for supper" (XVIII, 340), but the children are not dragons, and they will devour him only with their attention. He dislikes the French word for wife (femme, or "woman"), much preferring the English word derived, as he claims, [249/250] from "weaver." In a cryptic sentence, he tells the children, "You must be either house-Wives, or house-Moths.... you must either weave men's fortunes, and embroider them; or feed upon, and brink them to decay" (XVIII, 337). Between the devouring or corrupting beast and the subservient child lies no third alternative. The category subtly excluded from the book's pattern of antitheses is precisely that of adult sexuality. There is no place to grow up -- no place, either, to grow old and die. The seed, Ruskin maintained again and again, is for the sake of the flower, not the flower for the seed; the flowering time must never yield to the seed time because the seed is the beginning of death -- for the organism that bears it.
And so Ruskin converts his children into aesthetic objects, living artifacts that move in a kind of dance to the music of no time. Playing is, ultimately, the dominant motif of the book, as playfulness is the Lecturer's predominant manner -- a manner that is often coy, self-indulgent, and repellent, but a mode, finally, that represents a necessary fiction or respite from the "grim face of reality," just as Blake's Beulah is the necessary respite from the wars of Eternity. But for Blake's Thel, paradise becomes the prison house of unreal existence. In a remarkable moment of self-irony, just as the Lecturer is preaching about dancing, cooking, and sewing, Ruskin has the children pretend he is dreaming at the fire, like a withered Narcissus caught by Naiads.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Works. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. 16 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969-, IV.
Last modified December 2000