Section 2, 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. 
n The Queen of the Air Ruskin asks his adult readers to take Greek myths as seriously as the children in The Ethics of the Dust took their Lecturer's Egyptian allegories, and for the same reasons.4 From the perspective of innocence, which is also sexual innocence, the structure of reality is dualistic explicable by a set of allegorical fairy tales that reinforce the division. On the one hand is the childhood paradise, the defining emblem of which is the children as embodiments of crystalline [250/251]
energy; on the other, the "after life," emblems of which are gold and serpents. But from the perspective of experience, the structure of reality is explicable by mature religious myth, which celebrates heroic virtue instead of submissive virtue, and conceives of a universal formative power in creative interchange with the serpent, or power of the earth. Ruskin chooses Greek mythology as his central example of religious apprehension and invites his readers to see the world afresh -- to look upon "the stars, and hills, and storms" with "the earnestness of those childish eyes," that is, the eyes of the Greeks, the "children of men" (XIX, 300). But the Greek "childhood" really occupies the apex of spiritual development in history, as does the Venetian Gothic -- the consummation of the first stage, when the strength of childhood and the autonomy of adulthood are fused.
All myths, Ruskin writes in The Queen of the Air, have three "structural parts -- the root, and the two branches." The root is a physical phenomenon; the branches are, first, "a personal incarnation. . ., a trusted and companionable deity, with whom you may walk hand in hand, as a child with its brother or its sister," and second, a moral meaning. But the chief interest of myths lies in their highest development in the work of a great poet or artist. The mature stage of myth in Virgil or Phidias is therefore the consummation of human knowledge, standing to science not as fancies to fact but as a complete activity incorporating and transcending the limitations of scientific observation:
But if, for us also, as for the Greek..., the sun itself is an influence . . . of spiritual good -- and becomes thus in reality, and not in imagination, to us also, a spiritual power, -- we may then soon overpass the narrow limit of conception which kept that power impersonal and rise with the Greek to the thought of an angel who rejoiced as a strong man to run his course (XIX, 302-303).
In using the Nineteenth Psalm to articulate the experience of a Greek beholding Apollo, Ruskin is true to the unity of what Blake called the "poetic genius," except that unlike Blake, Ruskin insists on the complementary validity of scientific and imaginative perception. This complementarity he achieves by virtue of physico-spiritual parallelism: light, for example, is both a physical and a spiritual power, and life itself, an unanalyzable power, may be conceived scientifically as molecular interactions but imaginatively as "spirit."
For Ruskin the study of myths reveals the unity of the human imagination in its collective character, a unity ascertainable most clearly in the work of great and inspired minds. That unity in turn implies a structure of coherence in the universe, since the mind does not act without an object. But the unity of mind is Ruskin's ultimate ontological ground and not, as before, the objectivity of natural appearances. Thus he writes that "all true vision" [251/252]
is founded on constant laws common to all human nature; that it perceives, however darkly, things which are for all ages true . . . and that its fullness is developed and manifested more and more by the reverberation of it from minds of the same mirror-temper, in succeeding ages. You will understand Homer better by seeing his reflection in Dante, as you may trace new forms and softer colours in a hillside, redoubled by a lake. [XIX, 310]
The image of the "diminishing glass" in The Stones of Venice and of the "dark mirror" in Modern Painters V clearly refers to fallen human perception, but the present image stresses clarity rather than distortion, the clarity gained by comparing various views. In a related figure from "Fairy Stories," he compares the natural development of a mythological tradition with a "flying cloud," which, though it changes, remains a "sign of the sky" -- "a shadowy image, as truly a part of the great firmament of the human mind as the light of reason which its seems to interrupt" (XIX, 236). Normally we would expect the cloud to stand for fancy, half-concealing and half-revealing the sun of truth, but the primary meaning here is that the products of myth and the products of scientific reason are equally "natural," equally "true." Both passages deny the mirror model of truth, returning in effect to the assumption implicit throughout Modern Painters I that interpretations are enhancements rather than successively feebler reflections of reflections. As a result, "primitive" myths, constructed in one set of historical circumstances, may be reinterpreted and reconceived for a new age, in exactly the way that words require redefinition.
And so The Queen of the Air, drawing eclectically upon certain current anthropological theories,5 nevertheless stands as the culmination of nearly thirty years of thinking about nature and representation, a final attempt at conceiving all the modes of confronting nature as a single, consistent activity of praise. The immediate origin of the book is a lecture delivered in 1869 entitled "Greek Myths of Storm," but as usual for Ruskin, the relation of specific topic to broader subject creates organizational confusion. The first chapter incorporates the original lecture. The second, "supplementary to the preceding lecture," studies [252/253]
the "relations of Athena to the vital force in material organism," centering chiefly on birds, snakes, and plants. The third -- "Various Notes relating to the Conception of Athena as the Directress of the Imagination and Will" -- is a jumble of ideas on art and economics, mostly spliced together from other books. The chapter titles, which impose an imprecise but suggestive unity upon this miscellany, are composed of corresponding English and Greek phrases: "Athena in the Heavens," "Athena in the Earth," and "Athena in the Heart" correspond to "Athena Chalinitis" (the Restrainer), "Athena Keramitis" ("Ready for the Potter," as in ge keramitis, "potter's earth"), and "Athena Ergane" (the Worker). But who is this protean goddess? Most broadly she is the animating principle or "formative power" of nature -- what Coleridge called the esemplastic power -- which in Christian terms becomes Wisdom, the female counterpart of the creative Logos. Again, as air or spirit, she is the romantic muse, like Shelley's West Wind, literally "inspiring" the answering mind with the fierceness of will, at once creative and destructive, necessary to the moral and poetic imagination. Yet again, she is a specific combination of virtues and qualities, associated at once with specific myths and with Ruskin's own career: the confused third chapter is essentially an apologia for the writer's life, using the goddess as its guiding metaphor. Ruskin's Athena, then, is at one and the same time the object and creation of the religious imagination in general and also a particular figure, one among several in the Greek pantheon. In refashioning traditional materials into personal perspective, Ruskin is of course repeating a standard romantic procedure: we think not only of Shelley and Blake and Keats but also of Carlyle's Teufelsdröckh, who can describe the religious imagination in general only in terms of a specific subject (the clothes philosophy, acting as a trope for vision) and a specific persona with a biography. But just as clearly, the perspectivism, so to speak, of The Queen of the Air looks forward to twentieth-century habits of thought: Athena, we might say, is the ethos of Ruskin's philosophizing (as the Winnington pupils are the ethos of a different perspective in The Ethics of Dust), just as, for example, Don Quixote is the ethos of Ortega y Gasset's ontology, the specific personal and cultural context from which a person learns to grasp the world. The book, then, is both an original act of myth making and a myth about myth making -- an activity that, for Ruskin, takes its "root" in natural appearances. As a manifestation of nature, Athena is the Aristotelian "formative power" infusing matter, or again the breath of life infusing the inanimate clay, or yet again, the element of air acting on earth. This last point suggests a way of unraveling the [253/254] complexities of the first two lectures. For Ruskin, various models of myth making draw from various classes of natural phenomena -- specifically, from weather, plants, and animals, which we can now consider in order.
The first lecture attempts to map the heavens by classifying winds and clouds according to constant allegorical meanings, which as always for Ruskin exist in antithetical pairs. This firmamental map turns out to be a systematized version of the interpretations Ruskin suggested in Munera Pulveris, a system, that is to say, of energy economics in which the codes of emotion and wealth are interchangeable. For example, Aeolus, the steward of the winds, is prosperous with his fortress of brass and his twelve children, demonstrating "this idea of gifts and preciousness in the winds of heaven," but the Harpies, which are furious little whirlwinds, are "spirits of wasted energy, and wandering disease, and unappeased famine, and unsatisfied hope. So you have, on the one side, the winds of prosperity and health, on the other, of ruin and sickness" (XIX, 312-314). The effect of this and other readings of storm myths is to convert meteorological phenomena into the firmament of the human mind -- or rather that of a multiform energy both mental and passionate, which, when restrained and fulfilled by the agency of Athena or Wisdom, becomes life-as-wealth. But the most complex figure is Hermes, the cloud shepherd, whom Ruskin views as a kind of factotum for Athena. The character of this god varies from gentle and serviceable to deceitful. Certain epithets, according to Ruskin, suggest that physically Hermes represents "the silver cloud lighted by the sun," or the veiler of the light. Since his name means "impulse," he is also associated with all movements of air: he is "guide of all mysterious and cloudy movement" and "all successful subtleties" (XIX, 324). Because in a slightly earlier passage Ruskin reminds us that fables are intricate arabesques representing the "truths of emotion," it is hard not to see Ruskin's Hermes as the free play of fancy, or in Freudian terms, the distorting agency by which the primitive instincts are filtered into consciousness, itself an infinite arabesque of words and thoughts. In Ruskinian terms he is the activity of the symbolic grotesque, capable, when bound firmly to the service of Athena, of giving body to the highest truths in the form of great poetry and art.
Ruskin's reading of the heavens tends to become an elaborate metaphor of the shape-shifting activities of consciousness, rendered stable in terms of spectrums of meaning that become polarities at their opposing ends. This is not the case when Ruskin turns to plants, or the relation of air (Athena) to vegetative growth, because now his myth making takes the form of associative chains, like atoms on a molecular strand, or rather like the endless growth and curl of a vine. For example, the olive,. sacred to Athena, is associated with Hercules, who [254/255] planted it on Olympus to form the Olympic crown, with the oil of the Panathenaic games, with the anointing of the stock of Jesse, with extreme unction, the Mount of Olives, Gethsemane, and many other things. Thus, through a single plant --"those twisted branches whose leaves give grey bloom to the hillsides" of Greece and Palestine (XIX, 337) -- Ruskin binds both of the Western religious traditions, crowning them with three peaks, Olympus, the Acropolis, and Golgotha. The olive may stand for several moral ideas, but its chief importance is not as allegory but as nexus, a paradigm of the eternal human activity of "culture" in both its senses -- as the raising of crops from the fertile earth and as the attribution of social meanings to the created world. In this and other examples, which combine verbal and visual elements in a way familiar to us from Dante's eagle, Ruskin reconceives natural history and literary criticism as aspects of the same descriptive activity. Natural forms are the original materials of the poetic imagination yet cannot themselves be fully understood without reference to their cultural meanings.
Ruskin's second chapter, "Athena Keramitis," takes up the relations of Athena to the earth, or in other words, the incarnation of consciousness in organic material, but the new subject requires a new form of mythopoeic response. The first chapter set up an analogy between weather phenomena and the dialectical movements of mind and then between vegetation and the garlands woven by human culture, a binding activity made possible by the polysemous character of words. But the second lecture locates the unit of significance in nature itself, in the logos manifesting itself in antithetical forms. The vital force, Ruskin tells us, creates
calcareous earth . . . separately, and quartz, separately, and gold, separately, and charcoal, separately; and then so directs the relations of these elements that the gold may destroy the souls of men by being yellow; and the charcoal destroy their souls by being hard and bright; and the quartz represent to them an ideal purity; and the calcareous earth, soft, may beget crocodiles, and dry and hard, sheep . . . representing to [man] states of moral evil and good, and becoming myths to him of destruction or redemption, and, in the most literal sense, "Words" of God. [XIX, 359]
If the first chapter belongs to the associative imagination, the second belongs to the penetrative imagination, which reaches its mature stage in Ruskin's career in his invocations to the bird and the serpent. In the first of these prayerful meditations, he comes closest to the original ground of religious experience, permitting metaphor to arise by natural exfoliation from the heart of an observed object. The bird, he writes, is "a drift of the air brought into form by plumes," "a blown flame," the perfect type of breath or spirit "conscious of itself, conquering [255/256] itself, ruling itself," and of the sky given form and voice. "As we may imagine the wild form of the cloud closed into the perfect form of the bird's wings, so the wild voice of the cloud into its ordered and commanded voice; unwearied, rippling through the clear heaven in its gladness." And it comprises in itself all the gifts of the Queen of the Air -- light, color, sound, life, motion, restraint:
Also, upon the plumes of the bird are put the colours of the air: on these the gold of the cloud, that cannot be gathered by any covetousness; the rubies of the clouds that are not the price of Athena, but are Athena; the vermilion of the cloud-bar, and the flame of the cloud-crest, and the snow of the cloud, and its shadow, and the melted blue of the deep wells of the sky -- all these, seized by the creating spirit, and woven by Athena herself into films and threads of plume; with wave on wave following and fading along breast, and throat, and opened wings, infinite as the dividing of the foam and the sifting of the sea-sand; -- even the white down of the cloud seeming to flutter up between the stronger plumes, seen, but too soft for touch. [XIX, 360-361]
Like Hopkins's windhover, this bird is the "symbol of Divine help" in the form of the Holy Spirit and the tongues of fire (XIX, 361), yet it is a pagan bird as well, concentrating the heavens into a single point that is also "infinite" and therefore coterminous with the motions of wind, cloud, fire, and sea, like Venice. These motions are Athena, the supreme artificer who weaves the air into the bird tapestry just as Greek myths weave winds, clouds, and passions into the arabesque of their pantheon: human speech and natural language correspond precisely. And so Ruskin closes his chapter with an invocation to Athena that does not name her directly but rather fashions her out of a string of verbs, each one a dot of paint: the formative power warms, shades, and cools; fills, sustains, and designs; cherishes, calls, waits, and feeds; spins, weaves, renews, flits, whispers, thrills; joins itself, becomes, enters into, commands, measures, molds, fills, and passes away (XIX, 386).
"This," Ruskin concludes, "was the Athena of the greatest people of the days of old." But at the same time Athena is a "companionable deity," not an abstract presence only. The connection between "spirit" as a generative power and "spirit" as a set of moral gifts constitutes Ruskin's particular perspective on the moral universe.
Our most direct experience of Athena is through the air we breathe, which is "purification, and health, and power" (XIX, 328); thus she has power over "blessings of calm, and wrath of storm." Spiritually, she "inspires" humans with strength for battle or with "habitual wisdom; wisdom of conduct and of the heart, as opposed to the wisdom of imagination and the brain; moral, as distinct from intellectual; inspired, as distinct from illuminated." In general she is "inspired and 256/257] impulsive wisdom in human conduct and human art, giving the instinct of infallible decision, and of faultless invention" (XIX, 305-306, 346). In phrases like these, Ruskin attempts to compose qualities normally distinct into a fusion of opposites. For example, although Athena stands for Wisdom, she is associated with inspiration and passion rather than with intellect. She is "impulsive," giving "decision" that is at once instinctive and infallible. In another place, Ruskin couples "passion and virtue" with the "spirit" of man, the "central sign" of which is "endurance, or patience" (XIX, 352), thus placing passion and patience in the same camp. The Greek menis passes through many transmutations. As the first word of the Iliad, it is usually translated "anger," but Ruskin instead supplies "will" and "zeal, or passion" and, through its Latin derivative mens, "mind." Most broadly, these conjunctions mix feeling with thinking and self-control with desire, just as in his natural allegory, Ruskin transposes onto air qualities normally associated with water, the emotional element. Thus Athena is on the one hand the restrainer, bridling Pegasus and bestowing calm, but on the other, the inspirer, the menis (will, mind, wrath, passion, zeal) of Achilles: "If he is to be calmed, it is she who calms him; if angered, it is she who inflames him" (XIX, 333). The wrath, however, belongs less to Achilles than to the prophets, just as the wisdom of the goddess is closer to Solomon than to Apollo. Inspiration, zeal, justice, and the wisdom that begins in the fear of the Lord, properly belong to a Hebraic idiom rather than to a Hellenic one. We might say that The Queen of the Air is an attempt to reconcile the religions of Homer and Isaiah, lightening the Hebraic strictness of conscience by a glitter of the Adriatic and the tang of Alpine air.
This fusion helps us see by the bye the profound connections between Ruskin's study of myth and Arnold's contemporaneous excursions into social criticism and the study of religion. In temperament two men could hardly be more different. Arnold is among the wariest of thinkers, Ruskin among the most impetuous. The one dreaded being overwhelmed by what he called the multitudinousness of life as much as the other sought to plunge himself into it. For Arnold the accents of wisdom are tentative and reasonable; for Ruskin they are dramatic and paradoxical -- eccentric in the root sense of the word. For all these differences, their broadest intentions are profoundly similar. Both men assumed that the best that had been thought and said composed a coherent corpus, offering a vantage point from which modern subjectivity could be judged. Both sought to transcend intellect and passion by a synthesis that Arnold called imaginative reason and Ruskin personified as Wisdom. Both men, skeptics with a deep religious sensibility, sought beyond blind faith and material evidences for a joy whose grounds are true. By suffusing heroic resolution with the freshness [257/258]
of the Aegean and the "deep wells" of the air, by locating in the physical experience of nature the perpetually renewing fount of cultural achievement, by touching morality, as Arnold might have said, with joy, The Queen of the Air performs its own act of poetic legislation, attempting to alter and enrich the perceptual field of its reader.
"In beginning the series of my corrected works," Ruskin writes early in the third chapter, "I wish this principle ... to be made plain.... The faults of a work of art are the faults of its workman, and its virtues his virtues" (XIX, 389). The Queen of the Air was to be the first volume of a new edition of Ruskin's works and so would stand, in effect, as a general introduction. It would seem that the third chapter, entitled "Athena in the Heart" or "Athena the Worker," would be a brief casebook of Ruskin's own justification, picturing Athena as moving and working within him. Having distinguished her from Apollo, whose agency makes the work of man beautiful rather than moral, he in effect makes of her the muse of social reform and affirms the direction his career took with Unto This Last. The third part, then, is directly didactic, hammering out the particulars of the poetic "legislation" manifested in the earlier lectures.
Yet the emotional violence and slovenly disorganization of these pages come as a shock, an ominous precursor of the periodic derangements Ruskin was to suffer in his last two decades as a writer. At times he seems an irritable parody of Teufelsdröckh's editor ("I find by me a violent little fragment of undelivered lecture which puts this, perhaps, still more clearly" [XIX, 406]); at others, an avatar of Achilles himself, "a mortal whose name means 'Ache of Heart,' and whose short life is only the incarnate brooding and burst of storm" (XIX, 307). Inflamed rather than inspired, he becomes indistinguishable from the vengeful Hebrew deity whose words he puts into the mouth of Athena:
in justice only she judges and makes war. But in this war of hers she is wholly implacable. She has little notion of converting criminals. There is no faculty of mercy in her when she has been resisted. Her word is only, "I will mock when your fear cometh..." for her wrath is of irresistible tempest: once roused it is blind and deaf, -- rabies -- madness of anger -- darkness of the Dies Irae.
nd that is, indeed, the sorrowfullest fact we have to know about our own several lives. Wisdom never forgives. Whatever resistance we have offered to her law, she avenges for ever; -- the lost hour can never be redeemed, and the accomplished wrong never atoned for.... Wisdom can "put away" sin, but she cannot pardon it; and she is apt, in her haste, to put away the sinner as well, when the black aegis is on her breast. [XIX, 399-400]
This is the vengeful Athena, whose emblem is the gorgon, the judger of men as the good Athena is their comforter. The gifts of one (health, [258/259] purity, brightness) ar precisely antithetical to the curses of the other (rabies, tempest, blind and deaf, darkness), who becomes as insane and pestilential as her enemies. Clearly enough, the wrath is Ruskin's own, recoiling more harshly upon himself than upon his enemies. In one revealing passage he brings himself before the judging eye of a Turner drawing: "As I myself look at it, there is no fault nor folly of my life, -- and both have been many and great, -- that does not rise up against me, and take away my joy, and shorten my power of possession, of sight, of understanding. And every past effort of my life, every gleam of rightness or good in it, is with me now, to help me in my grasp of this art, and its vision" (XIX, 395-396). These are the words of a man on the rack, ravaged by the unrestrained superego that prosecutes wars of religion and is also akin to the demonic form of rationality Robert Lowell caught in his figure of the Roman Athena, the goddess of Empire: "Pure mind and murder at the scything prow / Minerva, the miscarriage of the brain." ("Beyond the Alps," in Selected Poems p. 56.)
Conscience, "inspired" or internalized, approves when its demands are met and turns vengeful when they are not. Ruskin's Athena, the type of the Wisdom that begins with the fear of God, is both "within" and "without" -- a divine lawgiver who punishes and rewards, and at the same time the inspiriting source of Ruskin's own voice, the ethos of a book that shifts from tenderness to fury. This radical splitting, which characterizes Ruskin's handling of the female figure throughout his career, we first noticed in The Stones of Venice in the alternation between virgin and whore. But ultimately Time itself is feminized, just as in the later book, Time is split between the eternal freshness of the Greek past and the terrors of a present experienced as perpetual bereavement. The poisonous rages of Athena are precisely the terrors of time banished from the Winnington world, where it is called "after life"; yet the two books, as I have suggested, are not contradictions but contraries similar to Blake's states of innocence and experience. The similarity is that, in both worlds, there can be no real forgiveness. Ruskin had written from Winnington, "The weary longing to begin life over again, and the sense of fate forever forbidding it -- here or hereafter -- is terrible." In the child garden, the girls are emblems of grace and so "ought not" to be capable of evil; for Ruskin at fifty, the laws of fate forbidding the renewal of life create the nostalgic dream of innocence on one hand and, on the other, a theory of myth renewing the ancient possibility of propitiation. This last possibility appears in a brief exchange between the Lecturer and one of the children in The Ethics of the Dust. The child has been describing the reaction of her little sister to the news that a friend had gone across the sea: [259/260]
Then Dotty looked around the room; and I had just poured some water out into the basin; and Dotty ran to it, and got up on a chair, and dashed her hands through the water, again and again; and cried, "Oh, deep, deep sea! send little Allie back to me."
ECTURER. Isn't that pretty, children? There's a dear little heathen for you! The whole heart of Greek mythology is in that; the idea of a personal being in the elemental power; -- of its being moved by prayer; and of its presence everywhere, making the broken diffusion of the element sacred. [XVIII, 353]
"The broken diffusion of the element is sacred": the phrase might stand as the epigraph for both books and as the master theme of Ruskin's half-despairing reassertions of the romantic faith during his final decades. For the broken diffusion is the brokenness of time as well and therefore of self. In 1868 Ruskin had written Norton, "In my genius I am curiously imperfect and broken.... And the greatest part of my life -- as Life (and not merely as an investigating or observant energy) has been . . . a series of delights which are gone for ever, and of griefs which remain forever" (XXXVI, 555). The image of a crystal stream, symbol of Life as a continuous force of virtue, is one fiction of stability erected to countermand the vision of total loss, a second fiction is the persistence of "companionable presence" in nature. The meaning of The Queen of the Air, as both a public and a private statement, lies in its prayerful invocations to the goddess that has been driven off, enacted also by the child who propitiates the elements for the return of her lost sister. "All great art is praise": in Ruskin's work on myth, praise becomes an effort of recapture, and the ineluctable bereaving of time is converted into a two-faced goddess who can be propitiated and assuaged.
Coleridge. Collected Works. ed. Kathleen Coburn. 16 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969-.
Lowell, Robert. "Beyond the Alps," in Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977)
Ortega y Gasset. Meditations on Quixote. Trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marlin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961.
Last modified December 2000