Section 2, Chapter 2, 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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ow does the world look to the pure in heart? To justify the objective validity of his way of seeing, Ruskin included a long theoretical apparatus that led Browning to call the book "inconsequent in some of the reasoning ... and rather flashy than full in the metaphysics" (Quoted in Leon, 82). The book's genuine metaphysical interest lies, rather, in the descriptive mode that many of Ruskin's students have called "phenomenological," an accurate enough term though potentially misleading. I will use "phenomenology" to mean a method, not an ontological position, that avoids taking as its ground either an assumption about the limits of
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human knowledge or an assumption about things in themselves, setting the subject-object distinction aside in favor of a description of the sensory manifold capable of intuitive validation by the experiences of others. For Ruskin such a description grows out of the empiricist tradition yet is subtly and crucially different. He opens Modern Painters I with a Lockean definition of sensory ideas and insists that these ideas constitute the limits of our knowiedge, yet his very first description transcends by implication the simpler forms of associationism. In his account of Landseer's The Old Shepherd's Chief-Mourner, he notes first the visual details -- the careful execution of the dog's hair, the wood of the coffin, and so forth, which he calls "language" -- and then the emotional connotations of the details, which he calls "poetry." The crucial point is that he already conceives of seeing as reading, an act of knowledge by which the whole exceeds the sum of the parts, since the parts adhere by virtue of an organizing syntax. His next and greatest task is to demonstrate that nature itself may be read by means of an inherent, intuitive grasp of syntax, even when we lack the familiar associations to guide us that we have in the case of the Landseer. In a letter of 1844 to Henry Liddell, he wrote that great modern paintings are "crowded with facts entirely unknown to the observer -- types with which his imagination has never been familiarised, and which therefore have no effect whatever by association .... hence they excite the passions little and have no historical effect .... they are the world as it was and is, not our ideas of things past away -- and they appeal only to the sense of pure -- inherent beauty, a sense nearly, if not altogether, wanting in most men" (III, 676). Ruskin arouses this "neglected faculty" in his readers by giving unprecedented clarity of attention to particular phenomena. As Patricia Ball has acutely remarked, "Seeing clearly ... means reading deeply into the object, recognizing the comprehensiveness of its self-expression, as it demonstrates its energies, displays the formal laws of its being, and sums up its past and its potential simply by the impact of its visual presence" (Science of Aspects, 69). This book remains one of the finest discussions of Ruskinian seeing in print). and this impact is beauty for Ruskin. In other words, he passes from the school of Locke to the school of Coleridge-or, more accurately, to a kind of vitalistic Aristotelianism; for the "science" of Modern Painters I is a science of essences, and its debt is to Aristotle, not as the father of the inductive method -- for Ruskin always hated and feared the "greyness" of general categories -- but as the discoverer of the concrete universal, the revelation of the universal through the particular essence of the individual.
5
This view of things corresponds to the lesson of Ruskin's
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first drawing master, who, he tells us in Praeterita, taught him "the habit of looking for the essential points in the things drawn, so as to abstract them decisively" (XXXV, 77). The sophistication of aesthetic discrimination implied in such simple advice already surpasses a simple associationism. Modern Painters I implicitly reconciles the contradiction between the language used by practicing artists and the language of philosophical empiricism, and it does so by a descriptive technique that enacts a fiction of "deep seeing," a fiction by which surfaces disclose essences and the factual becomes affective.
Probably the clearest example of deep seeing is a passage on waterfalls that characteristically describes both an actual scene and Turner's representation of it ("The Upper Fall of the Tees" in the series England and Wales). Ruskin begins with the idea of "form," which he has earlier distinguished from mere shape or outline. Foam, for example, may be suggested by lightly rubbed paper; "but nature gives more than foam, she shows beneath it, and through it, a peculiar character of exquisitely studied form bestowed on every wave and line of fall; and it is this variety of definite character which Turner always alms at." Form, or "character," then, is a law of activity manifested differently in different moments -- in a "variety of definite character." How does Turner achieve the character, not simply an undifferentiated effect? The answer comes from physics rather than from the rules of drawing. The water in a cascade is both swift-moving and heavy. Most painters use parabolic curves to indicate swiftness, but they sacrifice the sense of weight; Turner, on the other hand, uses catenary lines:
Now water will leap a little way, it will leap down a weir or over a stone, but it tumbles over a high fall like this; and it is when we have lost the parabolic line, and arrived at the catenary, when we have lost the spring of the fall, and arrived at the plunge of it, that we begin really to feel its weight and wildness. Where water takes its first leap from the top, it is cool and collected, and uninteresting, and mathematical; but it is when it finds that it has got into a scrape, and has farther to go than it thought, that its character comes out: it is then that it begins to writhe, and twist, and sweep out, zone after zone, in wilder stretching as it falls; and to send down the rocket-like, lance-pointed, whizzing shafts at its sides, sounding for the bottom. And it is this prostration, this hopeless abandonment of its ponderous power to the air, which is always peculiarly expressed by Turner. [III, 553-554] [38/39]
Like the physicist, the painter observes carefully and frequently enough to discover the law of visible expression that persists through changes. Again like the physicist, the artist is interested in changeable sense data for the sake of the properties and energies of a thing and so focuses on the sign that contains within itself the most information. Most generally, Ruskinian seeing is a set of conversions -- from surface phenomena to essences or qualities to energies and finally to a pervasive sentient energy or mind of which all things are manifestations. Ruskin's verbs gather force in a carefully arranged sequence, from "plunge," "spring," and "tumble," which seem to be objective distinctions, to "writhe, and twist, and seep out," to the final "hopeless abandonment of its ponderous power," only the last of which is clearly an example of pathetic fallacy. By an apparently casual fancifulness the description demonstrates the impossibility of fixing a definite point at which perception becomes conception and thought becomes feeling -- a double wedding that, though explicit in Coleridge, was by no means a commonplace in contemporary epistemology. This yielding of perception to conception and thought to feeling I take to be the distinguishing character of Ruskinian phenomenology, succinctly adumbrated in the well-known phrase "intellectual lens and moral [that is, emotional] retina" (IV, 36). First, perception becomes conception, because the details of things leap into life, so to speak, as a gestalt. Again and again in his works, Ruskin "spells" the parts, such as leaves on a tree, until the whole discloses itself all at once. Second, thought becomes feeling because the sudden disclosure of essences is an affective experience; we no longer see but, in ordinary language, sense or feel the heaviness of a stone or the thrust of a blade of grass. What we sense corresponds to the ultimate object of artistic representation, which for Ruskin is not a static image but "qualities ... emotions, impressions, and thoughts." Thus Ruskin avoids using the word "imitate" (which applies to a mechanical copy), preferring verbs like "state," "induce the effect of," "has reference to" -- we would add "express," the romantic term that perfectly describes the transcendence of subject and object implied in [39/40] Ruskinian seeing. If the truest experience of nature is affective and the truest record of nature expressive, it follows that the most "characteristic" subject (that is, the most sublime) would reveal nature at her most "passionate" moment -- for nature "has a body and a soul like man; but her soul is the Deity" (III, 148). Although this metaphor is an unwarranted extension of pure Lockean empiricism, it is a consistent extension of Ruskinian reading, according to which particulars can be grasped only in terms of the whole that renders them intelligible, as the features, viewed together, become the expression of a face.
In Ruskinian seeing, then, the oppositions inherent in traditional epistemology -- the oppositions of objective to subjective, appearance to essence, surface to depth, sensations to powers, perception to conception, seeing to feeling, are united in a visual process by which the first term of each pair shifts into the second, "truer" term. Moreover, by alternating accounts of painting with accounts of landscape, Ruskin's book produces an analogy between the coherence of a human artifact and the coherence of the natural world: the observed facts of the natural world become the standard for correcting or approving art, while at the same time a painter's skillful abstracting provides clues to a more complete reading of the natural world. The analogy does not amount to a proof that things "really" exist as we see them, or that there is an absolute standard of intersubjective validity. Yet the ability of such comparisons to induce even a degree of intuitive assent challenges the resources of traditional skepticism and marks Ruskin's book as a participant, however unconscious, in the current of thought made possible by German idealism and, in England, by Coleridge -- a participant, moreover, in the romantic drive tojustify intellectually our prinutive delight in the presentness and substantiality of a world greater than us yet made for us, in which we can lose ourselves in order to know ourselves more truly than before. Since this communion rests on the power to see affectively, the inability to see means the deterioration of feeling. Against that calamity nature stands (to alter Mill's famous phrase) as the permanent possibility of emotional experience; and the aim of representation is to increase our power to incorporate that experience.
The paintings Ruskin reads are generally of two kinds that are distinct in every way except for the active response required of the viewer: topographical realism, which demands a loving scrutiny of detail, and visionary expressionism, which stimulates an imaginative reconstruction of elements suggested or evoked. An example among a great many of the first kind is, once again, the Upper Fall of the Tees: "With this drawing before him a geologist could give a lecture upon the whole system of aqueous erosion, and speculate as safely upon the past and [40/41] future states of this very spot, as if he were standing and getting wet with the spray" (III, 488). Nothing could be farther removed from contemporary interests than the geological lecture Ruskin then provides, yet such passages are among the most wonderful of his aids to the student of Turner, showing how the painter could convert a set of facts into miniature ecologies at once energized and interdependent. To feel the force of a storm-swollen river, or to notice the angle of branches bent in the wind, or to locate the source of the storm in a departing veil of mist in the distance is to grasp connections and intuit emphases that no purely formal analysis of line and color can suggest.
A characteristic example from the other end of the spectrum, the Turner of
visionary indistinctness, is the word painting of Turnerian Venice, the tour
de force by which Ruskin introduces his hero to his readers : (The passage was
suppressed after the first edition in order not to give offense to other living
painters.) The rhetorical strategy is to describe hypothetical views of the
same subject by different painters. As in The King of the Golden River,
each contestant is given a task which only the last one truly fulfills -- in
effect, to make the living waters flow. The worst of the group is Canaletto,
who is at once too slovenly and too literal -- he gives us only "heaps
of earth and mortar, with water between." "But what more there is
in Venice than bricks and stone -- what there is of mystery and death, and memory
and beauty -- what there is to be learned or lamented, to be loved or wept --
we look for to Canaletti in vain." Turner's vision breaks upon us as an
epiphany, an explosion of space and light: "Thank heaven, we are in sunshine
again,-and what sunshine! ... white, flashing fulness of dazzling light, which
the waves drink and the clouds breathe, bounding and burning in intensity of
joy. That sky, -- it is a very visible infinity, -- liquid, measureless, unfathomable,
panting and melting through the chasms in the long fields of snow-white, flaked,
slow-moving vapour, that guide the eye along their multitudinous waves down
to the islanded rest of the Euganean hills." Ruskin then moves to details
-- a gondola advancing in the foreground in full distinctness, the line of buildings
in the background sketched in suggestively -- then back to the whole again:
"Detail after detail, thought beyond thought, you find and feel them through
the radiant mystery, inexhaustible as indistinct, beautiful, but never all revealed;
secret in fulness, confused in symmetry, as nature herself is to the bewildered
and foiled glance, giving out of that indistinctness, and through that confusion,
the perpetual newness of the infinite, and the beautiful" (III, 255-257).
Here in a few words is the
Ruskinian sublime, with a
characteristic three-part movement: first an undifferentiated sensuous delight,
when everything seems liquid light; then a lingering over suggestive details,
which accumulate to the point at which enumeration is impossible; then a reconstitution
of the whole, [41/42] this time grasped imaginatively
as an infinite sum of particulars that can be read as long as we like. The sudden
overflow of light and water turns out to be a boundless supply unexhausted by
boundless giving. Canaletto, Prout, and
Stanfield
had given marks on a canvas that never quite cohered into "poetry"
(Canaletto had given only lifeless matter, of the sort that the "bargeman"
and "bricklayer" would notice), and so the affective energies of the
viewer could not be released. But in
Turner the compositional
elements become objective correlatives, so to speak, of the mind struggling
to absorb what is too much for it, while the sunlight and water of the bay become
synecdoches of nature herself, "the exhaustless living energy with which
the universe is filled" (III, 383)
Such is the world as it is seen by the Wordsworthian child. The Ruskinian sublime, that is to say, is Wordsworthian rather than Burkean. Ruskin avoids the term because he rejects it as a useful category. "Anything which elevates the mind is sublime," he writes; it is therefore "not distinct from what is beautiful ... but is only a particular mode and manifestation" of the sources of pleasure in art (III, 128, 130). The phrase is ambiguous with regard to subject or object: the sublime is neither an experience of the viewer alone nor a quality of the thing seen alone but a "particular mode or manifestation." The relentless attention throughout the book to sublime beholding permits Ruskin to reconceive the elements of the aesthetic transaction -- nature, artist, audience, and artifact-according to a model of religious experience.
His conception of the first element, nature, depends upon the most childlike suspension of disbelief: the canvas should always seem a real place to be entered, the universe should always be a system "out there." In this fiction of radical outness, the internal is completely externalized., so that nature becomes the sum of all intellectual and affective energies, inscribed on an infinite sensory manifold. "Beauty" is simply the agent of the affective bond between eye and nature-not specifically a set of formal qualities but rather the divine energy made visible and received by the pure in heart. But "the moment that we trust to ourselves, we repeat ourselves, and therefore the moment we see in a work of any kind whatsoever the expression of infinity, we may be certain the workman has gone to nature for it" (III, 387). The task of the illusionistic painter is so to tap into this divine multitude, so to absorb the essential laws of things, that he can abstract from the infinite to make it comprehensible as the sublime. The untutored viewer sees lazily and unselectively. Instead of confusion, the artist gives him system; instead of blankness, the beginnings of detail; instead of dullness, freshness of sensation; instead of dead copies, life. But a painting is in itself only a single version or transcript. This is the point of Ruskin's one extended comparison between painters and preachers, both of whom [42/43] have space only for a single "text": "Both are commentators on infinity, and the duty of both is to take for each discourse one essential truth ... and to impress that, and that alone, upon those whom they address" (III, 157). A work of art is not the shadow of a shadow but a particular enhancement or clarification of the supreme reality, an assumption by which Ruskin implicitly overthrows our traditional insistence on the autonomy of the individual work. Always his readings go beyond the particular canvas or sketch (sometimes noticing only a corner of it) in order to recapture the primal act of beholding of which the artifact is only a trace. This approach is consistent with the peculiar division of his book into natural categories -- Earth, Skies, Water, and Vegetation -- which are for him the artist's vocabulary of forms analogous to Northrop Frye's vocabulary of archetypal imagery.
No wonder Ruskin had no space for a theory of "creative" imagination. But although he later moves to a more expressionist emphasis, Modern Painters I does not ignore the second element of the aesthetic transact'on, the artist. On the contrary, by rejecting the imagination as a separate principle in aesthetic activity, Ruskin makes possible an extreme theory of inspiration by which the great artist becomes the world before which he annihilates himself. Wordsworth had expressed a dream widespread among romantic poets when he hoped to show in The Recluse the "creation" that the mind and the world "with blended might/ Accomplish," but the Wordsworthian project is problematical indeed, resting on the polarity of an autonomous human power and the sensory presence of nature and on the struggle to translate the language of sense into a system of verbal signs. Ruskin's radical simplification of these problems arises, most obviously, from the experience of sketching, a kind of automatic writing that reproduces objects in a system of nonarbitrary signs that resemble them. The amateur sketch may stand as a purer paradigm even than a great poem of (in Coleridge's phrase) nature made into thought and thought made into nature, for as the concrete record of an action, lines on paper "express" both the object and the moving hand.
What we normally call sublime art is simply a special case, for Ruskin, of this trancelike self-forgetfulness, as he makes clear in his section on technical mastery. According to him, the largeness and difficulty of the subject make correspondingly large demands on the artist, until technical control shades over into a power of comprehension equal to the [43/44] power of the sensations that flood the expanding lens of the artist's eye. A very great power of comprehension or absorption is genius, such as that of Turner, who pervades even his most complex compositions as an abstract principle of order. This view, of course, is simply a restatement in pictorial terms of romantic theories of impersonal genius, but in Ruskinian phenomenology, since Turner represents the farthest possible reach of human perception, what he gives us is nature as far as we are concerned, with indications in the form of blank or sketchy areas of the point at which even his senses fall. This theory of inspiration, along with the form of Ruskin's exemplary readings, implies a fiction of beholding that emerges clearly enough even though Ruskin never describes it in detail. According to this fiction, the artist loses himself by being blinded or temporarily annihilated as a separate ego. Then the seer is restored to himself with a heightened sense of an access of separate power and of his place in nature. The sublime experience is a power exchange (metaphorically, a drinking in or a breathing in, an inspiring) ending in stability, which also leaves a trace in the viewer's memory -- a shorthand "possession" of part of the whole. Finally, the seer converts his experience into a set of signs resembling the visible signs by which nature expresses the divine energy but now organized according to the unity of his own apprehension. This whole account may be reduced to a single sentence if we adopt the metaphor of speech: the inspired painter is a prophet, and the "I" of that painter is the divine "I" as spoken through the prophet's lips.
The effect of this ventriloquism on the viewer, the third element of the aesthetic transaction, is not so much to convey messages as to induce a nearly equivalent experience of communion. In a well-known passage describing the storm in Turner's Long Ships Lighthouse, Land's End, Ruskin writes:
It is this untraceable, unconnected, yet perpetual form, this fulness of character absorbed in universal energy, which distinguish nature and Turner from all their imitators.... to mark the independent passion, the tumultuous separate existence, of every wreath of writhing vapour, yet swept away and overpowered by one omnipotence of storm, and thus to bid us
"Be as a presence or a motion-one
Among the many there ...."this belongs only to nature and to him. [III, 404-405]
The passage gathers detail upon detail until the local storm becomes a paradigm of all particular manifestations in their relation to the cosmos. Ruskin's voice correspondingly rises in degree of intensity until it bursts forth in the verses of Wordsworth's Wanderer, as though to [44/45] underscore the universality of Turner's vision and incidentally to repeat, by means of the embedded quotation, the effect of the several participating in the one. We are "thus" bid, as the syntax implies, to participate through our own fullness of character in the universal energy, which for Ruskin is the supreme experience of selfbood. An odd feature in Ruskin's own readings reinforces this sense. He is often drawn to scenes in which a human artifact named in the title -- Llanthony Abbey, a steamer, a slave ship, Babylon -- is surrounded by atmospheric tumult, yet he often omits mention of the presumed center of attention. It is as though by omitting reference to the human marker, he destroys all trace of the endistancing mirror relationship, subtly permitting his viewers to reconstitute themselves at the center of the scene -- as the organizing energy of the artist does.
Meaning in the visual arts is for Ruskin a dynamic interaction most suitably described in metaphors of speech. The artist is an interpreter in relation to his subject, a prophet (or bidder) in relation to his audience, and an inspired medium or oracle in relation to his own experience. The painting, which is the nexus of these relationships, generally disappears from Ruskin's accounts, since it must seem to annihilate itself in order to achieve immediacy, but when he does consider the work of art in itself, he uses metaphors of speech once again -- a "studied sermon and inspired poem," for example. But "sermon" and "poem" are both too general and too specific to convey the root idea of Ruskinian aesthetics. "All great art," he wrote many times, "is praise."
In a jumbled passage from the preface to his second edition, Ruskin introduces his theory of unconscious genius in commonplace Longinian terms:
The artist has done nothing till he has concealed himself; the art is imperfect which is visible.... In the reading of a great poem, in the hearing of a noble oration, it is the subject of the writer, and not his skill, his passion, not his power, on which our minds are fixed. We see as he sees, but we see not him. We become part of him, feel with him, judge, behold with him; but we think of him as little as of our ourselves.... The power of the masters is shown by their self-annihilation.... The harp of the minstrel is untruly touched, if his own glory is all that it records. Every great writer may be at once known by his guiding the mind far from himself, to the beauty which is not of his creation, and the knowledge which is past his finding out. [III, 22-23]
The unconscious artist is the precondition of an aesthetic interaction so immediate that the other elements fuse together: by his silence, his creations speak and his audience becomes "part of him" and beholds with him. But how silent is he really? Ruskin's many examples of "unconsciousness" include an orator (whose effects are studied and whose [45/46] presence is highly visible), a minstrel singing of his love, an absent genius such as Shakespeare, a sublime poet such as Turner or Wordsworth -- and, we might add, a preacher and an oracle. Essentially, Ruskin has confused a genuinely impersonal author with a charismatic speaker. In both cases we may "see as he sees," but Ruskin is clearly interested above all else in the power of the utterer, even as he claims that an audience is unaware of it. His rhetoric of praise, then, is also a charismatic rhetoric, as his conception of Turner and his own highly polished idiom make clear.
For Ruskin the oldest and probably most immediate paradigms of sublime speech are the Old Testament prophets and psalmists (the latter are probably implied above by the minstrel and his harp), both related to the romantic bardic tradition and the overtly classical form of the romantic ode. What is the rhetorical structure of such utterances? Most simply, the prophet "faces" an audience, delivering the work of God to the community, while the psalmist speaks in his own voice to God. When the psalm (and sometimes the prophecy) has a personal or lyric voice, we "overhear" him, to use the term with which Mill defines the lyric relationship. But insofar as the utterance loses its personal voice in an activity of invocation, we are neither addressed, as in the case of an orator, nor permitted to eavesdrop, as in the case of a meditation or complaint. Rather we begin to identify ourselves with the speaker in his beholding, in the way Ruskin describes. The identification of the reader and author becomes complete in ritual speech, when the congregation utters the words not as recitals of someone else's composition but as verbal actions -- the action of reaffirming the divine covenant. The imprecise notion that psalms are poems of praise, when in fact they vary greatly in form and intention, is therefore true in the sense that psalms are affirmations of relationship, the simplest form of which is the ritual naming of God's works as an act of praise -- and this, of course, is true also of the romantic ode, which, as Harold Bloom has written of Shelley, places the poet in an I-Thou relationship to nature (Shelley's Mythmaking, passim). The preacher, who in Ruskin's phrase comments on Infinity, also participates in a ritual affirmation.
In this way, I believe, Ruskin comes close to the heart of Turner's art. His attempt to square Turner with Evangelical pieties is of course bathetic and proved embarrassing to the painter (it is more accurately Ruskin's construction of an ideal self that would reconcile the demands of earnestness and desire). Yet the immediacy of experience induced by Turner's technical and iconographic inventions resembles the affirmation that Ruskin captures well in his own word paintings. The painter's
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very muteness, his inability to distinguish himself from the objects he presents or to make unambiguous statements, brings Turner close to the primitive power of ritual invocation, for his works may be viewed as various enactments -- in fierceness, in defiance, in deep calm -- of the words attributed to him on his deathbed: "The Sun is God." The celebratory mood of Modern Painters I does not correspond to the emotional range of that art, but in later years, when Ruskin's pessimism came to match Turner's own, he could still turn in his books to psalmlike affirmations of relationship that transcend the contradictions so baffling to the mind of faith. In the early book, the medium of praise is a translation of paint into words, both of which are viewed as modes of a single form of incantatory poetry. To describe painting with reference to language is to render explicit the dynamic of communication between viewer and artist while at the same time teaching a visually illiterate audience to read the language of sense. And to return again and again to the primacy of painting is to collapse the distance between subject and object embedded in the simplest forms of grammar, thus reinstating the immediacy of communion that only the eye can know and the effect that only a silent speaker can induce. And finally the audience of reverent viewers, which the book partly assumes and partly creates, resembles a congregation in worship, who by uniting themselves with the artist make each act of beholding a ritual utterance of their own.
Should painting really be expected to achieve this? As always with Ruskin, his specific subject is but the vehicle for an ideal it can never quite match, an ideal better expressed, perhaps, by Ruskin's own medium of eloquent prose. In that medium at least, he resolves some of the paradoxes attending the doctrine of artistic unselfconsciousness.
Leon, Derrick. Ruskin, the Great Victorian. London: 1949.
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.)
Last modified December 2000