Section 1, Chapter 5, from "The Legend of Time: "Paradise of Cities"" from 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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uskin's Fall story provides an emotional mode of viewing the world. The final chapter of the first volume, "The Vestibule," establishes this mode by guiding the reader along the roads and waterways that lead modern travelers to their first view of Venice. His dominant image is corruption, which like sin may perhaps be inevitable to organic life but is not its prior and natural condition. We see, for example, the Brenta, "A muddy volume of yellowish-grey water, that neither hastens nor slackens"; one of the villas on the Brenta, "a glaring, spectral shell of brick and stucco ... all burning in the thick glow of the feverish sunshine"; another villa of the old Venetian type, "sinking fast into utter ruin, black, and rent, and lonely"; and something else we are not allowed to see ("At last the road turns sharply to the north, and there is an open space covered with bent grass, on the right of it: but do not look that way"). At the inn in Mestre one eats "peculiar white bread, made with oil, and more like knots of flour than bread." The buildings outside are cheerless and conventional. There is a rose arbor nearby, but the air smells of "garlic and crabs, warmed by the smoke of various stands of hot chestnuts." The voyage outward continues:
we come to a low wharf or quay at the extremity of a canal..., which latter we fancy for an instant has become black with stagnation; another glance undeceives us, -- it is covered with the black boats of Venice. We enter one of them... and glide away; at first feeling as if the water were yielding continually beneath the boat and letting her sink into soft vacancy. It is something clearer than any water we have seen lately, and of a pate green; the banks only two or three feet above it, of mud and rank grass, [103/104] with here and there a stunted tree; gliding swiftly past the small casement of the gondola, as if they were dragged by upon a painted scene.
The gondola takes us out along the canal, past the torn bastions of an old fort, as the scent of sea air grows and the banks widen to a reedy shore until we see a "low and monotonous dockyard wall ... the railroad bridge, conspicuous above all things." The brick buildings at the end of it, "but for the many towers which are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an English manufacturing town": "but the object which first catches the eye is a sullen cloud of black smoke brooding over the northern half of it, and which issues from the belfry of a church. It is Venice" (IX, 412-415).
The buildings crumbling into rents, the plain baking under the sun, the waters thick with weed, the air heavy with garlic and fumes (presumably diabolical) develop a mood of increasingly sinister anticipation, dramatically confirmed by the ironic reversals of the close. We turn out to be on an antithetical pilgrimage: the road leads generally east, but it is a "broad road," concluding in the railroad bridge heading for the mouth of hell rather than the Heavenly City. The line of the bridge guides our eye to the significant object, like a line in Tintoretto, while at the same time displacing its own smoke onto the church, as though to suggest a polluted union of the religious and the mechanical, whose product is blasphemy and darkness. The anticlimax is nevertheless an epiphany: Italy is under a strange curse, of which the cloud is the emblem and the lingering trace.14
The complex emotional effect of this passage -- one of the most complex Ruskin ever achieved -- depends on his use of hypernormal attention to detail to create the impression of memory or dream. Dreams and memories are not, of course, as clear as waking life; attention is simply distributed differently, by agencies other than the pragmatic ego, so that the being of things may take on an unaccustomed power. Here the trope of the leisurely journey ritualizes the order of sensations, making the viewer passive before the procession of scenes. At moments when Ruskin slips into half-playful animation -- the scenes "dragging by" or the gondolas black like stagnation -- he resembles Dickens and that remarkable experiment in the grotesque, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," which this passage anticipates by a [104/105] few months. More important, the faintly uncanny quality of Ruskin's grotesque resembles a literature still struggling to be born, the urban dreamscape of Baudelaire and his symbolist followers [ For another comparison of Ruskin and Baudelaire]. Things are eerie because they are charged with indeterminable significance: the ordinary becomes unheimlich, and the "it" of the final sentence a vaguely apprehended domain of evil by which the past dooms the present.
With this note Ruskin brings down the curtain on the first act of his melodrama. When it rises (after a two-year intermission for his first readers), we find the gondola coursing northward toward Torcello and backward in history to geological time. Like Eden, which is the central point of the world and the meeting of four waters, Venice (whose seat is carefully prepared by minute adjustments of land and water level) is the meeting of powerful historical currents -- the Arabian, the Lombardic, and the Roman -- that mingle ultimately in the Ducal Palace, the "central building of the world." Since the Council Chamber contains the greatest painting in the world, Tintoretto's Paradise, the Venetian empire takes the form of concentric circles, from the united waters to the city, the building, and the room with the picture, the last suggesting that the City of Man has here become the type of the City of God. According to Northrop Frye, the romantics, tending to consider civilized life artificial and debased, reattached value to wilderness and associated human nature not with the life of reason, placed "above," but with forces rising from "below," or "within"(Frye, 32). Ruskin, recasting the romantic schema in social terms, imagines the relations of man and nature as a complete interpenetration. Cast upon the waters of exile, the Venetian forefathers made the sea their fortune; similarly, the body of their city is literally composed of the precious stones that surround her in the mountains, imitating the forms of waves and flowers and leaves. This organic body is of course the perfect form of purity as described in Modern Painters II and as such stands against the inorganic body-the slime and smoke of corruption described in "The Vestibule. "
Thus humanized, nature is not "improved," as neoclassical theory would have it, but "Interpreted," as Ruskin makes clear in the first volume when he compares the making of buildings with the making of sermons:
This infinite universe is unfathomable, inconceivable, in its whole; every human creature must slowly spell out, and long contemplate, such part of it as may be possible for him to reach; then set forth what he has learned of it for those beneath him ... and then the human being has to make its power upon his own heart visible also, and to give it the honour of the[105/106]good thoughts it has raised up in him, and to write upon it the history of his own soul. [IX, 409-410]
Architecture, then, is the ordering of both the natural flux and human temporal experience, an activity perfectly described by the symbol of weaving. In fact woven decorations are particularly interesting to Ruskin because they figure forth "the intricacy, and alternate rise and fall, subjection and supremacy, of human fortune; the 'Weave the warp, and weave the woof,' of fate and Time" (X, 163), thereby demonstrating the consonance of human creativity and Providence. In other words, the builders weave the Book of Nature into a Book of Scripture, rendering articulate the words of stones, water, and vegetation in order to repeat and affirm the myth of Redemption. But that myth is also their own spiritual history, the faith defining the cultural unity that is Venice.
The script of that history Ruskin calls the language of types, and from first to last typological imagery structures his vast narrative. In the first glimpse he gives us of the ancient Venetians, we see them fleeing across the waves in boats, with the skies still red from the sacking of their homelands. This crossing by water, an image we will meet again and again, compresses Noah's flood, the flight from Egypt to the Promised Land, and the type of all believers who find their resting place in Christ: the church at Torcello is "an ark of refuge" built "in the midst of a destruction hardly less terrible than that from which the eight souls were saved of old" (X, 34-35). Ruskin here shows human history rising, like the soul itself, from vague and confused memories of a sea of being. The dry land has not quite appeared, and the single work of human hands, more boat than building, shows the race still helpless in the hands of God; yet by virtue of that dependence, men are in unmediated communion with their Creator (X, 35).
The second scene in this book of illuminations is the island of Murano, with the ancient church of San Donato. Using the crumbling stones before him and the childlike legends preserved in dusty volumes, Ruskin imagines the church as it was in ages past -- "the Garden of Venice, 'a terrestrial Paradise, -- a place of nymphs and demigods!'" The ruins at both Torcello and Murano contain great mosaics of a sorrowing madonna blessing the worshipers and interceding for them on the Day of judgment. Ruskin praises these mosaics, not, he is careful to point out, in defense of mariolatry, but because they were the emblems of sincere belief, for these early worshipers "did honour something out of themselves; they did believe in spiritual presence judging, animating, redeeming them" (X, 65-68). This faith is the mark of innocence as a form of complete, childlike trust. We are still in the childhood of Venetian history, and Mary, the sorrowing intercessor, is both virgin and Mother. [106/107]
As civilization begins to flourish in Lombardy, Ruskin passes from marshland to island to mainland: the dry land seems to gather itself out of the sea, bearing the new Tyre -- the city that was of old "as in Eden, the garden of God" (IX, 17). Ruskin's task is now to define the mature Byzantine style through a detailed account of St. Mark's, the greatest example of the first Venetian school, but the typological narrative continues alongside the exposition on four levels. Out of the waters rose the dry land; after the Deluge rose a rainbow; in the desert beyond the Red Sea rose a Tabernacle; after baptism the believer enters the body of the church. St. Mark's is all these things-a garden, a rainbow, a temple, and also a book and a Bride -- yet her body is composed of precious stones. Stones are the dominant image of this region of the book, as water was the dominant image of the first.
The famous paragraph describing the first view of St. Mark's is a catalog of precious substances: the church is "a treasure-heap, it seems" of gold, opal, mother-of-pearl, alabaster like amber and ivory, jasper, porphyry, deep-green serpentine, marble of every color, coral, amethyst. But it is an animate treasure heap, crowded and leaping with life, bearing in its ornament all the innumerable forms of the created world:
sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes; and, in the midst of it, the solemn form of angels..., their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago.
The eye of the beholder rises and rises, as if scaling an Alp, past the porches and into a "continuous chain of language and of life," then farther still, above the Greek horses and the Lion of St. Mark to a culminating image of complete rapture: "until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst" (X, 82-83). The body of Venice is woven of stone and water; the body of the church is woven of treasure and energy, representing first animate forms and then, at its highest point, not animate form but, it would seem, the very principle of life, the creative surge of the divine spirit in matter. As traders the Venetians converted the ocean into wealth, and as builders they froze the waves into marble, consecrating the elements, as it were, by rendering up their treasure in the shapes of leaves and birds, wind and water. The church is both the visible form of God's [107/108] revelation and the spiritual form of Venetian prosperity; for in this Puritan epic, where prosperity is the outward sign of grace, the sea, the cargo, and the merchant's ledger find their counterpart in the cathedral, whose stones are a type of the kingdom of Heaven, bestowed unto this last: "above the crowd swaying forever to and fro in the restlessness of avarice or thirst of delight, was seen perpetually the glory of the temple, attesting to them . . . that there was one treasure which the merchantman might buy without a price, and one delight better than all others, in the word and the statutes of God" (X, 140).
Ruskin takes us into the church through the baptistry, as every Christian joins the church through baptism, to be washed of sin and return to the estate of our first parents. But the garden inside is dominated by the image of the cross, suggesting, as Ruskin says later on, the "entire dependence of the heavens and the earth upon the work of the Redemption -- for the iconography of the church resembles that of illuminated Bibles where the Creation ends in the Crucifixion, "the work by which all the families of created beings subsist" (X, 167). This is not the Eden of Genesis but the redeemed creation, in which the second Adam and his Bride take the place of our parents who fell. At the same time, the Venetian garden is neither the innocence of childhood nor a noble savagery but the natural state of redeemed man, just as the cross, the symbol of redemption, closely imitates the Tree of Life. In the mosaics of the central domes are two more symbols with similar meanings: the Dove of the Holy Spirit amid four streams of Pentecostal fire, and Christ enthroned on the rainbow, the "type of reconciliation" (X, 136). But for Ruskin the whole Creation is a rainbow: "In that heavenly circle which binds the statutes of colour upon the front of the sky, when it became the sign of the covenant of peace, the pure hues of divided light were sanctified to the human heart forever." In imitation of this sacred chord, the Medes built a seven-walled city, with each wall of a different color surrounding the king (who therefore wears, like Joseph -- and indeed like God Himself -- a coat of many colors) (X, 174-175)
Venice is also a city bright as a rainbow, an appropriate image for an art that is itself the mark of a covenant, since its forms are the works of God's hands inscribed by human thought. The famous "variegated mosaic" of Europe is therefore the perfect introduction to the following chapter, "The Nature of Gothic." As the eye moves from south to north, we see a geographical portrait of two temperaments the southern races refined and luxurious, the northern hardy and "rude" that also correspond to the Byzantine and Gothic styles, the one warm and encrusted with jewels, the other roughly carved with branchlike forms. The "reading" of Europe is a fairly subtle addition to Ruskin's typological structure (the continent is here an ordered "chord of colour," [108/109] the view that of a bird's), but bird and rainbow will reappear resonantly at the end of the subsection on Gothic naturalism: "The great Gothic spirit, as we showed it to be noble in its disquietude, is also noble in its hold of nature; it is, indeed, like the dove of Noah, in that she found no rest upon the face of the waters, -- but like her in this also, 'LO, IN HER MOUTH WAS AN OLIVE BRANCH, PLUCKED OFF"' (X, 239).
The controlling image of this section is vegetation, with its typological associations -- in addition to the olive branch and the garden, the bounteous land that the Israelites entered with the Tabernacle and the Arc of the Covenant, and the vineyard of the Lord, the type at once of Christ and the body of His communicants. If we step back and look at the book in its archetypal design, we would first see children in an ark, then a city rising like a Bride (as a spiritual Jerusalem does in Isaiah and Revelations), then a Man rising beside her to govern, like the Messiah -- a partnership we can still see in the Ducal Palace standing beside St. Mark's in the Piazza. Both styles express Venetian spirituality at its zenith, but in complementary ways. Although both take the form of a sculptured garden, Ruskin stresses preciousness in one case and natural imagery in the other; temperamentally, of course, one is southern and the other northern. Morever, since Ruskin had seen few examples of the Byzantine style, he had to limit himself to external description, giving only a few brief conjectures about a "spirit of Byzantine," but the exposition of Gothic is dominated precisely by an account of its spirit or governing ethos. In this respect the chapters on St. Mark's and the Gothic culminate the aesthetic dialectic of Modern Painters II, in which the style of Angelico and the style of Tintoretto broaden into a polarity between the beautiful and the imaginative and between purity and strength -- very much like the traditional symbol of the eagle and the dove. This I take to be the marriage metaphor at the heart of The Stones of Venice (and in the passage I have cited from X, 178-179), identical in structure to the Blakean marriage of Albion and Jerusalem, the soul and its emanations, the creator and his creations. But this myth of complementarity is also a myth of development, as Ruskin's history of Venice to this point suggests, a development marked by three stages in the relationship of the self to nature. In the first the personality is not clearly distinguishable from the waters out of which it rises but remains subordinate to a maternal image. In the second the union of man and nature is set aside in the form of an object, which is rendered up and sanctified; in this stage nature is an objectified anima, but not alienated from the subject. In the third stage the ego emerges as an activity of self-assertion, strengthened by communion with something greater than itself. Nature is the image both of that communion and of the soul's own internal organic relationships. [109/110] This is of course the structure of the Ruskinian sublime as well: by submission to an overwhelming vision, the self reconstitutes itself at the center of its own imaginative vision.
The central achievement of "The Nature of Gothic" is to restate in social terms the idea of a great soul whose energies are ordered by an imperishable principle of selfhood. For this purpose it uses the imagery of romantic organism specifically, the single image of a Gothic cathedral -- which acts not simply as an illustration of the argument but as the continuous visible manifestation of the argument at every point: it is thought sunk in sensuous form. The six characteristics of Gothicness (Savagery, Love of Change, Love of Nature, Grotesqueness, Rigidity, Redundancy or Generosity) constitute a specific personality (as everyone has noticed, they describe Ruskin himself), but I will limit my discussion to the first three, since these in particular describe the human spirit in the "Edenic" state -- mankind as Milton conceived them and as God intended them.
Savagery and Love of Change, which blend together, express "some great truths" that according to Ruskin the human race must understand "in all their work that they do under the sun." These are "the confession of Imperfection, and the confession of Desire of Change" (X, 214). The key terms of the entire exposition are "perfection" and its opposite, which act as portmanteau words, yoking a group of analogies into the similitude of a single organic conception. To see that conception clearly, along with its ambiguities, we need to distinguish some of its interrelated strands.
"Perfection" and "imperfection" are, first of all, key counters in an argument about artistic styles. In Modern Painters I Ruskin said that lack of finish was appropriate to subjects that exceed the artist's mastery, so that "sketchiness" becomes an expressive mark, the mark of the artist's power. In "The Lamp of Life" he said that imperfections characterize the vitality of an art style in its early stages, because at that point the struggle to conceive is of greater importance than subservience to standardized rules the artistic energy, that is to say, is internal, not imposed, like the energy that distinguishes an organic entity from a mechanical one. This is of course the idea restated by Browning in "Andrea del Sarto" ("A man's reach should exceed his grasp /Or what's a heaven for?"), yet both writers trivialize that idea in the examples they draw: Browning's Andrea oddly believes that Raphael is an inexpert draftsman, and Ruskin's examples of Gothic "rudeness" are similarly technical imperfections, such as rough carving, which could be corrected in a moment. This kind of imperfection seems beside the point, yet for Ruskin at least the idea fulfills a crucial aim: he wants to make a place for inferior skill in the construction of a church, so that truly to experience Gothic architecture is to experience "the still, sad [110/111] music of humanity" in its range of voices ("and then the human being has to make its power upon his own heart visible also, and to give it the honour of the good thoughts it has raised up in him, and to write upon it the history of his own soul" [IX, 410]). The divine revelation, we may conclude, can only be known through the numberless testimonies of fallible but believing hearts.
So far the Ruskinian Gothic appears to be an aesthetic correlative of laissez-faire, in which every effort for an individual good sums up to a society, the greatest good for the greatest number. But for Ruskin, laissez-faire economics really means that each individual good is gained at someone else's loss and this is precisely the opposite of the Gothic spirit. A second meaning of "imperfection" in the aesthetic argument is that quality of something by virtue of which it gains meaning only as part of a whole. On the purely perceptual level, this quality is individual difference, because when all units are identical, they become superfluous or detachable the gestalt cannot work, things do not leap together. For this reason, in his discussion of Imagination Associative in Modern Painters II, Ruskin claims that the great artist builds organic wholes in an all-at-once intuition, fusing parts that are in themselves incomplete or imperfect and this unity, Ruskin says elsewhere in the same book, resembles the unity of the human race itself, which is composed of various excellences that could not be combined in any single person. Because the medieval organization of labor permits every worker the expression of his particular excellence, a Gothic church lives in detail, however unskillful in execution. Each stone bears the mark of a particular human testimony and therefore preserves a human life. This power of architecture to express or deny the spirit of the worker inheres, moreover, in any system of labor exchange. An economy is, for better or worse, traffic in human life and this fact leads Ruskin to his first rule of humane consumption: "Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share" (X, 196).
Because aesthetic qualities are types of moral qualities, Ruskin's aesthetic argument becomes by untraceable shifts an argument for Christian humility: the Gothic, as John Rosenberg put it, confesses the Fall (96). According to Ruskin, the Christian makes daily admission of "lost power and fallen nature" because it tends, in the end, to "God's greater glory." To every person in her service, "Christianity" exhorts, "Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame." And so the "Gothic schools" receive "the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection [111/112] , and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise a stately and unaccusable whole" (X, 190). In the aesthetic argument"perfection" is the tyranny of neoclassical order; in the social argument, an economic tyranny that divides the labor and therefore the souls of human beings into mechanical fragments; in the moral argument, the tyranny of inflexible conscience. To be delivered of that conscience, to be released from the fear of shame and failure, is to enter the Garden again -- the garden not of perfection but of spontaneity and exuberance, the unconsciousness which, Carlyle said, is both wholeness and health. Here Ruskin's Fall myth converges with the Wordsworthian myth of childhood, since for Ruskin "perfection" means not only a fall into self-knowledge and self-doubt but also an internalization of the world's demands as well -- avarice, pride, ambition, and all the glittering vices associated with the Old Masters in Modern Painters I and in the present book with Renaissance builders. But the Gothic makes room for the childlike even though it is not itself childlike: the best architecture, Ruskin writes, is "the expression of the mind of manhood by the hands of childhood" (X, 200). Ruskin's habit of viewing workmen as children -- one of the unattractive features of his social thought -- suggests on the level of the moral argument that architecture symbolically enacts the continuance of the original, fresh energy by supplying a principle of governance lacking in childhood. In all this, the opposition of perfection and imperfection implies an opposition between two versions of Protestantism, romanticism and Puritanism, with the Gothic representing a casting out of Puritanism, which is then identified with its apparent antithesis, the spirit of secular rationalism.
What permits such variegated parts to form any unity at all? How does the sum of imperfections become "stately and unaccusable"? Ruskin's mediating category is the idea of style as ethos. The physical characters that stamp a building as "Gothic" -- pointed arches, pierced window traceries, and so forth -- are but the expressions of a particular mode of energy. Throughout Ruskin's exposition, vegetation, the usual symbol of organic unity, is the signature of the mode of energy known as Gothic: in its curling and wreathing and springing, its rigidity, even its prickliness and eccentricity, it is always at liberty because always, so to speak, obeying the laws of its own nature. We have reached yet a third level of the argument, the necessary imperfection of nature. To the romanticist the world is knowable only as process -- the burgeoning energy that always creates itself anew, nowhere manifesting itself in the same form. To such a view, neoclassical order (like empirical abstractions) must seem only to reduce this variety to a rigid uniformity imposed from outside and to deny energy altogether. For Ruskin imperfection is "essential to all that we know of life. It is the [112/113] sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom, a third part bud, a third part past, and a third part in full bloom, is a type of the life of this world" (X, 203). In this context to confess "lost power and fallen nature" is to confess the human participation in the natural stages of generation and decay. Thus affirmed, mortality can be understood as the condition of growth. Time is the felix culpa, since whatever moves toward death discloses its being in an arc of change, a condition, Ruskin believed, that prevailed in the biblical garden itself. The infinite, original energy of childhood is preserved within the structure of an ego strong enough to accept all that is at enmity with childish joy.
Acceptance is thus the new spirit of Ruskin's naturalism, which reaches its culmination in his exposition of the third characteristic of Gothic, Love of Nature. Here "imperfection" refers not to the workman's powers but to his subject, which in turn defines the Gothic spirit in terms closest to that of an individual human ego. We saw earlier that Ruskin believed his knowledge of the human to be much inferior to his knowledge of nature. His fear was overcome by his sudden and passionate response to the human art of Tintoretto. We saw also that the theory of penetrative imagination provided a fiction of incorporation, which implied that knowledge of the human was possible through the study of art. The Stones of Venice heals the breach between landscape as a subject and mankind as a subject by showing how the human soul can be inscribed on natural materials through the medium of natural imagery. ("The Lamp of Power" demonstrates the same point.) Moreover, since sculptured flowers and leaves are the Venetians' compensation for a vanished life in nature, architectural ornament becomes a symbol for the incorporation of lost objects, a symbol, that is, for the creation of a self. "The Nature of Gothic" in fact equates the incorporation of natural motifs with the incorporation of the human: Ruskin splices the Gothic love of nature together with a revised theory of the human subject in painting.
Painters, he tells us, can be divided into three categories, according to their characteristic choices of subject Purists, Sensualists, and Nat [113/114] uralists. Members of the third and greatest group, which includes Giotto, Tintoretto, and Turner, "render all that they see in nature unhesitatingly, with a kind of divine grasp or government of the whole, sympathizing with all the good, and yet confessing, permitting, and bringing good out of the evil also" (X, 222). The most obvious shift from Modern Painters II is Ruskin's denigration of Angelico and the "School of Love" to a second rank, on the grounds that the Purist withdraws from the world in cloistered virtue and depicts man as similarly withdrawn. But the greatest art takes as its subject all the passions "natural" to human beings: "The passions of which the end is the continuance of the race: the indignation which is to arm it against injustice...and the fear which lies at the root of prudence, reverence, and awe, are all honourable and beautiful, so long as man is regarded in his relations of the existing world." A semicolon in place of the colon would probably convey Ruskin's meaning better; the passions are three sexuality, indignation, and religious dread from which both the monk and the happy child need protection. The great naturalist, then,
takes the human being in its wholeness, in its mortal as well as its spiritual strength. Capable of sounding and sympathizing with the whole range of its passions, he brings one majestic harmony out of them all...he casts aside the veil from the body, and beholds the mysteries of its form like an angel looking down on an inferior creature: there is nothing which he is reluctant to behold, nothing that he is ashamed to confess; with all that lives, triumphing, falling, or suffering, he claims kindred, either in majesty or in mercy, yet standing, in a sort, afar off, unmoved even in the deepness of his sympathy; for the spirit within him is too thoughtful to be grieved, too brave to be appalled, and too pure to be polluted. [X, 226-227]
This famous and climactic passage turns out to be radically ambiguous. In proclaiming the ideal of a Shakespearean comprehensiveness of sympathy and a Shakespearean omnipotence of judgment, Ruskin must nevertheless imagine the artist himself to be pure, "in a sort, afar off," and the body, though released from shame, nevertheless an inferior object. Is the statement not more Purist than Naturalist? The stance is uncomfortably close to Tennyson's Arthur, in the poem that Ruskin's book so closely anticipates in theme and subject, at the moment when Arthur finishes reviling his fallen queen: "Lo! I forgive thee, as Eternal God/Forgives: do thou for thine own soul the rest" ("Guinevere," 541-542). By our standards Ruskin's specific judgments remain very much in the Purist vein. Murillo, for example, he judges a Sensualist, citing a picture in which two beggar boys devour fruit: "But is there anything else than roguery there, or was it well for the painter [114/115] to give his time to the painting of those wicked and repulsive children? Do you feel moved with any charity towards children as you look at them?" (X, 228). Certainly they would have devastated the garden at Herne Hill. Ruskin banishes perfection, along with cloistered virtue, only to let it return in the old figure of the supreme genius, stately and unaccusable, protected by aesthetic distance from the turbulent mortal life he in some sense embraces.
As a moral idea "The Nature of Gothic" remains ambiguous. Ruskin's argument praises a variety of moral qualities, many of them inconsistent: spontaneity, vitality, independence; humility and reverence; generosity, acceptance, mercy; a passion for justice; and also what must appear as rigidity and condescension. Because the Ruskinian Gothic contains a part that governs and forgives and a part that labors and is forgiven, the essay appears to prescribe humility, yet may also be read as a prescription for spiritual pride. It leaves unclear one's precise relationship to one's own failings and one's own sexuality (the word "confession" lets Ruskin have it both ways, since the word implies recognition of a general condition), and it also leaves unclear the line dividing what one may forgive from what one must condemn. But the greatness of "The Nature of Gothic" as a moral idea rests not on the particular values it upholds but on its conception of the conditions of the moral life. The Gothic is, first of all, not a collection of traits only but the organic principle of a community: the stones of a Gothic church are types of the community of the faithful as they will be judged by a merciful God, and its structure is the paradigm of an ideal human economy. But the church is also the body of Christ, and in this regard the Gothic is the spirit of an ideal Christianity. By sinking his moral argument in architectural description, Ruskin mediates between a particular building and an invisible idea, adumbrating at once the values of Protestantism and the power of a religious community to enfold and uplift its communicants. This is perhaps the last text in English romanticism to embody Miltonian Protestantism, with its vigorous independence, its sweetness as well as its strength, and its passionate belief in the idea of a Commonwealth. The Gothic, I have said, is the spirit of man in Eden -- as Milton also imagined him -- and this statement leads to the second point. The organic structure of Gothic is typical of the structure of the integrated ego, a principle of self-governance that harmonizes all impulses and failings and gives purpose to all moral actions. The symbol of vegetation unifies the two realms of the communal ego and the individual ego by locating the center both within and without.
The rudeness that heaves upward the "iron buttress and rugged wall"; the changefulness that "flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots"; the rigidity "here starting [115/116] up into a monster, there germinating into a blossom, anon knitting itself into a branch"; the redundancy, "which feels as if it could never do enough to reach the fulness of its ideal" -- these energies circle, so to speak, around a rooted naturalism that draws spiritual nourishment from the "grass of the field which is, at once, the type and the support of human existence" and so is as noble in its "hold of nature" as the Gothic is "noble in its disquietude." Ruskin figures this "hold of nature" as the dove holding the olive branch, a symbol of the coming of Gothic that answers the earlier image of the fugitives fleeing by sea. The olive branch also symbolizes the peace that passeth all understanding; for the dove and olive are typologically related to the Holy Spirit and the vine that is the type of Christ and His believers, "that ancient religious root, in which to abide was life, from which to be severed was annihilation" (XI, 70). This abiding is spiritual nourishment, the condition by which the outside becomes the inside. The moral strength so nourished we might today call ego strength or ego integrity. Ruskin provides a different name but one we have not yet encountered.
Ruskin wrote his father that everything in the first two volumes would come together in the chapter on the Ducal Palace (X, 327n). The plan makes sense: after an exposition of the Gothic spirit, Ruskin would then turn to the "central building of the world," a palace of justice combining all the essential Venetian styles, and would begin reading its stones for the embodied wisdom of this, the climactic moment of European culture. But even Ruskin could not make the damaged ornaments of the Palace bear so much meaning. Instead he gives a tedious account of each of the 8-sided capitals supporting the outer walls -- 36 capitals in all (including the bad Renaissance copies), 288 sides. But on one of these Ruskin finds an emblem that could represent the thematic cornerstone of his entire work. The subject is Temperance. As he shows in the third volume, this virtue means not "subdued and imperfect energy" nor a "stopping short in any good thing" but rather "the power which governs the most intense energy" -- his example is the curvature of a Gothic ornament, expressing a "reserve of resource" in the whole (XI, 7, 9). Having exalted the savagery, rudeness, redundance, and prickly waywardness of Gothic, as though to prove that the road to wisdom is through excess, he now claims that Gothic is really temperate and the Renaissance intemperate, and he does so by picturing temperance as the intense point at which restraint and release become indistinguishable -- a Golden Mean whose extremes are the two types of exhaustion exemplified by the Renaissance, repression and dissipation. The move is inevitable, given Ruskin's habit of viewing the virtues as modes of regulating energy -- the ethical counterpart, so to speak, of his dynamic Aristotelianism -- and as we will see, the theme becomes one of the leitmotifs of his career, from at least as early as "Moderation or the Type of Government by [116/117] Law" in Modern Painters II (where he calls it the most "essential" attribute of beauty because the "girdle and safeguard" of the rest) through such later books as Unto This Last and The Queen of the Air, where it is associated with Justice and then with Wisdom, personified by Athena. In the context of Gothic naturalism, Temperance is the "divine government" of the great artist and also that law by which organic beings move and develop according to their inherent nature. In Ruskin's thought this virtue occupies the place that Reason occupies for Blake -- as the bound and outward circumference of energy -- and so must be distinguished from repression as Blake distinguishes Reason from Urizenic laws.
That Temperance should be the ruling virtue of a writer so well known for his extravagance and his fondness for antitheses ought not to seem as strange as it does. On one hand, he tells us, his cast of mind is medieval in that it defines virtues in terms of opposing vices, but these oppositions often turn into spectrums in which the good acts as the synthesis of tendencies that are bad only in extremes. The tripartite structure sometimes imitates the organic cycle of growth, maturity, and decay, so that the interplay in Ruskin's thought between tripartite arcs and polar oppositions represents (to put it simply) the structural expression of his uneasy synthesis of organic philosophy with Evangelical morality. In The Stones of Venice the dialectical structure of paradise and fall accompanies an equally marked set of tripartite patterns: three volumes, three major periods, three zones in the map of Europe, at the center of which stands the Gothic. The Gothic is defined in terms of its antithesis, the Renaissance, but also in terms of its mediating position: it is the midpoint between Purism and Sensualism and also the zenith of Venetian history before Renaissance excess, the point when assertiveness meets reverence in the perfect harmony of self-government. In symbolic terms, the virgin and the strumpet meet in the synthesis I have associated with the Apocalyptic Marriage, which for Ruskin is also the moment when the self fully incorporates the world. Only at this point of synthesis can the body be accepted, and the human being taken "in its wholeness, in its mortal as well as its spiritual strength."
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Last modified December 2000