Section 2, Chapter 6, 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. In Ruskinian phenomenology, religion, the expanded sense of the term "landscape," is the history of the human imagination and its possibilities through changing cultural conditions. The faith of Modern Painters III rests on the transformation of ontological questions -- about God's existence, for example -- into a hypothesis about the fitting of mind and nature: the relative uniformity of the vision of nature through time, from the Greeks even to the great but faithless moderns, is an earnest that the world exists for us as permanent imaginative possibility. In short, Modern Painters III demonstrates how there can be a natural history of the imagination.
The historical anomaly most troubling to this project occurs in the second chapter devoted to Dante, which is ostensibly a survey of rock imagery in the Inferno. Ruskin reminds us that the love of mountains is a peculiarly modern taste: scenery we should delight in seemed to Dante "adapted only for the punishment of lost spirits." Consequently, the landscape of his hell is cloven into rocky chasms, without brightness or color. What seems to the moderns -- and to the ancient Hebrews -- the most concentrated sign of the divine presence seemed to the great [148/149] est Christian poet the sign of divine absence; Dante's Via Mala, moreover, is equivalent to Turner's St. Gothard, which gave him "the elements of his most terrible thoughts in mountain vision, even to the close of his life" (V, 296). The paradox calls into question not only the romantic sublime but the uniformity of religious myth itself.
In one respect Modern Painters IV is an extended meditation on this problem, a necessary supplement to the argument of Modern Painters III that develops into Ruskin's profoundest exploration of religious doubt. To follow him we must, once again, forge through an apparent miscellany of topics that are spectacularly uneven in interest. After five chapters on Turner's art in general, Ruskin provides a "transitional" chapter entitled "The Firmament," then proceeds through more than 250 pages of descriptive geology (somewhat resembling the architectural lessons in The Stones of Venice) before concluding with the famous pairing, "The Mountain Gloom" and "The Mountain Glory." But the remarks on rocks in Dante suggest to us that "mountain beauty" represents the material medium, so to speak, through which Ruskin will think out his new intuitions about faith, doubt, and imagination. He chooses stones and mountains for his medium because they are paradigmatic of the ambiguities of natural appearances in general, the objective correlatives, so to speak, of thought as a dialectical activity. In landscape as in architecture, stones may be either living or dead, tokens of the divine presence or the divine withdrawal. To the hard of heart, all things are lifeless as stones, but to the eye of faith, even the stones of the field rise together in living unity.
This stress on appearances marks a decisive shift from Modern Painters III. The two volumes of 1856 form a continuous argument, but a self-transforming argument that pivots on the phrase "science of aspects." The first tends to treat religion as the history of different modes of apprehending nature, different strong myths, so to say, degenerating into pathetic fallacy, which marks the modern failure of myth; the second volume tends to treat religion as the various modes of divine manifestation. Thus Ruskin barely finishes his chapter on cloudiness as a sign of modern faithlessness before starting a new volume in which cloudiness is viewed as the precondition of religious knowledge. In an analysis of the word "firmament" in the opening of Genesis, he explains that the firmament is the veil of clouds separating the earth from the blank infinity of space and therefore the medium, both metaphorically and literally, by which God accommodates Himself to limited human reason as a personality: "The Deity has stooped from His throne, and . . . in the person of the Father, taken upon Him the veil of our human thoughts, and permitted us, by His own spoken authority, to conceive Him simply and clearly as a loving Father and Friend" (VI, 110). But this is not God's only aspect. Of all created things, mountains [149/150] bear most vivid witness to Ruskin's culminating religious statement in this book: "Where the beauty and wisdom of the Divine working are most manifested, there also are manifested most clearly the terror of God's wrath, and inevitableness of His power" (VI, 416).
The same statement conveys the burden of Turner's art as Ruskin now understands it. It is as though Ruskin, having celebrated with Dante the vision of an Earthly Paradise, now descends with him to confront the witness of his gloomy precipices, discovering in that confrontation the only possibility of genuine religious myth for modern times. That myth must be tragic, as he shows in the important chapter on the "noble picturesque." The noble picturesque is the expression "of suffering, of poverty, or decay, nobly endured by unpretending strength of heart," not (as in the fashionable picturesque) the conversion of those subjects into a form of pleasurable quaintness. Ruskin introduces this distinction by contrasting the old tower of Calais, an enduring example of noble picturesque ruin, with the English preoccupation with gentility, tidiness, and smallness of scale -- each trait symptomatic, ultimately, of the denial of history. The English have only a "living present, consisting merely of what is 'fashionable' and 'old-fashioned'; and a past, of which there are no vestiges." Hence in England "the dead are dead to purpose." "But with us, let who will be married or die, we neglect nothing. All is polished and precise again next morning; and whether people are happy or miserable, poor or prosperous, still we sweep the stairs of a Saturday" (VI, 13-14). Once again Ruskin defends architectural memory as a way of preserving life, but by ranging the noble picturesque against fashionable English forgetting, he attacks not only the suppression of the past but also the suppression of suffering.
To experience one's own humanity, in other words, is to confront one's own suffering and to bind oneself, in pity and terror, to the facts of human suffering in general. Ruskin is in the position, at last, of understanding Turner as a tragic artist (as he might have done for Wordsworth also had he not already relegated Wordsworth to a secondary class of minds). His chief example is Turner's Goldau, a watercolor depicting a glorious sunset over a village that had once been devastated by earthquake, which suggests, in Ruskin's words, "an acute sense of the contrast between the careless interests and idle pleasures of daily life, and the state of those whose time for labour, or knowledge, or delight, is passed forever.... it is in the same tone of thought that he has placed here the two figures fishing, leaning against these shattered flanks of rock, -- the sepulchral stones of the great mountain Field" (VI, 381). Such an art transcends the sensibility even of the well-meaning lover of the picturesque, which in an implicit self-portrait Ruskin describes as a person of "slight tragical feeling" and "humble [150/151] and romantic sympathy" (VI, 21), who will nevertheless lend a hand to practical benevolences -- rather like the lover of landscape in the preceding volume. Such a person's love of ruins is nostalgic; the elegiac power of Goldau draws, on the other hand, on the unflinching strength of mind that Ruskin associates with the first order of poets, such as Homer. But Turner's power of acceptance is in a sense more awesome than Homer's, representing not pagan stoicism so much as a Hebraic negative capability, the simultaneous recognition of divine wrath and divine blessing. This is of course the Burkean sublime as well; even so, Ruskin still avoids the term, choosing instead to define the picturesque as a parasitical mode of the sublime -- parasitical because in depicting ruins and scenes of rural poverty, the artist transfers to small objects the formal qualities of sublime objects (such as jagged lines and rough textures). In this way he inscribes human artifacts with sublime associations while giving landscape new affective value: the mountains are endowed with historical language, the language of pathos, and this region becomes coextensive with all that fashionable English society must suppress. Goldau, then, epitomizes the landscape of Modern Painters IV, which is essentially a ruin -- that is to say, a grotesque.
The revelation toward which Ruskin's argument builds -- that this habitable earth is fallen and a ruin -- gives ironic fulfillment to his theory of the symbolic grotesque, which if we consider it again for a moment illuminates the character of his second Dantean journey of discovery. The theory of poetic inspiration in Modern Painters III differs only slightly from early romantic formulations except in the peculiarity that Ruskin retains the term "grotesque" for divinely inspired allegorical visions and links those visions with the contemplation of evil and the free play of fancy, specifically the kind of play exemplified in Gothic sculpture. One reason for this is no doubt Ruskin's own experience of a Gothic interior as the sculptured equivalent of an eerily pleasant "Gothic" nightmare. With its griffins and gargoyles lurking in odd corners, half shadow and half stone, a twilit cathedral could seem like a twilit grove, with its leaves and branches about to leap into phantasmagoric life -- as they do, for example, in Wordsworth's "Yew Trees," which Ruskin cites admiringly:
ghostly shapes
May meet at noontide; Fear and trembling Hope,
Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton
And Time the Shadow; there to celebrate
As in a natural temple...
United worship.
But the definition of "grotesque" is that which combines the ludicrous and terrible. By linking sublime allegory, such as the Divine Comedy [151/152] and the biblical Apocalypse, with the imaginations of humble and superstitious travelers, Ruskin deliberately risks blurring the distinction between fancy and genuine inspiration in order to reassert the Gothic acceptance of the Fall, his own version of the doctrine of accommodation -- and he also takes an important step, as Elizabeth Helsinger has observed, toward democratizing the sublime.13 Evil is somehow inherent in these revelations, not only because (in Ruskin's orthodox Evangelical explanations) God wishes to provide warning signs but also because to imperfect human sight, divine power is terrible and incongruous in aspect. The composite beasts of the Apocalypse are paradigmatic examples because the grotesque is itself a composite of the divine and the natural, like that other composite being, Christ. Thus, Ruskin concludes his chapter in Modern Painters III with a description of a "true griffin" copied from the cathedral of Verona, which springs convincingly to life by virtue of its forceful anatomical logic -- the grip of the claws, the use of the teeth, the position of the wings. Thus realized, the griffin, combining the eagle and the lion, is the type of the human and divine attributes of Christ, "narrowed" to the grotesque of an animal crushing in its paws a writhing dragon.
But the fearfulness of divine revelation lies less necessarily in its content than in the nature of its appearing. Symbols in themselves induce awe:
For even if the symbolic vision itself be not terrible, the scene of what may be veiled behind it becomes all the more awful in proportion to the insignificance or strangeness of the sign itself; and, I believe, this thrill of mingled doubt, fear, and curiosity lies at the very root of the delight which mankind take in symbolism.... [It is] the Divine Fear which necessarily) follows on the understanding that a thing is other and greater than it seems. [V, 181-182]
This "insignificance or strangeness" is actually the perception of an excess of significance, the dreadful moment when the instability of meaning is about to break forth into an overwhelming recognition. For Freud the uncanny is the experience of a repressed desire embodied by an external agent or action as the revelation of what has been hidden,14 [152/153] and indeed Ruskin comes close to this formulation at one point of his argument: in Joseph's dream, he says, the symbols of dominion "must have been afterwards felt by him as a distinctly prophetic indication of his own supreme power" (XI, 182).15 In later years, of course, Ruskin became obsessed with projections of a much more horrific nature -- the self confronted as serpentine, spectral, or skeletal -- in each case the enactment or punishment of a forbidden impulse recalling the phrase "Sphinx Atropos" that brought Marcolini to its premature termination. But in specifically religious revelations, the characteristic form of Ruskinian grotesque is the recognition that something is a type, a local concentration of an infinite power of good or evil. We recall the uncanny sense of things in "The Vestibule" that revealed themselves ultimately as types of the Fall, and the rather different experience near the fount of the Brevent, when objects were charged with the terror of an imminent disclosure.
In Modern Painters IV Ruskin enacts his own theory of the grotesque imagination, but to unexpected and ironic effect. Leading his readers through a geological exploration of the Alps, he combines in himself the sensibility of the practical man and the seer, for his stones shadow forth an awesome reality greater and other than themselves. That vision is parodic of Leah's, since Ruskin sees darkly and face to face: the marks of divine wrath and the even more terrifying marks of divine absence combine with studied ambiguity Old Testament monotheism [153/154] and a modern myth of God's withdrawal from the world. But the grimmest evidence of all lies in the conditions of Alpine poverty. Here, in the emotional climax of Modern Painters IV, Ruskin transmutes the primitive terror of seeing the self as deathly and alien into a vision of the human race as ossified and abandoned.
His apparent purpose in describing the structure of mountains is to provide evidence of a consistent order and intention, even in those parts of creation that appear repellent, by likening God to a picturesque architect who sculpts in four dimensions. But this theodicy is hardly reassuring. Ruskin tells his readers that he has immersed a wine flask in a small Alpine stream and has counted twenty-four grains of sediment, proving to him that the annual erosion of Alpine soil is on the order of 80,000 tons. For Lyell such a calculation would suggest the scope of one form of change only; for Ruskin it suggests a single and irreversible change that defines the direction of natural history: "The hills, which, as compared with living beings, seem 'everlasting,' are, in truth, as perishing as they..., and it is but the lapse of the longer years of decay which, in the sight of its Creator, distinguishes the mountain range from the moth and the worm." The world is a picturesque ruin -- "only the wreck of Paradise" -- but the origin to which Ruskin's evidences point is as terrifying and inconceivable as the ultimate conflagration. His language mingles biblical and scientific allusions: "As we endeavour to penetrate farther and farther into departed time, the thunder of the Almighty power sounds louder and louder; and the clouds gather broader and more fearfully, until at last the Sinai of the world is seen altogether upon a smoke, and the fence of its foot is reached, which none can break through" [VI, 179]. The monkish fear of the mountains seems confirmed: at the edge of intelligibility lies either the deity or the void. But in the dialectical shift of this book -- similar to the structural swing between hope and doubt in In Memoriam -- images of metaphysical terror alternate with comforting pieties as though in complete dissociation from one another. Thus, he is able to claim at the beginning of "The Mountain Gloom" that the study of mountain form has shown every feature to be "calculated for the delight, the advantage, or the teaching of men." Abruptly there follows one of Ruskin's most famous passages: a luxurious evocation of Alpine sublimity, bathed in light that seems the visible ministry of grace ("in its clear, consuming flame of white space, the summits of the rocky mountains are gathered into solemn crowns and circlets, all flushed in that strange, faint silence of possession by the sunshine"), juxtaposed against an image of human life utterly darkened and desolate:
For them, there is neither hope nor passion of spirit; for them neither advance nor exultation. slack bread, rude roof, dark night, laborious day, [154/155] weary arm at sunset; and life ebbs away.... their religion...mingled with threatening, and obscured by an unspeakable horror, -- a smoke, as it were, of martyrdom, coiling up with the incense, and, amidst the images of tortured bodies and lamenting spirits in hurtling flames, the very cross, for them, dashed more deeply than for others, with gouts of blood. [VI, 385; 387-389]
The mountain have achieved at last the condition of hell, where Christ himself appears not as the Redeemer but as the chief sufferer among the damned. The circuit of human and divine is broken, with the men as dead in spirit as those stones that are the type of all things cast out and condemned. In page after page Ruskin pursues his negative epiphanies: a chapel in the mountains containing a heap of bones; a shrine bearing images of demons; a Venetian actress wearing a death's head; German prints depicting dislocated joints and dismembered bodies. Ruskin's jeremiad hovers between loathing and compassion, as though unable to confirm whether the hearts of men are hardened or God has darkened His revelation. In his final word painting, he guides his reader through an Alpine village disfigured by every form of decay, then pauses behind the episcopal palace to note "a neglected vineyard, of which the clusters, black on the under side, snow-white on the other with lime-dust, gather around them a melancholy hum of flies" (VI, 414). The town, ironically named Sion, is a Catholic bishopric, so that the vineyard, powdery as a whited sepulchre, marks it as the type of ecclesiastical neglect and by extension of all suffering permitted by human indifference. But Ruskin has presented the earth itself as a ruin abandoned by its Master; the mountain slum, then, becomes the tragic reminder of God's promise, unredeemed, of a spiritual Zion.
The ambiguity of this passage, which is both an overt anti-Catholic diatribe and a covert rebuke to the Creator who has withdrawn, typifies the studied equivocation that pervades this book. For example, when describing God's manifestation to humans as a personality that punishes and blesses, Ruskin writes, "This conception of God, which is the child's, is evidently the only one which can be universal, and therefore the only one which for us can be true" (VI, 111). But the religion of Goldau is not a child's conception. Read on one level, Ruskin's argument reinforces at every turn an allegorical reading of nature as a system of rebukes and rewards. Read on another level, the argument denies every evidence of presence and purpose, building in 'The Mountain Gloom" to a climactic revelation of metaphysical evil. For Sion is not a noble picturesque but the exposure of blank and meaningless despair, demanding a response too urgent for the agencies of even the greatest art.
"For most men," Ruskin wrote in "The Moral of Landscape," "an [155/156] ignorant enjoyment is better than an informed one." By fracturing his audience into "most men" and an implied noble or unhappy few, he betrays his fear of unbelief by adopting a studied vacillation between stoical skepticism and a set of childlike pieties he cannot trust either himself or his audience to abandon completely. Yet we should not exaggerate this equivocation. The chief question of the present book (that is, the proper effect of natural beauty on the human mind) is of the most serious importance for "most men" as well as for Ruskin: for even though he was soon to abandon his belief in God, he never ceased insisting on the absolute necessity of religious experience -- that apprehension of human meaning in the natural world upon which, for him, both the moral life and the life of the imagination depend.
And so Modern Painters IV reconceives the world in mythical terms -- this time through the eyes not of the Greeks or the medievals or the great moderns but of the ancient Hebrews. Never before had Ruskin entered so deeply into the spirit of the prophets, even so far as to reenact their ascent to the high places, the altars of the Lord. The Hebrew deity, in His wrath and his mercy, becomes the mythical expression of the radical ambiguity of natural appearances, just as Ruskin's dialectical movement of thought imitates the alternating blessings and cursings of Old Testament prophecy -- or, more closely, the dialogues of Job. What man, Ruskin demands in "The Mountain Gloom," can "unravel the mystery of the punishment of NO sin? Can he entirely account for all that happens to a cab-horse?" (VI, 415). Like the Book of Job, Ruskin gives no direct answer.
Modern Painters III argued that religious myth held the power to provide meaning and affirmation in ages of belief. The fourth volume argues that great religious art in the nineteenth century must be tragic. It does not matter for such art whether we accept the geologists' hypothesis of creation or the biblical account of a forfeited paradise. The lesson of Sion is in any case the same: human redemption lies in human hands. And in either case the noble picturesque, both in landscape and in art, is a disturbing experience necessary to the soul's full moral awareness. This point Ruskin reaffirms in the strangely moving closing pages of "The Mountain Glory." For the coda to his book, he turns to the Bible, seeking instances of the spirit in communion with nature that can counterbalance the sundered communion of "The Mountain Gloom." He chooses three examples: the deaths of Aaron and Moses and the Transfiguration, which he pictures as the moment when Christ in his human character takes upon himself the human fear of death. That fear "had to be borne by Him, indeed, in a unity, which we can never comprehend, with the foreknowledge of victory, -- as His sorrow for Lazarus, with the consciousness of the power to restore him; but it had to be borne, and that in its full earthly terror." (VI, 464-465). [156/157] Ruskin began his book by juxtaposing the forgetfulness of death -- "the entire denial of all human calamity and care, in the swept proprieties and neatnesses of English modernism" (VI, 15) -- with the tower of Calais, a picturesque monument to lost time. He closes his book with the biblical paradigm of the victory over death through a full confrontation of it, and the image of the Mount of Transfiguration as a memorial to the divine sacrifice, God's accommodation to man in the flesh.
To "most men" mountains may seem graced with the remembrance of the Good Shepherd, whom they may imitate through kindly deeds. But in the course of years Ruskin come to see even more clearly that there could be another form of imitation, by which the unique experience of Christ becomes the emblem of the highest human self-actualization: the fear of death joined with the victory over it, and the sorrow for Lazarus joined with the restoration of him. Tragic awareness means incorporating into the self the divine wrath and the divine mercy and so to become an adult, not a child -- in the very act of accepting one's fallen mortality. Humankind must take the place of the deity that has withdrawn in order to rebuild the ruined earth. Doing so means that the science of aspects must center itself in the human mind, itself the locus of hell and chaos and Elysian fields. Such, at any rate, is Ruskin's mature humanism, expressed most movingly in the final volume of Modern Painters, when the "dark mirror" of the soul takes the place of the firmament:
So that the soul of man is still a mirror, wherein may be seen, darkly, the image of the mind of God.
"But this poor miserable Me! Is this, then, all the book I have got to read about God in?" Yes, truly so. No other book, nor fragment of book, than that, will you ever find; no velvet-bound missal, nor frankincensed manuscript; -- nothing hieroglyphic nor cuneiform; papyrus and pyramid are alike silent on this matter; -- nothing in the clouds above, nor in the earth beneath.
Therefore it is that all the power of nature depends on subjection to the human soul. Man is the sun of the world; more than the real sun. The fire of his wonderful heart is the only light and heat worth gauge or measure. Where he is, are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world. [VII, 260-262]
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Everyman Edition. London: Dent, 1967.
Landow, George P. The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.
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.)
Ruskin, John. The Diaries of John Ruskin. Ed. Joanne Evans and John Howard Whitehouse. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Last modified December 2000