Chapter 4 of Part I to 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. The generations of men run on in the tide of Time
But leave their destined lineaments permanent forever & ever.-- William Blake, Milton
Modern Painters I abolishes art history and proposes aesthetic experience as a way of transcending time. The Stones of Venice, begun only seven years later, conceives of art in historical terms and history in terms of ineluctable loss. This shift exemplifies the more general distinction that Gerald Bruns has made between romantic and Victorian thinking -- the distinction between "a synchronic world of systematic relations" and "a diachronic world of processes and events." In this transition Modern Painters II does not quite belong to either world. The Christian revelation as Ruskin reads it in Renaissance art is a revelation of timeless truth, since the events represented in that art exist in time yet are typical or emblematic and so are not parts of an historical process. Nor does he discuss the history of style -- the Italian painters seem to exist (as the letters from Italy show) in a separate imaginative and spiritual dimension from the present, in a mythological rather than a historical past.
Yet the same letters show that time, both personal and historical, was Ruskin's major, indeed his obsessive, preoccupation during his months away from home: we have seen him studying Sismondi, mourning the [77/78] loss of childhood, and watching the daily deterioration of Italy's natural and human heritage. His passion for landscape in some sense obliterated the sufferings associated with human losses. Wendell Stacy Johnson has shown, for example, that in the poems about Adèle, natural imagery appears to relieve the pain of sexual conflict, and something of the same purpose no doubt underlay Ruskin's advocacy, in the letter to Liddell, of painters who "excite the passions little and have no historical effect; -- no carrying back into past time" (III, 676). But to remember is also to do the work of mourning in the sweetly painful experience of having and not having. In the diary he divided into Intellect and Feeling, for example, Ruskin occasionally mentioned Adèle in the first part (which he did not destroy) when a significant anniversary arrived, and so he dealt with her memory partly by suppression, partly by ritualizing. The theme of nostalgic memory makes its way into Modern Painters II in the section on contemplative imagination: "There is an unfailing charm in the memory and anticipation of things beautiful, more sunny and spiritual than attaches to their presence; for with their presence it is possible to be sated, and even wearied, but with the imagination of them never; in so far that it needs some self discipline to prevent the mind from falling into a morbid condition of dissatisfaction with all that it immediately possesses and continual longing for things absent" (IV, 289). "Beautiful" and "imagination" signal the relationship between the emotional and the theoretical issues. The imagination is the capacity for seeing what is not present, yet Ruskin also defines it as a "mode of regard" that "colours" what it so carefully contemplates. That coloring is presumably not the same as the "added" charm of remembered association. Earlier, Ruskin had insisted on the objective character of beauty wholly separate from mere personal or subjective fancies, and to do so he had invented the theoretic faculty. His difficulty appears in a letter he wrote his friend Henry Acland: "All this while, I am not denying the power-the great power-of association. It is twenty times more powerful than beauty, but it is not beauty" (XXXVI, 59).
To love both landscape art and human art, therefore, means for Ruskin to resolve the contradictions between inherent beauty and the pleasures of association, and between escape from time into transcendent realities and the immersion in time with its human love and losses. This resolution means an understanding of the emotional and epis [78/79] temological character of memory. And so the themes of time and memory ripple powerfully through Modern Painters II, sometimes on the surface and sometimes not, so that a book that began as a discourse on landscape ends as a prelude to the study of buildings, artifacts whose character changes with time. The book achieves no satisfactory reconciliation of the theoretical problem, but it does present a pair of symbolic reconciliations in the two schools of art that dominate his discussion of imagination, of which we have only discussed the first so far: the school represented by Tintoretto, chiefly associated with penetrative imagination, and the school represented by Angelico, associated with the contemplative imagination. To understand Ruskin's conception of architecture as an art of memory, we must begin with his idea of contemplation and the kind of beauty associated with it.
Bruns, Gerald. "The Formal Nature of Victorian Thinking," PMLA 90 (1975), 905.
Ruskin, John. Works. Ed. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903-1912.
Last modified December 2000