Section 3, Chapter 8, 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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n the preface to The Political Economy of Art, Ruskin boasted that the only economist he read was Smith many years ago. Hostile reviewers of Unto This Last leaped on the admission in order to discredit Ruskin as an ignorant amateur, with the result that, while preparing his fourth essay, he apparently read the classical economists with the purpose of refuting them. "Ad Valorem" opens with a cross-examination of these texts, particularly Mill's, in which Ruskin demonstrates once and for all that, if his own mind was analytical, he had little better than a schoolboy debater's notion of logic. As John Fain and others have shown, the procedure is to quote haphazardly and out of context, to leap on isolated words and phrases, and incidentally to plagiarize the language and ideas of his sources, including Ricardo and Smith -- another example, presumably, of Apollo absorbing the Python. (Fain has demonstrated this point convincingly by comparing passages (pp. 144-145).) But in one feature of this repellent section, the quarrel with Mill's definitions, Ruskin exposes a real issue.
His essential complaint is vagueness. Thus Mill defines utility as "capacity to satisfy a desire, or serve a purpose"; but what kind of desire and what kind of purpose? Wealth includes "all useful and agreeable objects," but is a horse useful when no one can ride? Mill never defines "possession," but for Ruskin there are degrees of possession, including, at one extreme point, the corpse of St. Carlo Borromeo, with its gold crosier and cross of emeralds. The word "value," "when used without adjunct, always means, in political economy, value in exchange." Does this mean, Ruskin asks, that the rudders of two ships are valueless because they cannot be exchanged? His quibbles are easily refutable if we accept Mill's own explicit justification for abstract language in the moral sciences. His procedure, he says in The Principles of Political Economy, is to use words that often have normative meanings descriptively, not prescriptively ("useful" and "agreeable" apply simply to whatever people consider useful and agreeable, not necessarily to what is useful or agreeable in itself), and then to restrict their usual meanings to specialized senses useful for a specialized study ("value" therefore means only value in exchange). These abstractions, Mill then notes, must be qualified by "disturbing factors" when applied practically.[211/212] Homo economicus is one of these abstractions: when the economist speaks of people as desiring wealth, he is not necessarily claiming that people invariably and in all circumstances act according to their selfinterest. (For criticism of the idea of "disturbing factors" in applied economics, see Sherburne, - 120. Mill's theory of meanings and definitions appears in the System of Logic, book 1.) (These of course are the "disturbing factors" that Ruskin calls "affections.") Mill's procedure conforms to the modified empiricism of his System of Logic. There he claims that definitions are not of things in themselves but statements about meanings people normally attribute to words, and that general concepts are summations of particular instances, referring only to the sums of those instances that, in fact, may cohere by virtue of resemblance into what we call "classes." It follows that generalizations are valuable for their usefulness in a particular context, not for their power to describe things in themselves. This inductive theory of truth of course has obvious difficulties. When asked to define the essence of something, am empiricist might list the attributes found most often in a given class, but what if the object to be defined were human? One possible definition is "any featherless biped," to which we could add any number of other attributes, but how could we decide which quality, rationality or bipedality, was more important to humanness? How, in other words, should Bitzer condense his definition of the horse?
From the economist's point of view, the question is how far the inductive method, useful for natural science, can be adapted to the study of human beings. It has often been observed that Mill uses analogies from physics in the Principles ("disturbing forces" is borrowed from the concept of friction in the physical sciences), but the analogy runs deeper. Any attempt to create generalizations on the basis of recurrence, which may then be used instrumentally -- to predict or produce desired results -- implies, first of all, the conception of a self-sufficient and interdependent system and, second, the possibility of abstracting things so as to quantify them. Number tends to be the common denominator of all phenomena, which then have to be somewhat artificially viewed as units -- objects or motions. This idea suggests a second analogy. Marx, thinking of Hegel, called abstract logic the money of the mind. We might add that the inductive theory of meaning corresponds to the use of paper money in an economy. Like inductive generalizations, money translates objects into an abstract system of signification based on quantity; like inductive definitions, the relationship of money to things is arbitrary (definitions are what people take words to mean) and alters according to purposes outside the inherent value of things. For the capitalist and the scientist, things mean only what they need to mean for a specific purpose: as conceived by its [212/213] romantic critics, utilitarianism permits people to change meanings for selfish ends.
Ruskin's reformation of language attempts to overthrow arbitrary meaning by forging a necessary connection between words and the concrete reality, which -- since economics is a human science -- is the subjective human experience of things. However obscurely expressed, the attack on Mill is a denial that humans can be the object of a study without being subjects as well. Ruskin begins his reformation with what John Rosenberg calls his "humanization of the concept of value."
In classical economics the word "value" has relative meaning only. Like the word "is" in English grammar, it acts as the copula, putting things into relationship to each other. But in an actual economy the relationships shift like the croquet game in Alice: wages rise and fall according to "demand"; what fetched a pretty price yesterday is worthless today. Ruskin gives referential meaning to the term by means of etymology and word-association: "Valor, from valere, to be well or strong (ugianw);- -- strong, in life (if a man), or valiant; strong, for life (if a thing), or valuable. To be 'valuable,' therefore, is to 'avail towards life.' A truly valuable or availing thing is that which leads to life with its whole strength" (XVII, 84). From this definition flow several oppositions -- vanity to substance, "death, the Lord of Waste, and of eternal emptiness" to "Wisdom, the Lady of Saving, and of eternal fullness" (in turn associated with -- of all things -- the Madonna della Salute, also the name of a Venetian church), and wealth to illth. The effect of these [213/214] associations is to center a cluster of meanings on a conception of wellbeing that is both physiological and spiritual. In the theory of language Ruskin assumes (to which I will return later), definition rests not in accepted uses of a word but in the various meanings that descend from a root, which are related to each other and to similar words in a cluster that is the verbal equivalent of a grotesque. These relations correspond to relations in the real world, a world which -- exactly as in landscape -- is a world of essences, that is, of spiritual and physical energies.
In an almost literal sense, then, Ruskin's language stands to Mill's as dynamics to mechanics. Mechanics studies the interaction of matter and motion; the new science of dynamics studies the modifications of energy. Each of Ruskin's terms is active -- even "having," which is the "vital power to use" -- and the discussion of possession modulates into a discussion of use and ab-use of wine, of the body, of material value in general. By contrast, the strongest "force" in classical economics -- demand -- seems not even a force at all: the economists, Ruskin says, mean by "demand" "the quantity of a thing sold" whereas he means by it "the force of the buyer's capable intention to buy" (XVII, 84n). Later, in discussing price, he says that "the regulation of the purse is, in its essence, regulation of the imagination and the heart," a regulation to be determined by "quantity of wish" and "quantity of labour" (XVII, 94-95). And since the buyer's labor is his money, every element in economic life -- money, wealth, possession, labor, price, demand-becomes a manifestation of physical or moral energy capable of modification by other energies. All these energies are of course manifestations of human affections: Ruskin pictures the pattern of economic exchange as a materialization of character much as Pope does in the "Moral Epistles." The general term for these spiritual energies is Life, which takes the characteristic form of a struggle: "Labour is the contest of the life of man with an opposite; -- the term 'life' including his intellect, soul, and physical power, contending with question, difficulty, trial, or material force" (XVII, 95). Again, "THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration" (XVII, 105). But the activity of life is not only a struggle but a drive toward the creation of more life, since life is its own end. The motions of Ruskin's moral thermodynamics, therefore, take two typical forms: a pair of forces in creative opposition or fusion and a forward-bound or productive drive aimed at more strength and life. The simplest paradigm combining both movements is, of course, the union of man and woman to create a child.
The argument of "Ad Valorem" moves toward the triumph of Eros, as Hard Times ends in its defeat. In Ruskin's climax we see a new nation rising, like children coming to maturity and replacing the blocking [214/215] figures that had temporarily taken the place of wisdom and delight, just as a productive economy takes the place of the old limited economy founded on mere fraudulent exchange.In this respect, of course, Unto This Last presents the structure of comedy as defined by Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism, in particular 193, 181, 168-169, 171.12 In a sense Ruskin has just overthrown one set of blocking characters by refuting the bad economists, and we have seen that the third essay presents the wise ruler in the form of an allegorical portrait. The fourth essay presents an allegorical portrait of the bad capitalist by a reading of the Ixion myth:
Capital is the head, or fountain head of wealth -- the "well-head" of wealth, as the clouds are the well-heads of rain: but when clouds are without water, and only beget clouds, they issue in wrath at last, instead of rain, and in lightning instead of harvest; whence Ixion is said first to have invited his guests to a banquet, and then made them fall into a pit filled with fire; which is the type of the temptation of riches issuing in imprisoned torment, -- torment in a pit, (as also Demas' silver mine,) after which, to show the rage of riches passing from lust of pleasure to lust of power, yet power not truly understood, Ixion is said to have desired Juno, and instead, embracing a cloud (or phantasm), to have begotten the Centaurs; the power of mere wealth being, in itself, as the embrace of a shadow, -- comfortless... but in its offspring, a mingling of the brutal with the human nature: human in sagacity -- using both intellect and arrow; but brutal in its body and hoof, for consuming, and trampling down. For which sin Ixion is at last bound upon a wheel -- fiery and toothed, and rolling perpetually in the air; -- the type of human labour when selfish and fruitless (kept far into the Middle Ages in their wheel of fortune); the wheel which has in it no breath or spirit, but is whirled by chance only; whereas of all true work the Ezekiel vision is true, that the Spirit of the living creature is in the wheels, and where the angels go, the wheels go by them; but move no otherwise. [XVII, 99-101]
In this thickly woven grotesque -- Ruskin would produce a great many more, to the eternal confusion of his readers -- the psychic substructure of his argument bursts to the surface, providing in cryptic[215/216] form a diagnosis of the human soul deformed by avarice. We notice first that the Centaurs show both of the vices of capitalism, rapacity and deceit, which they "inherit" from the father's two sins, murder and lust; yet they are parthenogenic offspring, the product of a man and a cloud, or of a man and his phantasm, so that although Ixion has produced a race he is still "fruitless and selfish," having actually propagated himself as so many sins. As for the first of these crimes, Ruskin's editors note that in the Pindaric source, Ixion is "the first among the heroes to shed blood of kin craftily" (like Cain in the biblical tradition), the kinsman being Ixion's father-in-law. An oedipal pattern now comes clear: Ixion kills his father-in-law, then indulges in forbidden lust -- the original of the lust for riches (but with an odd reversal of the oedipal situation: "lust of pleasure" Ruskin attributes to the murder, "lust of power" to the attempted rape). Both sins combine delusion and violence. By implication, the avarice of the capitalist is a compelled repetition of kinsman murder (competition) and misdirected lusts (greed that cannot be satiated). Men kill their kin for money, but the unsatiated hunger turns them to beasts. Clouds and flatulence, moreover, become the type of vanity -- desire unappeasable because misdirected: clouds issue in wrath and lightning, Ixion embraces a cloud, Geryon grasps the air, and in a footnote, Dante's Plutus collapses like a sail swollen with wind (which suggests to Ruskin "the sudden and helpless operation of mercantile panic" -- boom and bust, in a word). The wheel of Ixion combines both the natural elements of his sins, fire and air, becoming in effect a mechanized storm cloud. Ixion has become his own bondage, since his body has turned into a machine, not a living thing -- in contrast to the vision of Ezekiel, which, like an organic system, is empowered from within. The mechanics of guilt, in other words, is regressive, dooming the sinner to enact his transgression forever in symbolic form. By extension, the whole capitalist system is such an obsessive repetition, ruled (as Ruskin says elsewhere) by Tisiphone, the goddess of retribution. We have here in brief the connection between money, guilt, compulsion, and repetition traced by Freud as well as something else: the two crimes, the acting out of infantile fantasy by an adult, are themselves regressions. The spiritual perversion of Mammonism is a solipsistic relationship to time.13
Ixion is the tragic prototype of wasted labor and destructive life. In the immediately preceding passage Ruskin offers as a parallel to this myth an account of fruitless goods. Like the man who reproduces himself[216/217] by embracing a phantasm, unproductive capital, according to Ruskin, is an aggregation of bulbs ("root producing root; bulb issuing in bulb, never in tulip; seed issuing in seed, never in bread"); or again, Prince Rupert's drops, "consummated in powder" (these playthings are bits of ground glass that explode when dropped); or yet again, like a plowshare reproducing other plowshares: "however the great cluster of polypous plough might glitter in the sun, it would have lost its function of capital." But the true purpose of the plow is "to grow bright in the furrow; rather with diminution of its substance, than addition, by the noble friction" (XVII, 98-99). The covert sexual implications of this imagery recall Steven Marcus's discussion of "genital economy" -- the Victorian belief that sexual energy is limited and in perpetual danger of diminishment -- corresponding precisely to a conception of economics as a science of scarcity.14 But for Ruskin, scarcity, both erotic and economic, is but the creation of hoarding. The image of physiological horror renders Benthamite "self-interest" into a gruesome pun (it is the self recreating itself in debased form like money), an antithetical generativity that is both sterile and monstrous, deriving from an absolute alienation of the body that then loses its proper function. (The "idiotic" body is useless to the state since, Ruskin tells us, "idiot" in Greek means "a person entirely occupied with his own concerns" [XVII, 87].) And of course the delusion of avarice is a vain wish to derive sustenance from one's own desires -- the economists, for example, are "like children trying to jump on the heads of their own shadows; the money-gain being only the shadow of the true gain, which is humanity" (XVII, 102). Once again the airy produce of the pedant combines with the filthy produce of the miser. Finally, the parthenogenic product is destructive of life, issuing ultimately in war. Like a sexual perversion, "self-interest" is unnatural, producing ultimately and on the largest scale the materialized form of the Death-instinct in our time.
To this morbid procreation Ruskin opposes the generation of life -- human fertility integrated into the cycle of vegetation. As the bulb issues in flower and the plough labors for grain, so is childbearing the type of all "positive" labor: "While the wife is said to be as the vine (for cheering), the children are as the olive branch, for praise: not for praise only, but for peace (because large families can only be reared in[217/218] times of peace): though since, in their spreading and voyaging in various directions, they distribute strength, they are, to the home strength, as arrows in the hand of the giant -- striking here and there far away" (XVII, 97-98). Rearing, not begetting, Ruskin says in a footnote: "The praise is in the seventh season, not in OZOQY]l05, nor in ~UTakta, but in oZ(i)Qa" (XVII, g7n). In Galen's seven seasons, the year begins in spring, with the rising of the shoot in the ground, and ends with futalia (planting). But by making the third season (opora, the dog days, or season of ripe fruit) the seventh, Ruskin imagines a year beginning with planting and culminating with the fruit -- just as conception fulfills itself in the "flower" of the child. In antithesis to the Centaurs, who throw the arrows of disruption, the human family is at peace; its "arrows" are the slow strength of growth through time and space. But procreation is only a special case, though the perfect "type," of generativity, which is the dominant activity of the productive economy. Gradually the metaphorical weight of Unto This Last has shifted from wealth to life (which is wealth viewed from a different angle), conceived first as a nourished and flowing energy, then as a growing energy. In the rhythm of continuous growth, there are two "beats," production and consumption. Of true production, Ruskin says, there are two kinds: "one of the seed, and one food; or production for the Ground, and for the Mouth.... And since production for the Ground is only useful with future hope of harvest, all essential production is for the Mouth; and is finally measured by the mouth; hence . . . consumption is the crown of production; and the wealth of a nation is only to be estimated by what it consumes" (XVII, 101). As the seed is to the flower and as conception is to the child and as the arrow of desire is to fulfillment, so is production to consumption, a cycle that repeats along with the seasons. In The Political Economy of Art, the central image was the storehouse, or "true" granary binding past and future, which actually creates its "store" by giving out. The dominant schema of Unto This Last is a similar circulating system, in which true saving is distribution and wealth is consumed not by the moth and rust but by the human. I speak of the substance of that flow as energy rather than matter, because matter is understood through its parts (it is analyzed), but energy is understood through its manifestations; and the four essays, building on one another, have treated that energy as affection, wealth, just nourishing and growing life (food and man). The subject of bad political economy, however, is lifeless and inert matter -- "money-gain" not "mouth-gain." To confuse the two is to repeat the punishment of Midas, for whom excrement becomes aliment, but in Ruskin's alchemy, nature is converted from excrement to the gold that truly nourishes.
No wonder that modern man needs to learn how to content himself. For the ideology miscalled political economy is at bottom an attack on [218/219] the body and its needs, a blocking of nourishment by the products of vanity and of the peaceful and natural circuit of life energy by the desires of vanity. The Mammonist gospel divorces body and spirit, starving both: the rich are told that the only pleasures are basely material, the poor that the only holiness is renunciation. Ruskin's response is to reintegrate body and soul, making nature man's spiritual body. That body is organic. In Ruskin's myth of Ixion, what cannot grow or change seems condemned to duplicate itself; what cannot participate in the social body must embrace its own vanities (hoard). The connection between the mechanical and the offalous asserts itself when we see that self-duplication and compelled repetition ("bulb issuing in bulb" in one image pattern; the race of Centaurs and Ixion's wheel in another) have their social expression in the factory system of "The Nature of Gothic" -- men as parts, labor as palsied repetition. Ixion, I said above, has a solipsistic relationship to the past; the natural cycle, on the other hand, pushes ever forward -- children are arrows pressing into the future. Eros belongs to the present, ever consummating itself in the future. Earlier, we saw that the debt structure of money binds the poor to the rich and that mechanical exchange decrees that every man's wealth is someone else's need. Ruskin nowhere says so explicitly, yet his own image pattern strongly suggests that the productive economy frees humans from the bondage of debt and want and therefore from guilt and repression. The social system no longer springs from an original weakness and debt. Time is redeemed. For if time is money, it disappears the moment it is spent; hoarded, it turns into the delusions of Ulro (as money turns to illth). But time redeemed is wealth. On St. Mark's, wealth comes alive in the marble spray, which is the arrest of the temporal flux; in the productive economy, time is not arrested but flows onward in wealth, like a golden river.
For there is "no Wealth but Life": "That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others" (XVII, 105). This passage, the climax of all Ruskin's social thought, confounds material goods with spiritual and possession with power, by means of the biblical paradox that to lose oneself is to save oneself. It means that the split between subject and object is healed -- that what one is, what one does, what one gives, what one loves, are in the state of fulfillment a unity. It means many things, in fact, for the tremendous power of the aphorism is simply Unto This Last concentrated into six words. We can sum up at least three of Ruskin's several arguments, however, by three paraphrases of "There is no Wealth but Life": it means, first, that all things are valuable only as they serve real human needs; second, that spiritual [219/220] fulfillment is the experience of life energy both given and possessed, both expressed and preserved; and third, that the only true aim of an economic system is the raising of children and the manufacture of souls. It has yet another meaning suggested by the pages that follow, which form a kind of coda envisioning the productive economy extending throughout the land.
The habitable zones of the earth, Ruskin says, will then "be loveliest in habitation."
The desire of the heart is also the light of the eyes. No scene is continually and untiringly loved, but one rich by joyful human labour; smooth in field; fair in garden; full in orchard; trim, sweet, and frequent in homestead; ringing with voices of vivid existence. No air is sweet that is silent; it is only sweet when full of low currents of under sound -- triplets of birds, and murmur and chirp of insects, and deep-toned words of men, and wayward trebles of childhood. As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary; -- the wild flower by the wayside, as well as the tended corn; and the wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle; because man doth not live by bread only, but also by the desert manna; by every wondrous word and unknowable work of God. [XVII, 111]
What saves this passage from pastoral sentimentality is the multiplicity of its references. It seems that if the agricultural sector of the English economy is expanded to feed everyone adequately, the agrarian paradise will also correspond to a Paradise within, since an economy of abundance and cooperation will fulfill the spiritual craving of which the landscape hunger is one symptom and so, in a sense, will erase the divorce of city and country -- partly because all production will follow an agricultural paradigm, that is, will be production for the mouth. Man will then be naturalized and nature humanized, because the love of beauty and the need of the body will be consummated at once, as aspects of each other. This immediacy of fulfillment, unknown in the fallen world except in the infant's bond with its mother, I take to be one meaning of "The desire of the heart is also the light of the eyes," a sentence worthy to stand beside a proverb of Solomon's or Blake's. But nature is redeemed as well: There is no natural wealth without human life, and no human wealth that does not flow from the life of nature. (In Blake's words, "Nature without man is barren.'')15
[220/221]We come now to the last pages of all, in which Ruskin develops the theme of the "law of the house" through the familiar image of Wisdom: "thus it is said of Wisdom that she 'hath builded her house, and hewn out her seven pillars'; and even when. . . she has to leave her house and go abroad, her paths are peace also" (XVII, 113). Wisdom connects the house and the landscape, a center of peace expanding like ripples to make the world a garden and the household a world. The figure, as we have already seen in The Political Economy of Art, is a virtual commentary on the eighth and third chapters of Proverbs, picturing Wisdom both as housewife and as God's helpmate during the Creation. The phrase "the light of the eye" also alludes to her (Ruskin's editors compare it with Proverbs 15:30: "The light of the eyes rejoices the heart"), and there is perhaps an allusion to the creation passage in the description of the heavenly eagle "gazing forever on the light of the sun of justice." The eye of the eagle, we recall, is the just souls who are "to the whole human race, as the light of the body, which is the eye"; the "light of the body," however, is a phrase from the Sermon on the Mount ("The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness"). The image and the phrases return in the final sentences of the book, when Ruskin's poetic vision achieves its culmination:
but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold. Raise the veil boldly; face the light; and if, as yet, the light of the eye can only be through tears, and the light of the body through sackcloth, go thou forth weeping, bearing precious seed, until the time come, and the kingdom, when Christ's gift of bread, and bequest of peace, shall be "Unto this last as unto thee." [XVII, 114]
[221/222]In an essay on the Crystal Palace, Ruskin had imagined paupers appearing at a London dinner party, as though to rebuke those who were taking bread from their dying lips. The aim of Unto This Last is to lift the veil of willful blindness separating rich and poor, living and dying -- to make these unbidden guests members of a household that is also a nation -- and so, if necessary, to exchange the blindfold for tearful sight and the selfish bounty for sackcloth. The penitent bearing seed personifies the imminent period of abnegation before luxury "innocent and exquisite" can be possible for all and so harkens back to the Sybil of Modern Painters V, seen in the twilight of mourning and bearing the dust of the future. But the penitent also resembles our forebears leaving Eden and looks forward to the seeing "face to face" and, perhaps, the resurrection of the body. For "Raise the veil boldly" suggests clothing as well as a curtain. The spread of wealth to all would then be the transformation of the social body into that perfect organic system of which the crystal and the individual human body are the types, just as the Sybil Deiphobe is the body, so to speak, of human hope.
If such is Ruskin's meaning, it is a fit conclusion to his vision of individual and social transcendence, in which erotic energy is released through social affections and productive labor and in which the human experience of the world as alienated possession is replaced by sensuous interchange. But the vision is always practical as well. Ruskin's title bears what he elsewhere called a materialist reading of Scripture: the biblical parable is an allegory of the kingdom of heaven, the "last" being the latest convert to Christ, whereas Ruskin's kingdom is fulfillment in this world, attainable only through effort and sacrifice. In its most personal aspect, his social gospel follows upon the renunciation of hopes the older gospel once sustained -- a facing down of things seen through tears: the suffering of the poor, the withdrawal of God, the finality of death, the fear as well as the beauty of the body. This is the felix culpa of Ruskin's tragic humanism.
Considered in such light, Unto This Last stands at the end of a great cycle of books. If we consider all the major works of 1851-1860, which I have called Ruskin's great decade, it is possible to see a single large movement, broken at many points, that begins with the rise and fall of a Venetian Paradise and concludes in a qualified vision of a redeemed kingdom that will survive the judgment upon the old. If we think of the books as prophecies, The Stones of Venice fits the type of the prophecy against Tyre. The later Modern Painters follows the fall of Judah, mingling sorrow with comfort, and Unto This Last, finally, preaches the flowering of the desert and the building of the Temple -- the Temple, specifically, of Solomon as beheld by Sheba, except that the new Jerusalem will be splendid in the extent, not the glitter, of its wealth and the new rulers will be Princes of Peace. We might argue that these works [222/223] comprise the most ambitious approach in Victorian literature to a national epic, the product, it is important to note, not of an eccentric dreamer but of a true son of his times. The power and failures of Ruskin's social vision, as well as its perplexing mingling of boldness and reaction, come largely from its being an expression, as epics are, of the national dream. Ruskin far more often opposed what his countrymen practiced than what they preached-the disparity between the two results in a mixture of rebuke and conciliation. For Ruskin, the Victorians preached the submission of women, laborers, and children, the sacredness of home, the purity of sex, the grace of social behavior, the possible greatness of the nation, the spread of the Empire, the increase of wealth, and the authority of the Bible; they practiced the greed of riches, the hatred of the body, the starvation of the poor, the pollution of nature, and the authority of "political economy." In assailing the pride of the nation, Ruskin was working in a long-established tradition; by taking with extreme literalness the professions of the nation, he appeared mad. Unto This Last is an attempt to purify that nation through rebuke. By the same token, the book that acts out the beginning of a filial rebellion also carries the image of the elder Ruskins within it: by speaking in the persona of a merchant of wisdom and a "helpful" saint, he absorbs and perfects his parents for his own purposes.
Sherburne, James. Ruskin, or, The Ambiguities of Abundance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 237.
Carlyte. Sartor Resartus, Everyman Edition, (London: Dent, 1967), 29.
Tennyson, G. B. Sartor Called "Resartus" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 266.
Frye, Northrop. The Great Code (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982), chap. 1.
Last modified December 2000