Section2, Chapter 11, of the author'sof 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 his introduction, Ruskin tells his readers that Proserpina and Deucalion are Greek myths of the betrayal and redemption corresponding to the Hebrew myths of Eve and Noah. Deucalion, survivor of a universal deluge, was told by the oracle that he could repopulate the earth by throwing behind him the bones of his mother, that is to say, the stones of the earth -- "lifeless seeds of life," Ruskin calls them elsewhere (XXVI, 555). It follows that geology, like Turnerian landscape, is a kind of anatomy of our mother, but one that traces out the living lineaments, not one that analyzes her into dust.
The antithesis of life and death also governs Ruskin's antithesis of myth to theory: myth records "a natural impression on the imaginations of great men" and theory "an unnatural exertion of the wits of little men."
The writings of modern scientific prophets teach us to anticipate a day when even these lower voices shall be also silent; and leaf cease to wave, and stream to murmur, in the grasp of an eternal cold. But it may be, that rather out of the mouths of babes and sucklings a better peace may be promised to the redeemed Jerusalem... at the gates of the city, built in unity with herself, and saying with her human voice, "My King cometh."[XXVI, 99]
As in Modern Painters IV, stones emerge paradigmatically as antithetical signifiers, the things that may be either living or dead, while geology emerges as the paradigm of antithetical perception. In allegorical terms, the higher forms are dead at the present moment, as after the Flood, but the stones and the minerals (which, as Herbert says, marry "earth and plants" [XXVI, 344]) may knit together into a new race. Once again seeing, for Ruskin, is alchemy: the "eternal cold" of Dante's Caina (mentioned at XXVI, 346) is the ultimate "prophetic" vision of "theory," but the Heavenly City, like Deucalion's conversion of stones to seed, is the ultimate vision of the mythopoeic imagination -- a new form of Wordsworth's "apocalyptic marriage" of mind and nature. The self can be redeemed only by knowing the world truly, and the world can be redeemed only by knowing the self truly. It follows that the writing of Ruskin's geological diary becomes part of its subject.5 In [274/275] a playful moment, he claims he is presently planning seventy-four volumes (a Babel enterprise, evidently) and then calls his present works a "heap of loose stones collected for this many-towered city which I am not able to finish." Deucalion, then, as the "fragments of good marble... useful to future builders" (XXVI, 96), corresponds to the bones of the Mother and also, perhaps, to the sowing of the author's own seeds as the figurative offspring of the marriage. By attempting once again to make nature humanly available to human viewers and to rescue it from all in modern science that renders it abstract, frightening, and inhuman, Ruskin also attempts to vindicate his own way of seeing, his own right to speak as an elder statesman of the mountains.
Throughout the fragmented heterogeneity of Deucalion, Ruskin attempts again and again to construct an affective language that will compete with the scientists' purely empirical procedures. In one chapter he proposes to codify stones in the form of a grammar, and in another chapter, as an alphabet.6 Most interesting for our purposes is the particular style, at once ruminative, associative, and elliptical, that becomes general in the writings of the 1870s and 1880s -- the style that seems to present, as Rosenberg has remarked, the "lineaments of thought without the intervening medium of words" (Rosenbeerg, p.187). One particularly homely and memorable example is the chapter on silicas of lava, an [275/276] extended grotesque that quickly takes on the character of a diarist's private mutter. He has walked, Ruskin tells us, on "ghastly slags" of lava, where he practically burned his soles, slags that have congealed from the liquid state into
ropy or cellular masses, variously tormented and kneaded by explosive gas; or pinched into tortuous tension, as by diabolic tongs, and are so finally left by the powers of Hell, to submit themselves to the powers of Heaven, in black or brown masses of adamantine sponge without water, and horrible honey-combs without honey, interlaid between drifted banks of earthy flood, poured down from merciless clouds whose rain was ashes. [XXXVI, 234]
As in Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," Ruskin builds his evocation of sterility by conjuring up absence. There is no honey or water, the clouds are not merciful, the flood is not a flood, the rain is not rain. The lava is kneaded, but it is not bread; it is cellular, but there is no life. The basic analogy of earth and water calls upon hunger and thirst, then denies it by the evocation of dryness. There is no moral pretext for the description, as there would have been in Fors, and yet it suits the mood of the rest of the chapter. There Ruskin's mind lurches back and forth in stubborn irritability. He demands answers, "with illustrative specimens," from the geologists. He rails at the infirmities of himself and others (he is "weary of . . . losing the powers of observation and thought which are connected with the complacency of possession, and the pleasantness of order" [XXVI, 236]). He harps on his age ("but I find silica enough . . . for my life, or at least for what may be left of it" [XXVI, 235]). In these dry thoughts of a dry season, rock seems transformed into the medium of prose, which then becomes its own subject, the condition of a particularly crabbed music.
But the most pervasive subject of Ruskin's tactile music is glacial ice. A glacier, he says, building a characteristic matrix of metaphors, is "a tide which takes a year to rise, a cataract which takes fifty to fall, a torrent that is ribbed like a dragon, and a rock that is diffused like a lake" (XXVI, 163n). But in a series of kitchen experiments, relating the frigid and vast to the cozy and domestic, he builds mountains out of blancmange and presses dough hills into folds; one "mellifluous glacier" of honey flowed across his plate through "magnificent moraines composed of crumbs of toast" (XXVI, 162). The Alps are themselves "one great accumulation of ice-cream" poured out like "melted sugar... on the top of a bride-cake." Remarks such as these fall into a strange mix of the earnest and the playful, as though Ruskin were parodying the scientists in the very attempt to upstage them. At another point he dines in a Swiss hotel, "disturbed partly by the invocation... of calamity on the heads of nations, by the howling of a frantic [276/277] wind from the Col; and partly by the merry clattering of the knives and forks of a hungry party in the salon" (XXVI, 219). His remarkable aside, revealing in a flash two worlds of consciousness, recalls his early remark that, in the grotesque, the mind "plays with terror, and summons images which, if it were in another temper, would be awful, but of which, either in weariness or in irony, it refrains for the time to acknowledge the true terribleness" (XI, 166). Here the clattering of knives and howling of winds correspond to the avalanches of honey, as though Ruskin were using the kitchen to shore up the fear of elemental forces and the desolate world discovered by the natural sciences, but his absorption with the ooze and fall of treacle also suggests something else -- an aging man's symbolic play with the inexorable, embodied in a child's treat.
In the structure of Deucalion as a whole, the motion of ice unites the flow of thought with the flow of time. Like time, glaciers fascinate Ruskin because they move yet seem not to move. The Alpine snows, for example, "will lie in the hollows like lakes, and clot and cling about the less abrupt slopes in festooned wreaths of rich mass and sweeping flow"; yet this charmed stasis is deceptive.
Yet never for an instant motionless -- never for an instant without internal change, through all the gigantic mass, of the relations to each other of every crystal grain. That one which you break now from its wave-edge, and which melts in your hand, has had no rest, day nor night, since it faltered down from heaven when you were a babe at the breast; and the white cloud that scarcely veils yonder summit... has strewed it with pearly hoar-frost, which will be on this spot, trodden by the feet of others, in the day when you also will be trodden under feet of men, in your grave. [XXXVI, 1 34-135]
To give a sense of such slowness, Ruskin cites measurements -- the glacier moves two feet a day, an inch an hour, three times slower than the minute hand of a watch -- then concludes, "Between the shores of the vast gulf of hills, the long wave of hastening ice only keeps pace with that lingering arrow [i.e., the minute hand], in its central crest; and that invisible motion fades away upwards through forty years of slackening stream, to the pure light of dawn on yonder stainless summit, on which this morning's snow lies -- motionless" (XXVI, 135). "Motionless" brings us back to "yet never for an instant motionless" and emphasizes the contrast between motion that is frozen ("sweeping flow" and "breaking away," above) and ice that is moving, however imperceptibly. One paragraph moves forward to death and backward to birth, encompassing both limits of human time; the next paragraph freezes forty years in a single view, yet collapses time at the mountain peak, since the peak is at once forty years "back" and as recent as this [277/278] morning. Both paragraphs create an almost mystic sense of visual mastery over time even as the viewer is humbled before an object that will survive him almost indefinitely. The glacier, then, allows the viewer to put himself into an extraordinary and paradoxical relationship to time, while the icy flow finally becomes the flow of consciousness itself -- inscrutable when examined, immense in its cumulative effect.
Around the glacier as a figure for inexorability, the book sets up a double scheme of historical discontinuities -- between the human present and the remembered past, and between the human past and geological antiquity. Nowadays, according to Ruskin, tourists plunge through the Alps in trains, flourish Alpenstocks, and pass off seeing nothing. "We used to do it differently in old times," he declares, showing his audience Turner's first study of the Lake of Thun (XXVI, 111), where a boat sails peacefully across a crystalline surface. Both art and memory occupy a timeless region of imaginative experience, which is shattered in the present: the blindness of the mechanized tourist is a symptom like the visions of materialist science -- the boiling of seas, the heaving of mountains, the extinction of monstrous beasts, all of which Ruskin would banish by a kind of visual bracketing. "I do not care, -- and I want you not to care," he tells his students, "how crest or aiguille was lifted.... I do care that you should know ... in what strength and beauty of form it has actually stood since man was man" (XXVI, 113). Seen in this way, the world is restored as an ancient and familiar place, "practically eternal," with its local traditions and names that endure for longer than we shall know: "But yonder little rifted well in the native whinstone by the sheepfold, -- did the grey shepherd not put his lips to the same ledge of it, to drink -- when he and you were boys together?" (XXVI, 121) The point is strengthened by a theoretical contribution of Ruskin's own: streams, he asserts, do not wear down their beds, but gradually fill up the valleys, so that in fifty years he has recognized no change in any of his "old dabbling-places." As in Modern Painters IV Ruskin insists that the earth's decline is inexorable: "All character is being gradually effaced; all crooked places made straight, -- all rough places plain; and among these various agencies . . . none are so distinct as that of the glacier" (XXVI, 123). As interpreted by Ruskin, Lyell's three eras correspond roughly to his own theory of the cresting and decline of nations, so that Deucalion transfers to the Alps the time scheme of The Stones of Venice. Thus, he has it both ways: just as the glacier, when we watch it, appears to move and not to move, so does the clock of the earth. If we bracket at one end of the time flow the revelations of atheist science (a kind of Apocalypse before Creation) and at the other the equally hideous depredations of recent civilization, we will find the works of men most worthy of enduring figured in an Edenic valley that is "practically eternal." [278/279]
So far Ruskin's quarrel with science seems
but a vague attack on a state of mind, since he has found no means to question
the methods of the geologists, or their findings, or their prestige as discoverers
and theorists. This opportunity came in the controversy over glacial movement.
In 1843 James David Forbes published the theory on which Ruskin's poetic description
of glaciers is based -- the theory that ice, although
apparently brittle, behaves as a viscous substance when subjected to steady
pressure. In the 1860s John Tyndall, on the suggestion of Huxley, proposed an
alternative view, drawing upon recent discoveries in mechanics, particularly
Michael
Faraday's theory of regelation. The resulting controversy was bitter even
by the standards of the times, partly because Forbes was accused of failing
to acknowledge his predecessors. Of Forbes's challengers, Tyndall was by far
the most distinguished. An articulate advocate of philosophical materialism
and a brilliant physicist, whose theories had beneficent practical applications,
he was also a passionate lover of nature -- he had published his own record
of Alpine travels in a poetic, descriptive mode not unlike Ruskin's -- and the
only scientist to become a close friend of
Carlyle's. In several
ways, then, he was Ruskin's scientific counterpart, if not indeed a type of
the practical, sturdy man of science praised in Modern Painters III.
Stung perhaps by unconscious rivalry, Ruskin chose to make Tyndall the focus
of attack by entering the defense of Forbes, exactly as he had entered the defense
of Turner thirty years before, picturing Tyndall
as an arrogant johnny-come-lately and Forbes as the traduced representative
of the "old ways," of a science modest, accurate, and loving. The
hysteria of Ruskin's diatribe suggests the degree to which he displaced onto
the glacier question his generalized rage at an atheistic and technological
society and, more deeply still, the fear of his own diminished power and uncontrollable
anger. [279/280]
The centerpiece of his attack appears in "Thirty Years Past," which defines the glacier question as essentially a conflict between past and present and between vision and desecration. The chapter is as remarkable for its emotional disequilibrium as for its mastery of structure. The title refers to an incident in 1844, when Ruskin and his parents met Forbes by chance during their travels in Switzerland. (It also alludes to the subtitle of a Scott novel and therefore indirectly to the fact that Forbes was the son of Scott's "first love"; Forbes is thus made to occupy the timeless region of Ruskin's boyhood reading and his boyhood visits to Scotland.) The old geologist appears in this chapter through a haze of memory as he and the Ruskins fall into conversation in a hotel. Afterward we follow young John on a morning hike up the fresh slopes of yesteryear. The rest of the narrative interlaces past and present with the skill of the best Fors letters: Ruskin in the present reads Dante as his coach climbs the slopes (in the poem Bernard is looking down from Paradise upon an unused Jacob's ladder and the disarray of the order he founded), then beholds the sky clear over the Aletsch glacier ("the intermittent waves of still gaining seas of light... as if on the first day of creation" [XXVI, 226], or indeed as if looking down from the celestial spheres), only to have his epiphany befouled when a guide shows him a "hôtel" built by Professor Tyndall on the Bell Alp -- a sight that stirred up "every particle of personal vanity and mean spirit of contention which could be concentrated in one blot of pure black ink" (XXVI, 227). The scientific Hotel is a nest of philosophical fleas, "puces des glaces," facing the house of Christian Hospitallers that now lies vacant. The connections in the passage are typically complex: the empty hospice recalls St. Bernard and the lapsed orders, a symbol of the age of faith like Arnold's Grande Chartreuse; Forbes appears as a great shape from the past, like Bernard, quiet, dignified, and absorbed; spiritual aspiration is succeeded by earthly ambition, as the "philosophers," prophets of a new religion of materialism, swarm over the glacier they desecrate like antithetical angels on a frozen ladder.
The image is a moment of Faulknerian horror, seeming to mark the death of the romantic dream of nature. As for Tyndall, he is a poor writer, a sloppy draftsman, and a dishonest controversialist -- a "scum of vanity," "unsteadied by conceit, and paralyzed by envy," and so forth. The attack on Forbes's opponents is an attack on discontinuity, but the defense of Forbes is a defense of continuity, of which the discussion of continuous flow in nature is the unconscious emblem. In addition to the kitchen experiments mentioned above (themselves borrowed from Tyndall), Ruskin analyzes the process of flow by tireless verbal qualifications and distinctions. There is, for example, the "perfect and absolute plasticity of gold," "the fragile, and imperfect... plasticity of clay, and, most precious of all, the blunt and dull plasticity [280/281] of dough"; "the vigorous and binding viscosity of stiff glue," the "softening viscosity of oil, and tender viscosity of old wine" (XXVI, 156-157). Or again: "You can stretch a piece of India-rubber, but you can only diffuse treacle, or oil, or water.... let [honey] be candied, and you can't pull it into a thin string.... You can't stretch mortar either. It cracks even in the hod, as it is heaped" (XXVI, 141). Exactly as in the attack on Mill, Ruskin attempts to crush Tyndall on his own ground by means of an apparent refinement of logic -- he distinguishes, for example, between "plastic," "viscous," "ductile," and "malleable." The reason Tyndall cannot see that ice could be viscous is his inattention to words and the phenomena that words reflect. By implication, however, Ruskin's use of language would refute not only Tyndall but the empirical method as well. For Ruskin, verbal distinctions increase the mind's sense of concrete particulars in nature -- the natives of Cumberland, for example, have six words for "valley" (XXVI, 244) -- and also have a real correspondence to the forms of nature. The mark of bad science is the coinage of vague and ugly terms like "sub-aerial denudation" -- a dissolution of the passionate and concrete into the pompous and abstract.
The defense of Forbes is a reassertion of what we might call a moral empiric: the belief that scientific truth, like great art, can be the product only of direct and sensuous apprehension and an expression of the perceiver's moral state. Tyndall is wrong, finally, because he is a wicked and irreverent man. But his selfish conceit is also, in effect, an oedipal revolt directed against both nature and his predecessors. Ruskin, in attacking him as an arrogant schoolboy, exorcizes everything in himself that is unruly, contentious, and discordant and then, by joining himself with an ideal paternity represented by Forbes, heals the breach with his own past -- the same structure as that of Modern Painters I. But now the sublime ecstasy that marked the union with Turner is replaced by a spot of time remembered as a vision.
"The Vale of the Cluse" narrates such a moment, an occasion of almost mystical rapture occurring on Ruskin's last walk through the valley in 1874. He has just returned from six months in Italy, a nation already delivered, it would seem, to the fiends: "monstrous and inhuman noises..., wild bellowing and howling of obscene wretches..., clashing of church bells ... dashed into reckless discord ... as if wrung by devils..., filthy, stridulous shrieks and squeaks." Then, suddenly, he "found himself..., as in a dream," walking through the Swiss vale, a favorite spot of his youth, "unchanged since I knew it first ... quite forty years ago." The sudden transition turns the experience into a vision, rendered with hallucinatory clarity:
But presently, as I walked, the calm was deepened, instead of interrupted, by a murmur -- first low, as of bees, and then rising into distinct harmo [281/282] nious chime of deep bells, ringing in true cadences -- but I could not tell where.... I turned about and stood still, wondering; for the whole valley was filled with the sweet sound, entirely without local or conceivable origin; and only after some twenty minutes' walk, the depth of tones, gradually increasing, showed me that they came from the tower of Maglans in front of me; but when I actually got into the village, the cliffs on the other side so took up the ringing, that I again thought for some moments I was wrong.
Perfectly beautiful, all the while, the sound, and exquisitely varied, -- from ancient bells of perfect tone and series, rung with decent and joyful art.
"What are the bells ringing so to-day for, -- it is no fête?" I asked of a woman who stood watching at a garden gate.
"For a baptism, sir." [XXVI, 151-152]
But soon the beauty and peace of Cluse (the "closed valley") will be lost forever, for a railroad is about to be thrown across it. When in his concluding paragraph Ruskin contrasts the "claims of all sweet pastoral beauty" with the "present state of science" ("dispute, and babble, idler than the chafed pebbles of the wavering beach"), he enacts for us the Betrayal and the Redemption: for the Cluse with its archetypal elements -- the woman by the garden, the bells, the baptism -- is the valley of the Edenic past and the baptism its temporary recapture. The waters of the sacrament, like the "refluent sea" of Jordan contemplated by Bernard, reverse the flow of time -- the torrents and glaciers of the Alps, the falling rocks, the slow pollution of history that becomes one with the pebbly chatter of the materialists. Juxtaposed against that chatter, the discord in effect of damned spirits, is the valley's low hum like a single bell, the union of human and divine and also the music of the spheres as Bernard would hear it.
As in the garden of old, the diabolic agencies of the present bring the temptation to forbidden knowledge. In a lecture in Cumberland, Ruskin warns that the Mylodon, or giant sloth, was created by the devil and is now exhibited by "the fiends" in the British Museum (XXVI, 264), where it unnerves and brutalizes schoolchildren: they become what they see. The diabolical is also the subject of a lecture on snakes, entitled "Living Waves," which makes its way incongruously into a book on geology. First Ruskin warns his audience against the venom of snakes (his accounts of actual deaths by snakebite are repellent in their detail) and then, more important, against their significance as "hieroglyphs" of evil. Lest his hearers forget the latter, he shows them an engraving of Eden from Giotto and concludes with a bizarre account of young men stuffing themselves with serpentine knowledge until they turn into human sausages, goaded on by the vanity of well-meaning fathers: "And the fathers love the lads all the time, but yet, in every word they speak to them, prick the poison of the asp into their young [282/283] blood, and sicken their eyes with blindness to all the true joys, the true aims, and the true praises of science and literature" (XXVI, 329).
Ruskin's interest in the demonic hieroglyph had intensified in the 1870s into obsession: the Fors letters, which he wrote as a symbolic reenactment of St. George's struggle, had their nocturnal counterparts in the huge serpents he wrestled in his dreams, a protracted mental torment that reached its climax in 1878 with his first attack of madness. "Living Waves," delivered two years afterward, speaks with authority, then, on the question of demonic temptation; yet the snakes also embody in hieroglyphic concentration the phenomena of motion that Ruskin has been describing throughout the Deucalion series. The analogy between glaciers and serpents is not capricious. Any aerial photo will show the long, nestling arms of ice, marked by dirt bands that indicate the direction of invisible flow. Sometimes Ruskin makes the association explicit: the glacial torrent is "ribbed like a dragon," and even the Alps themselves may seem monstrous. We have already noticed the importance of grotesque connections in this book's descriptions -- a lava specimen, for example, can be "an oolite with yolks of its eggs dropped out" or a "gaseous wasp's nest." The technique reaches an almost hysterical climax in "Living Waves," where Ruskin "classifies" snakes as lizards who have lost their legs, fish who have lost their fins, birds who have lost their wings, and honeysuckles with heads stuck on. The matrix of associations makes the object seem anomalous, while the formula of "like a this without a that" emphasizes disjunctions and vacancies, as though to show that all species, the beneficent and the sinister, if not indeed all valuations, shift perpetually in an arabesque of joinings and dissolutions that the serpent symbol cannot contain.
The obsessions of Ruskin's declining years -- the adders of "Living Waves," the phantoms in the bedchamber, the demonic hisses and plague winds -- seem far removed from the springtime exultation of Modern Painters I, yet they are simply more horrific versions of the primal energies in nature and man that have been Ruskin's concern at every point of his career. We have not yet considered the leitmotif of the serpent and its related ideas -- religious dread, sinfulness, and time -- in their central position in Ruskin's evolving myth. "Living Waves" provides a chance to do so before we return to the final episode of Deucalion, which in some ways calms the disturbed energies of that book.
Alexander, Edward. "Ruskin and Science," Modern Language Review 64 (1969), 508-521.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Collected Works. Ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Rosenberg, John. The Darkening Glass. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
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.
Last modified December 2000