Footnote 6, Chapter 11, 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. [GPL]. When he was twelve, Ruskin tells us, he began a mineralogical dictionary "written in a shorthand composed of crystallographic signs now entirely unintelligible to me" (XXVI, 97); fifty years later he was arranging chalcedonies for a museum according to a numbering system "unseen by the public" ((XXXVI, liii). These arcane schemes suggest an attempt not so much to provide descriptive categories as to encode the language of nature, transforming hieroglyphic objects into hieroglyphic signs that may then in some magical or alchemical sense master the chaotic flux of the experienced world. The most elaborate "grammar" in Deucalion is in the lecture "The Iris of the Earth," addressed to young women of means in a characteristic tone of saccharine condescension. Ruskin correlates the colors of gems with the traditional moral meaning of colors in heraldry, then advises the women to adorn their bodies like Tabernacles, so that the nation, composed of such jewels, may be as in Eden, rich in gold, bdellium (that is, crystal), and onyx. In the logic of the lecture, jewels are the primary signifier that renders three other systems interchangeable -- women, the nation (Tabernacles), the natural order. In all these "grammars," and in so much of Ruskin's thought, the unacknowledged wish appears to be to control the world through signs, which are made ontologically primary to the things they signify.
Last modified December 2000