Footnote 6, Chapter 2, 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]. See Elizabeth Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, chap. 3. In Praeterita Ruskin recalls the peculiar way he set about to learn reading: "I absolutely declined to learn to read by syllables; but would get an entire sentence by heart with great facility, and point with accuracy to every word in the page as I repeated it. As, however, when the words were once displaced, I had no more to say, my mother gave up, for the time, the endeavour to teach me to read " (XXXV, 23). This ability to register unities all at once, as in a photograph, resembles Ruskin's procedure in prose of providing descriptive details in terms of a preconceived unity of impression. Until an initial apprehension is made, no fragment is meaningful. Each descriptive detail then, corresponds to the words rather than to the syllables, since the words for the child were the smallest possible units of apprehension. In perceptual terms, sense data are recognized by the eye only after the eye can organize them into significant unities. Such a unity is a "word" or primary gestalt.
Last modified December 2000