Footnote 6, Chapter 5, 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]. The book purchase is noted in The Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Van Akin Burd, 2 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973),II, 726n. Ruskin's note approving The Friend is in the diary for February 1843 (The Diaries of John Ruskin, ed. Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse 3 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956], I, 242). But sometime in the mid-1850s Ruskin told Charles Eliot Norton that he thought Coleridge vastly overrated as a philosopher and that "his best poems were feverish" (Letters of Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904], I, 21). In the letter asking Henry Liddell for writers on imagination, Ruskin alludes to a certain dispute between Wordsworth and Coleridge concerning that faculty and fancy, but discussion of the dispute makes up only a small part of the Biographia Literaria, and there is no evidence that Ruskin knew it directly. It is hard to believe, however, that he would not have been drawn to a book like The Statesman's Manual, which purports to show the English intellectual elite how to read the Bible as a guide to national policy. But given Ruskin's habit of obscuring his sources and repudiating tendencies in an influential writer that he did not like in himself, we can suppose that the figure of Coleridge would have been a troubling one. In Modern Painters in, Ruskin contrasts a Carlylean hardheadedness with the reprehensibie dreaminess of German metaphysicians in a way that recalls Carlyle's famous portrait of Coleridge in the Life of John Sterling, published five years before. There was on the one hand the great poet, a friend of Wordsworth, a lover of nature, and a Christian Tory philosopher who waged war with the utilitarians. On the other hand, there was the aging wool gatherer, who spoke and wrote in the kind of obscure style Ruskin could not easily tolerate. My guess is that Ruskin read or reread The Statesman's Manual at least before the writing of The Stones of Venice (which, like Unto This Last, contains strong echoes of the Manual). By the middle of the 1850s he had given his emotional allegiance to Carlyle yet retained many of Coleridge's hints and thoughts, if none of his manner.
For another discussion of the possible influence of the Manual on Ruskin, see Richard Dellamora, "A Victorian Optic: Translucent Landscape in Coleridge, Ruskin, and Browning," Prose Studies 3 (1980), 271-286. Dellamora uses the terms "translucence," "transparency," and "opacity" to derive three categories of imaginative landscape in Victorian writers.
Last modified December 2000