Footnote 15, Chapter 6, 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]. In an Oxford lecture Ruskin described some dreams that are precise examples of the grotesque, the first of which contains the familiar crossing by water: "The first was of a Venetian fisherman, who wanted me to follow him down into some water which I thought was too deep; but he called me on, saying he had something to show me; so l followed him; and presently through an opening. as if in the arsenal wall, he showed me the bronze horses of St. Mark's, and said, 'See, the horses are putting on their harness.' The second was of a preparation at Rome . . . for the exhibition of a religious drama. Part of the play was to be a scene in which demons were to appear in the sky.... There was a woman dressed in black, standing at the corner of the stage watching them, having a likeness in her face to one of my own dead friends, and I knew somehow that she was not that friend, but a spirit; and she made me understand, without speaking, that I was to watch, for the play would turn out other than expected. And I waited; and when the scene came on, the clouds became real clouds, and the fiends real fiends, agitating themselves in slow quivering, wild and terrible, over the heads of the people and the priests" (XXII, 445). These dreams show particularly well the relationship of dream experience to apocalyptic experience, since they both center on moments of anticipation before a manifestation of natural or demonic power, although only the first arrests the anticipation at that moment of indeterminacy described by Freud's theory of the uncanny and Weiskel's theory of the sublime.
Last modified December 2000