Ruskin Poems

[Dion Worles]

Numbersin brackets indicate page breaks in the print edition and thus allow users of VW to cite or locate the original page numbers. When page breaks occur in the middle of words, the brackets appear after the word.

7. Ruskin's comments on Scott may owe something to Hazlitt's The Spirit of the Age (London, 1825), also an attempt to define the modern temper. Hazlitt deprecates exactly what Ruskin praises about Scott, calling him "a literal, a matter-of-fact expounder of truth or fable" (p. 136). Scott "has found out (oh, rare discovery) that facts are better than fiction" (p. 142). Hazlitt finds mere description of facts a virtue in fiction but not in poetry. "It must be owned, there is a power in true poetry that lifts the mind from the ground of reality to a higher sphere, that penetrates the inert, scattered, incoherent materials presented to it, and by a force and inspiration of its own, melts and moulds them into sublimity and beauty. But Sir Walter . . . has not this creative impulse" (pp. 135-136). Wordsworth, who is not merely factual or descriptive, has the true creative impulse; he is "the most original poet now living" (p.238).

15. See Ralph Cohen's discussion of the shift in criticism of descriptive poetry from praise of the eye to praise of "the eye of the mind," in The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's "The Seasons" and the Language of Criticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 162-173.

17.Wordsworth's version of how the mind responds to natural scenery is, as Harold Bloom has pointed out (Ruskin as Literary Critic," pp. 176-179), ultimately more comforting than Ruskin's. Ruskin agreed with Wordsworth that the landscape feeling was most intense in youth and gradually faded, but where Wordsworth welcomed its replacement by the philosophic mind, Ruskin, tying thought and feeling to immediate visual experience, could only mourn the loss of responsiveness as total deprivation.

19. In the hundreds of references to Wordsworth and his poetry indexed in the Library Edition, there are none to The Prelude. "Yew Trees" is also quoted by Coleridge (Biographic] Literaria, chap. 22) as an example of Wordsworth's imaginativepower.

21. I take my use of the word "traditionalist" from the term as it has been applied to Burke. J. G. A. Pocock's description of the critic of traditionalism who is radical in stance, yet reactionary in locating the values he urges in a distant past, seems to me to fit Ruskin on Wordsworth rather well. I am indebted to Pocock's Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1973); esp. pp. 233-272.

24. "And men who have this habit of clustering and harmonizing theirthoughts are a little too apt to look scornfully upon the harder workers who tear the bouquet to pieces to examine the stems. This was the chief narrowness of Wordsworth's mind; he could not understand that to break a rock with a hammer in search of crystal may sometimes be an act not disgraceful to human nature, and that to dissect a flower may sometimes be as proper as to dream over it; whereas all experience goes to teach us, that among men of average intellect the most useful members of society are the dissectors, not the dreamers" (5.359; also 12.392). Note that Ruskin is not criticizing Wordsworth because he dispenses with accurate observation (Wordsworth insists, in the supplemental essay of 1815, that the poet must begin with accurate looking). Nor does Ruskin disagree with Wordsworth's claim that the poet must pay attention to how natural objects strike the mind and imagination, not just to how they look (8.58; 5.358-59). Ruskin does object to Wordsworth's impatience with analytic observation, taking the object to pieces and examining it part by part. He suggests that the beholder must employ this progressive,analytic method, to grasp both external facts and his own associative and emotional perceptions of those facts. Only by this piecemeal method, according to Ruskin, can the beholder reconstruct the instantaneous imaginative perception of the gifted poet or artist.

To read these chapters of Modern Painters III as a revaluation ofWordsworth puts Ruskin's most famous contribution to literary criticism, his theory of the pathetic fallacy, in a different light. This muchdebated concept has been read as Ruskin's response to romanticism byboth Patricia Ball and Harold Bloom.2 Ball rightly relates the patheticfallacy to Ruskin's early prose descriptions, identifying both as adeparture from romantic attitudes toward observation. But by using Coleridge as her reference point, she misses an important part ofRuskin's quarrel with his romantic models: his distinction betweenthe imaginative perception of the romantic poet, exemplified byWordsworth, and the critical perception Ruskin recommended to the Victorian reader and adopted as his own. Bloom, stressing the actions and reactions of poetic influence, turns immediately to Wordsworth.For Bloom, however, the distance Ruskin discovered between himselfand Wordsworth is the "terrible pathos" in Ruskin's critical art, not,as Ball argues, an important shift in nineteenth-century attitudes toward description (Bloom, p. 178). Limited in focus to the pathetic fallacy, neitherBloom nor Ball looks closely at Ruskin's other objections to romanticpoetry. Those objections are essential to my concerns: Wordsworth'srole in Ruskin's self-definition as a critic and Ruskin's redirection ofthe nineteenth-century English response to landscape.

Wordsworth occupies a more prominent place on the title page ofModern Painters than either Turner or the author. Every edition of every volume carries a long epigraph from The Excursion (IV. 978-992):

Although Ruskin follows Wordsworth in identifying the imagination with a mental eye, he nonetheless praises him primarily as a descriptive poet. The quotations in Modern Painters I are all exampleswhere outward images are not plowed aside or outer detail made "obscure, mysterious, and interrupted" to better reveal inner nature(4.253). The Wordsworth of Modern Painters I is the man of acute observation and faithful description, not the poet for whom "the light of sense / Goes out" (The Prelude [1805] VI.534-35) when the light ofimagination dawns. When Ruskin praises Wordsworth in eighteenthcentury terms as a pictorial poet, he departs from Wordsworth'sunderstanding that accurate observation and description are only thefirst step toward imaginative creation. He departs also from the devaluation of purely visual description in poetry expressed by other romantics (Coleridge and Hazlitt, for example). Ruskin found in Evangelical typology a theoretical precedent for his conviction that outerdetail and inner essence, visual and imaginative or spiritual truth,could coexist in equality.6 But when he reexamined Wordsworth andromantic poetics in Modern Painters III, he discovered that they couldnot serve as literary examples of an art both pictorial and imaginative.

At the beginning of Modern Painters III Wordsworth is once againpaired with Turner as an imaginative poet-artist, but halfway throughthe volume he is first condemned as a bad judge of painting, next putin a lower order of poets, and then replaced as the representative modern poet by Walter Scott. By the end of Ruskin's discussion of themodern temper, Turner stands alone as the great creative mind ofnineteenth-century England. Even in Wordsworth's own territory,the Lake Country, Ruskin takes Turner for his guide (see immediately below. Turneralone is hailed as "the master of this science of Aspects." What has happened to the co-hero of Modern Painters I?

This question, which must have struck many readers, Ruskin answers from a characteristically changing series of critical perspectives.He raises three major objections to Wordsworth's poetry in Modern Painters III. First, nineteenth-century poetry is peculiarly susceptible tothe pathetic fallacy. As a poet, Wordsworth is not simply the humblestudent of Nature and Truth portrayed in The Excursion. A favoritedevice of modern poetry has led him to a serious failure of perception.Second, Ruskin argues that since painting conveys the emotion oflandscape more effectively than poetry, visual description is moreimportant than Wordsworth allows. Turner's art expresses and responds to the temper of the age better than Wordsworth's antipictorial poetry. Finally, according to Ruskin, Wordsworth's account of his landscape experience is inaccurate; thought is always an inseparable part of perception. Because he misrepresents his own act of seeing, Wordsworth is a misleading guide for modern readers who share his love of landscape. Ruskin's chapter "The Pathetic Fallacy" is his first substantial qualification [47/48] of Wordsworth's greatness. The pathetic fallacy, as Ruskindefines it, is a device for expressing psychological truths in descriptivepoetry. A distorted presentation of natural facts reveals the emotionalpreoccupations of the perceiver. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keatsare "Reflective or Perceptive" poets (5.205n) for whom the patheticfallacy is an effective strategy. Their poetry uses a speaker describingand meditating on nature "who perceives wrongly, because he feels,and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or asun, or a fairy's shield, or a forsaken maiden" (5.209). There is a contrasting mode of poetry, which Ruskin calls the creative; it is notprimarily descriptive or meditative nature poetry and need not rely onpathetic fallacy to portray emotional responses. Though description isnot its primary mode, it may contain passages of description; but (atleast in the examples Ruskin gives) these descriptions of natural factare introduced as comparisons or metaphors for some fact of humanaction or emotion. Unlike pathetic fallacy, such comparisons need notblur or distort differences between human and external nature. Dantecan compare falling souls to falling leaves

This way of putting the case identifies the poet's choice of the reflective or perceptive poetic mode with a serious flaw in perception. Thefollowing chapters of Modern Painters III apply this criticism to romantic poets in general and to Wordsworth in particular. In one senseRuskin is extending a romantic criticism of nature poetry, followingWordsworth and Coleridge when he argues that a poet's perception ofnature is inadequate if it does not involve all the faculties of a wellbalanced mind. But where Wordsworth, thinking of the late eighteenth century, attacked the "mimic" rules of picturesque perceptionand the narrow rationalism of scientists and philosophers, Ruskinfinds the greatest danger for poets of Wordsworth's and succeedinggenerations to come from the very feeling they had trusted to correctthe distortions of rules and reason. Wordsworth's Wanderer accusesthe self-reflecting intellect Ruskin attacks the self-projecting heart.He continues to praise Wordsworth's "intense penetrative depth" inModern Painters III, but his praise is repeatedly qualified by warningsthat the feeling Wordsworth brings to his perception of nature hasbecome a source of "proud Self-love." Ruskin makes this criticism ofWordsworth when he praises another romantic poet, Walter Scott.

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