Figural Language in the Criticism of Ruskin

Review Article Figural Language in the Criticism of Ruskin GARY WIHL Elizabeth K. HeIsinger. Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1982. 342, illus. $25.00 Elizabeth HeIsinger's book is the result of 'ten years' immersion' in the study of Ruskin; it will probably serve as the point of departure for Ruskin studies over the next decade. Unlike the major studies which have appeared over the past twenty years, HeIsinger's presents a powerful and lucid theory ofhow Ruskin ought to be read, based, according to her claim, on Ruskin's own exegetical methods and didactic examples. The theory attempts an account of the major transitions in Ruskin's career: the shift from criticism of landscape painting to social criticism; the need to reconcile these 'historical languages of the human imagination' with the 'religious exegesis of the transcendent language of nature and the Bible'; and Ruskin's final turn towards a fully historical understanding of the human activities of 'reading' and 'beholding' which assimilates pagan myth to the Bible and the Augustinian notion of the sacred book of nature. Unlike Robert Hewison or George Landow, HeIsinger has not resorted to the history of ideas to gloss over the difficulty of explaining these transitions. Ruskin's theories of the picturesque, his use ofthe Evangelical methods oftypology, his use of the Romantic doctrine of the imagination do not become the occasion for a historical summary; HeIsinger always centres her discussion upon a crucial text in Ruskin. The term 'reading' has a double sense in HeIsinger's study. It is, first of all, a critical metaphor, which translates perception into a linguistic activity so that language is 'visible' and images 'readable.' At the same time, reading is a metaphor for a particular 'method of exposition': an excursive journey through Ruskin's works, a structural device for the organization of the readings in the first sense. Ruskin's complex attempt to unite perception with cognition can only be approached partially, one step at a time. Reading him is like taking a picturesque tour. HeIsinger asks that we 'suspend [our] expectation of a complete account of Ruskin's views for many chapters and that [we] read successive chapters as continually modifying and complicating those views put forth in earlier chapters.' In principle, we can have no objection to this method; it is similar to Ruskin's own avowed method in the second preface to Modern Painters I. But the method UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 1, FALL 1985 110 GARY WIHL raises certain doubts, in Ruskin as well as in HeIsinger. The metaphor of the excursive approach assumes a progressive understanding of the numerous ambiguities and inconsistencies in Ruskin's works; HeIsinger even asserts that, though her book's 'destination will not be immediately apparent, there are no major confusions or discontinuities obstructing the way.' The critical metaphor of reading as travelling subsumes the problems of the initial metaphor, that seeing is equivalent to reading. HeIsinger has assimilated Ruskin too well; like Proust, who also made the excursion or 'pilgrimage' the ruling metaphor of his interpretation of Ruskin, HeIsinger falls into a pattern of error, in the root sense ofwandering. At each crucial moment, when the supposed union of seeing and reading is meant to illuminate another aspect of Ruskin's career, a fundamental epistemological error is revealed. This is evident at the outset of HeIsinger's study, and is repeated thereafter in various guises. My remark is not intended as a final judgment, however. Perhaps the finest Ruskin criticism is that which repeats the aberrations which stem from Ruskin's own epistemological metaphors. The first chapter, 'The Poet-Painter,' presents a common beginning in Ruskin criticism: a stylistic analysis of a purple passage from Modern Painters I, in this case the approach to La Riccia. The text has exemplary value, since it is an excursive sight, a traveller's view, made up of scattered visual impressions first recorded in Ruskin's diaries two years earlier. The partial views have now been constituted into an imaginative whole, expressive of the effects of Turnerian light in the painter's landscapes. But HeIsinger immediately identifies a problem in Ruskin...