Ruskin as a Prejudice Reader

Ruskin as a Prejudiced ReaderAuthor(s): Jeffrey L. SpearSource: ELH, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), pp. 73-98Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872882 .

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RUSKIN AS A PREJUDICED READER

BY JEFFREY L. SPEAR

My particular subject is Ruskin's way of reading literary texts, but with Ruskin the criticism of literature is always intertwined with extra-literary arguments and more general questions of interpretation. Indeed it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for Ruskin all the world was a text. Ruskin thought of the imagination as a visual faculty, whether engaged with sights or words, and of images as vehicles of meaning. From childhood he read the creations of God and man, whether landscape, painting, architecture, or literature, by alternately surrendering himself to what he saw and analyzing it: "watching vapours and splitting straws," as he said in youthful mock humility.' Ruskin studied mineralogy and geology as if they were the vocabulary and grammar that conveyed the meaning of the mountains. He thought of art as "a noble and expressive language" (3. 87). He advocated "reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas" (10. 206). Aesthetic experience and analysis, sight and insight, come together in his prose as interpretation and application.

After the success of the first volume of Modern Painters Ruskin tried to expand his defense of Turner into a more general interpretive theory that would demonstrate the participation of both the physical world and the perceptive and creative faculties of man in the overarching unity of God. He would thus make the creation of images in the arts at least potentially a revelation of the divine, and their study an act of reverence, if not an actual road to salvation, and so vindicate his decision to become a critic rather than the clergyman his parents had intended. The general theory of interpretation implicit in his definitions of the "types" of the divine in Modern Painters II was never systematically developed. It fell victim to the decline in Ruskin's Evangelical faith that culminated in the "unconversion" of 1858. But just as in the throes of doubt he took up a form of Pascal's wager and decided to act as though the Bible were true, so in criticism of all sorts he wrote as though he possessed the universal interpretive theory he desired.2 In other words, Ruskin's

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belief in an ultimate unity underlying his multifarious studies, which was articulated in his theocentric theory of creation and understanding in Modern Painters II, survived his loss of faith in the form of a prejudice.

By "prejudice" I do not simply mean an unsubstantiated judgment, a mere opinion (particularly one with which the reader dis- agrees). Ruskin's work is full of prejudices of this sort ranging from the assertion that landscapes such as Claude's harden and degrade the human heart, in the Preface to Modern Painters I, to the de- scription of The Mill on the Floss as "a study of cutaneous disease," in Fiction Fair and Foul (34. 377). Rather I am concerned with "prejudice" as it is used in hermeneutic philosophy, "prejudice" in its root sense as the judgment one brings to what one studies, the meanings assumed as reading and analysis begin rather than the meanings articulated at their end.

The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being.3

Prejudice, or "fore-understanding" in Hans-Georg Gadamer's sense is the precondition to understanding and misunderstanding alike. It is essential to the formation of the reader's horizon, his historical outlook, the sense of his own situation that he brings to the act of interpretation. Interpretation itself involves neither a conquest of the horizon of the work, nor a surrender to it; the interpreter neither possesses the work nor is possessed by it. Rather interpretation is a fusion of horizons, a dialogue between the interpreter and a text or work of art that is made possible by tradition, or prejudices in common. It is tradition that makes genuine historical understanding both possible and forever imperfect. The vehicle of tradition is language:

Every interpretation of the intelligible that helps others to understanding has the character of language. To that extent, the entire experience of the world is linguistically mediated, and the broadest concept of tradition is thus defined-one that includes what is not itself linguistic, but is capable of linguistic interpretation.4

Even the response to landscape is conditioned by tradition as conveyed in language and expressed in art, as Ruskin himself realized in his historical analysis of landscape in Modern Painters III.5

Ruskin's implicit faith in the possibility of a general, cross-

74 Ruskin As Prejudiced Reader



disciplinary theory of interpretation applicable to all the so-called human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) was explicitly developed in Germany. Gadamer's Truth and Method itself is at one and the same time the expression of his own understanding of the process of interpretation and an historical critique of a hermeneutic tradition rooted, like Ruskin's, in the Protestant interpretation of the Bible. That tradition runs from German pietism through the work of Schleiermacher and Dilthey down to Gadamer who blends it with the phenomonology of Heidegger.6 Gadamer's enterprise, with its rejection of "the subjectivisation of aesthetics," its insistence upon application as a part of understanding, and its claim of a special mode of knowledge for the humanities as opposed to the physical sciences, gives philosophic coherence and articulation to some of Ruskin's basic prejudices. Gadamer's insistence upon the historicity of both interpreter and the work interpreted, upon the fusion of horizons in the act of interpretation, exposes Ruskin's pursuit of critical absolutes as chimerical.7 (Indeed the ultimate ambiguity of both the Bible and great works of art and literature was to Ruskin one of the great mysteries of life and its arts.) However, Gadamer's concept of interpretive understanding also directs attention to the dialogues with sets of texts, art works, even landscapes-some vir- tually lifelong-that underlie Ruskin's dogmatism of the moment, his assertion time and again as his horizon shifted that this interpretation, at last, is fact and fact only-even if the fact itself is only part of a larger, never to be wholly comprehended, truth.

It is with Gadamer's analysis of the process of interpretation in mind-not itself a method, but an understanding and critique of method-that I wish to examine the religious context of Ruskin's definition of himself as an interpreter, and the example of his method of literary interpretation in "Of King's Treasuries" (1864), his lecture on how and what to read. My particular emphasis will be upon Ruskin's transformation and secularization of an Evangelical mode of Bible reading.

I THE HOUSE OF INTERPRETER

"My own special function," remarked Ruskin in 1881, "is, and always has been, that of the Interpreter only, in the Pilgrim's Prog- ress" (25. 112). Like most of Ruskin's late references to his early reading, this one has implications that go beyond the immediate context (his critique of passages from W. J. Courthope's The Paradise of Birds). Interpreter deals in images, the visible forms of

Jeffrey L. Spear 75



eternal things, explaining to Christian, and later to Christiana, the latent meanings of paintings, dream visions, and allegorical tab- leaux, and teaching them to interpret on their own. He performs his function by linking images to scriptural texts or Christian doctrines. Image and interpretation alike are conveyed by Bunyan's prose just as art and landscape come to the reader of Modern Painters as part of interpretations that are themselves interwoven with quotations from, or allusions to, canonical texts-texts, that is, of Ruskin's canon, both religious and secular. There is one respect, however, in which the analogy Ruskin draws between himself and Interpreter represents not a function, but a desire. In Bunyan's fiction In- terpreter links images, Scripture and doctrine with absolute certainty, certainty such as Ruskin the Evangelical found both necessary and impossible to achieve, and which he pursued but could never finally secure through all stages of his religious belief and his evolution as a critic.

The Ur-text for Ruskin as much as for Interpreter was, of course, the Bible, which was drilled into him from infancy and consequently known before it could be understood. His mother's "un- questioning evangelical faith in the literal truth of the Bible" placed Ruskin "as soon as I could conceive or think, in the presence of an unseen world; and set my active analytic power early to work on the questions of conscience, free will and responsibility" (35. 128). These questions, Ruskin assures us, he solved by the exercise of the unaided reason. But the mystery of the unseen world and of the text that was said to reveal both its influence upon this one, and the connection between eternal life and present belief and be- havior, deepened as Ruskin matured. The Evangelical belief in the verbal inspiration of Scripture, whether absolute or "plenary,"8 was one of truth not clarity. Possession of the Word came first, understanding might well require a personal revelation, as Margaret Rus- kin wrote to her husband in 1826:

till the Almighty opens the understanding it is a sealed book when he does all by degrees is so clear so beautiful that we are struck with wonder with absolute astonishment at our blindness & stupidity.9

Margaret Ruskin's recourse to visual metaphor was not casual. "The difference between hearing and seeing," according to Henry Mel- vill, Ruskin's favorite Evangelical minister, "is the difference be-




tween receiving truth on the testimony of others and being ourselves its witness":

before there is any personal experience in matters of religion, there may be an acting on the experience of others, and that, wheresoever this is faithfully done, the personal experience will be the probable result . . . "as we have heard, so have we seen, in the city of the Lord of Hosts."'0

Because it is divinely inspired, Holy Scripture differs from all other writing in being "self-evidencing," and the reading of it can be the equivalent of personal experience. In the tradition of Calvin, Mel- vill argues that understanding illuminates not the text but the reader. The earnest cottager stands in relation to the truth of the Bible on the same footing as the scholar capable of attempting external verification of the text. Indeed, Melvill contends that the sincere inquirer can actually determine for himself which verses of the Apocrypha are divinely inspired in fulfillment of the text "if any man will do his will, he shall know the doctrine whether it be of God," for "he will find its statements brought home to his conscience and heart, with that extraordinary force which is never at- tached to a human composition."" Thus to the true seeker the Bible offers both the comforts of doctrinal certainty and, through self-identification with its characters of virtue, the equivalent of their spiritual experience.

It was in accordance with the tradition articulated by Melvill that Margaret Ruskin drove her son through the Bible from infancy. But the Bible and the sermons he dutifully summarized were not Rus- kin's only guides to the manifestations of the unseen world. There were other Sunday books: Quarles' Emblems, Robinson Crusoe and, particularly, The Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan's allegory thus took its place among the texts Ruskin absorbed in his early years, and with which he carried on intermittent dialogues as he defined his own identity and categorized other people. Raised to become Evangelist, he took on the function of Interpreter, but like every believing reader of Bunyan he first felt called upon to imitate Christian. The young Ruskin, however, could not perceive beneath the facade of his father's establishment in Billiter Street or the reassuring order of his mother's garden the lineaments of the City of Destruction from which he was enjoined to flee (35. 189). Conversely, it was only when stirred by the sublimity of Mt. Blanc with its many artistic and literary associ- ations that he was reminded "of Bunyan's celestial city, and the lake [Geneva] in its calmness seemed a radiant path to it."'12

Jeffrey L. Spear 77



As he matured, Ruskin took increasing pride in his powers of analysis and had difficulty accepting the willing suspension of dis- belief as a condition for reading the Bible. He conceded that the doctrine was "God's affair," but insisted that the revelation of it was his.

And this is the great question with me-whether indeed the Revelation be clear, and Men are blind; according to that "He hath blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts"; or whether there be not also some strange darkness in the manner of Reve- lation itself.13

Where once he had been content to accept without understanding, the conscious will to believe kept bringing him up against textual cruxes. Doubts and questions his parents could not settle he took, like Christian, to latter-day interpreters, the tutors of his youth and early manhood, the Reverends Thomas Dale and Walter L. Brown, hoping to be argued out of his deepening conviction that except for general warning great parts of Scripture were "useless to us- vague-inaccurate-and incapable of any certain interpretation." The prophetic books were becoming '"so much poetry."'4 Prophecies to be understood after their fulfillment seemed useless as instruction, and the standard justifications of God's progressive revelation presented by Brown he thought irrational. Raised to live according to the strictures and precepts of a Bible said to be accessible to all who earnestly sought its truths, and ever ready to accuse the Puseyites of "bold refusals to read plain English" (12. 533), Ruskin could not accept enigma as a proper rhetorical vehicle for divine revelation.

Despite his doubts, he continued to act upon the theory that earnest reading of the Bible would verify doctrine and consequently serve to unite rather than further divide the Protestant denominations. He attempted to settle doctrinal differences by means of close, literal reading of disputed passages, going so far as to write an "Essay on Baptism" in response to the Gorham controversy15 and to publish his views on the proper form, offices and functions of the Church in Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds-to no avail. Not surprisingly he developed a fine scorn for "high minded Christians, who so only that you obey Evanglist, never care to enter the house of the Interpreter" (12. 575).

Frustrated by the English Bible, Ruskin turned to the Greek text, the process of translation and the history of interpretation. Oxford




introduced Ruskin to the Fathers of the Church, and by his twenty- first year he was turning on his own to the interpreters who had shaped Christian doctrine. His mother reminded him that: "if you read that you may know the truth and what you ought to do you will find all necessary direction for every part of conduct in your bible"; but she hoped, nevertheless, that "you will find something in [Pope] Gregory to help you."'16 Thus, however reluctantly, Mar- garet Ruskin approved a line of historical inquiry that in Ruskin's generation could only undermine Evangelical faith.

As Ruskin grew up the religion in which he was raised was rapidly nearing the place where "two ways meet." The nature of this division was expressed in Melvill's sermon on "The Witness in Oneself" (1 John 5.10), which distinguishes between "historical and saving faith," outer evidence and inner conviction:

whatever the statements which Scripture advances in relation to the condition and circumstances entailed upon man by the fall, the believer in Christ does not turn to any external sources, in order to gain assurance of their truth. He goes into himself.17

Historical faith is of the head; saving faith of the heart. That the Evangelical should be forced to choose between two aspects of his faith that he had once assumed to be mutually supportive (though never of equal importance) was not simply the result of external historical and intellectual developments, but of a trend within Protes- tantism itself that goes back to the seventeenth century.

The literal interpretation of Scripture requires an acceptance of its historical claims. The Hebrew Bible, as Erich Auerbach put it, "seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history.' This historical claim made the interpretive transformation of Scripture necessary first within what became the Christian canon, as St. Paul harmonized the Old Testament with the Gospels, laying the groundwork for Christian typology, and subsequently in commentary on both Testaments.

St. Augustine, who became for Ruskin "the founder of lay Chris- tianity" (33. 432-3), urged study not simply of the harmony of the Testaments, but of languages and "the knowledge of things" as a means of "clarifying the enigmas of the Scriptures.' 19 Both the typological and historical modes of scholarship and commentary survived the Reformation. However, as Hans Frei points out, the eagerness of seventeenth-century Protestants to see the fulfillments of types and prophecies in their own times, an enthusiasm sub-

Jeffrey L. Spear 79



sequently pursued in popular Evangelical religion, indicates "the breakup of the cohesion between the literal meaning of the biblical narratives and their reference to actual events."20 Instead of absorbing the present into the "common and inclusive world" of biblical narrative, such interpretation made of history an autonomous providential design. Where once figural interpretation had absorbed the events of the present into the greater reality of biblical narratives, now the narratives were combed for signs that would verify the meanings assigned to contemporary figures and events, and for timeless moral lessons. There opened in consequence "a logical distinction and a reflective distance between the stories and the 'reality' they depict.''21 This development had consequences for both biblical scholarship and belief itself that were important in Ruskin's religious history and his critical career.

When meaning became detachable from narrative, interpretation began to emphasize the harmony between biblical and extrabibli- cal histories and points of view. This "precritical" tradition was still alive in England when Ruskin was growing up. Its most notable product of that time was the work of a moderate Evangelical, Thomas Hartwell Horne, whose Introduction to the Critical Study and Knowledge of the Holy Scriptures (1818) established itself in the 1820's as a central text in Protestant seminaries in England and the United States. The Evangelical emphasis upon personal religion and its failure to make original contributions to theology should not be mistaken for an entire lack of an intellectual tradition. Horne's four volumes are an ambitious attempt to demonstrate the inspired dictation and textual integrity of the Scriptures, their internal consistency, their harmony with profane history, and their perpetual application. He provides rules for interpretation and en- closes the present in a history of types and prophecies yet unfulfilled. He buttresses his arguments with evidence drawn from history, natural history, philology, comparative mythology, numisma- tics, epigraphy, biblical geography and the social, political and military history of the Jews in relation to the other peoples of the ancient Near East. This range of interests rivals Ruskin's, and syn- cretism such as Horne's, which harmonizes many disciplines by subordinating them to the higher reality of Scripture, anticipates Ruskin's early attempt to bring his many interests into systematic relation. But Horne's refutation of skepticism and "deistical publi- cations" in fact assumed the unity and historical reliability of Scripture that it purported to defend. Already in Germany the gap




between event and meaning, story and reality, to which Frei points had led in the "Higher Criticism" to a reversal of the method of scholarship still practiced by Horne; that is, to the dispassionate application of historical and critical scholarship to the text of the Bible itself. Even as Horne wrote, Protestants like Schleiermacher, who had accepted the implications of the new scholarship, were answering "the cultured critics of religion" from the safer ground of man's religious nature while using that scholarship to attempt the reconstruction of the historical horizons and, hence, the authorial intentions, of the writers of the Scriptures.22

German scholarship made its way but slowly into England, but even without its influence, for an Evangelical of Ruskin's generation with some classical and scientific education to attempt to har- monize his secular and religious interests was to court doubt. The conflict between a literal reading of Genesis and uniformitarian geology, and even the unsystematic application of classical scholarship to the Bible, made a questioning of the historical probability of biblical narrative almost inevitable. Powerful in themselves, these studies had the further effect of highlighting the decline in narrative interpretation that had already, inadvertently, led to a break in the sense of continuity between biblical and contemporary history within the Evangelical tradition itself. Emphasis upon the moral import of biblical episodes, even typological ones, made understanding and interpretation steps on the way to application, which was the principal focus.23

In The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan pressed discrete biblical elements into his own narrative of the chosen soul's journey. Bunyan's justification of his allegory was the fact that God's law was "held forth/By Types, Shadows and Metaphors" .. .1; "Dark Figures, Al- legories."24 The young Ruskin would, as George Landow notes, have recognized Bunyan's use of typology.25 But the typical figures who appear in The Pilgrim's Progress are not types, but symbols of types abstracted from their historical setting and functioning as dramatized application. They exist neither in a typological history, nor in the prophetic vision of a biblical figure that might have a typological fulfillment, but in a tropological realm, a realm or moral significance wherein types, symbols and personifications all have the same ontological status. It is a realm in which the pillar of salt that was Lot's wife and the Valley of the Shadow of Death have the degree of reality. One must be familiar with typological interpretations of Scripture to understand why it should be Moses who ap-

Jeffrey L. Spear 81



pears and beats Faithful when he secretly inclines to the first Adam, why Christian should have to retrace his steps after forget- ting his scroll, and what a meal of Heave-Shoulder and Wave-Breast might stand for.26 But what The Pilgrim's Progress presents are not, strictly speaking, types because we are given the meaning not the event.27 It does not follow from the fact that the reader who would understand Bunyan must be familiar with Protestant exegetics that "the reader has to interpret Pilgrim's Progress in the same way the Evangelicals-and the Puritans before them-interpreted the Bible,"28 except in the limited sense that some events in The Pil- grim's Progress prefigure others within the fiction. In so far as The Pilgrim's Progress imitates the figural pattern of Scripture it actually removes that pattern from history making it part of the evolution of "abstracted typology" that has been traced by Paul Kor- shin.29 However, the reader can, indeed, ought, to imitate the examples of virtue Bunyan presents as he would the exemplary characters of the Bible. Indeed Christian's pilgrimage teaches im- itatio Christi.

Like The Pilgrim's Progress, the sermons that Ruskin endured and summarized in childhood made occasional reference to types, and some were built upon their interpretation. Typology was thus part of his religious education, but it was not the focus of his religious experience, his crisis of faith, nor in its strict sense his interpretive method. His obsessions were with literal meaning, im- itation and moral application. Indeed, there is some evidence that even in his college days Ruskin thought the hunt for types in itself a mechanical exercise of the spirit, an example of that extrapolation of tag lines from context he was later to stigmatize as the Evangelical habit of making "horrible sausage-books ... out of chopped-up Bible" (28. 70).30 Ruskin's own definition of "typical" appended to Modern Painters II is nondoctrinal: "any character in material things by which they convey an idea of immaterial ones." It is the equivalent of Carlyle's "intrinsic symbol."31 Thus Ruskin can speak of the foxglove-one third bud, one third bloom, one third past-as "the type of the life of this world" (10. 203).

Ruskin's definition of "type" and his use of "typical" in Modern Painters II for aspects of the divine inherent in the visible world seems to blend the incarnational aspect of a biblical type with Platonic participation. On a page of definitions of Greek terms for representation omitted by the editors from Ruskin's 1862 Diaries, Ruskin actually defines the Greek "idea" as "type" in contrast to




"ceidos," "species," and paradeigma, untranslated, but presumably "'pattern" as in Plato. "Tupos" he translates literally as "Stamp of die."32 "Idea" as "type" thus maintains its root sense of something seen, sensible form, while suggesting that aspect of the object that makes it identifiable, its essential characteristic.

After his unconversion, Ruskin seems actually to avoid using "type" in its strict sense. He refers, for example, to Rossetti's drawing of "The Passover of the Holy Family," showing Jesus watching his father strike blood on the doorpost, as having "'sym- bolical meaning" though Rossetti himself insisted it was specifically figural.33 The blending of typological, symbolic and allegorical interpretation in Ruskin's work to which Landow rightly points was less a personal extension of an orthodox typology Ruskin learned from his mother and her ministers in childhood than his own version of a tradition that for more than a century had been extending figuralism into political types, mythic types, character types, natural types, and the like in the work of writers Ruskin knew ranging from Bunyan to Wordsworth, and a synthesis of his biblical and classical studies.

Ruskin's definition of "type"' includes the doctrinal sense (at least of types already recognized as such) and the extension some Evangelicals made of that sense into the natural world. It elimi- nates, however, the element of historical fulfillment in providential time. Consequently the need to distinguish between history and the "as if" reality of fiction in the revelation of a "type" is no longer crucial if the fiction makes manifest an otherwise abstract truth. The fulfillment of a Ruskinian "type" lies entirely in the human realm of recognition and fulfillment through moral action. This move is not simply a personal vagary of Ruskin's but a product of his historical situation.

The universe in which Ruskin's childhood religion placed him was theoretically continuous with a biblical history pregnant with types and prophecies yet unfulfilled, but Ruskin's growth into religious self-consciousness made him ever more aware of the gap between his own times and those of the Bible. Like Abraham, he would do as angels bid him, should any appear. Living in Christ's time he "would have gone with Him up to the mountain," but "that was quite another thing from going to Beresford chapel, Walworth, or St. Bride's, Fleet Street" (35. 189). He may have accepted the patriarchal history because it was in the Bible, but he not could truly believe it, he could not experience it as he did the world of the

Jeffrey L. Spear 83



Covenanters in Old Mortality. Defending to his tutor Thomas Dale the moral benefit of fiction, the young Ruskin argued that the viv- idness of scene and character in Scott "have the same effect upon us as if we actually passed through them," and in consequence we momentarily defeat "our great enemy, Self" (1. 365-6). It was Scott and not Moses whose words, in Melvill's terms, were "like a testimony to his senses." Ruskin admitted to his father that he did not really believe in the Old Testament history without which typological exegesis was a mere rhetoric until he saw it in the Campo Santo in 1845. For Ruskin seeing was believing.

I never believed the patriachal history before, but I do now, for I have seen it . . . all the patriarchs in the costume of the 13th century-n'importe. It is Abraham himself still. Abraham & Adam, & Cain, Rachel & Rebekah, all are there, the very people, real, visible, created, substantial, such as they were, as they must have been-one cannot look at them without being certain that they have lived-and the angels, great, & real, and powerful.34

Ruskin understood the iconographic schemes of medieval eccle- siastical buildings as some literary scholars do the anachronisms of the mystery plays, which enclose the contemporary costume, language and references of the actors in biblical time, thus blending presentation of typological fulfillment with tropological application in present time.35 He experienced the Campo Santo frescoes as what Gadamer calls "an ontological event," an event in which "being becomes meaningfully visible."

A picture is not a copy of a copied being, but is in ontological communion with what is copied.... Word and picture are not mere imitative illustrations, but allow what they represent to be for the first time what it is.36

Ruskin believed in Benozzo's angels as much as in his Abraham, but only by virtue of his ability to imagine himself as one with the painter's original audience, by becoming in imagination a medieval man. Ruskin's experience through art of the medieval sense of continuity with biblical time was itself an act of historical imagination, a momentary defeat of self. But the power of historical projection that comes so readily to an imagination saturated with Scott is as easily put in the service of skepticism as of belief. It was Scott's sympathetic treatment of both sides in the sectarian conflicts of Scottish history as much as Ruskin's classical scholarship that led him, in contravention of Melvill's Evangelical view of self- evidencing Scripture, to read St. Paul's Epistles from the point of 84 Ruskin As Prejudiced Reader



view of the audience as well as the Apostle-even to assume in his reading the identity of the questioning, pagan, Corinthian rather than that of the prostelytizing saint.

Here is a Jewish enthusiast comes into the midst of Corinth, and to the Greek thinkers, declares a new theory about the dead. That the "Spirit" . . . survived-the best Greek thinkers had always supposed. But this Jew tells them the Body shall survive and ... "rise again." To whom the Greek thinker replies-"Rise? From Whence? ... You, Jews bury your bodies-We burn: ... How are the dead raised-and with what body do they come"? The question ... is the only rational verse in the whole chapter.

St. Paul answers first by calling the questioner a fool [1 Cor. 15:35-6]. I serenely accept the title ... Fool or not-I repeat my question-which if you can answer, I will thank you; if you cannot, or will not-go your way in peace; and leave me to mine.7

Epiphanic experiences such as that in the Campo Santo effected no permanent conversion. Rather they reinforced Ruskin's feeling that he lived in fallen times. While once the church had Apostles, prophets, teachers, miracles, gifts of healing, governments, diver- sities of tongues, it now had, he told his father, "nothing but teachers." "The church has lost her miraculous powers as a seden- tary person loses the use of his limbs: and does now know what he has lost." How is one to believe Mark 16:16 ("He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be dammed") when Mark 16:17 which follows from it "is for the present-not true."38 ("And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues.")

It was while Ruskin was struggling with the clarity and consistency of the Bible, with the question of what might be decay in the church; what, somehow, decay of meaning, that F. J. Furnivall introduced Ruskin to R. C. Trench's The Study of Words. Trench's account of "the hid treasures" of the English tongue, of etymology, and what Trench saw as the degeneration and purification of words "<through the influences of Divine faith working in the world"39 gave Ruskin a vehicle for the recovery of meaning from biblical texts through the historical examination of their terms in the original language and the history of translation. After 1858 Ruskin found himself in "the Bye-path meadow," but unlike Christian, without the will to return-at least to Evangelicalism. The meadow is "a bad place for walking in this will-o-the-wispish time; but as far as that straight old road between the red brick walls, half Babel, quarter fiery furnace, and quarter chopped straw, I can't do it any more" (36. 367). The problems and methods of interpretation Rus-

Jeffrey L. Spear 85



kin worked with while trying to keep to the straight road, however, remained with him in his years in the "bye-path meadow." They can be seen clearly in his interpretation of the speech of St. Peter in Milton's Lycidas.

II EXPLICATION AND APPLICATION

"Of King's Treasuries" was announced as a lecture about how and what to read: "about the treasures hidden in books; and about the way we find them, and the way we lose them" (18. 54). Charac- teristically Ruskin does not treat his subject for its own sake. He contrasts true treasure with false, education sought as advancement in learning against that sought as "Advancement in life." How and what to read becomes one of the many guises in which Ruskin discusses true and false ambition, true and false leadership, true and false social policy. His example of how to read, an analysis of the "digression" on the corrupt clergy in Lycidas, has a double application. It demonstrates at once Ruskin's method of reading and his underlying social argument. Ruskin's method is, in theory, objective and, like the Evangelical Bible reading advocated by Melvill, involves a submission of self to the author's meaning. But the interpretation itself is eminently Ruskinian, a dialogue with the text that is also an exhortation to the audience, an application of Milton's meaning that reveals Ruskin's own historical horizon, his own prejudices.

Before turning to the question of how to read, Ruskin distinguishes between what he calls "books of the hour" and "books of all time" (i.e., classics).40 The model for books of the hour is the personal letter, an extension of the author's voice. The book of the hour, whether fact or fiction, topical commentary, memoir or novel, is "the useful or pleasant talk of some person you cannot otherwise converse with, printed for you" (18. 60). However valuable such a volume may be, Ruskin argues, it is not a book. It is in essence a talking thing, multiplying the voice, whereas a book in essence is a written thing; not simple communication, but perpetuation of what the author "perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful."

"This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another; ... but this I saw and knew.... That is his "writing"; ... and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a "Book." (18. 61)

Indeed, even the wise man's volume will be mixed with "evil




fragments." Only the parts "honestly and benevolently done" are true and those parts "are the book" (18. 61).

The books of the great form an immortal aristocracy of merit, a court to which we must earn entry not through ambition, but through a demonstration of love. That is, we must desire instruction, desire to enter into the author's thoughts rather than to seek confirmation of our own. The proper response to the thought of one wiser than ourselves is "how strange that is" rather than "that's exactly what I think." "Judge it afterwards if you think qualified to do so; but ascertain it first" (18. 63)-a consideration Ruskin desired for his own "true book," Unto This Last (18. 103). The ascer- tainment itself is not a gift to the reader, but his reward, the equivalent of progression from hearing the word to seeing, to experienc- ing the inspired author's witness. (Defending the outspoken rhetoric of Unto This Last, Ruskin said: "I do not profess to be a Reformer-only a Witness.")41

Ruskin found in the "scripture" of the great writers the same ambiguity that tormented him as an Evangelical reader of the Bible. There is a "cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their deeper thought" (18. 63) whether in canonical or noncanonical "scripture." The unconverted Ruskin held that "the soundest scholars and thinkers in Europe" (including, presumably, himself) believed that the Christian Bible was not ver- bally or even doctrinally certain, being but one religious scripture among many. All such writings contain "a portion, divinely ap- pointed, of the best wisdom which the human intellect, earnestly seeking for help from God, has hitherto been able to gather between birth and death" (17. 349). Not to believe in inspiration at all, however, Ruskin considered to be evidence of emotional incapacity regardless of the power of the skeptic's intellect. This last shred of the doctrine of verbal inspiration survives as a prejudice. It is not logically necessary once the unique Bible has been surrendered, but it puts a limit on the relativism Ruskin found so repugnant. However veiled their expression, the inspired passages of both religious and secular scripture have extractable meaning.

On analogy with the "physical type of wisdom, gold" (18. 64), Ruskin argues that words are as rock from which the author's "mind and meaning" can be extracted through crushing and smelting. The analogy implies a distinction between inspiration or concept and its vehicle. The author puts his meaning into the words; the reader who has the will and mental equipment equal to the job, extracts it.

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The mining analogy suggests that the author has it in his power to fix his meaning in words and decide the degree to which it will be accessible. But Ruskin evades this conclusion by shifting his imagery. Words spring to life. Suddenly they mask and skulk through Europe. We are told of words that everyone uses and nobody un- derstands; words that "wear chameleon cloaks" and take the "col- our of the ground of any man's fancy" only to "rend them with a spring from it."

There never were creatures of prey so mischievous, ... never poisoners so deadly, as these masked words; they are the unjust stewards of all men's ideas: whatever fancy or favourite instinct a man most cherishes, he gives to his favorite masked word to take care of for him; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over him,-you cannot get at him but by its ministry. (18. 66)

Words have suddenly shifted from the conveyers to the betrayers of thought. Like the bad steward in the parable, they abuse their office, they discount meaning. Changes in usage allow words to gain power even over the author, altering or obscuring what they were meant to convey. In the public arena people fight and die over words they only assume they understand. Worse, in "mongrel" languages like English "a fatal power of equivocation is put into men's hands, almost whether they will or no" (18. 66) since it so often gives the speaker or writer the choice between a high sounding term derived from Greek or Latin and a "vulgar" Saxon one for the same idea. In pointing out the power of deliberate equivocation given to the unscrupulous by synonyms having different connota- tions, Ruskin gives the germ of the argument elaborated by George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language. "42 His central concern, however, is not with deliberate deception but with the stabil- ity of meaning and the match between idea and word; word and audience; even relative rank in the hierarchies of both words and members of the audience-a concern at least as old as Plato's Phaedrus, which Ruskin occasionally echoes here and cites else- where.43

Ruskin's concern with words almost invariably turns to the Word, here to translation, as in the significance of translating the Greek katakrin3 as "damn" where force is wanted and "condemn" where gentleness (Mark 16:16 versus Heb. 11:7) and to the historical sep- aration of the equivalent terms "book"' and "bible." Ruskin's equa- tion of "book" and "bible"' follows from his surrender of the theory that the Judeo-Christian Scripture was the product of unique verbal




inspiration by the Almighty Ruskin's insistence that "the Word of God, by which the heavens were, of old, and by which they are now kept in store [2 Peter 3:5-7], cannot be made a present of to anybody in morocco binding; . .. but is nevertheless being offered to us daily, ... sown in us daily, and by us, as instantly as may be, choked" (18. 67), turns the distinction between the letter and the spirit of the law into a contrast between idolatry and faith. For Melvill God "breathed himself into the compositions of the prophets, and apostles, and Evangelists and there ... he still resides, ready to disclose himself to the humble, and to be evoked by the prayerful."44 But for Ruskin the words of the book have become different in kind from the Word that created and sustained the world, and do not in themselves participate in what they represent. What matters is the meaning sown in the heart and acted upon whether-as Ruskin reads the Parable of the Sower-it is sown by means of the Scriptures or any other means. This is Melvill's saving faith cut free from the assumption that the Holy Ghost would necessarily verify the text-make doctrine clear to the believer.45 Ruskin here implies what he was to say directly in Fors, that Pro- testant literalism makes an idol of the Bible and effectively substi- tutes word for meaning, faith for act, catechism for the word that can be realized and applied only through deeds. The only sure fulfillment of type or prophecy is that which we can act out in the moral realm, fulfillment we can will, fulfillment not dependent upon the completion of God's scheme of types in sacred time, nor upon a special Providence.

Logic seems to be driving Ruskin in the direction of nominalism, yet his prejudices lie in the other direction. Even at his most Lock- ean, Ruskin insisted that "there are certain ideas inherent in language itself" (3. 91); and in his pursuit of objective interpretation Ruskin turns not to the naming of clear and distinct ideas, but to what he saw as the natural history of words. Richard C. Trench's appeal that "they who feel an inward call to teach and enlighten their countrymen, should . . . draw out the stores of thought which are already latent in their native language, to purify it from the corruptions which time brings upon all things, and from which language has no exemption,"'46 touched a responsive chord in Rus- kin. Many words, he explains, come into English through a series of other languages, Greek, Latin, French or German, "undergoing a certain change of sense and use on the lips of each nation; but retaining a deep vital meaning, which all good scholars feel in

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employing them" (18. 68). It is not, however, to Trench but the more recent work of F. Max Muller to which Ruskin appeals for authority, urging the audience to read his Lectures on the Science of Language thoroughly. Miller's insistence that the vocabulary of any language can be traced back to a set of roots, each of which embodies a concept, provided support for Ruskin's realistic bias by fusing language and thinking, and supplying a rough equivalent of the divine presence Evangelicals found in the inspired word. Muller, as Siegfried Schmidt points out:

refers the linguistic structuring of speech back to the "true categories" (i.e. to universals of all languages) due to which the grammatical categories come about at all. These categories are "Cnot only forms of language and thought, they are the antecedent conditions of language and therefore of thought." Had this ex- tenuating "therefore" been lacking, one would assume that Muller falls back here on an idealistic standpoint.47

It is Ruskin's continuing faith in some measure of inspiration, together with his belief that an Ur-meaning in words underlies changes in usage, that allows him to defend not simply writing and books, but essential Scripture and "bookness"-passages, if not whole volumes, of Truth, whether written by Moses or Milton.

That Ruskin should have chosen St. Peter's speech in Lycidas as his example of "a true book" was anything but random. He may have recalled Trench's remark on Milton's ability to reconnect through his usage the English word to "its original derivation, and not suffer it to forget itself though it would.'"48 And this passage in particular suited not only Ruskin's need to demonstrate his method of objective reading through careful examination of root meanings and historical usage in "true books," but an underlying social argument concerning the state of the nation's faith as expressed both in its church and the actions of its people. The result was what Marjorie Nicholson in her John Milton called "one of the finest explications ever written on any passage of poetry,"49 his interpretation of the epithet Milton applies to the corrupt clergy, "blind mouths," as expressing the reverse of the root meanings of bishop ("a person who sees") and pastor ("a person who feeds").

Ruskin begins his commentary by quoting lines 108-129 of Lycidas and noting the fact that Milton the arch-Puritan is willing to read Matthew 16:19 "honestly," and acknowledge the scriptural authority of the Episcopal function through St. Peter,, "the very type of it." The comment is an implicit reproach to all Protestant sects




who proclaim their literal adherence to Scripture yet refuse bishops-an argument that harks back to Ruskin's attack upon the rejection of Episcopacy by the Scotch Presbyterian Church in The Construction of Sheepfolds. The real question about bishops then is not whether there should be such, but what distinguishes a good from a bad one, the true clergyman from those who "for their bel- lies' sake, creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold." Ruskin claims that Milton needs all three verbs for his meaning, and in the process of explaining why, converts those who creep, intrude and climb into three character types who seek not merely entry into the fold but power within it. Creepers desire secret influence, occult power over the minds of others. Intruders are demogogues whose eloquence and self-assertion sways "the common crowd." Climbers rise within the church on the power of labour and sound learning exerted "in the cause of their own ambition'" rather than on the flock's behalf; so "Scrambling at the shearer's feast." Ruskin thus expands Milton's three verbs of entry into personifications of the three forms of lust for power within the church. There follows the celebrated analysis of "blind mouths" with its less often noted conclusion: "that nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light.... The bishop's office is to oversee the flock" (18. 72).

Ruskin demonstrates what a present-day bishop should have in sight by turning the Bill and Nancy of Oliver Twist, "down the back alley, knocking each other's teeth out," into an abstracted type, the idea of criminality bred by poverty and neglect. One true book here reinforces another, Dickens's novel in its truth becoming the equivalent of history.

"Nay," you say, "it is not [the bishop's] duty to look after Bill in the back street." What! the fat sheep that have full fleeces-you think it is only those he should look after while (go back to your Milton) "the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw" (bishops knowing nothing about it),' "daily devours apace, and nothing said"?

C'But that's not our idea of a bishop." Perhaps not; but it was St. Paul's; and it was Milton's (18. 72-3.)

It should be clear by now that Ruskin is not simply surrendering himself to Milton's text and applying it to present circumstances, but carrying on a double dialogue: on one side with Milton's text concerning its meaning, on the other with his audience concerning immediate application. Milton's passage is spoken by St. Peter and carries the aura of the passages in the Bible that contrast the good

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and bad shepherd; the true servant and the hireling. But Milton's words concern the corrupt clergy exclusively. The proper role of a bishop is there only as an implied contrast that Ruskin makes ex- plicit. This idea of a bishop is St. Paul's by extension to bishops of such passages as 1 Peter 3:25 and Acts 20:28-9, which is addressed to the Ephesian elders ("Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flocks, over which the Holy Ghost hath made you over- seers, to feed the church of God ... after my departing shall grie- vous wolves enter in amongst you.") St. Paul's direct statements on bishops pay more attention to personal character and powers of persuasion than to overseeing (1 Tim. 3:1-7; Titus 1:6-14).50

"I go on," says Ruskin, and there follows a remarkable response to Milton's "But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw," Ruskin insisting that this apparently coarse and obscure "type" is "quite literally accurate." By etymological slight of hand, bor- rowed perhaps from Trench's Synonyms of the New Testament,5' Ruskin makes the etymological link between "wind," "spirit" and "breath" an excuse for, in effect, substituting "breath" for "wind" in the verse and so connecting "wind," "inspiration" and "expire." The breath that fills the flock (preaching) is either God's breath inspiring "health, and life, and peace"; or the word man calls spiritual, "disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the fen," which causes them to expire. As in the case of the bishops, Milton's nega- tive is given its implicit positive and then Victorian application, a denunciation of sectarianism, Catholic or Protestant, but particularly, it seems, the Evangelical sort.

Your converted children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, . . . your converted dunces, . . . those who hold that men can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of work;-these are the true fog children-clouds, these, without water; bodies, these, of putres- cent vapour and skin, without blood or flesh: blown bagpipes for the fiends to pipe with-corrupt, and corrupting,-"Swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw." (18. 74)

The grotesque image whereby Milton's "scrannel pipes of wretched straw" are applied directly to the bloated sheep turning them into bagpipes is worthy of a Gothic grotesque, or even Hieronymus Bosch. The allusion to 1 Cor. 8 verse 1ff ("Now as touching things offered unto idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth") once again associates worship of the word with idolatry.

The explication closes formally with praise of Milton's (as op-




posed to Dante's) understanding of St. Peter's power of the keys, associating the iron key that shuts amain specifically with Luke 11:52: the key of the prison "in which the wicked teachers are to be bound who 'have taken away the key of knowledge, yet entered not in themselves"'-Jesus's accusation against the scribes and Pharisees. Implicitly, however, the explication demonstrates in its contemporary application Ruskin's final stage of reading:

Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers, that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this higher advance to make;-you have to enter into their Hearts....

We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, not merely to know from them what is True, but chiefly to feel with them what is just. (18. 78,80)

It is with some surprise, I think, that after absorbing an explication that replaces the literary pastoral in which Milton set his passage with a contemporary social and religious argument, to find Ruskin saying that we have been:

putting ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assuredly to say, "Thus Milton thought," not "Thus I thought, in mis-reading Milton. (18. 75)

It has been said that in the exegesis of "blind mouths" Ruskin "senses his way back into the Miltonic mind and re-creates the learned, literal, impassioned imagination that first coined the phrase,"52 and certainly Ruskin's interpretation has become part of the effective history of Milton's poem, influencing how it is read down to the present day. Ruskin the interpreter has given us understanding (literal meaning), interpretation (explaining the relationship between "bishop" and "blind," "pastor" and "mouth,") and application (first to the corrupt clergy, then, by implication, to the proper office of the bishop). Even here at its most historical, however, it is clear that the application Ruskin has most in mind is to his own time. As the explication progresses it becomes obvious that in the process of reading Ruskin transforms "thus Milton thought" into "here is what that thought means for us today." Ruskin has not the slightest interest in the context of St. Peter's speech within Lycidas, nor in the reconstruction of Milton's historical horizon beyond his specific usage and his biblical allusions. He does not care whether or not Milton's invocation of St. Peter condemned by contrast any contemporary bishop. Not caring about external threats, he actually avoids specific interpretation of "the grim wolf

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with privy paw." Concerned with immanent not eternal judgment, he never reaches for the notorious "two handed engine" at the end of the passage. The digression is a passage of essential "bookness," it is Milton's inspired Scripture and can be removed from the poem and applied to modern circumstances as a preacher would apply an episode of Old Testament narrative or a Parable of Jesus. As the dialogue between Ruskin and Milton's text moves back and forth, we sense not only congruity between Ruskin and Lycidas but ten- sion, a revelation both of aspects of Milton's text and of Ruskin's personal, historical horizon. We see his recognition of Milton's invocation of St. Peter as "the type and head of true episcopal power," a doctrinal type, and the changes he rings upon the typical: the bishop's symbolic miter and keys as types, the three types of falsely ambitious clergy, the abstraction of Bill and Nancy trading blows from Dickens's text into a type of criminality, the "coarse type" of the bloated sheep as the falsely taught, all carrying into the period of Ruskin's religion of humanity a modified Evangelical way of reading and his own form of typological symbolism whereby he locates the idea of the immaterial in material things.

So far the understanding, interpretation and application of Pro- testant hermeneutics have been treated as stages in the process of interpretation, but Gadamer argues that all three are in fact insepa- rable from reading itself and not distinguishable as steps in understanding. The reader does not exist who:

when he has his text before him, simply reads what is there. Rather, all reading involves application, so that a person reading a text is himself part of the meaning he apprehends. He belongs to the text that he is reading.53

Here we move back to the act of reading itself, to prejudice that can only be inferred from the interpretation. Ruskin's heavy emphasis upon contemporary application is clearly a carry-over from his Evangelicalism and essential to the deliberate dialectic of his argument. But in implying that there is no saving doctrine but one that can be acted out; that there is no definition of belief prerequi- site to salvation; that, as he says explicity later in the lecture, "there is a Church wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and that is the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be"' (18. 96)-in all this we see the product of Ruskin's own religious struggles filling in where Milton is not specific. Whatever he thought of works as opposed to faith as the vehicle of salvation, Milton himself had more than a passing interest in Christian doc-




trine. There is nothing in Lycidas to suggest the literal feeding of the flock so important to Ruskin.

Finally there is the question of Ruskin's own identification with St. Peter, his acting out of the episcopal role in the remainder of the lecture, his own address to the infected flock who, he says, have "despised literature"; "despised science"; "despised Art"; "despised Nature"'; "despise[d] compassion." It is Ruskin who bears witness to what the ordained Bishop, the Bishop of Ripon in St. Pauls, should have had sight of at the time he was routinely per- forming his seventh special service of the year. It is the coroner's inquest into the death of one of the unfed, a Michael Collins, who chose to starve to death when out of work rather than undergo the humiliation of the workhouse. Vigorously does Ruskin "exhort and rebuke," "give account of the flock," and urge his audience, if they would be cured, if they would be kingly, to take action to both feed and teach the needy, to offer bread of the body and of the spirit.

It may not be too fanciful to recall, as we imagine him reading St. Peter's speech in preparation of his lecture, the conversation Ruskin once overheard (and recorded perhaps thirty years later) between his father and a painter friend who regretted Ruskin's attacks upon Raphael and lamented

what an amiable clergyman was lost in me,-"Yes," said my father, with tears in his eyes-(true and tender tears, as ever father shed,) "he would have been a Bishop." (35. 25)54

Princeton University FOOTNOTES

'Letter to the Reverend Osborne Gordon, 10 March 1844 in The Works of John Ruskin, eds. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, Library Edition, 39 vols. (Lon- don: George Allen, 1903-1912), vol. 3, p. 666; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.

2 George P. Landow connects Ruskin's religious history with his interpretation of both art and literature in The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). The discussions of Ruskin's visual imagination in John D. Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); Richard L. Stein, The Ritual of Interpretation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Jay Fellows, The Failing Distance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Robert HewisonJohn Ruskin: The Argument of the Eye (Princeton University Press, 1976) and E. K. Helsinger, "Ruskin and the Poets: Alterations in Autobiography," Modern Philology 74 (1976), 142-70, all bear at least indirectly on the relationship between Ruskin's set of mind and his interpretation of literature, and upon my argument.

3 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Garret Barden and John Cum- ming (New York: Seabury, 1975), p. 245.

A Aesthetics and Hermeneutics," trans. and ed. by David E. Linge, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 99; cf. Truth and Method, pp. 86-90.

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5 See particularly the chapters "Of Modem Landscape" and "The Moral of Land- scape.

6 For analysis of the stages in this tradition see Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969).

7 E. D. Hirsch objects to Gadamer's contention that the sequence of "subtilities" in traditional hermeneutics-intelligendi, explicandi and applicandi-is a rhetorical abstraction from what is simultaneous in the reader's act of understanding. The distinction between understanding and explication (in his terms, understanding and interpretation) is essential to Hirsch's purpose, to identify meaning with the author's intention. See chapters 1, 2 and 4 of Validity in Interpretation and Appendix II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). For replies to Hirsch from the perspective of hermeneutic philosophy, see Palmer, pp. 60-6 and especially David C. Hoy, The Critical Circle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 11-40. Gadamer's ontology of understanding is not a method, but to accept his analysis is to accept one's own historicity as an interpreter. It does not follow from this acceptance, however, that the critic must report the process rather than the results of his dialogue with the text.

8'"Plenary" inspiration, which allowed for scribal but not doctrinal error, was accepted by many Evangelicals, including Bishop J. C. Ryle: see his Introduction to Expository Thoughts on the Gospels, St. John, vol. 1 (New York: Robert Carter, 1874); for the Presbyterian version, Claude Welch, Prostestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 202-3.

9 The Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Van Akin Burd (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), I. p. 145.

10 "Testimony Confirmed by Experience" in Sermons, ed. Rev. C. P. M'Ilvaine (New York: Stanford and Swords, 1849), vol. I, p. 233.

11 Ibid, p. 236. 12 The Diaries of John Ruskin, eds. Joan Evans and J. H. Whitehouse (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1956-9), I 322. 13 Ruskin's Letters from Venice, 1851-2, ed. J. L. Bradley (New Haven: Yale Uni-

versity Press, 1956), p. 149. 14 "John Ruskin's Unpublished Letters to his Oxford Tutor on Theology," Etudes

Anglais 30 (1977), 202. 15 Reverend G. C. Gorham was refused a living on the grounds that his Calvinistic

views on baptismal regeneration were in conflict with Anglican dogma. After his appeal to the Court of Arches failed, he was vindicated by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and the place of Calvinists and Evangelicals within the established church was preserved: see 12, xxv-xxvii. Both essays are in volume 12.

16 Family Letters, II, p. 694. 17 Lectures on Practical Subjects (New York: Stanford and Swords, 1853), p. 79. 18 Mimesis, trans. William Trask (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1953), p. 12.

Auerbach spells out the interpretive consequences of this historical outlook in "Fig- ura" in his Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Meridian, 1959).

19 On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 50.

20 Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 4.

21 Ibid, p. 5. 22 On Religion: Addresses In Response to Its Cultured Critics (1806), trans. Ter-

rence N. Tice (Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1969), "Apologia," pp. 39-58. Palmer gives a brief summary of Schleiermacher's hermeneutics, pp. 84-97; for his significance in Protestant theology, see Welch, Chapter 3.

23 Truth and Method, p. 274; Hoy, p. 53. 24 Grace Abounding. ., and The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (London:

Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 142.




25 Landow, p. 360. Landow's is the best treatment of the influence of typological exegesis on Ruskin, and is followed by Hewison and Herbert L. Sussman in Fact Into Figure: Typology in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1979). Sussman is rather less careful than Landow in discriminating between strict and extended uses of the method. Landow's work is also my starting place.

26 Bunyan is careful to make this food emblematical only: "To shew that they must begin their Meal with Prayer and Praise to God. The Heave-shoulder David lifted his Heart up to God with. .. ," p. 356. Were there a literal level to the meal it would actually be a typological reversal or defulfillment of the new law. Landow insists the "pilgrims dine on the Levitical offering," p. 362. For The Pilgrim's Progress as a narrative of interpretation, see Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), chapter IV.

27 I have taken the distinction between meaning and event from T. P. Roche's "Tasso's Enchanted Woods," in Literary Uses of Typology, ed. Earl Miner (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 77.

28 Landow, p. 362. 29 "The Development of Abstracted Typology in England, 1650-1820," in Literary

Uses of Typology, pp. 147-203. Landow picks up Korshin's argument in Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows (London: Routledge, 1980), which includes discussion of "types" in nature, politics, and the imagery of writers and painters.

30 Ruskin's specific reference to Melvill's typological interpretations is light hearted, if not satiric (1. 490). Ruskin's praise of his sermon on "Eve Parleying with the Tempter" (Diaries, I, 243) to which Landow points makes no reference to typology, but focuses upon a point of literal reading Ruskin had not noticed heretofore, that Eve's disparagement of God's mercy can be seen in the fact that she drops the word "freely" from the formula "thou shalt freely eat." Considering Ruskin's train- ing there are surprisingly few references to orthodox typological interpretation in his published works, letters and diaries and in the numerous notes on biblical passages the editors cut out of the published Diaries. These last may be examined in the typescripts prepared for Cook and Wedderburn, which are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and in the manuscripts of the diaries, the bulk of which are in the Ruskin Galleries, Bembridge School, Isle of Wight.

31 Cf. Sussman, pp. 9-10. 32 From the unpublished Cook and Wedderburn transcript, Bodleian Library. The

list also opposes eidos diaphanes to idea. This list, of course, only applies directly to Ruskin's reading of Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes in the 1860's. The contrast between eidos and idea is not supported by scholarship on the subject: see H. C. Baldry, "Plato's 'Technical Terms'," The Classical Quarterly 30 (1937), 141-50.

33 The best explication of Rossetti's figural scheme is Landow's in "'Life touching lips with immortality': Rossetti's Typological Structures," Studies in Romanticism, 17 (1978), 249-51; but see also Sussman who quotes Ruskin's response to Coventry Patmore's objection to the painting's symbolism, his insistance that the "Passover," from which he commissioned a watercolor, was "plain prosy Fact." No notice is taken of Ruskin's apparent reluctance to expound upon the figuralism he knew so well. Sussman, pp. 67-9.

34 Ruskin in Italy, ed. Harold I. Shapiro (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 67. 35 For a detailed discussion of time in the mystery plays see chapter five of V. A.

Kolve's The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966); for the tropological emphasis, D. W. Robertson, Jr., "The Question of Typology and the Wakefield Mactacio Abel," in Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 218-35.

36 Truth and Method, p. 126. Ruskin approximates Gadamer's point in Modern Painters III when he insists that while nature is greater than any painting, great paintings interpret nature for us and thereby allow us to see and comprehend the essence of a scene, its meaning. All such pictures "are true or inspired ideals, seen in

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a moment to be ideal; that is to say, the result of all the highest powers of the imagination, engaged in the discovery and apprehension of the purest truths, and having so arranged them as best to show their preciousness and exalt their clear- ness" (5. 187).

37 Hayman, p. 205. 38 Bradley, p. 152-3. 38 The Study of Words, 2nd ed. (New York: Redfield, 1852), p. 45. 40 Gadamer makes a similar distinction between works largely subject to the vicis-

situdes of time and changing taste, and the body of "classical" works that in their essence exist "in a kind of timeless present that is contemporaneous with every other age" (Truth and Method, p. 256).

41 From a letter to Miss Brown, daughter of Rev. W. L. Brown, transcribed for Cook and Wedderburn but unpublished, Bodleian Library.

42 Ruskin may be drawing here on Trench's third lecture in The Study of Words and his English Past and Present (New York: Redfield, 1855). Ruskin credited Trench and F. J. Furnivall for beginning his "investigations of words as interpreters of things" (38. 332). Rosenberg notes the Orwell parallel in "Style and Sensibility in Ruskin's Prose," The Art of Victorian Prose, eds. George Levine and William Mad- den (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 196.

43 See particularly Phaedrus, 274c-277e, Plato: The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1961), pp. 520-23.

44 "Testimony," p. 235. 45Cf. Lectures, p. 87. 4" The Study of Words, p. 6. 47 "German Philosophy of Language in the Late 19th Century," in History of

Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1976), p. 670. Schmidt quotes from The Science of Thought (1887), but the same views were advanced in the lectures Ruskin cites. Michael Sprinker, arguing against Landow's understanding of Ruskin on allegory, contends that Ruskin's ideas about language were at one with his Lockean theory of perception. See "Ruskin on the Imagination," Studies in Romanticism, 18 (1979), 132. While such a view would have been consistent, it ran against Ruskin's prejudice in favor of stable meaning, his need to cling to some vestige of the doctrine of inspiration: hence the move from Trench to Muller. Trench himself was not a Lockean: see Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 230-46 for Trench's place in the history of linguistics.

48 The Study of Words, p. 181. 49John Milton (New York: Noonday Press, 1963), p. 98. Lycidas is here quoted

from Ruskin's text. 50 In Sheepfolds Ruskin made the common argument that officials of the early

Church called themselves "with absolute indifference Deacons, Bishops, Elders, Evangelists according to what they are doing at the time of speaking," thus opening the way for applying lines on elders to the definition of "bishops" (12: 537). The same texts were of course cited by anti-episcopal denominations in favor of the title and organization they favored, assimilating "bishop" to their term. Ruskin's texts were of course cited by anti-Episcopal denominations in favor of the title and organization they favored assimilating "bishop" to their term.

51 Synonyms of the New Testament, second part, (New York: Scribner, 1864), pp. 116-9.

52 Rosenberg, "Style and Sensibility," p. 183. 53Truth and Method, p. 304. 54 Research for this article was made possible by an NEH Fellowship.




Ruskin as a Prejudice Reader

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