Reading Ruskin Writing - John Ruskin - Bibliography

Ruskin is always there, in other words, and always returning, yet never quite codifiable, and the charm of his legacy might be said to reside in the proliferation of his protean inconsistency. As Ruskin himself remarked in 1858, in an inaugural address to the Cambridge School of Art, "I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly until I have contradicted myself at least three times." This may sound whimsical, but Ruskin was deadly serious in both his argument and its application. His entire critique of industrial society began with his detestation of specialization and the division of labor, which, he argued, resulted in the division and diminution of human beings, enacted through the fracturing of thought and sensation, of time and space, of body and mind, of act and intention, of planning and execution. Thus he became mildly hysterical at the proposition of either "pure thought" or "pure sensation," and, in this, he quarreled with utilitarians and romantics alike. Here, from the third volume of Modern Painters, is his response to Walter Scott's and William Wordsworth's contentions that their delight in nature was the benison of thoughtless, pure sensation:

[Wordsworth's and Scott's] delight, so far from being without thought, is more than half made up of thought, but of thought in so curiously languid and neutralized a condition that they cannot trace it. And observe, farther, that this comparative Dimness and Untraceableness of the thoughts, which are the sources of our imagination, is not a fault in the thoughts at such a time. It is, on the contrary, a necessary condition of their subordination to the pleasures of Sight. If the thoughts were more distinct we should not see so well, and beginning definitely to think, we must comparatively cease to see.

This observation rather succinctly defines the discomfort modern readers feel when reading Ruskin. His writing never ascends into the geometry of pure thought, nor does it descend into the atmospheres of pure sensation. Ruskin argues (as does Gilles Deleuze) that neither event can actually take place--that, in our vanity, we only mimic the pretense of such pure disassociation. Embodying this conviction, Ruskin's writing cleaves to the world; it rides the fulcrum of cognition and sensation, so when we are reading him, we are never reading books or encountering thought, we are dwelling in the realm of sense, reading Ruskin writing and experiencing the flow of Ruskin thinking on the edge of sensation. Our experience in this realm is further complicated by the fact that Ruskin is probably the most learned writer in English literature without the faintest scholarly inclination. His colleagues at Oxford would remark that he seemed to possess virtually no "knowledge" yet somehow maintained the full resources of Latin and Greek, the whole of the Bible and the bulk of English literature not in his head but on the tip of his tongue, in a condition of intricate verbal readiness, as a vehicle for his passion.