etween the word painting of Modern Painters I and the mental landscapes of Praeterita stretch the forty-five years of Ruskin's career. Within a decade after Modern Painters I he was certain that his vocation was to be a critic and not a poet or painter. The third volume of Modern Painters confronts us directly with Ruskin's choice. At the beginning of that volume he identifies himself firmly for the first time as a professional writer on art:
I have now given ten years of my life to the single purpose of enabling myself to judge right of art, and spent them in labour as earnest and continuous as men usually undertake to gain position, or accumulate fortune. It is true, that the public will call me un "amateur" ... I have, however, given up so much of life to this object; earnestly desiring to ascertain, and be able to teach, the truth respecting art. [5.4]
Ruskin offered his ten years of study not only to show that he was not an amateur but also to ask that he no longer be read as a word painter. He defended his method and style as "the labour of a critic who sincerely desires to be just" (5.6). In fact Ruskin had put aside his ambitions as poet and artist shortly after Modern Painters I was published, but in the succeeding decade he went on to reexamine the whole notion of the romantic poet-artist. The second half of Modern Painters III is a sustained if often indirect criticism of Wordsworth in which Ruskin distinguishes for himself a vocation and a manner of seeing different from that represented by the great romantic nature poet.
Turner may be the professed hero of Modern Painters, but Wordsworth is his co-hero in Modern Painters I. In that volume Turner, Wordsworth, and sometimes Ruskin himself seem to share the same [41/42] mode of seeing and feeling, imaginative vision at its most sublime. This trinity has dissolved in Modern Painters III. What Ruskin set out to justify and emulate in the prose of Modern Painters I—the art of Turner and Wordsworth — is examined in III and IV from a perspective consciously distinct from theirs. Ruskin's criticism of Wordsworth is part of a larger critique of the romantic imagination as a privileged mode of perception. The romantic descriptions of the poetic imagination, Ruskin opposes his own versions first of imaginative and finally of critical perception. Though Ruskin identifies himself as a romantic, he defines a critical attitude—and with it, a prose style formed in opposition to his romantic model. At the end of his chapters on romanticism in Modern Painters III Ruskin invites his readers to join him in his different mode of perception, the critical "science of aspects."
In his larger critique of romanticism, beginning with the chapter "Of the Novelty of Landscape," Ruskin questions the meaning and value of the nineteenth-century passion for landscape. Ruskin's chapters have for the most part been read piecemeal, either for his history of landscape representation, his theory of the pathetic fallacy, or his shift from aesthetic to social criticism—but not for his startling comments on Wordsworth.1 The seven chapters seem to me to form a coherent argument against a particular kind of romantic vision which Ruskin identified with Wordsworth. Ruskin's case against his former hero is a convenient place to begin an examination of his critical approach to romantic art. The criticism of Wordsworth is also Ruskin's first sustained presentation of an alternative, beholder's point of view.
To read these chapters of Modern Painters III as a revaluation of Wordsworth puts Ruskin's most famous contribution to literary criticism, his theory of the pathetic fallacy, in a different light. This much debated concept has been read as Ruskin's response to romanticism by both Patricia Ball and Harold Bloom.2 Ball rightly relates the pathetic fallacy to Ruskin's early prose descriptions, identifying both as a departure from romantic attitudes toward observation. But by using Coleridge as her reference point, she misses an important part of Ruskin's quarrel with his romantic models: his distinction between the imaginative perception of the romantic poet, exemplified by Wordsworth, 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 himself and 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, neither Bloom nor Ball looks closely at Ruskin's other objections to romantic poetry. Those objections are essential to my concerns: Wordsworth's role in Ruskin's self-definition as a critic and Ruskin's redirection of the nineteenth-century English response to landscape.
Ruskin was not the only Victorian in the 1850s to criticize romantic examples. Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold all did so before him.4 Tennyson's In Memoriam (1850), subtitled "The Way of a Soul," can serve as a Victorian analogue to Wordsworth's (The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind, published posthumously in the same year. Two of Wordsworth's earlier poems, "Tintern Abbey" (text) and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Earliest Childhood," provide a context for the comparison of romantic with Victorian experience as pursued both in In Memoriam and in Modern Painters III. Like Ruskin's critical prose, Tennyson's poem seems consciously to alter readers' expectations established by romantic conventions (for Tennyson, the long romantic lyric).5 Arnold's "The Scholar Gypsy" and Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (1853 and 1855) similarly take a special romantic theme—the autobiographical quest—as an occasion for expressing their distance, in temper and style, from romantic models. In the same years both poets also attempted in prose to define and distinguish themselves from some aspect of romantic poetry: Arnold in the 1853 preface to his Poems, Browning in his 1851 essay on Shelley. For all three men these revisions of romantic attitudes and styles were not their first work, but marked the beginning of a distinctive personal style and a distinctively Victorian self-consciousness. Ruskin's 1856 volumes of Modern Painters, prefaced by his presentation of himself as a professional critic, occupy a similar position in the development of his critical attitudes and prose.
Unlike his contemporaries, however, Ruskin was assessing the romantic imagination through its art as well as its literature. In Modern Painters I he uses romantic poetry to illustrate, and elevate, landscape art; in Modern Painters II romantic poetics provide the primary model tor Ruskin's theories of imagination; in Modern Painters III he reverses [43/44] the strategy of the first volume and uses landscape art to criticize romantic poetry. His criticisms amount to a further revision of romantic sister-arts theory, a departure from his own insistence in earlier volumes on the equality of Painting and her traditionally greater sister, Poetry. The judgments of Modern Painters III are specifically historical, however, as those of Modern Painters I and II were not. Ruskin approaches Turner and modern landscape painting from the new perspective provided by his recent venture into cultural history, The Stones of Venice, Where his first volume had simply assumed common modes of seeing and feeling in recent landscape art and literature, and his second volume had developed aesthetic theories in support of that assumption, the third volume of Modern Painters focuses on these modes of seeing and feeling as an historical phenomenon expressing and serving particular cultural needs. Writing now from the viewpoint of the cultural critic, Ruskin finds that landscape painting is and should be the dominant modern form of expression because it can better serve the needs of the culture. His criticisms of the romantic imagination have to be viewed in the context of this revaluation of poetry and painting in modern European culture—a revaluation that is as much political as it is aesthetic.
uskin turns to Wordsworth at three different times in his critical career: in the l840s, to illustrate Turner; in the l850s, as a key example
of modern landscape feeling; and in the l880s, as a foil for his praise of
Byron. The discussion of Wordsworth in Modern Painters III provides
the fullest explanation for the dramatic shift in Ruskin's opinion between the 1840s and the l880s, and the poet's role in Modern Painters; is the best index to what Wordsworth once meant to Ruskin. (There was
another Wordsworth for Ruskin, whom he continued to admire. I shall
return to this Victorian Wordsworth in the next chapter.)
Wordsworth occupies a more prominent place on the title page of Modern Painters than either Turner or the author. Every edition of every volume carries a long epigraph from The Excursion (IV. 978-992):
Accuse me not
Of Arrogance ...
If, having walked with Nature ...
And offered, far as frailty would allow,
My heart a daily sacrifice to Truth,
I now affirm of Nature and of Truth,v
Whom I have served, that their Divinity
Revolts, offended at the ways of men
Philosophers, who, though the human soul
Be of a thousand faculties composed,
And twice ten thousand interests, do yet prize
This soul and the transcendent universe,
No more than as a mirror that reflects
To proud Self-love her own intelligence.
The Wanderer, who speaks these lines, affirms an authority based on the direct experience of nature. Ruskin seems to be adopting this claim as his own. The Wanderer contrasts the experience of a humble heart with the narrower intelligence of philosophers—for Wordsworth, as the larger context of the quotation makes clear, an attack on scientists and eighteenth-century rationalists like Voltaire. Ruskin's first volume is similarly offered as the testimony of an amateur observer of nature against the experts, in his case art reviewers, historians, and critics. Like Wordsworth, Ruskin claims for the amateur a direct access to knowledge of nature, soul, and God. And he endorses Wordsworth's attack on the "proud Self-love" of the experts, which both men counter with the nonprofessional's love of his subject for its own sake—the pure love of the Divinity of Nature and Truth. Ruskin does not attempt to distinguish between himself, Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's Wanderer—between the amateur critic, the poet, and the voice of traditional pastoral wisdom, Wordsworth's pedlar-sage. These identifications hold true throughout the first volume of Modern Painters. The tone and diction ofRuskin's prose sometimes identify the author as amateur observer, sometimes as exalted poet-seer, and) sometimes as preacher or sage.
Wordsworth is also the poet whose descriptions Ruskin most frequently quotes in Modern Painters I to illustrate Turner's natural phenomena. Ruskin singles out three Wordsworthian qualities for special praise: his acute observation of visual detail, his penetration beyond surface detail to essential natural facts, and the balance of faculties, in [45-46] eluding feeling, which characterizes his perceptions. He quotes Wordsworth for "fine and faithful" descriptions (3.363), calls him "the keenest-eyed of all modern poets for what is deep and essential in nature" (3.307), and holds him up as model for the inferior English landscapists who "have not the intense all-observing penetration of well-balanced mind" or "anything of [Wordsworth's] feeling" (3.177). This praise is both romantic and Wordsworthian and, at the same time, unWordsworthian and even anachronistic in the 1840s: Ruskin sounds romantic when he uses the keen eye as a metaphor for the penetrating, feeling mind; anachronistic when he praises Wordsworth as a descriptive poet. The emphasis on penetration and the well-balanced mind follows Wordsworth's own correction of superficial picturesque attitudes to nature—"The repetitions wearisome of sense, / Where soul is dead, and feeling hath no place" (Excursion IV. 620-21); the "tyranny" of the eye "Bent overmuch on superficial things" and insensitive "to the moods / Of Nature and the spirit of the place" (The Prelude [1805] XI.179, 161-62). Ruskin cites the same Wordsworthian qualities of intensity, penetration, and feeling as signs of imagination, "the highest intellectual power of man" in Modern Painters II. The theory of imagination developed there is largely based on romantic poetics (Wordsworth's prefaces are cited), but it serves as a theory for the visual arts as well. Ruskin calls the central mode of imagination for both painters and poets "penetrative"; it is above all intense, acts reciprocally with feeling, and pushes beyond surface detail to grasp essences:
It never stops at crusts or ashes, or outward images of any kind; it ploughs them all aside, and plunges into the very central fiery heart; nothing else will content its spirituality; whatever semblances and various outward shows and phases its subject may possess go for nothing ... it looks not in the eyes, it judges not by the voice, it describes not by outward features; all that it affirms, judges, or describes, it affirms, from within. [4.250-51]
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 examples where 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 of imagination dawns. When Ruskin praises Wordsworth in eighteenthcentury terms as a pictorial poet, he departs from Wordsworth's understanding that accurate observation and description are only the first 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 outer detail and inner essence, visual and imaginative or spiritual truth, could coexist in equality.6 But when he reexamined Wordsworth and romantic poetics in Modern Painters III, he discovered that they could not serve as literary examples of an art both pictorial and imaginative.
At the beginning of Modern Painters III Wordsworth is once again paired with Turner as an imaginative poet-artist, but halfway through the volume he is first condemned as a bad judge of painting, next put in a lower order of poets, and then replaced as the representative modern poet by Walter Scott. By the end of Ruskin's discussion of the modern temper, Turner stands alone as the great creative mind of nineteenth-century England. Even in Wordsworth's own territory, the Lake Country, Ruskin takes Turner for his guide (see immediately below. Turner alone is hailed as "the master of this science of Aspects." What has happened to the co-hero of Modern Painters I?
Turner's Keswick Lake, or Derwentwater. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
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 to the pathetic fallacy. As a poet, Wordsworth is not simply the humble student of Nature and Truth portrayed in The Excursion. A favorite device of modern poetry has led him to a serious failure of perception. Second, Ruskin argues that since painting conveys the emotion of landscape more effectively than poetry, visual description is more important 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 Ruskin defines it, is a device for expressing psychological truths in descriptive poetry. A distorted presentation of natural facts reveals the emotional preoccupations of the perceiver. Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Keats are "Reflective or Perceptive" poets (5.205n) for whom the pathetic fallacy is an effective strategy. Their poetry uses a speaker describing and meditating on nature "who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, 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 not primarily descriptive or meditative nature poetry and need not rely on pathetic fallacy to portray emotional responses. Though description is not its primary mode, it may contain passages of description; but (at least in the examples Ruskin gives) these descriptions of natural fact are introduced as comparisons or metaphors for some fact of human action or emotion. Unlike pathetic fallacy, such comparisons need not blur or distort differences between human and external nature. Dante can compare falling souls to falling leaves
without, however, for an instant losing his own clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves; he makes no confusion of one with the other. But when Coleridge speaks of
"The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,"
he has a morbid, that I to say, a so far false, idea about the leaf; he fancies a life in it, and will, which there are not; confuses its powerlessness with choice, its fading death with merriment, and the wind that shakes it with music. [5.206-207]
Though Ruskin insists that both groups of poets must be "first-rate in their range" (5.205), he orders them in a definite hierarchy. Creative poetry is a higher mode than reflective or perceptive poetry because it gives equal weight to psychological truth and physical fact. Where poets and speakers are clearly distinct, the pathetic fallacy is, Ruskin says, a legitimate dramatic device (5.218). But if, as Ruskin sometimes (rather unfairly) assumes, poets' perceptions are often as distorted as their speakers', then they are inferior to creative poets who, though they too feel strongly, also "think strongly, and see truly" (5.209).
This way of putting the case identifies the poet's choice of the reflective or perceptive poetic mode with a serious flaw in perception. The following chapters of Modern Painters III apply this criticism to romantic poets in general and to Wordsworth in particular. In one sense Ruskin is extending a romantic criticism of nature poetry, following Wordsworth and Coleridge when he argues that a poet's perception of nature 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 perception and the narrow rationalism of scientists and philosophers, Ruskin finds the greatest danger for poets of Wordsworth's and succeeding generations to come from the very feeling they had trusted to correct the distortions of rules and reason. Wordsworth's Wanderer accuses the self-reflecting intellect Ruskin attacks the self-projecting heart. He continues to praise Wordsworth's "intense penetrative depth" in Modern Painters III, but his praise is repeatedly qualified by warnings that the feeling Wordsworth brings to his perception of nature has become a source of "proud Self-love." Ruskin makes this criticism of Wordsworth when he praises another romantic poet, Walter Scott.
When Ruskin looks for a representative nineteenth-century poet, he assumes that this poet will share the period's unusual love of landscape. We might expect, then, that the nineteenth-century poet would also use the pathetic fallacy. According to Ruskin, only Scott does not. Why then choose Scott, whose best work Ruskin himself believes to be his novels, rather than Wordsworth, whom Ruskin considers the greatest poet in the reflective or perceptive school of nature poetry? Ruskin says that Scott can represent the weaknesses as well as the potential strengths of landscape poetry, but it does not seem to be entirely for his faithlessness or sentimental attitude toward the past that Ruskin has chosen him. Scott seems to be important for Ruskin because his is the only example of a descriptive, reflective nature poetry which does not rely on the pathetic fallacy. Scott is representative not of what landscape poetry has been, but of what it could be—though Ruskin does not claim that Scott is himself the greatest landscape poet. The undercurrent of comparison between Scott and Wordsworth which runs through "Of Modern Landscape" constantly points to the fallacy of projected feeling as the chief difference between them. Scott alone of modern writers is humble and free of affectation. Wordsworth [49/50] worth's conversations reveal traces of "jealousy or self-complacency" and he is "often affected in his simplicity" (5.332). Scott is the greatest example of the "pure passion for nature," the "habit of looking at nature ... as having an animation and pathos of its own." This attitude "is not pathetic fallacy; for there is no passion in Scott which alters nature," and consequently his "enjoyment of Nature s incomparably greater than that of any other poet I know. All the rest carry their cares to her, and begin maundering in her ears about their own affairs." Tennyson, Keats, Byron, and Shelley are particularly guilty:
Wordsworth is more like Scott, and understands how to be happy, but yet cannot altogether rid himself of the sense that he is a philosopher, and ought always to be saying something wise. He has also a vague notion that nature would not be able to get on well without Wordsworth; and finds a considerable part of his pleasure in looking at himself as well as at her. But with Scott the love is entirely humble and unselfish. [5.340-43]7
Ruskin's first objection to Wordsworth, then, is that he slights visual for psychological fact, preferring the subjective truth conveyed by the pathetic fallacy.
To this essentially romantic criticism of Wordsworth and romantic poetry, Ruskin joins a second, unromantic attack on poetry that undervalues visual imagery. His praise of Scott's narrative and descriptive poems over Wordsworth's more psychological ones is involved in this attack as well. In Modern Painters III and and at the beginning of Modern Painters III Ruskin insists on the theoretical equivalence of painting and poetry as imaginative arts.8 Though by doing so he sets himself against an antipictorial tradition of romantic poetics, which begins with Burke, enlists Coleridge and Hazlitt, and influences Wordsworth, Ruskin at first coopts Wordsworth as an example of his own position. He assumes that the art of Turner and the poetry of Wordsworth can be understood in the same terms. But later in Modern Painters III Ruskin argues that painting has a greater imaginative effect than poetry on the modern mind. In making that argument he establishes criteria to show that Wordsworth's antipictorial poetry works differently, and less effectively, than Turner's painting.
When Burke compared emotional effects in the literature and art of [50/51] the sublime, he argued that language affects emotional response more directly and powerfully than pictures. Burke was refuting the picture theory of language derived from Hobbes and Locke, which held that words act on the mind by evoking images. The picture theory had helped call into question the Renaissance view that painting was a lesser sister of the other major imitative art, literature. Burke observed that words are not very effective at evoking images. From this he went on to suggest new grounds for the superiority of literature to painting.
The truth is, all verbal description, merely as naked description, though never so exact, conveys so poor and insufficient an idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely have the smallest effect, if the speaker did not call in to his aid those modes of speech that mark a strong and lively feeling in himself. Then, by the contagion of our passions, we catch a fire already kindled in another, which probably might never have been struck out by the object described. Words, by strongly conveying the passions . . . compensate for their weakness in other respects . . . [They are] able to affect us often as strongly as the things they represent, and sometimes much more strongly.9
The contagion of passions that Burke described was elaborated into romantic theories of a sympathetic imagination. His suggestion that literature, because its "business is to affect rather by sympathy than imitation," should avoid merely pictorial description was taken up by Coleridge and Hazlitt, who also affirmed his speculation that literature might affect us more strongly than imitative art. Hazlitt writes that
the argument which has been sometimes set up, that painting must affect the imagination more strongly, because it represents the image more distinctly, is not well founded . . . Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself: poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it. But this last is the proper province of the imagination.10
Or again: "words are a key to the affections. They not only excite feelings, but they point to the why and wherefore . . . They are links in the chain of the universe, and the grappling-irons that bind us to it . . . they alone answer in any degree to the truth of things" (XII, 337). Both Hazlitt and Coleridge attack writers (Crabbe is a favorite target) who [51/52] seem to give descriptive detail for its own sake. Coleridge affirms: "images taken from nature and accurately described [do] not characterize the poet. They must be blended or merged with other images, the offspring of imagination, and blended, besides, with the passions or other pleasurable emotions which contemplation has awakened in the poet himself."12 In a Burkean passage, Coleridge insists, "What are deemed fine descriptions, produce their effects almost purely by a charm of words, with which & with whose combinations, we associate feelings indeed, but no distinct Images.'"13
Wordsworth's many references to the tyranny of the eye and the need for the imagination to escape it indicate his sympathies with this antipictorial approach. In the preface to his 1815 Poems Wordsworth lists accurate observation and description of "things as they are in themselves . . . unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer" as the first power necessary to the poet, but he adds: "This power, though indispensable to a poet, is one which he employs only in submission to necessity, and never for a continuance of time: as its exercise supposes all the higher qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state of subjection to external objects, much in the same way as a translator or engraver ought to be to his original."14 In Wordsworth's poetry, eye is again and again either opposed to heart, mind, and imagination or stripped of its usual sensory meaning in order that it may become a metaphor for mental action.15 When Wordsworth remembers, in (The Prelude, his early picturesque tour of the Alps, he says "the eye was master of the heart" and "held my mind / In absolute dominion"; imagination suffered under this tyranny of the eye (XI[l8o5]. 171,174-75). Only when "we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul" can sight return as a metaphor for an inward action of the mind. Then,
with an eye made
quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy
We
see into the life of things" ("Tintern Abbey," 45-49).
In Modern Painters I and II Ruskin directly opposes the Burkean argument that poetry, as an imaginative art, is higher than painting, an imitative art. But as George Landow has pointed out, he opposes it "with an interesting mixture of romantic and unromantic ideas about the imagination."16 On the one hand, he extends romantic poetics to the visual arts when he insists that both poetry and painting are imaginative arts: they appeal to the same supreme faculty. On the [52/53] other hand, he defines imagination differently: the imagination works reciprocally with feeling, but it works through visual images—in literature, as in painting. This view of a primarily visual imagination, though common in the eighteenth century, was not shared by romantics. Ruskin admits that "in representing human emotion words surpass painting" (5.330), but he would not agree with Burke that visual imagery is irrelevant to the power of words to evoke an emotional response in the reader. He is committed to the belief that both words and paint evoke images in the imagination and by that route affect the emotions of readers and viewers. Hence a single definition serves for both literature and art: both are "poetry," "the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions." Still more explicitly, "the power of assembling, by the help of the imagination, such images as will excite these feelings, is the power of the poet" (5.28,29). By this definition, there is no distinction in kind between the imaginative effects of a Turner painting and a Wordsworth poem.
In "Of Modern Landscape," however, Ruskin changes his appraisal of the sister arts by shifting from a theoretical to an historical argument. Looking at the nineteenth century, Ruskin asks whether the new emphasis on landscape alters the equality of painting and poetry as imaginative arts. His criterion is a cultural historian's: he is comparing art and literature as expressions of the modern mind. At the same time, he is making an aesthetic judgment, but one intended to be historically limited: he is comparing the power of art and literature to appeal to a modern audience.
As the admiration of mankind is found, in our times, to have in great part passed from men to mountains, and from human emotion to natural phenomena, we may anticipate that the great strength of art will also be warped in this direction . . . and farther, because ... in representing natural scenery painting surpasses words, we may anticipate also that the painter and poet . . . will somewhat change their relations of rank in illustrating the mind of the age; that the painter will become of more importance, the poet of less. [5.329-30]
Wordsworth's poetry may be doubly damned, but Ruskin's judgment of it must nonetheless be understood in the light of his belief that painting, not poetry, has greater power to express and move a modern [53/54] mind Ruskin certainly criticizes Wordsworth's handling of nature in his pceny. By opposing feeling to sight, Wordsworth lets his own responses obscure certain truths of nature (the pathetic fallacy). Moreover, he does not sufficiently recognize what seems to Ruskin to be the fundamental importance of the eye to imagination and feeling. Yet Ruskin's attacks on Wordsworth, like his praise of Scott, are qualified by his belief that no landscape poetry has the imaginative power of the greatest landscape painting. Ruskin replaces Wordsworth with Scott not because Scott's poetry is greater, but because Scott's treatment of nature—joyful description for its own sake, otherwise "unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer" — is closer to the pure landscape feeling that painting more successfully captures. In Modern Painters III Wordsworth remains for Ruskin the chief figure in nineteenth-century landscape poetry. But that poetry, with its emphasis on individual feeling at the expense of accurate description, misrepresents and perhaps misleads the modern mind.
In the last chapter of his critique of romanticism, Ruskin raises his third objection, this time to Wordsworth's account of perception. Ruskin challenges the authority of Wordsworth's personal experience of nature, the authority by which Wordsworth subordinates the eye to feeling and imagination. Where Wordsworth testifies that his youthful landscape response ("a feeling and a love,/That had no need of a remoter charm,/By thought supplied"; "Tintern Abbey," 80-82) became with age less vivid but more profound, Ruskin insists that sense is never separate from thought, even in the child. "There is not, however, any question but that both Scott and Wordsworth are here mistaken in their analysis of their feelings. Their 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" (5.355). The thought that more than half makes up their impressions is subordinated to the visual image, of which alone they are conscious. Taking as example a scene of many visual delights? where what "impresses us most" is nonetheless "a thin grey film or the extreme horizon," because it "is known to mean a mountain ten thousand feet high, inhabited by a race of noble mountaineers," Ruskin notes that the identification of the thin film as mountain takes place at a level of perception below consciousness. It is not an articulated [54/55] thought: "the thoughts and knowledge which cause us to receive this impression are so obscure that we are not conscious of them; we think we are only enjoying the visible scene; and the very men whose minds are fullest of such thoughts absolutely deny, as we have just heard, that they owe their pleasure to anything but the eye" (5.356).
Relying, like Wordsworth, on his own experience, Ruskin finds that his earliest response to natural scenery "was never independent of associated thought" (5.365). Even as a child he possessed a frame of reference that governed his perception of visual beauty. Literary and historical associations suggested a contrast between his everyday experience of contemporary cityscapes and images of a more pastoral past. A particular set of emotions—joy, affection, sorrow, delight mixed with awe—were part of his frame of reference. According to Ruskin's account, he could never have seen landscape without a complex of individual and cultural associations.
Ruskin insists that there is no such thing as seeing without thought because he wants to deny the second part of Wordsworth's testimony: that there can continue to be landscape feeling—and for Wordsworth, more profound feeling—if the youthful delight in visual experience fades.17 Ruskin maintains that thought is and must remain subordinate to visual experience.
And observe, farther, that this comparative Dimness and Untraceableness of the thoughts which are the sources of our admiration, is not a fault in the thoughts, at such a time. It is, on the contrary, a necessary condition of their subordination to the pleasure 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. [5.356]
He describes the proper relation of thought to sight, characteristically, through a visual metaphor: a garland of thoughts and fancies grouped and fastened about a natural object (5.359). This act of seeing, more than half made up of dim and untraceable thoughts even in the child, is not a prelude to imagination; it is imagination, "the power of the imagination in exalting any visible object, by gathering round it, in farther vision, all the facts properly connected with it; this being, as it were, a spiritual or second sight, multiplying the power of enjoyment according to the fulness of the vision" (5.355).
Ruskin has in fact identified imagination as "the power of fully perceiving [55/56] any natural object." The process takes place not at the level of language but at the level of images. It is a kind of visual thinking. Though he distinguishes imaginative perception from simple visual sensation, it is clear that he does not believe such primary or innocent sight actually possible—even the child's sight is thoughtful or imaginative. As he later claimed, all seeing, properly understood, is imaginative; it is "second or spiritual sight" (22.195). The word "spiritual" is not just an exhortation to look for moral or religious significance in things seen (though Ruskin often uses it this way). His efforts to reform perception are based on an argument about the nature of perception as a psychological process. He is countering romantic psychology with his own. Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Wordsworth contend that, while images may imitate reality, only words convey feelings and associations, "the proper province of the imagination." For Ruskin, to perceive is to feel and think without language. To perceive is to imagine.
Ruskin's account of perception resembles both the associationist psychology important to Wordsworth and modern psychological explanations of perception, but differs from them in one important respect. Like the most widely known associationist, Archibald Alison, Ruskin stresses the role of association in even the child's response to natural beauty. And like gestalt and perceptual psychologists, whose ideas have been incorporated into art theory by Rudolph Arnheim and Ernst Gombrich, Ruskin insists that these associations are a necessary part of the act of seeing itself, operating below the level of consciousness and hence of language.18 We see the gray film because we identify it as a distant mountain. It may sound strange to attribute this notion of perception to Ruskin who, after all, also invented the phrase "innocence of the eye" (15.27n). (Gombrich uses Ruskin as his straw man when he argues for the conventionality of all perception.) But it is worth remembering that the innocent eye is a notion Ruskin introduced in a handbook on drawing for amateurs; its principal function was to help his students shed a particular set of pictorial conventions. Modern Painters III, written a year before The Elements of Drawing, is the other side of the heuristic argument for an innocent eye. No eye, Ruskin argues in Modern Painters III, really comes innocent to the perception of landscape.
But Ruskin stops short of a belief in the complete subjectivity or [56/57] conventionality of perception. He is closer to Gombrich or Arnheim than to Alison or Wordsworth because he understands perception as a sort of visual thinking with association as a part of, and not subsequent to, the act of seeing. But he differs from both Alison and the later writers because he believes that the perceiver does register one image that corresponds to the object in front of him. The central image in the garland of thought-images retains its status as an objective fact, though its power as impression is enhanced by the cluster of associated images. Ruskin's metaphoric description of the perceptual process may be difficult to take literally, but it reflects his desire to distinguish his own account of perception from associationist accounts that make the response to landscape too personal. All perception may be imaginative, but imaginative perception is nonetheless, as Wordsworth's Wanderer testified, a road to the discovery of Nature and Truth. From that road, Ruskin feared, Wordsworth had strayed.
Why does Ruskin attach so much importance to correcting romantic accounts of imaginative perception? He places a heavy weight of cultural responsibility on the landscape poet and artist. Ruskin has moved from what Victorians understood to be a romantic emphasis on imagination as the province of literature (and art) to a more Victorian concern with imaginative perception understood as essential to cultural health. Perceptive poetry interests him less as poetry than as part of a broader historical phenomenon: changes in perception brought about by modern science and technology, to which the modern interest in landscape seems to be a reaction. Though Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Shelley, and Tennyson write about a relationship with landscape to which perception is central, none of these poets, Ruskin believes, properly understands and values the act of perception.
Ruskin's argument, developed in the last few pages of "The Moral of Landscape," runs something like this. All perception may be imaginative, but not everyone is aware of the unconscious thoughts that constitute much of what is seen. For "nearly all persons of average mental endowment" the unconscious mental act of seeing is very quickly succeeded by a "wandering away in thought from the thing seen to the business of life . . . They see and love what is beautiful, but forget their admiration of it in following some train of thought which it suggested, and which is of more personal interest to them" (5-357-58). Distraction in the ordinary perceiver is not necessarily a [57/58] matter for concern, but it has changed in recent years from mere unconsciousness of aesthetic pleasure in landscape to careless disrespect for what is seen. Distraction and disrespect have been exacerbated by the declining belief in a spiritual life once associated with nature, and by technological and scientific conquests over nature. The railroad and the telegraph (Ruskin's two examples) speed up the process of seeing, change the appearance of the landscape, and hence profoundly affect the act of perception. The modern interest in natural scenery is a reaction against changed habits of perception, but the role of landscape feeling in contemporary culture is also a sign that these changes have already occurred. The landscape feeling indicates a healthy desire in ordinary men to recover aesthetic and spiritual pleasures of perception, but it is also commonly viewed as dreamy idleness or willful rebelliousness—in part because it is not valued by cultural authorities. Modern educators put all their emphasis on knowledge of words and the abstract sciences and neglect or dismiss disciplines that would teach people to look more attentively at their surroundings. The child's interest in natural history is "violently checked" or "scrupulously limited to hours of play," while drawing is taught as a social accomplishment by masters who encourage the substitution of a visual shorthand for first-hand observation and accurate depiction. The result is that those who do observe and draw landscape "are for the most part neglected or rebellious lads—runaways and bad scholars—passionate, erratic, selfwilled, and restive against all forms of education; while your well-behaved and amiable scholars are disciplined into blindness and palsy of half their faculties" (5.376-77).
Perceptive poetry and landscape painting spring from just the kind of careful looking that doubt and progress are making eccentric or obsolete. Poet and artist can make the average person conscious that his own perception is richer than he knows. They can arrest and convey the fullness of imaginative perception, the natural object and its garland of thought and feeling that make up the fleeting first pression. They can educate people of average intelligence to value others' perceptions and to cultivate their own, and perhaps persuade them to make certain that the conditions for attentive perception are not irrevocably altered. At stake is not just the existence of art but the quality of human life. But if perceptive poetry and landscape art are to exemplify and make conscious the value of imaginative perception, they [58/59] cannot "wander away in thought from the thing seen"; they must suggest the garland of thought and feeling, while the experience conveyed remains immediate and visual. Reflection and philosophy have no part in the visual thinking that characterizes imaginative perception. Wordsworth remains for Ruskin an ideal perceptive poet when he keeps to description, as in the short poem "Yew Trees," which Ruskin quotes (5.358-59). But the Wordsworth of many of the "Poems of Imagination," and presumably of (The Prelude,19 betrays the heart that loves Nature. He has ceased to see, and hence to imagine.
Ruskin's changed attitude toward Wordsworth is thus also historical and political. Twenty-five years later when he again turned to Wordsworth, this character of his criticism is much more striking.20 His worries about cultural health were far more urgent by 1880. The careless inattention to environment and the distraction that characterized modern perception by then seemed closely linked to the social woes of nineteenth-century England. Ruskin's judgment of Wordsworth was correspondingly harsher. In 1856 he still classed Wordsworth as a Seer, albeit a flawed one; by 1880 even his praise of the poet is devastating. By narrowing his focus, Wordsworth has achieved
A measured mind, and calm; innocent, unrepentant; helpful to sinless creatures and scatheless, such of the flock as do not stray. Hopeful at least, if not faithful; content with intimations of immortality such as may be in skipping of lambs, and laughter of children—incurious to see in the hands the print of the Nails. [34.320]
Wordsworth's rank and scale among poets were determined by himself, in a single exclamation:
What was the great Parnassus' self to thee,
Mount Skiddaw? ("Pelion and Ossa flourish side by side"; 34.318)
Behind Ruskin's attacks on Wordsworth lies his sense that Wordsworth is traditionalist at a time when tradition is dying or dead.21 To recover disappearing habits of mind it is no longer enough to evoke their co inuing presence in remote rural areas or in a poet's memories. Recollected experience is not sufficient support for the present experience of the ordinary man or of the culture. Past and present are too sharply divided; only radical criticism and change will restore the habits of imaginative perception that Ruskin had praised as an essential human activity in 1856. Then he had written that "the greatest thing a [59/60] human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way" (5.333). Already in Modern Painters III Ruskin was defending perception as both an absolute moral necessity and a contemporary political one. He identified changes in habits of seeing as a phenomenon of the nineteenth century and saw those changes as potentially destroying pleasures of perception important for human minds and societies. And he took responsibility as a critic for asking how landscape art and poetry met the threats to imaginative perception. From this point of view, Wordsworth's calm and measured mind would not do. By 1880 Ruskin had turned to a different perceptive poet. This poet also "never loses sight of the absolute fact"—but Ruskin has extended the meaning of fact to include not only the facts of a benign landscape (Wordsworth's pure mountain tarns) but also the facts of landscape altered by human thoughtlessness and cruelty (Carlyle's and Byron's rivers of blood and "seas of gore"; 34.322,328). And Ruskin is convinced now that clear sight of such facts will be accompanied not just by the selfless joy he had once praised in Scott, but also by emotions he had once considered personal and selfish: unrelieved melancholy, scorn, satire, and anger born of "an instinct for Astraean justice." By this more inclusive definition of visual fact and undistorting feeling, Byron, not Wordsworth, is "the truest, the sternest, Seer of the Nineteenth Century" (34.341-43, 397)
suggested at the beginning of this chapter that Ruskin's criticism of Wordsworth and romantic nature poetry was a significant stage in his definition of himself as a critic. To evaluate the romantic achievement, he created an historical category that included himself (the modern temper, expressed in landscape literature and art, and often employing the pathetic fallacy) and then distinguished himself from both the poets and the artists he admired. I would like to turn now from Ruskin's arguments to the structure and metaphors of his prose, asking what it meant to write as a critic of romanticism.
The last pages of Ruskin's chapters on romanticism differ from conclusions to similar sections in Modern Painters I in two important ways. In the earlier volume, when he wishes to mark an ending by a change in rhetoric or some noticeable structural device, Ruskin characteristically shifts from explanation to praise and often ends (as he sometimes [60/61] begins) with a vision—a virtuoso descriptive passage that serves both to glorify Turner's vision and to identify Ruskin's own mode of seeing with Turner's.22 In Modern Painters III, as in much of Ruskin's subsequent criticism, the rhetorical shift is from explaining art and nature to exhorting the reader. The concluding structural device does not illustrate or dramatize imaginative perception, but rather invokes the object of critical perception by alluding to it, through an image or phrase whose meaning depends on and recalls the constellation of thoughts articulated in the essay. Thus the seven chapters exploring landscape art and poetry conclude with attacks on the modern education and technology that seem to follow from the romantic misunderstanding of perception. And the last paragraphs of the section name Turner "master of this science of Aspects," completing the critique of romantic imagination by calling its greatest representative an instructor in a different kind of perception. Similarly, in "Of Kings' Treasuries" (1865), Ruskin shifts from advice on reading to a passionate attack on his audience for "despising literature, despising science, despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, and concentrating its soul on Pence" (18.84). The lecture ends by reiterating the phrase that is its title, now metaphorically extended to bring together the two concerns of the lecture. True kings' treasuries, Ruskin had begun by suggesting, contained not gold but books; and true kings, he ends by urging, should pave not their coffers but the streets of their cities with this gold—should, that is, make the wealth of knowledge part of the daily lives of their'people (18.104-105).
The new rhetorical conclusions of the 185os and 186os seem to be directly related to his decision, first evident in Modern Painters III, to separate himself from the romantic art that was his first subject and to .bring his readers to make the same separation. Concluding his argujnents not by praising but by exhorting, and not by dramatizing imagination but by renaming his critical subject, Ruskin has abandoned the authority he invoked in Modern Painters I. There he concluded his explanations by writing like a painter or poet—a prose Wordsworth or Turner. In Modern Painters III he ends his chapters on romanticism instead with a demand upon his readers for engagement and social action. His new name for Turner recalls his arguments for the importance of sight to the imagination. It also reminds his readers that sight should, for them, be joined to thought by another route than that of [61/62] the romantic imagination—by the new science of aspects, a process of critical perception that Ruskin himself has demonstrated.
The move to accusation and exhortation asserts what was for Ruskin an essential—and always final—phase of critical perception. In Modern Painters III he moves through a bewildering variety of different kinds of criticism. Perceptive poetry, denned as a literary mode, later becomes an historical category: nineteenth-century landscape poetry. From literary criticism and cultural history Ruskin turns to arguments based on recent aesthetic theory and psychology. With each kind of criticism he moves from analysis to judgment, but judgment made from yet another perspective, that of the cultural critic. Cultural criticism is the last perspective from which Ruskin writes, because it is the perspective that leads beyond the imaginative perception of art to engagement and action. The critic follows the audience out the door and the reader from his study. Reversing an earlier hope, Ruskin concludes in Modern Painters III that neither landscape art nor perceptive poetry can directly effect reforms. Thus when he ends by exhorting his audience, he is separating himself, through subject and rhetoric, even those artists whose imaginative perceptions he admires. Still, judgments of the cultural critic, though they must come last, do not blot out any of the insights achieved by the critic in his other guises. The science of aspects—like the name by which Ruskin appeals to women at the end of "Of Queens' Gardens" (Maud or Madeleine, the Magdalen) or the abiding virtues he invokes at the end of a lecture on a cloud that vanishes, "The Mystery of Life and Its Arts"—works to multiply meaning and reinject complexity into the simplifying rhetoric of the call to reform. This final act of naming is thus faithful to the critic's rejection of reductive vision, as of reductive rhetoric, in favor of perceptual richness.
The distinction between romantic artist and critic suggested by these rhetorical changes is also expressed in two different metaphors for the way of seeing Ruskin adopts as his own. Ruskin's chapter "Of the Use of Pictures," introducing his examination of landscape feeling, takes as its special subject "imaginative power in the beholder" as that differs from imaginative power in the artist (5.178-86). The initial difference Ruskin notes is one of degree. The artist's imagination is readily aroused, even by the shapeless ink splash on the wall. The beholder's imagination is fragile, sluggish, "eminently weariable." The [62/63] difference in power is also a difference in method of comprehension or mode of seeing, however. This is most clearly brought out by the submerged metaphor governing Ruskin's description. His beholder's imagination is constantly compared to a traveler. It must be awakened and prodded into motion; its attention can be arrested, as the traveler's might be by an opportunity for a sketch. It tires easily, with "the weariness which is so often felt in traveling too much." It must be occasionally given a chance to "rest, and, as it were, places to lie down and stretch its limbs in; kindly vacancies, beguiling it back into action." Above all, like the traveler, the beholding imagination needs to be guided. Ruskin's comparison stresses the peculiar needs of the beholder, but it also suggests a fundamental difference in the way the beholder approaches a landscape or a painting. The beholder's experience, like the traveler's, is progressive. It takes time visually to explore a landscape or a painting. From the beholder's changing perspective, variation of pace and incident together with strongly marked compositional guideposts are as important as overall form or atmosphere, because he does not, like the man facing a broad prospect, take in the whole at a single glance. Form and meaning unfold progressively, as they do for the spectator moving through a landscape.
The artist's imagination, by contrast, works instinctively and instantaneously (5.187-188). His sight is marked by a "peculiar oneness" instantly achieved. The true artist holds his whole composition before the mind's eye from the start. His first impressions of landscape will exhibit the same unifying vision.
I know not if the reader can understand,—I myself cannot, though I see it to be demonstrable,—the simultaneous occurrence of idea which produces such a drawing as this [a Turner]: the grasp of the whole, from the laying of the first line, which induces continual modifications of all that is done, out of respect to parts not done yet. No line is ever changed or effaced: no experiment made; but every touch is placed with reference to all that are to succeed, as to all that have gone before. [7.243-44]
Ruskin comes back to the artist's unique power of instantaneous, comprehensive seeing again and again, as in this passage from Modern Painters V. He stresses the absolute difference between artistic vision and normal perception: "All noble composition of this kind can be cached only by instinct; you cannot set yourself to arrange such a subject; [63/64] you may see it, and seize it, at all times, but never laboriously invent it" (15.210). We may see it, but only by tracing out the parts. If the beholder is a traveler, who can enlarge his limited perspective only by constantly changing his point of view, the artist stands stationary on an eminence, immediately taking in the whole in a single intense ' moment of perception. The prospect of the artist, however, is more extensive than any actual prospect, for it embraces distant times as well as distant places, fusing the past experience of both the individual and the culture into a single perception (6.33-42). The artist's vision transcends the limitations of both space and time with no apparent effort. The ordinary beholder, like the ordinary traveler, needs other methods and strategies to overcome his limitations and properly see a landscape or a painting.
Ruskin's science of aspects presents these methods and strategies under a different metaphor. The natural scientist replaces the tourist as a figure for the beholder. Or, rather, the scientist is the tourist who sees more accurately and more methodically, for the natural scientist also roams the countryside, climbing mountains, breaking open rocks, gathering and dissecting flowers. Ruskin's beholder, however, does not practice the ordinary, Baconian empirical "science of Essence" but a new science of perception: "there is a science of the aspects of things, as well as of their nature; and it is as much a fact to be noted in their constitution, that they produce such and such an effect upon the eye or heart (as, for instance, that minor scales of sound cause melancholy), as that they are made up of certain atoms or vibrations of matter" (5.387). Ruskin's wandering natural scientist, like his visionary artist, does not merely observe but perceives: his own responses, shaping his observations, are an admitted part of his subject. Just as an ideal art presents things as they seem to an imaginative perceiver, so too the beholder must concern himself with the "effect upon the eye or heart" of what he observes. But these perceptual facts, like the sensible facts at their core, must be accumulated gradually in the course of investigative experience by the average spectator. This activity is the beholder's science.
In light of Ruskin's repeated attempts to distinguish artistic from scientific perceptions—attempts continued in the distinction between aspect and essence, perception and observation—it may be surprising to find him turning to science for a model for beholding. The term works here to remind us of the failure of Wordsworth and other poets [64/65] sufficiently to value observation. Wordsworth, as Ruskin earlier complains, does not appreciate the importance of natural science to those who do not have the poet's capacity for rich imaginative perception, instinctively and instantaneously achieved.24 The observations of the natural scientist, like the slow progress of the traveler, can be another route to fuller perception. In place of the quick grasp of imaginative perception, the scientist labors to assemble perceptual data that will multiply the significance of the experience. The natural scientist also can discover, as Ruskin elsewhere writes, "the inner relations of all these things to the universe, and to man" and learn to perceive undreamt-of "natural energies" and "past states of being" (12.392).
The results will not be quite the same. Scientist and traveler still need the artist to provide the unifying visions at which they too hope to arrive. Without the artist, indeed, their laborious methods of covering ground may never bring them to unite their first impressions of aspects with their detailed subsequent knowledge into a single perception of the whole. "The man who has gone, hammer in hand, over the surface of a romantic country, feels no longer, in the mountain ranges he has so laboriously explored, the sublimity or mystery with which they were veiled when he first beheld them" (12.391-392). The sternly critical mind still needs its complement, the quick imaginative perception of the poet-artist. The natural scientist, Ruskin goes on, will look with gratitude on the man who
retaining in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity to the facts of science so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and credible to the most sternly critical intellect, should yet invest its features again with the sweet veil of their daily aspect; should make them dazzling with the splendour of wandering light, and involve them in the unsearchableness of stormy obscurity; should restore to the divided anatomy its visible vitality of operation, clothe the naked crags with soft forests, enrich the mountain ruins with bright pastures, and lead the thoughts from the monotonous recurrence of the phenomena of the physical world, to the sweet interests and sorrows of human life and death. [12.392-93]
The scientist gathers the natural facts; the scientist of aspects, or beholder, gathers natural facts as they are perceived by a human mind; the artist alone sees all these and instantly understands the connections between them. [65/66] Turner is Ruskin's master artist, the master of the science of aspects. He can both teach and surpass the natural scientist and the traveling beholder. But Ruskin in these chapters on romanticism is himself "the man who has gone, hammer in hand, over the surface of a romantic country." Constantly shifting his perspectives, he has indeed discovered much about the natural energies, past states of being, and inner relations of his romantic country "to the universe, and to man." The traveler's and the scientist's changing points of view are his characteristic method, too. As he announces when he begins "Of the Use of Pictures," his approach is "one of drawbacks, qualifications, and exceptions"; "useful truths . . . like human beings . . . are eminently biped." Multiplying one's point of view was for Ruskin the ordinary man's best route to comprehension, both visual and intellectual. So in his chapters on romanticism, he does not immediately arrive at the name of the method which his study of Turner has taught him. He constructs his epithet as the scientist of aspects himself constructs his garland of imaginative perception, by laboriously gathering and articulating the thoughts that the epithet conveys. He ends his critique of romanticism by offering as exemplar to his readers an image of the workings of his own mind, a phrase that points to a process of critical perception defined as the obverse of the romantic imagination. The "science of Aspects'" is another name for the beholder's art. [66/67]
Last modified 7 April 2024