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Figural Language in the Criticism of Ruskin

Elizabeth HeIsinger's book is the result of 'ten years' immersion' in the study of Ruskin; it will probably serve as the point of departure for Ruskin studies over the next decade. Unlike the major studies which have appeared over the past twenty years, HeIsinger's presents a powerful and lucid theory of how Ruskin ought to be read, based, according to her claim, on Ruskin's own exegetical methods and didactic examples. The theory attempts an account of the major transitions in Ruskin's career: the shift from criticism of landscape painting to social criticism; the need to reconcile these 'historical languages of the human imagination' with the 'religious exegesis of the transcendent language of nature and the Bible'; and Ruskin's final turn towards a fully historical understanding of the human activities of 'reading' and 'beholding' which assimilates pagan myth to the Bible and the Augustinian notion of the sacred book of nature. Unlike Robert Hewison or George Landow, HeIsinger has not resorted to the history of ideas to gloss over the difficulty of explaining these transitions. Ruskin's theories of the picturesque, his use of the Evangelical methods of typology, his use of the Romantic doctrine of the imagination do not become the occasion for a historical summary; HeIsinger always centres her discussion upon a crucial text in Ruskin. The term 'reading' has a double sense in HeIsinger's study. It is, first of all, a critical metaphor, which translates perception into a linguistic activity so that language is 'visible' and images 'readable.' At the same time, reading is a metaphor for a particular 'method of exposition': an excursive journey through Ruskin's works, a structural device for the organization of the readings in the first sense. Ruskin's complex attempt to unite perception with cognition can only be approached partially, one step at a time. Reading him is like taking a picturesque tour. HeIsinger asks that we 'suspend [our] expectation of a complete account of Ruskin's views for many chapters and that [we] read successive chapters as continually modifying and complicating those views put forth in earlier chapters.' In principle, we can have no objection to this method; it is similar to Ruskin's own avowed method in the second preface to Modern Painters I. But the method