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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
If the theory and practice of Pre-Raphaelite medievalism are something more today than historical curiosities, it is partly because critical interest still attaches to a question they explore. This question may be phrased as follows: how far is Ruskin's doctrine of unmediated sense perception, of the so-called uneducated or innocent eye, an artistic possibility? In this essay I shall consider a few of the ways in which Browning's approach to the question differs from the characteristic approach of three contemporaries. I shall briefly compare three of Browning's poems on medieval subjects – “Childe Roland,” “Count Gismond” and “Old Pictures in Florence” – with D. G. Rossetti's “The Blessed Damozel,” William Morris's “The Chapel in Lyoness,” and Gerard Manley Hopkins's “Duns Scotus's Oxford.”
1. The Elements of Drawing, in The Complete Works of John Ruskin, ed. Cook, E. T. and Wedderburn, Alexander (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), xvGoogle Scholar, footnote to paragraph 5, p. 27: “The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, – as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.”
2. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 186–89, 356–58.Google Scholar
3. Of course, in later books of Modern Painters Ruskin is no less emphatic that sight is insight: it is a truth of fact, but something only the truth of symbol or value can complete. As technically accurate and faithfully descriptive as his transcript may be, the “truth so presented,” says Ruskin, , “will need the help of the imagination to make it real” (The Complete Works of John Ruskin, v, 185).Google Scholar
4. Of course, the list is not exhaustive. Another important device, too pervasive to examine in a short essay, is the “over-determining” of formal elements: the excessive use of alliteration in much of Swinburne's verse, for example.
5. McGann, Jerome J., “Rossetti's Significant Details,” Victorian Poetry, 7 (1969), 41–54.Google Scholar
6. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought (London: Kegan Paul, 1936), p. 11.Google Scholar
7. Philosophical Writings, ed. Boehner, Philotheus (New York: Nelson, 1957), p. 47.Google Scholar
8. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 341, 90Google Scholar: “Commentary, we remember, is allegorization.” “The commenting critic is often prejudiced against allegory without knowing the real reason, which is that continuous allegory prescribes the direction of his commentary, and so restricts its freedom.”
9. The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. Hopman, F. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954)Google Scholar, especially the chapter “Symbolism in its Decline,” pp. 200–14.
10. A systematic exposition of this doctrine can be found in the epistemology of T. H. Green, especially in his Introduction to Hume's Treatise on Human Nature (1874)Google Scholar and Prolegomena to Ethics (1883).Google Scholar In reinterpreting Kant's dictum that “the understanding makes nature,” Green argues that without mind-made relations there would be no intelligible world for the observer to perceive.
11. Hegel, G. W. F., Lectures on Aesthetics, rpt. in Hegel on Art, Religion, Philosophy, ed. Gray, J. Glenn (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 116.Google Scholar
12. Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (London: Smith, Elder, 1852), p. 251.Google Scholar
13. Exploratio Philosophica (Cambridge, England, 1865), Part i, p. 58.Google Scholar
