We began this discussion of Ruskin by suggesting that a good reason for undertaking it was that no other writer revealed so well the complex quality of work. The extent to which this claim is justified deepens the problems at hand. It is not easy to understand what Ruskin makes of work because he seems never quite to make up his mind about it. He was often accused of self-contradiction and in his Cambridge inaugural address he appeared to have brushed the criticism aside with a genial confession:

The point is a serious one. He had some, perhaps slight, acquaintanceship with Hegel but Ruskin differs from the German dialectical logic in his refusal to believe that the necessary closure of contradictions by synthesis is anything other than ‘stiff’. Ruskin suggests that truth must embody contradicting statements so that it is itself likely to be contradicted by the superimposition of any simplifying synthesis.