The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin's Aesthetics Author(s): John Macarthur Source: Assemblage, No. 32 (Apr., 1997), pp. 126-141 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171412 . Accessed: 12/09/2014 11:49 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Assemblage. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:49:36 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 1. John Ruskin,End of Market, St. Croydon John Macarthur The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin's Aesthetics John Macarthuris a lecturer at the Uni- For, in a certain sense, the lower picturesque ideal is an emi- versity of Queensland, Brisbane,Australia. nently heartless one; the lover of it seems to go forth into the world in a temper as merciless as its rocks. All other men feel some regret at the sight of disorder and ruin. He alone delights in both; it matters not of what. Fallen cottage - desolate villa - deserted village - blasted heath - mouldering castle - to him, so that they do but show jagged angles of stone and timber, all are equally joyful. Poverty, and darkness, and guilt, bring their several contributions to his treasuryof pleasant thoughts. The shattered window, opening into black and ghastly rents of wall, the foul rag or strawwisp stopping them, the dangerous roof, decrepit floor and stair, ragged misery, or wasting age of the inhabitants, - all these conduce, each in due measure, to the fullness of his satisfaction. What is it to him that the old man has passed away his seventy years in helpless darknessand untaught waste of soul? The old man has at last accomplished his destiny, and filled the corner of a sketch, where something unsightly was wanting. What is it to him that the people fester in that feverish misery in the lower quarter of the town, by the river?Nay it is much to him. What else were they made for? what could they have done better? John Ruskin, "Of the Turnerian Picturesque,"in Modem Painters, vol. 4 (6: 19-20)1 John Ruskin's disgust at the picturesque is palpable and ex- emplary in passages such as this. For him, the inhabitants of the picturesque scene are unconscious of their "untaught waste of soul." But for such Assemblage 32: 126-141 ? 1997 by the distress to go unnoticed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology heartless aesthete in a search for tone and shadow is another 127 This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:49:36 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions or N 4t'N '1!Ip This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:49:36 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions assemblage 32 and parallel kind of waste:the affliction of art with a can- Disinterest kerous failure of sympathy.Yet the movement of the pas- Ruskin'sproposal to cure the picturesque with sympathy sage, from its propositionalforms to the description of a might seem to be in opposition to eighteenth-centurycon- scene, particularand exemplary,is like that supposed in the cepts of aesthetical disinterest.The invention of modern term "picturesque."We say a thing is "like a picture"not aesthetics is synonymous with the concept of disinterested- in order to use it as such, but to walk in or out of it, inter- ness. In the eighteenth century the problem of aesthetic changing, back and forward,the flatness of possession with theory had been how to articulatethe relation of things of lived experience or theoretical insight. value and the exercise of taste. Ruskin points out that aes- We might think, and rightly,that this passage is confes- theticism creates an opposite problem of the relation of sional, describing feelings that Ruskin knows well. Read in taste to the ugly, the distorted,and the pathological. This isolation, the passage might seem a renunciation. In fact, it relation had alreadybeen problematized in the first period is an overly affecting call for a quite subtle modification of of the picturesque around the general question of how to the picturesque that Ruskin is proposing. For him, the pic- conceptualize a high taste for low objects. In the theory of turesque is a startingpoint, one that it is unclear he ever Uvedale Price this gradient of taste is merely a tactical mo- surpasses.It is the received aesthetic of his age, which he ment in evincing knowledge of the hierarchyof genre.2We believes can be given a cause and origin (lack of sympathy) exercise our taste on Dutch paintings of peasants in cottages and then surpassedinto a more complete aesthetic project only to expressthe liberalityof our appreciationof the land- for which the picturesque had given us a taste. The pictur- scapes of Claude Lorrain;similarly, our love for the ordi- esque is "heartless";nevertheless, it can lead us to nobility. nary agriculturalcountryside of Britaindoes not signify an Indeed, the movement that occurs here in Ruskin'scom- inability to appropriatethe Alps or the Bay of Naples. mentary is little more than an iteration of the structureof Price's interest in the picturesque, which is to say, in the the picturesque idea; we give up the picture for the ability ordinary,in the ugly and deformed, is supposed to be an to split viewing into concept and affect. Ruskin'siteration is explorationof the range of taste, so as to better understand significant, however, not only in the historyof the propaga- and agree on a common standardof proprietyin taste. But tion of the concept of the picturesque, but in its conceptual Price was unable to persuade his critics that his proposalof structure.It is on the basis of Ruskin'suptake that the pic- the value of low objects in evincing disinterestwas not, in turesque reiteratesin modern perceptualistculture. Ruskin the end, a perverseinterest in disgust. After all, Price as- writes of the picturesque as if it were a naturalpropensity to sumes a special value for the ugly and deformed, which is taste that requiresthe development of an aesthetic theory to that they can improve in our appropriationof them while discipline and instruct it. Rathermore obscurely, he deals the beautiful is indifferentto us. Ruskin'simage of the per- with the picturesque as a preexistingtheoretical problem of versityof picturesque practice is, then, the repetition of genre, disinterest,and affected disgust. In moving between a critique from the turn of the century, which he must these two constructions of the picturesque, Ruskin invents have been familiarwith through his reading of Humphry for it a temporal mechanism by which the picturesque can Repton. But, in general, the exaggerationand critique of be both a present lack and a historical origin. Price's position by Repton, J. C. Loudon, William 128 This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Fri, 12 Sep 2014 11:49:36 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Macarthur Marshall,and others is directed at Price's taste and his vari- nor take pleasure.4He offers a very simplistic hierarchyof ance from propriety.3He had made himself ridiculous with genre based on the distance that can be achieved from the his appetite for views of higglers, and by imagining banditti exact imitation of nature and the particularityof things.5 on his lawn, and no one would have thought to be con- The higher genres do not call on our appetites and desires, cerned with the effect of Price's aesthetics on the subjects of do not put us in a relationshipwith objects. Rather,moral his view. This is the force of Ruskin'spassage, which im- judgments are called on to be exercised over general ideas bues the foolishness of aesthetic distancing with a sense of in the realm of civil life. Price argues against Reynolds that injustice and moves the social and political context of taste the picturesque was a kind of generic transcoding;like, he from outside (the choice of objects proper for gentlemen to says, the plays of Shakespearein which are embedded rustic judge) to inside (the subject/object relation). Ruskin'spas- and comic scenes and subplots that provide a reflection sage asks us to briefly imagine what should be impossible on the great themes of the play. He nevertheless follows and must be avoided: that crippled laborersand tubercular Reynolds on the issue of detail; finding that the better genre children might ask us why we look at them "like that." paintersare those who are not obsessed with mechanical imitation and who expressa knowledge of their subject as As I will in this much of the mechanism of argue paper, genre. Few records exist of Ruskin'sOxford lectures of 1875 aesthetical continues in Ruskin in relation to the disgust on Reynolds'sDiscourses, but the notes that surviveshow a that Ruskin's is directed picturesque, except disgust largely vehement continuity of the idea of a nobility of taste and a at the ratherthan it. But before look- picturesque through hierarchy of painting (22: 493-507).