SOURCE: " 'Out of the Same Mouth Proceedeth Blessing and Cursing': Ruskin as the 'Strange Disciple'," in Modern Philology, Vol. 90, No. 3, February, 1993, pp. 360-380.

I

In his childhood conception of a sacred covenant, John Ruskin exulted in the exchange of a child's obedience for the Father's blessing. He was reluctant, however, to confront the Lord's cursing, which, inescapable in Scripture, left him silent and incapacitated. He abruptly ended his childhood sermons, the Sermons on the Pentateuch, with an unfinished account of the cursing in Deuteronomy. Thirty years later, on the verge of a religious crisis, he cut short his epistolary sermons to the children at Winnington Hall, a girls' academy, and retracted his discussion of cursing the Lord's enemies in what he called the "Hostile Psalms." A year after that, when Mrs. La Touche exacted a ten-year public silence about his religious doubt, Ruskin accepted a ban that merely formalized a long-standing pattern of impotent speechlessness.

This pattern is broken by an episode in letter 20 of Fors Cilaigera that may record Ruskin's victory over helpless silence in the face of cursing. As he struggles to write amid a Dantean vision of an accursed Venice, its people capable only of cursing, the steamboats in the Lido shriek so "that I could not make any one hear me speak in this room without an effort," and their repeated and quickening whistles threaten to splinter his letter into incoherent fragments. But Ruskin appears able to cope with the cursing. Earlier in the letter, he hears a boy vendor's cry, "Fighiaie!" (Figs!), rise above the confused quarreling of gondoliers, and Ruskin reads this as emblematic of cursing—a curse shot from between the boy's legs, grotesque and latently obscene in its complex allusions to "making the figs," the gesture that scandalizes Dante in the malbolgia of thieves. Ruskin not only discerns in the curse the prophetic sign of God's anger that the boy unconsciously bears, the untimely fallen figs of Revelation and the evil fruit of Jeremiah and Amos, but also overcomes his past paralysis to counter the boy's accursedness with a few coins of blessing.

Yet this positive response also repeats another pattern that had always accompanied Ruskin's past silences: a regression to a childhood myth in which there is no cursing. His three-halfpence blessing too cheaply purchases a blessing from the boy that, unlike Ruskin's, arises from unconsciousness of the accursedness in which he is caught up: "His face brought the tears into my eyes, so open, and sweet, and capable it was; and so sad.… He little thought how cheap the sight of him and his basket was to me, at the money." In the Winnington letters, a similarly sentimental image of childhood had offset the children's lessons on the Hostile Psalms; to counter those lessons, Ruskin recalled his audience to their "child character" of open trust, like the fig boy's, and their role of keeping ignorant of sin rather than cursing the enemies of God. This impulse to nullify cursing in a child's world can be traced back as far as Ruskin's own childhood Sermons, where the formulaic language of judgment conflicts with a more earnest desire for childlike trust in a kindly Father.

Ruskin's persistence in regressing to and cherishing a childhood paradise is well known. However, it has not been remarked how such regressions evade a contradiction that had paralyzed him from childhood: a blessing Father could become a cursing Judge. Once we see Ruskin's later religious teaching as overcoming his attachment to a blessed childhood free of contradiction, his later prose appears remarkable in exorcizing paralysis and dwelling on destruction and redemption simultaneously. Letter 20 of Fors, which presents one such confrontation (as well as nostalgia for the body's sweet trust), is aptly explicated by John Rosenberg in terms of its opening quotation from James 3:10, "out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing." But Rosenberg mistakes Ruskin's achievement as that of controlling his sanity by releasing his own need to curse. The letter is more courageous than therapeutic, declining Saint James's childlike hope "that there should be no cursing at all" and instead exchanging silence for the psalmist's speech "in which the blessing and cursing are inlaid as closely as the black and white in a mosaic floor."

In this essay, I shall first examine Ruskin's unpublished Sermons on the Pentateuch (juvenilia dating from about 1832-33) to ground my claim that he created his first myth of childhood to escape the contradiction between the Father and the Judge. Next, I will compare these Sermons to Ruskin's Winnington "Sunday letters," arguing that his purpose here was to challenge his earlier myth by urging the Winnington girls to curse as well as bless, to bear witness to God's wrath as well as to God's kind providence. Seeking to remake his own childhood education vicariously and recover an adolescence better prepared to face the Lord's cursing, Ruskin ultimately fails in this confrontation, and the Sunday letters revert to the patterns of the Sermons. Nevertheless, the letters anticipate and illuminate the rhetorical structures of such later works as Fors in which Ruskin relays the complexity of judgment and blessing through a harsher myth. Overcoming paralysis, he repudiates his childhood faith, which had assumed his own elect blessedness, and adopts a persona that opens him to judgment: he identifies with the "strange disciple" of Mark 9, who, casting out devils in Christ's name, neither opposes Christ nor follows him. Such estrangement means in part that Ruskin conceals the extent of his religious doubt from audiences of childlike purity—children and women—whom he fears to mislead and on whom he continues to rely for comfort. At the same time, however, strange discipleship calls on an ethical and religious energy that eschews the platitudes of ordinary evangelical Calvinism and works in the world without self-assurance of reward and blessing. Such energy is characterized as intense in both joy and vengeance, even when it emits from the mouth of babes.

II

Ruskin's childhood Sermons on the Pentateuch follow a plan conventional in evangelical Calvinism. A portion of Scripture, in this case the first five books of the Old Testament, is interpreted as revealing the process of conversion: conviction of sin, justification by faith, and sanctification of the justified sinner. At each stage in the plan, Ruskin lays particular stress on obedience since evangelicals during this period characteristically advocated severe childhood discipline. The child is to rely on his parents (an analogy for and intermediate step toward reliance on the Heavenly Father) for help in withdrawing from the world; this docility preserves him or her for the conversion that can be worked only by the grace of the Holy Spirit and never by the sinner's own efforts. Ruskin's self-consciousness about the child's part in this doctrinal mode is evident in the considerable attention he devotes to the Fifth Commandment.

In what may reflect a larger contradiction in Victorian evangelical approaches to children, the Sermons also insist on reverencing a wholly kind and providential Father in contrast with their Calvinist stress on judgment. In rehearsing the maxim that a child learns to obey God by obeying parents, Ruskin is careful to argue that both the earthly and the divine parent can be reverenced without fear because they are kind. God is "not a despotic and tyrannical monarch who forms laws merely for the purpose of gratifying his pride"; just so, the injunction to "fear" earthly parents "must be understood as meaning, reverence" since "the child ought rather to trust in his father and his mother, than to fear them." Ruskin again illustrates his rejection of filial fear with the story of Joseph's testing of his brothers. He revises the usual reconciliatory motive ascribed to Joseph, for "instead of producting … the object which I think erroneously he is said to have had in view, namely to soften his brethren and cause them to repent, he only made them fear him." Such a result, in Ruskin's mind, is so reprehensible that he reads the story as an example of "Pride … Joseph's bane."

To obviate this conflict between orthodox Calvinism and joyful, unfearing obedience, Ruskin resorts to special pleading. The Sermons raise the usual sharp distinction in evangelicalism between the children of God and the children of "the world," who deserve God's wrath. Paradoxically, while Ruskin energetically condemns the world, he also makes the child's joyful obedience form the basis of the entire social order, accursed "world" and all. The social instinct, he believes, must be based on a "universal" desire for "pure, and honest intercourse." Since he believes that "society would be the cause of its own annihilation, if it were impure," he conceives of it as a household maintaining perfect order and joyful peace by adherence to the Fifth Commandment. Accordingly, with honor for parents postulated as "the basis of all government," his ideal society, like the home of Sesame and Lilies, must remain untroubled by the world's battles, lest conflict imply "impure" contradiction in children and their earthly or divine parents. The actualities of "impure" authority and compliance are glossed over. "No shepherd was ever placed over … flocks, who was unable to guide and protect them, no judge was ever placed upon the bench, who was not endued with powers to [do] justice impartially although he might punish unwillingly, no sovereign has ever attained to the throne, who might not have been the protector, the governor, the Father of his people; I do not say these faculties have never been abused, I only say that The Almighty has always given them, in order to promote this pure, and honest society." Having staved off contradiction by special pleading, Ruskin proceeds to offer a myth of a millennial kingdom of the heavenly Father. A nation that obeys parents "would go down in its prosperity to the conflagration of the earth" without need of enforcement measures because its "children would gradually rise up into a nation possessing such a healthiness of morals, & purity of principle, as even to do away with the necessity of magistracy, and handing those morals and principles down from generation to generation, and watching the convulsions and revolutions of all other nations on the earth, itself unchanged, and unchangeable."

In due course of this commentary on the Pentateuch, however, the Judge reemerges when Ruskin arrives at Deuteronomy. Since the cursing in this book challenges Ruskin's wholly beneficent providence, the Sermons collapse into rough draft. In effect, the Sermons do conclude by celebrating spiritual love when, in the last completed sermon (the nineteenth), a peroration connects the Decalogue with Paul's spiritual gifts. Perhaps uncertain about the orthodoxy of such a conclusion yet unwilling to change direction, Ruskin allows the Sermons to peter out with a draft on Deut. 30:19, a text that would force on him precisely the contradiction he has avoided: " I … set before you life and death, blessing and cursing."

The charmed circle projected in Ruskin's childhood myth, its covenant of unmixed paternal blessings on perfect filial obedience, anticipates his illustration of the "law of help" in Modern Painters V. There, warring elements, if left "quiet," will purge themselves of "impurity" and compose themselves into adamant and pure color. Unlike the law of help, however, which functions through energy, the earlier myth is static: perfectly obedient children revere perfectly honest rulers, who were once (and fundamentally remain) perfectly obedient children. Power can only be kindly and providential since there is no need for cursing. This passivity and serenity of obedience will be the first feature of his childhood myth to be critiqued in Ruskin's Sunday letters to Winnington.

III

In the bulk of correspondence between Ruskin, Winnington Hall's headmistress Margaret Bell, and "the birds" (as he called the girls), the connected group of Sunday letters (1859-60) reintroduces the theology presented by the Sermons as appropriate for children. The letters start by establishing obedience as a keynote from Matthew to Revelation. The Gospels' "primary" and "conclusive" teachings are "first the subduing of the heart to obedience" in the Beatitudes, then "fulfillment of obedience" in the Commandments, and, finally, the "Reward of obedience" in Revelation's water of life. Ruskin insists, however, that these texts demand "obedience by action." In keeping with the law of help, which he is formulating at this time, he demands purposive, positive activity from the children.

To obtain this active form of obedience, Ruskin assaults the 'purity' that, in the Sermons, justifies the child's passiveness. Refusing to allow the children to substitute the "metaphorical term" of 'purity' for 'holiness,' as he himself had done, he revises the etymology of 'sanctification': "If you mean by sanctus—'set apart,' " he tells the girls, "you might think it meant you were all to go into convents. If you mean by sanctus—pure—you might think it meant that you were to know nothing of evil." In Ruskin's meaning of 'holiness' as "Helpfulness, Healing, or Sustaining," etymology points to engagement with the world and knowledge of its evil. Thus, Ruskin enjoins an obedience through action that, by the standards of his childhood, would appear "impure" in its dual potential for joy or fear, for showering blessings in the name of the Father or hailing curses in the name of the Judge.

This obedience to both Father and Judge entails no return to the orthodox Calvinist evangelicalism that Ruskin avoided in childhood. He expressly repudiates evangelical doctrine, which he finds so rooted in justification by faith that it approaches justice in this world neither terribly nor joyfully enough. His profound quarrel with evangelicals, pursued in much of his later work, is that they fail to both bless and curse, love and fear, with sufficient intensity and energy.

According to Ruskin, insofar as evangelicals conceive of man's righteousness as imputed by faith, their outlook on the "world" is too removed. Emphasizing man's social duty, he distinguishes between human righteousness, the mercy Christ orders us to perform in the world, and God's punitive role. Man's righteousness is "a power," not merely "a submission," and should therefore be intensely joyous when exercised as constructive action: "No Dreadful justice this—no sworded & blinded justice. But all Joyful—Because, the only Justice which man can do is to Undo the misery he has made.—That's his equity—In God's Equity there is also the 'Vengeance is Mine'—But Man's Equity is Mercy." Ruskin asked the children to copy this teaching of his for Rose La Touche but then dared not show it to her because her father, "staunch Evangelical of the old school, … might not like … speaking mercifully of Error."

At the same time, if evangelical faith is too dour in its understanding of man's duty, it is not severe enough, Ruskin thinks, in understanding God's equity, the "Vengeance is Mine." Again, Ruskin counters what he perceives as the evangelicals' preoccupation with justifying faith as opposed to obeying moral law: the doctrine "that men may go on knowingly contending with God all their lives & be forgiven at last" is "the invention of the great Adversary"; "neither in the Levitical Law nor in the Gospel is there… such a notion." Whatever a sinner professes, we must be prepared to condemn sin as vigorously as we work to save. God will not forgive, and we must not forgive, sins that prevent humans from fulfilling their active part in this world. These are sins against the law of help or, as Ruskin says in Unto This Lsst, against "justice": "sins which in their very nature separate one Being from another."

Thus, if even the joyful vigor of "man's equity" cannot offset the fact of transgressions against the law of help, childhood religion must sacrifice its preoccupation with joy as well as purity. Here, Ruskin leads the children away from the Gospels, draining platitudinous comfort out of the injunction to love one's enemies—"You are to love all, but not to treat them as your friends; that would be unjust to your friends"—and introduces them to the "Hostile Psalms," David's invective against his enemies. If the children have understood that holiness means helpfulness, they must recognize—at whatever cost to their complacency—that the opposite, separation and competition, cannot be forgiven. "The justice of man is mercy," he reminds them, quoting himself from earlier in the letters, but he adds, "What is mercy? The Spear through the throat may sometimes be the only mercy Possible." The implicit image of a slain dragon was much on Ruskin's mind, having recently read Turner's dragon in the Garden of the Hesperides as a fearful sign of England's Mammon worship (Works). Such sins that defile by causing separations "are unforgiveable—because," he sees, "the gulfs cannot close." Charity in such cases mistakes the meaning of purity, which Ruskin now defines not as the negation of sin but as social harmony achieved through active help. But Ruskin finds that he cannot advocate active help without also embroiling the children in the conflict that he had expelled from his childhood myth.

This threat to joy is clearly what most disturbs Ruskin in his revision of childhood religion. His habitual teasing of the girls becomes sardonic in the letters on the Hostile Psalms ("You should fight against the World. Do you suppose … that phrase only means … not to buy strings to your bonnets at too much the yard?"). These letters are also the most guarded, warning the children that merely to think about God's vengeance against his enemies is "very terrible" and that, "for petted little birds who live in a park… and are locked in it, it is quite intolerable that they should have to sing about being delivered from … the fear of their enemies"—"people have gone mad in thinking of that." The threat, in fact, becomes so disturbing that Ruskin abruptly ends his discussion of the Hostile Psalms and instead recommends to his audience "two main conditions of child character" that exactly reverse the ethos of wariness and retribution he has been inculcating in them. First, with faces open and sweet (like the fig boy's), the children are to exhibit "trustfulness": "An ordinarily right minded child thinks everyone about it is its friend—believes what everyone about it says.… Therefore the child-voice is against all distrust—all strangeness—all enmity." Second, the children are to eschew vengeance on injustices. The strain is manifest in Ruskin's commentary as he reverses himself: "Well, you know, I've told you before there are some injuries which can't be forgiven—But if you are child enough—even some of those may be forgotten—And generally the child voice is for submission—for patience—for Forgetfulness. 'That thou mightest still the Avenger.' " Thus, with that adaptation of Psalm 8, the vengeance of the Hostile Psalms is stilled by inducing limitless forgiveness "out of the mouth of babes and sucklings." After this drastic reversal, the Sunday letters become intermittent as well as disconnected from a clear plan.

In this reenactment of the Sermons' paralysis and retreat, Ruskin shuns an added peril in cursing that he never imagined in childhood: he fears judgment on his personal loss of faith. He has kept this loss hidden from the children, but his revision of their education has in effect brought their curses down on his own head. Needing their consolation, as well as worrying that a revised education might lead them likewise to skeptical questioning, he restores the children's capacity to forgive and forget. Yet, prior to this reversal, Ruskin uses the Sunday letters to respond constructively to doubt by evolving a new persona for bearing and withstanding the onus of cursing and blessing. Here and in the public letters of Fors, Ruskin figures as an exiled prophet who is possibly accursed himself, or at least edging near doubtful margins of faith where he himself fears to tread, much less lead children.

IV

Ruskin's criticism of modern evangelicals for failing to bless and curse with sufficient energy sounds evangelical in itself, but he is trying to imagine for himself religious obedience without faith. At their most daring, the Sunday letters not only urge a more active and confrontational "holiness" beyond the Winnington park gates but also suggest that helpfulness may be rendered from outside the conventional community of the faithful. To illustrate, Ruskin repeatedly cites Mark 9, the unlikely example of the disciple who casts out devils in Christ's name but does not follow Christ. The earlier Sermons on the Pentateuch had illustrated unquestioning faith and obedience by concentrating on Abraham. The example of Mark 9 in the Winnington sermons, by contrast, depicts action from the very margins of faith. As Ruskin explains the text, "You cannot indeed in the separated—doubting state of his—be sure that he is right, yet," he immediately adds, "forbid him not—he is not against us."

Identifying himself with the strange, increasingly estranged disciple, Ruskin reveals in his reading of Mark 9 both sympathy and discomfort with such equivocal authority. On the one hand, since an estranged disciple seeks the witness of a following to cast out devils—that is, transgressors against the law of help—Ruskin revises childhood religion to form an alternative community with himself as its teacher. From the start of the Winnington correspondence, he proclaims the children "progressive," thrilling them with heresy ("I think you are not quite shocked enough by some things I have said") and flattering them with intimacy ("You can't conceive how few people I know with whom I can be myself—They are all half doubters.… My Father & Mother themselves, much as they love me—have no sympathy with what I am trying to do," and "I've no sisters." Complementing this role of "separated-doubting" yet authoritative prophet is Ruskin's role as a child among frank and advanced children, who will approach the Bible with him so as not "to bring out anything" predetermined, as his doctrinaire mother did, "nor to be afraid of finding out anything," but "only to make sure that whatever [they] read, [they] either do—or don't understand." Thus, the sentimental Victorian notion of becoming like a child to accept a simple faith transmutes, in Ruskin's progressive pedagogy, to a fearless innocence. Because children remain unpracticed in their elders' doctrinaire readings, which (in Ruskin's view) encourage otherworldliness over a holy worldliness, they will heed Christ's commandments to social duty. These paired roles of militant child and marginalized prophet no doubt arose from Ruskin's belated rite of passage to adolescence, usually documented by an 1863 letter to his father, written from Winnington, in which he unleashed his frustration with his parents' effeminizing overprotection.

On the other hand, uncertain of his authority despite his demands for his own followers' belief, the strange disciple needs reassurance and comfort, so he clings to the skirts of orthodoxy by cutting short the Hostile Psalms and reinvesting childhood with the spiritual capacities of trust and obliviousness to sin. Fearful lest he taint that comforting purity with doubt, Ruskin must have been acutely aware that the gospel verses on the strange disciple climax in the pertinent warning, "Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea." (Mark 9:42). Accordingly, Ruskin's roles as child and father doubly change aspect as he becomes a child subservient to the girls' authority ("The time has come for you to teach me") and a parent solicitous of their purity ("I should be very sorry that any of you should share in some of my feelings").

In this at once tentative and deliberate heterodoxy, Ruskin keeps the comforting image of childish trust and forgiveness safely in reserve while exploring the limits of his own apostasy through loss of faith: How far dare he withdraw himself and his following from the faithful without falling away from God in his "separated-doubting state" or harming the children? His discussion of unforgivable sin seems reassuringly couched in a conventional evangelical rhetoric, yet it reveals how far he has departed from traditional faith. Conventionally, the children are to understand unforgivable sins as arising from the failure of merely "formal" Christians to realize what evangelicals called the experiential "religion of the heart": "There are Sins against the 'Helpful Spirit.' Not against the Law, But the Spirit; Against all the inner teaching—all the instinctive kindly impulses—all the plainly written characters of the will of God in the heart. Not against a known law, not against a scheme of redemption, but against a spirit that strives with man. They shall not for they cannot be forgiven neither in this world nor in the world to come." This definition resembles arguments in the Sermons on the Pentateuch that law must be felt in the hearts of the justified but differs in discriminating between the failure to achieve an experimental faith and sin against "known law" and the "scheme of redemption." According to the earlier Ruskin, law and the experience of faith are one and the same: the unity binding ceremonial sacrificial law, the New Testament scheme of redemption, and the moral law enforcing holy purity of mind and conduct proves the divinity of the Bible. Holiness of mind and conduct is taught through the sacrificial law of Leviticus as a typological shadow of the Atonement. The whole rationale for this older law, as the Reformers had held, is to impress man with his inability to fulfill it and thus throw him on the redemptive mercy of Christ that the old law foreshadows. In a transitional passage between his sermons on the Levitical law and the following sermons on the moral law, Ruskin articulates the cohesion of these parts of Scripture in forming a foundation for faith:

We … examine how far this economy [of Mosaic law] unites the necessity for moral purity, & holiness, with the doctrine of atonement for sin, by sacrifice. For, could it be supposed, that throughout the whole bible, there could be found one single sentence which inculcated the principle, that there was no necessity for purity of conduct, … [sin being] atoned for when committed, it would be so entirely out of keeping with the doctrine of God, as to afford us sufficient ground for the entire rejection of the Bible,—at least as a book of divine origin; but when on the other hand, we find a directly contrary principle held up to us, it is as strong a confirmation of the divinity, as the contrary would have been of the nondivinity, of the Bible.

At Winnington, Ruskin similarly unifies the Bible on the basis of deeds, not creeds, and asserts that it contains not a single antinomian sentence; however, by enjoining obedience to a mysterious "Helpful Spirit" who can be understood apart from a "scheme of redemption," he also tests his own apostasy. "He that is not against us is on our part," he repeats from Mark. Read as a gloss on Ruskin's preceding sentence, "You need never fear falling into [willful sin] so long as you love God ever so little," the verse implies Ruskin's salvation through his good works and perhaps through his reverence for the children's faith. Read with Ruskin's following sentence, however, the verse is countered by a check on his alienation: "But I believe no doctrine was ever so entirely the invention of the great Adversary himself as the doctrine that men may go on knowingly contending with God all their lives & be forgiven at last." I interpreted this assertion earlier as Ruskin's exhortation to an active obedience as opposed to the otherworldly antinomianism that he associates with evangelical worship, but his assertion can also be read as a judgment on his own contention with God—on his inability to believe in a scheme of redemption. Ruskin had ventured to affirm earlier that "God will look with most love on those who have the hardest & least—(here) rewarded battles with themselves," but now his assurance may well be faltering.

At this point, as he comes close to turning the Hostile Psalms against himself, Ruskin reverses the children's lessons in recognizing and redressing evil and instead asks them to "still the Avenger." The estranged disciple puts to rest both his self-appointed vengeance on social injustice and his fears of vengeance on his own possible apostasy; now, addressing the children as "babies," he switches to a playfully domestic persona. The request to still the Avenger is presented in the form of a poem composed as a "singing dance" for the children, anticipating the inventions of the self-indulgent "Old Lecturer" of The Ethics of the Dust—dialogues with "young housewives" that grow out of the Winnington experience.

This retreat serves to locate the barrier that Ruskin must overcome if he is to bear the onus of cursing as well as blessing: he must be open to bringing cursing on himself. The persona that he has begun to prepare for this confrontation is that of the estranged prophet who accuses an accursed people while remaining full of doubt and uncertain of his own grace as well. In the sardonic public letters of Fors, this figure wanders in a wilderness, and gardens like Winnington appear only as threatened visions.

V

In letters 18-20 of Fors (1871), a group on blessing and cursing that includes the apocalyptic vision with which I began, Ruskin specifies St. George's Company as "outcasts and Samaritans" who give alms. What has estranged discipleship come to mean to him in the decade since Mrs. La Touche silenced his doubt?

First, while Ruskin adopts a persona of estrangement in Fors, he does still rely on the consoling myths and the guarded teachings of the Sermons and Sunday letters. Carried over from both is the general method of defining the key to an entire text as obedience and then, within those confines, cradling blessed landscapes that blossom from obedience. In Fors 18-20, the method is applied to the "not unblest" peasant life in the Val di Niévole. Ruskin surveys the valley from a tower whose bell is embossed with the covenant that the people will reap the fat of the land if they obey the voice of the Lord; the covenant is fulfilled by the peasant children, Adam and Eve, whose honesty, Ruskin implies, is rewarded by the scene's exquisite fullness. Again, just as the child of the Sermons kept himself pure and apart from the world, the Val di Nievole has survived by remaining separate from the "curse of your modern life." Hence Ruskin admonishes St. George's Company to create more such mythic vales by rejecting the world's wisdom of personal profit and working communally to capture waters on barren land. His advice on these hydraulics, "one strong impression" remembered from childhood, would re-create conditions in the kingdom of the heavenly Father: "If you will educate [mountain streams] young," they will behave with "utter docility and passiveness."

Fors does not rest with the formulations of the Sermons, however, for letters 18-20, like the Sunday letters, stress an active faith. They reiterate criticisms of "polite" clergy who, in failing to curse idlers and wrongdoers, contribute to the modern spectacle of a wholly accursed people who no longer know how to bring about blessing. More significantly, the Fors letters break with both the Sermons and the Sunday letters by moving from blessed vales to accursed modern cityscapes, a process in which the estranged prophet shows himself willing to bear a share of the cursing on his own head.

At the exact center of letter 20, Ruskin places neither the Val di Nievole nor the fig boy episode with its slighter suggestion of escape to comforting childhood but the exegesis of texts on blessing fragmented by the cursing of the steamboats—a moment-by-moment interruption of blessing by cursing enacted in the prose itself. This grotesquerie is keenly explicated by Rosenberg as an antiphony between Ruskin's" 'blessed,' episcopal self" and his" 'accursed' self," a controlled expression of divided consciousness arising from "the 'accursedness' of modern civilization and its assault upon [Ruskin's] own sanity. I would argue, however, that Ruskin's achievement lies in confronting the transmutation itself of blessing and cursing, not just in portraying his own divided consciousness. Such a confrontation, judging by the aborted attempt in the Sunday letters, must have arisen from his acceptance of some part in the curse—not just a succumbing to the curse of madness. The fig boy episode is saved from sentimental escapism by the suggestion that both the boy and his benefactor stand in need of blessing. In the middle of the letter, Ruskin's movement toward the experience of blessing and cursing resists the pull to childish forgiveness that had comforted him at the abrupt end of the Sunday letters.

As Paul Sawyer remarks, the biblical model for this persona of penitence and movement into the "wilderness of this modern world" is John the Baptist. "Bred in luxury, which I perceive to have been unjust to others, and destructive to myself, vacillating, foolish, and miserably failing in all my own conduct in life—and blown about hopelessly by storms of passion—I, a man clothed in soft raiment,—I, a reed shaken with the wind, have yet this Message to all men again entrusted to me: 'Behold, the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Whatsoever tree therefore bringeth not forth good fruit, shall be hewn down and cast into the fire.' " Ruskin has become capable of adopting this persona by explicitly exorcising both his incapacity in the face of cursing and his penchant for retrogression to blessed childhood. In a passage from "Traffic" (1866) that remains obscure without reference to this past paralysis, he overcomes the Gorgon's stare and accepts a harsher myth, an acceptance that he labels coming of age. The myth is that of Athena, whose

aegis, the mantle with the serpent fringes, … and the Gorgon, on her shield, are both representative mainly of the chilling horror and sadness (turning men to stone, as it were,) of the outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge—that knowledge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the child. For out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, danger, and disdain; but from perfect knowledge, given by the full-revealed Athena, strength and peace, in sign of which she is crowned with the olive spray, and bears the resistless spear.

A more complete rejection of Ruskin's past pattern of silence and retrogession is unimaginable. The mature Ruskin does not achieve peace by the child's "stilling the Avenger," a mere postponement of the recoil of cursing; rather, peace lies in a chastened acceptance of the double truths of Greek myth, emblemized in Athena's olive crown and spear. The Greeks acted in Athena's name, Ruskin emphasizes, without "ardent affection or ultimate hope [in an afterlife]; but with a resolute and continent energy of will, as knowing that for failure there was no consolation, and for sin there was no remission."

Ruskin's mastery of paralysis and refusal to escape to a myth of blessed childhood are figured in his choices of feminine deities as his objects of contemplation and of flesh-and-blood women as his allies in activism. In an 1863 letter to his father from Winnington (written shortly before the rite-of-passage letter), he abandons children as icons and allies ("It is especially the young ones between whom & me I now feel so infinite a distance,—and they are so beautiful and so good, and I am not good.… The weary longing to begin life over again, and the sense of fate forever forbidding it—here or hereafter—is terrible"), while only a few months earlier he referred for the first time to the "young women," not children, at Winnington, who would now provide his strength: "I am quite certain no man can be in a healthy or strong state of mind or body unless he is in proper relations with women."

Ruskin's feminine mythology overcomes the thwarting desires and fears of a disjointed mind because it is structured, as Sawyer remarks, like Blake's 'contraries': as oppositions that remain related in that, "in both worlds, there can be no real forgiveness." Sawyer is misleading; however, in identifying one of those worlds as that of children and women (i.e., innocence). Ruskin has exchanged the child's world for the woman's, imagining gardens tended by women whose righteousness arises not from oblivion, as does children's purity in the kingdom of the heavenly Father, but from an aesthetic of order and design, like the measures of dance and song created for Winnington. Design characterizes human justice actively at work in the world; it is distinguished from but responsive to the inscrutable justice of Ruskin's opposing myth, the divine wrath of destructive storm that he attributes to Athena. This juxtaposition was apparent to Ruskin in Psalm 85 on sowing righteousness and reaping peace, which he explicated for the Winnington children: "When Justice is wild—it is cruel—loses its fruit. When ordered and tamed and grown into full ear, it is merciful"—"ordered Righteousness—Grain set opposite grain."

Suggestive of Ruskin's juxtaposed worlds of blessedness and accursedness, one always transmutable into the other, is the myth by which Nina Auerbach explains Victorian representations of women—a myth of transfiguration. Auerbach, however, sees Ruskin's good women merely as his "defensive response" against their transformation into demonic power. To Auerbach, Ruskin is the "pristine" example of simultaneously doing homage to and shielding himself against self-transforming female power: his child-women cutting down to size, as it were, his own massive goddesses of cursings, It is true that Ruskin often conflates women with children as naive interpreters and spiritual agents, like Tennyson's Elaine, to whom he can turn to escape enigma. Thus, at the time he sought to restore "child character" to the Winnington girls, he praised the "consolation" in the fictional domestic "conversations," Friends in Council, by his friend Arthur Helps, because its new series (1859) included women as interlocutors. Ruskin adopted the dialogue genre in The Ethics of the Dust (1866), the first book to exhibit his preoccupation with the child-woman Rose La Touche as both audience and object of contemplation. Similarly, the queens of Sesame and Lilies must retain a "majestic childishness," their education limited to sympathetic support of men, not independent mastery, because otherwise men could not rely on them for comfort. Even in letter 20 of Fors, if Ruskin pivots the letter on the transformation of blessing into cursing in the steamboat passage, he flees from its agitating immediacy to the enclosed dreamworld of the child-woman Saint Ursula.

Despite the consolations of these dreaming and timeless child-women—in fact, as a critique of Rose's intense religious purity—Ruskin imagines more active women who bless in full knowledge of evil. Thus, attention to women's role in Ruskin's later mythmaking does not result in the "equal plausibility" that Auerbach finds in arguing for his antifeminism and for his feminism (or, in the most recent formulation, arguing for his patriarchal ethos and for his womanliness); his good women simply are not assigned the demeaning and sheltered "child character" of the Sunday letters. Far from protecting their ignorance, in Sesame Ruskin foists on women the agony beyond the garden wall. Lest they ignore this in seeking the next world, his bitter invective against women who occupy themselves with theology is meant to attack not "female interference … [with] the interests of a patriarchal religion" but evangelicals who emphasize the Atonement and speculate about the afterlife to the exclusion of practical justice here and now—an invective he directs with equal fury against male clergymen.

In his persona of the domestic Old Lecturer of Ethics, it is true, Ruskin does move to preserve the purity of his "housewives," even as he lays out their feminine duties, by invoking a masculine "brotherhood, to enforce, by strength of heart and hand, the doing of human justice among all who [come] within their sphere." Similarly, in Fors he enumerates the duties of Guild members (resembling the girls' creed in Ethics) as if "for the great Monastery of the Servants of God." No doubt Ruskin resisted exposing a feminine following to trial as outcasts and Samaritans "whom the world hates" since he continued to believe that only men must become "hardened" by battle. Finally, the Old Lecturer suppresses the strange disciple as he ends Ethics with the assurance that the earth is providentially advancing to "animated Rest". Unlike his childhood myth, however, Ruskin's gendering of duties does not constitute a retreat from action and complexity of vision. In his persona of the Old Lecturer, as in his persona of the strange disciple, Ruskin elicits radical support along with comfort. Dismissing the forgetfulness of sin that would win himself easy grace, he refuses to allow the women to excuse wrong as the product of good intentions. Rejecting conventional tenets of faith, he tells the young women (having sent the younger girls out of hearing) never to meditate on heavenly reward since otherworldliness weakens duty. His meditation in Fors 18-20 on modem work inlays blessing and cursing "as closely as the black and white in a mosaic floor." In Fors—written, unlike Ethics, in the apprehension of a world laid under a curse, where even the speech of children forebodes apocalypse—the strange disciple does not merely inveigh against the accursedness to seek alternative blessedness in the Father but resolves to bring blessing out of accursedness by humane effort. Such effort relies on no facile forgiveness, neither for himself nor for the spectacle of lost souls he contemplates.