IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, epic poetry served as an instrument by which to measure the cultural losses and gains of modernity. “Do not the song and saga and the muse,” Karl Marx asked in 1857, “necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions for epic poetry vanish?” While Marx worried about the vanishing conditions for writing epic poetry, the English cultural critic John Ruskin believed that the inability or unwillingness to read it reflected a disturbing break with the past. He imagined that the degeneracy of the nineteenth century—evidence for which he finds in the structural relations of modern capitalism and in the blindness among his contemporaries to natural, artisanal, and poetic beauty—could be countered through a revivification of cultural memory. The Queen of the Air, his highly elliptical publication of 1869, elaborates a complex mythology as a way of responding to the prevalence of scientific thinking, widespread environmental degradation, the pernicious effects of political economy, and mechanistic labor. Because epics enshrine myths, Ruskin believed they could provide the nineteenth century with a means of reenchanting the present.

Ruskin’s hope for an aesthetic redemption of ordinary experience links him to two other cultural critics with well-established ties to one another: Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin. No effort has yet been made to situate the three in a comparative study, although Proust was influenced by Ruskin and Benjamin was influenced by Proust. All three were engaged in what Benjamin calls, apropos of Proust, the “blind, senseless, obsessive quest for happiness”; and they all sought to establish what Charles Baudelaire calls correspondances with the past. Since the past is the very thing that modernity disavows, Benjamin also finds correspondances “great and significant” because of their “encounter with an earlier life.” In what follows, I delineate a pattern of influences in which each writer, perceiving the deleterious effects of modernity, attempts to achieve an aesthetic redemption of the present through myth or remembrance, but is imperfectly successful, thus leaving room for the next theorist’s efforts.

John Ruskin, Shocked

In the first volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin attempts to teach the reader how to see and read properly “the mysteries of God” inscribed in the natural world. “The sky,” he argues, “is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust.” Sensory perception involves moral truth because nature is itself a “written scripture of natural beauty that contains moral truth.” In Sesame and Lilies, he insists that in order to understand “great” authors “[y]ou must love them, and show your love in these two following ways: first, by a true desire . . . to enter into their thoughts,” and then “to enter into their Hearts.” This is “what is rightly called ‘reading,’” in which we are “putting ourselves always in the author’s place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able to assuredly say, ‘Thus Milton thought,’ not ‘Thus, I thought, in misreading Milton.” This same principle should be applied to whatever object one approaches—from art to natural phenomena to literature.

This explains why Ruskin derides Archibald Alison, who theorized that the beauty of an object depends chiefly on the associations made by the human mind. Although Ruskin admits that emotional investments and associations do have some bearing on individual valuations of the beautiful, he also laments that “in many who have no definite rules of judgment, preference is decided by little else, and thus, unfortunately, its operations are mistaken for, or rather substituted for, those of inherent beauty.” Ruskin here attempts to take a stand against what he sees as the contingency of modern perception, which collapses all too easily essence and appearance. If nature no longer stands for truth, then environmental degradation necessarily follows. Associativity empties the symbolic realm of (what Ruskin believes to be) its intrinsic, spiritual meaning; its primary threat, as Gary Wihl points out, stems from “the potential lapse from symbolic form to the contingency of the sign.” Thus, in the second volume of Modern Painters Ruskin attempts to keep association and beauty distinct categories; their conflation in Alison’s theory, he insists, leaves the apprehension of the world to the frailties of the human mind.

By the 1860s, however, and especially in The Queen of the Air, Ruskin abandons this model of reading in order to focus not on the authorially determined meaning of a text but rather on the readerly experience of it. This shift in focus from the author to the reader is important for Ruskin, because he believes that poetry provides his contemporaries with access to Greek consciousness—a way of responding to the world which might have redemptive possibilities for modern experience. Focusing on how myth “is traceable in the Greek mind,” he is ultimately less interested in a diachronic analysis of myth that would trace its origins than in a synchronic analysis that reveals how myth weaves together disparate cultural phenomena and inner states of consciousness. “Now you must always be prepared,” Ruskin tells his readers, “to read Greek legends as you trace threads through figures on a silken damask: the same thread runs through the web, but it makes part of different figures.” The Queen of the Air models the way in which a mythological figure might come to stand for a range of seemingly unrelated phenomena. Yet, although Ruskin certainly would argue that he is describing a mythological form of apprehending the web of connections that make up the world, it is hard to see how this is anything other than the very sort of associative model against which Ruskin argues in the second volume of Modern Painters.