I. I have kept the following kind and helpful letter for the close of
the year:—
“January 8, 1874.
“Sir,—I have been much moved by a passage in No. 37 of Fors
Clavigera, in which you express yourself in somewhat desponding
terms as to your loneliness in ‘life and thought,’ now you have
grown old. You complain that many of your early friends have
forgotten or disregarded you, and that you are almost left alone. I
cannot certainly be called an early friend, or, in the common
meaning of the word, a friend of any time. But I cannot refrain
from telling you that there are ‘more than 7,000’ in this very
‘Christ-defying’ England whom you have made your friends by your
wise sympathy and faithful teaching. I, for my own part, owe you a
debt of thankfulness not only for the pleasant hours I have spent
with you in your books, but also for the clearer views of many of
the ills which at present press upon us, and for the methods of
cure upon which you so urgently and earnestly insist. I would
especially mention ‘Unto this Last’ as having afforded me the
highest satisfaction. It has ever since I first read it been my
text-book of political economy. I think it is one of the
needfullest lessons for a selfish, recklessly competitive,
cheapest-buying and dearest-selling age, that it should be told
there are principles deeper, higher, and even more prudent than
those by which it is just now governed. It is particularly
refreshing to find Christ’s truths applied to modern commercial
immorality in the trenchant and convincing style which
characterizes your much maligned but most valuable book. It has
been, let me assure you, appreciated in very unexpected quarters;
and one humble person to whom I lent my copy, being too poor to buy
one for himself actually wrote it out word for word, that he might
always have it by him.”
(“What a shame!” thinks the enlightened Mudie-subscriber. “See what
comes of his refusing to sell his books cheap.”
Yes,—see what comes of it. The dreadful calamity, to another
person, of doing once, what I did myself twice—and, in great part
of the book, three times. A vain author, indeed, thinks nothing of
the trouble of writing his own books. But I had infinitely rather
write somebody’s else’s. My good poor disciple, at the most, had
not half the pain his master had; learnt his book rightly, and gave
me more help, by this best kind of laborious sympathy, than twenty
score of flattering friends who tell me what a fine word-painter I
am, and don’t take the pains to understand so much as half a
sentence in a volume.)
“You have done, and are doing, a good work for England, and I pray
you not to be discouraged. Continue as you have been doing,
convincing us by your ‘sweet reasonableness’ of our errors and
miseries, and the time will doubtless come when your work, now
being done in Jeremiah-like sadness and hopelessness, will bear
gracious and abundant fruit.
“Will you pardon my troubling you with this note? but, indeed, I
could not be happy after reading your gloomy experience, until I
had done my little best to send one poor ray of comfort into your
seemingly almost weary heart.
“I remain,
“Yours very sincerely.”
II. Next to this delightful testimony to my ‘sweet reasonableness,’
here is some discussion of evidence on the other side:—
November 12, 1872.
“To John Ruskin, LL.D., greeting, these.
“Enclosed is a slip cut from the ‘Liverpool Mercury’ of last
Friday, November 8. I don’t send it to you because I think it
matters anything what the ‘Mercury’ thinks about any one’s
qualification for either the inside or outside of any asylum; but
that I may suggest to you, as a working-man reader of your letters,
the desirability of your printing any letters of importance you may
send to any of the London papers, over again—in, say, the space of
‘Fors Clavigera’ that you have set apart for correspondence. It is
most tantalizing to see a bit printed like the enclosed, and not
know either what is before or after. I felt similar feelings some
time ago over a little bit of a letter about the subscription to
Warwick Castle.
“We cannot always see the London papers, especially us provincials;
and we would like to see what goes on between you and the newspaper
world.
“Trusting that you will give this suggestion some consideration,
and at any rate take it as given in good faith from a disciple
following afar off,
“I remain, sincerely yours.”