who was so idolized. For Garibaldi men braved martyrdom. For him,
women endured starvation. Priests risked the anathema of their
masters. Boys, wearing the red shirt, flung themselves upon the
bayonets of Austria and France. Captured, they were tortured by the
enemy, but died smiling rather than betray Garibaldi. There is a
tradition not mentioned by his best biographer, that many Italians
claim is absolutely true. Once when he was in hiding, he appeared at
midnight in the public square of Naples. The city was completely
controlled by the King, who had set a price upon Garibaldi's head. But
many of the people were secret followers of Garibaldi, who wished to
confer with one of his friends in the prison. Recognizing a policeman
who was his friend, Garibaldi put his fingers upon his lips and drew
his cloak the closer about his face. After a whispered word the
soldier led Garibaldi to the entrance of the prison. Another whispered
word and the great iron gate swung open. A second whispered
conversation and the inner gate opened. Within, another guard stooped
while Garibaldi whispered in his ear. A little later, out of a cell,
came that captured friend of Garibaldi. The hero asked and obtained
the information he desired. Putting his two fingers upon his lips,
Garibaldi saluted, and was led to the inner gate. Having passed
through he put those two fingers upon his lips, saluted, and was led
to the outer gate. Putting his fingers upon his lips he saluted again,
and with an officer who had become his guide, walked hurriedly to an
alley, where he stepped into his carriage, where he saluted and
disappeared in the darkness--whether cellar or attic no man knows
unto this day. The following morning Garibaldi led his troops into
battle. Now tell me, where is there in history of human heroism a
chapter more thrilling than this story of Garibaldi?
The truism that men without fault are generally men without force, is
well illustrated in the life of Garibaldi. It is the strongest, most
adventurous, romantic and troublous career in history. There are many
blots upon his scutcheon, just as there are many yellow spots upon the
front columns of the Parthenon, and nothing is gained by calling the
roll of faults rehearsed by his critics and enemies. "The evil that men
do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."
Remember the story of the farmer in Sardinia who came home at night,
sick because he had lost a favourite lamb, and how the next morning
Garibaldi returned with the little dumb creature wrapped in his blanket
and lying upon his bosom. Remember, how at Palermo, Garibaldi came out
of the battlefield unshaken, but at sight of the little orphans in the
asylum crying for food the great soldier burst into tears. Even when
they led him to the palace and called him "Your Excellency," he frowned
and moved to the lighthouse, where, the idol of his people, he lived in
a tiny room with no furniture but a couch and a stool. Once he was
offered great riches if he would go out to China and lead a regiment and
ship slaves to South America, but he answered that "Not all the wealth
of the Indies could induce him to buy and sell human flesh." After his
long campaigns and victories for the people of Uruguay the new
government sent him a title deed to an enormous tract of land and
thousands of heads of cattle, but he tore up the deeds because he had
fought for liberty. In time of plague he became a nurse, in time of
shipwreck he risked his life to save his comrades.
It is true that for some years, under the influence of two friends who
were foreigners, he passed under the influence of their own materialism
and doubt, and he tells us that from that hour it seemed as if the
spirit of his mother and of Anita had both deserted him. During the last
years of his life he became almost a hermit and seemed to be confused by
the problems of the world in which he lived. But he had been starved,
imprisoned, tortured, betrayed and shot down. The real Garibaldi speaks
in this message that he addressed to the people of Italy:
"I am a Christian and I speak to Christians.
"I love and venerate the religion of Christ.
"Christ came into the world to deliver humanity from slavery.
"You who are here have the duty to educate the people.
"Educate them to be Christians.
"Education gives liberty.
"On a strong and wholesome education for the people depend the liberty
and greatness of Italy!
"Viva Victor Emmanuel!
"Viva Italia!
"Viva Christianity!"
VIII
JOHN RUSKIN
(1819-1900)
_And the Diffusion of the Beautiful_
The genius of John Ruskin's message is in a single sentence: "Life
without industry is guilt, and industry without art and education is
brutality." He held that all the doing that makes commerce is born of
the thinking that makes scholars, and that all the flying of looms and
the whirling of spindles begins with the quiet thought of some
scholar, hidden in a closet, or sequestered in a cloister. He never
made the mistake of supposing that education would change a ten-cent
boy into a thousand-dollar-a-year man, but he _did_ know that there is
some power in Nature that will transform a seed into a sheaf, an acorn
into an oak, and that the truth will change a child into a sage, a
statesman, a seer, a man with a message for his century.
Ruskin wrote many volumes to prove that wealth is not in raw
material;--not in iron, not in wood, not in stone, not in cotton, not
in wool. Wealth is largely in the intelligence put into the raw
material. Pig-iron is worth twenty dollars a ton, but intelligence
turns that ton of iron into a ton of tempered hair-springs, and it is
worth perhaps ten thousand dollars a ton. The clay in Rodin's
_Thinker_ represents a value of a few francs, but the idea in the
_Thinker_ brought 150,000 francs. On the sixtieth anniversary of the
coronation of Queen Victoria, an editor offered Rudyard Kipling $1,000
for a Commemoration poem. The paper, ink and the pen stand for a few
pennies; all the rest of the $1,000 was for a trained intellect. The
average income of a family in the United States to-day is not far from
$2,000. That income could be carried up to $4,000 if our workers would
only double the intelligence, efficiency and loyalty put into the raw
material they handle!
The career of Edison illustrates the industrial value of one informed
intellect to the nation. In 1910, business men in the United States
had invested in the expired patents of Thomas Edison six billion seven
hundred millions of dollars. These factories brought in an annual
income of a billion and seventy millions of dollars. To-day,
half-a-dozen Edisons, the one showing us how to burn the coal in the
ground, the other taking nitrogen out of the air, another showing us
how to transmute metals, another attacking the enemies of the cotton,
the fruits and the grains, with a teacher who would show the parents
of the country how successfully to assault intellectual and moral
illiteracy, would easily double our annual income. What our
country--what every country--needs is an invasion of knowledge and
sound sense. Therefore Ruskin's message, "the first business of the
nation is the manufacture of souls of a good quality."
During his lifetime John Ruskin wrote some forty volumes. Between the
ages of twenty and thirty he wrote _Modern Painters_, dealing with the
claims of cloud, sun, shower, wave, shrub and flower, land, sea, and
sky upon man's intellectual and moral life. He held that the open-air
world is man's best college and the forces of the winter and the
summer his best teachers. From thirty to forty he wrote the _Lectures
on Architecture_, and _Stones of Venice_, with many studies of the
galleries, towers, and cathedrals of Florence and Rome. In these books
his thought is that the soul of the people within determines the
painting, architecture and civilization of the state without. From
forty to fifty he wrote many books on the claim of the beautiful upon
man's spiritual life, and insisted that those claims were binding not
less upon the working people and the peasants in factory and field,
than upon the scholar in his library and the artist in his studio.
From fifty to sixty he wrote his _Fors Clavigera_, his _Time and
Tide_, _Munera Pulveris_, and _Unto This Last_, studies of the
problems of wealth and poverty, of labour and capital. He tells us
that men, to-day, are charmed with the glitter of gold and silver as
young birds are charmed with the glitter of snakes' eyes; that the
business man is divinely called to serve through property; that there
is, however, such a thing as a despotism of wealth; that the property
of some millionaires represents the breaking of the strength and the
will of competitors and the paralysis of the forces of the people, so
that what seems to be wealth, in verity is only "the gilded index of
far-reaching ruin, a wreckers' handful of coin, gleaned from the beach
to which he has beguiled an argosy; the camp follower's bundle of
rags, unwrapped from the breasts of goodly soldiers dead, the purchase
pieces of potter's fields, wherein shall be buried together the
citizen and the stranger."
And then Ruskin bent himself to what he believed to be the real task
of his life, the writing of a series of books on the problems of
labour and capital, in the hope that he might save the State from
trampled cornfields and from bloody streets. But just at the supreme
moment in his career his health gave way, and he never completed his
studies of the _Robber King_, the _Rust Kings_, the _Moth King_ and
the _Hero Kings_. John Ruskin died believing himself to be an
unfulfilled prophecy, in that he was unable to complete these books
for which he believed all his life had been one long preparation. But
in reality he was a prophet who gave forth a message that is slowly
transforming the institutions of mankind.
A full understanding of Ruskin's life-work begins with an outlook upon
his contribution to modern social reform. Biographers often identify a
great reform with one man's name, as if this man, single handed, had
wrought the social transformation. Thus they speak of Howard as the
reformer of prisons; of Shaftesbury as the author of the Poor Acts; of
Cobden as the author of the Corn Laws; of Lincoln, as the emancipator
of slaves; of Booth as the founder of the City Colony, the Home
Colony, the Farm Colony. But strictly speaking, thousands of leaders
of the movement for the abolition of slavery stood behind the forces
of Wilberforce in England, and Lincoln in the United States. Not
otherwise many biographers have claimed too much for the influence of
Ruskin, certainly more than the master would have claimed for himself.
At the beginning of his career Ruskin started a movement to diffuse
the beautiful in the life of the people. For centuries the beautiful
had been concentrated in the temples of Athens, the palaces and
galleries of Italy, the museums of Paris and London, in the manor
houses of the landed gentry. Meanwhile the poor people of Athens,
Venice and Florence lived in huts, wore leather garments, ate crusts,
dwelt amid ugliness, squalor and filth. Ruskin dreamed a dream of the
beautiful put into the life of the common people. He found that
Sheffield, with its smoking chimneys and grimy streets, had been
spoken of as the ugliest factory town in England. Therefore Ruskin
went to Sheffield, hired a building, installed therein his paintings,
etchings, and illuminated missals, and hired a few instructors to help
him diffuse the beautiful in the daily life of the people. He brought
in men who made the implements of the dining-room, and showed them how
to make the knife, the fork, the spoon, the table linen, minister to
the sentiment of taste and refinement. He brought in men who made
wall-papers for the poor man's house, and showed the craftsmen how to
make the colours soft and warm, delicate and beautiful. He interested
himself in beautiful furniture. He wrought with William Morris for a
more beautiful type of illustrations in books and magazines. He
denounced the ugliness of the houses and clothing and bridges and
railways. He insisted that women should have beautiful garments, the
youth read beautiful books, the men ride in beautiful cars, the
families live in beautiful little houses, the children play upon
beautiful carpets and look upon walls that had one or two beautiful
pictures. John Ruskin laboured, and others wrought with him, and now
at last we have entered into the fruit of their labours. To-day the
beautiful, once concentrated in temples, palaces, and cathedrals, is
diffused in the life of the common people.
In the same fashion Ruskin started a movement among the working men
for a diffusion of sound learning. The St. George Guild represents the
first University Extension Course and the first Chautauqua system our
world ever knew. More than fifty years ago he worked out his plan to
carry the knowledge given to rich men's sons in their lecture halls
and libraries to the working people, who were to carry on their
studies in the evening after the day's labour was over. He laid out a
course of studies for these working men, planned the organization of
lecture centers, gave us the outline of the University Extension
Course of lectures, induced many men in England to go from one working
man's guild and club to another, and after Ruskin's health broke down,
the men in the faculty of Oxford University took Ruskin's mother-idea,
and developed it into the University Extension Course of lectures.
Brought to our country that idea has spread through these lecture
courses carried on in great halls in the winter, in tents and open-air
assemblies in the summer.
We say much of our Social Settlement Work, and trace these thousands
of settlements in the tenement-house region of great cities back to
Arnold Toynbee's work, and that of Canon Barnett, in the East End of
London. But we must remember that when Ruskin was lecturing in Oxford
to some of the richest boys in Great Britain he told them that every
boy who consumed more than he produced was a pauper and that the more
the youth received from his ancestors and the State, the larger his
debt to those who were less fortunate. He believed that every gifted
boy should keep in touch, not only with his own class, but with all
classes, and that every youth would do well to do some physical work
every day. Ruskin and his students built a road outside of Oxford, and
the foreman of the gang of students was young Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee
admired and loved Ruskin, as a young pupil and disciple loves a noble
teacher and a great master.
After his health broke down, Ruskin gave up his work in Whitechapel Road
and urged Arnold Toynbee to give himself to the problems of the poor,
and when Ruskin's health gave way completely, it was Toynbee who rewrote
his lectures on labour and capital and gave them a new form in his
_Industrial Revolution in Great Britain_. The time came when Arnold
Toynbee broke down with overwork and brain fever, as his master had
broken before him, and his friend Canon Barnett raised the money to make
Toynbee Hall a permanent institution. But the seed of the Social
Settlement movement was John Ruskin's brief career in the tenement
region of the East End, and the first full fruit was in his disciple's
Toynbee Hall and in Canon Barnett's noble work at St. Jude's. Little by
little the Social Settlement Idea spread, until in the tenement regions
of Manchester, Birmingham, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco,
gifted men and women of wealth, leisure and patrician position, began
to give their lives to the neglected poor.
Not less striking, the influence of Ruskin upon the plans of General
Booth. Long before the book called _In Darkest England and the Way
Out_ was published, Ruskin founded his coöperative printing press in a
little colony outside of London. One of his biographers has told the
story of Ruskin's plan to make the men and women in the poorhouses
self-supporting, happy and useful. This biographer has never fully
established the connection between that first coöperative colony of
Ruskin, and Booth's plans for the City Colony, the Farm Colony and the
Foreign Colony. But one thing is certain:--Ruskin had a pioneer mind.
Instead of his chief interest being in mountains and clouds, in wave
and flower, cathedrals, pictures, marbles, illuminated missals, the
overmastering enthusiasm of his life was people, and his real message
was a message of social reform. When long time has passed, Ruskin's
fame will rest upon his work as a social reformer, a man who loved the
poor and weak.
Not less significant, his views of education, that have leavened all
modern schools whatsoever. Matthew Arnold defined culture as "a
familiarity with the best that has ever been done in literature."
Ruskin insisted that there were thousands of scholars living in their
libraries, surrounded by books, who were perfectly familiar with the
best that has ever been thought or done, but whose knowledge was all
but worthless, because it was selfish. He looked upon the informed man
as a sower, going forth to sow the seed of truth over the wide land.
All selfish culture is like salt in a barrel; the salt has no power to
save unless it is scattered. Selfish culture is like seed corn in the
granary, important for a harvest. Under Ruskin's influence many of his
friends gave an evening or two a week to lectures before his working
men's clubs, his art groups, and his classes for the improvement of
the handicrafts.
No modern author has made so much of vision, or tried so hard to teach
people how to see. Many teachers think that education is stuffing the
pocket of memory with a mass of facts. When the mind is filled so that
it cannot hold another truth, the youth receives a diploma. Ruskin held
that education was teaching the child how to see everything true and
beautiful in land and sea and sky. "For a thousand great speakers, there
is only one great thinker; for a thousand great thinkers, there is only
one great see-er; we cut out one 'e' and leave it seer, but the true
poet and sage is simply the see-er." The millions are blind to the
signals hanged out from the battlements of cloud. Isaac Newton was a
see-er,--he saw an apple falling from the tree; saw a moon falling
through space, and gave us the law of gravity. Columbus was a see-er. In
a crevice in a bit of driftwood, tossed upon the shore of Spain, he saw
a strange pebble, and his imagination leaped from the driftwood to the
unknown forest from whence it came, from that bright piece of stone to
the mountain range of which it was a part. Columbus had the seeing eye,
and discovered the continent hidden behind the clouds.
Not otherwise the geologist sees the handwriting of God upon the
rock-pages; the astronomer sees His writing upon the pages of the sky;
the physiologist reads His writing on the pages of the human body; the
moralist deciphers the writing on the tablets of the mind and the
heart. The beginning of Wordsworth's fame was the hour when his eyes
were opened, and he saw man appearing upon the horizon, and like a
bright spirit trailing clouds of glory, coming from God who is man's
home. It was the inner sight of Wordsworth's soul that was "the bliss
of solitude." It was his power of vision that enabled him to look out
upon the field, yellow as gold, a vision that lingered long in his
memory when he said, "and then my heart with rapture thrills, and
dances with the daffodils."
It is useless for people who are colour-blind to look at Rembrandt's
portrait. It is folly for people who cannot follow a tune to buy a
ticket for a symphony concert. Men who by neglect atrophy the
spiritual faculty, or by sin cut gashes in the nerve of conscience,
will soon exclaim, in the spirit of the fool, "There is no God," just
as the blind man is certain that there is no sun. The old black
ex-slave, Sojourner Truth, once illustrated this principle. In those
days excitement ran high. Northern merchants, fearful of losing their
trade with Southern cities, frowned upon any one who dared criticize
"the peculiar institution" of the South. One day, in New York,
Sojourner Truth, just escaped from slavery, went to an Abolition
Meeting, hoping for an opportunity of making a plea for the
emancipation of her race. When the black woman, with her gnarled
hands, and face seamed with pain and sorrow, arose to speak, a young
newspaper reporter slammed his book upon the table, and stamped his
way down the aisle toward the door. Just before he reached the door,
Sojourner Truth stretched out her long black finger and said, "Wait a
minute, honey! You goin' 'way 'cause of me? Listen, honey--I would
give you some ideas to take home with you to your newspaper, but I see
you ain't got nothing to carry 'em in!" . . . Homely but forceful
illustration of an old truth. The angel of truth and the angel of
beauty, leaning from the battlements of heaven, oft whispers, "Oh, my
children! I would fain give you a new tool, a new painting, a new
science, but you have no eyes to see the vision, and no ears to hear
the sweetest music that ever fell from heaven's battlements." It is
the man of vision who founds the new school of painting, or the new
reform or the new liberty. The visions of the idealist to-day become
the laws and institutions of to-morrow.
In this power of the open eye, Ruskin found the secret of daily
happiness, and mental growth. No one knew better than John Ruskin that
the millions of working men and women would never be able to make
their way to the galleries of Paris and Madrid, of Florence and
Venice, to St. Peter's or the Parthenon, much less have time, leisure
and money for travel unto the far-off ends of the earth. Therefore he
taught the people how to see the wonders of God, in every fluted blade
of grass, in every bush that blazed with beauty, and blazing, was not
consumed. He proved that he who knows how to see will find the common
clod to be a casket filled with gems, and that the sky that looks down
upon all workers, spreads out scenes of such loveliness and beauty as
to make travel to distant lands unnecessary!
And yet, for the most part, men turn their eyes toward the sky only in
moments of utter idleness and insipidity. "One says it has been wet,
and another, it has been windy, and another, it has been warm. But
who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and
precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the
horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of
the south, and smote upon their summits, until they melted and
mouldered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead
clouds, when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew
them before it like withered leaves? All has passed, unregretted, and
unseen. Not in the clash of the hail nor the drift of the whirlwind,
are the highest characters developed. God is not in the earthquake,
nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. Blunt and low those
faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through
lamp-black and lightning."
The whole world owes Ruskin an immeasurable debt for this: that he
taught us how to see the beauty in the great imperial palace in which
man hath his home.