[Sidenote: Ancestry.]
It is easy to trace in the life of Ruskin these two forces tending
respectively toward the love of beauty and toward the contempt of mere
beauty. They are, indeed, present from the beginning. He inherited
from his Scotch parents that upright fearlessness which has always
characterized the race. His stern mother "devoted him to God before he
was born,"[1] and she guarded her gift with unremitting but perhaps
misguided caution. The child was early taught to find most of his
entertainment within himself, and when he did not, he was whipped. He
had no playmates and few toys. His chief story-book was the Bible,
which he read many times from cover to cover at his mother's knee.
His father, the "perfectly honest wine-merchant," seems to have been
the one to foster the boy's aesthetic sense; he was in the habit of
reading aloud to his little family, and his son's apparently genuine
appreciation of Scott, Pope, and Homer dates from the incredibly early
age of five. It was his father, also, to whom he owed his early
acquaintance with the finest landscape, for the boy was his companion
in yearly business trips about Britain, and later visited, in his
parents' company, Belgium, western Germany, and the Alps.
[Sidenote: Early education.]
All this of course developed the child's precocity. He was early
suffered and even encouraged to compose verses;[2] by ten he had
written a play, which has unfortunately been preserved. The hot-house
rearing which his parents believed in, and his facility in teaching
himself, tended to make a regular course of schooling a mere
annoyance; such schooling as he had did not begin till he was fifteen,
and lasted less than two years, and was broken by illness. But the
chief effect of the sheltered life and advanced education to which he
was subjected was to endow him with depth at the expense of breadth,
and to deprive him of a possibly vulgar, but certainly healthy,
contact with his kind, which, one must believe, would have checked a
certain disposition in him to egotism, sentimentality, and dogmatic
vehemence. "The bridle and blinkers were never taken off me," he
writes.[3]
[Sidenote: Student at Oxford.]
[Sidenote: Traveling in Europe.]
At Oxford--whither his cautious mother pursued him--Ruskin seems to
have been impressed in no very essential manner by curriculum or
college mates. With learning _per se_ he was always dissatisfied and
never had much to do; his course was distinguished not so much by
erudition as by culture. He easily won the Newdigate prize in poetry;
his rooms in Christ Church were hung with excellent examples of
Turner's landscapes,--the gift of his art-loving father,--of which he
had been an intimate student ever since the age of thirteen. But his
course was interrupted by an illness, apparently of a tuberculous
nature, which necessitated total relaxation and various trips in Italy
and Switzerland, where he seems to have been healed by walking among
his beloved Alps. For many years thereafter he passed months of his
time in these two countries, accompanied sometimes by his parents and
sometimes rather luxuriously, it seems, by valet and guide.
[Sidenote: Career as an author begins.]
Meanwhile he had commenced his career as author with the first volume
of _Modern Painters_, begun, the world knows, as a short defense of
Turner, originally intended for nothing more than a magazine article.
But the role of art-critic and law-giver pleased the youth,--he was
only twenty-four when the volume appeared,--and having no desire to
realize the ambition of his parents and become a bishop, and even less
to duplicate his father's career as vintner, he gladly seized the
opportunity thus offered him to develop his aesthetic vein and to
redeem the public mind from its vulgar apathy thereby. He continued
his work on _Modern Painters_, with some intermissions, for eighteen
years, and supplemented it with the equally famous _Seven Lamps of
Architecture_ in 1849, and _The Stones of Venice_ in 1853.
[Sidenote: Domestic troubles.]
This life of zealous work and brilliant recognition was interrupted in
1848 by Ruskin's amazing marriage to Miss Euphemia Gray, a union into
which he entered at the desire of his parents with a docility as
stupid as it was stupendous. Five years later the couple were quietly
divorced, that Mrs. Ruskin might marry Millais. All the author's
biographers maintain an indiscreet reserve in discussing the affair,
but there can be no concealment of the fact that its effect upon
Ruskin was profound in its depression. Experiences like this and his
later sad passion for Miss La Touche at once presage and indicate his
mental disorder, and no doubt had their share--a large one--in
causing Ruskin's dissatisfaction with everything, and above all with
his own life and work. Be this as it may, it is at this time in the
life of Ruskin that we must begin to reckon with the decline of his
aesthetic and the rise of his ethical impulse; his interest passes
from art to conduct. It is also the period in which he began his
career as lecturer, his chief interest being the social life of his
age.
[Sidenote: Ruskin's increasing interest in social questions.]
By 1860, he was publishing the papers on political economy, later
called _Unto this Last_, which roused so great a storm of protest
when they appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ that their publication
had to be suspended. The attitude of the public toward such works
as these,--its alternate excitement and apathy,--the death of his
parents, combined with the distressing events mentioned above,
darkened Ruskin's life and spoiled his interest in everything that
did not tend to make the national life more thoughtfully solemn.
"It seems to me that now ... the thoughts of the true nature of
our life, and of its powers and responsibilities should present
themselves with absolute sadness and sternness."[4]
His lectures as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, a post which he
held at various times from 1870 to 1883, failed to re-establish his
undistracted interest in things beautiful.
[Sidenote: Triumph of the reformer over the art-critic.]
The complete triumph of the reformer over the art-critic is marked by
_Fors Clavigera_, a series of letters to workingmen, begun New Year's
Day, 1871, in which it was proposed to establish a model colony of
peasants, whose lives should be made simple, honest, happy, and even
cultured, by a return to more primitive methods of tilling the soil
and of making useful and beautiful objects. The Guild of St. George,
established to "slay the dragon of industrialism," to dispose of
machinery, slums, and discontent, consumed a large part of Ruskin's
time and money. He had inherited a fortune of approximately a million
dollars, and he now began to dispose of it in various charitable
schemes,--establishing tea-shops, supporting young painters, planning
model tenements, but, above all, in elaborating his ideas for the
Guild. The result of it all--whatever particular reforms were effected
or manual industries established--was, to Ruskin's view, failure, and
his mind, weakening under the strain of its profound disappointments,
at last crashed in ruin.
[Sidenote: Death in 1900.]
It is needless to follow the broken author through the desolation
of his closing years to his death in 1900. Save for his charming
reminiscences, _Præterita_, his work was done; the long struggle was
over, the struggle of one man to reduce the complexities of a national
life to an apostolic simplicity, to make it beautiful and good,
Till the high God behold it from beyond,
And enter it.
[1] _Præterita_. He was born February 8, 1819.
[2] Ruskin himself quotes a not very brilliant specimen in _Modern
Painters_, III, in "Moral of Landscape."
[3] _Præterita_, § 53.
[4] _The Mystery of Life._