HIS WORK AS ART CRITIC AND SOCIAL REFORMER--BEST BOOKS ARE
"MODERN PAINTERS," "THE SEVEN LAMPS" AND "THE STONES OF
VENICE."
John Ruskin deserves a place among the great English writers of the
last century, not only because of his superb style and the amount of
his work, but because he was the first to encourage the study of art
and nature among the people. So enormous have been the strides made in
the last twenty years in popular knowledge of art and architecture,
and so great the growth of interest in the beauties of nature that it
is difficult to appreciate that a little over a half century ago, when
Ruskin first came into prominence as a writer, the English public was
densely ignorant of art, and was equally ignorant of the world of
pleasure to be derived from beautiful scenery.
It was Ruskin's great service to the world that he opened the eyes of
the public to the glories of the art of all countries, and that he
also revealed the wonders of architecture. Many critics have laid bare
his infirmities as a critic, but a man of colder blood and less
emotional nature would never have reached the large public to which
Ruskin appealed. Like a great orator he was swayed by the passion of
convincing his audience, and the very extravagance of his language and
the ardor of his nature served to make a profound impression upon
readers who are not usually affected by such appeals as his.
Ruskin was one of the most impractical men that ever lived, but in the
exuberance of his nature and in his rare unselfishness he started a
dozen social reforms in England, any one of which should have given
fame to its founder. He gave away a great fortune in gifts to the
public and in private generosity. He founded museums, established
scholarships, tried to put into practical working order his dream of a
New Life founded on the union of manual labor and high intellectual
aims, labored to induce the public to read the good old books that
help one to make life worth living.
[Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN ON JULY 20,
1882, BY MESSRS. ELLIOTT & FRY]
That much of his good work was neutralized by his lack of common sense
detracts nothing from the world's debt to Ruskin. The simple truth is
that he was a reformer as well as a great writer, and the very fervor
of his religious and social beliefs, his contempt of mere money
getting, his hatred of falsehood, his boundless generosity and his
childlike simplicity of mind--all these traits at which the world
laughed lifted Ruskin above the other men of genius of his time and
placed him among the world's great reformers.
Among this small body of men whose spiritual force continues to live in
their books or through the influence of their great self-sacrifices,
Ruskin deserves a place, for he gave fortune, work and a splendid
enthusiasm to the common people's cause.
Ruskin's whole life was abnormal, and his early training served to
accentuate those weaknesses of mind and will that made failures of so
many schemes for the public good. If Ruskin had been trained in the
English public schools he would have learned common sense in boyhood.
As it was, his father and mother shielded the boy in every way from
all contact with the world. Ruskin's father was a prosperous wine
merchant with much culture; his mother was a religious fanatic, whose
passion for the Bible imposed upon her boy the daily reading of the
Scriptures and the daily memorizing of scores of verses.
Such training in most cases causes a revolt against religion, but in
Ruskin's case it resulted in training his boyish ear to the cadences
of the Bible writers and in filling his mind with the sublime imagery
of the prophets, with the result that when he began to write he had
already formed a style, the richest and most varied of the last
century.
The boy was a mental prodigy, for he taught himself to read when four
years old, and at five he had devoured hundreds of books and was
already writing poems and plays. At ten, when he had his first tutor,
his knowledge was wide and he had become a passionate lover of natural
scenery, as well as no mean artist with pen and pencil. Scott's novels
and Byron's _Childe Harold_ formed much of his reading at a time when
most boys are content with the stories of Ballantyne or Mayne Reid.
The range of his mental activity until he entered Oxford at eighteen
was very wide. He was interested in mineralogy, meteorology,
mathematics, drawing and painting. What probably expanded his mind
more than all else was the education of travel. His father spent about
half his time journeying through England and the Continent in an
old-fashioned chaise and John always shared in these expeditions. At
Oxford he competed for the Newdigate prize in poetry, and after being
twice defeated won the coveted honor. He never gained any high
scholarship, but he received valuable training in writing.
There is no space here to chronicle more than a few of his many
activities after leaving college. He first came into prominence by his
passionate defense of the painter Turner against the art critics, and
his study of Turner led him to adopt art criticism as his life work.
At twenty-three years of age, when most youths are puzzled about their
vocation, Ruskin had completed the first volume of _Modern Painters_,
the publication of which gave him fame and made him a social lion in
London. Other volumes of this great work followed swiftly and caused a
great commotion in the world of art and letters because of the radical
views of the author and the remarkable qualities of his style.
This was followed by _The Seven Lamps of Architecture_, in which
Ruskin expounded his radical views on this kindred art; _The Stones of
Venice_, an eloquent book enforcing the argument that Gothic
architecture sprang from a pure national faith and the domestic
virtues; _King's Treasuries_, a noble plea for good books; _Fors
Clavigera_, a series of ninety-six parts published in eight volumes,
the record of his social experiments; _Preterita_, one of the most
charming books of youthful reminiscences in any language, and many
others. Ruskin's mental activity was enormous. He had to his credit in
his fifty-five active years no less than seventy-two volumes and one
hundred magazine articles, as well as thousands of lectures.
This outline sketch of Ruskin's life would be incomplete without
mention of the great sorrows that darkened his days but gave eloquence
to his writings. The first was the desertion of his wife, who married
the painter Millais, and the second was the loss by death of Rose La
Touche, a beautiful Irish girl whom he had known from childhood. She
refused to marry him because of their differences of religion; even
refused to see him in her fatal illness unless he could say that he
loved God better than he loved her. Her death brought bitter despair
to Ruskin, but the world profited by it, for grief gave his work
maturity and force. The last ten years of Ruskin's life were spent at
his beautiful home at Brantwood, surrounded by the pictures that he
loved and served faithfully by devoted relatives.
[Illustration: JOHN RUSKIN FROM THE SEMI-ROMANTIC PORTRAIT OF SIR
JOHN E. MILLAIS]
Ruskin's books are not to be read continuously. Many dreary passages
may be found in all of them, which the judicious reader skips. But his
best works are more full of intellectual stimulus than those of any
writer of his time with the single exception of Carlyle. _Modern
Painters_ overflows with the enthusiasm of a lover of art and of
nature who preaches the gospel of sincerity and truth. It is marked,
like all his work, by eloquent digressions on human life and conduct,
for Ruskin held that the finest art was simply the flowering of a
great soul nurtured on all that was highest and best. _The Seven
Lamps_ does for architecture what his first work did for painting. The
book is written in more ornate style than any other, but he who loves
impassioned prose will find many specimens here that can only by
equaled in De Quincey's best work. Read the peroration of the "Lamp
of Sacrifice" and you will not need to be told that this is the finest
tribute to the work of the builders of the mediæval cathedral. Here is
a part of this eloquent passage:
It is to far happier, far higher exaltation that we owe those
fair fronts of variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies
and dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever
filled the depth of midsummer dream; those vaulted gates,
trellised with close leaves; those window labyrinths of
twisted tracery and starry light; those misty masses of
multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses,
perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations.
All else for which the builders sacrificed has passed away.
* * * But of them and their life and their toil upon earth,
one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those great heaps
of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave
their powers, their honors and their errors; but they have
left us their adoration.
No space is left here to mention in detail Ruskin's other works, but
_Unto This Last_, _The Stones of Venice_, _Sesame and Lilies_ and _The
Crown of Wild Olive_ may be commended as well worth careful reading.
Also _Preterita_ is alive with noble passages, such as the pen-picture
of the view from the Dale in the Alps, or of the Rhone below Geneva.
Read also Ruskin's description of Turner's "Slave Ship" or the
impressive passage on the mental slavery of the modern workman in the
sixth chapter of the second volume of _The Stones of Venice_. Read
these things and you will have no doubt of the genius of Ruskin or of
his command of the finest impassioned prose in the English language.