THE HARVEST
OF RUSKIN
THE HARVEST
OF RUSKIN
BY
JOHN W. GRAHAM, M.A.
PRINCIPAL OF DALTON HALL, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
AUTHOR OF “THE DESTRUCTION OF DAYLIGHT”
[Illustration: colophon]
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1
_First published in 1920_
(_All rights reserved_)
PREFACE
This book is concerned with Ruskin’s teaching in the departments of
Religion and Economics only, including his social reforms and
educational schemes. It leaves out all his work on Art and in Natural
History and Mineralogy. His thoughts on Beauty in Landscape are treated
only so far as that Beauty is damaged by Industrialism or by War. Nor
has any attempt been made to produce an analysis of his literary style
or styles. The long extracts which the plan of the book requires,
however, afford sufficient examples of his artistry in words.
My aim is to give a critical estimate in a reverent spirit of Ruskin’s
teaching in these two departments, and to apply it to the needs of our
own time.
The development of Ruskin’s religious faith and its final outcome have
not, I believe, been fully worked out before, and the reconciliation
which I have attempted in the region of Economics is long overdue. These
parts of the book have been delivered as lectures in past years under
the Manchester and Liverpool University Extension Committees, at Summer
Schools, and elsewhere.
I am indebted to Ruskin’s literary executors for permission to quote
freely from his works.
J. W. G.
DALTON HALL,
MANCHESTER.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE SIGNS OF A PROPHET 9
II. THE PILGRIM’S WAY 26
III. TO WHAT FOLD? 55
IV. RUSKIN AND MILL: A RECONCILIATION 78
V. RUSKIN’S RECONSTRUCTION 120
VI. RUSKIN’S ECONOMICS TO-DAY 151
VII. USURY 185
VIII. WAR 203
IX. MACHINERY 222
EPILOGUE 259
INDEX 267
The Harvest of Ruskin
_CHAPTER I_
_THE SIGNS OF A PROPHET_
Now that one hundred years have gone by since their one precious boy was
born in London to a Scottish wine merchant and his wife, it may be well
to ask how much of Ruskin’s teaching has proved to be chaff which the
wind driveth away, and how much has been precious seed. Ruskin is just
now suffering from the time of comparative neglect which intervenes
between an author’s contemporaries and posterity, the years when the
immediate appropriateness of his message may have lapsed, when it is no
longer fresh and startling, but its permanent value has not yet been
settled by the verdict of several generations. All or nearly all the
great Victorians are in like case.
Ruskin’s art criticism is, as a matter of fact, not only ignored but
resolutely rejected nowadays among critical writers. He loved beauty
and charm in subject; he rejected scenes of horror and torture, and also
subjects of mere Dutch commonplace. He loved delicate and accurately
minute drawing, and the realistic detail of the Preraphælites. He
desired that a tree in a picture should be recognized as an oak or a
birch; and he loved above all fine drawing of mosses, leaves, and
peacocks’ wings. This is the day of impressionism, super-impressionism
and impression of impressionism, and so on, through ever greater
abandonment of drawing and significance, to cubism, futurism and other
weird follies. I am not wishful to dogmatize on these matters; I incline
to the sage and wonderful conclusion that all styles are good provided
they are good styles; that conscientiousness in the portrayal of what
the artist really sees will not lead him astray; that originality, or at
any rate a marked individual gift, is a necessity; and that there is no
one orthodox school. As in everything else, the letter killeth,
convention blocks progress, and slovenliness includes a multitude of
sins.
But this book is not concerned with art criticism, but with the teaching
about human duty and happiness, to which Ruskin’s art interests led
him. The characteristic note he contributed to art criticism was to
regard art as a revelation of God and of Man. He was a prophet of Beauty
from his birth. Concerning his susceptibility in childhood to the power
of natural Beauty, he writes in the third volume of _Modern
Painters_,[1] in words which throw light upon his special gifts of
temperament: “Although there was no definite religious sentiment mingled
with it, there was a continual perception of sanctity in the whole of
Nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest; an instinctive awe,
mixed with delight; an indefinable thrill, such as we sometimes imagine
to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit. I could only feel this
perfectly when I was alone; and then it would often make me shiver from
head to foot from the joy and fear of it, when, after being some time
away from the hills, I first got to the shore of a mountain river, where
the brown water circled among the pebbles, or when I first saw the swell
of distant land against the sunset, or the first low broken wall covered
with mountain moss. I cannot in the least describe the feeling; but I do
not think this is my fault, nor that of the English language, for I am
afraid no feeling is describable. If we had to explain even the sense of
bodily hunger to a person who had never felt it, we should be hard put
to it for words; and the joy in nature seemed to me to come of a sort of
heart-hunger, satisfied with the presence of a Great and Holy Spirit.
These feelings remained in their full intensity till I was eighteen or
twenty, and then, as the reflective and practical power increased, and
the ‘cares of the world’ gained upon me, faded gradually away, in the
manner described by Wordsworth in his _Intimations of Immortality_.”
The fact is that we are dealing with a man who belongs to the prophetic
order: and this book is written in the belief that he was not only a
prophet for the nineteenth, but also for the twentieth century. He has
all the prophetic signs. Right or wrong, fantastic or terribly truthful,
we feel that he is coining his soul into golden words. The stress and
strain of his cry against priesthoods, modern business, false teaching
of economics as he thought it, wore him out, and left him subject to
attacks of inflammation of the brain. Rightly he spoke of _Fors
Clavigera_ as the book of his life; “best worth calling a book,” he
said, of anything he had written. With it his serious work ended in
1884. Only the chatty reminiscences of _Præterita_ were to be written
after that.
He had, besides a dreadful sincerity, another mark of the true afflatus.
Never, as he pleaded, had he written a line for money or for the glory
of self. It was the wrong done to Turner that drove him to write _Modern
Painters_; the necessity of character in a nation was the lesson he had
to teach in tracing the history of Venice in her monuments; the cry of
the poor, and indignation over the wrecking of humanity in the name of
business, drove him to write _Unto This Last_, and all his social and
economic works. He had the single-mindedness of the seer.
Again, he inspired love and discipleship in hearts ready for his
message, as prophets do. The Master he was called, and the Master he
remains. His loss was a personal loss. The event of January 20, 1900,
was to many of us a real bereavement. The strong personal note which
caused the prophets Isaiah and Hosea to do in their own persons
emblematic acts for a sign, caused Ruskin also to tell his readers more
about himself than anyone would who did not identify himself with his
message. To the unseeing eye this looks like egotism, but it is far
from that.
His life, too, was such as a prophet’s ought to be. He gave away the
greater part of a fortune of £157,000, and some house property, and
chose to do without advertising his books. In love and in the loss of
love he suffered, but did nothing base, everything that was kind and
true. As a prophet whose burden was wealth and poverty, social tyranny
and human wreckage, he was able to speak as a rich man to members of his
own class. A poor man who prophesies on this subject is apt to be
discounted by blunt humanity, who think that he may be merely an envious
grumbler.
And, once again, he has that characteristic of the messengers of the
Truth, that their message is too new and strange to be acceptable at
once to their contemporaries. They are accepted by the few: the world
smiles or curses and passes by, but gradually it bends round in one of
its great curves, and round its spiral path revolves as it approaches
the centre of attraction. I shall try to show that much of Ruskin’s
social and economic teaching is just such a centre of our constant
approximation, though we are apparently always going nearly at right
angles to it.
Here, then, we have every sign of the prophetic character: fidelity to
the deepest motives of the soul, an inevitable and generally unconscious
selflessness, the loyalty of his followers, his frank openness to the
world, his consecrated life and holy sorrow, the antagonisms he evoked
and the contempt of the proud, and the clear influence he is
exerting--these, all together, are prophetic.
Let us examine his outward qualifications. Ruskin’s judgment was at
times erratic; his playfulness and his petulance prevent our taking
everything he said with prosaic seriousness; he was not always able to
speak in measured tones of sober exactness, but gave way to
exaggeration. But his intellectual equipment was of the best. He was
heir both to Greece and to Judæa. The Bible was his text-book and Plato
was his political teacher. All culture was at his command. Oxford,
Geneva, Rome, Venice, the Alps, the Apennines and the Lake of Coniston
had yielded up their best to him. He prophesied from no street
corner--from the Sheldonian Theatre in the University of Oxford his
message was uttered.
So much for the signs and for the outward qualifications of the seer.
The prophet’s fire is recognizably there. The tabernacle of God is with
men, as of old; and if He is to speak with a clear Word to our hasting
age, to preach righteousness, purity, work to the idle and rest to the
weary, clean cities, and clean hearts, how else would He preach than
with the text of Ruskin: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you that
your millionaires in all their glory of machines cannot supply to us the
loss of these.”
At the age of forty-one, about the time when the mind reaches maturity,
begin the social teachings of John Ruskin in full completeness--not to
be much changed, except in one particular, for the quarter of a century
of writing that was left him. The live coal from off the altar came to
him as he was wandering in restless suffering among the valleys of
Savoy, and his first “Thus saith the Lord” was written at Chamonix. Not
that all this came at once. The growth can be traced; but before 1860 he
was chiefly an art critic, and in that year the last volume of _Modern
Painters_ appeared.
Let us look at the advantages of the delay. They were manifold. A man
should do something else besides prophesy. He should win his position,
take his rank among men, in some walk of life, before he is quite
qualified to tell others how to order their steps. He has a degree to
take in something besides homiletics. It was from the pulpit of a great
literary reputation that the author of _Modern Painters_ opened his
mouth to preach. That reputation he was content utterly to throw away;
to tread on it, step upon it as upon a ladder, that from the top of it
he might be heard when he spoke the words the Spirit taught him. That
was the great renunciation of his literary life. What a refusal of a
call it would have been had he hugged his reputation, been careful of
his influence, that last temptation of noble minds. It is politicians
who do that, not prophets. But these know the glorious liberty into
which they come.
No doubt any other professional career would have ended with a message.
What an explosion might have occurred in the Church had his mother’s
wish been fulfilled, and he become a clergyman, with a Bishop to look
after him. As it was, his father’s art tastes and preoccupation with
pictures and with picturesque scenery, and the boy’s own early skill
both as writer and draughtsman, led him, after an attempt at poetry, to
become by profession a writer on Art. There he had the opportunity of
elaborating his mighty implement, that superb, facile, plastic
instrument of music and voice of thunder, his inimitable style. It is
that which ensures the preservation of his work. Noble style is the
antiseptic which preserves from decay the written words of men. Books
without style are not read long.
In classifying the books in our libraries, under what head shall we
place the seventy volumes of John Ruskin? There is much temptation to
fall back helplessly upon the heading “Miscellaneous”; for he wrote on
Art, including Sculpture, Engraving, Architecture and Heraldry; on
Economics, History and constructive Politics; on Botany, Meteorology,
Ornithology, Geology, and Mineralogy; he wrote Guide-books, Poems,
Autobiography, Literary Criticism; he treated Theology, Ethics,
Education, Music and Mythology; he brought out regularly for seven years
a monthly periodical _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_; he edited
Biography, German stories and translations from the Greek and the
Italian: he wrote Dialogue and Fairy Tale.
Where shall we seek for unity in this manifold outpouring of a versatile
genius, who touched none of these subjects without irradiating it? In
that fact lies our key. With what did he irradiate this comprehensive
list of human interests? The answer cannot be doubtful in the mind of
any careful student. He told us how it seemed to him that all these
things looked to the eye of God. He tried to solve all questions by the
flashlight of the Eternal. He worked at agate and crystal that it might
reveal the beauty of the Lord; he fought his social crusade for the sake
of the dim disinherited multitude who had no eyes for the Divine
loveliness, and no glory to behold: and for the sake of justice and of
love which wealth and luxury denied. He was a messenger of the Most High
to modern needs; and his eager soul found a service throughout this wide
range of science and art.
Not one of his writings is called a sermon, yet we have found his class,
for he belongs to the class of Divines, ordained in a temple more
Metropolitan and more Catholic than Canterbury or Rome, and not made
with hands. Through nearly half a century of active authorship he
consecrated his every gift to the service of men. He never looked back
in any unfaithfulness that we know of. I wish first to make clear that
all his life the gates between the soul and the Divine Source were open:
that he was truly a religious man under every form of faith and doubt;
and that no one need hesitate about this at any tight place in his
career. Keep this as a sure clue, and we shall fearlessly follow his
story.
The childish sensibility to landscape beauty I take to be an early
manifestation of the gift of the seer, a significant token of native
nearness to the Unseen. For many years he never climbed a mountain,
alone, without instinctively dropping on his knees on the summit, in
thankful reverence. As the careless foot of an engrossing industrialism
stamped into ashes more and more of the land whose fairness had been his
life’s passion, it seemed to him to be indeed sacrilege and desecration,
a reckless destruction of Divine things. Art he only valued as a form of
expression, a language whose subject was Nature and Man. In the latter
half of his life more emphatically, but more or less from the beginning,
he regarded Man as the object for whose welfare Nature, in the landscape
sense, existed; and he rested not till he had brought Man into due
relation with God, up to whom in the end came all things.
He was devout by training. Morning and evening he read his chapter out
of the Bible; and the fourteenth century manuscript he used in later
years occupied a prominent and handy place in the study at Brantwood. In
Swiss and Italian villages in his early journeys he read the service
through on Sunday to his servant, when there was no Protestant Church.
From the Biblical references in the indexes to his works, you would
suppose they were a theological library. In his Oxford Lectures Art was
the illustration, but conduct the theme, and Art was chosen as an
illustration because in it the artist shows what manner of Man he is, in
a way that cannot be dissembled.
What are the qualifications which fit a man to be a religious
researcher, a mountain-top gazer into heaven?
He must know from his own experience the meaning of holiness, thereby
gaining a practical knowledge of God. He must, in Pauline words, be
crucified with Christ, though he may not care for such an expression; he
must preach not himself and please not himself. Such a man John Ruskin
was. Among the many wayward and impulsive men who have been “dear to
the Muses and to the nymphs not unbeloved,” not all like him have been
also masters of themselves, and kept on their foreheads the white stone,
with the new name written. Ruskin was himself noble and sweet in his
life, a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief endured in silence,
with nothing ignoble in his eighty years of generous charity and lonely
service. He had passed, too, through that experience which seems
essential to the wielding of spiritual power. He had had his great
renunciation, he had heard some hard call, and had obeyed. The prophets
have all gone on the Via Crucis: they have all lost their lives that
they might find them. As Whittier abandoned a hopeful political career
and remained poor till he was sixty that he might help to free the
slave, and gained his spiritual power thereby, so Ruskin in 1860 went
boldly out to do battle with the Society that loved and honoured him.
Further, such a man must greatly dare. He must face the demon of the
study first; then, too probably, the resentment of organized religion.
One cannot succeed as a researcher without discovering something new;
and that is bound to modify or overthrow something old and established.
Nor can such a man usually present a heart of iron and a front of brass
to the darts of controversy. He must be a sensitive man, by the very
nature of his research. He may or may not be privileged to feel strong
in the strength of his cause; but even if he does the shrinking of the
nerves remains. This daring and suffering were pre-eminently the lot of
Ruskin; and it was this which finally broke down his mind. “He was
beside himself for others’ sakes.” It was the neglect with which the St.
George’s Guild and allied reform work were treated by those who were
otherwise his friends, which contributed to drive him into inflammation
of the brain in 1878, and again several times afterwards. “Wounded in
the house of my friends.”
Besides these essential qualifications Ruskin had his very unusual
gifts, which it may be long before we find again combined with the
religious faculty--his long lifetime free from the need of earning
money, his early popularity, his wonderful style, the vantage ground of
his Professorial chair, his penetrating mind, his wit and his fire. It
may be long before we see his like again.
I am far from claiming infallibility for Ruskin. Infallibility is an
out-of-date conception altogether. There is no such thing on earth. To
be infallible you must know everything; you must be infinite. The
infallibility of a finite creature is an inhuman, even an inorganic
conception. Organic life means growth, and growth means imperfection;
but growth is Nature’s way of making things. Infallibility is a tyrant
born of ecclesiasticism, and bred on human laziness and fear. It has
become the attribute of the quack pill, and there let it abide.
But, beyond this safe generality, Ruskin had human weaknesses of an
obvious kind. He loved paradox; he played with his thunderbolts a
little, and rather liked to shock people. He was a humorist as well as a
divine. It is difficult to put down some of his derivations to anything
but sheer fooling; a man who will put the English _Force_ and Latin
_Fors_ down to the same root, will do anything in that line. Again, when
he was in thunderous action he allowed volcanoes of vituperation to
erupt, which one would have wished otherwise. He sadly lacked restraint,
but, like the strong language of the old Prophets, his had its root in
love of man.
We know more of his intimacies and his foibles, which he loves
humorously to exaggerate, than are generally given to the public. He has
taken means to prevent any artificial pedestal, in idealized aloofness,
ever being raised to him. His utter frankness led him to give the public
his private accounts, which people generally keep to themselves; and
such correspondence as that painful one with Octavia Hill.[2] But when
the faults of others were in question he was silent as the grave, to his
own hurt. He was “kind even to the unthankful and the evil.” As for many
of us, how much more vulgar and base would the world have been without
that noble and lovely soul. Many are those who owe him an irredeemable
debt. His life was not, as he sadly thought, the story of baffled
strife. Of him, as of Dr. Arnold, it could be said that not alone was he
saved.[3]
_CHAPTER II_
_THE PILGRIM’S WAY_
Having now stated our conviction that Ruskin was always essentially
religious, we will trace the history of his beliefs.
He began life in 1819, under the strong influence of his mother, as a
Calvinistic Protestant, of the narrow type then current. The Ruskins
were properly Scottish Presbyterians, living in London. A Low Church or
Spurgeon’s Tabernacle was equally acceptable. His mother made him read
with her daily portions of the Bible, two or three chapters, undiluted
and unselected. They accomplished the journey from Genesis to Revelation
in about a year, and then began at Genesis again next day, “hard names,
numbers, Levitical Law and all.” They went through it at least six times
together.
She also taught him, “complete and sure,” twenty-six chapters of the
Bible, including the 119th Psalm, and all the Scottish Paraphrases of
the Psalms.[4]
This did not make him vitally religious; he was not “converted.” The
Bible was, for the present, a rather tiresome task, and to chapel he and
his father went submissively, feeling their sad inferiority to the
mother in these matters. His mother’s creed he dutifully imbibed,
without question or strong feeling of any kind. He had the proper
antipathy to Rome, and the habit of outward prayer.[5] His real religion
was born at Friar’s Crag, Derwentwater, at four years old, when he
looked with awe into the dark lake over the mossy tree roots, and felt
himself in the Presence.
He was, as an only child, a protected treasure, the pride of and a great
responsibility to his wealthy parents. He never went to a Public School,
and when he went to Oxford to be made into a Bishop his parents came
with him, lived in the High, and his mother saw him every day. With
them, far into mid-life, he went on all his foreign journeys but two,
those of 1845 and 1858. The parental ideas remained potent with him to
an extent hardly realizable by this generation, which often finds it so
difficult to bring their parents up properly.
His earlier works are written with the questionless devoutness of the
untried mind. They were narrow in theology, fiercely Protestant, earnest
enough; and on their positive side, still sound and valuable. The first
two volumes of _Modern Painters_, the whole of the _Stones of Venice_
and the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_, and the Edinburgh _Lectures on
Architecture and Painting_ belong to this period. So, broadly, do the
Manchester Lectures on the _Political Economy of Art_ in 1857; but they
are the herald of the next epoch.
He resisted the new Geology of Lyell, declared indignantly that God had
created the Alpine valleys, and put the rivers to flow along them,
denying that the rivers had worn their own valleys out. Somewhere in the
later fifties we find him scandalized by the statement of Frederick
Denison Maurice that Jael’s treacherous murder of Sisera was a wicked
deed. The fact that Deborah the Prophetess sang a sacred song over it
was enough to justify it to Ruskin, then over thirty-five.[6]
Just before this incident, however, his moral sense was beginning to
revolt from certain parts of his creed. He was, he says, invited to a
“fashionable séance of Evangelical doctrine, at the Earl of Ducie’s,
presided over by Mr. Molyneux, then a divine of celebrity in that sect,
who sat with one leg over his other knee, in the attitude always given
to Herod at the Massacre of the Innocents in mediæval sculpture, and
discoursed in tones of consummate assurance and satisfaction, and to the
entire comfort and consent of his Belgravian audience, on the beautiful
parable of the Prodigal Son. Which, or how many, of his hearers he meant
to describe as having personally lived on husks, and devoured their
father’s property, did not of course appear; but that something of the
sort was necessary to the completeness of the joy in heaven over them,
now in Belgrave Square, at the feet, or one foot, of Mr. Molyneux, could
not be questioned. Waiting my time, till the raptures of the converted
company had begun to flag a little, I ventured, from a back seat, to
enquire of Mr. Molyneux what we were to learn from the example of the
other son, not prodigal, who was, his father said, ‘ever with me and all
that I have, thine.’ A sudden horror and unanimous feeling of the
serpent having somehow got over the wall into their Garden of Eden,
fell on the whole company; and some of them, I thought, looked at the
candles, as if they expected them to burn blue. After a pause of a
minute, gathering himself into an expression of pity and indulgence,
withholding latent thunder, Mr. Molyneux explained to me that the
home-staying son was merely a picturesque figure introduced to fill
the background of the parable agreeably, and contained no instruction
or example for the well-disposed scriptural student, but on the
contrary, rather, a snare for the unwary, and a temptation to
self-righteousness--which was, of all sins, the most offensive to God.
Under the fulmination of which answer, I retired from the séance in
silence, nor ever attended another of the kind from that day to
this.”[7]
It was just this lack of feeling for righteousness as such, the idea
that you needed first to be a “most sinful sinner” if you wished to
become a “most Christian Christian,” and a want of recognition that
forgiveness was a spiritual and inward process, which caused the
contemptuous references to his early form of doctrine which are
scattered thickly throughout Ruskin’s later writings.
The experiences which make epochs in men’s lives are indeed strangely
various and unexpected. Three events stand out as the destroyers of his
Protestantism and of much of his outward edifice of faith. Their year
was 1858. One was the discovery that the Puritan Sabbath of his youth
had no Scriptural authority, but based itself, without confessing it, on
the Jewish Sabbath Day, by erroneous interpretation. “If they have
deceived me in this, they have deceived me in everything,” he said. His
faith in his mother’s religious guides was gone.[8] In 1858 for the
first time he broke the Sabbath by drawing some flowers on Sunday. That
act, in him, stood for emancipation.[9] He had been finding that
Catholic Psalters were lovely things, that Catholic peasants in Tuscany
led sweet and patient lives, and that “Presbyterian prayers against time
by people who never expected to be any the better for them, were
unlovely and wrong.”[10] The same year he turned in at Turin to hear a
Waldensian pastor. This was the second event. “To an audience of about
seventeen gray-haired women and a few men, the preacher, a somewhat
stunted figure with a cracked voice, put his utmost zeal into a
consolatory discourse on the wickedness of the wide world, more
especially of the plain of Piedmont and the city of Turin, and on the
exclusive favour with God enjoyed by the between nineteen and
twenty-four elect members of his congregation, in the streets of Admah
and Zeboim.” “Myself neither cheered nor greatly alarmed by this
doctrine, I walked back into the condemned city, and up into the gallery
where Paul Veronese’s ‘Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’ glowed in full
afternoon light.” And in that hour’s meditation his “evangelical beliefs
were put away, to be debated of no more.”[11]
But the solvent influences did not stop there. They seldom fail to
proceed. Rebuilding rather than repair is generally necessary to a
broken down system of thought. But that which left him in great darkness
was an experience which could have so affected no one but Ruskin. This
was the third event. It was the discovery at Venice that the best work
was done by irreligious painters. He found that “Tintoret only
occasionally forgot himself into religion,” and that Titian had no
religion at all, and yet had to be given as the standard of perfection
in painting. Ruskin concluded, first, and quite truly, that “human work
must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now men; whether
we expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter.
That by the work we have done and not by our belief we shall be
judged.”[12] He went on, by generalizing, to a further conclusion in
that year, afterwards to be corrected. The conclusion and the correction
divide the periods of Ruskin’s life. He concluded that the group of
great worldly painters of various nations, Turner, Titian, Velasquez,
Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese, did more perfect
and stronger work than the sacred army of obedient Catholics headed by
Cimabue, Giotto and Angelico, who worked under the guidance of a
heavenly vision.
This seems a strange reason for losing faith. It can only be understood
when we remember that Ruskin regarded art as the expression of the
painter’s whole nature, especially the soul of him; and if the endowment
from heaven were really potent, it should inspire the artist to do work
that is clearly supreme. That it did not do so was Ruskin’s
stumbling-block. I will not anticipate the ultimate solution; but only
pause to mourn over the many stumbling-blocks which our theories put in
our way. Because the lot decided unfairly, Silas Marner, the wronged of
heaven, lost his faith. How many have been and are unable to see through
pain and poverty to God. How many have bound their faith to the accuracy
of a record or the fidelity of a frail fellow-creature.
Of the religious utterances of this first period, which ended in 1858,
the second volume of _Modern Painters_ is the most typical. To me, it
was the door by which in 1882 I entered into my love of Ruskin the
author, as _Fors_ led me to love and reverence the man. The subject is
an analysis of Beauty as a various expression of the mind of God. It is
published separately; it is not a long book; and it might be read for a
second time along with the Author’s notes of 1883. These give us the
verdict of age upon the enthusiasm of its own youth, and are vastly
entertaining. Even as Tennyson, in his “Locksley Hall Sixty Years
After,” puts his quietus upon the ebullitions of the most rhythmic and
moving utterance of his youth, so does Ruskin, with mocking self-blame,
speak with fatherly candour to the Oxford Graduate of 1845.
To this period, too, belongs his avowedly theological pamphlet, _Notes
on the Construction of Sheepfolds_. It is of 1851, attacks
ecclesiastical pretensions on Scriptural grounds, and in spite of its
sectarian limitations was considered so sound in its main drift that the
author reissued it in his mature period.
He states that all his works up to 1853 are marred by his narrow
Protestant dogmatism. Now 1858, as we have seen, was his year of freedom
from it, and from much that was more precious. Between 1853 and 1858
came out volumes iii and iv of _Modern Painters_, the _Lectures on
Architecture and Painting_ at Edinburgh, and the lectures at Manchester
on the _Political Economy of Art_. The last marks transition. It is the
forerunner of the next period; it shows us how his way of treating Art
led him on to Economics. But it is of great interest to study his
position in these two volumes of _Modern Painters_. They are as
religious as ever, and as devout; but between Catholic and Protestant,
frequently brought into contrast, they hold the scales of judgment. The
author casts the lantern of criticism impartially upon both, but his
own faith in the great verities still holds. It is plain, however, that
conduct was rising to the chief place in his mind. The Sermon on the
Mount was becoming, what it ever afterwards remained to him, the central
teaching of the Christian faith.
If we omit the Poems of his boyhood and youth, and his early minor
scientific contributions to journals, and begin his career as a writer
for the public with the year 1842, when he wrote the first volume of
_Modern Painters_, published next year, we have sixteen years of
authorship for the Early Period. We have also, oddly enough, sixteen
years of authorship, 1858 to 1874, for his Middle Period, shortly to be
described; and if we give sixteen years for the mature period also, that
brings us to 1890, only a few months after the last number of
_Præterita_ struggled into the light from his failing pen. He wrote no
more. We thus have three periods, Early, Middle, and Mature, each of
sixteen years, not difficult to remember, 1842-1858, 1858-1874, and
1874-1890. It is a testimony to his utter frankness and undimmed candour
that we are able thus to map out the growth of his convictions.
For a growth it was, all the time, though apparently 1858 was a year of
wreck and ruin. We cannot put new wine into old wineskins. His middle
period was the time for the analytical tendency of his mind to have its
way. Mazzini had already said that Ruskin had the most analytic mind in
Europe; and now that searching analysis which had discovered Luini and
placed Tintoretto, and had penetrated, by a way of its own, far into the
hidden secret of Beauty, could not be denied when it faced the
stronghold of the Christian revelation, even though his own heart and
every fibre of his sensitive nature was within the fortress attacked.
His economic crusade began in 1860; and on his spiritually desolated
heart was piled the sorrow of the social system. Hermit and heretic he
became, in religion and economics alike. Victorious in his championship
of Turner and the Pre-raphaelites, whom single-handed he had placed on
the pinnacle they have never lost, he had the literary and artistic
world at his feet. This great position he cast aside to enter on a
sterner battle. The recognized leader of taste, the arbiter of
reputations, turned aside to abuse so good a man as John Stuart Mill, to
say the most shocking things about the clergy and the clergy’s wives,
to testify against rent and interest, to blaspheme that steam power by
which England was conquering the world, and to utter strange hesitating
sayings which showed that he was not sure of a life to come. Nor could
he brave the storm with the self-confident dogmatism of youth. “I seldom
now feel sure of anything,” he wrote in the first Christmas issue of
_Fors_, “still seldomer, however, do I feel sure of the contrary of
anything.”[13] When we add that this period was marked by the loss of
his parents, who had been everything to him, and by a grievous
disappointment in love--for the girl who loved him would not marry him
because he was not orthodox, so far as reasons can ever be given for
such decisions, but died of a decline instead--we shall see how heavy
was the lonely task set before him to do. Nor had the veneration of
disciples and the growing recognition of all good men come to him yet;
it came afterwards, built the prophet’s shrine, in his lifetime
certainly,[14] but only after the world’s neglect, and his failure even
to carry his own friends with him, had helped to break the powers of
his mind and set his brain reeling in recurring attacks of delirious
inflammation. He was, in that madness, being offered upon the sacrifice
and service of our faith.
During this middle period of prime mental power, he wrote nineteen
volumes, and numerous catalogues and pamphlets. They are, in order of
time: _The Two Paths_, _Modern Painters_, vol. v., _Unto This Last_,
_Munera Pulveris_, _Sesame and Lilies_, _The Ethics of the Dust_, _The
Crown of Wild Olive_, _Time and Tide_, _The Queen of the Air_, _Lectures
on Art at Oxford_, the first half of _Flors Clavigera_, _Aratra
Pentelici_, _The Eagle’s Nest_, _Love’s Meinie_, _Ariadne Florentina_,
_Val D’Arno_, and most of the papers reprinted in _On the Old Road_. As
an author he was in his full strength.
The significance of the period is that under the most painful
uncertainties of doctrine, true religion shone still, blazed beaconlike,
in fact: blazed as a beacon blazes when blown by tempest. But few
readers ever thought of the writer as a heretic. He preached all the
time the simple eternal sanction for right conduct which the nature of
man, akin to the Divine, provides. He recognized the ineradicable claim
which the teaching of the New Testament has upon our obedience. He
attacked the Churches, not for being too Christian, but for not being
anything like Christian enough. Referring to his mother’s gift of
twenty-six chapters learnt by heart, he says in 1874:--
“The chapters became, indeed, strictly conclusive and protective to me
in all modes of thought; and the body of divinity they contain,
acceptable through all fear or doubt; nor, through any fear or doubt or
fault have I ever lost my loyalty to them, nor betrayed the first
command in the one I was made to repeat oftenest: ‘Let not Mercy and
Truth forsake thee.’ And at my present age of fifty-five, in spite of
some enlarged observations of what modern philosophers call the Reign of
Law, I perceive more distinctly than ever the Reign of a Spirit of Mercy
and Truth--infinite in pardon and purification for its wandering and
faultful children, who have yet Love in their hearts; and altogether
adverse and implacable to its perverse and lying enemies, who have
resolute hatred in their hearts, and resolute falsehood on their
lips.”[15]
The classical passage, as I should esteem it, for this period is in
_The Eagle’s Nest_,[16] the Oxford Lectures of 1872; which contain some
of his most careful religious writing:
“All of you who have ever read your Gospels carefully must have wondered
sometimes, what could be the meaning of those words, ‘If any speak
against the Son of Man it shall be forgiven; but if against the Holy
Spirit it shall not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the next.’
The passage may have many meanings which I do not know; but one meaning
I know positively, and I tell you so just as frankly as I would that I
knew the meaning of a verse in Homer. Those of you who still go to
Chapel say every day your creed; and, I suppose, too often, less and
less every day believing it. Now, you may cease to believe two articles
of it, and--admitting Christianity to be true--still be forgiven. But I
can tell you, you must not cease to believe the third!
“You begin by saying that you believe in an Almighty Father. Well, you
may entirely lose the sense of that Fatherhood and yet be forgiven.
“You go on to say that you believe in a Saviour Son. You may entirely
lose the sense of that Sonship and yet be forgiven.
“But the third article--disbelieve if you dare! ‘I believe in the Holy
Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life.’ Disbelieve that! and your own being
is degraded into the state of dust driven by the wind; and the elements
of dissolution have entered your very heart and soul.
“All Nature, with one voice--with one glory--is set to teach you
reverence for the life communicated to you from the Father of Spirits.
The song of birds, and their plumage, the scent of flowers, their
colour, their very existence, are in direct connection with the mystery
of that communicated life: and all the strength, and all the arts of
men, are measured by and founded upon their reverence for the passion,
and their guardianship of the purity, of Love.”
Such is the utmost asceticism of the soul; the most careful and
determined assimilation of the least quantity of the bread of life. We
may sum his creed in the words: Happy are the pure in heart, for they
yet in their flesh shall see the light of Heaven and know the will of
God.
Perhaps the question of Divine Personality may be felt even in our most
audacious moments to be beyond our analysis. I do not count the word
Personality a very helpful one, one way or the other. It is clearly on
the human plane, must be imperfect, and may seriously limit our thought
of God. Tennyson’s favourite prayer was “O Thou Infinite, Amen.” And
with this much of personal address or aspiration our souls may surely
rest. Take this as a satisfying account of the Creative Logos of the
Greeks, written in the light of evolution, in 1869 (_Queen of the Air_,
pp. 124-6):
“With respect to all these divisions and powers of plants--it does not
matter in the least by what concurrences of circumstance or necessity
they may gradually have been developed: the concurrence of circumstance
is itself the supreme and inexplicable fact. We always come at last to a
formative cause, which directs the circumstance, and mode of meeting it.
If you ask an ordinary botanist the reason of the form of a leaf, he
will tell you it is ‘a developed tubercle,’ and that ‘its ultimate form
is owing to the directions of its vascular threads.’ But what directs
its vascular threads? ‘They are seeking for something they want’ he will
probably answer. What makes them want that? What made them seek for it
thus? Seek for it, in five fibres or in three? Seek for it, in
serration, or in sweeping curves? Seek for it, in servile tendrils, or
impetuous spray? Seek for it, in woollen wrinkles rough with stings, or
in glossy surfaces, green with pure strength, and winterless delight?
“There is no answer. But, the sum of all is, that over the entire
surface of the earth and its waters, as influenced by the power of the
air under solar light, there is developed a series of changing forms, in
clouds, plants and animals, all of which have reference in their action
or nature, to the human intelligence that perceives them; and on which,
in their aspects of horror and beauty, and their qualities of good and
evil, there is engraved a series of myths or words of the forming power,
which, according to the true passion and energy of the human race, they
have been enabled to read into religion. And this forming power has been
by all nations partly confused with the breath of air through which it
acts, and partly understood as a creative wisdom, proceeding from the
Supreme Deity; but entering into and inspiring all intelligences that
work in harmony with Him. And whatever intellectual results may be in
modern days obtained by regarding this effluence only as a motion or
vibration, every formative human art hitherto, and the best states of
human happiness and order, have depended on the apprehension of its
mystery (which is certain), and of its personality (which is probable).”
He concludes that lecture, the second in _The Queen of the Air_, with
these words:
“This only we may discern assuredly; this, every true light of science,
every mercifully granted power, every wisely restricted thought, teach
us more clearly day by day, that in the heaven above, and the earth
beneath, there is one continual and omnipotent presence of help, and of
peace, for all men who know that they Live, and remember that they Die.”
To quote from the religious teaching of these fruitful years would be an
endless task; I must only refer, I fear, without quoting any of it, to
_The Mystery of Life and its Arts_, printed in the complete edition of
_Sesame and Lilies_; a characteristic and pathetic exhortation, and
chiefly perhaps, to §10-16 of the Introduction to _The Crown of Wild
Olive_.
So much for his constructive teaching. But he was a destroyer too. The
peculiarity of his position and the cause of his loneliness was that he
was always throwing his darts not only into the camp of the business men
and their allies the economists, but also into the two religious camps,
generally opposed to one another, held, one by the clergy, the other by
the materialistic men of science. He rebuked both parties for their
assumptions, and he smote them with all the artillery of sarcasm, wit
and indignation. “You have to guard against the fatalest darkness of the
two opposite Prides: the Pride of Faith, which imagines that the nature
of the Deity can be defined by its convictions; and the Pride of
Science, which imagines that the energy of Deity can be explained by its
analysis.”[17] As sword-play it is fine. He gives what purports to be a
scientific account of Shakespeare: so much water, so much carbo-hydrate
and phosphorus, and thus you build up your organism called William
Shakespeare--with, of course, something left out. He was ever dwelling
on the realities of the spirit which chemistry omits. The fashionable
scientific materialism of the seventies he utterly abhorred: he behaved
to it as St. George to the Dragon. He loathed anatomy, mocked at the
idea that you understood a creature by cutting up its remains; and when
the men of science at Oxford proceeded to vivisection he threw up his
professorship in flaming wrath, sick at heart; every sentiment of
mercy, every safe doctrine of science violated in unholy cruelty and
impatience.
He describes the limitations of “some scientific minds, which in their
judgment of the Universe can be compared to nothing so accurately as to
the woodworms in the panel of a picture by some great painter, if we may
conceive them as tasting with discrimination of the wood, and with
repugnance of the colour, and declaring that even this unlooked for and
undesirable combination is a normal result of the action of molecular
Forces.”[18]
We pass on to the third period of sixteen years, the Mature Period as I
call it, from 1874 to 1890, when his productive life ended. He now came
to know more fully the fullness of faith. Here he entered into his
reward, I say. The revelation of God to him became clearer, sweeter,
mightier. As in 1858, the time of crisis was marked by two events which
occurred that year, one in things spiritual and one in things
artistic.[19]
The artistic event of 1874 was a reversal of the puzzling judgment of
1858 to the effect that the worldly painters excelled the devout ones.
It came about through his copying one of Giotto’s frescoes on the roof
of the Lower Church at Assisi. He was allowed to erect a platform in
that dark church over the High Altar, that he might see the picture.
There he discovered that Giotto was only beaten by Tintoret in mere
science, technique, laws of perspective, composition and light and
shade, and that religion had solemnized and developed every faculty of
Giotto’s heart and hand. The Franciscan monastery at Assisi is one of
the most sacred places on earth anyhow, but 1874 saw one more gift of
light there vouchsafed, and a haunting problem solved. Art was to Ruskin
a visible manifestation of life’s full faculties, in a department he
specially understood; and religion, which is the source of strength and
the support of character, he thought should be judged by its output.