RUSKIN.
THE centenary of John Ruskin's birth, which fell on Saturday last, has afforded no small pleasure to his old admirers by reminding them that he is still a living influence. Twenty stormy years have passed since his death, more than a generation since he wrote his last words, and half-a-century since he produced his most character- istic and memorable books. Yet Ruskin, for all that, still exerts his power and his fascination, indirectly perhaps but not the less surely, over many quiet people here and in other countries. A centenary celebration is perhaps the severest test to which any man's reputation can be sub- Incted, but Ruskin has faced the ordeal with entire success. the years following his death some of his moat devoted readers would not have felt very sanguine of such a result. Ruskin had had an immense vogue for many years of the Victorian era, and this was followed, naturally enough, by a reaction. A well-known French critic discovered him and was enthusiastic over him as the apostle of the " Religion of Beauty " at the very moment when his countrymen were turning away to other and more strenuous literary pastors. It was the fashion to sniff at Ruskin as an Early Victorian, a namby-pamby who had been shielded from the rough-and-tumble of life, an art critic who admired the wrong things, an economist who did not know the alphabet of the " dismal science " which he strove to reconstruct. No one could deny the surpassing charm of his prose, but he was said, by many young people who wanted to be thought modern, to be little more than an artist in words. We can all see now that this phase has passed. Ruskin has survived his detractors, and is now generally recognized as a great writer who gave new cur- rency to ideas of permanent worth. This is not to say that his collected works, edited in two score volumes with such perfect taste and scholarship by Sir Edward Cook, are all memorable or likely to endure. He was too versatile and too dogmatic for that. He impressed firmly and once for all on the British mind the greatness of Turner's art, but he did not and could not convince us finally that, while all Gothic art was religious, the art of Vitruvius and Palladio was essentially devilish and that iron was synony- mous with ugliness. His artistic judgments in detail were often curious ; even those who love Ruskin most find it hard to repress a smile at the thought that he worshipped William Hunt's painstaking copies of birds' nests and contemned Rembrandt's mighty creations. When he wrote on wealth and wages and the social problem, he showed his aloofness from practical affairs and his inherited prejudices. He hated the Manchester school of soulless commercialism with a fervour for which there was abundant reason, but it might be objected that his ideal employer savoured too much of the all-powerful patriarch of a remote past to commend himself to the workman of the nineteenth, still less of the twentieth, century. Yet, though Ruskin was the child of his age and though much of his work will not bear critical examination, his influence endures and his chief books will survive.
The truth is, in a word, that Ruskin was a prophet. He had a definite message to deliver to his fellow-men, and he gave it in a literary form which charmed even when it did not convince. The essence of his art teaching was expressed in the saying in his Oxford lectures that " life without industry is sin, and industry without art, brutality." He repudiated the dilettante's creed that art is a joy for the few elect, and boldly claimed our artistic heritage for the many, not as a mere luxury but as a necessary of life. If we take it for granted nowadays that every city should maintain as good an art gallery as it can afford, and that the nation should acquire as many masterpieces as possible for the public enjoyment, we owe it in no small degree to the boundless enthusiasm of Ruskin, which was infectious and irresistible. We must judge of his success in this direction, not by the little Ruslrin Museum at Sheffield, pleasant as it is, but by the widespread activities of public bodies and private societies such as were undreamed of when Ruskin was a boy. Again, Ruskin was a devout Nature-worshipper, and, partly in reaction against the horrors of industrial areas, taught his readers to admire the
unspoiled countryside and the quiet hills, the rooks and the wayside flowers. Who shall say for how much his passionate advocacy of a return to Nature has counted in the modern revolt against smoke-bound acres of bricks and mortar, in the craving for more parks and open spaces, and in the endeavours of the National Trust to secure to the people for ever fine viewpoints and picturesque build- ings that have somehow survived the tooth of time ? When he wrote of industrial questions he was in his most prophetic vein. We need not construe his advice literally or cavil at his lack of economic science—if economics is indeed a science. The value of Unto This Last and the beat letters in Fora Clasigera lies in their splendid idealism. Ruskin's outlook was Victorian ; he was perhaps unduly influenced by Carlyle, and he had an absurd prejudice against steam engines and machinery and railways. But his doctrine, or rather his attitude towards the subject, of employment was essentially sound. He emphasized the human factor in industry. He insisted that the employer should regard the workman as a human being and not as a machine or a mere article of merchandise. He uplifted his voice on behalf of fair dealing and honest workmanship. He insisted, despite the mid-Victorian economists, that production was not the only thing to consider, and that the proper distribution of the product was not less important. Nowadays, we fear, the tendency is to talk more of distri- bution than of production, but half-a-century ago Ruskin's protest against the narrowness of the Ricardian school was salutary. His fundamental ideas are not obsolete, but of lasting value :-
" There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings ; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influ- ence, both personal, and, by moans of his possessions, over the lives of others."
" A strange political economy," he comments, " the only one, nevertheless, that over was or can be." A prophet who could compel his fellow-men to listen to such large views will not, we think, be forgotten.
His power lay in his incomparable literary gifts. Prophets do not survive merely by virtue of their gift of prophecy. The Delphic Oracle, for example, must have emitted many sage prophecies which have been lost because they had no literary merit. Mohammed's Koran has never become a part of the world's reading, to say nothing of religious objections, because it is extremely dull and obscure. On theother hand, a Hebrew prophet like Isaiah or Habak- kuk could command the respect of a Voltaire because his langugage was superb, although his denunciations of temporary and local evils might seem obsolete. Ruskin has outlived his age and appeals to twentieth-century readers, who live under very different conditions, because he was a master of English prose in all its wonderful variety. Every one may find something to his taste in Ruskin's work. When the young graduate of Oxford astonished England with the first volume of his Modern Painters, he revelled in rhetorical effects, and for years he continued to dazzle his readers with his virtuosity. The famous description of Turner's "Slave Ship" is only one among many passages which illustrate his command of words and rhythm. His Stones of Venice is a veritable prose epic, which rivalled Byron's poetry as an incentive to eager travellers to go post-haste to the romantic city of the lagoons. Who could resist such descriptions as this?-
" And at last, when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded rampart, but es a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the Indian Sea ; when first upon the traveller's eight the long ranges of columned palaces,—each with its buck boat boat moored at the portal,—each with its image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation ; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi ; that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent ; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry, ' Ah ! Stall,' struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal, where the splash of the water followed close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side ; and when at last that boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the front of the Ducal Palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should he so deeply entranced by the visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to forget the darker truths of its history and its being. Well might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive ; that the waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness : and that all which in nature was wild or mereilesa—Time and Decay, as well as the waves and tempests,—had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might still spare, for egee to come, that beauty which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea."
But when Ruskin turned from art and architecture to economics he adopted a sterner and simpler style. Nothing could be plainer or more direct than the English of Unto This Last or The Two Paths or Fors. Let us quote, not only for its manner but for its matter, from "The Work of Iron," a lecture delivered in 1858 :-
" By far the greater part of the suffering and crime which exist at this moment in chatted Europe, arises simply from people not understanding this truism—not knowing that produce or wealth is eternally connected by the laws of heaven and earth with reso- lute labour ; but hoping in some way to cheat or abrogate this everlasting law of life, and to feed where they have not furrowed and be warm where they have not woven. I repeat, nearly all our misery and clime result from this one misapprehension. The law of nature is, that a certain quantity of work is necessary to produce a certain quantity of good, of any kind whatever. If you want knowledge, you mint toil for it : if food, you must toil for it : and if pleasure, you must toil for it. But men do not acknowledge this law ; or strive to evade it, hoping to get their knowledge, and food, and pleasure for nothing and in this effort they either fail of getting them, and remain ignorant and miserable, or they obtain them by making other men work for their benefit ; and then they are tyrants and robbers. Yee, and worse than robbers."
The prophet was a great writer, who could vary his style to suit his subject and his audience. There, as well as in his goodness of heart, his unselfishness, and his abounding interest in man and Nature, lies the secret of Ruskin's continuing popularity.
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