• MR. RUSKIN'S UNIQUE DOGMATISM.
AS we have often had occasion, if not exactly to remark, yet to imply, in what we have said of him, Mr. Ruskin is a very curious study. For simplicity, quaintness, and candour, his confidences to "the workmen and labourers of Great Britain" in Fors Clavigera are quite without example. For delicate irony of style, when he gets a subject that he fully understands, and in- tends to expose the ignorance, or what is much worse, the affec- tation of knowledge which is not knowledge, of others, no man is his equal. But then as curious as anything else, in that strange medley of sparkling jewels, delicate spider-webs, and tangles of exquisite fronds which makes up Mr. Ruskin's mind, is the high-handed arrogance which is so strangely blended with his imperious modesty, and that, too, often when it is most gro- tesque. It is not, indeed, his arrogance, but his modest self-know- ledge which speaks, when he says in this new number of the For; that though there are thousands of men in England able to conduct the business affairs of his Society better than he can, "I do not believe there is another man in England able to orgcrnise our elementary lessons in Natural History and Art. And I am therefore wholly occupied in examining the growth of Anagallis tenella, and completing some notes on St. George's Chapel at Venice." And no doubt he is quite right. Probably no one could watch the growth of Anagallis tenella to equal purpose, and no one else could complete his notes on St. George's Chapel without spoiling them. We are equally sure that he is wise, when he tells his readers that he must entirely decline any manner of political action which might hinder him "from drawing leaves and flowers." But what does astonish us is the supreme con- .fidence,—or say, rather, hurricane of dictatorial passion,—though we do not use the word passion ' in the sense of anger or irrita- tion, but in the higher sense of mental white-heat, which has no vexation in it,—with which this humble student of leaves and flowers, of the Anagallis tenella and the beauties of St. George's Chapelat Venice, passes judgment on the whole structure of human society, from its earliest to its latest convolutions, and not only judgment, but the sweeping judgment of one who knows all its laws of structure and all its misshapen growths with a sort of as- surance which Mr. Ruskin would certainly never feel in relation to the true form or the distortions of the true form of the most minute fibre of one of his favourite leaves or flowers. Curiously enough, the humble learner of Nature speaking through plants and trees, is the most absolute scorner of Nature speaking through the organisation of great societies and centuries of social ex- perience. We know well what Mr. Ruskin would say,—that the difference is great between the growth that is without moral freedom, and the growth which has beenfor century after century distorted by the reckless abuse of moral freedom. And we quite admit the radical difference. But what strikes us as so strange is that this central difficulty of all,—how much is really due to the structural growth of a great society, and quite independent of any voluntary abuse which might be amended by voluntary effort, and how much is due to the false direction of individual wills, never strikes Mr. Ruskin as a difficulty at all. On the contrary, he generalises in his sweeping way on social tendencies which appear to be far more deeply ingrained in the very structure of human life, than the veins of a leaf in the structure of a plant, with a confidence with which he would never for a moment dream of generalising as to the true and normal growth of a favourite plant. Thus he tells us in the last number of Fors that "Fors Clavigera is not in any way in- tended as counsel adapted to the present state of the public mind, but it is the assertor of the code of eternal laws which the public mind must eventually submit itself to, or die ; and I have really no more to do with the manners, customs, feelings, or modified conditions of piety in the modern England, which I have to warn of the accelerated approach either of Revolution or Destruction, than poor Jonah had with the qualifying amiabilities which might have been found in the Nineveh whose overthrow he was ordered to foretell in forty days." But the curious part of the matter is that Mr. Ruskin, far from keeping to simple moral laws, denounces in the most vehement manner social arrangements which seem to most men as little connected with them as they would have seemed to "poor Jonah." We are not aware, for instance, that Jonah denounced the use of machinery in Nineveh. Indeed, he seems to have availed himself of a ship, which is a great complication of machines, and to have "paid his fare" from Joppa to Tyre, without supposing himself to have been accessory to anything evil in so doing. We are not aware, too, that Jonah held it to be wrong, as Mr. Ruskin holds it to be wrong, to charge for the use of a thing when you do not want to part with it
altogether. These are practices which are so essentially interwoven alike with the most fundamental, as also with the most superficial principles of social growth, that any one who assumes that they arc rooted in moral evil is bound to be very careful to discriminate where the evil begins, and show that it can be avoided,—just as a naturalist who should reproach the trees on a hill-side for sloping away from the blast they have to meet, should certainly first oak himself how the trees are to avoid the blast, or how, if they cannot avoid it, they are to help so altering their growth as to accom- modate themselves to it. But Mr. Ruskin, though in relation to nature he is a true naturalist, in relation to human nature has in him nothing at all of the human naturalist. It never occurs to him, apparently, that here, too, are innumerable princi.. pies of growth which are quite independent of the will of man, and that it becomes the highest moralist to study humbly where the influence of the human will begins and where it ends, instead of rashly and sweepingly condemning, as due to a perverted morality, what is in innumerable cases a mere inevitable result of social structure.
Consider only how curiously different in spirit is the humility with which the great student of the laws of beauty watches the growth of the Anagallis tenella,' and that with which he watches the growth of the formation of human opinion. A correspondent had objected to him that he speaks so contemptuously of some of the most trusted leaders of English workmen, of Goldwin Smith, for instance, and of John Stuart Mill. Disciples of such leaders, the writer had said, "are hurt and made angry, when names which they do not like are used of their leaders." Mr. Ruskin's reply is quite a study in its way :—
" Well, my dear Sir, I solemnly believe that the loss they like it, the better my work has been done. For you will find, if you think deeply of it, that the chief of all the curses of this unhappy age is the universal gabble of its fools, and of the flocks that follow them, rendering the quiet voices of the wise mon of all past time inaudible. This is, first, the result of the invention of printing, and of the east power and extreme pleasure to vain persons of seeing themselves in print. When it took a twelvemonth's hard work to make a single volume legible, men considered a little the difference between one book and another ; but no a', when not only anybody can got themselves made legible through any quantity of volumes, in a week, but the doing so becomes a means of living to them, and they can fill their stomachs with the fooligh foam of their lips, the universal pestilence of falsehood fills the mind of the world as cicadas do olive-leaves, and the first necessity for our mental government is to extricate from among the insectile noise, the few books and words that are Divine. And this has been my main work from my youth up,—not caring to speak my own words, but to discern, whether in painting or scripture, what is eternally good and vital, and to strike away from it pitilessly what is worthless and venom- ous. So that now, being old, and thoroughly practised in this trade, I know either of a picture—a book—or a speech quite securely whether it is good or not, as a cheesemonger knows cheese ;—and I have not the least mind to try to make wise men out of fools, or silk purses out of sows' ears•' but my one swift business is to brand thorn of base quality, and get them out of the way, and I do not oars a cobweb's weight whether I hurt the followers of those men or not,— totally ignoring them, and caring only to get the foots concerning the mon themselves fairly and roundly stated, for the people whom I have real power to teach. And for qualification of statement, there is neither time nor need. Of coarse there aro few writers capable of obtaining any public attention who have not some day or other said something have a rational ; and nanny of the foolishest of them are the amiablost, and have all sorts of minor qualities of a most recommendable ebarseter,— propriety of diction, suavity of temper, benevolence of disposition,
acquaintance with literature, and what not. But the one g I
to assert concerning them is that they are mon of eternally worthless intellectual quality, who never ought to have spoken a word in this world, or to have been heard in it, out of their family circles; and whose books are merely so much floating fog-bank, which the first breath of sound public health and sense will blow back into its native ditches for over."
Now observe that here Mr. Ruskin, who would follow the lines of a gossamer-thread sparkling in the morning dew with reverent wonder and conscientious accuracy, arraigns, first, the tendency of man to express immature and tentative views of passing events, as if that were wholly due, not to a law of human nature, but to those voluntary abuses of human freedom which might as effec- tually be arrested as murder or theft could be arrested by moral effort ; next arraigns, if not the discovery of the printing-press (of which any one would suppose that he entertained a stern disapprobation), at least the inevitable results of that discovery, precisely as he would arraign a general prevalence of positive vice ; and last of all, that he actually claims the power, as an old litt6rateur, to discern at sight "what is eternally good and vital, and to strike away from it pitilessly what is worthless and venom- ous." On the first two heads, as it seems to us, Mr. Ruskin arraigns laws of nature as practically unchangeable as any by which the sap rises in the tree and the blossom forms upon the flower. On the last head, he assumes a tremendous power in relation to subjects very far removed from those which he has made his own,
and one indefinitely greater, of course, than any which he would dream of assuming in relation to the subjects which he had made his own, for on the latter he would know far better the strict limitations of his own insight. The man who humbly fol- lows nature on the small scale, violently reprimands and inveighs against her on the large scale, without waiting for a moment to inquire whether he is right in supposing that all he objects to is a mere product of crime and sin, or rather of the very tissue of social growth, whether at its lowest or its highest level. What a singular paradox is this,—that the same man should sit at God's feet while He is busy with the leaf and the insect, and then storm at His most absolute laws, when He is making the great city, the brain of the nineteenth century, and the mechanism of human civilisation ; that the same man should be so humble and modest in dealing with the subjects he knows intimately, and so peremp- tory and rash in dealing with the great mass of subjects of which he knows little. We will admit that so far as our knowledge goes, the majority of books, journals, printed papers, &c., are of trivial value, and that their number has in some respects very injurious effects. But the same thing exactly is true of the majority of other results of human labour. And we should certainly question pro- foundly Mr. Ruskin's power to discriminate good from bad amongst books, as much as we should his power to discriminate the good from the bad amongst the results of the work of the "labouring poor," whom, for some mysterious reason, he calls "the producers of all wealth." Yet what Mr. Ruskin vituperates so roundly in the nature of human society is not any equivalent for the manly human reticence, and wisdom, and thoughtful, silent obediences of past ages, but rather an equivalent—if history may be trusted —for vacancy of mind, for the riot of the senses, for cares much ignobler, and selfishness much more rampant and energetic, than any even which we now have to complain of. The fatiguing abundance of shallow noise of which Mr. Ruskin complains has not really drowned the voices of the wise of old, but rather the still more unmeaniug chatter of the ignorant of old. With fewer books men did not appreciate what they had better, but less. Most of our book i may be eternally worthless, but at least we learn, either from them or in spite of them, to appreciate those which are " eternally " worthy, more than they were ever appre- ciated before.
In truth, though Mr. Ruskin can note and admire the strange alchemy by which the earth transforms vulgar particles of flint and ,dust and moisture into the beauty of the stalk and leaf and blossom, he has no eyes for the similar process by which she tranforms the vulgar interests of the millions of yesterday into the somewhat less vulgar interests of the millions of to-day, and by which these, again, will be sifted, till they would, perhaps a few thousand years hence, satisfy the relatively crude taste of the Mr. Ruskin of a past which would then be so far behind it as that of our own generation. How is it that the thoughtful and modest naturalist, studying laws in the minutest lines and colours of the actual world, ceases altogether to be modest, though not perhaps to be thoughtful, when he is watch- ing the laws of evolution of the moral world ? We cannot explain it, but this we can say,—that Mr. Ruskin wastes an im- mense proportion of his fine moral gifts in this childish invective against principles which are quite as deeply ingrained in the Pro- vidential rule of the social universO, as is the principle of harmony in the development of the leaf, the principle of grandeur in the uprearing of the mountains, or the principles of aimplieity, candour, and moral arrogance in the character of Mr. Ruekin
himself.
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