The Harvest of Ruskin

PREFACE

T HIS 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.

CHAPTER I

THE SIGNS OF A PROPHET

N OW 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

H AVING 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