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RUSKIN, JOHN. 



629 



again I swept bits of St. Giles's foot pavements, 

 showing my corps of subordinates how to finish 

 into depths of gutter. 1 worked with a carpenter 

 until i could make an even shaving six feet long 

 oil' a board, and painted enough with properly 

 and delightfully sloppy green paint to feel the 

 master's superiority in the use of a blunt brush. 

 But among all these and other such student- 

 ships the instrument I finally decided to be the 

 most difficult to man: f*e was the trowel. For 

 accumulated months of my boy life 1 watched 

 bricklaying and paving, but when I took the 

 trowel into my own hand 1 abandoned at once 

 all hope of the least real skill with it unless I 

 gave up all thoughts of any future literary or 

 political career. But quite the happiest bit of 

 manual labor I ever did was for my mother in 

 the old inn at Sixt, where she alleged the stone 

 staircase to ha've become unpleasantly dirty since 

 the last year. Nobody in the inn appearing to 

 think it possible to wash it, I brought the buckets 

 of water from the yard myself, poured them into 

 a beautiful image of Versailles waterworks down 

 the fifteen or twenty steps of the great staircase, 

 and with the strongest broom I could find cleaned 

 every step into its corners. It was quite lovely 

 work to dash the water and drive the mud from 

 each with accumulating splash down the next one. 

 " The admiration of tree branches at Fontaine- 

 bleau led me into careful discernment of their spe- 

 cies; and while my father, as was his custom, 

 read to my mother and me for half an hour after 

 ' breakfast, I always had a fresh-gathered outer 

 spray of a tree before me, of which the mode of 

 growth, with a single leaf full size, had to be done 

 at that sitting in fine pen outline, filled with the 

 simple color of the leaf at one wash. On fine 

 days, when the grass was dry, I used to lie down 

 on it and draw the blades as they grew, with the 

 ground herbage of buttercup or hawkweed mixed 

 among them, until every square foot of meadow 

 or mossy bank became an infinite picture and pos- 

 session to me, and the grace and adjustment to 

 each other of growing leaves a subject of more 

 curious interest to me than the composition of 

 any painter's masterpiece. The love of complexity 

 and quantity influencing my preference of flam- 

 boyant to pure architecture was here satisfied 

 without qualifying sense of wasted labor by what 

 I felt to be the constant working of Omnipotent 

 kindness in the fabric of the food-giving tissues 

 of the earth; nor less, morning after morning, did 

 I rejoice in the traceries and the painted gloss of 

 the sky at sunrise. 



" This physical study had advanced since 1842, 

 when it began, until in 1847 it had proceeded into 

 botanical detail, and the collection of material for 

 Proserpina began with the analysis- of a thistle 

 top, as the foundation of all my political economy 

 was dug down to, through the thistle field of 

 Crossmount. Analysis of thistle top, I say, not 

 dissection nor microscopic poring into. Flowers, 

 like everything else that is lovely in the visible 

 i world, are only to be seen rightly with the eyes 

 ! which the God who made them gave us, and 

 neither with microscopes nor spectacles. These 

 have their uses for the curious and the aged. But 

 in hoalth of mind and body men should see with 

 their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, 

 walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and 

 war with their arms, not with engine beams nor 

 rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before 

 you can see them. And far more difficult work 

 than this was on foot in other directions. Too 

 sorrowfully it had now become plain to me that 

 neither George Herbert, nor Richard Hooker, nor 

 Henry Melvill, nor Thomas Dale, nor the Dean of 



I 



Christ Church, nor the Bishop of Oxford could in 

 any wise explain to me what Turner meant by 

 the contest of Apollo with the python or by the 

 repose of the great dragon above the garden of the 

 Hesperides. For auch nearer python as might 

 wreathe itself against my own now gathering 

 strength, for such serpent of eternity as might re- 

 veal its awe to me amid the sands even of Forest 

 Hill or Addington Heath, I was yet wholly un- 

 prepared." 



Has the great analyst laid bare in these few 

 pages the secret of his lamentable failure in the 

 world of men and of the social forces? He mis- 

 took the former for dwarfed and distorted physical 

 creations. He " saw men as trees walking," and 

 he mistook the great plantation of society for a 

 field of thistles and a meadow or woodland, where 

 the uprooting was to be ruthless and the blendings 

 of light and color given full play in heaven's own 

 atmosphere. He forgot that no amount of patient 

 study could show him the " noon wind " from the 

 great mountain chains of the spiritual world ; that 

 the minglings of mental and moral powers were 

 as much hidden from human searching as is the 

 growth of a flower from the peeping and probing 

 student of stem and root. The most sorrowful 

 part of it was that right there, where he felt called 

 of God to apply all his powers to the good of men 

 whom God had made, he threw away all the noble 

 lessons he had learned and taught so well to others, 

 and forgot his long patience and its results. He 

 spent years over the same few pages of literature, 

 months studying a single group of stone, a sand 

 heap, a square inch of foliage with ear close to 

 the ground, with eye aflame with acute and be- 

 loved attention ; and when he came to write for, 

 to speak to, to build and plan and work for men, 

 he made no study of that world of humanity 

 from which his own had been shut out as if by 

 monastery walls. Where he had bidden the world 

 take nothing in Nature for granted, but turn a 

 patient and devout eye and ear to watch and listen 

 through silence and through storm, he now bade 

 it, with scorn, bitterness, and an agony of im- 

 patience, heed only his teaching and his practical 

 methods of transforming society. The mental, 

 moral, and physical freedom he had insisted upon 

 for himself, often at the cost of the love or sympa- 

 thy of his fellows, he imperiously denied to others. 

 The science of fitting things to their own places 

 through faithfully learning how they had come 

 into such relations, he threw contempt upon by 

 his unscientific methods of using his influence and 

 his wealth. He had learned to break stones from 

 humble stonebreakers, but he came to threaten to 

 break the heads of those who did not desire to 

 break stones as he did. Ruskin presents the most 

 striking instance of the need of the world for 

 patriots and lovers, not reformers ; of builders, not 

 iconoclasts. 



Ruskin's life and work stand as a beacon light 

 of welcome and of warning. His sincerity, his 

 purity, his devotion to duty, his fine ideals, and 

 his noble contributions to literature and art will 

 live in memory while English life endures; but his 

 misconceived, clumsy, bigoted, and conceited at- 

 tempt to snatch the Maker's trowel out of his 

 hand and to shape bricks without straw and walls 

 without cement or alignment will serve as a warn- 

 ing to some wiser generation than the ones that 

 have witnessed the attempt and are even now try- 

 ing in puny ways to establish the earth on new 

 and insecure foundations. If his readers will learn 

 from Ruskin that *' in health of mind and body 

 men should see with their own eyes, hear and 

 speak without trumpets, walk on their own feet, 

 and work and war with their own arms," there 



