632 



RL T SKIN, JOHN. 



heard falsehood taught: he must needs try to 

 remedy the one, and was compelled to deny the 

 other. He believed his work to have grown to 

 its natural shape and size in his social writing 

 and effort. He says : " Of that tree, if any fruit 

 grow such as you like, you are welcome to gather 

 it without thanks; and so far as it is poor or 

 bit t IT. it will be some justice to refuse it with- 

 out reviling." The rhetoric is charming, but the 

 truth is that those who would have been glad 

 t<> gather such good as they could make use of 

 had their heads broken because they did not 

 gather and use it all just as it was shaken or 

 Hung at them; and if denunciation is reviling, 

 then those who refused it all received a portion 

 with the wicked. During the years from 18GO to 

 1870 Kuskin's interest in social matters en- 

 croached more and more upon his art life and 

 work, and finally overwhelmed it utterly. In 

 |s.~>7 he had proclaimed the power over him of 

 Thomas Carlyle, " my master," as he always 

 railed him. and the influence of the great cynic 

 and dogmatist is but too painfully evident upon 

 the naturally sweet and tender and truly Chris- 

 tian character of Ruskin. What the rude thought 

 and uncouth literary style of Carlyle could not 

 do in pressing home his opinions upon his coun- 

 trymen, that Ruskin tried to do for him with 

 inimitable grace. Detestation of the world as it 

 is was the prominent feeling with both writers, 

 but one hated while he detested, and the other 

 loved. 



Ruskin's Manchester lectures first revealed him 

 as a political economist of a novel type. In these 

 lectures he treats of the duties of the nation in 

 relation to art and artistic genius the discovery, 

 application, accumulation, and distribution of 

 them. Here may be found the germs of nearly all 

 his later work in this direction. The topics dealt 

 with were co-operation, contentment, legislation, 

 expenditure, entertainment, the authority of the 

 Bible, thanksgiving, demoniacal influence, dictator- 

 ship, and the necessity of law; the proper offices 

 of bishop and overseer, and duke or leader; es- 

 sential laws against theft by false work or bank- 

 ruptcy, and by unjust profits; education and its 

 relations to position in life; the evil effects of 

 servile employments and excessive and improper 

 work; improvidence in marriage; the dignity of 

 the fine arts; the duties of the upper classes; the 

 just tenure of land; the office of the soldier; 

 inevitable distinctions of rank; and necessary 

 submission to authority. In 1862 some of the 

 teachings of these lectures had been expanded in 

 I 'nt 1 1 this Last. Time and Tide by Wear and 

 Tyne, which contained 25 letters to a working- 

 man in Sunderland, appeared in 1867. Its general 

 theme was the nature of the laws bearing on 

 honesty in work and exchange. "I tell you 

 iliis." "You may take this for granted," "I 

 know," " Believe me," he reiterated in all these 

 letters, with delightful obliviousness of the fact 

 that one, or ten, or twenty years before he had 

 been equally positive that exactly the contrary of 

 many of his statements was true. 



In 1871 Ruskin began the publication of a pe- 

 riodical, issued monthly, called Fors Clavigera. 

 This he kept up until he was overtaken by seri- 

 ous illness, caused by overwork, while writing the 

 number for March. 1878. He resumed them after 

 his recovery. He explains that the title, Fors 

 Clavigera, meant " the fate which bears the club, 

 the key, or the nail," the overpower, the guiding 

 or the compelling forces of human life. In the 

 opening article he says: " Consider the ridiculous- 

 of the division of parties into Liberal and 

 Conservative. There is no opposition whatever 



between those two kinds of men. There is oppo- 

 sition between Liberals and Illiberals that is to 

 say, between people who desire liberty and who 

 dislike it. I am a violent Illiberal, but it does 

 not follow that I am a Conservative. A Con- 

 servative is a person who wishes to kdep things 

 as they are; and he is opposed to a destructive, 

 who wishes to destroy them, or to an innovator, 

 who wishes to alter them. Now, though I am 

 an Illiberal, there are many things I should like 

 to destroy. I should like to destroy most of the 

 railroads of England, and all the railroads in 

 Wales. I should like to destroy and rebuild the 

 Houses of Parliament, the National Gallery, and 

 the East End of London ; and to destroy, with- 

 out rebuilding, the new town of Edinburgh, north 

 suburb of Geneva, and the city .of New York. 

 Thus in many things I am the reverse of conser- 

 vative; nay, there are some long-established 

 things which 1 hope to see changed before I die: 

 but I want still to keep the fields of England 

 green, and her cheeks red; and that girls should 

 be taught to courtesy and boys to take their 

 hats off when a professor or other dignified per- 

 son passes by; and that kings should keep their 

 crowns on their heads, and bishops their crosiers 

 in their hands, and should duly recognize the 

 significance of the crown and the use of the 

 crook." 



Near the close of the fifth number of the peri- 

 odical he wrote: " There are three material thing-. 

 not only useful but essential to life. No one 

 ' knows how to live ' till he has got them. These 

 are pure air, water, and earth. There are three 

 immaterial things not only useful but essential 

 to life. No one knows how to live until he has 

 got them also. These are admiration, hope, and 

 love. These are the six chiefly useful things to bi- 

 got by political economy when it has become a 

 science. I will briefly tell you what modern po- 

 litical economy the great ' sarnir inoiirir' is 

 doing with them. Heaven gives you the main 

 elements of the first three. You can destroy 

 them at your pleasure, or increase, almost with- 

 out limit, the available quantities of them. You 

 can vitiate the air by your manner of life, and of 

 death, to any extent. You might easily vitiate 

 it so as to bring such a pestilence on the globe as 

 would end all of you. You or your fellows, Ger- 

 man and French, are at pi-esent busy vitiating it 

 to the best of your power in every direction, 

 chiefly at this moment with corpses, and animal 

 and vegetable ruin in war; changing men, horses, 

 and garden stuff into noxious gas. But every- 

 where, and all day long, you are vitiating it with 

 foul chemical exhalations; and the horrible nc-ts 

 which you call towns are little more than labora- 

 tories for the distillation into heaven of venom 

 ous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from 

 decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata 

 from purulent disease. On the other hand, your 

 power of purifying the air, by dealing properly 

 and swiftly with all substances in corruption, by 

 absolutely forbidding noxious manufactures, and 

 by planting in all soils the trees which invigorate 

 earth and atmosphere, is literally infinite. Yo;i 

 might make every breath of air you draw food. 

 And so on, through the category of changes that 

 suggest a new heaven and a new earth. In clo>- 

 ing. he laid out. in few words, the plan he would 

 pursue in helping to found them both. He say-: 

 "The tenth of whatever is left to me I will make 

 over to you in perpetuity, with engagement to 

 add the tithe of whatever I earn afterward. Who 

 else will help, with little or much? the object of 

 such fund being to begin, gradually, no matter 

 how slowly, to increase the buying and securing 





