RUSKIN, JOHN. 



RUSSIA. 



633 



of land in England, which shall not be built upon, 

 but- cultivated by Englishmen with their own 

 hands and such help of force as they can find in 

 wind and wave. Jf any come to help me, it is to 

 be on the following conditions: We will try to 

 make some small piece of English ground beau- 

 tiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no 

 >lcaiu engines upon it, and no railroads; we will 

 have no untended or unthought-of creatures on 

 it; none wretched but the sick; none idle but the 

 dead. We will have no liberty upon it, but in- 

 stant obedience to known law and appointed 

 persons; no equality upon it, but recognition of 

 very betterness we can find, and reprobation of 

 every worseness. When we want to go anywhere 

 we will go there quietly and safely, not at forty 

 miles an hour in the risk of our lives; when we 

 want to carry anything anywhere, we will carry 

 it' either on the backs of beasts, or on our own, 

 or in carts, or boats; we will have plenty of 

 flowers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty of 

 corn and grass in our fields, and few bricks." 



From 1869 till 1879 Ruskin was Slade Professor 

 of Art at Oxford. His superintendence of the 

 practical work of art teaching was close and un- 

 wearied until it was terminated by his long and 

 dangerous illness a complete breaking down of 

 his nervous strength. On his recovery he was re- 

 appointed and returned to the thankless post in 

 1883. He found large and increasing audiences, 

 and was compelled to hold his lectures in the 

 theater of the museum. This was crowded to the 

 doors twice a week, and he was obliged to repeat 

 each lecture. Graduates, undergraduates, and 

 numbers of ladies attended. It might have been 

 said of these lectures as Lowell said of Emer- 

 son's : " It was chaos come again, but it was a 

 chaos full of shooting stars, of creative forces."' 

 Xo one who heard Ruskin could tell what 

 the lectures were about from their titles, and 

 hardly from their subject-matter, so disjointed 

 were they and mingled of fanciful ethics and 

 more fanciful theology, violent criticism on art 

 and letters and life, all given with the marvelous 

 beauty of diction and flood of emotion that never 

 failed to astonish and move the hearer. But at 

 last all this became too strange to be endured by 

 those who cared most for Ruskin's reputation, 

 and he was persuaded to resign the chair for a 

 second time. In doing so he sent a characteristic 

 letter to the vice-chancellor, in which he said that 

 his reasons were that the university would not 

 buy Turner's The Crook of Lune, and that by 

 a recent vote it had sanctioned vivisection. As 

 to the former, it may be said, in passing, that 

 the university could not get its rents and had 

 lot paid its debts, so that 1,200 for a Turner 

 ras not forthcoming. 



Ruskin had endowed munificently, from his 

 )wn fortune, a mastership for the art school, and 

 jiven it a series of valuable educational drawings, 

 "le did the same thing for the FitzWilliam Mu- 

 seum in Cambridge. His gifts to every object 

 that seemed to him worthy were generous and 

 frequent. He had inherited 175,000, and he 

 died comparatively poor. St. George's Guild, 

 which was founded as the result of the appeals 

 in Fors Clavigera, was intended to be a return 

 to primitive agricultural life where the old simple 

 virtues should be instilled and insisted upon; 

 I'here the old and homely methods of hand work 

 should do all that was required, without aid from 

 my modei-n machine or manufacture. 



In the later numbers of Fors Clavigera Ruskin 

 ised to publish the accounts of his own private 

 icome and expenditure and of the Order or Com- 

 pany of St. George, which he had endowed, and 



for which he was constantly appealing to his 

 countrymen for sympathy and support. The ob- 

 ject of the association was to promote good and 

 honest work. The vows taken, founded on be- 

 }ief in the goodness of God and the dignity of 

 human nature, inculcated honor, honesty, indus- 

 try, frugality, gentleness, and obedience. As the 

 hopelessness of this struggle against the world as 

 it is, and mankind in its daily need and real de- 

 sire, was gradually borne in upon a mind that 

 was blind to the causes of its failure, Ruskin 

 became more bitter in his detestation of the art 

 and manners, trade and commerce, impulse and 

 movement, that he saw about him. He was again 

 prostrated by severe illness, and again his won- 

 derful constitution triumphed over disease, and 

 he was spared to write one of the most delight- 

 ful of all his books Praeterita which pictures 

 his true inner self in its modesty and gentleness 

 and faith. Ruskin's sad marriage and unmarriage 

 with the beautiful woman who afterward became 

 the wife of John Everett Millais, the painter, is 

 a story that he omits to tell, and that need only 

 be referred to here. 



Ruskin has not said the final word concerning 

 art, even if he has said many that stand as final 

 truth; he certainly has not said a final word as 

 to social conditions in an age and world of steam- 

 ships and railways, cities and manufactures, al- 

 though he has presented noble ideals of thought 

 for those who can grasp real conditions; but as 

 a master of written language his place seems to 

 be assured. His last volume is not his least 

 beautiful one, and the charm of his character is 

 more apparent because the friction was a thing 

 of the past, and faithful friends made the decline 

 of life pleasant to his sensitive spirit. The Rus- 

 kin Society, London, was founded in 1881 ; the 

 Ruskin Reading Guild, in 1887. The Society pub- 

 lishes a quarterly magazine called Igdrasil, a 

 title as strange and noncommittal as are most 

 of Ruskin's own. He was D. C. L. of Oxford, and 

 an honorary student of Christ Church College. 

 In 1871 the degree of LL. D. was given to him 

 by Cambridge. He founded a museum at Walk- 

 ley, which was transferred to Sheffield in 1890. 

 Here he placed part of his priceless library and 

 treasures of art. He made his home in Brant- 

 wood, Coniston, in the lake country, where he 

 died, and where, in accordance with his wish, he 

 was buried. This paragraph, written at Coniston 

 in one of his periods of illness, was happily un- 

 fulfilled, for love of moorland and wood and sleep- 

 ing village did serve him to the last, while friend- 

 ship gave what love had long withheld: 



" Morning breaks, as I write, along those Con- 

 iston fells, and the level mists, motionless and 

 gray beneath the rose of the moorlands, veil the 

 lower woods and the sleeping village and the long 

 lawns by the lake shore. Oh, that some one had 

 but told me in my youth, when all my heart 

 seemed to be set on these colors and clouds, that 

 appear for a little while and then vanish away, 

 how little my love of them would serve me when 

 the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of 

 morning should be completed; and all my 

 thoughts should be of those whom, by neither, I 

 was to meet more." 



RUSSIA, an empire in northern Europe and 

 Asia. The throne is hereditary in the dynasty of 

 Romanoff-Holstein-Gottorp. The system of gov- 

 ernment is an absolute monarchy in which the 

 legislative, executive, and judicial powers are 

 united in the Emperor, or Czar, who is assisted 

 by a Cabinet of Ministers, each of whom has 

 charge of an executive department; by a Council 

 of State, which examines and passes upon projects 



