Part 11

Not less striking, the influence of Ruskin upon the plans of General Booth. Long before the book called _In Darkest England and the Way Out_ was published, Ruskin founded his coöperative printing press in a little colony outside of London. One of his biographers has told the story of Ruskin's plan to make the men and women in the poorhouses self-supporting, happy and useful. This biographer has never fully established the connection between that first coöperative colony of Ruskin, and Booth's plans for the City Colony, the Farm Colony and the Foreign Colony. But one thing is certain:--Ruskin had a pioneer mind. Instead of his chief interest being in mountains and clouds, in wave and flower, cathedrals, pictures, marbles, illuminated missals, the overmastering enthusiasm of his life was people, and his real message was a message of social reform. When long time has passed, Ruskin's fame will rest upon his work as a social reformer, a man who loved the poor and weak.

Not less significant, his views of education, that have leavened all modern schools whatsoever. Matthew Arnold defined culture as "a familiarity with the best that has ever been done in literature." Ruskin insisted that there were thousands of scholars living in their libraries, surrounded by books, who were perfectly familiar with the best that has ever been thought or done, but whose knowledge was all but worthless, because it was selfish. He looked upon the informed man as a sower, going forth to sow the seed of truth over the wide land. All selfish culture is like salt in a barrel; the salt has no power to save unless it is scattered. Selfish culture is like seed corn in the granary, important for a harvest. Under Ruskin's influence many of his friends gave an evening or two a week to lectures before his working men's clubs, his art groups, and his classes for the improvement of the handicrafts.

No modern author has made so much of vision, or tried so hard to teach people how to see. Many teachers think that education is stuffing the pocket of memory with a mass of facts. When the mind is filled so that it cannot hold another truth, the youth receives a diploma. Ruskin held that education was teaching the child how to see everything true and beautiful in land and sea and sky. "For a thousand great speakers, there is only one great thinker; for a thousand great thinkers, there is only one great see-er; we cut out one 'e' and leave it seer, but the true poet and sage is simply the see-er." The millions are blind to the signals hanged out from the battlements of cloud. Isaac Newton was a see-er,--he saw an apple falling from the tree; saw a moon falling through space, and gave us the law of gravity. Columbus was a see-er. In a crevice in a bit of driftwood, tossed upon the shore of Spain, he saw a strange pebble, and his imagination leaped from the driftwood to the unknown forest from whence it came, from that bright piece of stone to the mountain range of which it was a part. Columbus had the seeing eye, and discovered the continent hidden behind the clouds.

Not otherwise the geologist sees the handwriting of God upon the rock-pages; the astronomer sees His writing upon the pages of the sky; the physiologist reads His writing on the pages of the human body; the moralist deciphers the writing on the tablets of the mind and the heart. The beginning of Wordsworth's fame was the hour when his eyes were opened, and he saw man appearing upon the horizon, and like a bright spirit trailing clouds of glory, coming from God who is man's home. It was the inner sight of Wordsworth's soul that was "the bliss of solitude." It was his power of vision that enabled him to look out upon the field, yellow as gold, a vision that lingered long in his memory when he said, "and then my heart with rapture thrills, and dances with the daffodils."

It is useless for people who are colour-blind to look at Rembrandt's portrait. It is folly for people who cannot follow a tune to buy a ticket for a symphony concert. Men who by neglect atrophy the spiritual faculty, or by sin cut gashes in the nerve of conscience, will soon exclaim, in the spirit of the fool, "There is no God," just as the blind man is certain that there is no sun. The old black ex-slave, Sojourner Truth, once illustrated this principle. In those days excitement ran high. Northern merchants, fearful of losing their trade with Southern cities, frowned upon any one who dared criticize "the peculiar institution" of the South. One day, in New York, Sojourner Truth, just escaped from slavery, went to an Abolition Meeting, hoping for an opportunity of making a plea for the emancipation of her race. When the black woman, with her gnarled hands, and face seamed with pain and sorrow, arose to speak, a young newspaper reporter slammed his book upon the table, and stamped his way down the aisle toward the door. Just before he reached the door, Sojourner Truth stretched out her long black finger and said, "Wait a minute, honey! You goin' 'way 'cause of me? Listen, honey--I would give you some ideas to take home with you to your newspaper, but I see you ain't got nothing to carry 'em in!" . . . Homely but forceful illustration of an old truth. The angel of truth and the angel of beauty, leaning from the battlements of heaven, oft whispers, "Oh, my children! I would fain give you a new tool, a new painting, a new science, but you have no eyes to see the vision, and no ears to hear the sweetest music that ever fell from heaven's battlements." It is the man of vision who founds the new school of painting, or the new reform or the new liberty. The visions of the idealist to-day become the laws and institutions of to-morrow.

In this power of the open eye, Ruskin found the secret of daily happiness, and mental growth. No one knew better than John Ruskin that the millions of working men and women would never be able to make their way to the galleries of Paris and Madrid, of Florence and Venice, to St. Peter's or the Parthenon, much less have time, leisure and money for travel unto the far-off ends of the earth. Therefore he taught the people how to see the wonders of God, in every fluted blade of grass, in every bush that blazed with beauty, and blazing, was not consumed. He proved that he who knows how to see will find the common clod to be a casket filled with gems, and that the sky that looks down upon all workers, spreads out scenes of such loveliness and beauty as to make travel to distant lands unnecessary!

And yet, for the most part, men turn their eyes toward the sky only in moments of utter idleness and insipidity. "One says it has been wet, and another, it has been windy, and another, it has been warm. But who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their summits, until they melted and mouldered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds, when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves? All has passed, unregretted, and unseen. Not in the clash of the hail nor the drift of the whirlwind, are the highest characters developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. Blunt and low those faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lamp-black and lightning."

The whole world owes Ruskin an immeasurable debt for this: that he taught us how to see the beauty in the great imperial palace in which man hath his home.

In his defense of Turner, the world's greatest landscape painter, Ruskin advanced his theory of first seeing accurately, and then, through the creative imagination, carrying up to ideal perfection flowers, faces and landscapes often marred by the storms and upheavals of life. It is altogether probable that John Ruskin saw as accurately the scene of loveliness as Turner himself. It seems quite certain that Ruskin was altogether unique in his capacity for enjoyment. It was not simply that his eyes saw accurately, and his intellect registered his impressions without flaw, but that his imagination and his emotions were sensitive to the last degree, as sensitive as the silken threads of an Æolian harp that responds to the lightest wind that blows. Many people know the intense flavour of a strawberry, but Ruskin's soul was pierced with an intense and tumultuous pleasure at the sight of the clouds piled up upon the mountains. He loved Nature with all the passion with which Dante loved Beatrice. In Ruskin's forty odd volumes the scholar can find registered a hundred experiences in the presence of the mountain glory and the mountain gloom, in which this delight and happiness sent his whole body shivering with the piercing intensity that shook the soul of Romeo during his passionate interview with Juliet. Coarse natures, gluttonous, avaricious, full of hate, can no more understand the happiness of Ruskin's life than a deaf man can understand Mozart's rapture, when he listened to the music in the cathedral. Not even a tornado can make a crowbar vibrate, but the flutter of a lark's wing can set a silken thread vibrating and singing.

Ruskin has spread out, like a rich map, the story of the people who educated him. The overmastering influence in his life was that of his mother. He tells us that he received from his home in childhood the priceless gift of peace, in that he had never seen a "moment's trouble or disorder in any household matter, or anything whatever done in a hurry or undone in due time." To this gift was added the gift of obedience. "I obeyed word, or lifted finger, of father or mother, simply as a ship her helm; not only without idea of resistance but as necessary to me in every moral action as the law of gravity in leaping. To the gifts of peace and obedience my parents added the gift of Faith, in that nothing was ever promised me that was not given; nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever told me that was not true." And to these was added the habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind--this being the main practical faculty of his life, causing Mazzini to say of Ruskin that he had "the most analytic mind in Europe."

The books from which Ruskin had his style in childhood were Walter Scott's novels, Pope's translation of the _Iliad_, Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_, Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_, and above all, the Bible. "My mother forced me, by steady and daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart; as well as to read it every syllable through aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year; and to that discipline, patient, accurate, and resolute, I owe much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature." The great chapters of the Bible from which Ruskin says he had his style included the fifteenth and twentieth of Exodus; the twenty-third Psalm, and also the thirty-second, ninetieth, ninety-first, one hundred and third, one hundred and twelfth, one hundred and nineteenth, one hundred and thirty-ninth, the Sermon on the Mount, the conversion of Paul, his vision on the road to Damascus, Paul's Ode to Love and Immortality. "These chapters of the Bible," Ruskin says, "were the most precious, and, on the whole, the one essential part of my education."

Ruskin's message upon education is of vital importance to the people of our republic. Strictly speaking, education should teach each citizen to think aright upon every subject of importance, and to live a life that is worthy, making the most out of the gifts received from God and one's ancestors. Ruskin traced the national faults and miseries of England, to illiteracy and the lack of education in the art of living. The inevitable result of this illiteracy was that England "despises literature, despises compassion, and concentrates the soul on silver." From this illiteracy came physical ugliness, envy, cowardice, and selfishness, instead of physical beauty, courage and affection. To the dry facts taught, therefore, he proposed to add inspiration, and the art of seeing.

Above all, he feared the results of uniformity and the manufacture of men by machinery, until all youths coming out of the same school, having studied the same facts, in the same way, became as uniform as crackers, and also as dry. The important man, he thinks, is the occasional boy, who has received a gift and can open up new realms for the rest. "Genius? You can't manufacture a great man, any more than you can manufacture gold. You find gold, and mint it. You uncover diamonds, but do not produce them. You find genius, but you cannot create it." Getting on, therefore, does not mean "more horses, more footmen, more fortune, more public honour,--it means more personal soul. He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace." Education is a preparation for complete living; therefore Ruskin adopts Milton's definition of the complete and generous education as, "that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the duties of all the offices of life."

Frederic Harrison gives Ruskin's _Unto This Last_ first place as the most original book in modern English literature. He ranks it as a masterpiece of pure, incisive, brilliant, imaginative writing, "a book glowing with wit and fire and passion." The heart of the message is that every man is born with a gift appointed by his fathers, and that happiness begins with grasping the handle of one's own being. The greatest and most enduring work is done for love, and not for wage. The soldier's task is to keep the state in liberty, and when the second or third battle of Gettysburg or Ypres comes, he does not go on a strike, but puts death and duty in front of him and keeps his face to the front; in like manner the physician is appointed to keep the state in health and in time of yellow fever or the Black Death he works as hard for nothing as for a large fee, even as a father, in time of famine, shipwreck or battle, will sacrifice himself for his son.

Ruskin held that the commercial text, "Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest," was part truth, and part falsehood. "Buy in the cheapest market? Yes; but what made your market cheap? Charcoal may be cheap among the roof timbers after a fire, and bricks may be cheap in your streets after an earthquake, but fire and earthquake may not be, therefore, national benefits. Sell in the dearest market? Yes; but what made your market dear? Was it to a dying man who gave his last coin rather than starve, or to a soldier on his way to pillage the bank, that you put your fortune? The final consummation of wealth is in full-breathed, bright-eyed and happy-hearted human creatures." Therefore, said Ruskin, "I can imagine that England may cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom they first arose; and that, while the sand of the Indias and adamant of Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash from the turban of the slave, she at last may be able to lead forth her sons, saying, 'These are my jewels!'"

Whether, therefore, property shall be a curse or a blessing depends upon man's administrative intelligence. "For centuries great districts of the world, rich in soil, and favoured in climate, have lain desert, under the rage of their own rivers, not only desert, but plague-struck. The stream which, rightly directed, would have flowed in soft irrigation from field to field,--would have purified the air, given food to man and beast, and carried their burdens for them on its bosom--now overwhelms the plain, and poisons the wind, its breath pestilence, and its work famine. In like manner, wealth may become water of life, the riches of the hand and wisdom, or wealth may be the last and deadliest of national plagues, water of Marah, the water of which feeds the roots of all evil." Man's body alone is related to factory and mine. No amount of ingenuity will ever make iron and steel digestible. Neither the avarice nor the rage of men will ever feed them. And however the apple of Sodom and the grape of Gomorrah may spread the table with dainties of ashes and nectar of asps,--so long as men live by bread, the far-away valleys laugh only as they are covered with the gold of God, and echo the shouts of His happy multitudes.

During the closing and most fruitful period of his career, Ruskin's supreme thought had to do with the manufacture of souls of good quality. Quite beyond the influence of some hero or statesman was the influence, hidden, constant, but immeasurable, of the spirit of the invisible God. "If you ask me for the sum of my life-work, the answer is this,--whatever Jesus saith unto you, do that." Daniel Webster himself never made a more powerful plea for the Christian Church and preacher than Ruskin's statement on the importance of the hour on Sunday, after the people have been exposed for six days to the full weight of the world's temptation. That hour when men and women come in, breathless and weary with the week's labour and "a man sent with a message, which is a matter of life or death, has but thirty minutes to get at the separate hearts of a thousand men, to convince them of all their weaknesses, to shame them for all their sins, to warn them of all their dangers, to try by this way and that to stir the hard fastenings of those doors, where the Master Himself has stood and knocked, yet none opened, and to call at the openings of those dark streets, where Wisdom herself has stretched forth her hands and no man hath regarded,--thirty minutes to raise the dead in!--let us but once understand and feel this, and the pulpit shall become a throne like unto a marble rock in the desert, about which the people gather to slake their thirst."

And in the very fullness of his power, when his bow was in full strength, and every sentence and arrow tipped with fire, Ruskin gathered his strength for a final study of the obligations of wealth to poverty, of wisdom to ignorance,--the opportunity of rich men to serve their generation, and make the world once more an Eden garden of happiness and delight. Just as men sweep together an acre of red roses, and condense the blossoms into a little vial filled with the precious attar, we may condense several volumes of Ruskin into a single parable. Why has one man ten-talent power? Why have ninety-nine men only one-talent power? Why is one boy ten years of age and strong, while in the same orphan asylum are ninety-nine little boys one year old? And what if some kind hand hath spread the table with orange, date, and plum, with every sweet fruit and nutritious grain? Has the ten-year-old boy, answering to the ten-talent man, a right to dash up to the table, and with one hand sweep together all the fruits, and with the other hand, all the cereals, milk and cream, while he shouts to the ninety-nine little one-year-old children, "Every fellow for himself! Get all you can! Keep all you can! The devil take the hindmost!" This, says Ruskin, is the fashion of certain rust-kings, and moth-kings. Why is that one boy ten years of age? Is his strength not for the sole purpose of carrying these foods to the little one-year-old children, scarcely able to provide for themselves? It is said of the Master and Lord of us all, that "being rich, for our sakes He made Himself poor." And the kings in the realm of art, or song, of industry or finance, have been ordained by God, not to loot the world of its blossoms, not to squeeze men, like so many purple clusters, into their own cups. In the vegetable world the expert pinches off ninety-nine roses, and forces the rich and vital currents into one great rose at the end of the stock. But what if a ten-talent man should pinch out ninety-nine lesser men as competitors, and force the vital elements of all their separate factories and stores, that were intended to be distributed among many men, of lesser gifts, into his one treasure house?

Ruskin not only pointed the moral but fashioned his own life after it. He was one of the few men who have lived what they taught. He fell heir to what his generation thought was a very large fortune. He made another fortune by sheer force of genius. But he held his treasure as a trust fund in the interest of God's poor. And so-called practical men turned upon him, with the bitterness and hate of wolves that try to pull down some noble stag. His articles were shut out of the _Cornhill Magazine_. Through the influence of selfish men who feared the influence of his teachings upon the people, he was for a time bitterly assaulted. Scoffed at and maligned, he overworked and passed from one attack of brain fever to another. When it was too late, the angry voices died out of the air, and his sun cleared itself of clouds. When at last a wreath of honour was offered Ruskin, it was as if an old man had taken the blossoms and the laurel leaf, and carried them out to God's acre, to be placed in the snow upon his mother's grave. But ours is a world that first slays the prophet and then builds his sepulchre. It is indeed, as the wise man said, a world that crucifies the Saviour.

And we can say of Ruskin what James Martineau said of the world's injustice, that "in almost every age which has stoned the prophets, and loaded its philosophers with chains, the ringleaders of the anarchy have been, not the lawless and infamous of their day, but the archons and chief priests, who could protect their false idols with a grand and stiff air, and do their wrongs in the halls of justice, and commit their murders as a savoury sacrifice; so that it has been by no rude violence, but by clean and holy hands that the guides, the saints, the redeemers of men have been poisoned in Athens, tortured in Rome, burned in Florence, crucified in Jerusalem." And we ought not to be surprised that a world that threatened Milton, starved Swammerdam, imprisoned Bunyan, and assassinated Lincoln, should break the health and the heart of John Ruskin, who poured out his very life-blood to redeem the people from ignorance, and sloth, and wrong.

Index

Abelard and Héloise, 19

Achilles, 37

Act of Toleration, The, 114

_Adam Bede_, 146

Æneas, The wanderings of, 35

Alexander the Great, 86, 103

Alexander the Sixth, 42, 51

Alva, Duke of, 61, 66, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75

Angelo, Michael, 11, 12, 15, 27, 39, 123, 140

_Areopagitica_, 131, 132

Aristotle, 25

Arnold, Matthew, 144

Asbury, Francis, 162

Asia Minor, 55

Athens, 26, 37, 50, 84, 195

Augustus Cæsar, 36

Bacon, Francis, 32

Balfour, Lord, 89

Barnett, Canon, 197

Barrett, Elizabeth, 39

Beatrice, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 26, 30, 205

Bedford Jail, 32, 85

Beecher, Henry Ward, 158

"Beggars," The fleet of, 73, 74, 77

Bernard the Monk, 105

Birrell, Augustine, 144

Black Death, The, 97, 100

"Bloody Council," The, 57

Booth, William, 199

Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, 151

Bradford, William, 57

Brescia, 43

Brougham, Henry, 103

Browning, Robert, 39

Bunyan, John, 12, 32, 85, 105, 142, 216

Burke, Edmund, 132

Calvin, John, 54

Carlyle, Thomas, 89, 145

Cateau-Cambresis, Treaty of, 70

Cavour, 39, 166

Cecilia, St., 21

Cervantes, 84

Charles I of England, 94, 95, 99, 101, 102, 103, 109, 110, 112, 123, 132, 133

Charles II of England, 111, 112

Charles V, Emperor of Germany, 69

Charles VIII of France, 48

Charles IX of France, 74

Childe Harold, 23

Church, The, 15, 41, 53, 63, 93

Columbus, Christopher, 14, 35, 200

Common people in the Dark Ages, The, 14

_Comus_, 121

Constantinople, 36, 40, 88, 168

Copernicus, 35

Cromwell, Oliver, 57, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 97, 98, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 123, 132, 133, 134, 135