"To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over plough, hoe, and spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray,—these are the things which make men happy; they have always had the power to do this, and they always will. The world's prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things, but upon iron or glass, or electricity or steam, in nowise."
Ruskin has always had a quarrel with the railroads, and says that all travelling becomes dull in proportion to its rapidity. "Going by railroad," he affirms, "I do not call travelling at all; but it is merely 'being sent' to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel. A man who really loves travelling would as soon consent to pack a day of such happiness into an hour of railroad as one who loved eating would agree, if it were possible, to concentrate his dinner into a pill." Walking he commends most heartily to young men, and considers it one of the rarest pleasures of life. In this country walking-parties are as yet almost unknown, but in Europe they are extremely common, especially among students. What could be better for the youth of our land than such a pastime as this for their vacations?
He has also a great contempt for some of the feats of modern science, and exclaims somewhere:—
"The scientific men are as busy as ants examining the sun and the moon and the seven stars; and can tell me all about them, I believe, by this time, and how they move, and what they are made of. And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they move or of what they are made. I can't move them any other way than they go, nor make them of anything else better than they are made."
It is over forty years ago that Ruskin startled the literary and artistic world with that marvellous book entitled "Modern Painters; Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All the Ancient Masters." The title contained the argument of the book, and it was a monumental heresy to utter at that time. Not that there was the least doubt as to its truth, but no voice had then been raised to proclaim it. The English people at that time were blind worshippers of Claude and one or two other old masters; and here was a daring youth—reminding one of David with his sling—going forth to do battle against all the received art opinions of his day, and boldly proclaiming Turner a better painter than Claude, Salvator Rosa, Gaspar Poussin, and the various Van-Somethings who had until that time held undisputed sway in conventional art circles. The young Oxford graduate was greeted with a perfect tempest of ridicule and denunciation. Every critic in the land hurled his lance at him, and every artist looked upon him with sovereign contempt. The young Oxford man, however, valiantly held his ground. He possessed genius, profound conviction, and a magnificent self-conceit; and he hurled back defiance to the whole art-clan, and rode forward. Criticism beat upon the book in vain. Everybody read it, and everybody talked about it, and it conquered criticism at last. No such sensation in the art line has been made in Ruskin's day. His teachings in the course of a few years well-nigh revolutionized art opinion in England. The sum and substance of it was Nature against conventionality. People must look at Nature with their own eyes and judge art by the help of Nature. This seems simple enough to-day, but it was a new doctrine in Ruskin's youth.
Ruskin has always been an extremest in everything, and he went so far as to denounce Raphael's "Charge to Peter" on the grounds that the Apostles are not dressed as men of that time and place would have been when going out fishing. He held to an almost brutal realism in everything, and preached his doctrine whether men would hear or whether they would forbear. He soon rallied a little coterie of artists about him, and formed a school styled the Pre-Raphaelites. The principal founder of the school was Dante Gabriel Rossetti, since better known as a poet than an artist. He held his little court in London for many years, and a great number of young men sat at his feet. His chief supporters at first were Holman Hunt and Millais. These latter soon left Rossetti far behind in execution; but Rossetti was the soul of the movement. He had received his inspiration directly from Ruskin. Among the reminiscences of this art movement are Oscar Wilde and the esthetes of London to-day, with their "symphonies" in blue and their "arrangements" in yellow, and the hideous females who go about London drawing-rooms in limp dresses of sulphur color and sage green loosely hanging from their shoulders, after the manner of ancient Greece. But they have had real artists among them,—these apostles of the sunflower and knights of the lily,—and although some of the better class have repudiated the antics of their followers, the movement known as Pre-Raphaelitism has really been an artistic success.
Ruskin followed the "Modern Painters" in due time with his "Seven Lamps of Architecture" and his "Stones of Venice." They were masterpieces of eloquent description and rhetoric. No such vivid writing had been seen for many a day, and no such zeal and earnestness. The wealth of gorgeous imagery was dazzling; the declamation imparted to it the eloquence of an earlier day, and the lofty thought and moral purpose were peculiarly the author's own. The books exerted a remarkable influence. He has written much since, but he has never reached the height he attained in those earlier books.
As he grew older, he grew dogmatic and crotchety in the extreme. He imitated Carlyle in his scoldings, and indeed was much influenced by Carlyle in many ways. He has always been an impracticable theorist, and in these latter years he has put forth a thousand foolish and subversive vagaries. People have not taken him quite seriously for some time. They laugh at his follies, ridicule his philanthropic schemes,—of which he has an infinite number, for he is a man of the kindest heart,—they tell excruciating stories of his colossal self-conceit, and they go home and read his books because no such books can be found written by any other man, search they never so widely. He has always been a wrong-headed man, entirely out of accord with the world around him, and consequently almost sure to be on the wrong side of every practical political question. He and Carlyle had much in common in all this, and it would have been a rich treat to have heard Ruskin proclaiming his political creed, "I am a King's man, and no mob's man;" and to have heard Carlyle answer with denunciations of his millions of fellow-countrymen, "mostly fools."
Ruskin lives in one of the most beautiful of London suburbs,—on Denmark Hill, at the south side of the river, near Dulwich and the exquisite Sydenham slopes, where the Crystal Palace stands. His home is beautiful, filled with wonderful art treasures and numberless books, with many rare and costly editions. He has lectured much at Oxford; and of late years his lectures have been so crowded that tickets had to be procured to attend them. This, when the lectures of the most learned professors of the university are often given to a beggarly array of empty boxes.
He has given away during his lifetime the greater part of his large fortune,—not always wisely, but always in a manner characteristic of the man. He has acted upon the belief that it is wrong to take interest in excess of the principal, and has made the property over to his debtors whenever he has had interest to this extent. He gave seventeen thousand pounds to his poor relations as soon as he came into his fortune; and fifteen thousand pounds more to a cousin, tossing it to him as one would a sugar-plum; fourteen thousand pounds to Sheffield and Oxford; and numberless other gifts to different charities, mostly of an eccentric nature. He retained for himself three hundred and sixty pounds a year, upon which he says "a bachelor gentleman ought to live, or if he cannot, deserves speedily to die." Of course such a royal giver has been besieged during his whole life by an innumerable company of beggars for every conceivable object; but he has always chosen to select for himself his beneficiaries, and has often sent sharp answers to appeals; like the following to the secretary of a Protestant Blind Pension Society: "To my mind, the prefix of 'Protestant' to your society's name indicates far stonier blindness than any it will relieve." And in reply to a letter asking aid in paying off a church debt he replies:—