God willing, I will go on writing, and as well as I can. There are three volumes published of my Oxford lectures,[116] in which every sentence is set down as carefully as may be. If people want to learn from me, let them read them or my monthly letter Fors Clavigera. If they don't care for these, I don't care to talk to them.
Truly yours,
J. Ruskin.
FOOTNOTES:
[114] This letter was written to Mr. Chapman, of the Glasgow Athenæum Lecture Committee, in reply to a request that Mr. Ruskin would lecture at their meetings during the winter. Writing from Oxford four years later, in answer to a similar request, Mr. Ruskin wrote as follows: "Nothing can advance art in any district of this accursed machine-and-devil driven England until she changes her mind in many things, and my time for talking
is past.—Ever faithfully yours, J. Ruskin. I lecture here, but only on
the art of the past." (Extract given in the Times, Feb. 12, 1878.)
[115] The evil result on Dickens' health of his last series of readings at St. James's Hall, in the early part of 1870, scarcely four months before his death, is thus noted by Mr. Forster: "Little remains to be told that has not in it almost unmixed sorrow and pain. Hardly a day passed, while the readings went on or after they closed, unvisited by some effect or other of the disastrous excitement consequent on them."—"Life of Charles Dickens," vol. iii. p. 493.
[116] "Aratra Pentalici." "The Eagle's Nest"; and either "Val d'Arno" (Orpington, 1874) or "Lectures on Art" (Clarendon Press, 1870).
[Date and place of publication unknown.]
THE CRADLE OF ART![117]
18th Feb. 1876.
My dear Sir: I lose a frightful quantity of time because people won't read what I ask them to read, nor believe anything of what I tell them, and yet ask me to talk whenever they think they can take a shilling or two at the door by me. I have written fifty times, if once, that you can't have art where you have smoke; you may have it in hell, perhaps, for the Devil is too clever not to consume his own smoke, if he wants to. But you will never have it in Sheffield. You may learn something about nature, shrivelled, and stones, and iron; and what little you can see of that sort, I'm going to try and show you. But pictures, never.
Ever faithfully yours,
John Ruskin.