Ever faithfully yours,
John Ruskin.
FOOTNOTES:
[138] Horace, Epistles, i. 4. 12.
[From "The Science of Life.">[
THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHIVALRY.[139]
Venice, February 8th, 1877.
My dear——: This is a nobly done piece of work of yours—a fireman's duty in fire of hell; and I would fain help you in all I could, but my way of going at the thing would be from the top down—putting the fire out with the sun, not with vain sprinklings. People would say I wasn't practical, as usual of course; but it seems to me the last thing one should do in the business is to play Lord Angelo, and set bar and door to deluge. Not but I should sift the windows of our Oxford printsellers, if I had my full way in my Art Professorship; but I can't say the tenth part of what I would. I'm in the very gist and main effort of quite other work, and can't get my mind turned to this rightly, for this, in the heart of it, involves—well, to say the whole range of moral philosophy, is nothing; this, in the heart of it, one can't touch unless one knew the moral philosophy of angels also, and what that means, "but are as the angels in heaven." For indeed there is no true conqueror of Lust but Love; and in this beautifully scientific day of the British nation, in which you have no God to love any more, but only an omnipotent coagulation of copulation: in which you have no Law nor King to love any more, but only a competition and a constitution, and the oil of anointing for king and priest used to grease your iron wheels down hill: when you have no country to love any more, but "patriotism is nationally what selfishness is individually,"[140] such the eternally-damned modern view of the matter—the moral syphilis of the entire national blood: and, finally, when you have no true bride and groom to love each other any more, but a girl looking out for a carriage and a man for a position, what have you left on earth to take pleasure in, except theft and adultery?
The two great vices play into each other's hands. Ill-got money is always finally spent on the harlot. Look at Hogarth's two 'prentices; the sum of social wisdom is in that bit of rude art-work, if one reads it solemnly.
FOOTNOTES:
[139] The following letters were addressed by Mr. Ruskin to the author of a pamphlet on continence, entitled "The Science of Life." There were two editions of the pamphlet, and of these only the second contained the first and last of these letters, whilst only the first contained the last letter but one. Some passages also in the other letters are omitted in the first edition, and a few slight alterations are made in the second in the letter of February 10.
[140] For further notice by Mr. Ruskin of this maxim, which occurs in Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Study of Sociology," p. 205, see the article on "Home and its Economies" in the Contemporary Review of May, 1873, and "Bibliotheca Pastorum," p. xxxiv.