I believe we have now mentioned all the points of Quakerism, except the testimony against all War. From Chapter VIII devoted to this, it is clear that Ruskin was generally, but not always, on Quaker lines. He wobbled somewhat, and felt puzzled, and I am afraid that a certain number of Friends have done the same at times of crisis.
Lastly, the Quaker simplicity of life, the avoidance of luxury and social pretensions, the fixing of attention chiefly on the things of the spirit, are Ruskin’s dearest delight, the subject of his most earnest pleas. Take one:
“The uses, and the desire, of seclusion, of meditation, of restraint, and of correction, are they not passing from us in the collision of worldly interests, and restless contests of mean hope and meaner fear? The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?”[47]
For a man who, in the name and for the sake of spiritual things, fought the good fight of a reformer during two generations, Ruskin was but little brought into personal friendship with members of the Society of Friends. George Baker, of Bewdley, who was one of the early donors to the St. George’s Guild and was long one of its Trustees, and afterwards its Master, is the principal personal link he had with the Society. Henry Swan, formerly his curator at the Sheffield Museum, was a Friend.
When the writer, as one of a party of Friends, was kindly shown over Brantwood by its owner in 1884, the only things he had to say to us about Quakerism in the course of a forty minutes’ talk, were a little homily on sectarianism, contrasted with a church of “God-fearing people,” including Catholics and Turks—a little chaff about our failing in the matter of usury to literally obey our Bibles, as he supposed we thought we always tried to do—and an astonishing pronouncement that “Your early Friends would have carried all before them, if they had not opposed that which is obeyed by the whole of the animal creation—the love of colour.” We must take this as one of the characteristic plunges into emphasis (some well-balanced people would use a stronger term perhaps), which are a cause at once of his strength as a stimulating teacher, and of his insufficiency as an infallible oracle, to be mechanically interpreted.
These three utterances, however, slight as they are, show a misreading of Quakerism. We are, I trust, the least sectional of little sects. The religion of the Light Within is at the basis of all other religions too; it is the absolute religion, religion reduced to its simplest, and it brings us into sympathetic connection with Evangelical, Ritualist, Jew, Mohammedan and “heathen,” so far as these have the Divine Spirit shining through their particular forms of thought and practice. Also, of all people, we are the least prone to unintelligent Biblical literalism, and are quite unlikely to be stumbled by the Mosaic regulations about usury. There is a measure of truth in his third statement about “colour,” if by that he meant, in a comprehensive sense, those recreations which relieve the strain of a severely ruled life. We have become less numerous, I doubt not, through our restrictions (now abandoned) on art, music, “the theatre and the ball-room.” But there have been compensations to those who have stayed under the discipline.
Ruskin, then, never understood the Society of Friends in the outward. This was the mere result of circumstances. Brought up in the south of London, educated at Oxford, living much abroad, with local interests and acquaintances chiefly centering round Denmark Hill, Oxford and Coniston, he had no great opportunity to meet Friends.
He never had any Quaker teaching in his youth. The voice of the Society of Friends was too faint to reach him. He never found his way across the hill from Brantwood to the ancient meeting house at Hawkshead, but his word has penetrated further than ours, and all unaware he has done our work.
How marvellous is this series of harmonies, unintended, unrecognized on both sides, between him and the Society of Friends! It looks as though Quakerism is not an arbitrary group of doctrines gathered up, as he fancied them, by George Fox, but a coherent system, all whose parts hang together as they all appear together when they rise up in Ruskin. It is a strong confirmation of the coherence and validity of the religious discoveries of our Quaker forefathers in the seventeenth century, when we find that they are repeated in the research of another emancipated but devout thinker, a religious rationalist who was an expert in the things of the soul.