Not one of his writings is called a sermon, yet we have found his class, for he belongs to the class of Divines, ordained in a temple more Metropolitan and more Catholic than Canterbury or Rome, and not made with hands. Through nearly half a century of active authorship he consecrated his every gift to the service of men. He never looked back in any unfaithfulness that we know of. I wish first to make clear that all his life the gates between the soul and the Divine Source were open: that he was truly a religious man under every form of faith and doubt; and that no one need hesitate about this at any tight place in his career. Keep this as a sure clue, and we shall fearlessly follow his story.
The childish sensibility to landscape beauty I take to be an early manifestation of the gift of the seer, a significant token of native nearness to the Unseen. For many years he never climbed a mountain, alone, without instinctively dropping on his knees on the summit, in thankful reverence. As the careless foot of an engrossing industrialism stamped into ashes more and more of the land whose fairness had been his life’s passion, it seemed to him to be indeed sacrilege and desecration, a reckless destruction of Divine things. Art he only valued as a form of expression, a language whose subject was Nature and Man. In the latter half of his life more emphatically, but more or less from the beginning, he regarded Man as the object for whose welfare Nature, in the landscape sense, existed; and he rested not till he had brought Man into due relation with God, up to whom in the end came all things.
He was devout by training. Morning and evening he read his chapter out of the Bible; and the fourteenth century manuscript he used in later years occupied a prominent and handy place in the study at Brantwood. In Swiss and Italian villages in his early journeys he read the service through on Sunday to his servant, when there was no Protestant Church. From the Biblical references in the indexes to his works, you would suppose they were a theological library. In his Oxford Lectures Art was the illustration, but conduct the theme, and Art was chosen as an illustration because in it the artist shows what manner of Man he is, in a way that cannot be dissembled.
What are the qualifications which fit a man to be a religious researcher, a mountain-top gazer into heaven?
He must know from his own experience the meaning of holiness, thereby gaining a practical knowledge of God. He must, in Pauline words, be crucified with Christ, though he may not care for such an expression; he must preach not himself and please not himself. Such a man John Ruskin was. Among the many wayward and impulsive men who have been “dear to the Muses and to the nymphs not unbeloved,” not all like him have been also masters of themselves, and kept on their foreheads the white stone, with the new name written. Ruskin was himself noble and sweet in his life, a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief endured in silence, with nothing ignoble in his eighty years of generous charity and lonely service. He had passed, too, through that experience which seems essential to the wielding of spiritual power. He had had his great renunciation, he had heard some hard call, and had obeyed. The prophets have all gone on the Via Crucis: they have all lost their lives that they might find them. As Whittier abandoned a hopeful political career and remained poor till he was sixty that he might help to free the slave, and gained his spiritual power thereby, so Ruskin in 1860 went boldly out to do battle with the Society that loved and honoured him.
Further, such a man must greatly dare. He must face the demon of the study first; then, too probably, the resentment of organized religion. One cannot succeed as a researcher without discovering something new; and that is bound to modify or overthrow something old and established.
Nor can such a man usually present a heart of iron and a front of brass to the darts of controversy. He must be a sensitive man, by the very nature of his research. He may or may not be privileged to feel strong in the strength of his cause; but even if he does the shrinking of the nerves remains. This daring and suffering were pre-eminently the lot of Ruskin; and it was this which finally broke down his mind. “He was beside himself for others’ sakes.” It was the neglect with which the St. George’s Guild and allied reform work were treated by those who were otherwise his friends, which contributed to drive him into inflammation of the brain in 1878, and again several times afterwards. “Wounded in the house of my friends.”
Besides these essential qualifications Ruskin had his very unusual gifts, which it may be long before we find again combined with the religious faculty—his long lifetime free from the need of earning money, his early popularity, his wonderful style, the vantage ground of his Professorial chair, his penetrating mind, his wit and his fire. It may be long before we see his like again.
I am far from claiming infallibility for Ruskin. Infallibility is an out-of-date conception altogether. There is no such thing on earth. To be infallible you must know everything; you must be infinite. The infallibility of a finite creature is an inhuman, even an inorganic conception. Organic life means growth, and growth means imperfection; but growth is Nature’s way of making things. Infallibility is a tyrant born of ecclesiasticism, and bred on human laziness and fear. It has become the attribute of the quack pill, and there let it abide.
But, beyond this safe generality, Ruskin had human weaknesses of an obvious kind. He loved paradox; he played with his thunderbolts a little, and rather liked to shock people. He was a humorist as well as a divine. It is difficult to put down some of his derivations to anything but sheer fooling; a man who will put the English Force and Latin Fors down to the same root, will do anything in that line. Again, when he was in thunderous action he allowed volcanoes of vituperation to erupt, which one would have wished otherwise. He sadly lacked restraint, but, like the strong language of the old Prophets, his had its root in love of man.