VIII
JOHN RUSKIN
(1819–1900)
And the Diffusion of the Beautiful
The genius of John Ruskin's message is in a single sentence: "Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art and education is brutality." He held that all the doing that makes commerce is born of the thinking that makes scholars, and that all the flying of looms and the whirling of spindles begins with the quiet thought of some scholar, hidden in a closet, or sequestered in a cloister. He never made the mistake of supposing that education would change a ten-cent boy into a thousand-dollar-a-year man, but he did know that there is some power in Nature that will transform a seed into a sheaf, an acorn into an oak, and that the truth will change a child into a sage, a statesman, a seer, a man with a message for his century.
Ruskin wrote many volumes to prove that wealth is not in raw material;—not in iron, not in wood, not in stone, not in cotton, not in wool. Wealth is largely in the intelligence put into the raw material. Pig-iron is worth twenty dollars a ton, but intelligence turns that ton of iron into a ton of tempered hair-springs, and it is worth perhaps ten thousand dollars a ton. The clay in Rodin's Thinker represents a value of a few francs, but the idea in the Thinker brought 150,000 francs. On the sixtieth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Victoria, an editor offered Rudyard Kipling $1,000 for a Commemoration poem. The paper, ink and the pen stand for a few pennies; all the rest of the $1,000 was for a trained intellect. The average income of a family in the United States to-day is not far from $2,000. That income could be carried up to $4,000 if our workers would only double the intelligence, efficiency and loyalty put into the raw material they handle!
The career of Edison illustrates the industrial value of one informed intellect to the nation. In 1910, business men in the United States had invested in the expired patents of Thomas Edison six billion seven hundred millions of dollars. These factories brought in an annual income of a billion and seventy millions of dollars. To-day, half-a-dozen Edisons, the one showing us how to burn the coal in the ground, the other taking nitrogen out of the air, another showing us how to transmute metals, another attacking the enemies of the cotton, the fruits and the grains, with a teacher who would show the parents of the country how successfully to assault intellectual and moral illiteracy, would easily double our annual income. What our country—what every country—needs is an invasion of knowledge and sound sense. Therefore Ruskin's message, "the first business of the nation is the manufacture of souls of a good quality."
During his lifetime John Ruskin wrote some forty volumes. Between the ages of twenty and thirty he wrote Modern Painters, dealing with the claims of cloud, sun, shower, wave, shrub and flower, land, sea, and sky upon man's intellectual and moral life. He held that the open-air world is man's best college and the forces of the winter and the summer his best teachers. From thirty to forty he wrote the Lectures on Architecture, and Stones of Venice, with many studies of the galleries, towers, and cathedrals of Florence and Rome. In these books his thought is that the soul of the people within determines the painting, architecture and civilization of the state without. From forty to fifty he wrote many books on the claim of the beautiful upon man's spiritual life, and insisted that those claims were binding not less upon the working people and the peasants in factory and field, than upon the scholar in his library and the artist in his studio.
From fifty to sixty he wrote his Fors Clavigera, his Time and Tide, Munera Pulveris, and Unto This Last, studies of the problems of wealth and poverty, of labour and capital. He tells us that men, to-day, are charmed with the glitter of gold and silver as young birds are charmed with the glitter of snakes' eyes; that the business man is divinely called to serve through property; that there is, however, such a thing as a despotism of wealth; that the property of some millionaires represents the breaking of the strength and the will of competitors and the paralysis of the forces of the people, so that what seems to be wealth, in verity is only "the gilded index of far-reaching ruin, a wreckers' handful of coin, gleaned from the beach to which he has beguiled an argosy; the camp follower's bundle of rags, unwrapped from the breasts of goodly soldiers dead, the purchase pieces of potter's fields, wherein shall be buried together the citizen and the stranger."
And then Ruskin bent himself to what he believed to be the real task of his life, the writing of a series of books on the problems of labour and capital, in the hope that he might save the State from trampled cornfields and from bloody streets. But just at the supreme moment in his career his health gave way, and he never completed his studies of the Robber King, the Rust Kings, the Moth King and the Hero Kings. John Ruskin died believing himself to be an unfulfilled prophecy, in that he was unable to complete these books for which he believed all his life had been one long preparation. But in reality he was a prophet who gave forth a message that is slowly transforming the institutions of mankind.
A full understanding of Ruskin's life-work begins with an outlook upon his contribution to modern social reform. Biographers often identify a great reform with one man's name, as if this man, single handed, had wrought the social transformation. Thus they speak of Howard as the reformer of prisons; of Shaftesbury as the author of the Poor Acts; of Cobden as the author of the Corn Laws; of Lincoln, as the emancipator of slaves; of Booth as the founder of the City Colony, the Home Colony, the Farm Colony. But strictly speaking, thousands of leaders of the movement for the abolition of slavery stood behind the forces of Wilberforce in England, and Lincoln in the United States. Not otherwise many biographers have claimed too much for the influence of Ruskin, certainly more than the master would have claimed for himself.