Great Men as Prophets of a New Era

by Newell Dwight Hillis

At the beginning of his career Ruskin started a movement to diffuse the beautiful in the life of the people. For centuries the beautiful had been concentrated in the temples of Athens, the palaces and galleries of Italy, the museums of Paris and London, in the manor houses of the landed gentry. Meanwhile the poor people of Athens, Venice and Florence lived in huts, wore leather garments, ate crusts, dwelt amid ugliness, squalor and filth. Ruskin dreamed a dream of the beautiful put into the life of the common people. He found that Sheffield, with its smoking chimneys and grimy streets, had been spoken of as the ugliest factory town in England. Therefore Ruskin went to Sheffield, hired a building, installed therein his paintings, etchings, and illuminated missals, and hired a few instructors to help him diffuse the beautiful in the daily life of the people. He brought in men who made the implements of the dining-room, and showed them how to make the knife, the fork, the spoon, the table linen, minister to the sentiment of taste and refinement. He brought in men who made wall-papers for the poor man's house, and showed the craftsmen how to make the colours soft and warm, delicate and beautiful. He interested himself in beautiful furniture. He wrought with William Morris for a more beautiful type of illustrations in books and magazines. He denounced the ugliness of the houses and clothing and bridges and railways. He insisted that women should have beautiful garments, the youth read beautiful books, the men ride in beautiful cars, the families live in beautiful little houses, the children play upon beautiful carpets and look upon walls that had one or two beautiful pictures. John Ruskin laboured, and others wrought with him, and now at last we have entered into the fruit of their labours. To-day the beautiful, once concentrated in temples, palaces, and cathedrals, is diffused in the life of the common people.

In the same fashion Ruskin started a movement among the working men for a diffusion of sound learning. The St. George Guild represents the first University Extension Course and the first Chautauqua system our world ever knew. More than fifty years ago he worked out his plan to carry the knowledge given to rich men's sons in their lecture halls and libraries to the working people, who were to carry on their studies in the evening after the day's labour was over. He laid out a course of studies for these working men, planned the organization of lecture centers, gave us the outline of the University Extension Course of lectures, induced many men in England to go from one working man's guild and club to another, and after Ruskin's health broke down, the men in the faculty of Oxford University took Ruskin's mother-idea, and developed it into the University Extension Course of lectures. Brought to our country that idea has spread through these lecture courses carried on in great halls in the winter, in tents and open-air assemblies in the summer.

We say much of our Social Settlement Work, and trace these thousands of settlements in the tenement-house region of great cities back to Arnold Toynbee's work, and that of Canon Barnett, in the East End of London. But we must remember that when Ruskin was lecturing in Oxford to some of the richest boys in Great Britain he told them that every boy who consumed more than he produced was a pauper and that the more the youth received from his ancestors and the State, the larger his debt to those who were less fortunate. He believed that every gifted boy should keep in touch, not only with his own class, but with all classes, and that every youth would do well to do some physical work every day. Ruskin and his students built a road outside of Oxford, and the foreman of the gang of students was young Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee admired and loved Ruskin, as a young pupil and disciple loves a noble teacher and a great master.

After his health broke down, Ruskin gave up his work in Whitechapel Road and urged Arnold Toynbee to give himself to the problems of the poor, and when Ruskin's health gave way completely, it was Toynbee who rewrote his lectures on labour and capital and gave them a new form in his Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. The time came when Arnold Toynbee broke down with overwork and brain fever, as his master had broken before him, and his friend Canon Barnett raised the money to make Toynbee Hall a permanent institution. But the seed of the Social Settlement movement was John Ruskin's brief career in the tenement region of the East End, and the first full fruit was in his disciple's Toynbee Hall and in Canon Barnett's noble work at St. Jude's. Little by little the Social Settlement Idea spread, until in the tenement regions of Manchester, Birmingham, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, gifted men and women of wealth, leisure and patrician position, began to give their lives to the neglected poor.

Not less striking, the influence of Ruskin upon the plans of General Booth. Long before the book called In Darkest England and the Way Out was published, Ruskin founded his coöperative printing press in a little colony outside of London. One of his biographers has told the story of Ruskin's plan to make the men and women in the poorhouses self-supporting, happy and useful. This biographer has never fully established the connection between that first coöperative colony of Ruskin, and Booth's plans for the City Colony, the Farm Colony and the Foreign Colony. But one thing is certain:—Ruskin had a pioneer mind. Instead of his chief interest being in mountains and clouds, in wave and flower, cathedrals, pictures, marbles, illuminated missals, the overmastering enthusiasm of his life was people, and his real message was a message of social reform. When long time has passed, Ruskin's fame will rest upon his work as a social reformer, a man who loved the poor and weak.

Not less significant, his views of education, that have leavened all modern schools whatsoever. Matthew Arnold defined culture as "a familiarity with the best that has ever been done in literature." Ruskin insisted that there were thousands of scholars living in their libraries, surrounded by books, who were perfectly familiar with the best that has ever been thought or done, but whose knowledge was all but worthless, because it was selfish. He looked upon the informed man as a sower, going forth to sow the seed of truth over the wide land. All selfish culture is like salt in a barrel; the salt has no power to save unless it is scattered. Selfish culture is like seed corn in the granary, important for a harvest. Under Ruskin's influence many of his friends gave an evening or two a week to lectures before his working men's clubs, his art groups, and his classes for the improvement of the handicrafts.

No modern author has made so much of vision, or tried so hard to teach people how to see. Many teachers think that education is stuffing the pocket of memory with a mass of facts. When the mind is filled so that it cannot hold another truth, the youth receives a diploma. Ruskin held that education was teaching the child how to see everything true and beautiful in land and sea and sky. "For a thousand great speakers, there is only one great thinker; for a thousand great thinkers, there is only one great see-er; we cut out one 'e' and leave it seer, but the true poet and sage is simply the see-er." The millions are blind to the signals hanged out from the battlements of cloud. Isaac Newton was a see-er,—he saw an apple falling from the tree; saw a moon falling through space, and gave us the law of gravity. Columbus was a see-er. In a crevice in a bit of driftwood, tossed upon the shore of Spain, he saw a strange pebble, and his imagination leaped from the driftwood to the unknown forest from whence it came, from that bright piece of stone to the mountain range of which it was a part. Columbus had the seeing eye, and discovered the continent hidden behind the clouds.

Not otherwise the geologist sees the handwriting of God upon the rock-pages; the astronomer sees His writing upon the pages of the sky; the physiologist reads His writing on the pages of the human body; the moralist deciphers the writing on the tablets of the mind and the heart. The beginning of Wordsworth's fame was the hour when his eyes were opened, and he saw man appearing upon the horizon, and like a bright spirit trailing clouds of glory, coming from God who is man's home. It was the inner sight of Wordsworth's soul that was "the bliss of solitude." It was his power of vision that enabled him to look out upon the field, yellow as gold, a vision that lingered long in his memory when he said, "and then my heart with rapture thrills, and dances with the daffodils."

It is useless for people who are colour-blind to look at Rembrandt's portrait. It is folly for people who cannot follow a tune to buy a ticket for a symphony concert. Men who by neglect atrophy the spiritual faculty, or by sin cut gashes in the nerve of conscience, will soon exclaim, in the spirit of the fool, "There is no God," just as the blind man is certain that there is no sun. The old black ex-slave, Sojourner Truth, once illustrated this principle. In those days excitement ran high. Northern merchants, fearful of losing their trade with Southern cities, frowned upon any one who dared criticize "the peculiar institution" of the South. One day, in New York, Sojourner Truth, just escaped from slavery, went to an Abolition Meeting, hoping for an opportunity of making a plea for the emancipation of her race. When the black woman, with her gnarled hands, and face seamed with pain and sorrow, arose to speak, a young newspaper reporter slammed his book upon the table, and stamped his way down the aisle toward the door. Just before he reached the door, Sojourner Truth stretched out her long black finger and said, "Wait a minute, honey! You goin' 'way 'cause of me? Listen, honey—I would give you some ideas to take home with you to your newspaper, but I see you ain't got nothing to carry 'em in!" . . . Homely but forceful illustration of an old truth. The angel of truth and the angel of beauty, leaning from the battlements of heaven, oft whispers, "Oh, my children! I would fain give you a new tool, a new painting, a new science, but you have no eyes to see the vision, and no ears to hear the sweetest music that ever fell from heaven's battlements." It is the man of vision who founds the new school of painting, or the new reform or the new liberty. The visions of the idealist to-day become the laws and institutions of to-morrow.

In this power of the open eye, Ruskin found the secret of daily happiness, and mental growth. No one knew better than John Ruskin that the millions of working men and women would never be able to make their way to the galleries of Paris and Madrid, of Florence and Venice, to St. Peter's or the Parthenon, much less have time, leisure and money for travel unto the far-off ends of the earth. Therefore he taught the people how to see the wonders of God, in every fluted blade of grass, in every bush that blazed with beauty, and blazing, was not consumed. He proved that he who knows how to see will find the common clod to be a casket filled with gems, and that the sky that looks down upon all workers, spreads out scenes of such loveliness and beauty as to make travel to distant lands unnecessary!