Great Men as Prophets of a New Era

by Newell Dwight Hillis

And yet, for the most part, men turn their eyes toward the sky only in moments of utter idleness and insipidity. "One says it has been wet, and another, it has been windy, and another, it has been warm. But who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their summits, until they melted and mouldered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds, when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves? All has passed, unregretted, and unseen. Not in the clash of the hail nor the drift of the whirlwind, are the highest characters developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. Blunt and low those faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lamp-black and lightning."

The whole world owes Ruskin an immeasurable debt for this: that he taught us how to see the beauty in the great imperial palace in which man hath his home.

In his defense of Turner, the world's greatest landscape painter, Ruskin advanced his theory of first seeing accurately, and then, through the creative imagination, carrying up to ideal perfection flowers, faces and landscapes often marred by the storms and upheavals of life. It is altogether probable that John Ruskin saw as accurately the scene of loveliness as Turner himself. It seems quite certain that Ruskin was altogether unique in his capacity for enjoyment. It was not simply that his eyes saw accurately, and his intellect registered his impressions without flaw, but that his imagination and his emotions were sensitive to the last degree, as sensitive as the silken threads of an Æolian harp that responds to the lightest wind that blows. Many people know the intense flavour of a strawberry, but Ruskin's soul was pierced with an intense and tumultuous pleasure at the sight of the clouds piled up upon the mountains. He loved Nature with all the passion with which Dante loved Beatrice. In Ruskin's forty odd volumes the scholar can find registered a hundred experiences in the presence of the mountain glory and the mountain gloom, in which this delight and happiness sent his whole body shivering with the piercing intensity that shook the soul of Romeo during his passionate interview with Juliet. Coarse natures, gluttonous, avaricious, full of hate, can no more understand the happiness of Ruskin's life than a deaf man can understand Mozart's rapture, when he listened to the music in the cathedral. Not even a tornado can make a crowbar vibrate, but the flutter of a lark's wing can set a silken thread vibrating and singing.

Ruskin has spread out, like a rich map, the story of the people who educated him. The overmastering influence in his life was that of his mother. He tells us that he received from his home in childhood the priceless gift of peace, in that he had never seen a "moment's trouble or disorder in any household matter, or anything whatever done in a hurry or undone in due time." To this gift was added the gift of obedience. "I obeyed word, or lifted finger, of father or mother, simply as a ship her helm; not only without idea of resistance but as necessary to me in every moral action as the law of gravity in leaping. To the gifts of peace and obedience my parents added the gift of Faith, in that nothing was ever promised me that was not given; nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and nothing ever told me that was not true." And to these was added the habit of fixed attention with both eyes and mind—this being the main practical faculty of his life, causing Mazzini to say of Ruskin that he had "the most analytic mind in Europe."

The books from which Ruskin had his style in childhood were Walter Scott's novels, Pope's translation of the Iliad, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and above all, the Bible. "My mother forced me, by steady and daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart; as well as to read it every syllable through aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year; and to that discipline, patient, accurate, and resolute, I owe much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature." The great chapters of the Bible from which Ruskin says he had his style included the fifteenth and twentieth of Exodus; the twenty-third Psalm, and also the thirty-second, ninetieth, ninety-first, one hundred and third, one hundred and twelfth, one hundred and nineteenth, one hundred and thirty-ninth, the Sermon on the Mount, the conversion of Paul, his vision on the road to Damascus, Paul's Ode to Love and Immortality. "These chapters of the Bible," Ruskin says, "were the most precious, and, on the whole, the one essential part of my education."

Ruskin's message upon education is of vital importance to the people of our republic. Strictly speaking, education should teach each citizen to think aright upon every subject of importance, and to live a life that is worthy, making the most out of the gifts received from God and one's ancestors. Ruskin traced the national faults and miseries of England, to illiteracy and the lack of education in the art of living. The inevitable result of this illiteracy was that England "despises literature, despises compassion, and concentrates the soul on silver." From this illiteracy came physical ugliness, envy, cowardice, and selfishness, instead of physical beauty, courage and affection. To the dry facts taught, therefore, he proposed to add inspiration, and the art of seeing.

Above all, he feared the results of uniformity and the manufacture of men by machinery, until all youths coming out of the same school, having studied the same facts, in the same way, became as uniform as crackers, and also as dry. The important man, he thinks, is the occasional boy, who has received a gift and can open up new realms for the rest. "Genius? You can't manufacture a great man, any more than you can manufacture gold. You find gold, and mint it. You uncover diamonds, but do not produce them. You find genius, but you cannot create it." Getting on, therefore, does not mean "more horses, more footmen, more fortune, more public honour,—it means more personal soul. He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace." Education is a preparation for complete living; therefore Ruskin adopts Milton's definition of the complete and generous education as, "that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the duties of all the offices of life."

Frederic Harrison gives Ruskin's Unto This Last first place as the most original book in modern English literature. He ranks it as a masterpiece of pure, incisive, brilliant, imaginative writing, "a book glowing with wit and fire and passion." The heart of the message is that every man is born with a gift appointed by his fathers, and that happiness begins with grasping the handle of one's own being. The greatest and most enduring work is done for love, and not for wage. The soldier's task is to keep the state in liberty, and when the second or third battle of Gettysburg or Ypres comes, he does not go on a strike, but puts death and duty in front of him and keeps his face to the front; in like manner the physician is appointed to keep the state in health and in time of yellow fever or the Black Death he works as hard for nothing as for a large fee, even as a father, in time of famine, shipwreck or battle, will sacrifice himself for his son.

Ruskin held that the commercial text, "Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest," was part truth, and part falsehood. "Buy in the cheapest market? Yes; but what made your market cheap? Charcoal may be cheap among the roof timbers after a fire, and bricks may be cheap in your streets after an earthquake, but fire and earthquake may not be, therefore, national benefits. Sell in the dearest market? Yes; but what made your market dear? Was it to a dying man who gave his last coin rather than starve, or to a soldier on his way to pillage the bank, that you put your fortune? The final consummation of wealth is in full-breathed, bright-eyed and happy-hearted human creatures." Therefore, said Ruskin, "I can imagine that England may cast all thoughts of possessive wealth back to the barbaric nations among whom they first arose; and that, while the sand of the Indias and adamant of Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of the charger, and flash from the turban of the slave, she at last may be able to lead forth her sons, saying, 'These are my jewels!'"

Whether, therefore, property shall be a curse or a blessing depends upon man's administrative intelligence. "For centuries great districts of the world, rich in soil, and favoured in climate, have lain desert, under the rage of their own rivers, not only desert, but plague-struck. The stream which, rightly directed, would have flowed in soft irrigation from field to field,—would have purified the air, given food to man and beast, and carried their burdens for them on its bosom—now overwhelms the plain, and poisons the wind, its breath pestilence, and its work famine. In like manner, wealth may become water of life, the riches of the hand and wisdom, or wealth may be the last and deadliest of national plagues, water of Marah, the water of which feeds the roots of all evil." Man's body alone is related to factory and mine. No amount of ingenuity will ever make iron and steel digestible. Neither the avarice nor the rage of men will ever feed them. And however the apple of Sodom and the grape of Gomorrah may spread the table with dainties of ashes and nectar of asps,—so long as men live by bread, the far-away valleys laugh only as they are covered with the gold of God, and echo the shouts of His happy multitudes.