“My good young people, this is pre-eminently the foolishest—yes, quite the foolishest—notion that you can get into your empty little egg-shells of heads; that you can be a Titian, or a Raphael, or a Phidias; or that you can write like Seneca. But because you cannot be great, that is no reason why you should not aspire to greatness. In joy, humility, and humbleness, work together. Only don’t study art because it will pay, and do not ask for payment because you study art. Art will make you all wiser and happier, and is worth paying for. If you are in debt—as I suppose you are, or why pester me?—pay off your debts yourselves. If you write to me only that you may get money, you are on the foolishest of all errands. Wisdom is more precious than rubies, and is offered to you as a blessing in herself. She is the reward of industry, kindness and modesty. She is the prize of prizes, the strength of your life now, and an earnest of the life that is to come. This advice is better than money, and I give it to you gratis. Ponder it and profit by it.—Ever faithfully yours,
John Ruskin.”
Many were the comments which this letter, widely published, as it was, created; for scarcely any one doubted the authenticity of the letter addressed to Chesterfield, a name which recals that of a celebrated Earl who also wrote letters, but his were on the art of politeness.
But a few days afterwards Mr. Ruskin denied that he had composed the epistle; it is, therefore, only of interest now as so clever a parody of his style that the whole London press was deceived by it. The following letter, however, was certainly genuine. In June 1886, a circular was addressed to Mr. Ruskin appealing for subscriptions towards extinquishing the debt of the Baptist Church at Richmond, to which he replied:—
Sir,—I am sorrowfully amused at your appeal to me, of all people in the world the precisely least likely to give you a farthing. My first word to all men and boys who care to hear me is “Don’t get into debt. Starve, and go to heaven; but don’t borrow. Try first begging. I don’t mind, if it’s really needful, stealing. But don’t buy things you can’t pay for.” And of all manner of debtors, pious people building churches they can’t pay for are the most detestable nonsense to me. Can’t you preach and pray behind the hedges, or in a sandpit, or in a coal-hole first? And of all manner of churches thus idiotically built, iron churches are the damnablest to me. And of all the sects and believers in any ruling spirit, Hindoos, Turks, Feather Idolators, and Mumbo Jumbo Log and Fire Worshippers, who want churches, your modern English Evangelical sect is the most absurd and entirely objectionable and unendurable to me. All which you might very easily have found out from my books. Any other sort of sect would, before bothering me to write it to them.—Ever, nevertheless, and in all this saying, your faithful servant,
John Ruskin.
Having enumerated the most important parodies of our great novelists, and given such extracts as the limits of space would permit, it only remains to mention such other prose parodies of works of fiction, which are either of less merit in themselves, or mimic authors of less importance than those already dealt with. This list can only be approximately complete, as there are hundreds of such parodies buried away in the back numbers of the Magazines and Comic Journals.
W. Harrison Ainsworth.
The Age of Lawn Tennis. A fragment after Harrison Ainsworth’s “Rookwood.” See Tennis Cuts and Quips.