Page images
PDF
EPUB

factories. In the mines miserable women, naked to the waist, crawled through narrow passages drawing after them cars laden with coal. On the one hand was a careless, blatant, vulgar luxury and on the other a sullen, hopeless, defiant poverty. "It is no time for the idleness of metaphysics or the entertainment of the arts," said Ruskin.

His ever-deepening conviction that the very fountains of English life were impure impelled him to turn his back upon the fields in which he had labored with joy and honor to become a veritable voice crying in the wilderness. Unto This Last, the work which marks his transition, first appeared in the Cornhill Magazine. These papers were a stone thrown into the standing pool of contemporary economic thought. Political economy had indeed become the "dismal science." It was committing the cardinal sin of substituting logic for life. In the minds of many the conclusions of the "Manchester School" were the law delivered

once for all. Ruskin's onslaught against economic orthodoxy won for him the excoriations of thousands. He exchanged laudation for obloquy. The articles were unpopular to such an extent that Thackeray, at that time editor of the Cornhill, was compelled to limit the projected series to four articles. Ruskin's

"rattle-brained radicalism" consisted merely in trying to apply the teachings of Christianity to the industrial conditions of his own day. It is altogether possible that he was sometimes profoundly mistaken. He was, moreover, extreme in many of his statements. The ability to coo as gently as a dove was not a notable characteristic of Ruskin. But as we read Unto This Last to-day and view its teachings from the vantage ground of another generation, it is difficult for us to understand why its teachings were received with so many "showers of oil of vitriol."

For John Ruskin the die had been cast. Henceforth he was, like the knights of other days, to give his life to redressing human wrong. The interpreter of art had become a social reformer. This change of viewpoint had a most marked influence upon his literary style. He deliberately pruned the overrich eloquence of his earlier days; with little loss of its pristine beauty it became more concise, well-knit, and muscular. As the years passed by he preached with ever intenser vehemence and skill. To that which had been but a thunderous roar in Carlyle he gave precision, reality, and convicting power. There is a danger which not all writers about him have avoided: of fixing too great a gulf between the

two phases of Ruskin's literary life. It must be remembered that in the years when he was distinctively an art critic he was also a prophet of social betterment, and also that in the latter part of his life he delivered some of his most luminous lectures on art.

If Ruskin had simply said that it was wrong for a man of superior strength to strangle his weaker neighbor out of hate for him, everybody would have agreed. But he went further and contended that it was just as sinful for an individual of superior shrewdness to take advantage of some less gifted brother. It is to be most earnestly hoped that such teaching would not be found revolutionary to-day either in England or in America. A reading of the history of our own country in the decades immediately following the Civil War, when it seemed as though many of our national leaders were willing to lower their ethical standards in order to fill their coffers, impresses upon us the fact that within the last twenty years we have passed through a renaissance of righteousness. To the modern man of our generation the social message of Ruskin is not especially startling. "The survival of the fittest" is not the law of an industrialism which is Christian. Ruskin says: "You would be indignant if you saw a strong man walk into a theater

or lecture room and calmly choose the best place, take his feeble neighbor by the shoulder and turn him out of it into the back seats or the street. You would be equally indignant if you saw a stout fellow thrust himself up to a table where some hungry children were being fed and reach his arm over their heads and take the bread from them. But you are not the least indignant if, when a man has stoutness of thought and swiftness of capacity, and instead of being long-armed only has the much greater gift of being long-headed, you think it perfectly just that he should use his intellect to take the bread out of the mouths of all the other men in the town who are in the same trade with him; or use his breadth of sweep and sight to gather some branch of the commerce of the country into one great cobweb of which he is himself to be the central spider, making every thread vibrate with the points of his claws, commanding every avenue with the facets of his eyes. You see no injustice in this."

Strength is never an excuse for tyranny. "We that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak," said the great apostle to the Gentiles. There are times when unrestrained competition may be nothing more or less than flagrant robbery. Christianity is pre

Necessarily it is not
Else why should we
But it is that order
realize the greatest

eminently social. In Sur la Propriété, by Emile de Laveleye, the author gives expression to this significant thought: "There is a social order which is the best. always the present order. seek to change the latter? which ought to exist to good for humanity. God knows it and wills it. It is for man to discover and establish it." Ruskin was one of the pioneers in the search for the best social order. Many have followed in his footsteps. The splendid literature, prophetic of an era of brotherhood and justice given to us by forward-looking leaders of modern thought, belongs to the heritage which has come to our generation from John Ruskin, preacher of social righteousness and justice.

Ruskin had no language too scathing with which to denounce the nominal religion of materialized men and women. In his day, as in ours, ecclesiasticism and religion were not always synonymous terms. There were those who sat in high seats in the temples who worshiped not God but the "Goddess of Getting-on," or "Britannia of the Market.” Again and again with consummate eloquence and unrestrained irony he denounced that miscalled Christianity which expressed itself in barren

« PreviousContinue »