It would be surely superfluous to tell you that this representation of cloud is as false as it is monstrous; but the point which I wish principally to enforce on your attention is that all this loathsome and lying defacement of book pages, which looks as if it would end in representing humanity only in its skeleton, and nature only in her ashes, is all of it founded first on the desire to make the volume saleable at small cost, and attractive to the greatest number, on whatever terms of attraction. 187. The significant change which Mr. Morris made in the title of his recent lecture, from Art and Democracy, to Art and Plutocracy, strikes at the root of the whole matter;' and with wider sweep of blow than he permitted himself to give his words. The changes which he so deeply deplored, and so grandly resented, in this once loveliest city, are due wholly to the deadly fact that her power is now dependent on the Plutocracy of Knowledge, instead of its Divinity. There are indeed many splendid conditions in the new im pulses with which we are agitated, or it may be inspired: 1 66 [Compare § 179 (above, p. 386). The lecture was given in connexion with the Russell Club in the hall of University College, Oxford, and was briefly reported in the Times, and more fully in the Pall Mall Gazette, of November 15, 1883. It excited much notice and some anger (see a letter in the Times of November 19, as Morris avowed his Socialist opinions (compare J. W. Mackail's Life of Morris, vol. ii. pp. 117-120). The lecture covered much the same ground as that of the one published two months later-Art and Socialism: a Lecture delivered (January 23, 1884) before the Secular Society of Leicester, by William Morris, 1884. It appears from the report that Morris explained at the outset of his lecture that "its true subject was art under a plutocracy." Some of the College and University autho rities, who were present at the lecture, rose at its conclusion to dissociate themselves from the lecturer's political views. Ruskin followed in an impromptu and unreported speech, chaffing these grave and reverend signiors freely, and ending up, by some transition of thought no longer recoverable, with a description of a sunset. "Mr. Ruskin," says the report in the Pall Mall," whose appearance was the signal for immense enthusiasm, speaking of the lecturer as the great conceiver and doer, the man at once a poet, an artist, and a workman, and his old and dear friend,' said that he agreed with him in imploring the young men who were being educated here to seek in true unity and love one for another the best direction for the great forces which, like an evil aurora, were lighting the world, and thus to bring about the peace which passeth all understanding." Morris in the course of his lecture had said "Oxford itself, which should have been left as a precious jewel by us, the trustees of prosperity, has been treated as a stone in the highway; wherever a tree falls, a worse is planted in its place." Referring to this passage, Ruskin said in the present lecture (compare § 188): "The defilement of our ow Oxford, which Mr. Morris so grandly described to you and so bitterly resented, has been mostly due to the plutocracy of learning" (Pall Mall Gazette, November 19)) " but against one of them, I must warn you, in all affection and in all duty. 188. So far as you come to Oxford in order to get your living out of her, you are ruining both Oxford and yourselves. There never has been, there never can be, any other law respecting the wisdom that is from above, than this one precept,-" Buy the Truth, and sell it not." It is to be costly to you-of labour and patience; and you are never to sell it, but to guard, and to give. Much of the enlargement, though none of the defacement, of old Oxford is owing to the real life and the honest seeking of extended knowledge. But more is owing to the supposed money value of that knowledge; and exactly so far forth, her enlargement is purely injurious to the University and to her scholars. 189. In the department of her teaching, therefore, which is entrusted to my care, I wish it at once to be known that I will entertain no question of the saleability of this or that manner of art; and that I shall steadily discourage the attendance of students who propose to make their skill a source of income. Not that the true labourer is unworthy of his hire, but that, above all in the beginning and first choice of industry, his heart must not be the heart of an hireling.' You may, and with some measure of truth, ascribe this determination in me to the sense of my own weakness and want of properly so-called artistic gift. That is indeed so there are hundreds of men better qualified than I to teach practical technique: and, in their studios, all persons desiring to be artists should place themselves. But I never would have come to Oxford, either before or now, unless in the conviction that I was able to direct her students precisely in that degree and method of application to art which was most consistent with the general and perpetual functions of the University. 1 [Proverbs xxiii. 23.] [Luke x. 7; John x. 13. Compare Crown of Wild Olive, §§ 32, 33 (Vol. XVIII. pp. 412-414).] 190. Now, therefore, to prevent much future disappointment and loss of time both to you and to myself, let me forewarn you that I will not assist out of the schools, nor allow in them, modes of practice taken up at each student's fancy. In the classes, the modes of study will be entirely fixed; and at your homes I cannot help you, unless you work in accordance with the class rules, which rules, however, if you do follow, you will soon be able to judge and feel for yourselves, whether you are doing right and getting on, or otherwise. This I tell you with entire confidence, because the illustrations and examples of the modes of practice in question, which I have been showing you in the course of these lectures, have been furnished to me by young people like yourselves; like, in all things, except only, so far as they are to be excepted at all,-in the perfect repose of mind, which has been founded on a simply believed, and unconditionally obeyed, religion. 191. On the repose of mind, I say; and there is a singular physical truth illustrative of that spiritual life and peace which I must yet detain you by indicating in the subject of our study to-day. You see how this foulness of false imagination represents, in every line, the clouds not only as monstrous, but tumultuous. Now a lovely clouds, remember, are quiet clouds,'-not merely quiet in appearance, because of their greater height and distance, but quiet actually, fixed for hours, it may be, in the same form and place. I have seen a fair-weather cloud high over Coniston Old Man,-not on the hill, observe, but a vertical mile above it,-stand motionless,-changeless,-for twelve hours together. From four o'clock in the afternoon of one day I watched it through the night by the north twilight, till the dawn struck it with full crimson, at four of the following July morning. What is glorious and good in the heavenly cloud, you can, if you will, bring also into 1 [Compare The Storm-Cloud, § 5 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 11).] your lives, which are indeed like it, in their vanishing, but how much more in their not vanishing, till the morning take them to itself. As this ghastly phantasy of death is to the mighty clouds of which it is written, "The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angels,"1 are the fates to which your passion may condemn you, or your resolution raise. You may drift with the phrenzy of the whirlwind, or be fastened for your part in the pacified effulgence of the sky. Will you not let your lives be lifted up, in fruitful rain for the earth, in scatheless snow to the sunshine,-so blessing the years to come, when the surest knowledge of England shall be of the will of her heavenly Father, and the purest art of England be the inheritance of her simplest children? The following letter appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette of April 22, 1884 (where "A. P. Newton" was misprinted "G. S. Newton"):— To the Editor of the "Pall Mall Gazette" SIR,-Will you permit me, so far as I may, to rectify in your columns the faultful omission in my last Oxford lectures of the name of Mr. A. P. Newton as one of the chief, and the last, representatives of the old English water-colour landscape school? My own personal associations with the works of Copley Fielding and Robson led me to dwell on them at so great length that I had no time for the just analysis of Mr. Newton's especial power in rendering effects of light, or for the expression of my deep respect for his sincere love of mountain scenery and his conscientious industry in its unaffected delineation. It is, I trust, by this time well enough known that I never write for money interests; but it is only just to Mr. Newton's widow that, on the occasion of the approaching sale of many of her husband's most beautiful works, such weight as may be attached to my estimate of them should not be lost by my inability to introduce due notice of them in the short time of a school lecture.-I am, Sir, your obedient servant, J. RUSKIN. BRANTWOOD, April 21. For Ruskin's notice of A. P. Newton (1830-1883), see Academy Notes, Vol. XIV. pp. 201, 249. 1 [Psalms lviii. 17.] 1 APPENDIX 192. THE foregoing lectures were written, among other reasons, with the leading object of giving some permanently rational balance between the rhapsodies of praise and blame which idly occupied the sheets of various magazines last year on the occasion of the general exhibition of Rossetti's works; and carrying forward the same temperate estimate of essential value in the cases of other artists—or artistesof real, though more or less restricted, powers, whose works were immediately interesting to the British public, I have given this balance chiefly in the form of qualified, though not faint, praise, which is the real function of just criticism; for the multitude can always see the faults of good work, but never, unaided, its virtues: on the contrary, it is equally quick-sighted to the vulgar merits of bad work, but no tuition will enable it to condemn the vices with which it has a natural sympathy; and, in general, the blame of them is wasted on its deaf ears. When the course was completed, I found that my audiences had been pleased by the advisedly courteous tone of comment to which I had restricted myself: and I received not a few congratulations on the supposed improvement of my temper, and manners, under the stress of age and experience. The tenor of this terminal lecture may perhaps modify the opinion of my friends in these respects; but the observations it contains are entirely necessary in order to complete the serviceableness, such as it may of all the preceding statements. 2 1 [The exhibition of "Old Masters" at the Academy, 1883.] be, 3 [For other passages in which Ruskin discusses the functions of criticism, see Vol. XIV. pp. 5, 45, 256, 262; Vol. XVI. p. 32; Vol. XXIX. p. 585; and several letters in Arrows of the Chace (Vol. XXXIV.). For a more detailed list, see the General Index.] |