Selections from the works of John Ruskin

Preface

In making the following selections, I have tried to avoid the appearance of such a volume as used to be entitled Elegant Extracts. Wherever practicable, entire chapters or lectures are given, or at least passages of sufficient length to insure a correct notion of the general complexion of Ruskin's work. The text is in all cases that of the first editions, unless these were later revised by Ruskin himself. The original spelling and punctuation are preserved, but a few minor changes have been made for the sake of uniformity among the various extracts. For similar reasons, Ruskin's numbering of paragraphs is dispensed with.

I have aimed not to multiply notes. Practically all Ruskin's own annotation is given, with the exception of one or two very long and somewhat irrelevant notes from Stones of Venice. It has not been deemed necessary to give the dates of every painter or to explain every geographical reference. On the other hand, the sources of most of the quotations are indicated. In the preparation of these notes, the magnificent library edition of Messrs. Cook and Wedderburn has inevitably been of considerable assistance; but all their references have been verified, many errors have been corrected, and much has of course been added.

In closing I wish to express my obligation to my former colleague. Dr. Lucius H. Holt, without whose assistance this volume would never have appeared. He wrote a number of the notes, including the short prefaces to the various selections, and prepared the manuscript for the printer.

C. B. T.

September, 1908.

Contents

Introduction vii

The Life of Ruskin ....... vii

The Unity of Ruskin's Writings .... xi

Introduction

It is distinctive of the nineteenth century that in its passion for criticising everything in heaven and earth it by no means spared to criticise itself. Alike in Carlyle's fulminations against its insincerity, in Arnold's nice ridicule of Philistinism, and in Ruskin's repudiation of everything modern, we detect that fine dissatisfaction with the age which is perhaps only proof of its idealistic trend. For the various ills of society, each of these men had his panacea. What Carlyle had found in hero-worship and Arnold in Hellenic culture, Ruskin sought in the study of art; and it is of the last importance to remember that throughout his work he regarded himself not meting merely as a writer on painting or buildings or tendencies myths or landscape, but as the appointed critic of the age. For there existed in him, side by side with his consuming love of the beautiful, a rigorous Puritanism which was constantly correcting any tendency toward a mere cult of the aesthetic. It is with the interaction of these two forces that any study of the life and writings of Ruskin should be primarily concerned.

I

THE LIFE OF RUSKIN

It is easy to trace in the life of Ruskin these two forces tending respectively toward the love of beauty and toward the contempt of mere beauty. They are, indeed, present from the beginning. He inherited from his Scotch parents that upright fearlessness which has always characterized the race. His stern mother " devoted him to God before he was born," ^ and she guarded her gift with unremitting but perhaps misguided caution. The

1 Prceterita. He was born February 8, 1819.

viii INTRODUCTION

child was early taught to find most of his entertainment within himself, and when he did not, he was whipped. He had no playmates and few toys. His chief story-book was the Bible, which he read many times from cover to cover at his mother's knee. His father, the "perfectly honest wine-merchant," seems to have been the one to foster the boy's aesthetic sense; he was in the habit of reading aloud to his little family, and his son's apparently genuine appreciation of Scott, Pope, and Homer dates from the incredibly early age of five. It was his father, also, to whom he owed his early acquaintance with the finest landscape, for the boy was his companion in yearly business trips about Britain, and later visited, in his parents' company, Belgium, western Germany, and the Alps.

All this of course developed the child's precocity. He was early suffered and even encouraged to compose verses ; ^ by ten he had written a play, which has unfortunately been preserved. The hot-house rearing which his parents believed in, and his facility in teaching himself, tended to make a regular course of schooling a mere annoyance ; such Early schooling as he had did not begin till he was

education, fifteen, and lasted less than two years, and was broken by illness. But the chief effect of the sheltered life and advanced education to which he was subjected was to endow him with depth at the expense of breadth, and to deprive him of a possibly vulgar, but certainly healthy, contact with his kind, M^hich, one must believe, would have checked a certain disposition in him to egotism, sentimentality, and dogmatic vehemence. "The bridle and blinkers were never taken off me," he writes.^

At Oxford — whither his cautious mother pursued him — Buskin seems to have been impressed in no very es- Student sential manner by curriculum or college mates, at Oxford. With learning per se he was always dissatisfied and never had much to do ; his course was distinguished not so much by erudition as by culture. He easily won the

1 Ruskin himself quotes a not very brilliant specimen in Modern Painters, III, in " Moral of Landscape."

2 PrcBterita, § 53.

INTRODUCTION ix

Kewdigate prize in poetry ; his rooms in Christ Church were hung with excellent examples of Turner's landscapes, — the gift of his art-loving father, — of which he had been an intimate student ever since the age of thirteen. But his course was interrupted by an illness, apparently of a tuberculous nature, which necessitated total relaxation and various trips in Italy and Switzerland, where he Traveling seems to have been healed by walking among in Europe, his beloved Alps. For many years thereafter he passed months of his time in these two countries, accompanied sometimes by his parents and sometimes rather luxuriously, it seems, by valet and guide.

Meanwhile he had commenced his career as author with the first volume of Modern Painters, begun, the world knows, as a short defense of Turner, originally career as intended for nothing more than a magazine an author article. But the role of art-critic and law-giver ^^ "^' pleased the youth, — he was only twenty-three when the volume appeared, — and having no desire to realize the ambition of his parents and become a bishop, and even less to duplicate his father's career as vintner, he gladly seized the opportunity thus offered him to develop his aesthetic vein and to redeem the public mind from its vulgar apathy thereby. He continued his work on Modern Pai7iters, with some intermissions, for eighteen years, and supplemented it with the equally famous Seven Lam.jps of Architecture in 1849, and The Stones of Venice in 1853.

This life of zealous work and brilliant recognition was interrupted in 1848 by E-uskin's amazing marriage to Miss Euphemia Gray, a union into which he entered at the desire of his parents with a docility as stupid as it was stupendous. Five years later the couple were quietly divorced, that Mrs. Ruskin might marry Mil- Domestic lais. All the author's biographers maintain an tro'i^les. indiscreet reserve in discussing the affair, but there can be no concealment of the fact that its effect upon Ruskin was profound in its depression. Experiences like this and his later sad passion for Miss La Touche at once presage and indicate his mental disorder, and no doubt had their share

X INTRODUCTION

— a large one — in causing Kuskin's dissatisfaction with everything, and above all with his own life and work. Be this as it may, it is at this time in the life of Ruskin that we must begin to reckon with the decline of his aesthetic and the rise of his ethical impulse ; his interest passes from art to conduct. It is also the period in which he began his career as lecturer, his chief interest being the social life of his age.

By 1860, he was publishing the papers on political economy, later called Unto This Last, which roused so RusWn's great a storm of protest when they appeared in increasing the Cornhill 3fagazine that their publication had social ques- to be suspended. The attitude of the public toward tlons. such works as these, — its alternate excitement

and apathy, — the death of his parents, combined with the distressing events mentioned above, darkened Ruskin's life and spoiled his interest in everything that did not tend to make the national life more thoughtfully solemn.

"It seems to me that now . . . the thoughts of the true nature of our life, and of its powers and responsibilities should present themselves with absolute sadness and sternness." *

His lectures as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, a post which he held at various times from 1870 to 1883, failed to re-establish his undistracted interest in things beautiful. The complete triumph of the reformer over the art-critic is marked by Fors Clavigera, a series of letters to workingmen, begun New Year's Day, 1871, in which it was proposed to establish a model colony of peasants, whose lives should be made simple, honest, happy, and even cultured, by a return to more primitive methods of tilling the soil and of making useful and beautiful objects. The Guild of St. George, established to ''slay the dragon of industrialism," to dispose of machinery, slums, and discontent, consumed a large part of Ruskin's time the reform- and money. He had inherited a fortune of aper over the proximately a million dollars, and he now beeran art-critic. I ,. c -. ■ • i -^ i,i v

to dispose of it in various charitable schemes, —

establishing tea-shops, supporting young painters, planning 1 The Mystery of Life.

I

INTRODUCTION xi

model tenements, but, above all, in elaborating his ideas for the Guild. The result of it all — whatever particular reforms were effected or manual industries established — was, to Ruskin's view, failure, and his mind, weakening under the strain of its profound disappointments, at last crashed in ruin.

It is needless to follow the broken author through the desolation of his closing years to his death in 1900. Save for his charming reminiscences, Prceterita, his Death in work was done ; the long struggle was over, the ^^°°- struggle of one man to reduce the complexities of a national life to an apostolic simplicity, to make it beautiful and good,

Till the high God behold it from beyond,

And enter it.