John Ruskin, social reformer

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface v

I. Formative Influences of Early Life . . 11

Preface

A book which professes to be primarily an exposition of Mr. Ruskin's social teaching may seem at first sight to be needless and unprofitable. No master of impassioned prose has endowed his writings with more perspicuity of meaning and more force of utterance, or used a fuller liberty of reiteration in placing his chief thoughts before the reading public. And yet these very qualities of brilliance and amplitude have helped to hide from many the supreme value of Mr. Ruskin's criticism of life, especially in reference to social reform, by giving too great emphasis and attractiveness to unrelated individual thoughts, set in single jewelled sentences, or in purple patches, and by thus concealing the consistency of thought and feeling which underlay and gave intellectual unity and order to his work. Though Mr. Ruskin, like Matthew Arnold, would probably disclaim the title of a system-maker, as implying too mechanical a conception of his intellectual life, and though his mode of composition seldom leans towards severity of arrangement, yet no great modern thinker exhibits in his writings a more definite and conscious adjustment of ideas, both in the order of their growth and in the maintenance of their relations towards one another.

Mr. Ruskin will rank as the greatest social teacher

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of his age, not merely because he has told the largest number of important truths upon the largest variety of vital matters, in language of penetrative force, but because he has made the most powerful and the most felicitous attempt to grasp and to express, as a comprehensive whole, the needs of a human society and the processes of social reform. To assert that he has attained or even approached complete success, either in his delineation of the social ideal, or in his estimate of particular measures and movements of progress, would be to prefer a foolish claim. But it may be justly said that he has done more than any other Englishman to compel people to realise the nature of the social problem in its wider related issues affecting every department of work and life, and to enforce the supreme moral obligation of confronting it.

In seeking to mark this unity and consistency of conscious design in Mr. Ruskin's work, and, at the same time, to furnish a critical estimate of the whole and of the parts, I shall run the risk of offending some by tedium, and others by the presumption which attaches to the most cautious censorship of the great. In drawing together and imposing argumentative order upon thoughts which flit self-poised and with bright irrespon- \ sibility among the pages of Mr. Ruskin's brilliantly discursive books, I shall seem to some to be guilty of literary desecration. My defence must be that I am | claiming for Mr. Ruskin, as the chief among his virtues, . one which has not yet been admitted save by a small section of his numerous readers, the distinction of being a philosophic thinker upon the nature and modes of social progress, particularly on its economic side.

PREFACE. vil

The very qualities which have pleased the body of his readers most, the brilliant word-painting (which he has vainly repudiated), the superb freedom of passionate utterance in praise and blame, the immense variety of swift and telling illustration, the gifts of rhetorical exaggeration which he employs, have done him this injury with sober-minded thinkers of a more practical or scientific turn, that they have concealed the close and accurate texture of his deeper thought. Thus the selfish interests and the false passions which he so constantly and bitterly assailed have, in part at any rate, succeeded in persuading large sections of the thinking world that, while Mr. Ruskin is a valuable art-critic and a brilliant litterateur, he has no claim to serious consideration as an economist and a thinker upon social reform. Particular phrases and judgments have been distorted and abused, the grossest misrepresentations of a general character have been employed, in order either to pretend that Mr. Ruskin did not really mean what he has plainly said, or that his fundamental notions and valuations are too unsubstantial to deserve the attention of thoughtful practical reformers. This is the common price paid by literary genius to the dull-witted multitude, who have always been easily persuaded that a man who writes well cannot think clearly or deeply.

Some even among his lovers and admirers may hold their master to blame for a certain perverse ingenuity of waywardness in the intentional disorder of his reasoning. That he has in fact carried this disorder so far as to hide from many the full appreciation of his logic is my chief excuse for this work.

To crib, cabin, and confine in a dull array of formal

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propositions the rich exuberance of Mr. Ruskin's thought would be a needless injury. This I have endeavoured to avoid. But, however one may handle so delicate a writer for purposes of exposition, some considerable loss of the finer flavour of his work is unavoidable. As we draw together from diverse quarters the compact order of his thought, the spell of his eloquence is broken, the all-pervasive charm of his rich free utterance is dissipated. To some it may seem that the establishment of a sound logical reputation is no adequate compensation for such a loss. My answer is that every reader who would appraise his work aright, in all its breadth and fullness, must in some fashion do for himself this work of formal analysis and synthesis, must seek a wholeness and a harmony in Mr. Ruskin's art of life. This central fire of inspiration which gives vitality to all his works, this art of life, issuing as it does from his supreme sense of spiritual brotherhood, is identical with the passion of social reform, which is the aspect of his work that here engages us. Some account of the outward circumstances of his life, and of the more distinctively artistic and literary interests which absorbed much of his time and attention, is here given. But neither biography nor art philosophy is treated for its own intrinsic interest, but only in so far as it helps to explain, historically or logically, the order and nature of his social teaching. My design is to render some assistance to those who are disposed to admit the validity of the claim which Mr. Ruskin has made to be first and above all else a Political Economist, and who are willing to give careful consideration alike to the strictures he has passed upon current economic theory and prac-

PREFACE. IX

tice, and to the schemes of social and industrial reconstruction which he has advocated with zeal and persistency for over thirty years.

The main part of this book is devoted to a statement and a vindication of Mr. Ruskin's claim to have placed Political Economy upon a sounder scientific and ethical foundation than it had hitherto possessed, and to have built upon that foundation an ideal of a prosperous human society. The particular qualities and defects of Mr. Ruskin's criticism and constructive policy are examined in some detail, his repudiation of democratic ideas and institutions receiving special attention. The important contribution which he made to educational theories and experiments, and its bearing upon the wider social polity, are separately discussed, and chapters are accorded to certain themes, such as his attitude towards machinery and his view of the position of woman, which seem to demand separate treatment. Finally, some account is given of the constitution of the Society and Guild of St. George, and of the industrial and educational experiments either directly associated with the Guild or animated by the spirit of Mr. Ruskin's social teaching.

For many of the biographical facts I wish to express my indebtedness to the admirable work of Mr. Collingwood, " Life and Work of John Ruskin."

I have also to acknowledge the kindness and courtesy of Mr. Ruskin, and of Messrs. George Allen & Son, in permitting me the use of copious excerpts from Mr. Ruskin's published works.

J. A. Hobson.

JOHN RUSKIN.

Chapter I. Formative Influences Of Early Life

§ 1. "An entirely honest merchant" and his wife. §2. First impressions from literature and art. § 3. Education of nature and of books. § 4. A home-keeping youth — Dawn of the literary faculty. § 5. Undergraduate days at Oxford.

§ 1. Only those who are familiar with John Ruskin's estimate of the mercantile life and of the art of home-keeping can understand the full significance of the phrases in which he summed up the distinctive and essential virtues of his parentage. The first great " formative influence" in his life was the fact that he was the son of " an entirely honest merchant " and of " a consummate housewife."

Scotch blood entered his veins from both parents, with some infusion of the Galloway Celt. Those who attach importance to the powers of "race" as determinants of individual character and work may find an interest in tracing the Celtic qualities in Mr. Ruskin's art and literature, and will attribute to this source the vivid imagination and the impulsiveness which give such brilliant colour to his social criticism. A surer influence was exercised by the Jacobite traditions which prevailed for generations among his ancestors, and which in Scotland often coalesced with a deep enduring strain of evangelical religious sentiment. John James Ruskin and his cousin-wife, when they came South, in 1809, brought with them in powerful measure the qualities of grit and foresight, the commercial and intellectual acquisitiveness which have brought so many of the North Britons to the front in the struggle of life. The two great departments of business and home-life were ordered by them with equal diligence and success. Mr. Ruskin contributed the brains and energy to a great wine business with a famous reputation for high-class " sherry." " Entire honesty " he found to be an excellent policy, for he soon began to amass considerable wealth, which enabled him to satisfy, with an ample margin, all the demands of a luxurious home and a dignified social position. The status of a successful wine-merchant, even in an age when " trade " was less irreproachable in its respectability than now, was always good, being that of a responsible adviser to the aristocracy and gentry in one of the most important and critical departments of gentlemanly conduct — the selection of their wine. This fact, more than any other, enabled the wine-trade, in its upper grade, to escape some of the demoralising effects of excessive competition, which have broken down the responsibility of a merchant to his " customers" in most trades.

Though closely devoted to his business, Mr. Ruskin, however, was never absorbed in it. Having received a sound and liberal education in Edinburgh, he enjoyed ample leisure and means for cultivating literary and artistic tastes, and the reading aloud of good books and the collection and study of pictures form a large part of the early recollections of his son. Mrs. Ruskin seems to have been the stronger character of the two, determining with somewhat autocratic power all the larger issues, and exercising a constant and minute supervision over the early life and conduct of her only child. Her nature, as revealed to us in many scattered passages of John Ruskin' s books, is too acutely positive, too unyielding in its power, to be very prepossessing, seeking and winning more respect and admiration than affection. As we read the story of his childhood, we feel his mother's " principles " are too obtrusive to be wholly pleasing or wholly profitable. " My mother's general principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady watchfulness from all possible pain or danger ; and for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor troublesome." * The words, " as I liked," however, require serious qualification, for " toys " were forbidden ; and a sorrowful story is told of a carnally-minded aunt who gave the baby a splendid Punch and Judy, which was promptly confiscated by his mother, who said, " ' It was not right that I should have them,' and I never saw them again." Old-fashioned views about the place of punishment in education prevailed in the Ruskin household. " I was always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs." When it is added that her earliest conception of her special duty in education took the form of forcing John to acquire long chapters of the Bible with perfect verbal accuracy every morning, and 1 Jlors, Letter li. (iii. 38).

to read the book right through, once a year at least, \ from Genesis to the Apocalypse, every syllable, at a time when no skill of interpretation in the teacher and no precocity in the pupil could have imparted a right understanding of many portions, the opinion we form of her judgment and discretion is not too favourable.

But the imaginative reconstruction of a personality from episodes is seldom reliable, and, in the case of Mr. Ruskin's mother, evidently gives a most unjustly biassed view. The fuller and more general picture is that of a singularly peaceful and gentle home, parents closely attached to one another, and in ever kind and anxious sympathy with all that made for the interest and welfare of their child. The strong evangelical leanings of the mother admitted the relaxations of " a lighter self " capable of a free and honest enjoyment even of the stories of Fielding and Sterne, which Mr. Ruskin's father, a devoted student of literary masterpieces, read aloud in the evenings.

§ 2. This family life was self-centred to an unusual extent ; and the extreme care which both parents took of their boy kept him from many of the childish interests which might have thrown him freely amongst other children and have widened the area of child-life. As we read his early story we are reminded of the title he has given to one of his own books, " Hortus Inclusus." To the physical care bestowed upon him by his mother, John, » with his delicate constitution and mental precocity, owed very much. To the early training he received in literature and art he owed still more. Too much is often made " of books that have influenced me." But no careful student of Mr. Ruskin can fail to see the extraor- ' dinarily powerful impact upon his sensitive imagination and his retentive memory of the " great books " which taught him his earliest wider lessons of life and humanity. The Bible, Sir Walter Scott, Homer (in Pope's version) not only formed his early outlook upon life and history, but stored his childish mind with images and words which made an imperishable impression upon his literary work.

Art, too, crept early into his life, for his father was not merely a collector but an amateur painter of delicate taste, and pictures and engravings were objects of serious interest to him. The somewhat austere habits of this Scottish household seem to have admitted a good deal of material comfort which, under the pressure of a rapidly expanding income, included many expensive luxuries, though never degenerating into show or I magnificence.

Born in London, John Ruskin was yet no city-bred boy. In 1824, when he was five years old, the family moved to a comfortable mansion in Heme Hill, then a charming rural spot, upon which the speculative builder had not begun to lay unholy hands. Here the Ruskins kept almost entirely to themselves, rarely entertaining, never "entering society," giving their son John the best of everything, as they understood it, in physical and mental culture. In such an atmosphere, fenced round by parental solicitude, there was indeed grave danger lest a sensitive, precocious child might develop into a portentous prig. That he escaped this fate must in part be imputed to his native modesty, and to the powerful early interests in books, art, and nature which took him outside of himself.

§ 3. Had the elder Mr. Ruskin been possessed by that same genius of mis-education which was driving another Scottish father 1 to attempt the ruin of another distinguished son, it would have gone hard with John Ruskin. Fortunately, the strict physical regimen of young Ruskin was mitigated by abundance of free leisure, that " broad margin to life " which is so essential to healthy growth. From books and the routine of a too carefully ordered home, John found wholesome relief in the beauties of Nature, which were the objects of his earliest and most abiding passion. The woods and streams and trees in the charming country round Dulwich became his familiar friends, and their free beauty formed a healthy counterpoise to the "luxury and formalism" which in later years he recognised as chief dangers of his early years. Moreover, each summer, the peaceful monotony of residence at Heme Hill was broken by long and delightful travels, in which the child became familiar with all the varied scenery of his native land. There is an irresistible quaintness in the picture of little John packed away in the post-chaise with father and mother, leisurely traversing England and Scotland as they drove from one stately home to another, to take orders for sherry. Mr. Ruskin was his own traveller, and worked in pleasure and business most successfully. It was indeed a splendid education for such a child, who saw all the famous sights, the cities, cathedrals, rivers, mountains, castles of his native land. His first love, he tells us, was for castles and ruins, not for pictures ; that came afterwards. These travels, to be supplemented later by Continental journeys, fastened the realities of history upon his imagination, and early reflections and 1 James Mill.

I judgments began to stir his childish mind. From I Homer and Scott he had already gained "strange I ideas about kings," and in " Fors Clavigera" * he tells jhow "a painful wonder soon arose in my child-mind why the castles should now be always empty. Dark i yearning took hold of me for a kind of Restoration" — a seedling of the later hero-worship and new feudalism which were to figure so strongly in his scheme of social reform.

Too much, however, must not be made of these dim foreshadowings. Ruskin's early love was the pure romantic passion for beautiful scenery and historic associations. This soon took further shape in the beginnings of scientific curiosity. Not content with a " superficial sentiment," derived from the " grandeur " of mountains, he wished to know about them, became a searcher into causes. Mountains thus led him to mineralogy and physical geography, and one by one other branches of the natural sciences began to interest him, and he sought to give more definite meaning to the rivers, the clouds, trees, and all the objects of the external world.

This early scientific spirit belongs to the " analytic " talent which Mr. Ruskin in manhood has always justly claimed as his most distinctive gift. His was never a mere delicately receptive mind ; to accurate sensation he added this power of analysis and the attendant faculty of creative imagination. Those, however, who regard him distinctively as of a poetical imaginative nature have no justification for this view. Of the faculties just named, the creative imagination was always weaker than the faculties of observation and analysis, 1 Fors, Letter x. (i. 193).

§ 4. Later in life Mr. Ruskin brought this rare ana-, lytic power to bear upon the moral education of his early life. Its virtues and defects are clearly and justly: indicated by him. Peace, obedience, and faith were the moral atmosphere he breathed ; truth, honesty, and per-; feet exactitude of conduct were taught in the example; of his parents ; the foundation of justice and consideration for others was laid in his home life. It was a safe; but hardly a stimulating moral atmosphere. It furnished, he tells us, " nothing to love," and " nothing to! endure : " the " judgment of right and wrong and power I of independent action were left wholly undeveloped." 1 Nor was any corrective to this somewhat enervating calm furnished by school life. Except for a brief season in a small day-school, his " education " was conducted by private tutors under the same close parental care. The best "individual attention" of skilled teachers was secured for him both in the ordinary branches of learn- 1 ing and in art. It is impossible to assess the gain and loss arising from this policy of home education. On the ( whole, however, it is probably a matter for congratulation that young Ruskin escaped the hardening ordeal of a great public school at a time before modern notions of humanity had softened the asperities of mechanical discipline. Brutal injustice is ill compensated by a rough sense of comradeship ; and to thrust into the educational \ cock-pit a sensitive nature such as Ruskin's in order that he might " find his level," and " have the nonsense knocked out of him," was a fatuous policy, which the; good sense and affection of his parents forbade them to entertain. Thus he escaped the fate of being turned out 1 Fors, Letter liv. (iii. 109) v of an educational factory at nineteen, a "man of the world " with fixed habits, ideas, and associations.

The result of excessive home-keeping was a lack of comradeship in work and play, and a premature excessive cultivation of the arts of self-expression in literature. There was none of the coercive over-pressure which went near to ruin J. S. Mill. But the solitary leisure of childhood awakened too early and too rapidly the thirst for literary expression. At six years old " graphomania " seized him ; even before he had learned to write he taught himself to copy print, and the reading and making of books became his constant passion. Fiction with long descriptive passages and fraught with morals, in imitation of an early favourite, Miss Edgeworth, sometimes interspersed with dips into "hydraulics, pneumatics, acoustics, electricity, astronomy, mineralogy," were his earliest products. But from his eighth year the passion for metre and rhyme gained such a hold that he spent most of his leisure in composing poems, not wholly unambitious in their scope, as the title of one begun in his ninth year indicates, " Eudosia : a Poem of the Universe." As he advanced in boyhood, the diligent habit of putting into literary form, chiefly poetic, a close record of impressions and thoughts never quitted him. Even when much time was of necessity accorded to lessons, this activity did not much abate. The constant strain of mental energy does not seem to have been seriously discouraged by his parents, though it was undoubtedly the formation of a habit of restless intellectuality fraught with grave consequences in his later life.

Thus compassed in boyhood by all the luxuries of an

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upper middle-class home, where wealth was visibly swelling, enjoying the best books, the choicest art, the most interesting travels, picked teachers, and the constant care of devoted parents, Ruskin grew up to manhood. This tranquillity was but once subjected to serious disturbance, when an early attachment to a sweet young visitor, daughter of his father's French partner, was nipped in the bud by his discreet parents, who discovered with no slight alarm that their young prodigy, whom they destined for the Church, with secret hopes that he would one day be a bishop, was intending to pledge his affections to a Roman Catholic ! This severance was John Ruskin's first taste of deep sorrow, and his sufferings of body and mind testified to the unusual intensity of his emotional nature.

Among the many varied interests of boyhood — art, literature, science, travels, history — we find no distinct traces of any gathering of moral and intellectual forces of criticism which took the direction of social reform. Heme Hill was no rallying-place for those statesmen and economists whose earnest projects stirred the enthusiasm and exercised the understanding of young John Mill, who was to be Mr. Ruskin's protagonist in the field of social politics. His father, content with the political philosophy of Homer and Scott, stood rooted in a Toryism so firm and simple that the gathering clouds in the political horizon caused him neither interest nor fear. His son pithily sums up this attitude, describing him as " utterly hating Radicals and devoted to the House of Lords." x Though England was passing through

1 See this passage, " On the Old Koad," vol. i., p. 11, for an interesting vignette of the elder Kuskin.

the most critical phase of her modern political history in the struggle of the reform period, there is scarce a mention of politics in the full and free reminiscences of the home at Heme Hill. Public events, unless of a specially literary or artistic character, scarcely found entrance to this peaceful household.

The few visitors who penetrated this " self-engrossed quiet " were, with the exception of two or three artists, all business acquaintances, whose conversation hardly contributed to broaden the social views of the boy. Yet from this source some early enlightenment regarding the nature of the business world seems to have come upon young Ruskin, for he tells us in " Prseterita" how from these business dinners he formed " an extremely low estimate of the commercial mind as such." 1 Nor did the outer world supply what was needed for social education. A rich London suburb is perhaps the least favourable soil for the cultivation of genuine social sympathies. The Ruskins, moreover, appeared to have had but slight intercourse with neighbours, rich or poor. Neither theatregoing nor other public entertainments drew them out, and they seemed to have confined their public appearances to attendance at an unfashionable chapel on Sundays. They had few friends, still fewer intimates, " my father and mother in their hearts caring for nobody in the world but me." 2

Even in the travels over England and the Continent the chief and absorbing topics of interest were scenery, churches, castles, works of art, — the life and manners of the people being of quite subordinate and incidental import. Though John Ruskin, in his journeys over Britain 1 Prseterita, i. 328. 2 Ibid., i. 240.

in the post-chaise, must have passed over the land during the period of in tensest misery and degradation we have ever known, when " the condition of the people " was beginning to force itself upon the governing classes by insurrectionary movements of impotent despair, there is nothing to indicate that the poverty and degradation of a people widely lapsing into hopeless pauperism, or congested in loathsome disease-swept areas of new manufacturing towns, claimed the attention or deeply stirred the feelings of our travellers. Engels, in his " English Working Classes in 1844," has given an appalling picture of the great " Cottonopolis." But young Ruskin's boyish record confines itself to telling us that " Manchester is a most disagreeable town." 2

It was the England of romantic castles and cathedrals, of fair streams and majestic hills, that absorbed the boyish passion. Perhaps it was best that it should have been so, that the ugliness and misery of life should have been so carefully kept from spoiling the dreams of golden youth. Yet, as we read the eloquent denunciation and commiseration of Mr. Ruskin's later years, we sometimes feel that the note of close, detailed familiarity from personal experience, which gives such actuality to his treatment of inanimate nature and art, is lacking ; though deep inherent truths are presented, there is a suspicion

1 Later improvements only induced Kuskin to expand this judgment, for in " Fors " (iv. 201) we find him declaring that, " taken as a whole, Manchester can produce no good art and no good literature ; it is falling off even in the quality of its cotton ; it has reversed and vilified in loud lies every essential principle of political economy." It is only fair to say that this Khadamantine judgment was evoked by the proposal to annex the lake of Thirlmere for the supply of water to Manchester.

of unrealism which would not have been there if John Ruskin had grown up from infancy in frank, close, personal contact with the life of the masses, whose claims upon a life worth living he champions so powerfully.

This tardy experience of the darker side of life Mr. Ruskin himself clearly recognises. Summing the experiences of his first twenty years he says, " I had never seen death, nor had any part in the grief or anxiety of a sick chamber ; nor had I ever seen, far less conceived, I the misery of unaided poverty." 1

This is significant of much, for it points to a late I revelation of the meaning and entire character of life.

§ 6. Many a lad, his schooldays ended, is plunged into the battle of life, to fight his way in business or profession or in the university, and to stand or fall largely by his own efforts. But his parents fenced round John Ruskin with almost the same protecting care in his Oxford career as in his home. His mother lived in lodgings at Oxford during all the terms he kept, and his father's figure became a familiar one in the High Street. The choice of a college was a momentous question. The best that care or money could procure had always been his. Christ Church must be his college : the life of a commoner, even in an essentially aristocratic college, is not good enough ; he must be gentleman-commoner, wear a gold tassel, and consort with the scions of noble families. Though it is suggested that some doubt about his ability to pass a preliminary examination contributed to this decision, Mr Ruskin him- 1 Praeterita, i. 431.