Ruskin, John
John (1819-1900), a famous English art critic, author, and reformer. His father was a London wine merchant--an honest man of Scottish ancestry. When Ruskin was a young lad, small enough to sit on a bracket in front of his parents, he accompanied them in a chaise every summer, making the rounds of his father's customers. In this way he traveled through England, Wales, and the southern half of Scotland. He was educated at home or under private tutors. As we learn from Praeterita, an autobiographical work from Ruskin's own hand, his favorite books were Scott's novels, Pope's Dunciad, Robinson Crusoe, and Pilgrim's Progress. He attended lectures at King's College, London, and was sent to Christ's College, Oxford University. His first writing for publication consisted of essays for Loudon's Magazine of Natural History and the Architectural Magazine. The bit of writing by which he is known best to young people is The King of the Golden River. It was written in 1841 for a little girl friend. In 1848, when she was nineteen and he twenty-nine, they were married. Finding later that their domestic life was unhappy, and that he was not a real husband, he consented to the annulment of their marriage and her marriage to a young painter by the name of Millais.
At the conclusion of his university course Ruskin was of the opinion that he should devote himself to painting. He took lessons under the ablest instructors of the day, including Copley Fielding. In 1843 he began giving to the press a series of volumes entitled Modern Painters. They were signed "A Graduate of Oxford." In these volumes, which attracted immediate attention, he entered upon a brilliant defense of the work of recent painters, especially Turner, declaring it superior to that of the ancient masters. His work grew into a general exposition of the principles that underlie the art of painting. It won reputation for its author and recognition for the painters of the day, and is considered still a standard work on the subject. It is full of passages of great power and beauty, and thoroughly established the writer's reputation as a man of letters.
When a child, Ruskin was fond of watching carpenters and stone masons at work. During his travels through England he had opportunity to study the most noted cathedrals and other buildings. He traveled extensively on the continent, especially in Italy. In 1849 he began writing on architectural subjects. His Seven Lamps of Architecture is a systematic exposition of the principles that underlie the builder's art. These principles, which he called the "Seven Lamps," are sacrifice, truth, power, beauty, life, memory, and obedience. By sacrifice is meant, for instance, the expenditure of wealth. In his judgment a building must be rich to be architectural. This work was followed by The Stones of Venice in 1851, and The Elements of Drawing in 1857. Sesame and Lilies, a precious little volume in which he gives his ideas of reading and education, appeared in 1864. The Ethics of the Dust, Crown of Wild Olive, and Queen of the Air followed soon after. Other works that should be mentioned are his Architecture of Venice, The Harbors of England, Proserpina, Studies of Wayside Flowers, Arrows of the Chace, On the Old Road, etc. His collected works occupy thirty volumes. In 1878 he broke down under an attack of brain fever. With the exception of Praeterita, already mentioned, his writings came to an end.
About this time, when Ruskin was at the height of his fame, his father died, leaving him an independent fortune. His attention had been attracted gradually to the social conditions prevalent in England. His sympathies were aroused by the wretched condition of working people. He professed to be much indebted to the writings of Carlyle. Like Carlyle, he was a violent Tory. He believed that it was the duty of working people to be industrious, economical, temperate, and obedient, leaving to the so-called higher classes the duties of government. He believed it unwise to give poor men the right to vote or a voice in the election of members of Parliament. In 1871 he began writing Fors Clavigera, or Letters to the Workingmen and Laborers of Great Britain. For the next ten years he continued writing, until about 1885. From this time on, improvement in the condition of workingmen occupied the greater part of his thought. He invested $35,000, a tenth of his entire property, in a scheme known as the Guild of Saint George, under which name he started some experiments in agriculture and manufacturing. It was his design to rescue poor people from the slums of the large cities, and to employ them in helpful occupations in the country. Beyond showing his sympathy and arousing public interest, his plans came to little.
During his lifetime Ruskin held a number of educational positions. He lectured on art at Cambridge and at Oxford. In 1871 he was gratified by an honorary election to the rectorship of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Although not a practical man in the sense of being able to make one dollar earn another, Ruskin was without doubt one of the greatest men of his century. His writings are pervaded throughout by a spirit of purity, sincerity, and unselfishness. Like Carlyle, he was a foe to all pretense, whether in painting, sculpture, literature, or society. Ruskin lived too much by himself, too exclusively in the world of art and literature, to be able to suggest practical plans for the betterment of the homes and lives of laboring people, but it would be difficult to name a writer who has done more to elevate and purify human thought. One can scarce read a page of Ruskin chosen at random without finding himself possessed of greater determination to do the right thing by himself and his fellow men. As a writer of English prose Ruskin is unsurpassed. Words are his servants. They say exactly what he would have them say, no more, no less. No writer combines such beauty of imagination with such directness and simplicity of style.
SAYINGS OF RUSKIN.
Conceit may puff a man up, but never props him up.
Life without labor is guilt; labor without art is brutality.
In mortals, there is a care for trifles, which proceeds from love and conscience, and is most holy; and a care for trifles, which comes from idleness and frivolity, and is most base.
Of all God's gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color, and sad color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.
There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe; you might have seen the gods there morning and evening--Apollo and all the sweet muses of the Light--walking in fair procession on the lawns of it, and to and fro among the pinnacles of its crags. You cared neither for gods nor grass, but for cash (which you did not know the way to get); you thought you could get it by what the Times calls "Railroad Enterprise." You enterprised a railroad through the valley--you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream. The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton, which you think a lucrative process of exchange.
"Pay good and bad workmen alike?" Certainly. The difference between one prelate's sermons and his successor's--or between one physician's opinion and another's--is far greater, as respects the qualities of mind involved, and far more important in result to you personally, than the difference between good and bad laying of bricks (though that is greater than most people suppose). Yet you pay with equal fee, contentedly, the good and bad workmen upon your soul, and the good and bad workmen upon your body; much more may you pay, contentedly, with equal fees, the good and bad workmen upon your house.
"Nay, but I choose my physician and (?) my clergyman, thus indicating my sense of the quality of their work." By all means, also, choose your bricklayer, that is the proper reward of the good workman to be "chosen." The natural and right system respecting all labor is, that it should be paid at a fixt rate, but the good workman employed, and the bad workman unemployed. The false, unnatural, and destructive system is when the bad workman is allowed to offer his work at half price, and either take the place of the good, or force him by his competition to work for an inadequate sum.
For all other rivers there is a surface, and an underneath, and a vaguely displeasing idea of the bottom. But the Rhone flows like one lambent jewel; its surface is nowhere, its ethereal self is everywhere, the iridescent rush and translucent strength of it blue to the shore, and radiant to the depth.
Fifteen feet thick, of not flowing, but flying water; not water, either,--melted glacier, rather, one should call it; the force of the ice is with it, and the wreathing of the clouds, the gladness of the sky, and the continuance of time.
Waves of clear sea are, indeed, lovely to watch, but they are always coming or gone, never in any taken shape to be seen for a second. But here was one mighty wave that was always itself, and every fluted swirl of it, constant as the wreathing of a shell. No wasting away of the fallen foam, no pause for gathering of power, no helpless ebb of discouraged recoil; but alike through bright day and lulling night, the never-pausing plunge, and never-fading flash, and never-hushing whisper, and, while the sun was up, the ever-answering glow of unearthly aquamarine, ultramarine, violet-blue, gentian-blue, peacock-blue, river-of-paradise blue, glass of a painted window melted in the sun, and the witch of the Alps flinging the spun tresses of it forever from her snow. There were pieces of wave that danced all day as if Perdita were looking on to learn; there were little streams that skipped like lambs and leaped like chamois; there were pools that shook the sunshine all through them, and were rippled in layers of overlaid ripples, like crystal sand; there were currents that twisted the light into golden braids, and inlaid the threads with turquoise enamel; there were strips of stream that had certainly above the lake been, mill streams, and were busily looking for mills to turn again.--Geneva and the Rhone.