Briefly, Mr. Ruskin has passed his life in writing immortal books, and in spending his money on lavish but most generous principles of his own. It is a belief of his, that sometimes a man should die poor.

Still it by no means follows that Mr. Ruskin will be accepted as an authority by everyone. When any man sets himself to insist upon unwelcome truths, and is rewarded by silent or contemptuous disregard, it is only what we expect. It is only what he will expect, if he is wise. So there is a certain class of people ready enough to sneer at Mr. Ruskin's social criticism, and to indulge in any amount of cheap satire at its expense. They may call it in their vague way, "“sentimental," "unpractical," etc. Even another class, composed of persons who delight in his books, who acknowledge him as a master of English prose, will pronounce him foolish, whimsical, and extravagant, in matters outside the boundary of Art; and in a few that are inside, as well. Το a certain extent Mr. Ruskin has given cause for these strictures; but to an infinitely greater extent they are the result of ignorance or other insufficiency of his readers. For instance, if anyone were to open casually a volume of Fors Clavigera, and drop upon some " Affairs of the Master," he might possibly close the book with the thought that the author was a conceited crotchet-monger. Had he known the reasons (as given in other places) for the singularities that had thus annoyed him, his opinion might have been very considerably modified. But if anyone with a fair knowledge of Mr. Ruskin's books, comes to the same or a similar conclusion, then, without doubt, he is utterly unworthy to read either Mr. Ruskin or any other great author whatsoever. For the fact is, that upon nothing that Mr. Ruskin has at any time said, has there rested any shadow of meanness. And beyond the most capricious or impetuous statements that he has ever made, we can discern the great and noble soul which they would vainly struggle to hide.

"A man should die poor." How strangely and uncertainly the words must sound in ears nearly deafened by advice of the very opposite kind! The whole practice of Europe now-a-days is bitterly opposed to such a doctrine. Let a man's station be high or low, (we may suppose Mr. Ruskin's thoughts to be something of this kind), it matters not, his great aim in life is to grow rich or richer. Commerce has been turned upside down, the old and honester methods of business have been pushed aside by new and more rushing devices, and competition and false contrivances of trade have flooded the world with a mass of produce as cheap as it is nasty. The mania for cheapness has, in fact, been carried to such a pitch that scarcely anything we buy can be absolutely relied upon. The tricks of modern trade have become a by-word among us. The law that there is no friendship in trade is really taken to mean that there is no honor in it, but that everything is fair, as it is said to be in love and war. A practice such as this is altogether to be attributed to the covetous craving for riches. Our clergy, if they do not contradict by their deeds, usually ignore, upon this point, the teaching of the Master whom they profess to represent.

We have even reached the condition of being almost blind to our iniquity. The world looks with approving eyes upon the young man's

desire "to get on in life" after this fashion. It is sufficient for a man to be honoured, that he is rich. And so luxury, and her handmaiden misery, are extending each their comradeship in our midst, and may continue to do so until a point is reached where the hatreds and hardships of their connexion shall burst forth into open and horrid strife. And we know that that point must be reached sometime.

Can this sketch be called exaggerated? There are still some "entirely honest merchants;" but is it not notorious that they are in a minority as compared with those who carry on practices not now regarded as dishonourable, but which are really opposed to any high sense of honour, and which, indeed, under some slight mask, are playing, as it were, the parts of insidious but deadly poisons? Things which a man may not do without shame to a private individual, he may do with applause to a rival in trade. Or, can anyone walk through our cities without marking, not simply the toiling, but the wretched, senseless, brutal, repressed multitudes, by means of whose vital blood the system of luxury is kept supplied?

A

A great deal of Mr. Ruskin's teaching is directed against this evil, as it affects the various points of life. With passionate earnestness he declares that "advancing in life" cannot possibly mean getting more fortune, and footmen, and public honour; but that "he only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace. (2) He raises before us again the ideal of honour, and conjures us to shame it no more. man's honesty is, in sober fact, of greater importance to him than all the gold in the world. Sternly and deliberately does he assert that it is better for us to slay our neighbour than to cheat him. He asks our ever-restless citizens if they can find neither peace nor tranquility which they care to enjoy. God placed man upon the earth, intending him to be happy; will he never try to be so? Not in the phantoms he pursues may this happiness be found; but,

"A freeheartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to their pain; these, and the blue sky above you, and the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath; and mysteries and presences, innumerable, of living things-may yet be here your riches; untormenting and divine: serviceable for the life that now is; nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to come." (3)

Mr. Ruskin has written four essays upon Political Economy (4), dealing with commercial matters in a kindred spirit. They are mainly controversial. Some of the principal points insisted upon are that the merchant's calling, rightly understood, is a most noble one; that there should be a fixed wage for good and bad workmen alike; that wealth and morality are inseparable; and that the only true definition of wealth is, that it is life. With regard to the second point, Mr. Ruskin says, that at present the wages of a good workman, and his chance of work, are interfered with as follows:-a bad workman comes with an offer to

works now in course of issue.

(2) Sesame and Lilies, 42. The references are to the paragraphs in the revised edition of his (3) Crown of Wild Olive, 16. (4) Unto this Last.

do the work at a much less price; the good workman either loses the work, or he has to sink to the inadequate price. But if a fixed wage were paid, the good workmen would be employed, and the bad ones would not. Honourable provision is to be made for the poor, and those unable to obtain private employment by means of Government workshops, and various economic and educational arrangements are to be introduced. Perhaps some readers, from the look of this, may begin to imagine, as is the usual thing, that the whole scheme is of a visionary nature. It is, however, nothing of the kind. The principles laid down may be only partly true, or they may be untrue, but they cannot be so dismissed. Though there is not space here for an argumentative exposition of them, yet they are very capable of being defended. They are only unpractical in the sense that they have not been put in practice in full. They are in practice in part. Their one result, of perhaps lessening our trade, Mr. Ruskin would not much fear. For he will have nothing to do with the doctrine that England's greatness is due to her "coal" or her "shopkeeping." Strange to say, he considers other English things of even more importance than English trade.

What Mr. Ruskin thinks upon the various religious questions that are floating around us in such a confusing mist of controversy, it is hard to say. Probably his chief heresy is a too thorough belief in the precepts of Christ; and, further, a too eager wish that we should act upon them. But he has written one sentence upon religion, which one feels to be so deeply and enduringly good that it is impossible not to quote it: "For there is a true church wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and that is the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be." (4)

He has taken up strongly one or two positions with regard to Literature and Art. A large portion of the literature of the present day can scarcely be classed as of the healthiest kind. Some of our poets spend their faculties in vain regrets for Arcadian existences of the past, and some are writing what is only pretty but idle trifling. Indeed, in England, I think, no one poet (unless perhaps Browning) stands out forcibly enough as the possessor of the "large heart and the seeing eye to which nothing human is uninteresting or blank." There is only one man in America who may be said to come quite near to this. It is one reason even supposing there is no other, why even his detractors should have some little admiration for Walt. Whitman, that, whatever the sins he may have committed, he is at least so free from the prevalent ones. But, there is besides a considerable school of poets and artists who proclaim the doctrine of Art for Art's sake, who write for the mere production of a dilettante pleasure, who would deny the necessity of Truth to Beauty.

To all this Mr. Ruskin is opposed. The foundations of all great art he finds in virtue, and in virtue only. Clever bad art there may be, but' all its cleverness cannot redeem it from its badness, and it remains a disfigurement to the world. There may be art which is pretty and nothing (4) Sesame and Lilies, 37..

more, but it can never be worth much.

I have been wishing for a

chance of quoting some longer passages (the more so that Mr. Ruskin's books may possibly not be known to one or two of my readers), and will take the one that now offers. Mr. Ruskin has been saying that all lovely Art is didactic in its own nature :—

"It is often didactic also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto's, Michael Angelo's, Durer's, and hundreds more; but that is not its special functionit is didactic chiefly by being beautiful! but beautiful with haunting thought, no less than with form, and full of myths that can be read only with the heart.

"For instance, at this moment there is open beside me as I write, a page of Persian manuscript, wrought with wreathed azure and gold, and soft green, and violet, and ruby and scarlet, into one field of pure resplendence. It is wrought to delight the eyes only, and does delight them; and the man who did it assuredly had eyes in his head, but not much more. It is not didactic art, but its author was happy; and it will do the good and the harm, that mere pleasure can do. But, opposite me, is an early Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, taken about two miles from Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in the distance. The old city is seen lying beyond the waveless waters, veiled with a sweet misty veil of Athenia's weaving: a faint light of morning, peaceful exceedingly, and almost colourless, shed from behind the Voirons, increases into soft amber along the slope of the Saléve, and is just seen, and no more, on the fair warm fields of its summit, between the folds of a white cloud that rests upon the grass, but rises, high and tower-like, into the zenith of dawn above.

There is not as much colour in that low amber light upon the hill-side as there is in the palest dead leaf. The lake is not blue, but gray in mist, passing into deep shadow beneath the Voirons' pines; a few dark clusters of leaves a single white flower-scarcely seen-are all the gladness given to the rocks of the shore. One of the ruby spots of the eastern manuscript would give colour enough for all the red that is in Turner's entire drawing. For the mere pleasure of the eye, there is not so much in all those lines of his, throughout the entire landscape, as in half an inch square of the Persian's page. What made him take pleasure in the low colour that is only like the brown of a dead leaf? in the cold gray of dawn-in the one white flower among the rocks-in these-and in no more than these?

He took pleasure in them because he had been bred among English fields and hills; because the gentleness of a great race was in his heart, and its power of thought in his brain; because he knew the stories of the Alps, and of the cities at their feet; because he had read the homeric legends of the clouds, and beheld the gods of dawn. and the givers of dew to the fields; because he knew the faces of the crags, and the imagery of the passionate mountains, as a man knows the face of his friend, because he had in him the wonder and sorrow concerning life and death, which are the inheritance of the gothic soul from the days of its first sea kings; and also the compassion and the joy that are woven into the innermost fabric of every great imaginative spirit, born now in countries that have lived by the Christian faith with any courage or truth. And the picture contains also, for us, just this which its maker had in him to give; and can convey it to us, just so far as we are of the temper in which it must be received. It is didactic, if we are worthy to be taught, no otherwise. The pure heart, it will make more pure; the thoughtful, more thoughtful. It has in it no words for the reckless or the base." (5).

Of the beauty of his language what can be said? Unless we could say something well, it is better to be silent. Every reader knows it for himself. One or two things there are which we might notice. His chivalrous nature pervades all his books, and lends to them a very

(5) Queen of the Air, 108, 399.

attractive and delightful grace. He has the most charming way of introducing the beautiful Greek conceptions into our present actual life. He translates the old Greek authors in a really enchanting style. This is how he renders a passage from Homer:

"Then we came to the Eolian Island, and there dwelt Æolus Hippotades, dear to the deathless gods: there he dwelt in a floating island, and round it was a wall of brass that could not be broken; and the smooth rock of it ran up sheer. To whom twelve children were born in the sacred chamber-six daughters and six strong sons; and they dwelt for ever with their beloved father, and their mother strict in duty; and with them are laid up a thousand benefits; and the misty house around them rings with fluting all the day long." (6) So I come to the end of these few fragmentary words about John Ruskin. Giving a new Gospel to us, he has to many been a Master to follow, more than a great writer to admire. His has been a long life of the most untiring labour in the cause of man. Unhappily, there are not wanting signs that he will soon labour no more. May some of us, at any rate, live to see his ideal slowly working its way into English society. It is one of the encouraging lessons of history, that the dreams of one day sometimes become the commonplaces of the next. There are two noble verses of Robert Browning's, the one at the beginning, and the other at the end, of his Rabbi Ben Ezra, that speak, to clearest purpose, upon such subjects as we have been pursuing :

"Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made:

Our times are in His hand

Who saith; A whole I planned,

Youth shows but half; trust God, see all, nor be afraid.'"

"So take and use Thy work:

Amend what flaws may lurk,

What strain o' th' stuff, what warpings past the aim!

My times be in Thy hand!

Perfect the cup as planned!

Let age approve of youth and death complete the same!"

G.

(6) Odyssey, Book X, opening lines.

(7) Addressed to God: and the cup refers to a passage in Plato, which it would take too long to explain. It may be taken as the human soul-the plastic clay, of which God is the potter.