T H E H A R V E S T
O F R U S K I N

THE HARVEST
OF RUSKIN

BY
JOHN W. GRAHAM, M.A.
PRINCIPAL OF DALTON HALL, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
AUTHOR OF “THE DESTRUCTION OF DAYLIGHT”

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1
First published in 1920
(All rights reserved)

PREFACE

THIS book is concerned with Ruskin’s teaching in the departments of Religion and Economics only, including his social reforms and educational schemes. It leaves out all his work on Art and in Natural History and Mineralogy. His thoughts on Beauty in Landscape are treated only so far as that Beauty is damaged by Industrialism or by War. Nor has any attempt been made to produce an analysis of his literary style or styles. The long extracts which the plan of the book requires, however, afford sufficient examples of his artistry in words.

My aim is to give a critical estimate in a reverent spirit of Ruskin’s teaching in these two departments, and to apply it to the needs of our own time.

The development of Ruskin’s religious faith and its final outcome have not, I believe, been fully worked out before, and the reconciliation which I have attempted in the region of Economics is long overdue. These parts of the book have been delivered as lectures in past years under the Manchester and Liverpool University Extension Committees, at Summer Schools, and elsewhere.

I am indebted to Ruskin’s literary executors for permission to quote freely from his works.

J. W. G.

Dalton Hall,
Manchester.

CONTENTS

The Harvest of Ruskin

CHAPTER I
THE SIGNS OF A PROPHET

NOW that one hundred years have gone by since their one precious boy was born in London to a Scottish wine merchant and his wife, it may be well to ask how much of Ruskin’s teaching has proved to be chaff which the wind driveth away, and how much has been precious seed. Ruskin is just now suffering from the time of comparative neglect which intervenes between an author’s contemporaries and posterity, the years when the immediate appropriateness of his message may have lapsed, when it is no longer fresh and startling, but its permanent value has not yet been settled by the verdict of several generations. All or nearly all the great Victorians are in like case.

Ruskin’s art criticism is, as a matter of fact, not only ignored but resolutely rejected nowadays among critical writers. He loved beauty and charm in subject; he rejected scenes of horror and torture, and also subjects of mere Dutch commonplace. He loved delicate and accurately minute drawing, and the realistic detail of the Preraphælites. He desired that a tree in a picture should be recognized as an oak or a birch; and he loved above all fine drawing of mosses, leaves, and peacocks’ wings. This is the day of impressionism, super-impressionism and impression of impressionism, and so on, through ever greater abandonment of drawing and significance, to cubism, futurism and other weird follies. I am not wishful to dogmatize on these matters; I incline to the sage and wonderful conclusion that all styles are good provided they are good styles; that conscientiousness in the portrayal of what the artist really sees will not lead him astray; that originality, or at any rate a marked individual gift, is a necessity; and that there is no one orthodox school. As in everything else, the letter killeth, convention blocks progress, and slovenliness includes a multitude of sins.

But this book is not concerned with art criticism, but with the teaching about human duty and happiness, to which Ruskin’s art interests led him. The characteristic note he contributed to art criticism was to regard art as a revelation of God and of Man. He was a prophet of Beauty from his birth. Concerning his susceptibility in childhood to the power of natural Beauty, he writes in the third volume of Modern Painters,[1] in words which throw light upon his special gifts of temperament: “Although there was no definite religious sentiment mingled with it, there was a continual perception of sanctity in the whole of Nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest; an instinctive awe, mixed with delight; an indefinable thrill, such as we sometimes imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit. I could only feel this perfectly when I was alone; and then it would often make me shiver from head to foot from the joy and fear of it, when, after being some time away from the hills, I first got to the shore of a mountain river, where the brown water circled among the pebbles, or when I first saw the swell of distant land against the sunset, or the first low broken wall covered with mountain moss. I cannot in the least describe the feeling; but I do not think this is my fault, nor that of the English language, for I am afraid no feeling is describable. If we had to explain even the sense of bodily hunger to a person who had never felt it, we should be hard put to it for words; and the joy in nature seemed to me to come of a sort of heart-hunger, satisfied with the presence of a Great and Holy Spirit. These feelings remained in their full intensity till I was eighteen or twenty, and then, as the reflective and practical power increased, and the ‘cares of the world’ gained upon me, faded gradually away, in the manner described by Wordsworth in his Intimations of Immortality.”

The fact is that we are dealing with a man who belongs to the prophetic order: and this book is written in the belief that he was not only a prophet for the nineteenth, but also for the twentieth century. He has all the prophetic signs. Right or wrong, fantastic or terribly truthful, we feel that he is coining his soul into golden words. The stress and strain of his cry against priesthoods, modern business, false teaching of economics as he thought it, wore him out, and left him subject to attacks of inflammation of the brain. Rightly he spoke of Fors Clavigera as the book of his life; “best worth calling a book,” he said, of anything he had written. With it his serious work ended in 1884. Only the chatty reminiscences of Præterita were to be written after that.

He had, besides a dreadful sincerity, another mark of the true afflatus. Never, as he pleaded, had he written a line for money or for the glory of self. It was the wrong done to Turner that drove him to write Modern Painters; the necessity of character in a nation was the lesson he had to teach in tracing the history of Venice in her monuments; the cry of the poor, and indignation over the wrecking of humanity in the name of business, drove him to write Unto This Last, and all his social and economic works. He had the single-mindedness of the seer.

Again, he inspired love and discipleship in hearts ready for his message, as prophets do. The Master he was called, and the Master he remains. His loss was a personal loss. The event of January 20, 1900, was to many of us a real bereavement. The strong personal note which caused the prophets Isaiah and Hosea to do in their own persons emblematic acts for a sign, caused Ruskin also to tell his readers more about himself than anyone would who did not identify himself with his message. To the unseeing eye this looks like egotism, but it is far from that.

His life, too, was such as a prophet’s ought to be. He gave away the greater part of a fortune of £157,000, and some house property, and chose to do without advertising his books. In love and in the loss of love he suffered, but did nothing base, everything that was kind and true. As a prophet whose burden was wealth and poverty, social tyranny and human wreckage, he was able to speak as a rich man to members of his own class. A poor man who prophesies on this subject is apt to be discounted by blunt humanity, who think that he may be merely an envious grumbler.

And, once again, he has that characteristic of the messengers of the Truth, that their message is too new and strange to be acceptable at once to their contemporaries. They are accepted by the few: the world smiles or curses and passes by, but gradually it bends round in one of its great curves, and round its spiral path revolves as it approaches the centre of attraction. I shall try to show that much of Ruskin’s social and economic teaching is just such a centre of our constant approximation, though we are apparently always going nearly at right angles to it.

Here, then, we have every sign of the prophetic character: fidelity to the deepest motives of the soul, an inevitable and generally unconscious selflessness, the loyalty of his followers, his frank openness to the world, his consecrated life and holy sorrow, the antagonisms he evoked and the contempt of the proud, and the clear influence he is exerting—these, all together, are prophetic.

Let us examine his outward qualifications. Ruskin’s judgment was at times erratic; his playfulness and his petulance prevent our taking everything he said with prosaic seriousness; he was not always able to speak in measured tones of sober exactness, but gave way to exaggeration. But his intellectual equipment was of the best. He was heir both to Greece and to Judæa. The Bible was his text-book and Plato was his political teacher. All culture was at his command. Oxford, Geneva, Rome, Venice, the Alps, the Apennines and the Lake of Coniston had yielded up their best to him. He prophesied from no street corner—from the Sheldonian Theatre in the University of Oxford his message was uttered.

So much for the signs and for the outward qualifications of the seer. The prophet’s fire is recognizably there. The tabernacle of God is with men, as of old; and if He is to speak with a clear Word to our hasting age, to preach righteousness, purity, work to the idle and rest to the weary, clean cities, and clean hearts, how else would He preach than with the text of Ruskin: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you that your millionaires in all their glory of machines cannot supply to us the loss of these.”

At the age of forty-one, about the time when the mind reaches maturity, begin the social teachings of John Ruskin in full completeness—not to be much changed, except in one particular, for the quarter of a century of writing that was left him. The live coal from off the altar came to him as he was wandering in restless suffering among the valleys of Savoy, and his first “Thus saith the Lord” was written at Chamonix. Not that all this came at once. The growth can be traced; but before 1860 he was chiefly an art critic, and in that year the last volume of Modern Painters appeared.

Let us look at the advantages of the delay. They were manifold. A man should do something else besides prophesy. He should win his position, take his rank among men, in some walk of life, before he is quite qualified to tell others how to order their steps. He has a degree to take in something besides homiletics. It was from the pulpit of a great literary reputation that the author of Modern Painters opened his mouth to preach. That reputation he was content utterly to throw away; to tread on it, step upon it as upon a ladder, that from the top of it he might be heard when he spoke the words the Spirit taught him. That was the great renunciation of his literary life. What a refusal of a call it would have been had he hugged his reputation, been careful of his influence, that last temptation of noble minds. It is politicians who do that, not prophets. But these know the glorious liberty into which they come.

No doubt any other professional career would have ended with a message. What an explosion might have occurred in the Church had his mother’s wish been fulfilled, and he become a clergyman, with a Bishop to look after him. As it was, his father’s art tastes and preoccupation with pictures and with picturesque scenery, and the boy’s own early skill both as writer and draughtsman, led him, after an attempt at poetry, to become by profession a writer on Art. There he had the opportunity of elaborating his mighty implement, that superb, facile, plastic instrument of music and voice of thunder, his inimitable style. It is that which ensures the preservation of his work. Noble style is the antiseptic which preserves from decay the written words of men. Books without style are not read long.

In classifying the books in our libraries, under what head shall we place the seventy volumes of John Ruskin? There is much temptation to fall back helplessly upon the heading “Miscellaneous”; for he wrote on Art, including Sculpture, Engraving, Architecture and Heraldry; on Economics, History and constructive Politics; on Botany, Meteorology, Ornithology, Geology, and Mineralogy; he wrote Guide-books, Poems, Autobiography, Literary Criticism; he treated Theology, Ethics, Education, Music and Mythology; he brought out regularly for seven years a monthly periodical de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis; he edited Biography, German stories and translations from the Greek and the Italian: he wrote Dialogue and Fairy Tale.

Where shall we seek for unity in this manifold outpouring of a versatile genius, who touched none of these subjects without irradiating it? In that fact lies our key. With what did he irradiate this comprehensive list of human interests? The answer cannot be doubtful in the mind of any careful student. He told us how it seemed to him that all these things looked to the eye of God. He tried to solve all questions by the flashlight of the Eternal. He worked at agate and crystal that it might reveal the beauty of the Lord; he fought his social crusade for the sake of the dim disinherited multitude who had no eyes for the Divine loveliness, and no glory to behold: and for the sake of justice and of love which wealth and luxury denied. He was a messenger of the Most High to modern needs; and his eager soul found a service throughout this wide range of science and art.

Not one of his writings is called a sermon, yet we have found his class, for he belongs to the class of Divines, ordained in a temple more Metropolitan and more Catholic than Canterbury or Rome, and not made with hands. Through nearly half a century of active authorship he consecrated his every gift to the service of men. He never looked back in any unfaithfulness that we know of. I wish first to make clear that all his life the gates between the soul and the Divine Source were open: that he was truly a religious man under every form of faith and doubt; and that no one need hesitate about this at any tight place in his career. Keep this as a sure clue, and we shall fearlessly follow his story.

The childish sensibility to landscape beauty I take to be an early manifestation of the gift of the seer, a significant token of native nearness to the Unseen. For many years he never climbed a mountain, alone, without instinctively dropping on his knees on the summit, in thankful reverence. As the careless foot of an engrossing industrialism stamped into ashes more and more of the land whose fairness had been his life’s passion, it seemed to him to be indeed sacrilege and desecration, a reckless destruction of Divine things. Art he only valued as a form of expression, a language whose subject was Nature and Man. In the latter half of his life more emphatically, but more or less from the beginning, he regarded Man as the object for whose welfare Nature, in the landscape sense, existed; and he rested not till he had brought Man into due relation with God, up to whom in the end came all things.

He was devout by training. Morning and evening he read his chapter out of the Bible; and the fourteenth century manuscript he used in later years occupied a prominent and handy place in the study at Brantwood. In Swiss and Italian villages in his early journeys he read the service through on Sunday to his servant, when there was no Protestant Church. From the Biblical references in the indexes to his works, you would suppose they were a theological library. In his Oxford Lectures Art was the illustration, but conduct the theme, and Art was chosen as an illustration because in it the artist shows what manner of Man he is, in a way that cannot be dissembled.

What are the qualifications which fit a man to be a religious researcher, a mountain-top gazer into heaven?

He must know from his own experience the meaning of holiness, thereby gaining a practical knowledge of God. He must, in Pauline words, be crucified with Christ, though he may not care for such an expression; he must preach not himself and please not himself. Such a man John Ruskin was. Among the many wayward and impulsive men who have been “dear to the Muses and to the nymphs not unbeloved,” not all like him have been also masters of themselves, and kept on their foreheads the white stone, with the new name written. Ruskin was himself noble and sweet in his life, a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief endured in silence, with nothing ignoble in his eighty years of generous charity and lonely service. He had passed, too, through that experience which seems essential to the wielding of spiritual power. He had had his great renunciation, he had heard some hard call, and had obeyed. The prophets have all gone on the Via Crucis: they have all lost their lives that they might find them. As Whittier abandoned a hopeful political career and remained poor till he was sixty that he might help to free the slave, and gained his spiritual power thereby, so Ruskin in 1860 went boldly out to do battle with the Society that loved and honoured him.

Further, such a man must greatly dare. He must face the demon of the study first; then, too probably, the resentment of organized religion. One cannot succeed as a researcher without discovering something new; and that is bound to modify or overthrow something old and established.

Nor can such a man usually present a heart of iron and a front of brass to the darts of controversy. He must be a sensitive man, by the very nature of his research. He may or may not be privileged to feel strong in the strength of his cause; but even if he does the shrinking of the nerves remains. This daring and suffering were pre-eminently the lot of Ruskin; and it was this which finally broke down his mind. “He was beside himself for others’ sakes.” It was the neglect with which the St. George’s Guild and allied reform work were treated by those who were otherwise his friends, which contributed to drive him into inflammation of the brain in 1878, and again several times afterwards. “Wounded in the house of my friends.”

Besides these essential qualifications Ruskin had his very unusual gifts, which it may be long before we find again combined with the religious faculty—his long lifetime free from the need of earning money, his early popularity, his wonderful style, the vantage ground of his Professorial chair, his penetrating mind, his wit and his fire. It may be long before we see his like again.

I am far from claiming infallibility for Ruskin. Infallibility is an out-of-date conception altogether. There is no such thing on earth. To be infallible you must know everything; you must be infinite. The infallibility of a finite creature is an inhuman, even an inorganic conception. Organic life means growth, and growth means imperfection; but growth is Nature’s way of making things. Infallibility is a tyrant born of ecclesiasticism, and bred on human laziness and fear. It has become the attribute of the quack pill, and there let it abide.

But, beyond this safe generality, Ruskin had human weaknesses of an obvious kind. He loved paradox; he played with his thunderbolts a little, and rather liked to shock people. He was a humorist as well as a divine. It is difficult to put down some of his derivations to anything but sheer fooling; a man who will put the English Force and Latin Fors down to the same root, will do anything in that line. Again, when he was in thunderous action he allowed volcanoes of vituperation to erupt, which one would have wished otherwise. He sadly lacked restraint, but, like the strong language of the old Prophets, his had its root in love of man.

We know more of his intimacies and his foibles, which he loves humorously to exaggerate, than are generally given to the public. He has taken means to prevent any artificial pedestal, in idealized aloofness, ever being raised to him. His utter frankness led him to give the public his private accounts, which people generally keep to themselves; and such correspondence as that painful one with Octavia Hill.[2] But when the faults of others were in question he was silent as the grave, to his own hurt. He was “kind even to the unthankful and the evil.” As for many of us, how much more vulgar and base would the world have been without that noble and lovely soul. Many are those who owe him an irredeemable debt. His life was not, as he sadly thought, the story of baffled strife. Of him, as of Dr. Arnold, it could be said that not alone was he saved.[3]

CHAPTER II
THE PILGRIM’S WAY

HAVING now stated our conviction that Ruskin was always essentially religious, we will trace the history of his beliefs.

He began life in 1819, under the strong influence of his mother, as a Calvinistic Protestant, of the narrow type then current. The Ruskins were properly Scottish Presbyterians, living in London. A Low Church or Spurgeon’s Tabernacle was equally acceptable. His mother made him read with her daily portions of the Bible, two or three chapters, undiluted and unselected. They accomplished the journey from Genesis to Revelation in about a year, and then began at Genesis again next day, “hard names, numbers, Levitical Law and all.” They went through it at least six times together.

She also taught him, “complete and sure,” twenty-six chapters of the Bible, including the 119th Psalm, and all the Scottish Paraphrases of the Psalms.[4]

This did not make him vitally religious; he was not “converted.” The Bible was, for the present, a rather tiresome task, and to chapel he and his father went submissively, feeling their sad inferiority to the mother in these matters. His mother’s creed he dutifully imbibed, without question or strong feeling of any kind. He had the proper antipathy to Rome, and the habit of outward prayer.[5] His real religion was born at Friar’s Crag, Derwentwater, at four years old, when he looked with awe into the dark lake over the mossy tree roots, and felt himself in the Presence.

He was, as an only child, a protected treasure, the pride of and a great responsibility to his wealthy parents. He never went to a Public School, and when he went to Oxford to be made into a Bishop his parents came with him, lived in the High, and his mother saw him every day. With them, far into mid-life, he went on all his foreign journeys but two, those of 1845 and 1858. The parental ideas remained potent with him to an extent hardly realizable by this generation, which often finds it so difficult to bring their parents up properly.

His earlier works are written with the questionless devoutness of the untried mind. They were narrow in theology, fiercely Protestant, earnest enough; and on their positive side, still sound and valuable. The first two volumes of Modern Painters, the whole of the Stones of Venice and the Seven Lamps of Architecture, and the Edinburgh Lectures on Architecture and Painting belong to this period. So, broadly, do the Manchester Lectures on the Political Economy of Art in 1857; but they are the herald of the next epoch.

He resisted the new Geology of Lyell, declared indignantly that God had created the Alpine valleys, and put the rivers to flow along them, denying that the rivers had worn their own valleys out. Somewhere in the later fifties we find him scandalized by the statement of Frederick Denison Maurice that Jael’s treacherous murder of Sisera was a wicked deed. The fact that Deborah the Prophetess sang a sacred song over it was enough to justify it to Ruskin, then over thirty-five.[6]

Just before this incident, however, his moral sense was beginning to revolt from certain parts of his creed. He was, he says, invited to a “fashionable séance of Evangelical doctrine, at the Earl of Ducie’s, presided over by Mr. Molyneux, then a divine of celebrity in that sect, who sat with one leg over his other knee, in the attitude always given to Herod at the Massacre of the Innocents in mediæval sculpture, and discoursed in tones of consummate assurance and satisfaction, and to the entire comfort and consent of his Belgravian audience, on the beautiful parable of the Prodigal Son. Which, or how many, of his hearers he meant to describe as having personally lived on husks, and devoured their father’s property, did not of course appear; but that something of the sort was necessary to the completeness of the joy in heaven over them, now in Belgrave Square, at the feet, or one foot, of Mr. Molyneux, could not be questioned. Waiting my time, till the raptures of the converted company had begun to flag a little, I ventured, from a back seat, to enquire of Mr. Molyneux what we were to learn from the example of the other son, not prodigal, who was, his father said, ‘ever with me and all that I have, thine.’ A sudden horror and unanimous feeling of the serpent having somehow got over the wall into their Garden of Eden, fell on the whole company; and some of them, I thought, looked at the candles, as if they expected them to burn blue. After a pause of a minute, gathering himself into an expression of pity and indulgence, withholding latent thunder, Mr. Molyneux explained to me that the home-staying son was merely a picturesque figure introduced to fill the background of the parable agreeably, and contained no instruction or example for the well-disposed scriptural student, but on the contrary, rather, a snare for the unwary, and a temptation to self-righteousness—which was, of all sins, the most offensive to God. Under the fulmination of which answer, I retired from the séance in silence, nor ever attended another of the kind from that day to this.”[7]

It was just this lack of feeling for righteousness as such, the idea that you needed first to be a “most sinful sinner” if you wished to become a “most Christian Christian,” and a want of recognition that forgiveness was a spiritual and inward process, which caused the contemptuous references to his early form of doctrine which are scattered thickly throughout Ruskin’s later writings.

The experiences which make epochs in men’s lives are indeed strangely various and unexpected. Three events stand out as the destroyers of his Protestantism and of much of his outward edifice of faith. Their year was 1858. One was the discovery that the Puritan Sabbath of his youth had no Scriptural authority, but based itself, without confessing it, on the Jewish Sabbath Day, by erroneous interpretation. “If they have deceived me in this, they have deceived me in everything,” he said. His faith in his mother’s religious guides was gone.[8] In 1858 for the first time he broke the Sabbath by drawing some flowers on Sunday. That act, in him, stood for emancipation.[9] He had been finding that Catholic Psalters were lovely things, that Catholic peasants in Tuscany led sweet and patient lives, and that “Presbyterian prayers against time by people who never expected to be any the better for them, were unlovely and wrong.”[10] The same year he turned in at Turin to hear a Waldensian pastor. This was the second event. “To an audience of about seventeen gray-haired women and a few men, the preacher, a somewhat stunted figure with a cracked voice, put his utmost zeal into a consolatory discourse on the wickedness of the wide world, more especially of the plain of Piedmont and the city of Turin, and on the exclusive favour with God enjoyed by the between nineteen and twenty-four elect members of his congregation, in the streets of Admah and Zeboim.” “Myself neither cheered nor greatly alarmed by this doctrine, I walked back into the condemned city, and up into the gallery where Paul Veronese’s ‘Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’ glowed in full afternoon light.” And in that hour’s meditation his “evangelical beliefs were put away, to be debated of no more.”[11]

But the solvent influences did not stop there. They seldom fail to proceed. Rebuilding rather than repair is generally necessary to a broken down system of thought. But that which left him in great darkness was an experience which could have so affected no one but Ruskin. This was the third event. It was the discovery at Venice that the best work was done by irreligious painters. He found that “Tintoret only occasionally forgot himself into religion,” and that Titian had no religion at all, and yet had to be given as the standard of perfection in painting. Ruskin concluded, first, and quite truly, that “human work must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now men; whether we expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter. That by the work we have done and not by our belief we shall be judged.”[12] He went on, by generalizing, to a further conclusion in that year, afterwards to be corrected. The conclusion and the correction divide the periods of Ruskin’s life. He concluded that the group of great worldly painters of various nations, Turner, Titian, Velasquez, Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese, did more perfect and stronger work than the sacred army of obedient Catholics headed by Cimabue, Giotto and Angelico, who worked under the guidance of a heavenly vision.

This seems a strange reason for losing faith. It can only be understood when we remember that Ruskin regarded art as the expression of the painter’s whole nature, especially the soul of him; and if the endowment from heaven were really potent, it should inspire the artist to do work that is clearly supreme. That it did not do so was Ruskin’s stumbling-block. I will not anticipate the ultimate solution; but only pause to mourn over the many stumbling-blocks which our theories put in our way. Because the lot decided unfairly, Silas Marner, the wronged of heaven, lost his faith. How many have been and are unable to see through pain and poverty to God. How many have bound their faith to the accuracy of a record or the fidelity of a frail fellow-creature.

Of the religious utterances of this first period, which ended in 1858, the second volume of Modern Painters is the most typical. To me, it was the door by which in 1882 I entered into my love of Ruskin the author, as Fors led me to love and reverence the man. The subject is an analysis of Beauty as a various expression of the mind of God. It is published separately; it is not a long book; and it might be read for a second time along with the Author’s notes of 1883. These give us the verdict of age upon the enthusiasm of its own youth, and are vastly entertaining. Even as Tennyson, in his “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” puts his quietus upon the ebullitions of the most rhythmic and moving utterance of his youth, so does Ruskin, with mocking self-blame, speak with fatherly candour to the Oxford Graduate of 1845.

To this period, too, belongs his avowedly theological pamphlet, Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds. It is of 1851, attacks ecclesiastical pretensions on Scriptural grounds, and in spite of its sectarian limitations was considered so sound in its main drift that the author reissued it in his mature period.

He states that all his works up to 1853 are marred by his narrow Protestant dogmatism. Now 1858, as we have seen, was his year of freedom from it, and from much that was more precious. Between 1853 and 1858 came out volumes iii and iv of Modern Painters, the Lectures on Architecture and Painting at Edinburgh, and the lectures at Manchester on the Political Economy of Art. The last marks transition. It is the forerunner of the next period; it shows us how his way of treating Art led him on to Economics. But it is of great interest to study his position in these two volumes of Modern Painters. They are as religious as ever, and as devout; but between Catholic and Protestant, frequently brought into contrast, they hold the scales of judgment. The author casts the lantern of criticism impartially upon both, but his own faith in the great verities still holds. It is plain, however, that conduct was rising to the chief place in his mind. The Sermon on the Mount was becoming, what it ever afterwards remained to him, the central teaching of the Christian faith.

If we omit the Poems of his boyhood and youth, and his early minor scientific contributions to journals, and begin his career as a writer for the public with the year 1842, when he wrote the first volume of Modern Painters, published next year, we have sixteen years of authorship for the Early Period. We have also, oddly enough, sixteen years of authorship, 1858 to 1874, for his Middle Period, shortly to be described; and if we give sixteen years for the mature period also, that brings us to 1890, only a few months after the last number of Præterita struggled into the light from his failing pen. He wrote no more. We thus have three periods, Early, Middle, and Mature, each of sixteen years, not difficult to remember, 1842-1858, 1858-1874, and 1874-1890. It is a testimony to his utter frankness and undimmed candour that we are able thus to map out the growth of his convictions.

For a growth it was, all the time, though apparently 1858 was a year of wreck and ruin. We cannot put new wine into old wineskins. His middle period was the time for the analytical tendency of his mind to have its way. Mazzini had already said that Ruskin had the most analytic mind in Europe; and now that searching analysis which had discovered Luini and placed Tintoretto, and had penetrated, by a way of its own, far into the hidden secret of Beauty, could not be denied when it faced the stronghold of the Christian revelation, even though his own heart and every fibre of his sensitive nature was within the fortress attacked.

His economic crusade began in 1860; and on his spiritually desolated heart was piled the sorrow of the social system. Hermit and heretic he became, in religion and economics alike. Victorious in his championship of Turner and the Pre-raphaelites, whom single-handed he had placed on the pinnacle they have never lost, he had the literary and artistic world at his feet. This great position he cast aside to enter on a sterner battle. The recognized leader of taste, the arbiter of reputations, turned aside to abuse so good a man as John Stuart Mill, to say the most shocking things about the clergy and the clergy’s wives, to testify against rent and interest, to blaspheme that steam power by which England was conquering the world, and to utter strange hesitating sayings which showed that he was not sure of a life to come. Nor could he brave the storm with the self-confident dogmatism of youth. “I seldom now feel sure of anything,” he wrote in the first Christmas issue of Fors, “still seldomer, however, do I feel sure of the contrary of anything.”[13] When we add that this period was marked by the loss of his parents, who had been everything to him, and by a grievous disappointment in love—for the girl who loved him would not marry him because he was not orthodox, so far as reasons can ever be given for such decisions, but died of a decline instead—we shall see how heavy was the lonely task set before him to do. Nor had the veneration of disciples and the growing recognition of all good men come to him yet; it came afterwards, built the prophet’s shrine, in his lifetime certainly,[14] but only after the world’s neglect, and his failure even to carry his own friends with him, had helped to break the powers of his mind and set his brain reeling in recurring attacks of delirious inflammation. He was, in that madness, being offered upon the sacrifice and service of our faith.

During this middle period of prime mental power, he wrote nineteen volumes, and numerous catalogues and pamphlets. They are, in order of time: The Two Paths, Modern Painters, vol. v., Unto This Last, Munera Pulveris, Sesame and Lilies, The Ethics of the Dust, The Crown of Wild Olive, Time and Tide, The Queen of the Air, Lectures on Art at Oxford, the first half of Flors Clavigera, Aratra Pentelici, The Eagle’s Nest, Love’s Meinie, Ariadne Florentina, Val D’Arno, and most of the papers reprinted in On the Old Road. As an author he was in his full strength.

The significance of the period is that under the most painful uncertainties of doctrine, true religion shone still, blazed beaconlike, in fact: blazed as a beacon blazes when blown by tempest. But few readers ever thought of the writer as a heretic. He preached all the time the simple eternal sanction for right conduct which the nature of man, akin to the Divine, provides. He recognized the ineradicable claim which the teaching of the New Testament has upon our obedience. He attacked the Churches, not for being too Christian, but for not being anything like Christian enough. Referring to his mother’s gift of twenty-six chapters learnt by heart, he says in 1874:—

“The chapters became, indeed, strictly conclusive and protective to me in all modes of thought; and the body of divinity they contain, acceptable through all fear or doubt; nor, through any fear or doubt or fault have I ever lost my loyalty to them, nor betrayed the first command in the one I was made to repeat oftenest: ‘Let not Mercy and Truth forsake thee.’ And at my present age of fifty-five, in spite of some enlarged observations of what modern philosophers call the Reign of Law, I perceive more distinctly than ever the Reign of a Spirit of Mercy and Truth—infinite in pardon and purification for its wandering and faultful children, who have yet Love in their hearts; and altogether adverse and implacable to its perverse and lying enemies, who have resolute hatred in their hearts, and resolute falsehood on their lips.”[15]

The classical passage, as I should esteem it, for this period is in The Eagle’s Nest,[16] the Oxford Lectures of 1872; which contain some of his most careful religious writing:

“All of you who have ever read your Gospels carefully must have wondered sometimes, what could be the meaning of those words, ‘If any speak against the Son of Man it shall be forgiven; but if against the Holy Spirit it shall not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the next.’ The passage may have many meanings which I do not know; but one meaning I know positively, and I tell you so just as frankly as I would that I knew the meaning of a verse in Homer. Those of you who still go to Chapel say every day your creed; and, I suppose, too often, less and less every day believing it. Now, you may cease to believe two articles of it, and—admitting Christianity to be true—still be forgiven. But I can tell you, you must not cease to believe the third!

“You begin by saying that you believe in an Almighty Father. Well, you may entirely lose the sense of that Fatherhood and yet be forgiven.

“You go on to say that you believe in a Saviour Son. You may entirely lose the sense of that Sonship and yet be forgiven.

“But the third article—disbelieve if you dare! ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life.’ Disbelieve that! and your own being is degraded into the state of dust driven by the wind; and the elements of dissolution have entered your very heart and soul.

“All Nature, with one voice—with one glory—is set to teach you reverence for the life communicated to you from the Father of Spirits. The song of birds, and their plumage, the scent of flowers, their colour, their very existence, are in direct connection with the mystery of that communicated life: and all the strength, and all the arts of men, are measured by and founded upon their reverence for the passion, and their guardianship of the purity, of Love.”

Such is the utmost asceticism of the soul; the most careful and determined assimilation of the least quantity of the bread of life. We may sum his creed in the words: Happy are the pure in heart, for they yet in their flesh shall see the light of Heaven and know the will of God.

Perhaps the question of Divine Personality may be felt even in our most audacious moments to be beyond our analysis. I do not count the word Personality a very helpful one, one way or the other. It is clearly on the human plane, must be imperfect, and may seriously limit our thought of God. Tennyson’s favourite prayer was “O Thou Infinite, Amen.” And with this much of personal address or aspiration our souls may surely rest. Take this as a satisfying account of the Creative Logos of the Greeks, written in the light of evolution, in 1869 (Queen of the Air, pp. 124-6):

“With respect to all these divisions and powers of plants—it does not matter in the least by what concurrences of circumstance or necessity they may gradually have been developed: the concurrence of circumstance is itself the supreme and inexplicable fact. We always come at last to a formative cause, which directs the circumstance, and mode of meeting it. If you ask an ordinary botanist the reason of the form of a leaf, he will tell you it is ‘a developed tubercle,’ and that ‘its ultimate form is owing to the directions of its vascular threads.’ But what directs its vascular threads? ‘They are seeking for something they want’ he will probably answer. What makes them want that? What made them seek for it thus? Seek for it, in five fibres or in three? Seek for it, in serration, or in sweeping curves? Seek for it, in servile tendrils, or impetuous spray? Seek for it, in woollen wrinkles rough with stings, or in glossy surfaces, green with pure strength, and winterless delight?

“There is no answer. But, the sum of all is, that over the entire surface of the earth and its waters, as influenced by the power of the air under solar light, there is developed a series of changing forms, in clouds, plants and animals, all of which have reference in their action or nature, to the human intelligence that perceives them; and on which, in their aspects of horror and beauty, and their qualities of good and evil, there is engraved a series of myths or words of the forming power, which, according to the true passion and energy of the human race, they have been enabled to read into religion. And this forming power has been by all nations partly confused with the breath of air through which it acts, and partly understood as a creative wisdom, proceeding from the Supreme Deity; but entering into and inspiring all intelligences that work in harmony with Him. And whatever intellectual results may be in modern days obtained by regarding this effluence only as a motion or vibration, every formative human art hitherto, and the best states of human happiness and order, have depended on the apprehension of its mystery (which is certain), and of its personality (which is probable).”

He concludes that lecture, the second in The Queen of the Air, with these words:

“This only we may discern assuredly; this, every true light of science, every mercifully granted power, every wisely restricted thought, teach us more clearly day by day, that in the heaven above, and the earth beneath, there is one continual and omnipotent presence of help, and of peace, for all men who know that they Live, and remember that they Die.”

To quote from the religious teaching of these fruitful years would be an endless task; I must only refer, I fear, without quoting any of it, to The Mystery of Life and its Arts, printed in the complete edition of Sesame and Lilies; a characteristic and pathetic exhortation, and chiefly perhaps, to §10-16 of the Introduction to The Crown of Wild Olive.

So much for his constructive teaching. But he was a destroyer too. The peculiarity of his position and the cause of his loneliness was that he was always throwing his darts not only into the camp of the business men and their allies the economists, but also into the two religious camps, generally opposed to one another, held, one by the clergy, the other by the materialistic men of science. He rebuked both parties for their assumptions, and he smote them with all the artillery of sarcasm, wit and indignation. “You have to guard against the fatalest darkness of the two opposite Prides: the Pride of Faith, which imagines that the nature of the Deity can be defined by its convictions; and the Pride of Science, which imagines that the energy of Deity can be explained by its analysis.”[17] As sword-play it is fine. He gives what purports to be a scientific account of Shakespeare: so much water, so much carbo-hydrate and phosphorus, and thus you build up your organism called William Shakespeare—with, of course, something left out. He was ever dwelling on the realities of the spirit which chemistry omits. The fashionable scientific materialism of the seventies he utterly abhorred: he behaved to it as St. George to the Dragon. He loathed anatomy, mocked at the idea that you understood a creature by cutting up its remains; and when the men of science at Oxford proceeded to vivisection he threw up his professorship in flaming wrath, sick at heart; every sentiment of mercy, every safe doctrine of science violated in unholy cruelty and impatience.

He describes the limitations of “some scientific minds, which in their judgment of the Universe can be compared to nothing so accurately as to the woodworms in the panel of a picture by some great painter, if we may conceive them as tasting with discrimination of the wood, and with repugnance of the colour, and declaring that even this unlooked for and undesirable combination is a normal result of the action of molecular Forces.”[18]

We pass on to the third period of sixteen years, the Mature Period as I call it, from 1874 to 1890, when his productive life ended. He now came to know more fully the fullness of faith. Here he entered into his reward, I say. The revelation of God to him became clearer, sweeter, mightier. As in 1858, the time of crisis was marked by two events which occurred that year, one in things spiritual and one in things artistic.[19]

The artistic event of 1874 was a reversal of the puzzling judgment of 1858 to the effect that the worldly painters excelled the devout ones. It came about through his copying one of Giotto’s frescoes on the roof of the Lower Church at Assisi. He was allowed to erect a platform in that dark church over the High Altar, that he might see the picture. There he discovered that Giotto was only beaten by Tintoret in mere science, technique, laws of perspective, composition and light and shade, and that religion had solemnized and developed every faculty of Giotto’s heart and hand. The Franciscan monastery at Assisi is one of the most sacred places on earth anyhow, but 1874 saw one more gift of light there vouchsafed, and a haunting problem solved. Art was to Ruskin a visible manifestation of life’s full faculties, in a department he specially understood; and religion, which is the source of strength and the support of character, he thought should be judged by its output.

Now we turn to the second event. His hopes of the reality of a Spirit world received unexpected and potent confirmation from the fact that in December, 1875, he had, at the house of Lord Mount Temple, at Broadlands, Romsey, some psychic experience so definite that he was convinced that he had true communication with her whom he had lately lost, the “Rosie” of Præterita, No. XXVII.[20] It was a confirmation to his faith. He became an Honorary Member of the Society for Psychical Research the year after its formation in 1882, joining in that well-grounded hope that a true science of human Personality might be built up by its patient experimental methods. To Lady Mount Temple, née Tollemache, the Egeria of the winter of 1840 in Rome, we owe much for the help she was to Ruskin all through life; and much also that from her came the stimulus to Frederick W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney to begin the Society for Psychical Research. Two of Ruskin’s stories of Death wraiths may be found in Fors,[21] also a dream in Letter LXV. He never took to ordinary spiritualism; it is indeed from an attack upon it that he turns to a note describing the happiness of his own experience. “I leave this passage as it was written; though as it passes through the press, it is ordered by Atropos that I should hear a piece of evidence on this matter no less clear as to the present ministry of such powers as that which led Peter out of prison, than all the former, or nearly all the former, evidence examined by me was of the presence of the legion which ruled among the tombs of Gennesaret.”[22] He allows the contradiction to stand; indeed, in this puzzling and partially known subject, a consistent position is beyond the knowledge of most. He returns to the attack on Spiritualism, however, in his 1883 note to the second volume of Modern Painters, p. 244.

In the following year, 1876, at Venice at Christmas, he had vouchsafed to himself the inward assurance of an immortal life; he entered into a singular happiness; Fors became the organ of a mysticism truly Johannine; he loved to expound universal Christian truth, so catholic indeed in the true sense that Cardinal Manning aspired to turn him to Rome. That was a vain hope. He still retained his analytical faculty. He says that he would “give up Moses” if criticism demanded it.[23] Concerning his lectures of 1877 at Oxford he writes to Miss Beever in the “hortus inclusus” at Coniston that he has been able for the first time to speak boldly to the students of immortal life. The concluding passage of the last lecture is this:[24]

“But obey the word in its simplicity, in wholeness of purpose and with severity of sacrifice, like this of the Venetian Maids’, and truly you shall receive sevenfold into your bosom in this present life, as in the world to come, life everlasting.” “He shall give his angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways; and the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” It came to be true of himself that “if life be led under heaven’s law, the sense of heaven’s nearness only deepens with advancing years, and is assured in death.”[25]

“The faith of the saints and prophets rising into serenity of knowledge, ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ is a state of mind of which ordinary men cannot reason; but which, in the practical power of it, has always governed the world, and must for ever. No dynamite will ever be invented that can rule—it can but dissolve and destroy. Only the Word of God and the heart of man can govern.”[26]

We cannot conclude this analysis better than by quoting from the last number of Fors in 1884:

“Looking back upon my efforts for the last twenty years, I believe that their failure has been in great part owing to my compromise with the infidelity of this outer world, and my endeavours to base my pleading upon motives of ordinary prudence and kindness, instead of on the primary duty of loving God; foundation other than which no man can lay. I thought myself speaking to a crowd which could only be influenced by visible utility; nor was I the least aware how many entirely good and holy persons were living in the faith and love of God as vividly and practically now as ever in the early enthusiasm of Christendom. These have shown me, with lovely initiation, in how many secret places the prayer was made which I had foolishly listened for at the corners of the streets, and on how many hills which I had thought left desolate, the hosts of heaven still moved in chariots of fire.”[27] These passages show that F. W. H. Myers, in the beautiful obituary which I am permitted to print as an Epilogue, was not correct in describing the experience with the medium at Broadlands, as Ruskin’s one brief season of blissful trust in the Unseen. It is true of his temporary belief in spiritualism.

I trust it will have become clear that Ruskin’s spiritual history is not a story of arbitrary and fanciful changes without connected significance. It is the orderly development of a research, by a man singularly qualified to hold a religious Research Fellowship.

He may be said to have matriculated in religion at his mother’s knee. There he learnt his Bible. He took a degree with the second volume of Modern Painters and the works allied to it in spirit. He then became a Master of Arts, qualified to teach, a recognized religious authority among many authorities. Had he never gone to Venice and seen Tintoret he might have built, so he says, a Catholic archiepiscopal palace at York instead of a museum at Sheffield; or he might have been such a man as Dean Church or John Henry Newman, on Calvinistic Protestant lines. But Ruskin proceeded to a higher status. He must needs penetrate deeper; and in the crisis of 1858 he took his Fellowship by a thesis on the Irreducible Minimum of the Religious Outfit. Thenceforth he carried on a research, he was a “seeker after God,” often wrote “in much darkness and sorrow of heart”; and in sixteen years the conclusions were ready, the convictions matured, the saint perfected.

CHAPTER III
TO WHAT FOLD?

TO what school of thought or to which among our denominations, if to any, can Ruskin be said to belong? He did not actively, in mature life, belong to any, or attend Church or Chapel. Let us examine his doctrines in this connection.

The first point which strikes the inquirer is Ruskin’s strong hostility to professionalism in religion, to payment for preaching. Against a separate order of clergy, maintained for that object, and claiming a certain position by reason of their ministration, he was the most poignant voice of his time, from inside Christianity. Letters XXXVIII, XLIX, and LXII of Fors Clavigera are full of the most unrestrained expression of this testimony. We will quote:

“The particular kinds of folly also which lead youths to become clergymen, uncalled, are specially intractable. That a lad just out of his teens, and not under the influence of any deep religious enthusiasm, should ever contemplate the possibility of his being set up in the middle of a mixed company of men and women of the world, to instruct the aged, encourage the valiant, support the weak, reprove the guilty, and set an example to all; and not feel what a ridiculous and blasphemous business it would be, if he only pretended to do it for hire; and what a ghastly and murderous business it would be if he did it strenuously wrong; and what a marvellous and all but incredible thing the Church and its power must be, if it were possible for him, with all the good meaning in the world, to do it rightly—that any youth, I say, should ever have got himself into the state of recklessness or conceit, required to become a clergyman at all, under existing circumstances, must put him quite out of the pale of those whom one appeals to on any reasonable or moral question, in serious writing.... There is certainly no Bishop now in the Church of England who would either dare in a full drawing-room to attribute to himself the gift of prophecy, in so many words; or to write at the head of any of his sermons, ‘On such and such a day, of such and such a month, in such and such a place, the Word of the Lord came unto me, saying’:—Nevertheless he claims to have received the Holy Ghost himself by laying on of hands; and to be able to communicate the Holy Ghost to other men in the same manner. And he knows that the office of the prophet is as simply recognized in the enumeration of the powers of the ancient church, as that of the apostle or evangelist or doctor. And yet he can neither point out in the Church the true prophets, to whose number he dares not say that he himself belongs, nor the false prophets, who are casting out devils in the name of Christ without being known by him.... But the word ‘Priest’ is one which he finds it convenient to assume himself, and to give to his fellow clergymen. He knows, just as well as he knows prophecy to be a gift attributed to the Christian minister, that priesthood is a function expressly taken away from the Christian minister (as distinguished, that is to say, from other members of the Church). He dares not say in the open drawing-room that he offers sacrifice for any soul there; and he knows that he cannot give authority for calling himself a priest from any canonical book of the New Testament. So he equivocates on the sound of the word ‘Presybter.’ ...”[28]

“This preaching of Christ has, nevertheless, become an acknowledged profession and means of livelihood for gentlemen: and the simony of to-day differs only from that of apostolic times, in that, while the elder Simon thought the gift of the Holy Ghost worth a considerable offer in ready money, the modern Simon would on the whole refuse to accept the same gift of the Third Person of the Trinity, without a nice little attached income, a pretty church, with a steeple restored by Mr. Scott, and an eligible neighbourhood.”[29]

And, in soberer vein: “No way will ever be found of rightly ordaining men who have taken up the trade of preaching as a means of livelihood, and to whom it is a matter of personal interest whether they preach in one place or another; only those who have left their means of living, that they may preach, and whose peace follows them as they wander, and abides where they enter in, are of God’s ordaining; and practically until the Church insists that every one of her ministers shall either have an independent income, or support himself for his ministry on Sunday by true bodily toil during the week, no word of the living Gospel will ever be spoken from her pulpits. How many of those who now occupy them have verily been invited to such office by the Holy Ghost may be easily judged by observing how many the Holy Ghost has similarly invited of religious persons already in prosperous business or desirable position.”[30]

Another passage from another place runs: “Take the desire of teaching—the entirely unselfish and noble instinct for telling to those who are ignorant the truth we know, and guarding them from the errors we see them in danger of—there is no nobler, no more constant instinct in honourable breasts; but let the Devil formalise it, and mix the pride of a profession with it—get foolish people entrusted with the business of instruction, and make their giddy heads giddier by putting them up in pulpits above a submissive crowd—and you have it instantly corrupted into its own reverse; you have an alliance against the light (saying) ‘Light is in us only. Shut your eyes close and fast and we will lead you.’ ”[31]

In another place he says the difficult question is not, why workmen don’t go to church, but—why other people do. He asks,[32] “What Scripture warrant there is for the offices and authority of the clergy, and defies anyone to find any.” Their functions, he says, must depend on the needs of the time. “Robinson Crusoe, on his island, wants no Bishop, and makes a thunderstorm do for an evangelist. The University of Oxford would do ill without its Bishop, but wants an evangelist besides, and that forthwith.”

He says that by yielding to the impression that the most sacred calling is that of the clergy, “the sacred character of the layman himself is forgotten, and his own ministerial duty is neglected,” and so laymen wrongly “devote their whole time and energy to the business of this world. No mistake can possibly be greater. Every member of the Church is equally bound to the service of the Head of the Church, and that service is pre-eminently the saving of souls. There is not a moment of a man’s active life in which he may not be indirectly preaching, and throughout a great part of his life he ought to be directly preaching, and teaching both strangers and friends.” This is from the Sheepfolds pamphlet of 1851; at that time he nevertheless contemplates church officers of a sort, as organizers, deacons, or visitors, and thinks they may be maintained for their special work, and includes religious instruction and exhortation among these duties. But this last advice he supersedes in Fors of 1873 and later dates, when he places preaching on a purely amateur basis, in the passages quoted already, and similar ones.

“All good judging, and all good preaching, must be given gratis. Look back to what I have incidentally said of lawyers and clergy, as professional—that is to say, as living by their judgment, and sermons. You will perhaps now be able to receive my conclusive statement, that all such professional sale of justice and mercy is a deadly sin. A man may sell the work of his hands, but not his equity, nor his piety. Let him live by his spade, and if his neighbours find him wise enough to decide a dispute between them, or if he is in modesty and simplicity able to give them a piece of pious advice, let him do so, in Heaven’s name, but not take a fee for it.”[33]

In Letter XIII of Time and Tide and in Sesame and Lilies § 22 he explains the sort of functions he would give to his Bishops, as described in Chapter V.

We have incidentally alluded to Ruskin’s teaching on the Priesthood of all Believers. He asserts that all members of the Universal Church are Priests,[34] that the exclusive priestly claim of the Clergy is “blasphemous,” and has no shadow of excuse, “because it has been ordained by the Holy Spirit that no Christian minister shall once call himself a Priest as distinguished from his flock from one end of the New Testament to the other.”

Schools of religious thought are discriminated by nothing so decisively as by their attitude to the Bible. They are classed at once if they call the Bible the Word of God. This bad and quite unauthorized habit has blinded many eyes. Ruskin attacks it again and again. “The error consists, first, in declaring a bad translation of a group of books of various qualities, accidentally associated, to be the Word of God. Secondly, reading of this singular Word of God, only the bits they like, and never taking any pains to understand even those. Thirdly, resolutely refusing to practise even the small bits they do understand, if such practice happen to go against their own worldly—especially money—interests.”[35]

Compare this severe passage with one from The Ethics of the Dust, V § 59: “The way in which common people read their Bibles is just like the way that the old monks thought hedgehogs ate grapes. They rolled themselves (it was said), over and over, where the grapes lay on the ground: what fruit stuck to their spines, they carried off and ate. So your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture, and that nothing else is.”[36]

But Ruskin is not satisfied with negative teaching on this great subject. He tells us what the Word of God is, as well as what it is not:

“By that Word, or Voice, or Breath, or Spirit, the heavens and earth, and all the host of them, were made, and in it they exist. It is your life; and speaks to you always, so long as you live nobly; dies out of you as you refuse to obey it; leaves you to hear, and be slain by, the word of an evil spirit, instead. It may come to you in books—come to you in clouds—come to you in the voices of men—come to you in the stillness of deserts. You must be strong in evil, if you have quenched it wholly;—very desolate in this Christian land, if you have never heard it at all.”[37]

Much may be gleaned from a man’s use of the word Church. Is it a building, or a select and limited outward community or more than either? Ruskin, interpreting Scripture in his Sheepfolds,[38] finds a Low Church divine giving the meaning of the word Church to be an “external institution of certain forms of worship.” He therefore suggests the following emendations: “Unto the angel of the external institution of certain forms of worship at Ephesus write,” and “Salute the brethren which are at Laodicea, and Nymphas, and the external institution of certain forms of worship which is in his house.”

“I continually see subscriptions of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand pounds for new churches. Now a good clergyman never wants a church. He can say all that his congregation essentially need to hear in any of his parishioners’ best parlours, or upper chambers, or in the ball-room at the Nag’s Head; or if these are not large enough, in the market-place, or the harvest field. And until every soul in the parish is cared for, and saved from such sorrow of body or mind as alms can give comfort in, no clergyman, but in sin or heresy, can ask for a church at all. What does he want with altars? Was the Lord’s Supper eaten on one? What with pews?—unless rents for the pride of them? What with font and pulpit?—that the next wayside brook, or mossy bank, cannot give him? The temple of Christ is in His people—His order, to feed them—His throne, alike of audience and of judgment, in Heaven: were it otherwise, even the churches which we have already are not always open for prayer.”[39]

He suggests that we can decide “who are Christ’s sheep, not by their being in any definite fold, for many are lost sheep sometimes; but by their sheeplike behaviour; and a great many are indeed sheep which, on the far mountain side, in their peacefulness, we take for stones.”[40] This is a delightful expression of the feeling that you may be a child of God, without having heard of the Christian Revelation of Him.

To make Baptism a sign of admission into the visible Church he says is absurd; “for we know that half the baptized people in the world are very visible rogues. Also the Holy Ghost is sometimes given before Baptism, and it would be absurdity to call a man on whom the Holy Ghost had fallen, an invisible Christian.”[41]

On the Sacrament he declared to a correspondent in 1888 that he would take it from anybody’s hand, the Pope’s, the Queen’s or a hedgeside gipsy’s, and quoted Longfellow’s lines:

“A holy family, that makes
Each meal a supper of the Lord.”

He is drastic in his rejection of all Prayer Books. Prayers out of a book are no prayers to him; he cannot think that varying needs are met by routine prayer. These statements are in his Letters to the Clergy on the Lord’s Prayer and the Church (1879), reprinted in On the Old Road, p. 325, and he comments on the distrust in the efficacy of prayer likely to be produced by having to ask one day “that the rest of our lives hereafter may be pure and holy,” knowing that next day, or at least next Sunday, we shall be expected to confess that “there is no health in us.” He seriously suspects the effect of the Liturgy on the truthfulness of the English mind.

When he discusses the vital problem of the seat of Authority in religion he declares that it ultimately resides within, not in an outward Church or Book. He is absolutely uncompromising about this.

“There is, therefore, in matters of doctrine, no such thing as the authority of the Church. We might as well talk of the authority of a morning cloud. There may be light in it, but the light is not of it; and it diminishes the light that it gets; and lets less of it through than it receives, Christ being its sun. Or, we might as well talk of the authority of a flock of sheep—for the Church is a body to be taught and fed, not to teach and feed; and of all sheep that are fed on the earth, Christ’s sheep are the most simple,” likely to die in the bramble thickets; “but for their Shepherd, who is for ever finding them and bearing them back, with torn fleeces and eyes full of fear.”[42]

There is also an interesting passage in The Eagle’s Nest (p. 135) on “The Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

By way of Church discipline he advises a process of excommunication by a jury of laymen.[43]

What of religious decorative art? Surely here the great art critic and apostle of the Beautiful will be found on the ritualist side? Not so. He says that Church art, pictures, images, and so on, “make us believe what we would not otherwise have believed; and, secondly, make us think of subjects we should not otherwise have thought of, intruding them amidst our ordinary thoughts in a confusing and familiar manner.” “This art,” he says, “is misapplied, and in most cases, very dangerously so. Our duty is to believe in the existence of Divine, or any other, persons, only upon rational proofs of their existence; and not because we have seen pictures of them.”

“But I nevertheless believe that he who trusts much to such helps (as ‘Rafaelesque and other sacred paintings of a high order’) will find them fail him at his need; and that the dependence, in any great degree, on the presence or power of a picture, indicates a wonderfully feeble sense of the presence and power of God. I do not think that any man, who is thoroughly certain that Christ is in the room, will care what sort of picture of Christ he has on its walls and, in the plurality of cases, the delight taken in art of this kind is, in reality, nothing more than a form of graceful indulgence of those sensibilities which the habits of a disciplined life restrain in other directions. Such art is, in a word, the opera and drama of the monk. Sometimes it is worse than this, and the love of it is the mask under which a general thirst for morbid excitement will pass itself off for religion. The young lady who rises in the middle of the day, jaded by her last night’s ball, and utterly incapable of any simple or wholesome religious exercise, can still gaze into the dark eyes of the Madonna di San Sisto, or dream over the whiteness of an ivory crucifix, and returns to the course of her daily life in full persuasion that her morning’s feverishness has atoned for her evening’s folly. And, all the while, the art which possesses these very doubtful advantages is acting for undoubtful detriment, in the various ways above examined (in a previous passage), on the inmost fastnesses of faith; it is throwing subtle endearments round foolish traditions, confusing sweet fancies with sound doctrines, and enforcing false assertions with pleasant circumstantiality, until, to the usual, and assuredly sufficient, difficulties standing in the way of belief, its votaries have added a habit of sentimentally changing what they know to be true, and of dearly loving what they confess to be false.”

“Has there then (the reader asks emphatically) been no true religious ideal? Has religious art never been of any service to mankind? I fear, on the whole, not.

“More, I think, has always been done for God by few words than many pictures, and more by few acts than many words.”

“And for us all there is in this matter even a deeper danger than that of indulgence. There is the danger of Artistical Pharisaism. Of all the forms of pride and vanity, as there are none more subtle, so I believe there are none more sinful, than those which are manifested by the Pharisees of art. To be proud of birth, of place, of wit, of bodily beauty, is comparatively innocent, just because such pride is more natural, and more easily detected. But to be proud of our sanctities; to pour contempt upon our fellows because, forsooth, we like to look at Madonnas in bowers of roses, better than at plain pictures of plain things; and to make this religious art of ours the expression of our own perpetual self-complacency—congratulating ourselves, day by day, on our purities, proprieties, elevations, and inspirations, as above the reach of common mortals, this I believe to be one of the wickedest and foolishest forms of human egotism.”[44]

These clear-sounding testimonies form a coherent whole. Is there any religious body in England which holds all, or even most of these positions? Remarkably enough, there is one which holds them all; indeed, whose separate existence depends on holding just these positions, positive and negative alike. This one is the Society of Friends. We find to our surprise that, without knowing it, Ruskin was a real and very completely furnished Quaker.

The testimony against a paid or professional clergy, against all clerical claims, is the very heart of Quaker practice; and the raison d’être of their separate meetings. The Priesthood of all Believers is at the heart of their official statements, and the implication in their ministry. They say that there should be no laity among them, exactly as Ruskin does. They decline all forms of fixed or routine prayer, and never practise them. Their meeting houses are plain, and their worship is ascetically devoid of sensuous attraction in glowing glass or carven stone or in the odour of incense.

It is one of their central historical testimonies, dating from the seventeenth century, that the Bible should not be called the Word of God. For this they were called atheists by the clergy of Charles II. The controversies of that time rarely avoided touching on this sore point. For them, as for Ruskin, the seat of authority is The Light Within, and, like Ruskin, they are willing to “give up Moses” if history demands it.

The attitude of Ruskin to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper is a thoroughly Quaker one. Both hold that they are unnecessary and have no “Validity.” The only “Church” they recognize is the Universal Church composed of all faithful men everywhere; and as Ruskin speaks of sheep on distant mountains who look like stones, so Friends have always held that the heathen were or could be saints of the household of God, and that knowledge of the historical Jesus Christ was not essential to salvation here or hereafter.

There is a remarkable omission too. So far as I know Ruskin never speaks of Hell, as an article of faith. Nor does it ever occur in Quaker ministry.

It is almost uncanny that there is an agreement also on minor testimonies which might appear accidental. Friends do not approve of mourning garments, though there is in this generation some weakness about this. Ruskin thinks that “the people who really believe in immortality must be few, else why the Church’s singular habit of putting on mourning for every one summoned to be with Christ, which is far better.”[45]

It is well known that Friends refuse to take judicial Oaths, and gave a handle thereby to hostile magistrates, when other handles slipped away. Ruskin says plainly that Oaths are “disobedience to the teaching of Christ.”[46]

I believe we have now mentioned all the points of Quakerism, except the testimony against all War. From Chapter VIII devoted to this, it is clear that Ruskin was generally, but not always, on Quaker lines. He wobbled somewhat, and felt puzzled, and I am afraid that a certain number of Friends have done the same at times of crisis.

Lastly, the Quaker simplicity of life, the avoidance of luxury and social pretensions, the fixing of attention chiefly on the things of the spirit, are Ruskin’s dearest delight, the subject of his most earnest pleas. Take one:

“The uses, and the desire, of seclusion, of meditation, of restraint, and of correction, are they not passing from us in the collision of worldly interests, and restless contests of mean hope and meaner fear? The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?”[47]

For a man who, in the name and for the sake of spiritual things, fought the good fight of a reformer during two generations, Ruskin was but little brought into personal friendship with members of the Society of Friends. George Baker, of Bewdley, who was one of the early donors to the St. George’s Guild and was long one of its Trustees, and afterwards its Master, is the principal personal link he had with the Society. Henry Swan, formerly his curator at the Sheffield Museum, was a Friend.

When the writer, as one of a party of Friends, was kindly shown over Brantwood by its owner in 1884, the only things he had to say to us about Quakerism in the course of a forty minutes’ talk, were a little homily on sectarianism, contrasted with a church of “God-fearing people,” including Catholics and Turks—a little chaff about our failing in the matter of usury to literally obey our Bibles, as he supposed we thought we always tried to do—and an astonishing pronouncement that “Your early Friends would have carried all before them, if they had not opposed that which is obeyed by the whole of the animal creation—the love of colour.” We must take this as one of the characteristic plunges into emphasis (some well-balanced people would use a stronger term perhaps), which are a cause at once of his strength as a stimulating teacher, and of his insufficiency as an infallible oracle, to be mechanically interpreted.

These three utterances, however, slight as they are, show a misreading of Quakerism. We are, I trust, the least sectional of little sects. The religion of the Light Within is at the basis of all other religions too; it is the absolute religion, religion reduced to its simplest, and it brings us into sympathetic connection with Evangelical, Ritualist, Jew, Mohammedan and “heathen,” so far as these have the Divine Spirit shining through their particular forms of thought and practice. Also, of all people, we are the least prone to unintelligent Biblical literalism, and are quite unlikely to be stumbled by the Mosaic regulations about usury. There is a measure of truth in his third statement about “colour,” if by that he meant, in a comprehensive sense, those recreations which relieve the strain of a severely ruled life. We have become less numerous, I doubt not, through our restrictions (now abandoned) on art, music, “the theatre and the ball-room.” But there have been compensations to those who have stayed under the discipline.

Ruskin, then, never understood the Society of Friends in the outward. This was the mere result of circumstances. Brought up in the south of London, educated at Oxford, living much abroad, with local interests and acquaintances chiefly centering round Denmark Hill, Oxford and Coniston, he had no great opportunity to meet Friends.

He never had any Quaker teaching in his youth. The voice of the Society of Friends was too faint to reach him. He never found his way across the hill from Brantwood to the ancient meeting house at Hawkshead, but his word has penetrated further than ours, and all unaware he has done our work.

How marvellous is this series of harmonies, unintended, unrecognized on both sides, between him and the Society of Friends! It looks as though Quakerism is not an arbitrary group of doctrines gathered up, as he fancied them, by George Fox, but a coherent system, all whose parts hang together as they all appear together when they rise up in Ruskin. It is a strong confirmation of the coherence and validity of the religious discoveries of our Quaker forefathers in the seventeenth century, when we find that they are repeated in the research of another emancipated but devout thinker, a religious rationalist who was an expert in the things of the soul.

CHAPTER IV
RUSKIN AND MILL
A RECONCILIATION

THE controversy between Ruskin and the orthodox Political Economists of his time was central in his career, and has occupied a prominent place in the thought of the last sixty years. Either Ruskin’s teaching or that of Mill and his colleagues, or that of both, has been clouded with uncertainty and so has lost force. If it should be found, as I shall try to show, that there was no real ground for the controversy at all—that it was all due to misapprehension, to mere ambiguity in a term, it will reinforce the conclusions of the economists in their modern revised form, add cogency to the teaching of Ruskin, and clear away storm clouds which have done great harm. The mistake arose through a wrong conception by Ruskin of the scope of Economics—of what its teachers were after.

Political Economy has always been treated by careful writers as the science of human action with regard to the acquisition and use of property. This is a pure science. It is a branch of applied psychology. It measures motives, and analyses the action of buyers and sellers with a view to finding out what men in business will normally do, and how values of land, labour, capital and commodities are determined. This does not open any question of right or wrong, any question of oppression or starvation, of luxury, vanity or pride. This is as cold-blooded, as purely intellectual and critical an inquiry as the study and measurement of electrical currents; what produces them, conducts them, wastes or scatters them. An electrician will show how a telephone may be made, he will invent it, and he will explain it; but it is no business of his to ask whether courtesy and good feeling or profanity and fraud will characterize the messages which will go over his instrument. That is not his business as a scientist, though the use of his own telephone is his business as a man.

Now this is a perfectly intelligible, it may be a perfectly blameless, and, at first sight, a probably useful branch of inquiry. It separates off from the great mass of human actions a definite field; it omits the motive of religion, the motive of love, and the motive of self-denying service, outside service for the family for whom the man under discussion is economically responsible.

Concerning it, we must ask three questions:

1. Is this separation practicable, and in consequence are the results true or approximately true?

2. Under what limitations is it useful to make such a separation, and what real guidance to conduct, if any, follows?

3. Afterwards we will inquire to what extent the political economists have rigidly confined themselves to theory, and having found that they did not, when they went over into practical advice we will ask whether they were deluded by the results they had reached within their limits, and whether they hastily assumed that they had found a more complete guide to human action than they had.

Is then the separation of dealings which can be expressed in terms of money from the other dealings of life sufficiently possible to make a science of those dealings? Are they predictable, given the circumstances? Will like causes produce like results? Is the motive measured by money sufficiently separable from other motives, to be treated by itself?

We must at once admit that such separation cannot be absolute; that affection, pity, charity, habit, ignorance, legislative restriction, public spirit, prevent the individual from always acting according to his economic interests. He does not always buy in the cheapest shop; he grumbles but helps a struggling neighbour by his custom, and puts up for some time with an inferior article. He goes on using old machinery for want of knowledge or of a progressive mind. He keeps on an old hand for the sake of the past. Still, in the long run, these qualifications to the general law do not survive. In general, men in the large may be trusted to do that which it is their economic interest to do, within such lines of honesty as are ratified by law, or of honour as are regarded by public opinion. Competition, that is, is the general rule in business; and we shall not go far wrong in assuming it as the method in vogue in Europe and America, unless some special feature of monopoly or legislative Protection or trade combination supersedes it.

This is not the same as saying that it is always right to follow the lines of pure competition. We must at all points check the tendency to pass from the indicative to the imperative mood, from a science to an art; from what will raise our profits to what is our duty in our business.

So we assert that there is a Theory of Value, and that it is an approximately verified theory under the present system of business. Further, that in 1860, when business was less regulated than it is now, the results were so much nearer verification by experience.

That business is carried on for self-interest on the whole, seems to me a safe approximation to reality—and that the exceptions to it are not chemically explosive of its system as Ruskin says, but can be added to the enquiry afterwards, like friction or the resistance of the air in mechanics.

Whether this is desirable, or the last word of human organization, is quite another question; and the questions are better kept separate. Moral considerations are too important to come in as an incidental qualification to business motives. They should be the dominating influence, and it is better that economic results should not obtain a sort of sanction as being tinctured with righteousness, when only a few drops of the tincture have been administered. It is better that Economics should keep their place as a science of observed facts.

At the present moment when war is being diagnosed as the worst disease of society, there are many voices to point out its origin in economic greed, and through rivalry in the exploitation of backward peoples. Military pomp and pride, the mere ambition of Emperors and Generals, must bear their share of the blame, but greed and oppression are the tap-root of war, and Ruskin, it happens, was foremost in saying so, as is pointed out in a later chapter.

The economic motive is behind many actions where it is not avowed. Since the elementary need of man is, and always has been, to make a living, and he tries to make it as pleasantly as possible, this must be so, and the laws which govern production, distribution and exchange are of prime importance for men in communities.

When Ruskin touched on an economic law, on a doctrine of the science which he thus erroneously blasphemed, he was remarkably correct; he was an orthodox follower after all of much of the doctrine of Mill. He was “an utterly fearless and unscrupulous free trader.”[48] His instinct, the moral sanction to which he always looked—as Mill also did—as a guide to practice, told him that protection was a wicked action, forbidding to workers in other countries their right to earn their living in the way by which they could produce the most. “I mean by co-operation, not only fellowship between trading firms, but between trading nations; so that it shall no more be thought (as it is now, with ludicrous and vain selfishness) an advantage for one nation to undersell another, and take its occupation away from it; but that the primal and eternal law of commerce shall be of all men understood—viz., that every nation is fitted by its character and the nature of its territories for some particular employments and manufactures, and that it is the true interest of every other nation to encourage it in such speciality.”[49] “I do not admit even the idea of reciprocity. Let other nations, if they like, keep their ports shut; every wise nation will throw its own open.”[50] He knew every point of the correct economic theory of free trade. He realized foreign commerce as exchange or barter, with the dependence of exports upon imports. This dependence, showing the true nature of International Trade, follows from the correct doctrine of currency. Ruskin emphasized this doctrine repeatedly. He knew that every fall in the supply of commodities made the gold currency of less value. He knew that inflation by paper money similarly sent prices up. He was enthusiastic for a gold standard, not as being perfect, but being the best available.[51] Mill’s still valuable chapter on International Trade and all current economic doctrine on currency are Ruskinian economy too. Also, when a disciple of the much depreciated Manchester School talked of laisser faire he generally meant: “Let Protection alone.” His phrase was general, but in the days of Gladstone’s chancellorships of the exchequer, the “Manchester” man was thinking mainly of the removal of tariffs. It would not be in accord with human psychology if the principle had not been pushed too far, and by friends and opponents alike the principle of governmental abstention from interference enlarged, and made universal. In calling for government action to determine wages and organize employment, Ruskin was simply uttering a need not yet felt. He was a twentieth century voice, heard too soon.

But we must always avoid the snare into which the earlier economists fell, of assuming that their conclusions were rigid and absolutely correct. There can be no mechanical infallibility about Economics; it is not accurate enough to be mathematically true. It expresses tendencies. In a word, it is a psychological, not a physical science. Its subject is not wealth, simply, but human motive in regard to wealth.

Students of the Political Economy of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham and James Mill, find that these great founders of economic science, in whose debt we shall ever remain, assumed too much mechanical uniformity in men’s actions, and did not give enough weight to the reaction of man upon his circumstances. They counted a man too much as a passively responsive machine. This is what led them to the doctrines since so seriously modified—the existence of a fixed Wages Fund, the “Iron Law of Wages,” the thesis that “A demand for Commodities is not a demand for Labour.”

John Stuart Mill began life under these influences, and his Principles of Political Economy contain them; but in later life he abandoned his Wages Fund theory, gave greater weight to the human side, the variable and uncertain factor in economic problems, and under the influence of Comte and of the Socialists doubted the accuracy of much of his economic argument. This change was published in his review of the work of his friend Thornton, who had attacked the Wages Fund theory in 1869. It is in Mill’s collected Essays.

The Political Economy which Ruskin attacked was that of Mill’s Principles; and to judge fairly of the controversy we must treat the science, not as it was left, in high universal abstraction, by Ricardo; nor as worked up with rich historical material, cautious and well informed, as in Professor Marshall’s writings, but (between these) as Mill left it in his first edition of 1848.

In estimating the extent to which Ruskin’s attack was excusable, we need to know whether Mill overstepped the bounds of theory, of pure science—and became a political adviser and exhorter. This he certainly did, quite often in his book, and he says in his preface that it was part of his purpose to do so.

Ruskin says that it is when he is thus inconsistent with his own theory, and strays into practical teaching, that he begins to take any interest in him; and certainly Mill gave, precisely because he was a philanthropist and a social reformer, room for a critic to come in and say: “Lo, you pretend to be a practical guide to conduct, and you are only taking account of low and selfish motives; you are an unworthy exponent of human nature, if we are to regard you as taking it all for your province.” The chapters chiefly referred to here are those on “The Advantages of a Stationary State,” and on “The Futurity of the Labouring Classes.”

Ruskin recognizes and admits this in a clever but naughty way:

“I should have regretted the need of pointing out inconsistency in any portion of Mr. Mill’s work, had not the value of his work proceeded from its inconsistencies. He deserves honour among economists by inadvertently disclaiming the principles which he states, and tacitly introducing the moral considerations with which he claims his science has no connection. Many of his chapters are therefore true and valuable; and the only conclusions of his which I have to dispute are those which follow from his premises.”[52] Mill made the distinction between science and social reform quite plain in his chapters, and left no room for confusion. Ruskin must have thoroughly understood this.

Full in the face of this theoretical investigation comes Ruskin’s definition of Political Economy, with which he begins Munera Pulveris:

“Political Economy is neither an art nor science, but a system of conduct and legislature, founded on the sciences, directing the arts, and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture.”

Here we have an entirely different object. This Economy aims at telling us what we ought to do for the enriching and purifying of life upon the earth, and what the state ought to do for the same end. This is universal politics and social amelioration: frankly and definitely, not a science at all.

There need be no conflict between this comprehensive study of political ethics, including religion, art, and education among its principal departments—and that science which might usefully come in as one of those on which it is based. To be sure, both claim to be called Political Economy; but that is only a verbal rivalry. As to that, Ruskin’s Political Economy has by derivation the proper right to the term—the State’s Housekeeping. But it is not always wise to follow derivations; the scholastic Economy was in possession of the word, though properly speaking it was not ὁικονομἱα nor was it πολῑτῐκή. Ruskin’s weakness for playing with etymologies, often curious ones, helped to maintain this rivalry in words.

There is room for both studies, the scholastic economies and the Ruskinian economy. That is my thesis.

How differently the criticism of Carlyle and Ruskin might have been launched. Ruskin might have said that he admitted that in business people must be assumed to follow their own interests, that is, that the “economic man” would stand as a general average in business relations. But he might have said, after that, every word that he wanted to say, about the insufficiency of this principle as a guide to conduct. He might have dwelt on the strength of loyalties and affections, and on the powerful economic value of good relations between masters and servants. He might have shown how misleading were economic results if acted on as a complete handbook of conduct even in business. He might have written Unto This Last with an introduction by John Stuart Mill, and everything positive or constructive left in it. The satire and sword-play might have been used for something else.

Much of his attack might have taken the form of entirely sound but friendly criticism. Great play is made with a sentence of Ricardo’s:[53] “Utility is not the measure of exchangeable value, though it is absolutely essential to it.” This non-committal sentence does not carry us very far, and does not claim to be a definition, but is true as far as it goes. Ruskin makes hay of Ricardo’s statement next following, that Labour was, in primitive abstraction at any rate, the sole regulator of price. Neither he nor Ruskin had reached the modern theory of “marginal values” which solves so many ancient puzzles and misunderstandings. Price is fixed where Demand and Supply meet: and it measures two things. It represents on one side the value in use of the last article produced; and on the other the cost in labour of the production thereof. Then both sides are satisfied—the buyer and the seller. But the price does not represent the utility of the earliest articles produced—the first loaves of bread would be quite priceless,—nor the cost of the production of the first few easily grown crops. Both values are “final” or “marginal.” This simple and permanent plan of determining price, which nobody can or should alter, is, put shortly, the terrible law of supply and demand, the very heart of economic theory, about which so much indignation is wastefully expended. If Ruskin’s penetrating mind had been devoted to helpful criticism of the gaps left by the economists, they might have reached this theory much earlier. But Ruskin wrote in a state of noble rage—a bad state for the scientific temper. “Nothing in history,” he wrote, “has ever been so disgraceful to human intellect as the acceptance among us of the common doctrines of political economy as a science.”[54] This was chiefly because it was said to be a systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion, because it taught “the love of money” and “mammon service”; it was “a science of becoming rich.” Once accept so terrible a misconception, and all the vials of the prophets’ wrath are not too profuse. “To this science and to this alone (the professed and organized pursuit of money) is owing all the evil of modern days. I say all.”[55] Ruskin wrote in 1865 a letter to the Daily Telegraph in which he says people cannot get servants by political economy and the law of supply and demand—as though he had said they cannot be got by physics and the law of gravitation. To see his real attitude we must add a phrase of 1883: “While I admit there is such a thing as mercantile economy, distinguished from social, I have always said that neither Mill, Fawcett nor Bastiat knew the contemptible science they professed to teach.”[56]

This attitude is pure disaster, comparable to the great odia theologica which have cursed the world. It is not necessary nor wise to take sides in an utterly baseless controversy. Let us rather examine the programme of the science.

Prof. Marshall gives the following list of the inquiries chiefly pursued by economic science[57]:—

“How does economic freedom tend, so far as its influence reaches, to arrange the demand for wealth and its production, distribution and exchange? What organization of industry and trade does economic freedom tend to bring about; what forms of division of labour; what arrangements of the money market, of wholesale and retail dealing, and what relations between employer and employed? How does it tend to adjust values, that is, the prices of material things, whether produced on the spot or brought from a distance, rents of all kinds, interest on capital and the earnings of all forms of work, including that of undertaking and managing business enterprises? How does it affect the course of foreign trade? Subject to what limitations is the price of anything a measure of its real utility? What increase of happiness is prima facie likely to result from a given increase in the wealth of any class of society? How far is the industrial efficiency of any class impaired by the insufficiency of its income? How far would an increase of the income of any class, if once effected, be likely to sustain itself through its effects in increasing their efficiency and earning power?

“How far does, as a matter of fact, the influence of economic freedom reach, or how far has it reached at any particular time, in any place, in any rank of society, or in any particular branch of industry? What other influences are most powerful there? and how is the action of all these influences combined? In particular, how far does not economic freedom tend of its own action to build up combinations and monopolies, and what are their effects? How are the various classes of society likely to be affected by its action in the long run? What will be the intermediate effects while its ultimate results are being worked out; and, account being taken of the time over which they will spread, what is the relative importance of these two classes of ultimate and intermediate effects? What will be the incidence of any system of taxes? What burdens will it impose on the community, and what revenue will it afford to the State?”

Such then, is the subject matter of economic science spread out in some detail. But behind all these there are practical questions which give the chief motive to our interest in the subject; and though not within the actual range of the science, it will be of interest to us to hear the same authority state them. They vary very much from time to time. The earlier economists were occupied with the need of removing restrictions on free commerce, and government regulation generally, and they glorified economic freedom. We ask with Marshall:

“How should we act so as to increase the good and diminish the evil influences of economic freedom, both in its ultimate results, and in the course of its progress? If the first are good and the latter evil, but those who suffer the evil do not reap the good, how far is it right that they should suffer for the benefit of others?”

“Taking it for granted that a more equal distribution of wealth is to be desired, how far would this justify changes in the institution of property, or limitations of free enterprise, even when they would be likely to diminish the aggregate of wealth? In other words, how far should an increase in the income of the poorer classes and a diminution of their work be aimed at, even if it involved some lessening of national material wealth? How far could this be done without injustice, and without slackening the energies of the leaders of progress? How ought the burdens of taxation to be distributed among the different classes of society?”

“Ought we to rest content with the existing forms of division of labour? Is it necessary that large numbers of the people should be exclusively occupied with work that has no elevating character? Is it possible to educate gradually among the great mass of workers a new capacity for the higher kinds of work, and in particular for undertaking co-operatively the management of the businesses in which they are themselves employed?”

“What are the proper relations of individual and collective action in a stage of civilization such as ours? How far ought voluntary association in its various forms, old and new, to be left to supply collective action for those purposes for which such action has special advantages? What business affairs should be undertaken by society itself acting through the Government, imperial or local? Have we, for instance, carried as far as we should the plan of collective ownership and use of open spaces, or works of art, of the means of instruction and amusement, as well as of those material requisites of a civilized life, the supply of which requires united action, such as gas and water and railways?”

“When Government does not itself directly intervene, how far should it allow individuals and corporations to conduct their own affairs as they please? How far should it regulate the management of railways and other concerns which are to some extent in a position of monopoly, and again, of land and other things the quantity of which cannot be increased by man? Is it necessary to retain in their full force all the existing rights of property, or have the original necessities for which they were meant to provide, in some measure passed away?”

“Are the prevailing methods of using wealth entirely justifiable? What scope is there for the moral pressure of social opinion in constraining and directing individual action in those economic relations in which the rigidity and violence of Government interference would be likely to do more harm than good?

“In what respect do the duties of one nation to another in economic matters differ from those of members of the same nation to one another?”

In fact, we have to deal with the problems of Socialism, of Co-operation, of Municipal action, of Luxury and of Trade Wars. He might have added Pauperism and Old Age Pensions, Standard Wages and Hours, and Nationalization of various kinds of property. There is a strong and audible echo of Ruskin’s aims about these practical problems; and one does not yet see why we cannot make room in our own minds both for economic science and the Ruskinian Economy to which these issues belong.

There are passages, too, in Mill, which Ruskin himself might have written, which look beyond Production and Distribution to the larger needs and joys of man. He is considering the stationary state of capital and wealth, when economic progress has ceased, when people are not always growing more numerous and more wealthy, a state dreaded by the older economists, and ever to be held at arm’s length. But Mill says he thinks it would be better than our present condition. “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on, that the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of humankind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. The northern and middle states of America are a specimen of this stage of civilization in very favourable circumstances, having apparently got rid of all social injustices and inequalities, that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex, while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to ensure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does not forfeit it by misconduct. They have the six points of Chartism, and they have no poverty; and all that these advantages do for them is that the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of the other to breeding dollar-hunters. The best state for human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.”[58]

That is Ruskin without the eloquence; that is his advice to stay in the station in which we have been placed, and not be always trying to get out of it. A little more from Mill:

“I know not why it should be matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as representative of wealth, or that numbers should pass over, every year, from the middle classes into a richer class, or from the class of the occupied rich to that of the unoccupied.”

This reminds one of the well-known passage where Ruskin speaks of those who try “to advance in life without knowing what life means, who mean only that they are to get more horses and more footmen and more fortune and more public honours and—not more personal soul.”[59]

As some injustice has been done to Mill, particularly by us the pupils and friends of his eloquent antagonist, I will quote a little more from him to show that though the laws of Nature were represented by him as hard, he was himself as Ruskinian as any of us. He suggests a limitation of the right of bequest, so that no one should receive by gift or inheritance more than a moderate independence, so that there might be “a well paid and affluent body of labourers; no enormous fortunes, except what were earned and accumulated during a single lifetime; but a much larger body sufficiently at leisure to cultivate freely the graces of life.” Just so does Ruskin tell us that a man who dies rich dies disgraced. Mill proceeds to express his dread of greater density of population, because it crowds out solitude, so needful for depth of character, and takes away wild natural beauty. The whole passage might have come from Brantwood.

As to machinery, Mill goes on in the very spirit of Fors Clavigera: “Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make large fortunes.” I am afraid that with posterity John Stuart Mill may suffer in reputation from being the object of so much invective, embedded in peerless English, and written under a mighty spirit of prophesying. Fors Clavigera and Unto This Last will be read much longer than Mill’s Principles, and future ages may describe him as a cold-blooded Philistine, when really he was among the best and wisest of men. Certain Stoics and Epicureans, of whom all we know is that they encountered Paul, have hardly had justice from the ordinary English reader of the Acts. Mill obtained the verdict of contemporaries: but the future is the charmer’s.

In some ways these two protagonists, both of them among the princes of our race, were strangely alike in their history. Mill, born in 1806, was the elder by thirteen years. Both children were extraordinarily precocious, Mill with his Greek at two, Ruskin with his pencil and his poetry at seven. At sixteen Mill was writing in The Traveller in defence of his father and of Ricardo. From eighteen to twenty he contributed to the Westminster Review and other journals articles on the Game Laws, the Corn Laws, the Law of Libel and on a Paper Currency, and reviews of books on Economics. At this age Ruskin’s poetry was appearing in Friendship’s Garland, and at twenty-four he came out with the first volume of Modern Painters, with a fully developed style made in heaven, and an originality in his art criticism which made him a public man at once. Each of them, after a long and famous literary life, gave the world an autobiography it would not willingly lose.

They were both only sons, brought up with unusual solicitude, close parental control and remarkably severe if loving discipline. Their attachment to and regard for their parents was a great power with both, all their lives. The gravity, earnestness, and deep sense of responsibility taught in childhood never left either of them.

Both passed through the fires which try faith; and there are reasons for believing in both cases that what might have been a happy marriage was frustrated by want of conventional orthodoxy. So that they both suffered for the cause of truth in the hardest of all ways. Each of them had only six or seven years of married life, and neither left any children.

Strangely enough, also, Mill was forty-one when his Principles of Political Economy was written, and Ruskin at forty-one brought out his papers in the Cornhill, under the title of Unto This Last, which are his counterblast to Mill.

Each of them found it necessary in later life to recant some of their earlier teaching, and each faithfully did so. Mill gave up the Wages Fund Theory he had learnt from his father, and Ruskin scatters the later editions of his earlier works with notes denouncing the dogmatic evangelicalism which runs through them, which he had learnt from his mother.

So, in tragic conflict, these two men are before us. Not that Mill ever replied. He died in 1872, and during his lifetime he could afford to ignore the eccentricities of an unstable genius, at whom all sober people smiled in pity. But now I would fain even for Mill’s sake reconcile them. You have true tragedy, not when right meets wrong, the noble the ignoble, but when two principles, both noble, are brought into a conflict they cannot avoid—Mill, the Liberal, the rationalist, with his watchwords of equality, liberty and a free chance for all—and Ruskin the Conservative, the indignant enemy of mechanical progress, speaking ever of order and obedience, reverence and graded ranks:—Mill, a servant of present humanity, with but a faint critical hold on the Unseen; Ruskin, emotional and inspired, who not seldom would fain call down fire from heaven on Mill’s newly enfranchised citizens, because they blasphemed.

So that I conclude that scholastic Economics is a reliable, useful scientific enquiry, forming a basis for the very same practical aims which Ruskin has set us striving for, and written by men who loved their fellows and were conspicuous examples of uprightness and benevolence, truth-keeping and friends of their kind.

We know how unscrupulous men of business used their conclusions, particularly those conclusions which have not stood the test of criticism, as a sort of textbook of oppression, as giving a scientific necessity for starvation, and so excusing hardness of heart. That this was so, must be Ruskin’s excuse for declaring war upon the economists. But it was a war wholly unnecessary; it clouded his prophecy with confused issues, and it laid the Master himself among the wounded.

It will be necessary, in order properly to express the scope of Political Economy, to examine more fully its definition of the two factors whose action and reaction upon one another form the subject matter of the science. These two factors are Man and Wealth. What is Man as an economic being? What is the “economic man”?

He is assumed by Mill and others[60] as a being who considers his own side of a bargain only, who in all contracts will do the best he can for himself, and who, in the use of his capital, and the direction of his labour, is influenced by an intelligent and passionless eye to his own interests. He has no regard for custom, or public opinion, or compassion, or resentment, or personal partiality, or class prejudice.

Mill does not pretend that this person actually exists; but that the tendency of things is as though he did exist; and that it is most easy to assume his existence, and after that recognize the qualifications which other parts of human nature require us to put in, just as in mechanics we calculate what would happen if surfaces were smooth, and then allow for friction afterwards.

Ruskin’s criticisms are not always fair. He writes:

“Political Economy, being a science of wealth, must be a science respecting human capacities and dispositions. But moral considerations have nothing to do with political economy (says Mill). Therefore, moral considerations have nothing to do with human capacities and dispositions.”[61]

Perhaps the logical fallacy is not very obvious, but it is there. Human capacities and dispositions touch moral considerations on one side, and they touch political economy on the other. But these two need not therefore be connected. Because a man has two relations, as a citizen and as a father, and because the state does not bring up his children, and the two relations are separate, we must not argue that the man has nothing to do with his family, because the state, with which he is also connected, has nothing to do with it. All this wrong criticism was produced by the obvious remark of Mill, that the ethical character of a taste for diamonds is not the economist’s affair.

It is only as a first approximation, then, that economics postulates the monster known as the economic man; cold, calculating, well informed, shrewd, selfish with the unthinking uniformity of a machine. It is perhaps clearer to say that it can take account only of such motives as are sufficiently regular and predictable to be worth so much in money. Some unselfish actions are of that kind, such as a man’s service to his children, or if he be a Highlander to his third cousin; and we can predict certain of his regular subscriptions. The Law of Supply and Demand applies to ministers and missionaries and hospital nurses, though their payment is all from charitable gifts. To some extent the Charity Fund is a steady sum in any nation. It could be predicted that when the national War Fund was absorbing large sums, other charities, particularly London charities, would suffer; and such has been the case. The same phenomenon occurred to a less degree when General Booth was raising his Darkest England Fund. Here is a charitable motive steady enough to be measurable.

It is not assumed here, as so constantly asserted by Ruskin, that men are and must be treated as rogues. The argument of Ruskin was that the qualifications to be introduced into problems due to the fact that man is not an economic man, are not like allowances for friction, or other mechanical matters, but are organic and revolutionary. The right reply probably is that sometimes this is so, but far more generally not so.

When remarkable instances of unselfishness occur outside the family circle, where the economist expects and allows for them, they are told as instances of the unexpected. When the newspaper boys near the Mansion House are found giving an undisturbed beat to a lame boy who could not compete with them in running to customers, and refuse to sell a paper there, the admiring customer concludes his beautiful and kindly story by asking how many business men round the Mansion House would leave a rival in possession because of his weakness?

The definition of Wealth must now be considered. Mill defines it as consisting of “All useful and agreeable things which possess exchangeable value.”

He decides to include in the wealth of a country such personal qualities, skill, energy, perseverance, as tend to make the man who possesses them industrially more valuable. A skilled cotton spinner is a greater national asset than a labourer; a skilled medical man who can restore to labourers their industrial efficiency, is also national wealth, a utility embodied in a person; but a gifted preacher, whose message may even make a man a less keen producer of wealth than he was before, would not be an instance of national wealth, unless he made, as he might, a drunkard or a loafer into a regular wage earner. So the actor, or the singer, or the orator, unless their work ultimately produces material goods, is not to be counted wealth in economics. There is evidently the usual difficulty about drawing the line.

What is more, the most precious parts of character are excluded from national wealth in the economic sense. Wealth, that is, is taken to mean property, and not, more generally, the means of true well-being. Again, the most necessary things are from their abundance not wealth. Air, sunshine, and water are not wealth where and when they are given profusely by nature; though they are the most needful supports to life. But air which has to be pumped in by a ventilating fan has cost something, and is wealth; sunshine which has passed through a coal measure and is brought to our firegrates on a winter’s night is wealth, water turned on at our taps is wealth for which we pay a water-rate. We may come to import oxygen into our halls and theatres and lecture rooms, perhaps even into our cellar workrooms, and then it too will have a price and an economic value.

There is clearly room for much difference of opinion in detail here. And yet it will be plain to all that the subject matter of a science must be limited; we must know when our studies begin and end. It is not demoralization which makes an economist deny holiness to be wealth, it is a classification of sciences. Holiness is not matter either, nor electricity, nor gas; it does not come into Physics any more than into Economics. It comes into Ethics and Theology and practical Politics, and it is the most important thing in the world. It may be true, as Ruskin urges, that wealth is not any good to a miser or a spendthrift or a rogue; that it is often I11th rather than Wealth, if it makes its user soft and slack and selfish, or proud and cruel. But nevertheless, it is an object of desire, of human motive; and that is enough for the economist.

The mistake of the early economists before John S. Mill was in not recognizing, however, the reaction of man’s possession of wealth upon his conduct as a producer; how high wages might be remunerative, if they increased efficiency, and big fortunes wasted if they increased idleness. We really have to treat two factors, each of which is, in the language of Mathematics, an implicit function of the other—or, if that does not make it more clear—each of which acts upon and is acted upon by the other. The early economists lived in the age when steam engines and electric telegraphs were great and new achievements, when Chemistry was being reborn in the atomic theory, and Joule was proving the great generalization of the conservation of energy. They treated their subject—man in business—as if he were matter; whereas he has biological characteristics, and is modifiable and can modify his environment. Our age, on the contrary, is concerned with the modification of characteristics under environment. It is the age of Darwin. Biological evolution is seen to govern the growth of men and societies; and these, in writings of the dominant school of thinkers since Herbert Spencer, are seen to follow biological laws of growth. The Economic man is no exception.

John Stuart Mill begins his chapter defining wealth by remarking that everyone has a notion sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by wealth. This is not his definition; he reaches that later: it is a reasonable introductory remark. But Ruskin assumes that this is his definition, and assails him for his lack of scientific precision and his looseness of thought, as though an astronomer were to begin by saying that everyone has a notion, sufficient for common purposes, of what is meant by a star. The criticism is the more unreasonable, when we find the critic himself doing the very same thing in his famous chapter on “The Nature of Gothic” in The Stones of Venice, in which, at the opening, the remark occurs: “We all have some notion, most of us a very determined one, of the meaning of the term Gothic.” Ruskin goes on to play with the etymology of value;[62] from valor and valere, meaning that which avails towards life and health; and says true wealth is what tends to life and the increase of its powers, not pearls nor topaz, but air and light and cleanliness. “To be wealthy is to have a large stock of useful articles,” say the economists. What, he asks, is to “have"—has the embalmed body of Carlo Borromeo the golden crosier and the cross of emeralds on its breast? Has a gold-filled belt the man whom it drowns, or has he it? Does not “having” depend on the vital power to use? What, nextly, is “useful”? Persons called wealthy may be inherently incapable of wealth, mere reservoirs in the stream of national produce, if not impediments in its course, and so causing “illth” rather than “wealth.” Therefore the aim and end of Political Economy is to develop moral character and capacity for valiantly using valuables, and the great difficulty is that manly character is apt to suffer from possessing material wealth and also apt to cast it away. Wealth of character and wealth of goods tend to undermine one another.

“In a community regulated by laws of supply and demand but protected from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking, industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked, the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just and godly person.”[63]

With one further piece of Ruskin’s teaching on the nature of wealth, I think that the subject will be clear.

“ ‘Rich’ is a relative word implying its opposite ‘poor’ as positively as the word ‘north’ implies its opposite ‘south.’ Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible by following certain scientific precepts (Ruskin’s capital error turns up here), for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately upon the need or desire he has for it—and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour poor.”[64]

This is all true; if by rich we understand, as the use of the word in common practice warrants, relatively wealthy. The possession of money is the possession of an order upon labour; and it is of no use if there is no available labour needing it. Ruskin’s illustration is that of a large landed proprietor who could get no servants to feed his cattle, mine his gold, plough his corn lands, because no one was in want of his wages. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to produce even ordinary comforts, and live in the midst of a waste desert. Therefore, what is meant by making oneself rich is to produce the maximum inequality between ourselves and our neighbours.[65]

Ruskin is grievously unfair in saying that that is the object of mercantile (political) economy; that it is “the science of getting rich.” Such a statement libels both the science and its expounders; and it contains, for Ruskin, an extraordinary looseness in the use of words. There cannot be a science of getting rich, that is an art or a craft. Science is organized knowledge, not practical faculty to do anything or get anything.[66]

How wide is the range of Ruskin’s Economy, how practical its objects, how little of a science it is, how entirely an art, the art of practical government and production, will be further clear from this statement:

“Political economy (the economy of a State or of citizens), consists simply in the production, preservation and distribution, at fittest time and place, of useful or pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts his hay at the right time, the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in sound wood, the builder who lays good bricks in well tempered mortar, the housewife who takes care of her furniture in the parlour and guards against all waste in her kitchen, and the singer who rightly disciplines and never overstrains his voice, are all political economists in the true and final sense; adding continually to the riches and well-being of the nation to which they belong.”[67]

All this is quite true; but not in any sense a rival study to scholastic Economics. The great misfortune is that the atmosphere of controversy and revolt runs through all this glorious gospel, so strong and true in its teachings, so perverse in its criticisms. The sum of the whole doctrine is put in memorable words near the close of Unto This Last:

“There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.”[68]

All railing accusation is out of place. The business of the man whom Ruskin calls the “vulgar economist” is to theorize, his is to edify. The one is the theoretical engineer and surveyor for the house of the state; his part in the ὁικονομἱα is that of a professional consultant. Ruskin is the actual builder; round his guidance sound the clang of hammer and anvil, the actual stonemasons’ and plumbers’ tools; under his eye grow in time the ivy and the flowers; but it is not the business of the architect or surveyor or sanitary engineer to know all about these, still less to keep a supply of them in his office.

The vastness of the task Ruskin had undertaken is now plain to us and was pathetic for him. Munera Pulveris contains the definitions of the new science. No more of it has ever appeared in systematic scientific form. It is touching to find the inspired artist reformer stopped again and again in his great attempt to write a complete guide to public action, by some subject needing special research. “I will treat of this when I come to” coinage or education, or whatever it might be; ever promising, ever hoping, if so be by a tour de force of genius he might storm the city of Mansoul; whereas, it needed all the corps of economic researchers, mining here and there into truth, making a breach here and there into the wall of the unknown, working on Parliamentary Returns and tables of statistics, on records of public registrars and clearing house reports, by patient inquiry to achieve a little at a time. Ruskin wrote for thirty years after the epoch-making date of 1860; and it is even now our task to systematize, if we can, his scattered contributions to practical Economy.

We may be glad, in John Ruskin’s case, as in that of lesser prophets, that the greatness of men is measured, not like chains, by their weakest link, but rather like tides, by the highest they reach.

CHAPTER V
RUSKIN’S RECONSTRUCTION

THE teaching of Ruskin is generally piecemeal and unsystematic, but, happily, there is one exception to this. In collecting his Cornhill papers for publication as Unto This Last he wrote a Preface summarizing his practical proposals at their “worst.” They are as follows:

1. Government Schools, in certain cases compulsory, wherein a child shall be taught

Compulsory popular education was established ten years after this demand, and it was long overdue. It was quite central in Mill’s programme and in that of the school of Cobden and Bright. Only Herbert Spencer, in obstinate and inflexible individualism, disapproved of State Schools, and only the Anglican and Catholic Churches, in their own interest, blocked the way. As to what is taught there, we are slowly learning Ruskin’s lessons about physical and moral training, and in the continuation schools and the technical schools are advancing to trade instruction also; though we are far behind Munich and other German cities in this regard. More will be found on this on pp. 175-8 in Chap. VI. The recent orders of the Board of Education distinctly recognize some difference of subjects for urban, rural and sea-side children.

2. Government workshops for all articles, in fair competition with private ventures, and turning out nothing that was not genuine and of good quality.

Broadly speaking, this has not matured. Concerning it we may use Ruskin’s own words on the whole scheme: “It is only possible to answer for the final truth of principles, not for the direct success of plans.”[69] The right attitude, I would suggest, is to develop on practical lines of utility, and have work done by whatever agency does it most effectively. This is Ruskin’s drift. It looks as though municipal milk and beer, municipal houses and coal, as well as heat and light, municipal theatres and opera, and government transport and electrical power, were already with us in idea, if not yet in realization. The method is one for gradual application. Every step will, very properly, be contested. The experience of the transaction of business by Government during the Great War has just now strongly reinforced faith in private enterprise. We should keep an open mind. No high or final principle comes in, and dogma and prejudice are out of place.

Hitherto Government has controlled and inspected, rather than itself carried on the businesses of the country. Very few things are now left wholly to perfectly free competition. Later on Ruskin gave up Government workshops in favour of businesses owned and managed by Trade Gilds, thus anticipating the sequence of public thought in later years. See below in this Chapter.

3. The unemployed to be taught, or employed at fixed wages, or medically treated, or coerced to painful labour, according to the need of each case.

This close pastoral care by public authority has never yet been realized. It has been left to private philanthropy, guided at one time by the Elberfeld system as practised in the industrial towns on the Rhine. As in manufactures the State has guided and inspected business, rather than conducted it, so its Labour Exchanges and its unemployment allowance and Insurance against sickness have done much to ease and diminish the pain of unemployment. But, of course, this is only a stage in our progress. And the comprehensive lines of Ruskin’s case for the orphans of Great Business may well be earnestly remembered as a standard to work towards. We have at any rate left behind us mere reliance on the terrors of starvation and death as the only spur to industry in the Great Society, as the present world of vast production and exchange has been called.[70]

4. Comfort and home for the old and destitute, free from the slur of the Poor Law.

This has been provided by Old Age Pensions.

Thus Ruskin’s schemes are being or are on the way to be realized, in quite remarkable detail. How much, uttered by leading writers in 1862, remains so fresh as these in 1920? Ruskin proclaimed some truths too early for his peace of mind, but not for the service of men. The characteristic novelty of the proposals was that they were social, not political, though written in a period when political reforms occupied the forefront of progressive thought. They were no doubt a necessary stage. We should not belittle them in disappointment. For without a democratic franchise no social reforms could have been achieved. Ruskin’s proposals are also extremely moderate, and essentially conservative. He declares his disbelief in “the common Socialist idea of the division of property,”[71] though, as land is to be in the hands of those who can use it best, there was to be much compulsory purchase, a practice with which we are increasingly familiar, for housing, for allotments, and for small holdings. Nationalization of railways is definitely part of the programme, as we should expect.[72]

The most radical change concerned Wages. Ruskin declared that wages should be fixed and steady under the responsibility of either the Government or the Craft Gilds, and should be independent of the number of people competing for work. As usual, he blamed the economists because this was not so in nature, as though physiologists were to blame for indigestion. But, as mere economics, he understood the doctrine, and accepted its truth. He says that the cheapening of bread under the absence of the Corn Laws would cause wages “to fall permanently in precisely the same proportion.”[73] That is, he accepted the “supply price” of wages—being the maintenance which the labourer under competition would accept.

The great issue for human welfare was then, and is now, whether there is a supply price for wages above the merest starvation line. Labour, so far, like commodities, has its price determined by the reciprocal action of the buyers and sellers of it. On the side of demand the buyers cannot give more than the value of the product of the last labourer they engage. On the side of supply the labourer would change his trade, or not have children, or not bring up his children to that trade, or he would starve and die, unless he received what he considered a maintenance. This is the supply price. And in any given trade, wages are fixed at the point where demand and supply are both satisfied. Enough labourers are employed to make the least valuable worth the required maintenance and no more. Now the economists, arguing from the phenomena they saw believed, with Malthus, that there was no decent supply price for labour in practice, that people would multiply to the very limit of subsistence. Hence they deduced the terrible doctrine of the Iron Law of Wages, that wages tend to a starvation level, because they thought first that food,[74] and afterwards that capital,[75] was fixed at any time, or increased very slowly. Finally, J. S. Mill taught that fluid capital or the Wages Fund, that famous centre of controversy, being fixed, the total capital available for wages had to be divided between an ever multiplying number of wage earners, some of whom were therefore always starving.

This treatment of Labour as governed by the same law of supply and demand as commodities, is the only way it can be treated as subject matter of a science dealing with the production, distribution and exchange of wealth. But no one would stop there, shutting his eyes to the fact that behind the labour stands the labourer, a human being, with all the spiritual and emotional gifts and needs of a man. Only military authority treats men so. Even an economist, writing on labour as a commodity, proceeds to explain how it differs from material commodities—how slow is its reaction on the side of supply—how high wages up to a point produce a still higher quality of labour, and so forth. Business management, also, is a commodity subject to the same law, but I have never heard that the General Managers of Railway Companies feel degraded for that reason to the mere level of slaves.

Unluckily the economists, influenced by the poverty that followed the last great war, which ended in 1815, concluded that the unskilled labourer would multiply till his children starved. They saw in fact starvation rampant in England.

This was why Political Economy was called by Carlyle the Dismal Science. But the economists were no more responsible for it than theologians are for the Judgment Day, perhaps much less so. Ruskin believed and hated the doctrine, and so, in fact, was an orthodox Millite. And both he and Mill had their remedies. Mill recommended education, emigration and small families. Ruskin appealed to the state or the gilds. In time Mill came to the same point of view, and died a Socialist. He was able to do this because he was persuaded by Thornton that the Wages Fund theory did not hold; that in fact workers produced their own wages, with the help of some capital to oil the wheels, that is, to fill the gap in time caused by distribution under the machinery of payment. This occurred in 1869 after Munera Pulveris had been published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1862 and 1863, but before it came out in book form in 1872; and it is grievous that these two men did not consciously co-operate. Ruskin’s method of controversy, possibly drove Mill to silence.

The central blast of Ruskin’s attack was against this—ultimately abandoned—doctrine of hopelessness. I do not mean that we may be quite cheerful about free competition in wages; for there are departments of labour so helpless that they cannot obtain a decently living wage.[76] To meet this, choice of employment is necessary, but cannot always be found for physically weak or mentally ill-qualified people. The nation has decided to carry out in specified trades the Ruskinian principle of the fixed living wage, enforced by the Sweated Industries Acts. Under these more and more trades may and will come. The economic storm of the war has broken down the equable course of free competition, and has caused regulation of wages and prices on all sides. We must not speak as if this were a normal development either of socialism or of competition. We have suffered under it as part of the evil of war. The benefits of competition require time, and a fair field for all forces. There will still be much done by provision of alternative employment on the land, by the investment of capital in developing local industries, and indirectly, by housing, education and temperance reform, to diminish the remnant of the helpless victims of sweating. Behind these the nation will probably soon stand, committed to a national minimum in wages and in hours. Above these government minima stand the various Trades Union fixed rules. All are Ruskinian,[77] and Mill would rejoice in them too.

A generation ago a national minimum wage had the support of Socialists of the school of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and of J. A. Hobson.[78] For a long time it was not orthodox. I remember hearing a Professor of Political Economy speaking on this subject twice, at an interval of about ten years. The first time he summed up against it, pointing out how a minimum tended, in Australian experience, to become a maximum, with certificates of invalidism or incapacity easily obtainable to authorize a lower wage. The second time he was for a minimum wage, as what progressive thinkers hoped for. The steps have, of late, become rapid. Miners had their wages fixed by the Government after the Coal Strike of 1912, and again, after the Sankey Commission in 1919. The Railway and Transport Workers are also under Government protection. An international Labour Charter is part of the Peace of Versailles, which must lead to an international minimum. It will be a delicate undertaking to work it out with any completeness. Within a nation the cost of living varies from place to place; the value of money rises and falls as general prices fall or rise. Internationally, between San Francisco, New York, London, Constantinople, and Yokohama, the differences forbid uniformity of wage. Nobody can compel an employer to employ anybody whose work results in no profit. Some people exist who are not worth a minimum wage, unless it is too low to be acceptable. There will have to be provision for these. Pensions for Old Age and invalidity will assume larger proportions. The race will have to worry out this complex tangle of man with his environment. What is clear is that we have reached the Ruskinian standpoint about it.

Fors Clavigera is the most remarkable of the writings of Ruskin. He who has read Fors, or a large part of it, knows Ruskin, and if he loves and reveres the author, has become a Ruskinian. But without reading Fors no man or woman can become a Ruskinian. In it you become intimate with the man. He talks to you like a friend, button-holes you very much as Socrates did, invites you to laugh with him, and join in laughs at himself, tells you all his troubles, and the causes of the ups and downs of his spirits, tells you of his loneliness and his hopes and intentions, shows you his accounts every month, tells you where he has lost money, and to whom he has given it away, lets you see his letters and his replies to them, and holds you, by the personal power of him, while he pours vials of prophetic denunciation upon Society only to be equalled in the pages of the Hebrew Prophets; and then clinches it all with “Mind you, I mean every word of it; no exaggeration here.”

Fors is a book—a message:—it is often playful in style, the matter all scattered. The subject changes from page to page; nothing in it can be referred to without that Queen of Indexes which accompanies it: but the unity of its subject is in the unity of the author. You carry on an idea, cropping up under all sorts of irrelevancies and chance illustrations—and you carry on certain jokes too, or humorous allusions, as we all do in common life. This miscellany, I am persuaded, will attract readers longer than the stately symmetry of Modern Painters, or the laborious detail of the Stones of Venice. Who but Ruskin could have brought thus out of his treasury things new and old?

We shall look in vain for a completely worked out system of business and legislation in Ruskin’s writings. His Utopia is delightfully worked up here and there in detail, but it has great gaps; it often seems to raise more difficulties than it settles; and it is not always consistent with itself.

Indeed, one could not expect completeness or real mastery of the problem, either from the man or from the nature of the subject. From the man, because the prophet and the practical administrator are rarely combined. Comte went into detail, and we do not much value the Positivist detail. The prophet is the man with the clear vision and hot heart. The practical administrator must sit on committees and keep secretaries, and meet deputations; he must check accounts and hold dinner parties. What we desire is that practical men should give ear to the prophet.

Secondly, the subject is too vast and complicated for complete treatment. Great as has been the volume and secure the conviction of the attacks on our present social system, how very little in the way of stable fabric exists to-day in confessed substitution for it. Socialist and Communist colonies have failed through their principles being in advance of the practice of the men who had to pioneer their course. Of the thirty or forty whose history has been collected, most have broken up, a few with profit to the members, but most with loss. Religious communities have, of course, shown the greatest tenacity. The Shakers are now diminishing and discouraged, though they own some of the richest land in America, and are commercially connected with a valuable property besides, known as Mother Siegel’s Syrup. The Doukhobors from Russia now settled in the far West of Canada, have saved themselves by their communism under persecution. They again are bound by a mighty religious bond. But many are being absorbed by the society around, and their primitive faith in their leader Peter Verigin as an incarnation of God, will hardly survive Canadian education. We will not, then, expect to see a complete reconstruction of society. Ruskin’s is most fully worked out in Time and Tide: but Fors is thickly scattered with it too.

Roughly, then, and in the large, Regulation and Co-operation, rather than Competition and Economic freedom, are to be the guiding principles. That is, Ruskin is a Socialist. But he is no revolutionary nor divider up of property. He desired all things to be gradual, and was too wise to suppose that anything sweeping could be done at once, or indeed very much of any kind for a long time. To his private correspondents in Fors the advice was always given to stay where they were, and do as well as they could what they had in hand. Ruskin, again, is a Socialist of the aristocratic variety. He believed in graded ranks, and in people staying in the class they were born in. He did not say that everybody was equal. He was also of the earnestly religious type of Socialist. When I add that he considered that he and Carlyle were the only two Conservatives left in England, and that he was a Tory of the type of Scott and Homer, I may perhaps have succeeded in leaving my readers fairly confused in mind: as every one who tries to classify Ruskin will become.

As to Wealth, Ruskin proposes that there shall be a legislative upper limit to a man’s property; and that those whose superfluity is skimmed off by law should have titles instead and be employed in public service. As noted again in the chapter on Usury later, there are various ways of securing this: by steeply graduating the Income Tax and the Death Duties at the upper end, or by limiting the legal right of bequest, either by saying that you must not bequeath more than a certain sum to one person, or that a person must not inherit more than a certain total sum from all sources. These startling innovations would no doubt put an effective check on accumulation, if the State succeeded in fighting the ingenuity of the lawyers.

All interest on money he entirely forbids. This I deal with in Chapter VII.

All land is to be bought by the State from the landlords, and the aristocracy, living on the Government annuities thus created, are to become the legislators and leaders of the people. I don’t know whether he knew them very well. At any rate these annuities appear to me to be of the nature of interest.

War is to be managed by personal encounters between some of the military aristocrats and the aristocrats of the enemy, to save butchery of peasants and much needless devastation. A kind of international Rugby football match without referees might meet the case—where the honour of England was really at stake. It is a simple suggestion; but soberly Ruskin loathed war—particularly wars for conquest and all modern war by machinery and for the benefit of capitalists. This is shown in Chapter VIII.

Our factory system and the crowding into towns he detested; though he gives us no practical suggestions towards ending it except that most steam power should be abandoned—not quite all. There is a curious prophecy too about electricity superseding steam and smoke. We are beginning on hopeful lines here with Mond gas, central electrical power stations, and Garden Cities—if only we could and would compel our factories to stop making smoke, the greatest curse of the landscape. This is treated more fully in Chapter IX.

Our Government must also take heed to all means of keeping our population in the country.

Population Ruskin deals with fantastically by permitting marriages only to young men and young women after passing a suitable examination in business or domestic qualifications. He would provide them, on marriage, with an income for seven years from the State. If they had a private income beyond this minimum it must accumulate; so that all young couples start life on the same standard of expenditure. This is the most drastic of his regulations, and the most out of reach.[79]

Under land tenure from the State each person was to hold no more than he could properly make use of—a system of permanent peasant proprietors, that is, at a quit rent;—the land inalienable in title, and to descend by primogeniture.

We have also the somewhat obscure remark[80] that bread, water, and the roof over his head must be tax (i.e. rent) free to every man. Methods of administration are to be left to settle themselves. Also, “every man is to build his own house to his mind, and to have a mind to build it to.”

As a system this leaves large gaps. What are to be the exact duties of the aristocratic annuitant landowners, and who are they to be? There is an echo of Plato’s “Guardians” in their position and duties: indeed they seem very like in their functions to those hierarchical beings. It may have been from Plato too that Ruskin learnt to emphasize the degradation of continuous mechanical work, particularly that which is connected with the mechanical use of fire.

The Church is, as we have seen in Chapter III, to be exactly on the Quaker model. No one is to be paid for preaching. The preachers are to earn their living like other men; and the distinction between clergy and laity is to be absolutely done away. “Of clergymen’s usual work, admonition, theological demonstration, and the like I shall want very little done indeed, and that little done for nothing! for I will allow no man to admonish anybody, until he has previously earned his own dinner by more productive work than admonition.” The lesson on humility to religious persons in Time and Tide is very amusing.[81]

Turning to the business world, the deadliest war of Society would be against occult stealing, by making bad goods, by adulteration, and passing off sham articles. These practices would be guarded against by the formation of trade guilds. Ruskin enumerates in Letter LXXXIX of Fors twenty-one trades. The men of each trade are to form themselves into a guild, buy land and buildings, regulate prices and qualities, and become, in fact, capitalist employers. Retail dealers are to be salaried officers under the guild. Such is the proposal of Fors of 1879, and Time and Tide of 1867. In Unto This Last of 1860 the Government is to have the workshops, not private guilds. Ruskin began to think his later plan of private guilds more possible as years went on. Also, and always, property is to be acquired by the guilds by honest payment and voluntary bargains. It is very striking how prophetic these schemes are of the proposals now known as Guild Socialism, treated in the next chapter, at present the most popular form of socialistic reconstruction. They are, indeed, a sketch of the very thing.

Competition, outside the guilds or Government shops, is always allowed—“as a safety valve for outlet of irrepressible vice.” He believed in the cutaneous and curable eruption of such, rather than in forcing it into the system of the body politic—a wise and cautious idea, in no way that of a blind optimist. Another reason for this permission of outside competition was to provide scope for erratic ingenuity and original genius, and to conserve individual initiative; also to protect the rights of foreigners trading here. There is also much other sensible elasticity of arrangement hinted at. Honesty, truthfulness, freedom from oppression, some plan by which all the good national elements could become availing instead of being neglected and choked off, these are the objects of his trade guilds. The difficulty of foreign competition at low prices he does not touch, except to anticipate for a far future a similar international guild system.

One can easily see that increased facilities for combination are putting it into the power of combines and trusts to fix qualities and prices in a way the men of 1867 would never have expected. Is it beyond hope that what combinations of capital and management can do, labour combinations may do, for more public ends? Then indeed out of the eater will have come forth meat. “The lion and the bear shall feed,” and the capitalist shall dine like the labourer. “They shall not hurt nor destroy” in all my holy workshops and markets.

One of the most startling, but at the same time, most thought-compelling proposals for the ideal State are Mr. Ruskin’s Bishops. The έπίσκοπος of the New Testament was an Overseer, a man who looked after the members of the Early Church, the agent of their relief, and the supervisor of their conduct. This order of men Ruskin proposes to declericalize and to municipalize. The preaching, we shall remember, is to be separated from pastoral care, and to be done gratuitously by unofficial ministers. This leaves no link between the State and the family; even the action of the Fatherland as a father, now afforded by the State clergy, being done away with. Therefore, over every fifty or a hundred families there is to be elected, for life, a Bishop, who is to be a friendly counsellor, and to keep a record of all notable events—a much extended public registrar. All exceptional treatment which special circumstances may render desirable, any mitigation of ordinary law, is arranged through him. Where law is to be so pervasive, some cushion for its impact would certainly be necessary. He bears to the Government the relation which the Charity Organisation Society bears to the Poor Law Guardians, or an Inebriate Home to the Jail, or (in theory) Equity to Common Law. Thus the terrible loneliness and neglect of the poor, and haunts of undiscovered vice, would no longer be possible. The whole episcopal action was to be elastic, the methods patient, gentle, not compulsory, and not intrusive. The Bishops were to be paid officers, and they had to report to a higher officer called a Duke (Time and Tide, XIII).

We now approach the question of national leadership. So great was Ruskin’s distrust of the People, his hatred of Liberty and Equality, that he fell back upon our Aristocracy, commonplace as he knew it to be, for the power of governance. He is not so far out of our current national habit. We know well that any good, hardworking peer, baronet or landed magnate of good family, has at once a favourable hearing, and possesses by birth an open door to the confidence of the people; and he has only to show that he deserves it, to maintain it with ease. We democrats love a lord. So the Home Office and police work, also the Judgeships and the officering of the citizen army are to be the work of the present landed gentry; the careful husbanding of the nation’s resources in a glorified Board of Trade is to be the work of the present kings of business. The Education Department and the now nonexistent Artistic Department, the Board of Works, together with the few necessary Doctors, and the Musicians, are the third department of upper-class work, to be undertaken by the professional classes. It will be remembered that there are to be no hired soldiers or clergy and very few lawyers.

For the realization of this Utopia, no violence is to be used. As a prophet with an ethical gospel he entirely distrusted methods of physical force, as leaving you in reality just the men you were before, only damaged by the conflict in mind and person and estate. Nor did he, as a Conservative and a believer in continuity, look with favour or hope on a general confiscation bill, abolishing rent and interest. The whole thing had to be done by converting the upper classes, those classes whose glory is in living in comfort and pride served by the labour of others, and whose alienation from the multitude is graven deep into their characters by every one of their cherished habits. We have seen that the landlord would become an annuitant, the parson transformed, the solicitor and the barrister nearly wiped out. Many merchants, most bankers and stockbrokers and all shareholders in banks, if and when interest is abolished, would find themselves without the profits on which, it is to be feared, much of their happiness depends. Some of these persons would become public officers, living on salaries and earning them. Manufacturers would become profit sharers, and be invited to join a Guild. Doubtless the liquor interest would find that it had a stern master, though but little detailed allusion to it is made, and prohibition is not intended.

If you have ever tried to convince a man by some highly abstruse, or at any rate, long and intricate process of thought, of truths or proposals which upset his whole career, blighted his interests, and wrote him down a useless and pernicious person—if, for instance, you have explained the wickedness and folly of Protection to a friend from Pennsylvania, or the theoretical righteousness of Home Rule to a friend from Belfast, or the innate errors of Vivisection to a physiologist, or discoursed on Homœopathy to your own medical man, you will be able to foresee the blank look of polite indifference with which Ruskin’s schemes would be likely to be received by the Marquis of B. or by the distinguished directors of your bank. Why am I not to make cotton look like silk? will be asked by certain very excellent Lancashire firms. Is shoddy not to continue its useful, if humble career? is the cry of certain parts of the West Riding; and some of the metallic business of Birmingham would be a cause of much searching of heart. And there is not a retired old lady living in her bower of roses from the Lake District to Penzance whose peace of mind and perhaps nourishment of body would not, if interest were truly abolished, cease. I always notice that reformers who would abolish interest do not explain what they would do with the large class of ladies of all ages, and the smaller class of elderly men who, after all, do constitute the greater part of the technically idle class, and who are totally unable to earn a living; since neither the arts of dress nor of graceful conversation have a market value.

It must be plain to us that any wholesale conversion and sudden awakening of the social conscience in Ruskin’s direction is not to be expected. Neither the intellectual conviction, nor the moral power to carry it out if formed, will be produced except in a few instances, here and there. The astonishment and delight with which we hear of the doings of exceptional employers show how rare they are. Every year, of recent years, has seemed darker and darker to some of us, in noting the treatment of public affairs by the wealthy, and the extent to which “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”

Nor is it possible to an employer, even if intellectually convinced and morally sound, to raise his wages much above the rate paid by his competitors, to avoid drawing from the business wherewithal to pay interest on capital, nor, generally, to improve quality, with or without improving price.

We must fall back on legislation, on democratic conviction expressed by the organ of the national will, to bring about any portion of this scheme. We shall have to move all together, if we move at all. Take a comparative trifle, trifling compared to these large proposals—the weekly half-holiday. This can only be taken by all or none of a given trade in a given town; or take the Bank Holidays, popular benefits only to be won on the floor of the House of Commons, and which cost so much effort that a certain worthy banker has been canonized for his labours in obtaining St. Lubbock’s Day. Yet I am of Ruskin’s mind thus far—that any growth of an enlightened moral sentiment will most easily permeate the voting masses from individuals of the educated classes.

Ruskin cherished no delusions about it. He says: “You need not think that even if you obtained a majority of representatives in the existing Parliament, you could immediately compel any system of business, broadly contrary to that now established by custom. If you could pass laws to-morrow, wholly favourable to yourselves, as you might think, because unfavourable to your masters, and to the upper classes of society, the only result would be that the riches of the country would at once leave it, and you would perish in riot and famine. Be assured that no great change for the better can ever be easily accomplished, or quickly; nor by impulsive ill-regulated effort, nor by bad men; nor even by good men, without much suffering.”[82]

The scheme as a whole has never been systematized, nor worked out in detailed proposals. Still less has it been hinged on to our present social structure. It is a prophetic forecast, an inspiration of genius; it is a bow of glorious hue set in the clouds. When Ruskin wrote his economics the view was that by each man doing the best for himself the general good was automatically best advanced—an unseen hand behind human activities arranged the world’s welfare with nothing but individual selfishness to do it with.

We no longer accept this as a complete account of the matter. We recognize that that would be a wild-wood kind of a cosmic order; and that under it human affairs would be left to the same kind of governance as that of the forest and the jungle. The wolf pack and the wild bramble are all very well in their scale and their place; but for humanity this unrestrained individual luxuriance, with its terrible cost and waste, is now felt by us to be only a first approximation to society. It is the point whence we begin, not the goal we aim for. It is safe and stable as a foundation; it cannot be upset or overthrown, for it is actually itself the ground; and there is nothing to overthrow. Guilds, Monopolies, Trusts, also Governments and Charities are built upon it to regulate it; and they grow, and in time may decay and die, leaving the jungle of free competition to overrun once more the painful clearings. But out of the wilds men have in fact made their lawns and gardens, their orchards and their fields of wheat; they have built them palaces and cities which are permanent and stable enough, though not everlasting. The higher law of civilization is successfully holding at bay the wild tendencies. The millions of stray seeds, the storms of wind and crackings of frost, if let alone, would in time reduce a watering place like Scarborough to a green cliff side; still Scarborough exists and will exist, and justify its existence. Similarly there are limitations, orderly arrangements, which may be put upon the wild nature of economic freedom; and we may make a better world thereby. We all know how much is accepted already in the way of civilized restraint. When Parliament is free to attend to home affairs almost every Act is a regulation or limitation of individual freedom, or it is the taking up by Government of what had been previously left to the individual. The long list of municipal and imperial activities must be too familiar to need repetition here. We are indeed rushing rapidly in that direction. Can we go no further? Are we necessarily at the end just here?

I will try to outline in the following chapter a few ways in which we may. That is, we will test Ruskin by the changes of the last half century and those which are looming near; and see how much of his teaching abides our question.

CHAPTER VI
RUSKIN’S ECONOMICS TO-DAY

IT is well known that none of the proposals in the Preface to Unto This Last, summarized above, nor all of them together, satisfy the ideas of the most vigorous reformers of the moment. Nothing less than the abolition of all production and distribution for individual profit is believed by many earnest and experienced men to go to the root of our social diseases. On the other hand, State Socialism has fallen into discredit. The experience of Government officials in war time has taken all the gas out of that particular experimental balloon.

Guild Socialism is now the favourite form. Under this the government of the country is to be twofold, from top to bottom. Guilds of producers are to own and run businesses, having eliminated the capitalist as such, and are to be organized into local, county, and national guilds of the workers in that business. Then all the national guilds unite in a Parliament of producers, who govern wages, and, I presume, the import and export trade. Over against this stand our present geographical constituencies and our present Parliament, which is the nation organized as consumers. The State, represented by the present geographically elected Parliament, is to remain supreme, is to be the ultimate owner of the property used by the Guilds, with the right to tax it, by a quit rent. The Guilds are to be the taxable units.[83]

Rent, interest and profits are to be abolished. No provision for compensation is part of the proposal; but no doubt that would depend upon circumstances, and upon what could be arranged. It would also give rise to much difference of opinion among the advocates of the new order. And much would depend on whether it came gradually and peacefully, by consent—or after a revolutionary general strike—or, again, after civil war. One hears of an intention to respect life interests, but no more. Clearly this issue will subject our people to a political test which may be beyond their strength, and may, if we are not guided by justice and mercy, lead to a generation of violence and the ruin of many hopes.

The ideals behind the movement are noble—to give the workman a proprietary interest in his work, to break down the pernicious distribution of wealth which economic freedom has brought about, to bring up a healthy and well-bred race, not a well-bred class only, to put public service in place of profit as the motive for labour; to banish the wretched insecurity of unemployment, and take away the bored life of the idle rich; to use the surplus wealth of industry for the education of the whole people and for a full life for all. Nothing less than this is the guerdon of success.

If the Guild is to guarantee a wage to all its workers, well and ill, under good trade and bad, in defiance of changes in demand due to fashion or invention, or to changes in weather or to foreign imports, there will certainly have to be great powers in the Guild for the transfer of labour from where it is not wanted to where it is. Also, seeing that only a certain number of workers are wanted in the pleasanter occupations, some authority in the guilds will have to assign their duty to all labourers, instead of leaving the choice to competition with the sharp tooth of hunger behind it.

The coercion of the idle workman will be quite a large task; for slackness cannot be summarily dealt with as now by dismissal. It is such rocks of human frailty that will be the danger to the navigation of any ordered system. Are all childless women to be made to work for guild wages? Are married and unmarried men to be paid alike? Is any saving to be permitted? What machinery will determine prices, when demand and supply are denied their free play? It is not the place of this book to answer these questions or to pronounce a final opinion. It is enough to see that opinion is strongly tending in this direction, and that it is in the sequence of Fors Clavigera.

That this is, however, the direction of advance, one is led to believe, from the existence of a halfway house. There is in every movement always the moderate mass and the progressive vanguard, and they sometimes turn their guns heartily upon one another. The moderate proposal, the rival to Guild Socialism, is that of the Whitley Councils for bringing in the present capitalist employers and their workmen as collaborators in the conduct of businesses, and as joint constituents of a trade Parliament.

The Builders’ Parliament,[84] or “Industrial Council for the Building Industry,” was the forerunner of the Whitley Councils, but is on more thoroughgoing guild lines. Mr. Malcolm Sparkes, a young director of a carpentry and cabinet-making business in Willesden, was mixed up as an employer in a disastrous building strike in 1914. Hopeless of any solution by hostile and suspicious bodies of organized masters and organized men, never meeting except as opponents, and working by warfare and the balance of power, he conceived the idea of combined councils, representing both sides, meeting periodically to consider the well-being of the industry. Such bodies were not to deal with disputes, but could often avoid them and remove their causes. Above all they would provide a friendly atmosphere. He persuaded the men’s organizations first, and induced them to approach the masters, who responded willingly; and after due debates, and two years’ permeation of opinion in all the bodies concerned, the Builders’ Parliament was constituted. At its sixth quarterly meeting in August, 1919, it passed by an overwhelming majority a report, called the Foster Report, under which masters would become paid officials and capitalists would receive a fixed interest. Mr. Sparkes and the builders, therefore, are using their united organization to prepare the way for the Guild arrangement, and are favourable to it. They have offered the labour to build some thousands of houses to the Corporation of Manchester, if the latter will supply the capital and take the business risk. But the Whitley Council movement has had a wider development, if a less advanced one.

Mr. J. H. Whitley, Chairman of Committees in the House of Commons, and Chairman of a Government Sub-Committee on the relations of employers and employed, read an article by Mr. Sparkes on his scheme in the Venturer for December, 1916, and asked him to prepare a memorandum for him in detail, and to record his progress to date. This memorandum became the basis of the Whitley Report. The Government adopted it and organized under it the Whitley Councils. The day after Mr. Sparkes’s memorandum reached the printers the author was sent to prison as a conscientious objector to military service. He was a Quaker; he had refused an exemption as a works manager in a controlled business; he had resigned his directorship rather than do war work; and now in defiance of an Act of Parliament which granted exemption, the blind hand of the Tribunals and the War Office could do nothing better with this young patriot than to keep him in gaol for two years. He was liberated a little before the others because the King happened to ask for the author of the Whitley Report. This kind of thing gives pause to one’s hopes of better times coming out of the action of the present militarist states. To all these proposals Ruskin ought to be recognized as the idealist forerunner. His guilds of craftsmen, though differently founded, are very much like Mr. Cole’s. The same social message which Oxford sent through Ruskin from Christ Church and Corpus, she now sends through a Fellow of Magdalen. As the consummation of the idealist approaches, it becomes necessary to work the ideas out, and people will listen to the details, indeed will fiercely question them, and demand something practical. But in the history of economic thought, should these ideas become ultimately fruitful, a greater place should be found for the author of Fors than has yet been awarded to him by our writers on Economics. The chief differences between the modern scheme and that of forty years ago is that Ruskin would confiscate nothing, and would not demand, would even object to, a labour monopoly in the hands of the Guilds, which Mr. Cole declares to be a necessity, without which a Guild is not a Guild. It will be for our successors fifty years hence to say on which side wisdom lay.

On one point the age has gone beyond Ruskin. For good or evil we know we have nothing to trust to but Democracy. From the ugliness and gullibility of the democracy the secluded artist shrank, living in beauty and luxury at Oxford or Venice or by the Lake of Coniston. There was excuse, and there is still much excuse, for men of little faith. The democracy can be played upon and excited to war: its ruling puppets dare not take the drink from it even in war time. It has “demanded,” as economists say, our conscienceless and sensational newspapers, and it loves to read them. It needs much education, and particularly it needs what Ruskin hoped for from Education—character and conduct; first, grace and health and beauty of life; and, as chief intellectual prize, a relentless love of truth. Would that everybody would refuse to buy again a paper that had once deceived them, or to vote for a politician once proved untrustworthy.

Reformers, forgetting the dead weight they have to shift, turn their guns on one another. Socialists seem to be most scornful of Liberalism, and particularly of those employers who are generous and public-spirited.

It must be emphasized that Ruskin was an aristocrat in temperament. In fact he repudiated the idea of an equality which did not, he declared, exist. His sections in Munera Pulveris against equal voting and on “natural slavery"—I suppose learnt from Aristotle’s Politics—are clear on this.[85] He did not support negro slavery, but his interests were chiefly taken up with opposing economic slavery at home, or reserving it for the fit people. The whole passage must be read to be understood.

It is now in 1920 nearly fifty years since Fors Clavigera began to come out, and the outlines of St. George’s Guild were drawn. Those who in that decade found a new inspiration and delight in discipleship to him, are now growing elderly; the glory of the early time when Ruskin’s genius was irradiating the pages of Fors with the hope of a kingdom of God to be raised within the kingdom of this world, was in the days of youth, in the spring of aspiration and a not easily bounded hope. We nourished our hearts on godlike food; and we owe our Master an inextinguishable debt. It is often doubtless a thought full of sadness that the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to us, in the sober light of long experience in the realm of the commonplace. Our task now is, to gather up in our maturity that which abides; for our days are passing, and though the growth of the kingdom has not been all that we might have hoped, its spirit must still be handed on, and fixed, so far as we can fix it, in the permanent habits of man.