Слике страница
PDF
ePub

5

born 'Impossibility,' thou canst lift it up, thou canst, by thy soul's travail, bring it into clear being. That loud inane Actuality, with millions in its pocket, too 'possible' that, which rolls along there, with quilted trumpeters blaring round it, and all the world escorting it as mute or vocal flunky,- escort it not thou; say to it, either nothing, or else deeply in thy heart: 'Loud-blaring Nonentity, no force to of trumpets, cash, Long-acre art, or universal flunkyhood of men, makes thee an Entity; thou art a Nonentity, and deceptive Simulacrum, more accursed than thou seemest. Pass on in the Devil's 15 name, unworshipped by at least one man, and leave the thoroughfare clear!'

Not on Ilion's or Latium's plains; on far other plains and places henceforth can noble deeds be now done. Not on 20 Ilion's plains; how much less in Mayfair's drawingrooms! Not in victory over poor brother French or Phrygians; but in victory over Frost-jötuns, Marshgiants, over demons of Discord, Idleness, 25 Injustice, Unreason, and Chaos come again. None of the old Epics is longer possible. The Epic of French and Phrygians was comparatively a small Epic; but that of Flirts and Fribbles, what is 30 that? A thing that vanishes at cockcrowing, that already begins to scent the morning air. Gamepreserving Aristocracies, let them 'bush' never so effectually, cannot escape the

Subtle 35

Fowler. Game seasons will be excellent, and again will be indifferent, and by and by they will not be at all. The Last Partridge of England, of an England where millions of men can get no 40 corn to eat, will be shot and ended. Aristocracies with beards on their chins will find other work to do than amuse themselves with trundling-hoops.

and there is no other greatness. To make some nook of God's Creation a little fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God; to make some human hearts a little wiser, manfuller, happier,- more blessed, less accursed! It is work for a God. Sooty Hell of mutiny and savagery and despair can, by man's energy, be made a kind of Heaven; cleared of its soot, of its mutiny, of its need to mutiny; the everlasting arch of Heaven's azure overspanning it too, and its cunning mechanisms and tall chimney-steeples, as a birth of Heaven; God and all men looking on it well pleased.

Unstained by wasteful deformities, by wasted tears or heart's-blood of men, or any defacement of the Pit, noble fruitful Labor, growing ever nobler, will come forth,- the grand sole miracle of Man; whereby Man has risen from the low places of this Earth, very literally, into divine Heavens. Ploughers, Spinners, Builders; Prophets, Poets, Kings; Brindleys and Goethes, Odins and Arkwrights; all martyrs, and noble men, and gods are of one grand Host; immeasurable; marching ever forward since the beginnings of the World. The enormous, allconquering, flame-crowned Host, noble every soldier in it; sacred, and alone noble. Let him who is not of it hide himself; let him tremble for himself. Stars at every button cannot make him noble; sheaves of Bath-garters, nor bushels of Georges; nor any other contrivance but manfully enlisting in it, valiantly taking place and step in it. O Heavens, will he not bethink himself; he too is so needed in the Host! It were so blessed, thrice-blessed, for himself and for us all! In hope of the Last Partridge, and some Duke of Weimar among our English Dukes, we will be

The Future hides in it Gladness and sorrow; We press still thorow, Naught that abides in it Daunting us,- onward.

But it is to you, ye Workers, who do 45 patient yet a while. already work, and are as grown men, noble and honorable in a sort, that the whole world calls for new work and nobleness. Subdue mutiny, discord, widespread despair, by manfulness, justice, 50 mercy and wisdom. Chaos is dark, deep as Hell; let light be, and there is instead a green flowery World. Oh, it is great,

*

(1843)

55

[ocr errors]

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)

Ruskin's literary career divides itself into two periods: in the first, his supreme interest was art; in the second, his attention was chiefly directed to social problems and ethical teaching. When he was only seventeen his indignation was aroused by the current depreciation of the great landscape painter, Turner, to whom he wrote offering his pen in defence. The offer was declined, but this youthful project was realized in Modern Painters, the first volume of which Ruskin published when he was twenty-four, and the sixth when he was fortyone. His main principles are that truth is the standard of all excellence, and nature the inspiration of all great art; he applies these tests to establish the conclusion that Turner is the only perfect landscape painter the world has ever seen. In the midst of this undertaking, which was expanded far beyond its original object, Ruskin wrote The Seven Lamps of Architecture—(Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, Obedience). He developed his ideas further in The Stones of Venice, in which he defended Gothic architecture on the same grounds as he had defended Turner - - truthfulness and the love of nature. These works and the successive volumes of Modern Painters gave him an unprecedented position as an art critic, but he was already beginning to turn his attention to other subjects. He was greatly influenced by Carlyle, with whom he formed a close friendship; and he was deeply interested in the Workmen's College conducted by Maurice and Kingsley, writing for his pupils there The Elements of Drawing and The Elements of Perspective. In 1857 he said that the kind of painting they wanted in London was painting cheeks red with health, and in the same year he gave fuller utterance to his new ideas in a course of lectures at Manchester on The Political Economy of Art.' Four essays which appeared in The Cornhill Magazine in 1860 (afterwards republished under the title Unto This Last) were even more outspoken, and caused so much dissatisfaction that the editor refused to continue the series; Fraser's Magazine a little later took the same course with the papers now included in Ruskin's works as Munera Pulveris. He advocated the application of christian principles to the organization of labor, and condemned the accepted political economy of the day as self-seeking and unsound. His idea of political economy was that it was not an abstract science, but 'a system of conduct founded on the sciences, and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture.' He accordingly devoted his main energies henceforth to arousing the upper classes to a sense of their duties to the poor, and helping the lower classes to realize their opportunities. To this end he wrote, gave his money, and labored with his own hands. Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne and Fors Clavigera are letters to workingmen; Sesame and Lilies and The Crown of Wild Olive are lectures delivered in various parts of England, dealing with political, social, and economical questions. He held the Professorship of Fine Art at Oxford for many years, and his courses there were the foundation of several of his later works on art; after his retirement he wrote a series of sketches of his past life under the title Præterita (things gone by). His last years were spent in seclusion at Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water in the Lake District. On his eightieth birthday Edward, Prince of Wales, headed an address which was signed by the most distinguished men of the time to assure Ruskin of their deepest respect and sincerest affection.' While there have been wide differences of opinion about his theories of art and his views of political economy and social reform, his entire singleness of aim and his preeminence as a writer of English prose are beyond dispute.

TRAFFIC

(A lecture delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford, afterwards included in The Crown of Wild Olive)

My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down here among your hills that I might talk to you about this Exchange

you are going to build: but earnestly and seriously asking you to pardon me, I am going to do nothing of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say very little, 5 about this same Exchange. I must talk of quite other things, though not willingly; I could not deserve your pardon, if when you invited me to speak on one

subject, I wilfully spoke on another. But I cannot speak, to purpose, of anything about which I do not care; and most simply and sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset, that I do not care about this Exchange of yours.

[ocr errors]

10

If, however, when you sent me your invitation, I had answered, 'I won't come, I don't care about the Exchange of Bradford,' you would have been justly offended with me, not knowing the reasons of so blunt a carelessness. So I have come down, hoping that you will patiently let me tell you why, on this, and many other such occasions, I now 15 remain silent, when formerly I should have caught at the opportunity of speaking to a gracious audience.

sermons even were you able to preach them, which may be doubted.'

Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality -it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, 'What do you like?' Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, what their taste' is, and if they answer candidly, you know them, body and soul. You, my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what do you like?' 'A pipe and a quartern of gin.' I know you. You, good woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you like?' 'A swept hearth and a clean

In a word, then, I do not care about this Exchange, because you don't; and 20 tea-table, and my husband opposite me, because you know perfectly well I cannot make you. Look at the essential conditions of the case, which you, as business men, know perfectly well, though perhaps you think I forget them. You are going to spend £30,000, which to you, collectively, is nothing; the buying a new coat is, as to the cost of it, a much more important matter of consideration to me than building a new Ex- 30 change is to you. But you think you may as well have the right thing for your money. You know there are a great many odd styles of architecture about; you don't want to do anything 35 ridiculous; you hear of me, among others,

and a baby at my breast.' Good, I know you also. You, little girl with the golden hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?' 'My canary, and a run 25 among the wood hyacinths.' 'You, little boy with the dirty hands and the low forehead, what do you like?' 'A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch farthing.' Good; we know them all now. What more need we ask?

a respectable architectural man-milliner; and you send for me, that I may tell you the leading fashion; and what is, in our shops, for the moment, the 40 newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles.

Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the 45 expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word taste; '50 for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. No,' say many of my antagonists, taste is one thing, morality is an-55 Tell us what is pretty: we shall be glad to know that; but we need no

other.

'Nay,' perhaps you answer: 'we need rather to ask what these people and children do, than what they like. If they do right, it is no matter that they like what is wrong; and if they do wrong, it is no matter that they like what is right. Doing is the great thing; and it does not matter that the man likes drinking, so that he does not drink; nor that the little girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will not learn her lessons; nor that the little boy likes throwing stones at the sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday School.' Indeed, for a short time, and in a provisional sense, this is true. For if, resolutely, people do what is right, in time they come to like doing it. But they only are in a right moral state when they have come to like doing it; and as long as they don't like it, they are still in a vicious state. The man is not in health of body who is always thinking of the bottle in the cupboard, though he bravely bears his thirst; but the man who heartily enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, each in its proper quantity and time. And the entire object of

true education is to make people not merely do the right things, but enjoy the right things not merely industrious, but to love industry- not merely learned, but to love knowledge- not merely pure, but to love purity-not merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.

5

But you may answer or think, 'Is the liking for outside ornaments,- for pictures, or statues, or furniture, or archi-10 tecture,- a moral quality?' Yes, most surely, if a rightly set liking. Taste for any pictures or statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. Only here again we have to define the word 15 ' good.' I don't mean by 'good,' clever

or learned or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by Teniers, of sots quarreling over their dice: it is an entirely clever picture; so clever that nothing in 20 its kind has ever been done equal to it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an unman- 25 nered,' or 'immoral' quality. It is bad taste in the profoundest sense - it is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a picture of Titian's, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner land- 30 scape, expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral quality

[ocr errors]

it is the taste of the angels. And all delight in fine art, and all love of it, re- 35 solve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving is the quality which we call 'loveliness'(we ought to have an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things which de- 40 serve to be hated); and it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we love this or that; but it is just the vital function of all our being. What we like determines what we are, and is the 45 sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character.

you like, belongs to the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate Calendar for literature, and Pop goes the Weasel' for music. You think you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him: - he won't like to go back to his costermongering.'

And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice, or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and forever, either in bad art, or by want of art; and that there is no national virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to produce. Take, for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient courage. You have at present in England only one art of any consequence that is, iron-working. You know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer iron. Now, do you think in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infernos you have created; do you think, on those iron plates, your courage and endurance are not written forever not merely with an iron pen, but on iron parchment? And take also your great English vice- European vice - vice of all the world-vice of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven, bearing with them yet the atmosphere of hell -the vice of jealousy, which brings competition into your commerce, treachery into your councils, and dishonor into your wars - that vice which has rendered for you, and for your next neighboring nation, the daily occupations of existence no longer possible, but with the mail upon your breasts and the sword loose in its sheath; so that at last, you have realized for all the multitudes of the two great peoples who lead the so-called

As I was thinking over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the title of a book standing open 50 in a bookseller's window. It was'On the necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes.' 'Ah,' I thought to myself, my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste, where will 55 civilization of the earth, you have your classes be? The man who likes what

[ocr errors]

realized for them all, I say, in person

and in policy, what was once true only of the rough Border riders of your Cheviot hills—

They carved at the meal
With gloves of steel,
And they drank the red wine through the
helmet barred; -

[ocr errors]

do you think that this national shame 10
and dastardliness of heart are not written
as legibly on every rivet of your iron
armor as the strength of the right hands
that forged it?

one clown in it; but when the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic, I 5 think.

Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly allow for that. You don't know what to do with yourselves for a sensation: fox-hunting and cricketing will not carry you through the whole of this unendurably long mortal life: you liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better made: but then

Friends, I know not whether this thing 15 the worst of it is, that what was play to

[ocr errors]

you when boys, was not play to the sparrows; and what is play to you now, is not play to the small birds of State neither; and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking shots at them, if I mistake not.

I must get back to the matter in hand, however. Believe me, without farther instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany; splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. I have no time to do this tonight (I have done it elsewhere before now); but I proceed to apply the principle to ourselves in a more searching

manner.

the

be the more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is quite unspeakably both. Suppose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been sent for by some private gentleman, living in a suburban 20 house, with his garden separated only by a fruit-wall from his next door neighbor's; and he had called me to consult with him on the furnishing of his drawing room. I begin looking about me, and 25 find the walls rather bare; I think such and such a paper might be desirableperhaps a little fresco here and there on the ceiling a damask curtain or so at the windows. Ah,' says my employer, 30 'damask curtains, indeed! That's all very fine, but you know I can't afford that kind of thing just now!' 'Yet the world credits you with a splendid income!' 'Ah, yes,' says my friend, but 35 do you know, at present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel-traps?' 'Steel-traps! for whom?' Why, for that fellow on the other side of the wall, you know: we're very good friends, 40 also that the churches and schools are but we are obliged to keep our traps set on both sides of the wall; we could not possibly keep on friendly terms without them, and our spring guns. The worst of it is, we are both clever fellows 45 enough; and there's never a day passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or something; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in our traps, take it all together; and I don't see 50 how we're to do with less.' A highly comic state of life for two private gentlemen! but for two nations, it seems to me, not wholly comic? Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, if there were only one 55 madman in it; and your Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is only

·

I notice that among all the new buildings which cover your once wild hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large proportion, with your mills and mansions; and I notice

almost always Gothic, and the mansions and mills are never Gothic. Will you allow me to ask precisely the meaning of this? For, remember, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. When Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches; and when the Italian style superseded the Gothic, churches were Italian as well as houses. If there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, there is a Gothic belfry to the Hôtel de Ville at Brussels; if Inigo Jones builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an Italian St. Paul's. But now you live under one school of architecture, and worship under another. What do you mean by doing this? Am I

« ПретходнаНастави »