The Harvest of Ruskin

Ruskin writes: “What is required of the members of St. George’s Company is, not that they should never travel by railroads, nor that they should abjure machinery, but that they should never travel unnecessarily, or in wanton haste; and that they should never do with a machine what can be done with hands and arms, while hands and arms are idle.”124

There is no subject which causes more merriment amongst the Philistines than Ruskin’s objection to railways, combined with the frequent locomotion indulged in by his most devoted followers. But Ruskin’s objection to railways was never so absolute as was popularly supposed. He always approved of them on through main routes, and only objected to their intrusion into the peace of quiet valleys off the main tracks. He objected to what appeared to him the excessive provision by which a lovely valley was spoiled “in order that every fool in Buxton could be in Bakewell in half an hour.” We must remember that the railway mania of 1844 occurred when Ruskin was five and twenty, at the formative period of his life, and that he saw all around him rough destruction of that beauty which affected his soul with a thrill like a lover’s (as he tells us in the Third Volume of Modern Painters, pages 295-298, quoted in Chapter I). The countryside must have been sadly ruined in the forties, while the railway embankments were creeping along through the pastures.

Possibly not all of us know the remarkable passage in the Cestus of Aglaia in praise of a locomotive:125

“I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men they must be who dig brown ironstone out of the ground, and forge it into that! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them; more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered, and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile – a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous drop of flesh! What would the men who thought out this – who beat it out, who touched it into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and triumphantly saw it fulfil this task to the utmost of their will, feel or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of shadow of something else – mere failure in every motion, and endless disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of me? and what ought I to think of them?

“But as I reach this point of reverence, the unreasonable thing is sure to give a shriek as of a thousand unanimous vultures, which leaves me shuddering in real physical pain for some half minute following; and assures me, during slow recovery, that a people which can endure such fluting and piping among them is not likely soon to have its modest ear pleased by aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. Perhaps I am then led on into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse, who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by stokers’ fingers; meditation, also, as to the influence of her invention amidst the other parts of the Parnassian melody of English education.”

He further concedes that “steam, or any mode of heat power, may only be employed, justifiably, under extreme or special conditions of need; and for speed on main lines of communication, and raising water from great depths, or other such work beyond human strength.” This is a very large concession, and may be received with large gratitude. He even permits steam machinery for such purposes as “the deepening of large river channels; changing the surfaces of mountainous districts; irrigating tracts of desert in the torrid zone; breaking up and thus rendering capable of quicker fusion, edges of ice in the northern and southern Arctic seas, etc., so rendering parts of the earth habitable, which hitherto have been lifeless.”126

The teaching of Ruskin is not really revolutionary in immediate practice; he advises a manufacturer to go on using his machinery; he merely wants us to set our faces towards the restoration of nature’s gifts of beauty and peace to the lives of toilers; and for ceasing to uproot sentiments of cleanliness, reverence and order by unnatural, foul, crowded and vulgar surroundings. His tastes and instincts are vehemently against machinery; but his actual requirings are moderate.

It is the machine-made society we live in that distresses him, and distresses us; its occasional rough coarseness, its physical ill-health. There are, of course, scattered through Fors many outbursts against machinery in general, not so carefully limited as his more weighty pronouncements. In Letter V, pp. 10, 11, for instance, the assertion is made that a man and his family can, by their own labour, given land, feed and clothe themselves without machinery; and that therefore all labour-saving appliances are so many aids to idleness. I do not know where is the proof or disproof of the assertion. All we know is that savage tribes do so live, but no others, and that it is in the time and strength saved from labour for sheer food and clothing that the best activities of humanity find room: and that civilization began with the existence of a leisured class.

And now, turning to the human product of industrialism, we will take a sober view, not debiting to the factory system the evils which are inherent in human nature, but only those due to crowded town life and to employment in large rooms full of noisy machinery. If we have cured the smoke evil, and reduced hours to their present reasonable length, what remains to be done, and will it be on Ruskin’s lines?

South Lancashire is often taken as the type of industrial England. There I was born and brought up, and I have lived there for the greater part of my life. I have known very intimately a great many of the working people. They are far more pale and undersized than they ought to be. Their beauty has been taken from them. The half-time system, now perishing, has interfered with their education. The damp atmosphere in the hot rooms is bad for their lungs, and minding machines is utterly monotonous. But they are excellent people – they will stand comparison with the upper classes. There is every type, of course, they are as varied as are men at the Universities, or as the ladies who go to any Church. But, speaking as we must, in general, there is a level of conduct and intelligence in those mean streets, not different except in manner from that of the suburbs. The degeneracy is, I believe, only physical, so far as it is to be debited to the conditions of their work.

This bad physique is a real evil. The lack of room for cricket and football, the remoteness of the fields and woods, the ugliness of the grey streets, the lack of quiet, added to the humid factories and the smoke, have produced this. Parks and playgrounds and all sorts of open spaces, including extensive fields and woods and ponds accessible on a half-holiday, should be provided far more than they have been, and should be less doctored by parks’ superintendents.

Then there is a great sphere of service open to the familiar agencies for good. The Drink traffic should be curtailed, and put out of the reach of private profit, and better opportunities for sociability, music and dancing, provided, not as part of the bait of the drink seller, but by a democratic municipality. The usefulness of picture galleries will not be fully reached till oral teaching about the pictures is added, and the great educational value of comparatively cheap coloured reproductions is perceived. Into the work of founding the Art Museum in Ancoats, a working class district of Manchester, on exactly these lines, Mr. Ruskin threw himself heartily. It was indeed an inspiration derived from his writings by Mr. T. C. Horsfall which caused that Museum to be founded. It has recently been taken over by the Corporation.

Solemnly, then, and with due fear and doubt, considering the horror and difficulty of the case, let us resolutely set ourselves to see if, under the world of machinery, we can live good and healthy lives. The present products of our civilization are far from satisfactory to any of us. Are the crowds of girls who rush forth from the factory when the hour of freedom strikes, having pieced threads in a hot damp atmosphere, and shouted across the whirl of wheels all day to one another – are they on the way to make fit, self-respecting and physically strong wives and mothers and trainers of children? There are some three hundred thousand of these girls in the Lancashire factories, who will be mothers of a million English babies. Or take the young men. Go by a football train on a Saturday afternoon, when holiday is written on every bloomless and vulgar and swaggering young face: – what do you hear and see as you crowd fifteen to a carriage? Bets, ribaldry, ill nature, the carriage floor a mess, the whole scene an explosion of pent-up spirits of self-assertion and banal hilarity.127

These young people are undoubtedly products of the age of machinery; but for machine production they would never have been born, nor their surroundings formed; but the question is, cannot their tastes and characters be reformed even while they remain machine-hands? Are not excellent lives possible, and healthy surroundings obtainable, in industrial England? For factory life we can confidently point to such. Bournville, New Earswick, Port Sunlight, and of an earlier date, Saltaire, Bessbrook, and some other centres which have not a special local name, show that the thing can be done. For colliers the case is harder. There are colliery villages on the Tyne which once ran extension lectures; but the villages themselves are horrible. There are good colliery villages near Doncaster, one built round a private Park. Collieries have special difficulties. The coal mine will not last for ever; and when it is worked out the houses may become useless. They are therefore built to last only for from thirty to fifty years. They are erected all at one time; and large rows of houses exactly alike are the cheapest. They are often outside any municipality with its possibly watchful surveyor and inspectors. They are completely owned by the colliery company, which has no competitor as landlord. It is the classic case in England of the failure of pure competition to care for human welfare.

EPILOGUE

I AM kindly permitted by the Council of the Society for Psychical Research to reprint here the beautiful tribute by F. W. H. Myers, which appeared in their Journal for March, 1900; and has been reprinted in Mr. Myers’s Fragments of Prose and Poetry, pp. 89-94.

Ω οὗτος, οὗτος, Οίδίπους, τί μέλλομενχωρείν; πάλαι δἠ τάπὀ σοῦ βραδύνεται

Ruskin, then, has sunk to rest. The bracken and bilberries of the Lake-land which he loved so well have hidden the mortal shape of the greatest man of letters, the loftiest influence which earth still retained; – have enwrapped “the man dear to the Muses, and by the Nymphs not unbeloved" —

τὀν Μώσαις ϕίλον ἀνδρα, τὀν οὐ Νὐμϕαίσιν ἀπεϰθῆ

We may rejoice that the long waiting is over; but memory all the more “goes slipping back to that delightful time” when he was with us in his force and fire; when it was still granted to hearken to his utterance; to feel the germ of virtue quickened by his benignant soul. For those who had the privilege of knowing Ruskin, the author came second to the man; and in this brief notice of his Honorary Membership of our Society I may perhaps be pardoned if I dwell in reminiscence, without attempting any formal review.

I met him first in my own earliest home, beneath the spurs of Skiddaw, – its long slopes “bronzed with deepest radiance,” as the boy Wordsworth had seen them long since in even such an evening’s glow. Since early morning Ruskin had lain and wandered in the folds and hollows of the hill; and he came back grave as from a solemn service from day-long gazing on the heather and the blue. Later came many another scene; – pacings in the Old Court of Trinity with Edmund Gurney, who met those generous paradoxes with humorous play; graver hours at Oxford, in the sick-room of the Duke of Albany, who, coming back to earth-life from perilous illness, found nowhere a guidance fitter than Ruskin’s for eager and royal youth.

But chiefliest I think of him in that home of high thoughts where his interest in our inquiry first upgrew. For the introduction to the new hope came to him, as to Edmund Gurney and to myself, through a lady whom each of us held in equal honour; and it was on the stately lawns of Broadlands, and in that air as of Sabbatical repose, that Ruskin enjoyed his one brief season, – since the failure of his youthful Christian confidence – of blissful trust in the Unseen. To one among that company a vision came, as of a longed-for meeting of souls beloved in heaven, a vision whose detail and symbolism carried conviction to Ruskin’s heart. While that conviction abode with him he was happy as a child; but presently he suffered what all are like to suffer who do not keep their minds close pressed to actual evidence by continuous study. That impress faded; and leaving the unseen world in its old sad uncertainty, he went back to the mission which was laid on him, – that mission of humanizing this earth, and being humanized thereby, which our race must needs accomplish, whatever be the last doom of man.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind;And even with something of a Mother’s mindAnd no unworthy aim,The homely Nurse doth all she canTo make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,Forget the glories he hath known,And that imperial palace whence he came.

But Ruskin’s task, – however it might be pursued in forgetfulness of that unrememberable home, – was surely still the task (as Bacon called it) “to prepare and adorn the bride-chamber of the mind and the universe”; and that melior natura which seemed to be Ruskin’s, as it was Bacon’s, divinity has never shone more radiantly upon the inward shrine of any lover of men. It was half in jest that I would complain to him that to Earth he gave up what was meant for Infinity, and bent a cosmic passion upon this round wet pebble of rock and sea. “Ah, my friend!” he answered once when I spoke of life to come, “if you could only give me fifty years longer of this life on earth, I would ask for nothing more!” And half that season was granted to him, and all in vain; – for what Tithonus may tread for ever unweary the “gleaming halls of Morn”?

Then as that fervent life wore on, Ruskin turned more and more from the outward pageant to the human passion; from Alp and sunset to the sterner beauty of moral law. From the publication of Unto This Last, one may trace that slow-growing revolt against the Age which led him to preach in the end with such despairing emphasis the duty of protest, of renunciation, of sheer self-severance from most of the tendencies of modern life. The strength of this emotion in him was made, I remember, strangely plain on one occasion, when some of those who cared most for him had clubbed together, at Lord Mount-Temple’s suggestion, to surprise him, on his recovery from a serious illness, with the present of a picture of Turner’s, which he had once possessed and still dearly loved, but of which he had despoiled himself to meet some generous impulse. Never were givers more taken aback by the issue of their gift. For the sudden sight of the lovely landscape hung in his bedroom drew from him a letter of almost heart-broken pain, – at the thought that those whom he would so fain have helped, – who were thus willing to do this thing, or almost anything, to please him, – were yet not willing to do that other thing for their own souls’ sake; – to come out from the iniquity, – to shake off the baseness of the age, – to bind themselves in the St. George’s Guild with that small remnant who clung to things pure and true.

Indeed, there was something naïve, something childlike, in his Brotherhoods, his Leagues, his solemn Covenants against the onflowing tide of things; – but a stern reality beneath all this became strongly present to us then; – a deep compassion for the lonely heart, which so much needed love, yet could scarcely accept a fellowship in love which was not also a fellowship in all that he held for virtue.

There are some who fear lest too pervading a belief in that other world may make men indifferent to the loveliness and irresponsive to the woes of this. Yet must that needs be so? or might we not treat even this world’s problems with steadier heart, could we regain, – from some surer foothold in the Invisible, – that ancient serenity of the Saints? Watching that ardent soul, whose very raptures trembled on the brink of pain, I have thought that even from Ruskin’s delight in Nature something of a bitter yearning might have been soothed away, could he have seen in stream and moorland, nay even in could he have seen, I say, in these, as Plato saw in Castaly or in Hymettus, only the transitory adumbration and perishing symbol of somewhat more enduring and more fair. Nay, even from his compassion for stunted and erring souls might not the burning pain have gone, could he have seen those souls as Er the Paphlagonian saw them, marshalled in an everlasting order, of which but a moment’s glimpse is shown; – till even “this last” of men shall follow out, through all vicissitude, his endless and his mounting way?

great Skiddaw’s self, who shroudsHis double head among Atlantic clouds,And pours forth streams more sweet than Castaly; —

And turning then, with heart full of such-like fancies, to that well-loved Leader’s fate; – imagining his baffled isolation, and the disheartenment of solitary years; – I have pictured him waiting in the Coniston woodlands, as Œdipus in Colonus’ grove, – waiting in mournful memory, in uncomplaining calm – till he should hear at last the august summons, – nay, sounded it not like the loving banter? – of the unguessed accompanying God. “Come, Œdipus, why linger on our journey? Thou hast kept me waiting long.”

1

Chap. xiv. § 19.

2

Fors, Letter LXXXVI.

3

Rugby Chapel, by M. Arnold.

4

The passages were: Exod. xv, xx; 2 Sam. i. 17; 1 Kings viii; Ps. xxiii, xxxii, xc, xci, ciii, cxii, cxix, cxxxix; Prov. ii, iii, viii, xii; Is. lviii; Matt. v, vi, vii; Acts xxvi; 1 Cor. xiii, xv; James iv; Rev. v, vi. See Præterita for all this.

5

For his actual experience of prayer, see the incident of 1845 in Præterita, vol. ii. pp. 260, 261.

6

Præterita, iii. 28.

7

Præterita, III. i. 32-34. Also referred to in Munera Pulveris, App. V.

8

Præterita, vol. iii. p. 39.

9

Id. p. 41.

10

Id. p. 48.

11

Præterita, vol. iii. pp. 44-6. Fors, Letter LXXVI.

12

Fors, Letter LXXVI.

13

Letter XII, p. 3.

14

Notably in the address and Turner drawing presented by distinguished men on his 80th birthday.

15

Fors, Letter XLII.

16

Pp. 189-190.

17

Lectures on Art, p. 50.

18

Lectures on Art, p. 52.

19

See Fors, LXXVI, March 1877, vol. iv. p. 69.

20

See Epilogue.

21

Letter LXIII, vol. vi. p. 89.

22

Fors, Letter LXI, p. 7, note.

23

See also Fors, Letter LXVI, vol. vi. p. 172.

24

On the Old Road, vol. ii. p. 388.

25

Fors, XCII, 1883.

26

Id. XCII, vol. viii. p. 205.

27

This reference is known to refer chiefly to Francesca Alexander and her mother at Florence. Not improbably, also, to the Misses Beever at Coniston.

28

Letter XLIX.

29

Letter LV.

30

Fors, Letter LXXV, § 21. Notes and Correspondence.

31

Time and Tide, p. 71.

32

Sheepfolds, p. 269.

33

Fors, Letter XXXI, § 18, and also Letter LXVII, § 10.

34

Sheepfolds, p. 271.

35

Fors, Letter XXXV, § 3.

36

See also Fors, Letter LXV and Letter XLIV, also Letter XL for an amusing account of the edifying Bible story of Joab and Abner; and very numerous other passages.

37

Fors, Letter XXXVI, § 3.

38

On the Old Road, vol. ii. p. 253.

39

General Statement as to the Nature and Purpose of the St. George’s Guild, p. 12, 1882.

40

Sheepfolds: in On the Old Road, vol. ii. p. 259.

41

Sheepfolds, p. 259.

42

Sheepfolds, p. 267.

43

Sheepfolds, p. 283.

44

Modern Painters, vol. iii. p. 57 (iv. 4) (1856).

45

Crown of Wild Olive, Introduction, p. 17.

46

Fors, Letter XX.

47

Eagle’s Nest, p. 139.

48

Unto This Last, Libr. ed. § 53, n., small ed. p. 97, and Stones of Venice, iii. 168. This last passage was written just after the Repeal of the Corn Laws, when the question was hot.

49

Time and Tide, Letter I, p. 5.

50

Unto This Last, p. 97 n.

51

See the privately printed Dialogue on Gold; Library ed. vol. xvii. p. 491, written in 1863, and the letter to The Times, on p. 489.

52

Unto This Last, Libr. ed. § 58, small ed. pp. 109, 110.

53

Unto This Last, § 60, small ed. p. 114.

54

Unto This Last, Libr. ed. § 55, small ed. p. 103. See also § 1.

55

Letter to Dr. John Brown, Libr. ed. vol. xvii. p. lxxxii.

56

Note to A Disciple of Plato, by Wm. Smart, p. 48, Libr. ed., xviii, lxxxiii.

57

Principles of Economics, Bk. I. chap. vii. § 3.

58

Book iv. § 28.

59

Sesame and Lilies, i. 42.

60

Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, Essay V, 1884, and earlier in the Westminster Review.

61

Unto This Last, small ed. p. 114.

62

Unto This Last, §§ 61-64, Libr. ed.; small ed. pp. 118-127.

63

Unto This Last, § 65, or p. 128.

64

Unto This Last, § 27, or p. 40.

65

Unto This Last, § 29, or pp. 43, 44.

66

See in continuation of this the Apologue of the two sailors: Unto This Last, pp. 49-57 or § 33-7.

67

Unto This Last, Libr. ed. § 28, or pp. 41, 42 in small ed.

68

Unto This Last, § 77, or p. 156.

69

Unto this Last, Preface, p. 7.

70