JOHN RUSKIN

THE most obvious thing about Ruskin is his sensibility. Other characteristics—his integrity, his simplicity, his attitude towards art, his fatherly affection for the English poor, his querulous indignation — are the most striking at certain times; but underlying all these and animating his whole life is an extreme emotional sensitiveness. Of this there is abundant evidence. In early youth he was uncommonly affected by nature and art. Though discipline made him sober and serene, he always gave important things an emotional interpretation. Whenever he came in contact with women, moreover, he was ruled by the same sensibility, whether it was to revere them as a class, as in Queen's Gardens, or to fall in love with them individually, as he did many times. In old age one of the things he most liked was to be surrounded by innumerable, beautiful, ecstatic maidens, to whom he could teach, in half-fatherly way, his Ethics of the Dust. Still another evidence is his positive distress for the poor. "I simply cannot paint," he says in Fors Clavigera, "nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky . . . has become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly."

This sensibility, as in the case of two very different men, Burns and Keats, was Ruskin's weakness and strength. It caused him many a futile effort and

many an hour of misery. Yet few natures have been better endowed for inspiring people through beautiful language to an appreciation of the beautiful and the noble in life. For it must not be imagined that such sensibility precludes careful thought. Ruskin called himself" analytic" and "reasonable," even as a child; in fact, his power of mere intellect was very great. His reasoning, however, was in spiritual things; his intellect was governed by ideals rather than by material facts; and he never was so blind as to depend on mere intellect in matters where only spiritual insight could perceive. "You cannot judge with judgment," he says, "if you have not the sun in your spirit and passion in your heart." He had the intellectual virility of a man, but he had the quick sensibility of a woman.

As a consequence Ruskin stands, with Carlyle, as one of the great prophets of the Victorian Age. It is of small matter whether his views on art were sound or his social reforms practicable; it is of great matter that he pointed the way, that he made unflinching war on the ugly, the mean, and the sordid.

John Ruskin was born at 54, Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London, on February 8, 1819. Of his plebeian ancestry he was very proud. He tells in Fors that his mother was a sailor's daughter, one of his aunts a baker's wife, the other a tanner's, and adds that he doesn't know much more about his family, except that there used to be a green-grocer of the name in a small shop near the Crystal Palace. His father, John James Ruskin, of Scotch descent, was a wine merchant, upon whose grave the son wrote, "He was an entirely honest merchant." Ruskin's mother, Margaret Cox, was also of Scotch descent. Her well-trained

mind, strict discipline, and constant interest in the boy's welfare had much to do with shaping his habits and thoughts. It must not be imagined, however, that she was stern. She was in a sense very indulgent. So great was her care for her only son that she coddled him by her caution. Things which other boys did he was not allowed to do; not even allowed to put up the step of the carriage-"lest I should pinch my fingers; nor permitted "to go to the edge of a pond, or be in the same field with a pony."

At first Ruskin's schooling was chiefly in the Bible. My mother forced me," he says in Præterita, his autobiography, "to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart; as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year; and to that discipline-patient, accurate, and resolute I owe, not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature." As time went on, other studies were added, and the whole morning was consumed in work. In the afternoon the boy was allowed to walk with his nurse or to play in the garden at Herne Hill, whither the Ruskins had moved in 1823. But the Scotch parent, with her evangelical strictness, did not allow him a confusion of toys. "I had a bunch of keys to play with," he says, "as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older, I had a cart and a ball; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I

soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colors of my carpet."

Nearly all of Ruskin's education was at home. He early read Scott, and Pope's Homer, from whom, he says, he learned his Toryism. He always had an artist's love for kings and castles - but only as decoration for the land; for himself he desired a humble cottage. On Sundays his literary diet, besides the Bible, was Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe. As he grew older, he was allowed to sit quietly in his corner and listen to Mr. Ruskin read aloud. Thus he became familiar with Shakespeare, Christopher North's Noctes Ambrosianæ, and, oddly enough in such a family, with Byron and Smollett. By himself he early developed an interest in geology, which he kept up throughout his life. When he was fifteen he was sent to the private school of the Rev. Thomas Dale, and a Mr. Rowbotham came in to teach him mathematics. Much the most educative influence, however, his mother with her Bible always excepted, was exerted by his frequent travels. The sherry business took Mr. Ruskin all over England, and it was the custom for his wife and child to accompany him in a stately chaise. More important still was the influence of the Continent.

In 1832 Mr. Telford, a partner of Mr. Ruskin's, gave the boy a copy of Rogers's Italy, illustrated by Turner, and thus "determined," says Ruskin," the main tenor of my life." The following year the little family visited Germany, Switzerland, and Northern Italy. From now on, indeed, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes for the boy's health, which was never strong, the visits to Switzerland were frequent. Ruskin, writing in later

life, counted the first sight of the Col de la Faucille, a pass in the Alps, as one of the chief determining influences of his artist's life; it "opened to me in distinct vision the Holy Land of my future work and true home in this world." Of the influence of foreign cities, he says: "There have been, in sum, three centres of my life's thought: Rouen, Geneva, and Pisa."

Long before he saw the Alps, however, Ruskin began to write and to draw, at first in a very imitative way. "The earliest dated efforts I can find," he says, "are six poems' 'finished about January, 1827.' The whole of it, therefore, was written and printed in imitation of book-print, in my seventh year." His interest in drawing began a little later, but by 1831 he showed sufficient promise to have a Mr. Runciman come in to give him lessons.

Among his few playfellows Ruskin was shy and unsophisticated. He seems to have preferred the companionship of girls. When he was only eight he became very fond of his little Scotch cousin, Jessie Richardson, and agreed with her that "we should be married when we were a little older." About four years later, he says, a Miss Andrews, "an extremely beautiful girl of seventeen," sang "Tambourgi, Tambourgi," and "made me feel generally that there was something in girls that I did not understand and that was curiously agreeable." But these were only the beginnings of more serious sensibilities.

When Ruskin entered Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1836, then, he was an extremely delicate, sensitive youth, well disciplined in self-control, already ardently attached to art and nature, shy, and hopelessly ignorant of men and their ways. His mother came up to