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 682 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

No great writer has shown a more contemptuous disregard for those liter- ary arts of concealment commonly used to secure an appearance of consist- ency ; no one has so freely and loudly proclaimed his repudiation of past pronouncements upon important topics ; in no case has this serviceable frank- ness been treated with such lack of courtesy and understanding. Because Mr. Ruskin has always striven to confer upon the public that greatest service which a thinker can confer, by making everything he writes " part of a great confession ;" because he has set down all his thoughts and feelings in their natural order, without exaggeration or extenuation of their form and intensity, many of his critics have chosen to represent him as a loose and reckless thinker, borne along by sudden gusts of sentiment, and void of any stable unity of thought or clear order of development. Now the utter groundless- ness of such criticism is demonstrable by anyone who takes the trouble to read his representative books in the order of their publication.

In addition to the influence exerted by Mr. Ruskin's scientific studies, Mr. Hobson points out his obligation to Turner and Carlyle : "Turner made him an art prophet, Carlyle a social reformer." Mr. Hobson shows the growth of Mr. Ruskin's ideas by giving a very admirable chronological summary of the steps by which he advanced from art to social reform, which he sums up in the statement :

Such is the general growth of Mr. Ruskin's thought and labors, from nature to art, through art to human life, in the art of life a growing sense of the demands of eternal law in the making and governance of human society founded on principles of justice and humanity.

Instead of abandoning his proper work as an art teacher in order rashly to embark in political econ- omy, for which he had neither natural aptitude nor the requisite training and

knowledge Mr. Ruskin's first qualification is that of being a skilled

specialist in the finer qualities of work on the one hand, and of enjoyment or consumption on the other hand. Both from personal practice and from long habits of close observation of the work of skillful men in many places, he obtained a wide and varied knowledge of the handling of different tools and materials for the production of useful and beautiful goods. This experience was by no means confined to painting, sculpture, and the so-called " fine arts," but comprised the practical work of architecture, wood and metal work, pot- tery, jewelry, weaving, and other handicrafts.

His investigations into agriculture, both on the continent of Europe and in Britain, were minute and painstaking; and though his experiments in reclaiming and draining land were not always sucessful, they indicated close knowledge of the concrete facts.

Moreover, Mr. Ruskin made a lifelong study of animal and vegetable life, and of the structure and composition of the earth, thus gaining an inti-