Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/330

 his artistic criticism. 'In these books of mine,' he wrote in 'Modern Painters,' 'their distinctive character, as essays on art, is their bringing everything to a root in human passion or human hope. They have been coloured throughout, nay, continually altered in shape, and even warped and broken, by digressions respecting social questions, which had for me an interest tenfold greater than the work I had been forced into undertaking. Every principle of painting which I have stated is traced to some vital or spiritual fact, and in my works on architecture the preference accorded finally to one school over another is founded on a comparison of their influences on the life of the workman, a question by all other writers on architecture wholly forgotten or despised.' But how was this question to be pushed into the front, and brought into vital relation with the arts? The thing, he felt with increasing force, had to be done. 'It is the vainest of affectations,' he wrote, 'to try and put beauty into shadows, while all real things that cast them are left in deformity and pain.' With such thoughts surging in his brain Ruskin went off to Switzerland so soon as 'Modern Painters' was fairly out of hand, busied himself in 'the mountain gloom,' and for the next ten years was silent, except for a few occasional papers and lectures upon merely artistic matters. He withdrew also more and more from the world and from his old home ties. His married life had been a failure, and the days passed in the happy companionship of his father and mother were now drawing to an end. His economic heresies, which had already begun to appear in his lectures, had somewhat weakened the bond of intellectual sympathy between him and his father; his emancipation from protestant orthodoxy, that between him and his mother. He remained to the end a most dutiful and affectionate son, but his inclinations turned to solitude. His health and spirits were alike broken, and sombre thoughts crowded in upon him. Another influence which tended to divert Ruskin from art and natural history was his friendship with Carlyle. They had become acquainted soon after the publication of the second volume of 'Modern Painters.' Ruskin was a frequent visitor at Cheyne Walk, and Carlyle would sometimes ride over to Denmark Hill and spend the afternoon in the gardens. Ruskin venerated Carlyle as his master, and treated him with beautiful kindness and deference. Carlyle on his side encouraged his disciple with ungrudging praise, and heralded each approach of his to the battlefield of social and economic controversy with loud applause. 'No other man in England,' wrote Carlyle to Emerson, 'has in him the same divine rage against falsity.' In 1860 Ruskin was at Chamouni with W. J. Stillman (Century, January 1888). The greater part of the next two years, including two winters, he spent in Savoy with Mr. George Allen, mostly at Mornex. Wherever he happened to be, Ruskin was always interested in the 'condition of the people' question. In Italy he had been impressed by the necessity of preventing inundation and promoting irrigation (Arrows of the Chace and Verona and its Rivers). Among the Alps he made several attempts to buy land from various communes with a view to instituting agricultural experiments. The peasant holders thought he must have discovered a secret gold mine and declined to sell. 'The loneliness is very very great,' he wrote from Mornex to Mr. Charles Eliot Norton (whom he had met at Geneva in 1856, and who became one of his dearest friends), 'and the peace in which I am at present is only as if I had buried myself in a tuft of grass on a battlefield wet with blood.' It was in this mood that Ruskin devoted himself to economic studies. The result of his studies and the body of his economic doctrine were comprised in 'Unto this Last' (1860), being papers contributed to the 'Cornhill;' 'Munera Pulveris' (1862), a sequel to the foregoing, contributed in part to 'Fraser;' some letters on 'Gold' (1863); 'Time and Tide' (1867), and various minor letters and pamphlets in 1868. Faults which had not been absent from Ruskin's earlier books on art are conspicuous in his economic writings. Long ago, on the appearance of the first volume of 'Modern Painters,' Samuel Prout had pointed out the danger of exaggeration and discourtesy in controversy. In his books on economics Ruskin's petulance and contemptuous sarcasms had not always the justification of better knowledge. He was grossly unjust to Mill, with whose books he was insufficiently acquainted, and he raised needless animosities by not sufficiently distinguishing his terms. For his sins in this respect he paid the full penalty at the time. The papers in the 'Cornhill' caused so much offence that Thackeray stopped their publication—an event that did not interrupt Ruskin's friendly relations with the editor; and even Carlyle's recommendation and the friendship of Froude, then the editor of 'Fraser,' did not avail to avert a like fate in that magazine. Time brought its revenges, and Ruskin lived to see 'Unto this Last' (the book which he preferred to all the rest both for its substance and for its style)