Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/70

64 to feel the happier because the "stream of tendency not ourselves" has swept a new treasure out of our grasp; it is not noble to persuade ourselves that we are the better for that for which we are the worse; it is not brave to assure our own hearts that we are the richer for being positively poorer. Only if the loss is really balanced by a greater spiritual gain, only if the treasure lost is more than restored by the love of Him who takes it away, is this joy through sorrow, this springing-up of a new gladness in affliction, really reasonable. Mr. Ruskin sees this, which Mr. Matthew Arnold does not see, and it does credit, we think, to that fine instinct for beauty which no one carries on more truly than he does into the region of spiritual imagination.

Finally, it is curious to perceive how even in advice "to young girls," Mr. Ruskin's partly, no doubt, doctrinaire abhorrence of great cities breaks out. Nothing can be better than his advice as to their dress. He encourages them to be gay, he allows them to be swayed by the fluctuating flow and ebb of social taste, though he prohibits their being either expensive, or disposed to follow fashion into its wasteful caprices. But then he teaches even these young girls, so far as he can, to abhor London, as the Jewish prophet taught the women of his people to abhor the Moabitish or Amoritish women: —


 * Dress as plainly as your parents will allow you, but in bright colors (if they become you), and in the best materials, — that is to say, in those which will wear longest When you are really in want of a new dress, buy it (or make it) in the fashion; but never quit an old one merely because it has become unfashionable. And if the fashion be costly, you must not follow it. You may wear broad stripes or narrow, bright colors or dark, short petticoats or long — in moderation — as the public wish you, but you must not buy yards of useless stuff to make a knot or a flounce of, nor drag them behind you over the ground; and your walking-dress must never touch the ground at all. I have lost much of the faith I once had in the common sense and even in the personal delicacy of the present race of average Englishwomen, by seeing how they will allow their dresses to sweep the streets, if it is the fashion to be scavengers. If you can afford it, get your dresses made by a good dressmaker, with utmost attainable precision and perfection; but let this good dressmaker be a poor person, living in the country, not a rich person living in a large house in London. "There are no good dressmakers in the country?" No; but there soon will be, if you obey St. George's orders, which are very strict indeed, about never buying dresses in London. "You bought one there the other day for your own pet! "Yes; but that was because she was a wild Amorite, who had wild Amorites to please; not a companion of St. George.

One does not exactly see why poor dressmakers who live in London are to be punished for living there by getting no employment, unless it be regarded as a sin in itself to live in London, which is probably Mr. Ruskin's real view. He most likely believes society concentrated in such great masses as the great towns collect to be entirely incapable of any true organization; and wishes, therefore, by every means in his power to discourage such moral and spiritual crushes. But it is hard to conceive that great cities have not arisen as a consequence of action quite as inevitable, and therefore quite as certainly overruled by Providence, as any loss or gain which befalls the individual human life, and Mr. Ruskin would have taught, we think, what was more in consistency with his other lessons, if he had suggested the best way of alleviating the abuses of city life, instead of advising his pupils to ignore them. But his artistic genius is, we suppose, so much more revolted by the soiling and hiding of all the noblest detail, of all moral individuality, in these great dust-heaps of the world, than it is by still greater evils which admit of clear study and intelligent insight, that we are bound to make allowance for this little blot on the really fine taste and noble moral enthusiasm of Mr. Ruskin's "Letter to Young Girls."