Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/383

Rh all the Asiatic creeds, which is still curiously general in Asia as a counsel of perfection, and is perhaps one reason why Asiatic money-lenders are so very hard, and which is far from unknown in England — two apparently acute City men once, in our hearing, wasted an hour in most earnest and obviously sincere defence of the theory — that it is wrong to take interest in any shape in excess of principal, that when money has once been repaid, it is morally wrong to receive any more. He has held it from the beginning, and holds it now with such force, that unless we misconceive a slightly obscure passage, he can see no good in poor Dr. Fraser, because he consents to be bishop of the paradise of percentages, yet does not rebuke the sin. Unlike most upholders of the fancy — unlike, for instance, we believe, Mr. Sillar, Mr. Ruskin's master in its propagation — the great art-critic is partly logical — only partly — and applies his theory even to rent, surrendering a valuable property in Marylebone in the following terms: "I shall make over the Marylebone property entirely to the St. George's Company, under Miss Hill's superintendence always. I have had the value of it back in interest, and have no business now to keep it any more," thus deciding against himself as the French Communist decided against the noble, — "You have had the estate, as you prove, for eight hundred years. It is time your poor neighbor had his turn." Mr. Ruskin, of course, is not quite logical, for he altogether fails to perceive that in giving away his property he performs a supreme act of ownership, asserts in the most emphatic way that he has the right which he disclaims, and is inconsistent with himself, as he also is in another respect. He owns some bank-shares, which because the bank has distributed or will distribute more money than they cost, have tripled in value, and he does not reject that increment as he clearly ought to do, but rather pats himself on the back on account of that one successful investment. "I'm not always," he seems to say, "such a bad business man." It is, however, absurd to expect logical consistency from a man whose rule of consistency is to think himself consistent as long as he is consistently unselfish and faithful to his notions, and Mr. Ruskin has been both. He inherited £157,000 from his father and mother in cash, besides other possessions; and partly by bad investments, — he lost £20,000 on some mortgages he had been advised to take, and gives his bad counsellors a gently humorous slap for it; partly by gifts to poor relations, — he gave them straight out £17,000, and has had, he says, his interest in happiness, and "lost," it is his own word, £15,000 to the pardoned cousin afore-mentioned; partly by expenses on his country-house, which he puts down at £15,000; partly by gifts to Sheffield and Oxford — £ 14,000 — but principally by a "carefully restricted yearly spending of £5,500 for thirteen years," he has sacrificed £151,000 of his fortune, and but that his father's properties and pictures remain, and are greatly enhanced in value, would be in an unpleasant position even from his own point of view. Still, he really has acted up to his idea, and it is difficult to know whether most to wonder at the grotesque moral economic fancy which could so beguile a brain on many sides so keen, or to admire the persevering determination to do what he thought right at the risk of any consequences to himself. As it happens, his mode of life has not done him all the harm that might have been expected, for he has still £57,000 left, arising from the increased value of certain possessions, and though he at once proceeds in public to give most of this away, chucking a competence into one relative's lap as if it were a bouquet of field flowers, still he retains for himself his house, and £3,000 to be spent this year "in amusing himself at Venice or elsewhere," and £12,000 to be invested in consols, to supply the £360 a year on which a bachelor gentleman ought to live, or if he cannot, "deserves speedily to die." All this is explained in print, in letters addressed to working-men to whom he has been a benefactor, and who, though worshipping him, will probably no more understand why he thinks he must only take interest for thirty-three years, than why it seems to him perfectly reasonable to expend £3,000 in one last year of "amusing himself" at Venice or elsewhere. Could he not give that box of myrrh to the poor too? They will probably decide, with the majority, not as Mr. Ruskin decides, "I am beginning, for the first time in my life, to admit some notion into my head that I am a great man," but that he is "an utterly good one, though a little cracky," the very form of his goodness puzzling them inexpressibly. And certainly no form of goodness less like the regular English Protestant respectable Islington ideal, even when a very noble one, could be imagined. That a wealthy 