finely illustrated as in the equipment of this Drawing School.

His more exoteric teaching, the series of lectures given to the Oxford world, and later to the wider reading world, fulfilled a much larger and more directly important function. There was a deep inner propriety of time and place in the earnest prophetic voice which, from a professorial chair at Oxford, proclaimed a new and revolutionary doctrine of art, in protest at once against the engrossing commercialism of the outer world and the cold-hearted intellectualism which was stealing over the intellect of England in her chosen and ancient homes of learning. The very attitude of liberty he gave himself in the treatment of art savoured of revolution, and was so regarded by the mediocre respectability of the University. That a man told off to deal with a special field of culture should trespass freely over the fields of neighbouring professors, who were supposed to know and teach the desired truths in various sciences, histories, and literatures, was a terrible outrage of established order. This rough shaking of academic proprieties was not one of the least services Mr. Ruskin has rendered in his life. The shock was particularly needed, for one of the chief intellectual dangers of the age is a too precise specialism, which, by sharply marking out into carefully defined provinces the domain of learning, runs a constant risk of losing the wide standard of humanity, and cultivating triviality under the false name of thoroughness. Mr. Ruskin's discursiveness may, perhaps, have been over-emphasised, but it served as a wholesome and much needed protest. Moreover, he rightly felt that one of the most urgent needs in art

education was a recognition of the place which Fine Art holds in the general education of life. The relation of Art to Literature, to Science, to Morals was, therefore, to him not merely a legitimate but the most vitally important theme; and the great service of his Oxford teaching, alike for Art and for Humanity, consists in the persistent enforcement of this teaching.

His conviction of the deep importance of free personal intercourse between teacher and taught, so often dwelt upon in "Fors," was illustrated by his own example. Not a few of our most influential writers and artists came under the spell of his personality during these years, for Mr. Ruskin retained, like many great teachers, even amid the physical infirmity of increasing age, the charm and brilliancy of youth, the quality of direct and spontaneous sympathy with the needs and spirits of the young. Not merely in his own field of activity, wide as that was, did his influence appear; no one was more eager for the honour and welfare of the University. At the same time, that certain spirit of reaction, which made him the relentless enemy of liberalism in every shape, haunted him also in Oxford, the most mediæval and conservative of places. It came under the guise of opposition to science. Mr. Ruskin, though of many sciences he had more than a smattering, was never fair to scientific men or to their methods. The rapid progress of the physical sciences frightened him, and he foresaw under the unchecked sway of the scientist a mechanical life of the mind corresponding to the mechanical rule of industry. His final severance from Oxford was a characteristic expression of this fear. A vain struggle against the establishment of a physio

logical laboratory, which represented to him the endowment of vivisection and the desecration at once of the sanctity of animal life and of true human purposes in science, obliged him to relinquish his attempt to humanise Oxford by means of art.

CHAPTER XI.

WOMAN'S PLACE AND EDUCATION.

§ 1. The essentially right life for woman. § 2. Woman's work within and without the home. § 3. Mr. Ruskin's temperamental bias in the intellectual subordination of women. Historical justification of the struggle for "rights" as a provisional not a final policy.

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§ 4.

§ 1. To none of the doctrines and practices of modern "liberalism" was Mr. Ruskin more vehemently hostile than to those which find general expression in "the emancipation of woman." His resentment to all such movements was indeed so deep as rarely to find expression in his writings. What he has to say in direct criticism is condensed into a scathing brevity which never condescends to reason. In "Fors" he refers to "the enlightened notion among English young women, derived from Mr. J. Stuart Mill, that the career' of the Madonna is too limited a one, and that modern political economy can provide them . . . with much more lucrative occupations than that of nursing the baby.'"1 " Arrows of the Chace" also contains a brief letter to a Swiss journal which contains the same uncompromising testimony: "Je ne puis trouver des termes assez forts pour exprimer la haine et le mépris que je ressens pour l'idée moderne qu'une femme doit cesser d'être mère, fille ou femme 1 Fors, Letter 497 (i. xxiv).

pour qu'elle puisse devenir commis ou ingénieur."1 Of women's suffrage he is far too contemptuous to discuss it. The position of woman was one of his most absolutely fixed principles through life, connected as it was with the central idea of home. A woman was to be primarily a useful, secondarily a beautiful, home-maker and home-keeper.

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Occasionally Mr. Ruskin expresses himself in unqualified language, which seems to sanction the idea of drudgery or the narrow position of an average haus-frau in the middle classes of society to-day. For instance, he declares that "the essentially right life for all womankind is that of the Swiss paysanne."2 But then he partly idealised that life, as he saw it through the glasses of the Swiss novelist Gotthelf, or as brightened by romantic memory, and partly he designed to offer a dramatic protest against the notion of frivolity and uselessness which he saw to inhere in the English idea of ladyhood." He did not really mean that all women were to be farmers' wives like the heroine of "Ulric the Farm Servant," but that they were all to undertake useful service in the performance or the superintendence of manual labour connected with the life of the home. It is because agriculture is to him the basic industry that the life of the farmhouse is the type of "the essentially right life for all womankind." The testimony of all history to the abuse of male physical power, in imposing an almost intolerable burden of servile drudgery upon the "paysanne," is simply ignored by Mr. Ruskin, who, in his idyllic picture of true agricultural life, assumes relations of affection and comradeship which would give 1 Vol. ii. 224.

2 Fors, Letter xciv. (iv. 455).