CHAPTER II.

FROM ART TO SOCIAL REFORM.

§ 1. The different impulses to social reform. §2. Tardy development of social interests and views. § 3. The false imputation of loose thinking. §4. Love of Nature the starting-pointEarly excursions in architecture. §5. The art-teaching of "Modern Painters " Realism and Idealism. § 6. Moral purpose the criterion of art. 87. Moral ideas as effluences of Divinity. §8. First glimpses of his social outlook. $9. No definite recognition of " Society" in "Modern Painters." § 10. The relation of architecture to national life and character. §11. First study of the rise and fall of nations "Stones of Venice." § 12. The bridge between art reform and social reform. § 13. Beginnings of social revolt. §14. The political economy of art. § 15. "Unto this Last" - Mr. Ruskin enters the social crusade. § 16. "Munera Pulveris "- Formal abandonment of art mission. § 17. Practical applications of social doctrine "Time and Tide." § 18. The design and character of "Fors Clavigera "— Culmination of Mr. Ruskin's social teaching.

§1. IF we use the term social reform, in its broad sense, to describe those larger changes in the structure or working of society which aim directly at some general improvement of human life, as distinguished from such work of reform as attacks narrower and more specific defects, we shall find that social reformers come to this work by widely different paths. Often it is the personal experience of some concrete evil that first awakens a sense of social wrong, and a desire for redress; reform

energy once generated is fed by a natural flow from various neighbouring channels of activity, the stream broadening as it goes, until the man whose early activity was stimulated by the desire to break down some little barrier which dams the stream in his back garden, finds himself breasting the tide of some oceanic movement. So it was with such men as Cobden, Lord Shaftesbury, and Cobbett; a necessary organic association of related interests and sympathies drew them from some specific “cause" into the wider paths of philanthropic statesmanship. Other instances there are of men who, entering public life as a profession or a pastime, have come to discern underneath the chicanery of party moves, and those brief expediencies of legislation and administration which have usurped the honourable title of politics, the deeper needs of a continuous organic social policy, and have set themselves earnestly to the larger task. Men such as C. J. Fox and Gladstone may be placed in this order. Others again are social reformers à priori, entering through some gateway of large philosophic principles into the practical service of society. The Utilitarian School of Bentham and Mill, and modern Socialism furnish not a few instances of men thus deductively impelled to social reform. Literature, art, and theology have each contributed leading impulses to social revolt, accompanied by more or less definite suggestions of social transformation. Byron, Wordsworth and Shelley, Hugo, Whitman, Tolstoy, Ibsen, illustrate the flow of free literary forces in the same direction. Pre-Raphaelitism, Wagnerism, and the subsidiary art currents of naturalism and impressionism, have their wide social implications, and have contributed many of the most

powerful prophets of revolution or reform. Wagner himself, Burne-Jones, and Morris in England, are leading members of a great body of men in strenuous and radical revolt against some of the most distinctive features of recent civilisation.

For the influence of theology I now only allude to the Christian Socialism of the broad church clergy of this country in the middle of this century, and to the strong and spreading spirit of reform which prevails in a large section of the High Church in England, and in the Catholic Church of Austria, Germany, France, and Belgium at the present time, to say nothing of that most intense passion of revolt which animates the Russian sects who hazard their lives to embody in their social conduct the spirit of primitive Christianity as they interpret it.

§ 2. Now, politics, as we have seen, had no particular interest for Mr. Ruskin. He always spoke of himself as an "old Tory," and the making of democratic machinery was always repellant to his instincts of political order. The radical philosophy of Bentham, Austin, and the Utilitarians formed the object of his sternest denunciation from the earliest time when his attention was called to it. Indeed, it must be said that his mind had no natural affinity for political thought, and he early developed a rough intuitive philosophy of his own, grounded in natural piety, which disinclined him from the endeavour to explain either individual or national conduct by laws owing their discovery to rationalist analysis. It might indeed have seemed natural that the contemporary literature of his early life should have sown seeds of social revolt in so sen

sitive a nature. But no clear signs of such an influence are discernible. Byron was indeed an early favourite, but it was his penetration into the facts of nature, and not the sentiments of " Byronism," which impressed him. Byron's true gifts he held in high, perhaps unduly high, esteem, writing of him thus: "Of all things within range of human thought he felt the facts, and discerned the natures with accurate justice." 1 This love of fact, and the felicity of song which gave it voice, he received from Byron; the effervescent cynicism, together with the nobler sentiments of a great spirit in protest against the conventions and inhumanity of society, he failed to assimilate.

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Shelley never got that mastery over him which he held over so robust a genius as Browning; he seems to have always been to Mr. Ruskin what he was to Arnold, “a beautiful but ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings, in vain." The full human worth of Wordsworth was to bear fruit later in his life, though from the first the nature-worship of this poet was a constant fount of joy.

The brief sketch given in the last chapter of the outer circumstances of Mr. Ruskin's early life, and of the order of growth in his interests, will explain what has seemed to some the strange absence of all visible signs of sympathy with social movements of any kind in his early life.

It was not a case of retarded emotional or intellectual development. On the contrary, a perusal of the early tracts on Architecture, or vol. i. of the "Modern Painters," shows a quite astonishing maturity of refined emotional analysis. How comes it that one who had 1 Præterita, i. 269.

seen so much, had thought and felt so deeply and so widely upon so many matters, should have no inkling of that work which in middle life he came to recognise as his supreme mission? The answer to such questions is perfectly conclusive and satisfactory. Though incautious and sometimes extravagant in words, John Ruskin was a plodding and careful thinker; his thoughts had never been directed, by necessary contact with his early interests, to the social and economic structure of societies, and therefore he had never formed any definite convictions relating to them.

Never being thrown into the eddying tide of any of the radical movements in politics or philosophy which marked that restless age, he was not impelled by contact with other fervent souls into hasty speculations or cheaply acquired convictions upon the fundamental problems of society. Yet it is none the less true that throughout his studies of nature, art, and history, he had been sowing the seeds which, deeply buried for many years, were destined by necessary process of thought and feeling to grow and ripen into the ideals of his social teaching.

§ 3. No great writer has shown a more contemptuous disregard for those literary arts of concealment commonly used to secure an appearance of consistency, no one has so freely and so loudly proclaimed his repudiation of past pronouncements upon important topics; in no case has this serviceable frankness 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 confes