PREFACE.

A BOOK which professes to be primarily an exposition of Mr. Ruskin's social teaching may seem at first sight to be needless and unprofitable. No master of impassioned prose has endowed his writings with more perspicuity of meaning and more force of utterance, or used a fuller liberty of reiteration in placing his chief thoughts before the reading public. And yet these very qualities of brilliance and amplitude have helped to hide from many the supreme value of Mr. Ruskin's criticism of life, especially in reference to social reform, by giving too great emphasis and attractiveness to unrelated individual thoughts, set in single jewelled sentences, or in purple patches, and by thus concealing the consistency of thought and feeling which underlay and gave intellectual unity and order to his work. Though Mr. Ruskin, like Matthew Arnold, would probably disclaim the title of a system-maker, as implying too mechanical a conception of his intellectual life, and though his mode of composition seldom leans towards severity of arrangement, yet no great modern thinker exhibits in his writings a more definite and conscious adjustment of ideas, both in the order of their growth and in the maintenance of their relations towards one another.

Mr. Ruskin will rank as the greatest social teacher

of his age, not merely because he has told the largest number of important truths upon the largest variety of vital matters, in language of penetrative force, but because he has made the most powerful and the most felicitous attempt to grasp and to express, as a comprehensive whole, the needs of a human society and the processes of social reform. To assert that he has attained or even approached complete success, either in his delineation of the social ideal, or in his estimate of particular measures and movements of progress, would be to prefer a foolish claim. But it may be justly said that he has done more than any other Englishman to compel people to realise the nature of the social problem in its wider related issues affecting every department of work and life, and to enforce the supreme moral obligation of confronting it.

In seeking to mark this unity and consistency of conscious design in Mr. Ruskin's work, and, at the same time, to furnish a critical estimate of the whole and of the parts, I shall run the risk of offending some by tedium, and others by the presumption which attaches to the most cautious censorship of the great. In drawing together and imposing argumentative order upon thoughts which flit self-poised and with bright irresponsibility among the pages of Mr. Ruskin's brilliantly discursive books, I shall seem to some to be guilty of literary desecration. My defence must be that I am claiming for Mr. Ruskin, as the chief among his virtues, one which has not yet been admitted save by a small section of his numerous readers, the distinction of being a philosophic thinker upon the nature and modes of social progress, particularly on its economic side,

The very qualities which have pleased the body of his readers most, the brilliant word-painting (which he has vainly repudiated), the superb freedom of passionate utterance in praise and blame, the immense variety of swift and telling illustration, the gifts of rhetorical exaggeration which he employs, have done him this injury with sober-minded thinkers of a more practical or scientific turn, that they have concealed the close and accurate texture of his deeper thought. Thus the selfish interests and the false passions which he so constantly and bitterly assailed have, in part at any rate, succeeded in persuading large sections of the thinking world that, while Mr. Ruskin is a valuable art-critic and a brilliant litterateur, he has no claim to serious consideration as an economist and a thinker upon social reform. Particular phrases and judgments have been distorted and abused, the grossest misrepresentations of a general character have been employed, in order either to pretend that Mr. Ruskin did not really mean what he has plainly said, or that his fundamental notions and valuations are too unsubstantial to deserve the attention of thoughtful practical reformers. This is the common price paid by literary genius to the dull-witted multitude, who have always been easily persuaded that a man who writes well cannot think clearly or deeply.

Some even among his lovers and admirers may hold their master to blame for a certain perverse ingenuity of waywardness in the intentional disorder of his reasoning. That he has in fact carried this disorder so far as to hide from many the full appreciation of his logic is my chief excuse for this work.

To crib, cabin, and confine in a dull array of formal

propositions the rich exuberance of Mr. Ruskin's thought would be a needless injury. This I have endeavoured to avoid. But, however one may handle so delicate a writer for purposes of exposition, some considerable loss of the finer flavour of his work is unavoidable. As we draw together from diverse quarters the compact order of his thought, the spell of his eloquence is broken, the all-pervasive charm of his rich free utterance is dissipated. To some it may seem that the establishment of a sound logical reputation is no adequate compensation for such a loss. My answer is that every reader who would appraise his work aright, in all its breadth and fullness, must in some fashion do for himself this work of formal analysis and synthesis, must seek a wholeness and a harmony in Mr. Ruskin's art of life. This central fire of inspiration which gives vitality to all his works, this art of life, issuing as it does from his supreme sense of spiritual brotherhood, is identical with the passion of social reform, which is the aspect of his work that here engages us. Some account of the outward circumstances of his life, and of the more distinctively artistic and literary interests which absorbed much of his time and attention, is here given. But neither biography nor art philosophy is treated for its own intrinsic interest, but only in so far as it helps to explain, historically or logically, the order and nature of his social teaching. My design is to render some assistance to those who are disposed to admit the validity of the claim which Mr. Ruskin has made to be first and above all else a Political Economist, and who are willing to give careful consideration alike to the strictures he has passed upon current economic theory and prac