John Ruskin

JOHN RUSKINS lif e was not only centred, but limited, by the places vhere he was born and taught, and by the things he loved. The London suburb and the English lake-side for his homes, Oxford for his place first of study and then of teaching, usually one beaten road by France, Switzerland, and Italy for his annual journeys-these closed the scene of his dwellings and travellings. There was a water-colour drawing by his father that interested him when he was a little boy in muslin and a sash as Northcote painted him, with his own chosen blue hills for a background, and this drawing hung over his bed when he died the evenings of his last days were passed in the chair wherein he preached in play a sermon before he could well pronounce it. The nursery lessons and the house hold ways of the home on Herne Hill partly remained with him, reverend and unquestionable, to his last day. And yet the student of the work done in this quiet life of repetitions is somewhat shaken from the steadfastness of study by two things-multitude and movement. The multitude is in the tl oughts of this great and original mind, and the moveillent is the worlds. Ruskins enormous work has never had steady auditors or spectators it may be likened to a sidereal sky beheld from an earth upon the wing. Many, innumerable, are the points that seem to shift and journey, to the shifting eye. Partly it was he himself who altered his readers and partly they changed with the long change of a nation and partly they altered with successive and recurrent moods. John Ruskin wrote first for his contemporaries, young men fifty years later he wrote for the same readers fifty years older, as well as for their sons. And hardly has a mob ofShakespeares shown more sudden, unanimous, or clamorous versions and reversions of opinion than those that have acclaimed and rejected, derided and divided, his work, once to ban and bless, and a second time to bless and ban. LPolitical economy in 1860 had but one orthodoxy, which was that of Manchester scientifically, it held competition in production and in distribution, with the removal as far as was possible to coherent human society of all intervention of explicit social legislation, to be favourable to the wealth of nations and ethically INTRODUCTION...