A History of English Literature

a state of intellectual, social, and religious squalor and blindness, and
that while they continue in this condition it is of little use to talk to
them about Beauty. He believed that some of the first steps in the
necessary redemptive process must be the education of the poor and a return
to what he conceived (certainly with much exaggeration) to have been the
conditions of medieval labor, when each craftsman was not a mere machine
but an intelligent and original artistic creator; but the underlying
essential was to free industry from the spirit of selfish money-getting and
permeate it with Christian sympathy and respect for man as man. The
ugliness of modern life in its wretched city tenements and its hideous
factories Ruskin would have utterly destroyed, substituting such a
beautiful background (attractive homes and surroundings) as would help to
develop spiritual beauty. With his customary vigor Ruskin proceeded
henceforth to devote himself to the enunciation, and so far as possible the
realization of these beliefs, first by delivering lectures and writing
books. He was met, like all reformers, with a storm of protest, but most of
his ideas gradually became the accepted principles of social theory. Among
his works dealing with these subjects may be named 'Unto This Last,'
'Munera Pulveris' (The Rewards of the Dust--an attack on materialistic
political economy), and 'Fors Clavigera' (Fortune the Key-Bearer), the
latter a series of letters to workingmen extending over many years. To 1865
belongs his most widely-read book, 'Sesame and Lilies,' three lectures on
the spiritual meaning of great literature in contrast to materialism, the
glory of womanhood, and the mysterious significance of life.
From the death of his mother in 1871 Ruskin began to devote his large
inherited fortune to 'St. George's Guild,' a series of industrial and
social experiments in which with lavish generosity he attempted to put his
theories into practical operation. All these experiments, as regards direct
results, ended in failure, though their general influence was great. Among
other movements now everywhere taken for granted 'social settlements' are a
result of his efforts.
All this activity had not caused Ruskin altogether to abandon the teaching
of art to the members of the more well-to-do classes, and beginning in 1870
he held for three or four triennial terms the newly-established
professorship of Art at Oxford and gave to it much hard labor. But this
interest was now clearly secondary in his mind.
Ruskin's temper was always romantically high-strung, excitable, and
irritable. His intense moral fervor, his multifarious activities, and his
disappointments were also constant strains on his nervous force. In 1872,
further, he was rejected in marriage by a young girl for whom he had formed
a deep attachment and who on her death-bed, three years later, refused,
with strange cruelty, to see him. In 1878 his health temporarily failed,
and a few years later he retired to the home, 'Brantwood,' at Coniston in
the Lake Region, which he had bought on the death of his mother. Here his
mind gradually gave way, but intermittently, so that he was still able to
compose 'Praterita' (The Past), a delightful autobiography. He died in
1900.
Ruskin, like Carlyle, was a strange compound of genius, nobility, and
unreasonableness, but as time goes on his dogmatism and violence may well
be more and more forgotten, while his idealism, his penetrating
interpretation of art and life, his fruitful work for a more tolerable
social order, and his magnificent mastery of style and description assure
him a permanent place in the history of English literature and of
civilization.