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Grant that it showed a certain crudeness, unripeness, in one side of the man; later in life, he could not have erred in this way. Ruskin is reported saying that he never in his life wrote a letter to any human being that he would not be willing should be posted up in the market-place, or cried by the public crier through the town.
"Life is an outrage, and what duty can take precedence of righting it as far as we can. That old fool of a Ruskin I beg your pardon, Miss Wainwright, if you're fond of him did manage to say a sensible thing when he told a boarding-school full of girls that their first duty was to want to dance. To allow that there is any duty above making the best of life is a species of moral suicide."
Of other books which influenced me about this period, Emerson's ``Representative Men'' was one; another was Carlyle's ``Past and Present, in which the old Abbot of Bury became one of my ideals; still another was Buskin's ``Seven Lamps of Architecture''; and to such a degree that this art has given to my life some of its greatest pleasures. Ruskin was then at his best.
Into whatever millennial state Ruskin sought to usher his little band of English followers and disciples, one must speak appreciatively of his motives in projecting the scheme, and of the money and labor he personally lavished upon the Utopian project.
Even Ruskin, when he attempted to describe Land's End seas in his long convoluted sentences, failed to do anything but give a series of phrases and figures that the mind follows with weariness. Such things must be sketched vividly and briefly, or language only betrays its own limitations.
The bread-and-butter question has never troubled John Ruskin except in his ever-ardent desire that others should be fed. His days have been given to study and writing from his very boyhood; he has made money, but he has had no time to save it. He has expressed himself on every theme that interests mankind, except perhaps "housemaid's knee."
His taste, as far as one remembers, was for the Italian masters of the decline, and whether he selected pictures with a good judgment must be left for others to decide. Probably he shared with Shelley a fondness for the Guercinos and the Guido Renis, whom we can now admire only in defiance of Ruskin.
Ruskin is the bull that stands upon the track and threatens with annihilation the on-coming locomotive; and I think that any spectator who sees his menacing attitude and hears his roaring cannot but have fears for the locomotive. There are two sorts of infidelity concerning humanity, and I do not know which is the more withering in its effects.
"Great art can't exist without a moral element." "Oh God!" cried Lawson furiously. "I knew it was that. He wants morality." He joined his hands and held them towards heaven in supplication. "Oh, Christopher Columbus, Christopher Columbus, what did you do when you discovered America?" "Ruskin says..."
Not that the offenses of Guinevere and Elizabeth Barrett were parallel, but Morris was by nature a defender of women. And it should further be noted that Tennyson had not yet written his "Idylls of the King,"-at the time Morris wrote his poetic brief. Another author that these young men took up at this time was Ruskin.
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