The Harvest of Ruskin

Оглавление

Graham John William. The Harvest of Ruskin

PREFACE

CHAPTER I. THE SIGNS OF A PROPHET

CHAPTER II. THE PILGRIM’S WAY

CHAPTER III. TO WHAT FOLD?

CHAPTER IV. RUSKIN AND MILL

CHAPTER V. RUSKIN’S RECONSTRUCTION

CHAPTER VI. RUSKIN’S ECONOMICS TO-DAY

CHAPTER VII. USURY

CHAPTER VIII. WAR

CHAPTER IX. MACHINERY

EPILOGUE

Отрывок из книги

N OW that one hundred years have gone by since their one precious boy was born in London to a Scottish wine merchant and his wife, it may be well to ask how much of Ruskin’s teaching has proved to be chaff which the wind driveth away, and how much has been precious seed. Ruskin is just now suffering from the time of comparative neglect which intervenes between an author’s contemporaries and posterity, the years when the immediate appropriateness of his message may have lapsed, when it is no longer fresh and startling, but its permanent value has not yet been settled by the verdict of several generations. All or nearly all the great Victorians are in like case.

Ruskin’s art criticism is, as a matter of fact, not only ignored but resolutely rejected nowadays among critical writers. He loved beauty and charm in subject; he rejected scenes of horror and torture, and also subjects of mere Dutch commonplace. He loved delicate and accurately minute drawing, and the realistic detail of the Preraphælites. He desired that a tree in a picture should be recognized as an oak or a birch; and he loved above all fine drawing of mosses, leaves, and peacocks’ wings. This is the day of impressionism, super-impressionism and impression of impressionism, and so on, through ever greater abandonment of drawing and significance, to cubism, futurism and other weird follies. I am not wishful to dogmatize on these matters; I incline to the sage and wonderful conclusion that all styles are good provided they are good styles; that conscientiousness in the portrayal of what the artist really sees will not lead him astray; that originality, or at any rate a marked individual gift, is a necessity; and that there is no one orthodox school. As in everything else, the letter killeth, convention blocks progress, and slovenliness includes a multitude of sins.

.....

Besides these essential qualifications Ruskin had his very unusual gifts, which it may be long before we find again combined with the religious faculty – his long lifetime free from the need of earning money, his early popularity, his wonderful style, the vantage ground of his Professorial chair, his penetrating mind, his wit and his fire. It may be long before we see his like again.

I am far from claiming infallibility for Ruskin. Infallibility is an out-of-date conception altogether. There is no such thing on earth. To be infallible you must know everything; you must be infinite. The infallibility of a finite creature is an inhuman, even an inorganic conception. Organic life means growth, and growth means imperfection; but growth is Nature’s way of making things. Infallibility is a tyrant born of ecclesiasticism, and bred on human laziness and fear. It has become the attribute of the quack pill, and there let it abide.

.....