And the Diffusion of the Beautiful  
The genius of John Ruskin's message is in a single sentence: "Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art and education is brutality." He held that all the doing that makes commerce is born of the thinking that makes scholars, and that all the flying of looms and the whirling of spindles begins with the quiet thought of some scholar, hidden in a closet, or sequestered in a cloister. He never made the mistake of supposing that education would change a ten-cent boy into a thousand-dollar-a-year man, but he did know that there is some power in Nature that will transform a seed into a sheaf, an acorn into an oak, and that the truth will change a child into a sage, a statesman, a seer, a man with a message for his century.
 
Ruskin wrote many volumes to prove that wealth is not in raw material;—not in iron, not in wood, not in stone, not in cotton, not in wool. Wealth is largely in the intelligence[Pg 191] put into the raw material. Pig-iron is worth twenty dollars a ton, but intelligence turns that ton of iron into a ton of tempered hair-springs, and it is worth perhaps ten thousand dollars a ton. The clay in Rodin's Thinker represents a value of a few francs, but the idea in the Thinker brought 150,000 francs. On the sixtieth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Victoria, an editor offered Rudyard Kipling $1,000 for a Commemoration poem. The paper, ink and the pen stand for a few pennies; all the rest of the $1,000 was for a trained intellect. The average income of a family in the United States to-day is not far from $2,000. That income could be carried up to $4,000 if our workers would only double the intelligence, efficiency and loyalty put into the raw material they handle!
 
The career of Edison illustrates the industrial value of one informed intellect to the nation. In 1910, business men in the United States had invested in the expired patents of Thomas Edison six billion seven hundred millions of dollars. These factories brought in an annual income of a billion and seventy millions of dollars. To-day, half-a-dozen Edisons, the one showing us how to burn the coal in the ground, the other taking nitrogen out of the air, another showing us how to transmute[Pg 192] metals, another attacking the enemies of the cotton, the fruits and the grains, with a teacher who would show the parents of the country how successfully to assault intellectual and moral illiteracy, would easily double our annual income. What our country—what every country—needs is an invasion of knowledge and sound sense. Therefore Ruskin's message, "the first business of the nation is the manufacture of souls of a good quality."
 
During his lifetime John Ruskin wrote some forty volumes. Between the ages of twenty and thirty he wrote Modern Painters, dealing with the claims of cloud, sun, shower, wave, shrub and flower, land, sea, and sky upon man's intellectual and moral life. He held that the open-air world is man's best college and the forces of the winter and the summer his best teachers. From thirty to forty he wrote the Lectures on Architecture, and Stones of Venice, with many studies of the galleries, towers, and cathedrals of Florence and Rome. In these books his thought is that the soul of the people within determines the painting, architecture and civilization of the state without. From forty to fifty he wrote many books on the claim of the beautiful upon man's spiritual life, and insisted that those claims were binding not less upon the working[Pg 193] people and the peasants in factory and field, than upon the scholar in his library and the artist in his studio.
 
From fifty to sixty he wrote his Fors Clavigera, his Time and Tide, Munera Pulveris, and Unto This Last, studies of the problems of wealth and poverty, of labour and capital. He tells us that men, to-day, are charmed with the glitter of gold and silver as young birds are charmed with the glitter of snakes' eyes; that the business man is divinely called to serve through property; that there is, however, such a thing as a despotism of wealth; that the property of some millionaires represents the breaking of the strength and the will of competitors and the paralysis of the forces of the people, so that what seems to be wealth, in verity is only "the gilded index of far-reaching ruin, a wreckers' handful of coin, gleaned from the beach to which he has beguiled an argosy; the camp follower's bundle of rags, unwrapped from the breasts of goodly soldiers dead, the purchase pieces of potter's fields, wherein shall be buried together the citizen and the stranger."
 
And then Ruskin bent himself to what he believed to be the real task of his life, the writing of a series of books on the problems of labour and capital, in the hope that he might[Pg 194] save the State from trampled cornfields and from bloody streets. But just at the supreme moment in his career his health gave way, and he never completed his studies of the Robber King, the Rust Kings, the Moth King and the Hero Kings. John Ruskin died believing himself to be an unfulfilled prophecy, in that he was unable to complete these books for which he believed all his life had been one long preparation. But in reality he was a prophet who gave forth a message that is slowly transforming the institutions of mankind.
 
A full understanding of Ruskin's life-work begins with an outlook upon his contribution to modern social reform. Biographers often identify a great reform with one man's name, as if this man, single handed, had wrought the social transformation. Thus they speak of Howard as the reformer of prisons; of Shaftesbury as the author of the Poor Acts; of Cobden as the author of the Corn Laws; of Lincoln, as the emancipator of slaves; of Booth as the founder of the City Colony, the Home Colony, the Farm Colony. But strictly speaking, thousands of leaders of the movement for the abolition of slavery stood behind the forces of Wilberforce in England, and Lincoln in the United States. Not otherwise[Pg 195] many biographers have claimed too much for the influence of Ruskin, certainly more than the master would have claimed for himself.
 
At the beginning of his career Ruskin started a movement to diffuse the beautiful in the life of the people. For centuries the beautiful had been concentrated in the temples of Athens, the palaces and galleries of Italy, the museums of Paris and London, in the manor houses of the landed gentry. Meanwhile the poor people of Athens, Venice and Florence lived in huts, wore leather garments, ate crusts, dwelt amid ugliness, squalor and filth. Ruskin dreamed a dream of the beautiful put into the life of the common people. He found that Sheffield, with its smoking chimneys and grimy streets, had been spoken of as the ugliest factory town in England. Therefore Ruskin went to Sheffield, hired a building, installed therein his paintings, etchings, and illuminated missals, and hired a few instructors to help him diffuse the beautiful in the daily life of the people. He brought in men who made the implements of the dining-room, and showed them how to make the knife, the fork, the spoon, the table linen, minister to the sentiment of taste and refinement. He brought in men who made wall-papers for the poor man's house, and showed the craftsmen[Pg 196] how to make the colours soft and warm, delicate and beautiful. He interested himself in beautiful furniture. He wrought with William Morris for a more beautiful type of illustrations in books and magazines. He denounced the ugliness of the houses and clothing and bridges and railways. He insisted that women should have beautiful garments, the youth read beautiful books, the men ride in beautiful cars, the families live in beautiful little houses, the children play upon beautiful carpets and look upon walls that had one or two beautiful pictures. John Ruskin laboured, and others wrought with him, and now at last we have entered into the fruit of their labours. To-day the beautiful, once concentrated in temples, palaces, and cathedrals, is diffused in the life of the common people.
 
In the same fashion Ruskin started a movement among the working men for a diffusion of sound learning. The St. George Guild represents the first University Extension Course and the first Chautauqua system our world ever knew. More than fifty years ago he worked out his plan to carry the knowledge given to rich men's sons in their lecture halls and libraries to the working people, who were to carry on their studies in the evening after the day's labour was over. He laid out a[Pg 197] course of studies for these working men, planned the organization of lecture centers, gave us the outline of the University Extension Course of lectures, induced many men in England to go from one working man's guild and club to another, and after Ruskin's health broke down, the men in the faculty of Oxford University took Ruskin's mother-idea, and developed it into the University Extension Course of lectures. Brought to our country that idea has spread through these lecture courses carried on in great halls in the winter, in tents and open-air assemblies in the summer.
 
We say much of our Social Settlement Work, and trace these thousands of settlements in the tenement-house region of great cities back to Arnold Toynbee's work, and that of Canon Barnett, in the East End of London. But we must remember that when Ruskin was lecturing in Oxford to some of the richest boys in Great Britain he told them that every boy who consumed more than he produced was a pauper and that the more the youth received from his ancestors and the State, the larger his debt to those who were less fortunate. He believed that every gifted boy should keep in touch, not only with his own class, but with all classes, and that every[Pg 198] youth would do well to do some physical work every day. Ruskin and his students built a road outside of Oxford, and the foreman of the gang of students was young Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee admired and loved Ruskin, as a young pupil and disciple loves a noble teacher and a great master.
 
After his health broke down, Ruskin gave up his work in Whitechapel Road and urged Arnold Toynbee to give himself to the problems of the poor, and when Ruskin's health gave way completely, it was Toynbee who rewrote his lectures on labour and capital and gave them a new form in his Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. The time came when Arnold Toynbee broke down with overwork and brain fever, as his master had broken before him, and his friend Canon Barnett raised the money to make Toynbee Hall a permanent institution. But the seed of the Social Settlement movement was John Ruskin's brief career in the tenement region of the East End, and the first full fruit was in his disciple's Toynbee Hall and in Canon Barnett's noble work at St. Jude's. Little by little the Social Settlement Idea spread, until in the tenement regions of Manchester, Birmingham, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, gifted men and women of wealth, leisure and[Pg 199] patrician position, began to give their lives to the neglected poor.
 
Not less striking, the influence of Ruskin upon the plans of General Booth. Long before the book called In Darkest England and the Way Out was published, Ruskin founded his co?perative printing press in a little colony outside of London. One of his biographers has told the story of Ruskin's plan to make the men and women in the poorhouses self-supporting, happy and useful. This biographer has never fully established the connection between that first co?perative colony of Ruskin, and Booth's plans for the City Colony, the Farm Colony and the Foreign Colony. But one thing is certain:—Ruskin had a pioneer mind. Instead of his chief interest being in mountains and clouds, in wave and flower, cathedrals, pictures, marbles, illuminated missals, the overmastering enthusiasm of his life was people, and his real message was a message of social reform. When long time has passed, Ruskin's fame will rest upon his work as a social reformer, a man who loved the poor and weak.
 
Not less significant, his views of education, that have leavened all modern schools whatsoever. Matthew Arnold defined culture as "a familiarity with the best that has ever[Pg 200] been done in literature." Ruskin insisted that there were thousands of scholars living in their libraries, surrounded by books, who were perfectly familiar with the best that has ever been thought or done, but whose knowledge was all but worthless, because it was selfish. He looked upon the informed man as a sower, going forth to sow the seed of truth over the wide land. All selfish culture is like salt in a barrel; the salt has no power to save unless it is scattered. Selfish culture is like seed corn in the granary, important for a harvest. Under Ruskin's influence many of his friends gave an evening or two a week to lectures before his working men's clubs, his art groups, and his classes for the improvement of the handicrafts.
 
No modern author has made so much of vision, or tried so hard to teach people how to see. Many teachers think that education is stuffing the pocket of memory with a mass of facts. When the mind is filled so that it cannot hold another truth, the youth receives a diploma. Ruskin held that education was teaching the child how to see everything true and beautiful in land and sea and sky. "For a thousand great speakers, there is only one great thinker; for a thousand great thinkers, there is only one great see-er; we cut out one[Pg 201] 'e' and leave it seer, but the true poet and sage is simply the see-er." The millions are blind to the signals hanged out from the battlements of cloud. Isaac Newton was a see-er,—he saw an apple falling from the tree; saw a moon falling through space, and gave us the law of gravity. Columbus was a see-er. In a crevice in a bit of driftwood, tossed upon the shore of Spain, he saw a strange pebble, and his imagination leaped from the driftwood to the unknown forest from whence it came, from that bright piece of stone to the mountain range of which it was a part. Columbus had the seeing eye, and discovered the continent hidden behind the clouds.
 
Not otherwise the geologist sees the handwriting of God upon the rock-pages; the astronomer sees His writing upon the pages of the sky; the physiologist reads His writing on the pages of the human body; the moralist deciphers the writing on the tablets of the mind and the heart. The beginning of Wordsworth's fame was the hour when his eyes were opened, and he saw man appearing upon the horizon, and like a bright spirit trailing clouds of glory, coming from God who is man's home. It was the inner sight of Wordsworth's soul that was "the bliss of solitude."[Pg 202] It was his power of vision that enabled him to look out upon the field, yellow as gold, a vision that lingered long in his memory when he said, "and then my heart with rapture thrills, and dances with the daffodils."
 
It is useless for people who are colour-blind to look at Rembrandt's portrait. It is folly for people who cannot follow a tune to buy a ticket for a symphony concert. Men who by neglect atrophy the spiritual faculty, or by sin cut gashes in the nerve of conscience, will soon exclaim, in the spirit of the fool, "There is no God," just as the blind man is certain that there is no sun. The old black ex-slave, Sojourner Truth, once illustrated this principle. In those days excitement ran high. Northern merchants, fearful of losing their trade with Southern cities, frowned upon any one who dared criticize "the peculiar institution" of the South. One day, in New York, Sojourner Truth, just escaped from slavery, went to an Abolition Meeting, hoping for an opportunity of making a plea for the emancipation of her race. When the black woman, with her gnarled hands, and face seamed with pain and sorrow, arose to speak, a young newspaper reporter slammed his book upon the table, and stamped his way down the aisle toward the door. Just before he reached the[Pg 203] door, Sojourner Truth stretched out her long black finger and said, "Wait a minute, honey! You goin' 'way 'cause of me? Listen, honey—I would give you some ideas to take home with you to your newspaper, but I see you ain't got nothing to carry 'em in!" . . . Homely but forceful illustration of an old truth. The angel of truth and the angel of beauty, leaning from the battlements of heaven, oft whispers, "Oh, my children! I would fain give you a new tool, a new painting, a new science, but you have no eyes to see the vision, and no ears to hear the sweetest music that ever fell from heaven's battlements." It is the man of vision who founds the new school of painting, or the new reform or the new liberty. The visions of the idealist to-day become the laws and institutions of to-morrow.............