_ [Sidenote: Ancestry.]
It is easy to trace in the life of Ruskin these two forces tending respectively toward the love of beauty and toward the contempt of mere beauty. They are, indeed, present from the beginning. He inherited from his Scotch parents that upright fearlessness which has always characterized the race. His stern mother "devoted him to God before he was born,"[1] and she guarded her gift with unremitting but perhaps misguided caution. The child was early taught to find most of his entertainment within himself, and when he did not, he was whipped. He had no playmates and few toys. His chief story-book was the Bible, which he read many times from cover to cover at his mother's knee. His father, the "perfectly honest wine-merchant," seems to have been the one to foster the boy's aesthetic sense; he was in the habit of reading aloud to his little family, and his son's apparently genuine appreciation of Scott, Pope, and Homer dates from the incredibly early age of five. It was his father, also, to whom he owed his early acquaintance with the finest landscape, for the boy was his companion in yearly business trips about Britain, and later visited, in his parents' company, Belgium, western Germany, and the Alps.
[Sidenote: Early education.]
All this of course developed the child's precocity. He was early suffered and even encouraged to compose verses;[2] by ten he had written a play, which has unfortunately been preserved. The hot-house rearing which his parents believed in, and his facility in teaching himself, tended to make a regular course of schooling a mere annoyance; such schooling as he had did not begin till he was fifteen, and lasted less than two years, and was broken by illness. But the chief effect of the sheltered life and advanced education to which he was subjected was to endow him with depth at the expense of breadth, and to deprive him of a possibly vulgar, but certainly healthy, contact with his kind, which, one must believe, would have checked a certain disposition in him to egotism, sentimentality, and dogmatic vehemence. "The bridle and blinkers were never taken off me," he writes.[3]
[Sidenote: Student at Oxford.]
[Sidenote: Traveling in Europe.]
At Oxford--whither his cautious mother pursued him--Ruskin seems to have been impressed in no very essential manner by curriculum or college mates. With learning _per se_ he was always dissatisfied and never had much to do; his course was distinguished not so much by erudition as by culture. He easily won the Newdigate prize in poetry; his rooms in Christ Church were hung with excellent examples of Turner's landscapes,--the gift of his art-loving father,--of which he had been an intimate student ever since the age of thirteen. But his course was interrupted by an illness, apparently of a tuberculous nature, which necessitated total relaxation and various trips in Italy and Switzerland, where he seems to have been healed by walking among his beloved Alps. For many years thereafter he passed months of his time in these two countries, accompanied sometimes by his parents and sometimes rather luxuriously, it seems, by valet and guide.
[Sidenote: Career as an author begins.]
Meanwhile he had commenced his career as author with the first volume of _Modern Painters_, begun, the world knows, as a short defense of Turner, originally intended for nothing more than a magazine article. But the role of art-critic and law-giver pleased the youth,--he was only twenty-four when the volume appeared,--and having no desire to realize the ambition of his parents and become a bishop, and even less to duplicate his father's career as vintner, he gladly seized the opportunity thus offered him to develop his aesthetic vein and to redeem the public mind from its vulgar apathy thereby. He continued his work on _Modern Painters_, with some intermissions, for eighteen years, and supplemented it with the equally famous _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ in 1849, and _The Stones of Venice_ in 1853.
[Sidenote: Domestic troubles.]
This life of zealous work and brilliant recognition was interrupted in 1848 by Ruskin's amazing marriage to Miss Euphemia Gray, a union into which he entered at the desire of his parents with a docility as stupid as it was stupendous. Five years later the couple were quietly divorced, that Mrs. Ruskin might marry Millais. All the author's biographers maintain an indiscreet reserve in discussing the affair, but there can be no concealment of the fact that its effect upon Ruskin was profound in its depression. Experiences like this and his later sad passion for Miss La Touche at once presage and indicate his mental disorder, and no doubt had their share--a large one--in causing Ruskin's dissatisfaction with everything, and above all with his own life and work. Be this as it may, it is at this time in the life of Ruskin that we must begin to reckon with the decline of his aesthetic and the rise of his ethical impulse; his interest passes from art to conduct. It is also the period in which he began his career as lecturer, his chief interest being the social life of his age.
[Sidenote: Ruskin's increasing interest in social questions.]
By 1860, he was publishing the papers on political economy, later called _Unto this Last_, which roused so great a storm of protest when they appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ that their publication had to be suspended. The attitude of the public toward such works as these,--its alternate excitement and apathy,--the death of his parents, combined with the distressing events mentioned above, darkened Ruskin's life and spoiled his interest in everything that did not tend to make the national life more thoughtfully solemn.
"It seems to me that now ... the thoughts of the true nature of our life, and of its powers and responsibilities should present themselves with absolute sadness and sternness."[4] His lectures as Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, a post which he held at various times from 1870 to 1883, failed to re-establish his undistracted interest in things beautiful.
[Sidenote: Triumph of the reformer over the art-critic.]
The complete triumph of the reformer over the art-critic is marked by _Fors Clavigera_, a series of letters to workingmen, begun New Year's Day, 1871, in which it was proposed to establish a model colony of peasants, whose lives should be made simple, honest, happy, and even cultured, by a return to more primitive methods of tilling the soil and of making useful and beautiful objects. The Guild of St. George, established to "slay the dragon of industrialism," to dispose of machinery, slums, and discontent, consumed a large part of Ruskin's time and money. He had inherited a fortune of approximately a million dollars, and he now began to dispose of it in various charitable schemes,--establishing tea-shops, supporting young painters, planning model tenements, but, above all, in elaborating his ideas for the Guild. The result of it all--whatever particular reforms were effected or manual industries established--was, to Ruskin's view, failure, and his mind, weakening under the strain of its profound disappointments, at last crashed in ruin.
[Sidenote: Death in 1900.]
It is needless to follow the broken author through the desolation of his closing years to his death in 1900. Save for his charming reminiscences, _Praeterita_, his work was done; the long struggle was over, the struggle of one man to reduce the complexities of a national life to an apostolic simplicity, to make it beautiful and good,
Till the high God behold it from beyond,
And enter it.
[1] _Praeterita_. He was born February 8, 1819.
[2] Ruskin himself quotes a not very brilliant specimen in _Modern Painters_, III, in "Moral of Landscape."
[3] _Praeterita_, Sec. 53.
[4] _The Mystery of Life._ _