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Little Masterpieces 
 
 Edited by Bliss Perry 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 M 
 
 THE TWO BOYHOODS 
 
 THE SLAVE SHIP 
 
 THE MOUNTAIN GLOOM 
 
 THE MOUNTAIN GLORY 
 
 VENICE 
 
 ST. MARK'S 
 
 ART AND MORALS 
 
 THE MYSTERY OF LIFE 
 
 PEACE 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DOUBLEDAY & McCLURE CO. 
 
 i8g8 
 
 
 
 y 
 

 15913 
 
 Copyright, 1898, by 
 
 DOUBLEDAY & McCLURE Co. 
 
 Acknowledgment is due Messrs. Wiley <5r» Son 
 
 for permission to use selections from the text 
 
 of their Popular Edition of Ruskiri s Works 
 
 
 nw> copies BtCt.»to. 
 
Introduction 
 
Editor's Introduction 
 
 Mr. Ruskin's writings have been so copious, 
 and so varied in theme and temper, that no two 
 of his admirers would be likely to agree in their 
 selection of characteristic passages from his 
 books. The editor of the present volume can- 
 not hope that it will wholly satisfy those readers 
 who already know their Ruskin well. He has 
 simply endeavored, by a chronological arrange- 
 ment of carefully chosen extracts, to show some- 
 thing of the succession of themes that have 
 occupied Mr. Ruskin's mind, as well as the sort 
 of writing which early established and has long 
 sustained his reputation as a master of English. 
 
 The hero of his first work, " Modern Pain- 
 ters," was the artist Turner. Readers were first 
 attracted by his descriptive eloquence, rather 
 than by the intrinsic worth of his message to the 
 public. Here was a new kind of prose, — though 
 one more carefully modelled upon Richard 
 Hooker and other old writers than most people 
 v 
 
Editor's Introduction 
 
 imagined, — a prose captivating in its music, its 
 color, and the long supple coil of its periods. 
 The chapter entitled "The Two Boyhoods" — 
 Giorgione's and Turner's — is a good example 
 of this early manner. It is followed here by 
 Mr. Ruskin's famous description of Turner's 
 " Slave Ship," a piece of writing which takes 
 as much liberty with the picture as the picture 
 in turn does with nature. Such writing, in 
 Mr. Ruskin's hands, is strangely suggestive to 
 the imagination, but in the hands of his imita- 
 tors it has done much to obliterate the natural 
 distinction between literary and graphic art and 
 to vitiate the later prose of England and 
 America. 
 
 The chapters upon "The Mountain Gloom n 
 and " The Mountain Glory," reprinted here in 
 part, show the patient study of scientific detail, 
 the enthusiasm for natural beauty, and the ten- 
 dency to moralize upon the relations of beauty 
 to conduct which from the first have character- 
 ized Mr. Ruskin's mind. In any one of these 
 three directions his influence over his contem- 
 poraries would have been enough to give him 
 distinction, but it is quite possible that what he 
 has done to help people to use their eyes may 
 ultimately prove a more valuable contribution 
 to his generation than all his subtle and inge- 
 nious essays in philosophical analysis. 
 
 But there are many other ways in which he 
 vi 
 
Editors Introduction 
 
 has guided the thought and feeling of cultivated 
 people. Few travellers visit Florence and Ven- 
 ice without acquainting themselves, however 
 superficially, with Mr. Ruskin's criticisms of the 
 architecture and allied arts of the great artistic 
 epochs. " The Stones of Venice " contains 
 some of his most carefully elaborated work. I 
 have reprinted the chapter describing the situa- 
 tion of Venice, as well as the paragraphs devoted 
 to the exterior of St. Mark's. 
 
 As Mr. Ruskin advanced in life, the ethical 
 cast of his mind predominated more and more 
 over the aesthetic. The analyst of the rela- 
 tions of science to art, the critic who traced the 
 lines of the building back to the fortitude and 
 faith of the builders, brooded increasingly over 
 the fate of common men and women in this 
 perplexed age of the world. The lecture on 
 "The Mystery of Life and its Arts" expresses 
 some of his own perplexity and his strenuous 
 sense of the duties that are to be performed. 
 The lecture on " The Relation of Art to Morals " 
 is an acute and suggestive discourse upon a 
 subject that has always occupied his attention, 
 but which he has rarely discussed so much to 
 the reader's profit as here. The fragment from 
 "The Eagle's Nest" entitled "Peace" may 
 appropriately close these selections from the 
 books of a man who has felt most keenly the 
 discords of modern life, but who has not always 
 vii 
 
Editor's Introduction 
 
 been able to point out with any practical help- 
 fulness a way of escape. 
 
 It will be seen that I have not drawn upon 
 Mr. Ruskin's more technical productions, either 
 his studies of rock and leaf, flower and bird, or 
 his detailed criticisms of architecture and paint- 
 ing. Nor has anything been borrowed from his 
 later writings in the field of political economy 
 and social science. There is much in these 
 later books that is whimsical and perverse, 
 much wilful glorification of mediaevalism, much 
 following of his " master" Carlyle's bad fashion 
 of ignoring the best forces of his own age. The 
 Ruskinian political economy has not yet been 
 accepted by the economists, any more than his 
 theories of art have been accepted by the critics, 
 or his workingmen's gospel believed in very 
 largely by the workingmen themselves. But 
 Mr. Ruskin has found a sure refuge in the 
 "general reader," who knows pretty well in a 
 vague way what he wants from a book, and who 
 is, after all, the final judge of an author's place 
 in literature. The " general reader " has long 
 been loyal to Mr. Ruskin, liking not only his 
 knowledge of his subject and his skill with 
 words, but his noble passion for beauty and 
 goodness, his noble scorn of injustice and evil. 
 Looked at too narrowly, Mr. Ruskin's career 
 seems a succession of caprices. He has wor- 
 shipped, in turn, Turner and Tintoretto, Botti- 
 viii 
 
Editors Introduction 
 
 celli and Carlyle ; his concrete art teaching has 
 repeatedly changed its substance, and his reli- 
 gious faith its form.* Yet in the true perspec- 
 tive these contradictions disappear, his spirit 
 and intention become plain, and the whole 
 power of an extraordinarily gifted man seems 
 steadily directed towards making human life 
 more beautiful and bountiful. 
 
 Bliss Perry. 
 
 *Fors Clavigera, Letters LXXVL, LXXVIII. 
 
 IX 
 
Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Two Boyhoods . . . . . .3 
 
 The Slave Ship 27 
 
 The Mountain Gloom . . . > 33 
 
 The Mountain Glory . . . . 59 
 
 Venice 73 
 
 St. Mark's 91 
 
 Art and Morals 103 
 
 The Mystery of Life .... 135 
 
 Peace . . 189 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 § i. Born half-way between the mountains 
 and the sea — that young George of Castel- 
 franco — of the Brave Castle: — Stout George 
 they called him, George of Georges, so goodly 
 a boy he was — Giorgione. 
 
 Have you ever thought what a world his eyes 
 opened on — fair, searching eyes of youth? 
 What a world of mighty life, from those moun- 
 tain roots to the shore; — of loveliest life, when 
 he went down, yet so young, to the marble city 
 — and became himself as a fiery heart to it ? 
 
 A city of marble, did I say? nay, rather a 
 golden city, paved with emerald. For truly, 
 every pinnacle and turret glanced or glowed, 
 overlaid with gold, or bossed with jasper. Be- 
 neath, the unsullied sea drew in deep breathing, 
 to and fro, its eddies of green wave. Deep- 
 hearted, majestic, terrible as the sea, — the men 
 of Venice moved in sway of power and war ; 
 pure as her pillars of alabaster, stood her mo- 
 
 3 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 thers and maidens ; from foot to brow, all noble, 
 walked her knights ; the low bronzed gleaming 
 of sea-rusted armor shot angrily under their 
 blood-red mantle-folds. Fearless, faithful, pa- 
 tient, impenetrable, implacable, — every word a 
 fate — sate her senate. In hope and honor, 
 lulled by flowing of wave around their isles of 
 sacred sand, each with his name written and 
 the cross graved at his side, lay her dead. A 
 wonderful piece of world. Rather, itself a 
 world. It lay along the face of the waters, no 
 larger, as its captains saw it from their masts at 
 evening, than a bar of sunset that could not 
 pass away ; but, for its power, it must have 
 seemed to them as if they were sailing in the ex- 
 panse of heaven, and this a great planet, whose 
 orient edge widened through ether. A world 
 from which all ignoble care and petty thoughts 
 were banished, with all the common and poor 
 elements of life. No foulness, nor tumult, in 
 those tremulous streets, that filled, or fell, be- 
 neath the moon ; but rippled music of majestic 
 change, or thrilling silence. No weak walls 
 could rise above them ; no low-roofed cottage, 
 nor straw-built shed. Only the strength as of 
 rock, and the finished setting of stones most 
 precious. And around them, far as the eye 
 could reach, still the soft moving of stainless 
 waters, proudly pure ; as not the flower, so 
 neither the thorn nor the thistle, could grow in 
 4 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 the glancing fields. Ethereal strength of Alps, 
 dream-like, vanishing in high procession be- 
 yond the Torcellan shore ; blue islands of Paduan 
 hills, poised in the golden west. Above, tree 
 winds and fiery clouds ranging at their will;— 
 brightness out of the north, and balm from the 
 south, and the stars of the evening and morn- 
 ing clear in the limitless light of arched heaven 
 and circling sea. 
 
 Such was Giorgione's school — such Titian's 
 home. 
 
 § 2. Near the south-west corner of Covent 
 Garden, a square brick pit or well is formed by 
 a close-set block of houses, to the back windows 
 of which it admits a few rays of light. Access 
 to the bottom of it is obtained out of Maiden 
 Lane, through a low archway and an iron gate; 
 and if you stand long enough under the arch- 
 way to accustom your eyes to the darkness, you 
 may see on the left hand a narrow door, which 
 formerly gave quiet access to a respectable bar- 
 bels shop, of which the front window, looking 
 into Maiden Lane, is still extant, filled in this 
 year (i860), with a row of bottles, connected, 
 in some defunct manner, with a brewer's busi- 
 ness. A more fashionable neighborhood, it is 
 said, eighty years ago than now — never cer- 
 tainly a cheerful one — wherein a boy being 
 born on St. George's day, 1775, began soon 
 after to take interest in the world of Covent 
 
 5 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 Garden, and put to service such spectacles of 
 life as it afforded. 
 
 § 3. No knights to be seen there, nor, I im- 
 agine, many beautiful ladies ; their costume at 
 least disadvantageous, depending much on in- 
 cumbency of hat and feather, and short waists; 
 the majesty of men founded similarly on shoe- 
 buckles and wigs; — impressive enough when 
 Reynolds will do his best for it ; but not sug- 
 gestive of much ideal delight to a boy. 
 
 "Bello ovile dov' io dormii agnello:" of 
 things beautiful, besides men and women, dusty 
 sunbeams up or down the street on summer 
 mornings ; deep furrowed cabbage leaves at the 
 greengrocer's ; magnificence of oranges in wheel- 
 barrows round the corner ; and Thames' shore 
 within three minutes' race. 
 
 § 4. None of these things very glorious; the 
 best, however, that England, it seems, was then 
 able to provide for a boy of gift : who, such as 
 they are, loves them — never, indeed, forgets 
 them. The short waists modify to the last his 
 visions of Greek ideal. His foregrounds had 
 always a succulent cluster or two of greengrocery 
 at the corners. Enchanted oranges gleam in 
 Covent Gardens of the Hesperides; and great 
 ships go to pieces in order to scatter chests of 
 them on the waves. That mist of early sun- 
 beams in the London dawn crosses, many and 
 many a time, the clearness of Italian air; and 
 6 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 by Thames' shore, with its stranded barges and' 
 glidings of red sail, dearer to us than Lucerne 
 lake or Venetian lagoon, — by Thames' shore 
 we will die. 
 
 $ 5. With such circumstance round him in 
 youth, let us note what necessary effects followed 
 upon the boy. I assume him to have had Gior- 
 gione's sensibility (and more than Giorgione's, 
 if that be possible) to color and form. I tell 
 you farther, and this fact you may receive trust- 
 fully, that his sensibility to human affection and 
 distress was no less keen than even his sense- 
 for natural beauty — heart-sight deep as eye- 
 sight. 
 
 Consequently, he attaches himself with the' 
 faithfullest child-love to everything that bears; 
 an image of the place he was born in. No 
 matter how ugly it is, — has it anything about 
 it like Maiden Lane, or like Thames' shore ? If 
 so, it shall be painted for their sake. Hence, 
 to the very close of life, Turner could endure 
 ugliness which no one else, of the same sensi- 
 bility, would have borne with for an instant. 
 Dead brick walls, blank square windows, old 
 clothes, market-womanly types of humanity — 
 anything fishy and muddy, like Billingsgate or 
 Hungerford Market, had great attraction for 
 him; black barges, patched sails, and every 
 possible condition of fog. 
 
 § 6. You will find these tolerations and affeo 
 
 7 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 tions guiding or sustaining him to the last hour 
 of his life ; the notablest of all such endurances 
 being that of dirt. No Venetian ever draws 
 anything foul; but Turner devoted picture after 
 picture to the illustration of effects of dinginess, 
 smoke, soot, dust, and dusty texture ; old sides 
 of boats, weedy roadside vegetation, dunghills, 
 straw-yards, and all the soilings and stains of 
 every common labor. 
 
 And more than this, he not only could en- 
 dure, but enjoyed and looked for litter, like 
 Covent Garden wreck after the market. His 
 pictures are often full of it, from side to side ; 
 their foregrounds differ from all others in the 
 natural way that things have of lying abr in 
 them. Even his richest vegetation, ir> deal 
 work, is confused ; and he delights in shingle, 
 debris, and heaps of fallen stones. The last 
 words he ever spoke to me about a picture were 
 in gentle exaltation about his St. Gothard : 
 "that litter of stones which I endeavored to 
 represent." 
 
 § 7. The second great result of this Covent 
 Garden training was, understanding of and re- 
 gard for the poor, whom the Venetians, we 
 saw, despised ; whom, contrarily, Turner loved, 
 and more than loved — understood. He got no 
 romantic sight of them, but an infallible one, 
 as he prowled about the end of his lane, watch- 
 ing night effects in the wintry streets ; nor sight 
 8 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 of the poor alone, but of the poor in direct re- 
 lations with the rich. He knew, in good and 
 evil, what both classes thought of, and how 
 they dwelt with, each other. 
 
 Reynolds and Gainsborough, bred in country 
 villages, learned there the country boy's rever- 
 ential theory of " the squire/' and kept it. 
 They painted the squire and the squire's lady 
 as centres of the movements of the universe, to 
 the end of their lives. But Turner perceived 
 the younger squire in other aspects about his 
 lane, occurring prominently in its night scenery, 
 as a dark figure, or one of two, against the 
 moonlight. He saw also the working of city 
 cci ;]^erce, from endless warehouse, towering 
 over^Thames, to the back shop in the lane, 
 with its ^tale herrings — highly interesting these 
 last; one of his father's best friends, whom he 
 often afterwards visited affectionately at Bristol, 
 being a fishmonger and glueboiler; which gives 
 us a friendly turn of mind towards herring-fish- 
 ing, whaling, Calais poissardes, and many other 
 of our choicest subjects in after life; all this 
 being connected with that mysterious forest 
 below London Bridge on one side; — and, on 
 the other, with these masses of human power 
 and national wealth which weigh upon us, at 
 Covent Garden here, with strange compression, 
 and crush us into narrow Hand Court. 
 
 $ 8. "That mysterious forest below London 
 
 9 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 Bridge " — better for the boy than wood of pine, 
 or grove of myrtle. How he must have tor- 
 mented the watermen, beseeching them to let 
 him crouch anywhere in the bows, quiet as a 
 log, so only that he might get floated down 
 there among the ships, and round and round 
 the ships, and with the ships, and by the ships, 
 and under the ships, staring and clambering; — 
 these the only quite beautiful things he can see 
 in all the world, except the sky; but these, 
 when the sun is on their sails, filling or falling, 
 endlessly disordered by sway of tide and stress 
 of anchorage, beautiful unspeakably; which 
 ships also are inhabited by glorious creatures — 
 red-faced sailors, with pipes, appearing over the 
 gunwales, true knights, over their castle para- 
 pets — the most angelic beings in the whole 
 compass of London world. And Trafalgar hap- 
 pening long before we can draw ships, we, 
 nevertheless, coax all current stories out of the 
 wounded sailors, do our best at present to show 
 Nelson's funeral streaming up the Thames; 
 and vow that Trafalgar shall have its tribute of 
 memory some day. Which, accordingly, is ac- 
 complished — once, with all our might, for its 
 death ; twice, with all our might, for its vic- 
 tory ; thrice, in pensive farewell to the old 
 Temeraire, and, with it, to that order of 
 things. 
 
 § 9. Now this fond companying with sailors 
 10 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 must have divided his time, it appears to me, 
 pretty equally between Covent Garden and 
 Wapping (allowing for incidental excursions to 
 Chelsea on one side, and Greenwich on the 
 other), which time he would spend pleasantly, 
 but not magnificently, being limited in pocket- 
 money, and leading a kind of " Poor-Jack " life 
 on the river. 
 
 In some respects, no life could be better for a 
 lad. But it was not calculated to make his ear 
 fine to the niceties of language, nor form his 
 moralities on an entirely regular standard. 
 Picking up his first scraps of vigorous English 
 chiefly at Deptford and in the markets, and his 
 first ideas of female tenderness and beauty 
 among nymphs of the barge and the barrow, — 
 another boy might, perhaps, have become what 
 people usually term " vulgar." But the original 
 make and frame of Turner's mind being not 
 vulgar, but as nearly as possible a combination 
 of the minds of Keats and Dante, joining capri- 
 cious waywardness, and intense openness to 
 every fine pleasure of sense, and hot defiance 
 of formal precedent, with a quite infinite tender- 
 ness, generosity, and desire of justice and truth 
 — this kind of mind did not become vulgar, but 
 very tolerant of vulgarity, even fond of it in 
 some forms; and, on the outside, visibly in- 
 fected by it, deeply enough ; the curious result, 
 in its combination of elements, being to most 
 II 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 people wholly incomprehensible. It was as if a 
 cable had been woven of blood-crimson silk, 
 and then tarred on the outside. People handled 
 it, and the tar came off on their hands; red 
 gleams were seen through the black, under- 
 neath, at the places where it had been strained. 
 Was it ochre? — said the world — or red lead? 
 
 $ 10. Schooled thus in manners, literature, 
 and general moral principles at Chelsea and 
 Wapping, we have finally to inquire concerning 
 the most important point of all. We have seen 
 the principal differences between this boy and 
 Giorgione, as respects sight of the beautiful, 
 understanding of poverty, of commerce, and of 
 order of battle; then follows another cause of 
 difference in our training — not slight, — the 
 aspect of religion, namely, in the neighborhood 
 of Covent Garden. I say the aspect ; for that 
 was all the lad could judge by. Disposed, for 
 the most part, to learn chiefly by his eyes, in 
 this special matter he finds there is really no 
 other way of learning. His father taught him 
 " to lay one penny upon another. n Of mother's 
 teaching, we hear of none; of parish pastoral 
 teaching, the reader may guess how much. 
 
 $11. I chose Giorgione rather than Veronese 
 to help me in carrying out this parallel ; because 
 I do not find in Giorgione's work any of the 
 early Venetian monarchist element. He seems 
 to me to have belonged more to an abstract 
 12 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 contemplative school. I may be wrong in this ; 
 it is no matter; — suppose it were so, and that 
 he came down to Venice somewhat recusant, or 
 insentient, concerning the usual priestly doc- 
 trines of his day, — how would the Venetian re- 
 ligion, from an outer intellectual standing-point, 
 have looked to him ? 
 
 § 12. He would have seen it to be a religion 
 indisputably powerful in human affairs ; often 
 very harmfully so ; sometimes devouring widows' 
 houses, and consuming the strongest and fairest 
 from among the young ; freezing into merciless 
 bigotry the policy of the old : also, on the other 
 hand, animating national courage, and raising 
 souls, otherwise sordid, into heroism : on the 
 whole, always a real and great power ; served 
 with daily sacrifice of gold, time, and thought; 
 putting forth its claims, if hypocritically, at least 
 in bold hypocrisy, not waiving any atom of them 
 in doubt or fear ; and, assuredly, in large mea- 
 sure, sincere, believing in itself, and believed: 
 a goodly system, moreover, in aspect; gorgeous, 
 harmonious, mysterious; — a thing which had 
 either to be obeyed or combated, but could not 
 be scorned. A religion towering over all the 
 city — many-buttressed — luminous in marble 
 stateliness, as the dome of our Lady of Safety 
 shines over the sea ; many-voiced also, giving, 
 over all the eastern seas, to the sentinel his 
 watchword, to the soldier his war-cry ; and, on 
 
 13 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 the lips of all who died for Venice, shaping the 
 whisper of death. 
 
 § 13. I suppose the boy Turner to have re- 
 garded the religion of his city also from an 
 external intellectual standing-point. 
 
 What did he see in Maiden Lane ? 
 
 Let not the reader be offended with me ; I am 
 willing to let him describe, at his own pleasure, 
 what Turner saw there; but to me, it seems to 
 have been this. A religion maintained occa- 
 sionally, even the whole length of the lane, at 
 point of constable's staff; but, at other times, 
 placed under the custody of the beadle, within 
 certain black and unstately iron railings of St. 
 Paul's, Covent Garden. Among the wheelbar- 
 rows and over the vegetables, no perceptible 
 dominance of religion; in the narrow, disquieted 
 streets, none; in the tongues, deeds, daily ways 
 of Maiden Lane, little. Some honesty, indeed, 
 and English industry, and kindness of heart, 
 and general idea of justice ; but faith, of any 
 national kind, shut up from one Sunday to the 
 next, not artistically beautiful even in those 
 Sabbatical exhibitions; its paraphernalia being 
 chiefly of high pews, heavy elocution, and cold 
 grimness of behavior. 
 
 What chiaroscuro belongs to it — (dependent 
 
 mostly on candlelight), — we will, however, 
 
 draw considerately ; no goodliness of escutcheon, 
 
 nor other respectability being omitted, and the 
 
 14 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 best of their results confessed, a meek old woman 
 and a child being let into a pew, for whom the 
 reading by candlelight will be beneficial.* 
 
 § 14. For the rest, this religion seems to him 
 discreditable — discredited — not believing in 
 itself, putting forth its authority in a cowardly 
 way, watching how far it might be tolerated, 
 continually shrinking, disclaiming, fencing, 
 finessing ; divided against itself, not by stormy 
 rents, but by thin fissures, and splittings of 
 plaster from the walls. Not to be either obeyed, 
 or combated, by an ignorant, yet clear-sighted 
 youth ; only to be scorned. And scorned not 
 one whit the less, though also the dome dedi- 
 cated to it looms high over distant winding of 
 the Thames ; as St. Mark's campanile rose, for 
 goodly landmark, over mirage of lagoon. For 
 St. Mark ruled over life ; the Saint of London 
 over death ; St. Mark over St. Mark's Place, 
 but St. Paul over St. Paul's Churchyard. 
 
 §15. Under these influences pass away the 
 first reflective hours of life, with such conclusion 
 as they can reach. In consequence of a fit of 
 illness, he was taken — I cannot ascertain in 
 what year — to live with an aunt, at Brentford ; 
 and here, I believe, received some schooling, 
 
 * Liber Studiorum. " Interior of a church." It is worthy of 
 remark that Giorgione and Titian are always delighted to have 
 an opportunity of drawing priests. The English Church may, 
 perhaps, accept it as matter of congratulation that this is the 
 only instance in which Turner drew a clergyman. 
 
 *5 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 which he seems to have snatched vigorously; 
 getting knowledge, at least by translation, of 
 the more picturesque classical authors, which 
 he turned presently to use, as we shall see. 
 Hence also, walks about Putney and Twicken- 
 ham in the summer time acquainted him with 
 the look of English meadow-ground in its re- 
 stricted states of paddock and park; and with 
 some round-headed appearances of trees, and 
 stately entrances to houses of mark : the avenue 
 at Bushy, and the iron gates and carved pillars 
 of Hampton, impressing him apparently with 
 great awe and admiration ; so that in after life 
 his little country house is, — of all places in the 
 world, — at Twickenham ! Of swans and reedy 
 shores he now learns the soft motion and the 
 green mystery, in a way not to be forgotten. 
 
 § 1 6. And at last fortune wills that the lad's 
 true life shall begin ; and one summer's even- 
 ing, after various wonderful stage-coach experi- 
 ences on the north road, which gave him a love 
 of stage-coaches ever after, he finds himself 
 sitting alone among the Yorkshire hills.* For 
 the first time, the silence of Nature round him, 
 her freedom sealed to him, her glory opened to 
 him. Peace at last ; no roll of cart-wheel, nor 
 
 * I do not mean that this is his first acquaintance with the 
 country, but the first impressive and touching one, after his 
 mind was formed. The earliest sketches I found in the National 
 Collection are at Clifton and Bristol ; the next, at Oxford. 
 
 16 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 mutter of sullen voices in the back shop ; but 
 curlew-cry in space of heaven, and welling of 
 bell-toned streamlet by its shadowy rock. Free- 
 dom at last. Dead- wall, dark railing, fenced 
 field, gated garden, all passed away like the 
 dream of a prisoner ; and behold, far as foot or 
 eye can race or range, the moor, and cloud. 
 Loveliness at last. It is here then, among these 
 deserted vales ! Not among men. Those pale, 
 poverty-struck, or cruel faces; — that multitu- 
 dinous, marred humanity — are not the only 
 things that God has made. Here is something 
 He has made which no one has marred. Pride 
 of purple rocks, and river pools of blue, and 
 tender wilderness of glittering trees, and misty 
 lights of evening on immeasurable hills. 
 
 §17. Beauty, and freedom, and peace; and 
 yet another teacher, graver than these. Sound 
 preaching at last here, in Kirkstall crypt, con- 
 cerning fate and life. Here, where the dark 
 pool reflects the chancel pillars, and the cattle 
 lie in unhindered rest, the soft sunshine on their 
 dappled bodies, instead of priests' vestments; 
 their white furry hair ruffled a little, fitfully, by 
 the evening wind, deep-scented from the meadow 
 thyme. 
 
 § 18. Consider deeply the import to him of 
 this, his first sight of ruin, and compare it with 
 the effect of the architecture that was around 
 Giorgione. There were indeed aged buildings, 
 
 ?7 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 at Venice, in his time, but none in decay. All 
 ruin was removed, and its place filled as quickly 
 as in our London ; but filled always by archi- 
 tecture loftier and more wonderful than that 
 whose place it took, the boy himself happy to 
 work upon the walls of it ; so that the idea of 
 the passing away of the strength of men and 
 beauty of their works never could occur to him 
 sternly. Brighter and brighter the cities of 
 Italy had been rising and broadening on hill 
 and plain, for three hundred years. He saw 
 only strength and immortality, could not but 
 paint both ; conceived the form of man as death- 
 less, calm with power, and fiery with life. 
 
 § 19. Turner saw the exact reverse of this. 
 In the present work of men, meanness, aimless- 
 ness, unsightliness : thin-walled, lath-divided, 
 narrow-garreted houses of clay ; booths of a 
 darksome Vanity Fair, busily base. 
 
 But on Whitby Hill, and by Bolton Brook, 
 remained traces of other handiwork. Men who 
 could build had been there; and who also had 
 wrought, not merely for their own days. But 
 to what purpose? Strong faith, and steady 
 hands, and patient souls — can this, then, be all 
 you have left ! this the sum of your doing on 
 the earth ! — a nest whence the night-owl may 
 whimper to the brook, and a ribbed skeleton of 
 consumed arches, looming above the bleak 
 banks of mist, from its cliff to the sea ? 
 18 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 As the strength of men to Giorgione, to 
 Turner their weakness and vileness, were alone 
 visible. They themselves, unworthy or ephem- 
 eral ; their work, despicable, or decayed. In the 
 Venetian's eyes, all beauty depended on man's 
 presence and pride ; in Turner's, on the solitude 
 he had left, and the humiliation he had suffered. 
 
 § 20. And thus the fate and issue of all his 
 work were determined at once. He must be a 
 painter of the strength of nature, there was no 
 beauty elsewhere than in that ; he must paint 
 also the labor and sorrow and passing away of 
 men ; this was the great human truth visible to 
 him. 
 
 Their labor, their sorrow, and their death. 
 Mark the three. Labor; by sea and land, in 
 field and city, at forge and furnace, helm and 
 plough. No pastoral indolence nor classic pride 
 shall stand between him and the troubling of 
 the world ; still less between him and the toil 
 of his country, — blind, tormented, unwearied, 
 marvellous England. 
 
 §21. Also their Sorrow; Ruin of all their 
 glorious work, passing away of their thoughts 
 and their honor, mirage of pleasure, Fallacy 
 OF Hope ; gathering of weed on temple step ; 
 gaining of wave on deserted strand ; weeping of 
 the mother for the children, desolate by her 
 breathless first-born in the streets of the city,* 
 
 * "The Tenth Plague of Egypt." 
 
 J 9 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 desolate by her last sons slain, among the 
 beasts of the field.* 
 
 $ 22. And their Death. That old Greek 
 question again ; — yet unanswered. The uncon- 
 querable spectre still flitting among the forest 
 trees at twilight ; rising ribbed out of the sea- 
 sand; — white, a strange Aphrodite, — out of 
 the sea- foam ; stretching its gray, cloven wings 
 among the clouds; turning the light of their 
 sunsets into blood. This has to be looked upon, 
 and in a more terrible shape than ever Salvator 
 or Durer saw it. The wreck of one guilty 
 country does not infer the ruin of all countries, 
 and need not cause general terror respecting the 
 laws of the universe. Neither did the orderly 
 and narrow succession of domestic joy and sor- 
 row in a small German community bring the 
 question in its breadth, or in any unresolvable 
 shape, before the mind of Durer. But the 
 English death — the European death of the 
 nineteenth century — was of another range and 
 power; more terrible a thousand-fold in its 
 merely physical grasp and grief; more terrible, 
 incalculably, in its mystery and shame. What 
 were the robber's casual pang, or the rage of 
 the flying skirmish, compared to the work of 
 the axe, and the sword, and the famine, which 
 was done during this man's youth on all the 
 hills and plains of the Christian earth, from 
 
 * "Rizpah, the Daughter of Aiah." 
 20 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 Moscow to Gibraltar? He was eighteen years 
 old when Napoleon came down on Areola. 
 Look on the map of Europe, and count the 
 blood-stains on it, between Areola and Waterloo. 
 
 $ 23. Not alone those blood-stains on the 
 Alpine snow, and the blue of the Lombard 
 plain. The English death was before his eyes 
 also. No decent, calculable, consoled dying; 
 no passing to rest like that of the aged burghers 
 of Nuremberg town. No gentle processions to 
 churchyards among the fields, the bronze crests 
 bossed deep on the memorial tablets, and the 
 skylark singing above them from among the 
 corn. But the life trampled out in the slime of 
 the street, crushed to dust amidst the roaring 
 of the wheel, tossed countlessly away into howl- 
 ing winter wind along five hundred leagues of 
 rock-fanged shore. Or, worst of all, rotted 
 down to forgotten graves through years of igno- 
 rant patience, and vain seeking for help from 
 man, for hope in God — infirm, imperfect yearn- 
 ing, as of motherless infants starving at the 
 dawn ; oppressed royalties of captive thought, 
 vague ague-fits of bleak, amazed despair. 
 
 § 24. A goodly landscape this, for the lad to 
 paint, and under a goodly light. Wide enough 
 the light was, and clear ; no more Salvator's 
 lurid chasm on jagged horizon, nor Duress 
 spotted rest of sunny gleam on hedgerow and 
 field; but light over all the world. Full shone 
 21 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 now its awful globe, one pallid charnel-house, — 
 a ball strewn bright with human ashes, glaring 
 in poised sway beneath the sun, all blinding- 
 white with death from pole to pole, — death, 
 not of myriads of poor bodies only, but of will, 
 and mercy, and conscience ; death, not once 
 inflicted on the flesh, but daily, fastening on 
 the spirit ; death, not silent or patient, waiting 
 his appointed hour, but voiceful, venomous; 
 death with the taunting word, and burning 
 grasp, and infixed sting. 
 
 " Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe." 
 The word is spoken in our ears continually to 
 other reapers than the angels — to the busy 
 skeletons that never tire for stooping. When 
 the measure of iniquity is full, and it seems 
 that another day might bring repentance and 
 redemption, — "Put ye in the sickle." When 
 the young life has been wasted all away, and 
 the eyes are just opening upon the tracks of 
 ruin, and faint resolution rising in the heart for 
 nobler things, — " Put ye in the sickle." When 
 the roughest blows of fortune have been borne 
 long and bravely, and the hand is just stretched 
 to grasp its goal, — "Put ye in the sickle." 
 And when there are but a few in the midst of a 
 nation, to save it, or to teach, or to cherish ; 
 and all its life is bound up in those few golden 
 ears, — " Put ye in the sickle, pale reapers, and 
 pour hemlock for your feast of harvest home." 
 
 22 
 
The Two Boyhoods 
 
 This was the sight which opened on the 
 young eyes, this the watchword sounding within 
 the heart of Turner in his youth. 
 
 So taught, and prepared for his life's labor, 
 sate the boy at last alone among his fair English 
 hills; and began to paint, with cautious toil, 
 the rocks, and fields, and trickling brooks, and 
 soft, white clouds of heaven. 
 
 23 
 
The Slave Ship 
 
The Slave Ship 
 
 But, I think, the noblest sea that Turner has 
 ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly 
 ever painted by man, is that of the Slave Ship, 
 the chief Academy picture of the Exhibition of 
 1840. It is a sunset on the Atlantic after pro- 
 longed storm ; but the storm is partially lulled, 
 and the torn and streaming rain-clouds are mov- 
 ing in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the 
 hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea 
 included in the picture is divided into two ridges 
 of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a 
 low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like 
 the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath 
 after the torture of the storm. Between these 
 two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the 
 trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but 
 glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor 
 which burns like gold and bathes like blood. 
 Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing 
 waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly 
 27 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fan- 
 tastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly 
 shadow behind it along the illumined foam. 
 They do not rise everywhere, but three or four 
 together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, 
 as the under strength of the swell compels or 
 permits them ; leaving between them treacher- 
 ous spaces of level and whirling water, now 
 lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flash- 
 ing back the gold of the declining sun, now 
 fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguish- 
 able images of the burning clouds, which fall 
 upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and 
 give to the reckless waves the added motion of 
 their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the 
 lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast 
 upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold 
 and low, advancing like the shadow of death 
 upon the guilty* ship as it labors amidst the 
 lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon 
 the sky in lines of blood, girded with condem- 
 nation in that fearful hue which signs the sky 
 with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with 
 the sunlight, — and cast far along the desolate 
 heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the 
 multitudinous sea. 
 
 I believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner's 
 immortality upon any single work, I should 
 
 * She is a slaver, throwing her slaves overboard. The near 
 sea is encumbered with corpses. 
 
 28 
 
The Slave Ship 
 
 choose this. Its daring conception — ideal in 
 the highest sense of the word — is based on the 
 purest truth, and wrought out with the concen- 
 trated knowledge of a life ; its color is absolutely- 
 perfect, not one false or morbid hue in any part 
 or line, and so modulated that every square inch 
 of canvas is a perfect composition ; its drawing 
 as accurate as fearless; the ship buoyant, 
 bending, and full of motion ; its tones as true 
 as they are wonderful ; and the whole picture 
 dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and 
 impressions — (completing thus the perfect sys- 
 tem of all truth, which we have shown to be 
 formed by Turner's works) — the power, maj- 
 esty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illim- 
 itable Sea. 
 
 29 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 § I. We have now cursorily glanced over those 
 conditions of mountain structure which appear 
 constant in duration, and universal in extent; 
 and we have found them, invariably, calculated 
 for the delight, the advantage, or the teaching 
 of men ; prepared, it seems, so as to contain, 
 alike in fortitude or feebleness, in timeliness or 
 in terror, some beneficence of gift, or profound- 
 ness of counsel. We have found that where at 
 first all seemed disturbed and accidental, the 
 most tender laws were appointed to produce 
 forms of perpetual beauty; and that where to 
 the careless or cold observer it seemed severe or 
 purposeless, the well-being of man has been 
 chiefly consulted, and his rightly directed pow- 
 ers, and sincerely awakened intelligence, may 
 find wealth in every falling rock, and wisdom in 
 every talking wave. 
 
 It remains for us to consider what actual ef- 
 fect upon the human race has been produced by 
 
 33 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 the generosity, or the instruction of the hills ; 
 how far, in past ages, they have been thanked, 
 or listened to ; how far, in coming ages, it may 
 be well for us to accept them for tutors, or ac- 
 knowledge them for friends. 
 
 § 2. What they have already taught us may, 
 one would think, be best discerned in the midst 
 of them, — in some place where they have had 
 their own way with the human soul ; where no 
 veil has been drawn between it and them, no 
 contradicting voice has confused their ministries 
 of sound, or broken their pathos of silence : 
 where war has never streaked their streams with 
 bloody foam, nor ambition sought for other 
 throne than their cloud-courtiered pinnacles, 
 not avarice for other treasure than, year by 
 year, is given to their unlaborious rocks, in 
 budded jewels, and mossy gold. 
 
 § 3. I do not know any district possessing 
 more pure or uninterrupted fulness of mountain 
 character (and that of the highest order), or 
 which appears to have been less disturbed by 
 foreign agencies, than that which borders the 
 course of the Trient between Valorsine and Mar- 
 tigny. The paths which lead to it out of the 
 valley of the Rhone, rising at first in steep circles 
 among the walnut trees, like winding stairs 
 among the pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over 
 the shoulders of the hills into a valley almost 
 unknown, but thickly inhabited by an indus- 
 34 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 trious and patient population. Along the ridges 
 of the rocks, smoothed by old glaciers into long, 
 dark, billowy swellings, like the backs of plun- 
 ging dolphins, the peasant watches the slow col- 
 oring of the tufts of moss and roots of herb 
 which, little by little, gather a feeble soil over 
 the iron substance; then, supporting the nar- 
 row strip of clinging ground with a few stones, 
 he subdues it to the spade ; and in a year or two 
 a little crest of corn is seen waving upon the 
 rocky casque. The irregular meadows run in 
 and out like inlets of lake among these har- 
 vested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets, 
 that seem always to have chosen the steepest 
 places to come down, for the sake of the leaps, 
 scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and 
 that, as the wind takes them, with all the grace, 
 but with none of the formalism, of fountains ; 
 dividing into fanciful change of dash and spring, 
 yet with the seal of their granite channels upon 
 them, as the lightest play of human speech may- 
 bear the seal of past toil, and closing back out 
 of their spray to lave the rigid angles, and 
 brighten with silver fringes and glassy films 
 each lower and lower step of sable stone ; until 
 at last, gathered altogether again, — except, 
 perhaps, some chance drops caught on the ap- 
 ple-blossom, where it has budded a little nearer 
 the cascade than it did last spring, — they find 
 their way down to the turf, and lose themselves 
 
 35 
 
John Ruskin. 
 
 in that silently ; with quiet depth of clear water 
 furrowing among the grass blades, and looking 
 only like their shadow, but presently emerging 
 again in little startled gushes and laughing hur- 
 ries, as if they had remembered suddenly that 
 the day was too short for them to get down the 
 hill. 
 
 Green field, and glowing rock, and glancing 
 streamlet, all slope together in the sunshine to- 
 wards the brows of the ravines, where the pines 
 take up their own dominion of saddened shade ; 
 and with everlasting roar in the twilight, the 
 stronger torrents thunder down pale from the 
 glaciers, filling all their chasms with enchanted 
 gold, beating themselves to pieces against the 
 great rocks that they have themselves cast 
 down, and forcing fierce way beneath their 
 ghastly poise. 
 
 The mountain paths stoop to these glens 
 in forky zigzags, leading to some grey and nar- 
 row arch, all fringed under its shuddering curve 
 with the ferns that fear the light; a cross of 
 rough-hewn pine, iron-bound to its parapet, 
 standing dark against the lurid fury of the foam. 
 Far up the glen, as we pause beside the cross, 
 the sky is seen through the openings in the 
 pines, thin with excess of light ; and, in its 
 clear, consuming flame of white space, the sum- 
 mits of the rocky mountains are gathered into 
 solemn crowns and circlets, all flushed in that 
 
 36 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 strange, faint silence of possession by the sun- 
 shine which has in it so deep a melancholy ; 
 full of power, yet as frail as shadows ; lifeless, 
 like the walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in 
 tender fall of crimson folds, like the veil of some 
 sea spirit, that lives and dies as the foam flashes ; 
 fixed on a perpetual throne, stern against all 
 strength, lifted above all sorrow, and yet effaced 
 and melted utterly into the air by that last sun- 
 beam that has crossed to them from between 
 the two golden clouds. 
 
 § 4. High above all sorrow : yes ; but not un- 
 witnessing to it. The traveller on his happy 
 journey, as his foot springs from the deep turf 
 and strikes the pebbles gayly over the edge of 
 the mountain road, sees with a glance of de- 
 light the clusters of nut-brown cottages that 
 nestle among those sloping orchards, and glow 
 beneath the boughs of the pines. Here, it may 
 well seem to him, if there be sometimes hard- 
 ship, there must be at least innocence and peace, 
 and fellowship of the human soul with nature. 
 It is not so. The wild goats that leap along 
 those rocks have as much passion of joy in all 
 that fair work of God as the men that toil among 
 them. Perhaps more. Enter the street of one 
 of those villages, and you will find it foul with 
 that gloomy foulness that is suffered only by 
 torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here, it is tor- 
 por — not absolute suffering, — not starvation 
 
 37 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 or disease, but darkness of calm enduring ; the 
 spring known only as the time of the scythe, 
 and the autumn as the time of the sickle, and 
 the sun only as a warmth, the wind as a chill, 
 and the mountains as a danger. They do not 
 understand so much as the name of beauty, or 
 of knowledge. They understand dimly that of 
 virtue. Love, patience, hospitality, faith, — 
 these things they know. To glean their mea- 
 dows side by side, so happier ; to bear the bur- 
 den up the breathless mountain flank, unmur- 
 muringiy ; to bid the stranger drink from their 
 vessel of milk; to see at the foot of their low 
 deathbeds a pale figure upon a cross, dying 
 also, patiently; — in this they are different from 
 the cattle and from the stones, but in all this 
 unrewarded as far as concerns the present life. 
 For them, there is neither hope nor passion of 
 spirit ; for them neither advance nor exultation. 
 Black bread, rude roof, dark night, laborious 
 day, weary arm at sunset ; and life ebbs away. 
 No books, no thoughts, no attainments, no rest ; 
 except only sometimes a little sitting in the sun 
 under the church wall, as the bell tolls thin and 
 far in the mountain air ; a pattering of a few 
 prayers, not understood, by the altar rails of 
 the dimly gilded chapel, and so back to the 
 sombre home, with the cloud upon them still 
 unbroken — that cloud of rocky gloom, born 
 out of the wild torrents and ruinous stones, and 
 
 38 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 unlightened, even in their religion, except by 
 the vague promise of some better thing un- 
 known, mingled with threatening, and obscured 
 by an unspeakable horror, — a smoke, as it were, 
 of martyrdom, coiling up with the incense, and, 
 amidst the images of tortured bodies and la- 
 menting spirits in hurtling flames, the very 
 cross, for them, dashed more deeply than for 
 others, with gouts of blood. 
 
 § 5. Do not let this be thought a darkened 
 picture of the life of these mountaineers. It is 
 literal fact. No contrast can be more painful 
 than that between the dwelling of any well-con- 
 ducted English cottager, and that of the equally 
 honest Savoyard. The one, set in the midst 
 of its dull flat fields and uninteresting hedge- 
 rows, shows in itself the love of brightness and 
 beauty; its daisy-studded garden beds, its 
 smoothly swept brick path to the threshold, its 
 freshly sanded floor and orderly shelves of 
 household furniture, all testify to energy of 
 heart, and happiness in the simple course and 
 simple possessions of daily life. The other cot- 
 tage, in the midst of an inconceivable, inex- 
 pressible beauty, set on some sloping bank of 
 golden sward, with clear fountains flowing 
 beside it, and wild flowers, and noble trees, 
 and goodly rocks gathered round into a per- 
 fection as of Paradise, is itself a dark and 
 plague-like stain in the midst of the gentle land- 
 
 39 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 scape. Within a certain distance of its thresh- 
 old the ground is foul and cattle-trampled ; its 
 timbers are black with smoke, its garden choked 
 with weeds and nameless refuse, its chambers 
 empty and joyless, the light and wind gleaming 
 and filtering through the crannies of their 
 stones. All testifies that to its inhabitant the 
 world is labor and vanity ; that for him neither 
 flowers bloom, nor birds sing, nor fountains 
 glisten ; and that his soul hardly differs from 
 the grey cloud that coils and dies upon his hills ; 
 except in having no fold of it touched by the 
 sunbeams. 
 
 § 6. Is it not strange to reflect, that hardly an 
 evening passes in London or Paris but one of 
 those cottages is painted for the better amuse- 
 ment of the fair and idle, and shaded with paste- 
 board pines by the scene-shifter ; and that good 
 and kind people, — poetically minded,— delight 
 themselves in imagining the happy life led by 
 peasants who dwell by Alpine fountains, and 
 kneel to crosses upon peaks of rock ? that nightly 
 we lay down our gold to fashion forth simulacra 
 of peasants, in gay ribands and white bodices, 
 singingsweet songs, and bowing gracefully to the 
 picturesque crosses ; and all the while the verita- 
 ble peasants are kneeling, songlessly, to verita- 
 ble crosses, in another temper than the kind and 
 fair audiences dream of, and assuredly with an- 
 other kind of answer than is got out of the opera 
 40 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 catastrophe; an answer having reference, it 
 may be, in dim futurity, to those very audiences 
 themselves? If all the gold that has gone to 
 paint the simulacra of the cottages, and to put 
 new songs in the mouths of the simulacra of the 
 peasants, had gone to brighten the existent cot- 
 tages, and to put new songs into the mouths of 
 the existent peasants, it might in the end, per- 
 haps, have turned out better so, not only for 
 the peasants, but for even the audience. For 
 that form of the False Ideal has also its corre- 
 spondent True Ideal, — consisting not in the 
 naked beauty of statues, nor in the gauze flow- 
 ers and crackling tinsel of theatres, but in the 
 clothed and fed beauty of living men, and in 
 the lights and laughs of happy homes. Night 
 after night, the desire of such an ideal springs 
 up in every idle human heart ; and night after 
 night, as far as idleness can, we work out this 
 desire in costly lies. We paint the faded ac- 
 tress, build the lath landscape, feed our benevo- 
 lence with fallacies of felicity, and satisfy our 
 righteousness with poetry of justice. The time 
 will come when, as the heavy-folded curtain falls 
 upon our own stage of life, we shall begin to 
 comprehend that the justice we loved was in- 
 tended to have been done in fact, and not in 
 poetry, and the felicity we sympathized in, to 
 have been bestowed and not feigned. We talk 
 much of money's worth, yet perhaps may one 
 
 4i 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 day be surprised to find that what the wise and 
 charitable European public gave to one night's 
 rehearsal of hypocrisy, — to one hour's pleasant 
 warbling of Linda or Lucia, — would have filled 
 a whole Alpine Valley with happiness, and 
 poured the waves of harvest over the famine of 
 many a Lammermoor. 
 
 § 7. " Nay," perhaps the reader answers, " it 
 is vain to hope that this could ever be. The 
 perfect beauty of the ideal must always be ficti- 
 tious. It is rational to amuse ourselves with the 
 fair imagination; but it would be madness to 
 endeavor to put it into practice, in the face of 
 the ordinances of Nature. Real shepherdesses 
 must always be rude, and real peasants misera- 
 ble ; suffer us to turn away our gentle eyes from 
 their coarseness and their pain, and to seek 
 comfort in cultivated voices and purchased 
 smiles. We cannot hew down the rocks, nor 
 turn the sands of the torrent into gold." 
 
 § 8. This is no answer. Be assured of the 
 great truth — that what is impossible in reality 
 is ridiculous in fancy. If it is not in the nature 
 of things that peasants should be gentle and 
 happy, then the imagination of such peasantry 
 is ridiculous, and to delight in such imagination 
 wrong; as delight in any kind of falsehood is 
 always. But if in the nature of things it be 
 possible that among the wildness of hills the 
 human heart should be refined, and if the com- 
 42 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 fort of dress, and the gentleness of language, 
 and the joy of progress in knowledge, and of 
 variety in thought, are possible to the moun- 
 taineer in his true existence, let us strive to 
 write this true poetry upon the rocks before we 
 indulge it in our visions, and try whether, 
 among all the fine arts, one of the finest be not 
 that of painting cheeks with health rather than 
 rouge. 
 
 § 9. " But is such refinement possible ? Do 
 not the conditions of the mountain peasant's 
 life, in the plurality of instances, necessarily for- 
 bid it?" 
 
 As bearing sternly on this question, it is 
 necessary to examine one peculiarity of feeling 
 which manifests itself among the European na- 
 tions, so far as I have noticed, irregularly, — 
 appearing sometimes to be the characteris- 
 tic of a particular time, sometimes of a parti- 
 cular race, sometimes of a particular locality, 
 and to involve at once much that is to be 
 blamed and much that is praiseworthy. I 
 mean the capability of enduring, or even de- 
 lighting in, the contemplation of objects of ter- 
 ror — a sentiment which especially influences 
 the temper of some groups of mountaineers, 
 and of which it is necessary to examine the 
 causes, before we can form any conjecture what- 
 ever as to the real effect of mountains on human 
 character. 
 
 43 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 § 10. For instance, the unhappy alterations 
 which have lately taken place in the town of 
 Lucerne have still spared two of its ancient 
 bridges ; both of which, being long covered 
 walks, appear, in past times, to have been to 
 the population of the town what the Mall was 
 to London, or the Gardens of the Tuileries are 
 to Paris. For the continual contemplation of 
 those who sauntered from pier to pier, pictures 
 were painted on the woodwork of the roof. 
 These pictures, in the one bridge, represent all 
 the important Swiss battles and victories ; in the 
 other they are the well-known series of which 
 Longfellow has made so beautiful a use in the 
 Golden Legend, the Dance of Death, 
 
 Imagine the countenances with which a com- 
 mittee, appointed for the establishment of a 
 new " promenade " in some flourishing modern 
 town, would receive a proposal to adorn such 
 promenade with pictures of the Dance of Death. 
 
 § II. Now just so far as the old bridge at Lu- 
 cerne, with the pure, deep, and blue water of 
 the Reuss eddying down between its piers, and 
 with the sweet darkness of green hills, and far- 
 away gleaming of lake and Alps alternating 
 upon the eye on either side ; and the gloomy 
 lesson frowning in the shadow, as if the deep 
 tone of a passing-bell, overhead, were mingling 
 for ever with the plashing of the river as it glides 
 by beneath ; just so far, I say, as this differs 
 
 44 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 from the straight and smooth strip of level dust, 
 between two rows of round-topped acacia trees, 
 wherein the inhabitants of an English watering- 
 place or French fortified town take their de- 
 light, — so far I believe the life of the old 
 Lucernois, with all its happy waves of light, and 
 mountain strength of will, and solemn expecta- 
 tion of eternity, to have differed from the gen- 
 erality of the lives of those who saunter for their 
 habitual hour up and down the modern prome- 
 nade. But the gloom is not always of this 
 noble kind. As we penetrate farther among 
 the hills we shall find it becoming very painful. 
 We are walking, perhaps, in a summer after- 
 noon, up the valley of Zermatt (a German val- 
 ley), the sun shining brightly on grassy knolls 
 and through fringes of pines, the goats leaping 
 happily, and the cattle bells ringing sweetly, 
 and the snowy mountains shining like heavenly 
 castles far above. We see, a little way off, a 
 small white chapel, sheltered behind one of the 
 flowery hillocks of mountain turf; and we ap- 
 proach its little window, thinking to look through 
 it into some quiet home of prayer ; but the win- 
 dow is grated with iron, and open to the winds, 
 and when we look through it, behold — a heap 
 of white human bones mouldering into whiter 
 dust! 
 
 So also in that same sweet valley, of which I 
 have just been speaking, between Chamouni 
 
 45 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 and the Valais, at every turn of the pleasant 
 pathway, where the scent of the thyme lies rich- 
 est upon its rocks, we shall see a little cross and 
 shrine set under one of them ; and go up to it, 
 hoping to receive some happy thought of the 
 Redeemer, by whom all these lovely things were 
 made, and still consist. But when we come 
 near — behold, beneath the cross, a rude pic- 
 ture of souls tormented in red tongues of hell 
 fire, and pierced by demons. 
 
 § 12. As we pass towards Italy the appearance 
 of this gloom deepens ; and when we descend 
 the southern slope of the Alps we shall find this 
 bringing forward of the image of Death asso- 
 ciated with an endurance of the most painful 
 aspects of disease, so that conditions of human 
 suffering, which in any other country would be 
 confined in hospitals, are permitted to be openly 
 exhibited by the wayside ; and with this expo- 
 sure of the degraded human form is farther 
 connected an insensibility to ugliness and im- 
 perfection in other things; so that the ruined 
 wall, neglected garden, and uncleansed cham- 
 ber, seem to unite in expressing a gloom of 
 spirit possessing the inhabitants of the whole 
 land. It does not appear to arise from poverty, 
 nor careless contentment with little: there is 
 here nothing of Irish recklessness or humor; 
 but there seems a settled obscurity in the soul, — 
 a chill and plague, as if risen out of a sepulchre, 
 
 4 6 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 which partly deadens, partly darkens, the eyes 
 and hearts of men, and breathes a leprosy of 
 decay through every breeze and every stone. 
 ' ' Instead of well-set hair, baldness, and burn- 
 ing instead of beauty." 
 
 Nor are definite proofs wanting that the feeling 
 is independent of mere poverty or indolence. In 
 the most gorgeous and costly palace garden the 
 statues will be found green with moss, the ter- 
 races defaced or broken ; the palace itself partly 
 coated with marble, is left in other places rough 
 with cementless and jagged brick, its iron bal- 
 conies bent and rusted, its pavements overgrown 
 with grass. The more energetic the effort has 
 been to recover from this state, and to shake off 
 all appearance of poverty, the more assuredly 
 the curse seems to fasten on the scene, and the 
 unslaked mortar, and unfinished wall, and 
 ghastly desolation of incompleteness entangled 
 in decay, strike a deeper despondency into the 
 beholder. 
 
 § 13. The feeling would be also more easily 
 accounted for if it appeared consistent in its re- 
 gardlessness of beauty, — if what was done were 
 altogether as inefficient as what was deserted. 
 But the balcony, though rusty and broken, is 
 delicate in design, and supported on a nobly 
 carved slab of marble ; the window, though a 
 mere black rent in ragged plaster, is encircled 
 by a garland of vine and fronted by a thicket 
 
 47 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 of the sharp leaves and aurora-colored flowers 
 of the oleander ; the courtyard, overgrown by 
 mournful grass, is terminated by a bright fresco 
 of gardens and fountains ; the corpse, borne 
 with the bare face to heaven, is strewn with 
 flowers; beauty is continually mingled with the 
 shadow of death. 
 
 $ 14. So also is a kind of merriment, — not 
 true cheerfulness, neither careless nor idle jest- 
 ing, but a determined effort at gaiety, a resolute 
 laughter, mixed with much satire, grossness, 
 and practical buffoonery, and, it always seemed 
 to me, void of all comfort or hope, — with this 
 eminent character in it also, that it is capable of 
 touching with its bitterness even the most fear- 
 ful subjects, so that as the love of beauty retains 
 its tenderness in the presence of death, this love 
 of jest also retains its boldness, and the skeleton 
 becomes one of the standard masques of the 
 Italian comedy. When I was in Venice, in 
 1850, the most popular piece of the comic opera 
 was " Death and th ; Cobbler, " in which the 
 point of the plot was the success of a village 
 cobbler as a physician, in consequence of the 
 appearance of Death to him beside the bed of 
 every patient who was not to recover ; and the 
 most applauded scene in it was one in which 
 the physician, insolent in success, and swollen 
 with luxury, was himself taken down into the 
 abode of Death, and thrown into an agony 
 
 48 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 of terror by being shown lives of men, under 
 the form of wasting lamps, and his own ready 
 to expire. 
 
 §15.1 have also not the smallest doubt that 
 this endurance or affronting of fearful images is 
 partly associated with indecency, partly with 
 general fatuity and weakness of mind. The 
 men who applauded loudest when the actress 
 put on, in an instant, her mask representing a 
 skull, and when her sharp and clear " Sono la 
 Morte " rang through the theatre, were just 
 those whose disgusting habits rendered it im- 
 possible for women to pass through some of the 
 principal streets in Venice, — just those who 
 formed the gaping audience, when a mounte- 
 bank offered a new quack medicine on the Riva 
 dei Schiavoni. And, as fearful imagery is asso- 
 ciated with the weakness of fever, so it seems to 
 me that imbecility and love of terror are con- 
 nected by a mysterious link throughout the 
 whole life of man. There is a most touching 
 instance of this in the last days of Sir Walter 
 Scott, the publication of whose latter works, 
 deeply to be regretted on many accounts, was 
 yet, perhaps, on the whole, right, as affording 
 a means of studying the conditions of the decay 
 of overwrought human intellect in one of the 
 most noble of minds. Among the many signs 
 of this decay at its uttermost, in Castle Danger- 
 ous, not one of the least notable was the intro- 
 
 49 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 duction of the knight who bears on his black 
 armor the likeness of a skeleton. 
 
 § 16. The love of horror which is in this man- 
 ner connected with feebleness of intellect, is not, 
 however, to be confounded with that shown by 
 the vulgar in general. The feeling which is 
 calculated upon in the preparation of pieces full 
 of terror and crime, at our lower theatres, and 
 which is fed with greater art and elegance in 
 the darker scenery of the popular French novel- 
 ists, however morally unhealthy, is not unnat- 
 ural ; it is not the result of an apathy to such 
 horror, but of a strong desire for excitement in 
 minds coarse and dull, but not necessarily fee- 
 ble. The scene of the murder of the jeweller 
 in the " Count of Monte Cristo," or those with 
 the Squelette in the " Mysteres de Paris," ap- 
 peal to instincts which are as common to all 
 mankind as those of thirst and hunger, and 
 which are only debasing in the exaggerated con- 
 dition consequent upon the dulness of other 
 instincts higher than they. And the persons 
 who, at one period of their life, might take 
 chief pleasure in such narrations, at another 
 may be brought into a temper of high tone and 
 acute sensibility. But the love of horror re- 
 specting which we are now inquiring appears 
 to be an unnatural and feeble feeling; it is not 
 that the person needs excitement, or has any 
 such strong perceptions as would cause excite- 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 ment, but he is dead to the horror, and a strange 
 evil influence guides his feebleness of mind 
 rather to fearful images than to beautiful ones, — 
 as our disturbed dreams are sometimes filled 
 with ghastliness which seem not to arise out of 
 any conceivable association of our waking ideas, 
 but to be a vapor out of the very chambers of 
 the tomb, to which the mind, in its palsy, has 
 approached. 
 
 §17. But even this imbecile revelling in ter- 
 ror is more comprehensible, more apparently 
 natural, than the instinct which is found fre- 
 quently connected with it, of absolute joy in 
 ugliness. In some conditions of old German 
 art we find the most singular insisting upon 
 what is in all respects ugly and abortive, or 
 frightful ; not with any sense of sublimity in it, 
 neither in mere foolishness, but with a resolute 
 choice, such as I can completely account for on 
 no acknowledged principle of human nature. 
 For in the worst conditions of sensuality there 
 is yet some perception of the beautiful, so that 
 men utterly depraved in principle and habits of 
 thought will yet admire beautiful things and 
 fair faces. But in the temper of which I am 
 now speaking there is no preference even of the 
 lower forms of love iness ; no effort at painting 
 fair limbs or passionate faces, no evidence of 
 any human or natural sensation, — a mere feed- 
 ing on decay and rolling in slime, not appar- 
 
 5i 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 ently or conceivably with any pleasure in it, but 
 under some fearful possession of an evil spirit. 
 
 It seems one of the most cunning and fre- 
 quent of self-deceptions to turn the heart away 
 from this warning and refuse to acknowledge 
 anything in the fair scenes of the natural crea- 
 tion but beneficence. Men in general lean 
 towards the light, so far as they contemplate 
 such things at all, most of them passing " by 
 on the other side," either in mere plodding 
 pursuit of their own work, irrespective of what 
 good or evil is around them, or else in selfish 
 gloom, or selfish delight, resulting from their 
 own circumstances at the moment. Of those 
 who give themselves to any true contempla- 
 tion, the plurality, being humble, gentle, and 
 kindly hearted, look only in nature for what is 
 lovely and kind; partly, also, God gives the 
 disposition to every healthy human mind in 
 some degree to pass over or even harden itself 
 against evil things, else the suffering would be 
 too great to be borne ; and humble people, 
 with a quiet trust that everything is for the best, 
 do not fairly represent the facts to themselves, 
 thinking them none of their business. So, 
 what between hard-hearted people, thoughtless 
 people, busy people, humble people, and cheer- 
 fully minded people, — giddiness of youth, and 
 
 5 2 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 preoccupations of age, — philosophies of faith, 
 and cruelties of folly, — priest and Levite, mas- 
 quer and merchantman, all agreeing to keep 
 their own side of the way, — the evil that God 
 sends to warn us gets to be forgotten, and the evil 
 that He sends to be mended by us gets left un- 
 mended. And then, because people shut their 
 eyes to the dark indisputableness of the facts in 
 front of them, their Faith, such as it is, is shaken 
 or uprooted by every darkness in what is revealed 
 to them. In the present day it is not easy to 
 find a well-meaning man among our more ear- 
 nest thinkers, who will not take upon himself 
 to dispute the whole system of redemption, 
 because he cannot unravel the mystery of the 
 punishment of sin. But can he unravel the 
 mystery of the punishment of NO sin ? Can he 
 entirely account for all that happens to a cab- 
 horse? Has he ever looked fairly at the fate 
 of one of those beasts as it is dying, — measured 
 the work it has done, and the reward it has 
 got, — put his hand upon the bloody wounds 
 through which its bones are piercing, and so 
 looked up to Heaven with an entire understand- 
 ing of Heaven's ways about the horse ? Yet 
 the horse is a fact — no dream — no revelation 
 among the myrtle trees by night ; and the dust 
 it dies upon, and the dogs that eat it, are 
 facts; — and yonder happy person, whose the 
 horse was till its knees were broken over the 
 53 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 hurdles, who had an immortal soul to begin 
 with, and wealth and peace to help forward his 
 immortality ; who has also devoted the powers 
 of his soul, and body, and wealth, and peace, 
 to the spoiling of houses, the corruption of the 
 innocent, and the oppression of the poor; and 
 has, at this actual moment of his prosperous 
 life, as many curses waiting round about him 
 in calm shadow, with their death's eyes fixed 
 upon him, biding their time, as ever the poor 
 cab-horse had launched at him in meaningless 
 blasphemies, when his failing feet stumbled at 
 the stones, — this happy person shall have no 
 stripes, — shall have only the horse's fate of 
 annihilation ; or, if other things are indeed 
 reserved for him, Heaven's kindness or omnipo- 
 tence is to be doubted therefore. 
 
 § 33* We cannot reason of these things. 
 But this I know — and this may by all men be 
 known — that no good or lovely thing exists in 
 this world without its correspondent darkness; 
 and that the universe presents itself continually 
 to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, 
 or of choice, the good and the evil set on the 
 right hand and the left. 
 
 And in this mountain gloom, which weighs 
 so strongly upon the human heart that in all 
 time hitherto, as we have seen, the hill defiles 
 have been either avoided in terror or inhabited 
 in penance, there is but the fulfilment of the 
 
 54 
 
The Mountain Gloom 
 
 universal law, that where the beauty and wis- 
 dom of the Divine working are most mani- 
 fested, there also are manifested most clearly 
 the terror of God's wrath, and the inevitable- 
 ness of His power." 
 
 Nor is this gloom less wonderful so far as it 
 bears witness to the error of human choice, 
 even when the nature of good and evil is most 
 definitely set before it. The trees of Paradise 
 were fair ; but our first parents hid themselves 
 from God " in medio ligni Paradisi," in the 
 midst of the trees of the garden. The hills 
 were ordained for the help of man ; but, instead 
 of raising his eyes to the hills, from whence 
 cometh his help, he does his idol sacrifice " upon 
 every high hill and under every green tree." 
 The mountain of the Lord's house is established 
 above the hills ; but Nadab and Abihu shall 
 see under His feet the body of heaven in his 
 clearness, yet go down to kindle the censer 
 against their own souls. And so to the end of 
 time it will be ; to the end, that cry will still 
 be heard among the Alpine winds, "Hear, oh 
 ye mountains, the Lord's controversy ! " Still, 
 their gulfs of thawless ice, and unretarded roar 
 of tormented waste, and deathful falls of fruit- 
 less waste, and unredeemed decay, must be the 
 image of the souls of those who have chosen the 
 darkness, and whose cry shall be to the moun- 
 tains to fall on them, and to the hills to cover 
 
 55 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 them; and still, to the end of time, the clear 
 waters of the unfailing springs, and the white 
 pasture-lilies in their clothed multitude, and 
 the abiding of the burning peaks in their near- 
 ness to the opened heaven, shall be the types, 
 and the blessings, of those who have chosen 
 light, and of whom it is written, "The moun- 
 tains shall bring peace to the people, and the 
 little hills, righteousness." 
 
 56 
 
The Mountain Glory 
 
The Mountain Glory 
 
 § I. I HAVE dwelt, in the foregoing chapter, 
 on the sadness of the hills with the greater in- 
 sistance that I feared my own excessive love for 
 them might lead me into too favorable interpre- 
 tation of their influences over the human heart; 
 or, at least, that the reader might accuse me 
 of fond prejudice, in the conclusions to which, 
 finally, I desire to lead him concerning them. 
 For, to myself, mountains are the beginning and 
 the end of all natural scenery; in them, and 
 in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to 
 them, my affections are wholly bound up ; and 
 though I can look with happy admiration at 
 the lowland flowers, and woods, and open skies, 
 the happiness is tranquil and cold, like that of 
 examining detached flowers in a conservatory, 
 or reading a pleasant book ; and if the scenery 
 be resolutely level, insisting upon the declara- 
 tion of its own flatness in all the detail of it, as 
 in Holland, or Lincolnshire, or Central Lom- 
 
 59 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 bardy, it appears to me like a prison, and I 
 cannot long endure it. But the slightest rise 
 and fall in the road, — a mossy bank at the side 
 of a crag of chalk, with brambles at its brow, 
 overhanging it, — a ripple over three or four 
 stones in the stream by the bridge, — above all, 
 a wild bit of ferny ground under a fir or two, 
 looking as if, possibly, one might see a hill if 
 one got the other side of the trees, will in- 
 stantly give me intense delight, because the 
 shadow, or the hope, of the hills is in them. 
 § 2. And thus, although there are few dis- 
 tricts of Northern Europe, however apparently 
 dull or tame, in which I cannot find pleasure, 
 though the whole of Northern France (except 
 Champagne), dull as it seems to most travel- 
 lers, is to me a perpetual Paradise ; and, putting 
 Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, and one or two such 
 other perfectly flat districts aside, there is not 
 an English county which I should not find en- 
 tertainment in exploring the cross-roads of, foot 
 by foot ; yet all my best enjoyment would be 
 owing to the imagination of the hills, coloring, 
 with their far-away memories, every lowland 
 stone and herb. The pleasant French coteau, 
 green in the sunshine, delights me, either by 
 what real mountain character it has in itself (for 
 in extent and succession of promontory the 
 flanks of the French valleys have quite the sub- 
 limity of true mountain distances), or by its 
 60 
 
The Mountain Glory 
 
 broken ground and rugged steps among the 
 vines, and rise of the leafage above, against the 
 blue sky, as it might rise at Vevay or Como. 
 There is not a wave of the Seine but is associated 
 in my mind with the first rise of the sandstones 
 and forest pines of Fontainebleau ; and with the 
 hope of the Alps, as one leaves Paris with the 
 horses' heads to the south-west, the morning 
 sun, flashing on the bright waves of Charenton. 
 If there be no hope or association of this kind, 
 and if I cannot deceive myself into fancying that 
 perhaps at the next rise of the road there may 
 be seen the film of a blue hill in the gleam of 
 sky at the horizon, the landscape, however beau- 
 tiful, produces in me even a kind of sickness 
 and pain ; and the whole view from Richmond 
 Hill or Windsor Terrace, — nay, the gardens of 
 Alcinous, with their perpetual summer, — or of 
 the Hesperides (if they were flat, and not close 
 to Atlas), golden apples and all — I would give 
 away in an instant, for one mossy granite stone 
 a foot broad, and two leaves of lady-fern. 
 
 § 3. I know that this is in great part idiosyn- 
 crasy ; and that I must not trust to my own 
 feelings, in this respect, as representative of the 
 modern landscape instinct ; yet I know it is not 
 idiosyncrasy, in so far as there may be proved 
 to be indeed an increase of the absolute beauty 
 of all scenery in exact proportion to its moun- 
 tainous character, providing that character be 
 61 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 healthily mountainous. I do not mean to take 
 the Col de Bon Homme as representative of 
 hills, any more than I would take Romney 
 Marsh as representative of plains ; but putting 
 Leicestershire or Staffordshire fairly beside 
 Westmoreland, and Lombardy or Champagne 
 fairly beside the Pays de Vaud or the Canton 
 Berne, I find the increase in the calculable sum 
 of elements of beauty to be steadily in propor- 
 tion to the increase of mountainous character; 
 and that the best image which the world can 
 give of Paradise is in the slope of the meadows, 
 orchards, and corn-fields on the sides of a great 
 Alp, with its purple rocks and eternal snows 
 above; this excellence not being in any wise a 
 matter referable to feeling, or individual prefer- 
 ences, but demonstrable by calm enumeration 
 of the number of lovely colors on the rocks, the 
 varied grouping of the trees, and quantity of 
 noble incidents in stream, crag, or cloud, pre- 
 sented to the eye at any given moment. 
 
 % 4. For consider, first, the difference pro- 
 duced in the whole tone of landscape color by 
 the introductions of purple, violet, and deep 
 ultramarine blue, which we owe to mountains. 
 In an ordinary lowland landscape we have the 
 blue of the sky ; the green of grass, which I will 
 suppose (and this is an unnecessary concession 
 to the lowlands) entirely fresh and bright; the 
 green of trees ; and certain elements of purple, 
 62 
 
The Mountain Glory 
 
 far more rich and beautiful than we generally 
 should think, in their bark and shadows (bare 
 hedges and thickets, or tops of trees, in subdued 
 afternoon sunshine, are nearly perfect purple, 
 and of an exquisite tone), as well as in ploughed 
 fields, and dark ground in general. But among 
 mountains, in addition to all this, large un- 
 broken spaces of pure violet and purple are 
 introduced in their distances ; and even near, 
 by films of cloud passing over the darkness of 
 ravines or forests, blues are produced of the 
 most subtle tenderness ; these azures and pur- 
 ples passing into rose-color of otherwise wholly 
 unattainable delicacy among the upper sum- 
 mits, the blue of the sky being at the same time 
 purer and deeper than in the plains, Nay, in 
 some sense, a person who has never seen the 
 rose-color of the rays of dawn crossing a blue 
 mountain twelve or fifteen miles away, can hardly 
 be said to know what te7iderness in color means 
 at all ; bright tenderness he may, indeed, see 
 in the sky or in a flower, but this grave ten- 
 derness of the far-away hill-purples he cannot 
 conceive. 
 
 % 5. Together with this great source of pre- 
 eminence in mass of color, we have to estimate 
 the influence of the finished inlaying and 
 enamel- work of the color-jewellery on every 
 stone ; and that of the continual variety in spe- 
 cies of flower; most of the mountain flowers 
 
 63 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 being, besides, separately lovelier than the low- 
 land ones. The wood hyacinth and wild rose 
 are, indeed, the only supreme flowers that the 
 lowlands can generally show ; and the wild rose 
 is also a mountaineer, and more fragrant in the 
 hills, while the wood hyacinth, or grape hya- 
 cinth, at its best cannot match even the dark 
 bell-gentian, leaving the light-blue star-gentian 
 in its uncontested queenliness, and the Alpine 
 rose and Highland heather wholly without simil- 
 itude. The violet, lily of the valley, crocus, 
 and wood anemone are, I suppose, claimable 
 partly by the plains as well as the hills; but 
 the large orange lily and narcissus I have never 
 seen but on hill pastures, and the exquisite 
 oxalis is preeminently a mountaineer. 
 
 § 6. To this supremacy in mosses and flow- 
 ers we have next to add an inestimable gain in 
 the continual presence and power of water. 
 Neither in its clearness, its color, its fantasy of 
 motion, its calmness of space, depth, and re- 
 flection, or its wrath, can water be conceived by 
 a lowlander, out of sight of sea. A sea wave is 
 far grander than any torrent — but of the sea 
 and its influences we are not now speaking; 
 and the sea itself, though it ca?i be clear, is 
 never calm, among our shores, in the sense 
 that a mountain lake can be calm. The sea 
 seems only to pause ; the mountain lake to 
 sleep, and to dream. Out of sight of the ocean, 
 
 6 4 
 
The Mountain Glory 
 
 a lowlander cannot be considered ever to have 
 seen water at all. The mantling of the pools 
 in the rock shadows, with the golden flakes of 
 light sinking down through them like falling 
 leaves, the ringing of the thin currents among 
 the shallows, the flash and the cloud of the 
 cascade, the earthquake and foam-fire of the 
 cataract, the long lines of alternate mirror and 
 mist that lull the imagery of the hills reversed 
 in the blue of morning, — all these things belong 
 to those hills as their undivided inheritance. 
 
 § 7. To this supremacy in wave and stream is 
 joined a no less manifest preeminence in the 
 character of trees. It is possible among plains, 
 in the species of trees which properly belong to 
 them, the poplars of Amiens, for instance, to 
 obtain a serene simplicity of grace, which, as I 
 said, is a better help to the study of graceful- 
 ness, as such, than any of the wilder groupings 
 of the hills ; so also, there are certain condi- 
 tions of symmetrical luxuriance developed in 
 the park and avenue, rarely rivalled in their way 
 among mountains ; and yet the mountain supe- 
 riority in foliage is, on the whole, nearly as com- 
 plete as it is in water; for exactly as there are 
 some expressions in the broad reaches of a navi- 
 gable lowland river, such as the Loire or Thames, 
 not, in their way, to be matched among the 
 rock rivers, and yet for all that a lowlander can- 
 not be said to have truly seen the element of 
 
 65 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 water at all; so even in his richest parks and 
 avenues he cannot be said to have truly seen 
 trees. For the resources of trees are not devel- 
 oped until they have difficulty to contend with; 
 neither their tenderness of brotherly love and 
 harmony, till they are forced to choose their 
 ways of various life where there is contracted 
 room for them, talking to each other with 
 their restrained branches. The various ac- 
 tion of trees rooting themselves in inhospitable 
 rocks, stooping to look into ravines, hiding 
 from the search of glacier winds, reaching forth 
 to the rays of rare sunshine, crowding down to- 
 gether to drink at sweetest streams, climbing 
 hand in hand among the difficult slopes, open- 
 ing in sudden dances round the mossy knolls, 
 gathering into companies at rest among the fra- 
 grant fields, gliding in grave procession over 
 the heavenward ridges, — nothing of this can 
 be conceived among the unvexed and unvaried 
 felicities of the lowland forest : while to all these 
 direct sources of greater beauty are added, first 
 the power of redundance, — the mere quantity 
 of foliage visible in the folds and on the pro- 
 montories of a single Alp being greater than 
 that of an entire lowland landscape (unless a 
 view from some cathedral tower) ; and to this 
 charm of redundance, that of clearer visibil- 
 ity, — tree after tree being constantly shown in 
 successive height, one behind another, instead 
 66 
 
The Mountain Glory 
 
 of the mere tops and flanks of masses, as in the 
 plains; and the forms of multitudes of them 
 continually defined against the clear sky, near 
 and above, or against white clouds entangled 
 among their branches, instead of being con- 
 fused in dimness of distance. 
 
 § 8. Finally, to this supremacy in foliage we 
 have to add the still less questionable suprem- 
 acy in clouds. There is no effect of sky possi- 
 ble in the lowlands which may not in equal 
 perfection be seen among the hills ; but there 
 are effects by tens of thousands, forever invisi- 
 ble and inconceivable to the inhabitant of the 
 plains, manifested among the hills in the course 
 of one day. The mere power of familiarity 
 with the clouds, of walking with them and above 
 them, alters and renders clear our whole con- 
 ception of the baseless architecture of the sky ; 
 and for the beauty of it, there is more in a single 
 wreath of early cloud, pacing its way up an 
 avenue of pines, or pausing among the points 
 of their fringes, than in all the white heaps that 
 fill the arched sky of the plains from one horizon 
 to the other. And of the nobler cloud mani- 
 festations, — the breaking of their troublous seas 
 against the crags, their black spray sparkling 
 with lightning ; or the going forth of the morn- 
 ing along their pavements of moving marble, 
 level-laid between dome and dome of snow; — 
 of these things there can be as little imagina- 
 
 6 7 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 tion or understanding in an inhabitant of the 
 plains as of the scenery of another planet than 
 his own. 
 
 5 9. And, observe, all these superiorities are 
 matters plainly measurable and calculable, not 
 in any wise to be referred to estimate of sensa- 
 tion. Of the grandeur or expression of the hills 
 I have not spoken; how far they are great, or 
 strong, or terrible, I do not for the moment 
 consider, because vastness, and strength, and 
 terror, are not to all minds subjects of desired 
 contemplation. It may make no difference to 
 some men whether a natural object be large or 
 small, whether it be strong or feeble. But love- 
 liness of color, perfectness of form, endlessness 
 of change, wonderfulness of structure, are pre- 
 cious to all undiseased human minds ; and the 
 superiority of the mountains in all these things 
 to the lowland is, I repeat, as measurable as 
 the richness of a painted window matched with 
 a white one, or the wealth of a museum com- 
 pared with that of a simply furnished chamber. 
 They seem to have been built for the human 
 race, as at once their schools and cathedrals; 
 full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for 
 the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to the 
 worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, 
 glorious in holiness for the worshipper. And 
 of these great cathedrals of the earth, with their 
 gates of rock, pavements of cloud, choirs of 
 68 
 
The Mountain Glory 
 
 stream and stone, altars of snow, and vaults of 
 purple traversed by the continual stars,— of 
 these, as we have seen, it was written, nor long 
 ago, by one of the best of the poor human race 
 for whom they were built, wondering in himself 
 for whom their Creator could have made them, 
 and thinking to have entirely discerned the Di- 
 vine intent in them — " They are inhabited by 
 the Beasts." 
 
 § 10. Was it then indeed thus with us, and 
 so lately ? Had mankind offered no worship in 
 their mountain churches ? Was all that granite 
 sculpture and floral painting done by the angels 
 in vain ? 
 
 Not so. It will need no prolonged thought 
 to convince us that in the hills the purposes of 
 their Maker have indeed been accomplished in 
 such measure as, through the sin or folly of 
 men, He ever permits them to be accomplished. 
 It may not seem, from the general language 
 held concerning them, or from any directly 
 traceable results, that mountains have had se- 
 rious influence on human intellect ; but it will 
 not, I think, be difficult to show that their occult 
 influence has been both constant and essential 
 to the progress of the race. 
 
 69 
 
Venice 
 
Venice 
 
 5 i. In the olden days of travelling, now to 
 return no more, in which distance could not be 
 vanquished without toil, but in which that toil 
 was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate 
 survey of the countries through which the jour- 
 ney lay, and partly by the happiness of the 
 evening hours, when, from the top of the last 
 hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the 
 quiet village where he was to rest, scattered 
 among the meadows beside its valley stream ; 
 or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty 
 perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first 
 time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the 
 rays of sunset — hours of peaceful and thought- 
 ful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in 
 the railway station is perhaps not always, or to 
 all men, an equivalent — in those days, I say, 
 when there was something more to be antici- 
 pated and remembered in the first aspect of 
 
 73 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 each successive halting-place, than a new ar- 
 rangement of glass roofing and iron girder, 
 there were few moments of which the recollec- 
 tion was more fondly cherished by the travel- 
 ler than that which brought him within sight 
 of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open 
 lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but 
 that the aspect of the city itself was generally 
 the source of some slight disappointment, for, 
 seen in this direction, its buildings are far 
 less characteristic than those of the other great 
 towns of Italy ; but this inferiority was partly 
 disguised by distance, and more than atoned 
 for by the strange rising of its walls and towers 
 out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea, 
 for it was impossible that the mind or the eye 
 could at once comprehend the shallowness of 
 the vast sheet of water which stretched away in 
 leagues of rippling lustre to the north and south, 
 or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to 
 the east. The salt breeze, the white moaning 
 sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating 
 and disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving 
 shoal, under the advance of the steady tide, all 
 proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose 
 bosom the great city rested so calmly ; not such 
 blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Nea- 
 politan promontories, or sleeps beneath the 
 marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak 
 power of our own northern waves, yet subdued 
 74 
 
Venice 
 
 into a strange spacious rest, and changed from 
 its angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as 
 the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the 
 lonely island church, fitly named "St. George 
 of the Seaweed. ,J As the boat drew nearer to the 
 city, the coast which the traveller had just left 
 sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored 
 line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and wil- 
 lows : but, at what seemed its northern extrem- 
 ity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of 
 purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage 
 of the lagoon ; two or three smooth surges of 
 inferior hill extended themselves about their 
 roots, and beyond these, beginning with the 
 craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the 
 Alps girded the whole horizon to the north — 
 a wall of jagged blue, here and there showing 
 through its clefts a wilderness of misty preci- 
 pices, fading far back into the recesses of Ca- 
 dore, and itself rising and breaking away east- 
 ward, where the sun struck opposite upon its 
 snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, 
 standing up behind the barred clouds of even- 
 ing, one after another, countless, the crown of 
 the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from 
 pursuing them, to rest upon the nearer burning 
 of the campaniles of Murano, and on the great 
 city, where it magnified itself along the waves, 
 as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew 
 nearer and nearer. And at last, when its walls 
 
 75 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 were reached, and the outmost of its untrodden 
 streets was entered, not through towered gate 
 or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between 
 two rocks of coral in the Indian sea ; when first 
 upon the traveller's sight opened the long 
 ranges of columned palaces, — each with its 
 black boat moored at the portal, — each with its 
 image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that 
 green pavement which every breeze broke into 
 new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at 
 the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy 
 Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from 
 behind the palace of the Camerlenghi; that 
 strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, 
 strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow 
 just bent ; when first, before its moonlight cir- 
 cumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry, 
 " Ah ! Stall," struck sharp upon the ear, and 
 the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices 
 that half met over the narrow canal, where the 
 plash of the water followed close and loud, ring- 
 ing along the marble by the boat's side; and 
 when at last that boat darted forth upon the 
 breadth of silver sea, across which the front 
 of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine 
 veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of 
 Salvation, it was no marvel that the mind should 
 be so deeply entranced by the visionary charm 
 of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to for- 
 get the darker truths of its history and its being. 
 
 7 6 
 
'Venice 
 
 Well might it seem that such a city had owed 
 her existence rather to the rod of the enchanter, 
 than the fear of the fugitive ; that the waters 
 which encircled her had been chosen for the 
 mirror of her state, rather than the shelter of 
 her nakedness ; and that all which in nature 
 was wild or merciless, — Time and Decay, as 
 well as the waves and tempests, — had been won 
 to adorn her instead of to destroy, and might 
 still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which 
 seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of 
 the hour-glass as well as of the sea". 
 
 § II. And although the last few eventful years, 
 fraught with change to the face of the whole 
 earth, have been more fatal in their influence 
 on Venice than the five hundred that preceded 
 them ; though the noble landscape of approach 
 to her can now be seen no more, or seen only 
 by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing 
 on the iron line; and though many of her 
 palaces are for ever defaced, and many in dese- 
 crated ruins, there is still so much of magic in 
 her aspect, that the hurried traveller, who 
 must leave her before the wonder of that first 
 aspect has been worn away, may still be led to 
 forget the humility of her origin, and to shut 
 his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They, 
 at least, are little to be envied, in whose hearts 
 the great charities of the imagination lie dead, 
 and for whom the fancy has no power to re- 
 
 77 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 press the importunity of painful impressions, or 
 to raise what is ignoble, and disguise what is 
 discordant, in a scene so rich in its remem- 
 brances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for 
 this work of the imagination there must be no 
 permission during the task which is before us. 
 The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly 
 characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, 
 but never save the remains of those mightier 
 ages to which they are attached like climbing 
 flowers ; and they must be torn away from the 
 magnificent fragments, if we would see them as 
 they stood in their own strength. Those feel- 
 ings, always as fruitless as they are fond, are in 
 Venice not only incapable of protecting, but 
 even of discerning, the objects to which they 
 ought to have been attached. The Venice of 
 modern fiction and drama is a thing of yester- 
 day, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage 
 dream which the first ray of daylight must dis- 
 sipate into dust. No prisoner, whose name is 
 worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved 
 sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs," 
 which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of 
 Venice ; no great merchant of Venice ever saw 
 that Rialto under which the traveller now passes 
 with breathless interest : the statue which By- 
 ron makes Faliero address as of one of his 
 great ancestors was erected to a soldier of for- 
 tune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's 
 
Venice 
 
 death ; and the most conspicuous parts of the 
 city have been so entirely altered in the course 
 of the last three centuries, that if Henry Dan- 
 dolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned 
 from their tombs, and stood each on the deck 
 of his galley at the entrance of the Grand Canal, 
 that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite 
 subject, the novelist's favorite scene, where the 
 water first narrows by the steps of the Church 
 of La Salute, — the mighty Doges would not 
 know in what spot of the world they stood, would 
 literally not recognize one stone of the great 
 city, for whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, 
 their grey hairs had been brought down with 
 bitterness to the grave. The remains of their 
 Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses 
 which were the delight of the nation in its do- 
 tage ; hidden in many a grass-grown court, and 
 silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the 
 slow waves have sapped their foundations for 
 five hundred years, and must soon prevail over 
 them for ever. It must be our task to glean and 
 gather them forth, and restore out of them some 
 faint image of the lost city, more gorgeous a 
 thousand-fold than that which now exists, yet 
 not created in the day-dream of the prince, nor 
 by the ostentation of the noble, but built by 
 iron hands and patient hearts, contending 
 against the adversity of nature and the fury 
 of man, so that its wonderfulness cannot be 
 
 79 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 grasped by the indolence of imagination, but 
 only after frank inquiry into the true nature of 
 that wild and solitary scene, whose restless tides 
 and trembling sands did indeed shelter the 
 birth of the city, but long denied her dominion. 
 § ill. When the eye falls casually on a map 
 of Europe, there is no feature by which it is 
 more likely to be arrested than the strange 
 sweeping loop formed by the junction of the 
 Alps and Apennines, and enclosing the great 
 basin of Lombardy. This return of the moun- 
 tain chain upon itself causes a vast difference in 
 the character of the distribution of its debris on 
 its opposite sides. The rock fragments and 
 sediment which the torrents on the north side 
 of the Alps bear into the plains are distributed 
 over a vast extent of country, and, though here 
 and there lodged in beds of enormous thick- 
 ness, soon permit the firm substrata to appear 
 from underneath them; but all the torrents 
 which descend from the southern side of the 
 High Alps, and from the northern slope of the 
 Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or 
 mountain bay which the two ridges enclose; 
 every fragment which thunder breaks out of 
 their battlements, and every grain of dust which 
 the summer rain washes from their pastures, is 
 at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of the Lorn- 
 bardic plain; and that plain must have risen 
 within its rocky barriers as a cup fills with wine, 
 80 
 
Venice 
 
 but for two contrary influences which continu- 
 ally depress, or disperse from its surface, the 
 accumulation of the ruins of ages. 
 
 § IV. I will not tax the reader's faith in mod- 
 ern science by insisting on the singular depres- 
 sion of the surface of Lombardy, which appears 
 for many centuries to have taken place steadily 
 and continually; the main fact with which we 
 have to do is the gradual transport, by the Po 
 and its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of 
 the finer sediment to the sea. The character 
 of the Lombardic plains is most strikingly ex- 
 pressed by the ancient walls of its cities, com- 
 posed for the most part of large rounded Alpine 
 pebbles alternating with narrow courses of 
 brick ; and was curiously illustrated in 1848, by 
 the ramparts of these same pebbles thrown up 
 four or five feet high round every field, to check 
 the Austrian cavalry in the battle under the 
 walls of Verona. The finer dust among which 
 these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by the 
 rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine 
 snow, so that, however pure their waters may 
 be when they issue from the lakes at the foot of 
 the great chain, they become of the color and 
 opacity of clay before they reach the Adriatic - r 
 the sediment which they bear is at once thrown 
 down as they enter the sea, forming a vast belt 
 of low land along the eastern coast of Italy. 
 The powerful stream of the Po of course builds 
 81 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 forward the fastest ; on each side of it, north 
 and south, there is a tract of marsh, fed by 
 more feeble streams, and less liable to rapid 
 change than the delta of the central river. In 
 one of these tracts is built Ravenna, and in 
 the other Venice. 
 
 § v. What circumstances directed the pecu- 
 liar arrangement of this great belt of sediment 
 in the earliest times, it is not here the place to 
 inquire. It is enough for us to know that from 
 the mouths of the Adige to those of the Piave 
 there stretches, at a variable distance of from 
 three to five miles from the actual shore, a 
 bank of sand, divided into long islands by nar- 
 row channels of sea. The space between this 
 bank and the true shore consists of the sedi- 
 mentary deposits from these and other rivers, a 
 great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the 
 neighborhood of Venice, by the sea at high 
 water, to the depth in most p'aces of a foot or a 
 foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed 
 at low tide, but divided by an intricate network 
 of narrow and winding channels, from which 
 the sea never retires. In some places, accord- 
 ing to the run of the currents, the land has 
 risen into marshy islets, consolidated, some by 
 art, and some by time, into ground firm enough 
 to be built upon, or fruitful enough to be culti- 
 vated : in others, on the contrary, it has not 
 reached the sea-level; so that, at the average 
 82 
 
Venice 
 
 low water, shallow lakelets glitter among its 
 irregularly exposed fields of seaweed. In the 
 midst of the largest of these, increased in im- 
 portance by the confluence of several large 
 river channels towards one of the openings in 
 the sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built, 
 on a crowded cluster of islands; the various 
 plots of higher ground which appear to the 
 north and south of this central cluster, have at 
 different periods been also thickly inhabited, and 
 now bear, according to their size, the remains 
 of cities, villages, or isolated convents and 
 churches, scattered among spaces of open 
 ground, partly waste and encumbered by ruins, 
 partly under cultivation for the supply of the 
 metropolis. 
 
 § VI. The average rise and fall of the tide is 
 about three feet (varying considerably with the 
 seasons) ; but this fall, on so flat a shore, is 
 enough to cause continual movement in the 
 waters, and in the main canals to produce a re- 
 flux which frequently runs like a mill stream. 
 At high water no land is visible for many miles 
 to the north or south of Venice, except in the 
 form of small islands crowned with towers or 
 gleaming with villages : there is a channel, 
 some three miles wide, between the city and 
 the mainland, and some mile and a half wide 
 between it and the sandy breakwater called the 
 Lido, which divides the lagoon from the Adri- 
 
 83 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 atic, but which is so low as hardly to disturb 
 the impression of the city's having been built in 
 the midst of the ocean, although the secret of 
 its true position is partly, yet not painfully, be- 
 trayed by the clusters of piles set to mark the 
 deep-water channels, which undulate far away 
 in spotty chains like the studded backs of huge 
 sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the 
 crisped and crowded waves that flicker and 
 dance before the strong winds upon the unlifted 
 level of the shallow sea. But the scene is widely 
 different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or 
 twenty inches is enough to show ground over 
 the greater part of the lagoon ; and at the com- 
 plete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst 
 of a dark plain of seaweed, of gloomy green, 
 except only where the larger branches of the 
 Brenta and its associated streams converge to- 
 wards the port of the Lido. Through this salt 
 and sombre plain the gondola and the fishing- 
 boat advance by tortuous channels, seldom 
 more than four or five feet deep, and often 
 so choked with slime that the heavier keels 
 furrow the bottom till their crossing tracks 
 are seen through the clear sea water like the 
 ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves 
 blue gashes upon the ground at every stroke, 
 or is entangled among the thick weed that 
 fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen 
 waves, leaning to and fro upon the uncertain 
 
 8 4 
 
Venice 
 
 sway of the exhausted tide. The scene is often 
 profoundly oppressive, even at this day, when 
 every plot of higher ground bears some frag- 
 ment of fair building: but, in order to know 
 what it was once, let the traveller follow in his 
 boat at evening the windings of some unfre- 
 quented channel far into the midst of the 
 melancholy plain ; let him remove, in his im- 
 agination, the brightness of the great city that 
 still extends itself in the distance, and the walls 
 and towers from the islands that are near; and 
 so wait, until the bright investiture and sweet 
 warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the 
 waters, and the black desert of their shore lies in 
 its nakedness beneath the night, pathless, com- 
 fortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and fearful 
 silence, except where the salt runlets plash into 
 the tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their 
 margins with a questioning cry ; and he will be 
 enabled to enter in some sort into the horror 
 of heart with which this solitude was anciently 
 chosen by man for his habitation. They little 
 thought, who first drove the stakes into the 
 sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their rest, 
 that their children were to be the princes of 
 that ocean, and their palaces its pride ; and yet, 
 in the great natural laws that rule that sorrow- 
 ful wilderness, let it be remembered what 
 strange preparation had been made for the 
 things which no human imagination could have 
 
 85 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 foretold, and how the whole existence and for- 
 tune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or 
 compelled, by the setting of those bars and 
 doors to the rivers and the sea. Had deeper 
 currents divided their islands, hostile navies 
 would again and again have reduced the rising 
 city into servitude ; had stronger surges beaten 
 their shores, all the richness and refinement of 
 the Venetian architecture must have been ex- 
 changed for the walls and bulwarks of an ordi- 
 nary sea-port. Had there been no tide, as in 
 other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow 
 canals of the city would have become noisome, 
 and the marsh in which it was built pestiferous. 
 Had the tide been only a foot or eighteen 
 inches higher in its rise, the water-access to the 
 doors of the palaces would have been impossi- 
 ble : even as it is, there is sometimes a little 
 difficulty, at the ebb, in landing without setting 
 foot upon the lower and slippery steps : and the 
 highest tides sometimes enter the courtyards, 
 and overflow the entrance halls. Eighteen 
 inches more of difference between the level of 
 the flood and ebb would have rendered the 
 doorsteps of every palace, at low water, a treach- 
 erous mass of weeds and limpets, and the entire 
 system of water-carriage for the higher classes, 
 in their easy and daily intercourse, must have 
 been done away with. The streets of the city 
 would have been widened, its network of canals 
 86 
 
Venice 
 
 filled up, and all the peculiar character of the 
 place and the people destroyed. 
 
 § VII. The reader may perhaps have felt some 
 pain in the contrast between this faithful view 
 of the site of the Venetian Throne, and the ro- 
 mantic conception of it which we ordinarily 
 form; but this pain, if he have felt it, ought to 
 be more than counterbalanced by the value of 
 the instance thus afforded to us at once of the 
 inscrutableness and the wisdom of the ways of 
 God. If, two thousand years ago, we had been 
 permitted to watch the slow settling of the slime 
 of those turbid rivers into the polluted sea, and 
 the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of 
 the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, 
 how little could we have understood the pur- 
 pose with which those islands were shaped out 
 of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed with 
 their desolate walls of sand ! How little could 
 we have known, any more than of what now 
 seems to us most distressful, dark, and object- 
 less, the glorious aim which was then in the 
 mind of Him in whose hand are all the corners 
 of the earth ! how little imagined that in the 
 laws which were stretching forth the gloomy 
 margins of those fruitless banks, and feeding 
 the bitter grass among their shallows, there was 
 indeed a preparation, and the only preparation 
 possible, for the founding of a city which was to 
 be set like a golden clasp on the girdle of the 
 8? 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 earth, to write her history on the white scrolls 
 of the sea-surges, and to word it in their thun- 
 der, and to gather and give forth, in world- 
 wide pulsation, the glory of the West and of 
 the East, from the burning heart of her Forti- 
 tude and Splendor. 
 
 88 
 
St. Mark's 
 
St. Mark's 
 
 § X. And now I wish that the reader, before I 
 bring him into St. Mark's Place, would imagine 
 himself for a little time in a quiet English cathe- 
 dral town, and walk with me to the west front of its 
 cathedral. Let us go together up the more retired 
 street, at the end of which we can see the pin- 
 nacles of one of the towers, and then through 
 the low grey gateway, with its battlemented top 
 and small latticed window in the centre, into 
 the inner private-looking road or close, where 
 nothing goes in but the carts of th^ tradesmen 
 who supply the bishop and the chapter, and 
 where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced 
 in by neat rails, before old-fashioned groups of 
 somewhat diminutive and excessively trim 
 houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting 
 out here and there, and deep wooden cornices 
 and eaves painted cream color and white, and 
 small porches to their doors in the shape of 
 cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick, inde- 
 
 9 1 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 scribable wooden gables warped a little on one 
 side ; and so forward till we come to larger 
 houses, also old-fashioned, but of red brick, 
 and with gardens behind them, and fruit walls, 
 which show here and there, among the necta- 
 rines, the vestiges of an old cloister arch or 
 shaft, and looking in front on the cathedral 
 square itself, laid out in rigid division of 
 smooth grass and gravel walk, yet not uncheer- 
 ful, especially on the sunny side where the 
 canons' children are walking with their nursery- 
 maids. And so, taking care not to tread on 
 the grass, we will go along the straight walk to 
 the west front, and there stand for a time, look- 
 ing up at its deep-pointed porches and the 
 dark places between their pillars where there 
 were statues once, and where the fragments, 
 here and there, of a stately figure are still left, 
 which has in it the likeness of a king, perhaps 
 indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king 
 long ago in heaven ; and so higher and higher 
 up to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculp- 
 ture and confused arcades, shattered, and grey, 
 and grisly with heads of dragons and mocking 
 fiends, worn by the rain and swirling winds into 
 yet unseemlier shape, and colored on their 
 stony scales by the deep russet-orange lichen, 
 melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to the 
 bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses 
 itself among the bosses of their traceries, 
 92 
 
St. Mark's 
 
 though they are rude and strong, and only 
 sees like a drift of eddying black points, now 
 closing, now scattering, and now settling sud- 
 denly into invisible places among the bosses 
 and flowers, the crowd of restless birds that fill 
 the whole square with that strange clangor of 
 theirs, so harsh and yet so soothing, like the 
 cries of birds on a solitary coast between the 
 cliffs and sea. 
 
 § XI. Think for a little while of that scene, 
 and the meaning of all its small formalisms, 
 mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its 
 secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its 
 evidence of the sense and steady performance 
 of such kind of duties as can be regulated by 
 the cathedral clock; and weigh the influence 
 of those dark towers on all who have passed 
 through the lonely square at their feet for cen- 
 turies, and on all who have seen them rising far 
 away over the wooded plain, or catching on 
 their square masses the last rays of the sunset, 
 when the city at their feet was indicated only 
 by the mist at the bend of the river. And then 
 let us quickly recollect that we are in Venice, 
 and land at the extremity of the Calle Lunga 
 San Moise, which may be considered as there 
 answering to the secluded street that led us to 
 our English cathedral gateway. 
 
 § XII. We find ourselves in a paved alley, 
 some seven feet wide where it is widest, full 
 
 93 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 of people, and resonant with cries of itinerant 
 salesmen, — a shriek in their beginning, and 
 dying away into a kind of brazen ringing, all 
 the worse for its confinement between the high 
 houses of the passage along which we have to 
 make our way. Over-head an extricable con- 
 fusion of rugged shutters, and iron balconies 
 and chimney flues pushed out on brackets to 
 save room, and arched windows with projecting 
 sills of Istrian stone, and gleams of green leaves 
 here and there where a fig-tree branch escapes 
 over a lower wall from some inner cortile, lead- 
 ing the eye up to the narrow stream of blue sky 
 high over all. On each side, a row of shops, 
 as densely set as may be, occupying, in fact, 
 intervals between the square stone shafts, about 
 eight feet high, which carry the first floors: in- 
 tervals of which one is narrow and serves as a 
 door; the other is, in the more respectable 
 shops, wainscoted to the height of the counter 
 and glazed above, but in those of the poorer 
 tradesmen left open to the ground, and the 
 wares laid on benches and tables in the open 
 air, the light in all cases entering at the front 
 only, and fading away in a few feet from the 
 threshold into a gloom which the eye from 
 without cannot penetrate, but which is gener- 
 ally broken by a ray or two from a feeble lamp 
 at the back of the shop, suspended before a 
 print of the Virgin. The less pious shopkeeper 
 
 94 
 
St. Mark's 
 
 sometimes leaves his lamp unlighted, and is 
 contented with a penny print; the more reli- 
 gious one has his print colored and set in a little 
 shrine with a gilded or figured fringe, with per- 
 haps a faded flower or two on each side, and his 
 lamp burning brilliantly. Here at the fruiterer's, 
 where the dark-green water-melons are heaped 
 upon the counter like cannon balls, the Ma- 
 donna has a tabernacle of fresh laurel leaves ; 
 but the pewterer next door has let his lamp out, 
 and there is nothing to be seen in his shop but 
 the dull gleam of the studded patterns on the 
 copper pans, hanging from his roof in the dark- 
 ness. Next comes a " Vendita Frittole e 
 Liquori," where the Virgin, enthroned in a 
 very humble manner beside a tallow candle on 
 a back shelf, presides over certain ambrosial 
 morsels of a nature too ambiguous to be defined 
 or enumerated. But a few steps farther on, at 
 the regular wine-shop of the calle, where we are 
 offered "Vino Nostrani a Soldi 28-32," the 
 Madonna is in great glory, enthroned above ten 
 or a dozen large red casks of three-year-old 
 vintage, and flanked by goodly ranks of bottles 
 of Maraschino, and two crimson lamps; and 
 for the evening, when the gondoliers will come 
 to drink out, under her auspices, the money they 
 have gained during the day, she will have a 
 whole chandelier. 
 
 $ XIII. A yard or two farther, we pass the 
 
 95 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 hostelry of the Black Eagle, and, glancing as 
 we pass through the square door of marble, 
 deeply moulded, in the outer wall, we see the 
 shadows of its pergola of vines resting on an 
 ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its 
 side ; and so presently emerge on the bridge 
 and Campo San Moise, whence to the entrance 
 into St. Mark's Place, called the Bocca di Piazza 
 (mouth of the square), the Venetian character is 
 nearly destroyed, first by the frightful facade of 
 San Moise, which we will pause at another time to 
 examine, and then by the modernizing of the 
 shops as they near the piazza, and the mingling 
 with the lower Venetian populace of lounging 
 groups of English and Austrians. We will push 
 fast through them into the shadow of the pillars at 
 the end of the •' Bocca di Piazza," and then we 
 forget them all : for between those pillars there 
 opens a great light, and, in the midst of it, as 
 we advance slowly, the vast tower of St. Mark 
 seems to lift itself visibly forth from the level 
 field of chequered stones ; and, on each side, 
 the countless arches prolong themselves into 
 ranged symmetry, as if the rugged and irregular 
 houses that pressed together above us in the 
 dark alley had been struck back into sudden 
 obedience and lovely order, and all their rude 
 casements and broken walls had been trans- 
 formed into arches charged with goodly sculp- 
 ture, and fluted shafts of delicate stone. 
 
 9 6 
 
St. Mark's 
 
 § XIV. And well may they fall back, for be- 
 yond those troops of ordered arches there rises 
 a vision out of the earth, and all the great 
 square seems to have opened from it in a kind 
 of awe, that we may see it far away ; — a mul- 
 titude of pillars and white domes, clustered into 
 a long low pyramid of colored light ; a trea- 
 sure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly 
 of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath 
 into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair 
 mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, 
 clear as amber and delicate as ivory, — sculpture 
 fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, 
 and grapes and pomegranates, and birds cling- 
 ing and fluttering among the branches, all 
 twined together into an endless network of 
 buds and plumes ; and, in the midst of it, the 
 solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to 
 the feet, and leaning to each other across the 
 gates, their figures indistinct among the gleam- 
 ing of the golden ground through the leaves 
 beside them, interrupted and dim, like the 
 morning light as it faded back among the 
 branches of Eden, when first its gates were 
 angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls 
 of the porches there are set pillars of variegated 
 stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green 
 serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and 
 marbles, that half refuse and half yield to the 
 sunshine, Cleopatra-like, " their bluest veins to 
 
 97 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 kiss " — the shadow, as it steals back from them, 
 revealing line after line of azure undulation, as 
 a receding tide leaves the waved sand; their 
 capitals rich with interwoven tracery, rooted 
 knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acan- 
 thus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning 
 and ending in the Cross ; and above them, in the 
 broad archivolts, a continuous chain of language 
 and of life — angels, and the signs of heaven, 
 and the labors of men, each in its appointed 
 season upon the earth ; and above these, an- 
 other range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with 
 white arches edged with scarlet flowers, — a 
 confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts 
 of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their 
 breadth of golden strength, and the St Mark's 
 Lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, 
 until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the 
 arches break into a marble foam, and toss them- 
 selves far into the blue sky in flashes and 
 wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers 
 on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before 
 they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them 
 with coral and amethyst. 
 
 Between that grim cathedral of England and 
 this, what an interval ! There is a type of it in 
 the very birds that haunt them ; for, instead of 
 the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable- 
 winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. 
 Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle 
 9 8 
 
St. Mark's 
 
 among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft 
 iridescence of their living plumes, changing at 
 every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, 
 that have stood unchanged for seven hundred 
 years. 
 
 § XV. And what effect has this splendor on 
 those who pass beneath it ? You may walk 
 from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the 
 gateway of St. Mark's, and you will not see an 
 eye lifted to it, nor a countenance brightened 
 by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, 
 rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. 
 Up to the very recesses of the porches, the 
 meanest tradesmen of the city push their coun- 
 ters ; nay, the foundations of its pillars are them- 
 selves the seats — not " of them that sell doves " 
 for sacrifice, but of the vendors of toys and cari- 
 catures. Round the whole square in front of 
 the church there is almost a continuous line of 
 cafes, where the idle Venetians of the middle 
 classes lounge, and read empty journals ; in its 
 centre the Austrian bands play during the time 
 of vespers, their martial music jarring with the 
 organ notes, — the march drowning the mis- 
 erere, and the sullen crowd thickening round 
 them, — a crowd, which, if it had its will, would 
 stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in 
 the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots 
 of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and 
 listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards ; and 
 
 99 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 unregarded children, — every heavy glance of 
 their young eyes full of desperation and stony 
 depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing, 
 — gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, 
 hour after hour, clashing their bruised cen- 
 tesimi upon the marble ledges of the church 
 porch. And the images of Christ and His 
 angels look down upon it continually. 
 
 IOC 
 
Art and Morals 
 

Art and Morals 
 
 You probably recollect that, in the beginning 1 
 of my last lecture, it was stated that fine art 
 had, and could have, but three functions : the 
 enforcing of the religious sentiments of men, 
 the perfecting their ethical state, and the doing 
 them material service. We have to-day to ex- 
 amine the mode of its action in the second 
 power, that of perfecting the morality or ethical 
 state of men. 
 
 Perfecting, observe — not producing. 
 
 You must have the right moral state first, or 
 you cannot have the art. But when the art is 
 once obtained, its reflected action enhances and 
 completes the moral state out of which it arose, 
 and, above all, communicates the exaltation to 
 other minds which are already morally capable 
 of the like. 
 
 For instance, take the art of singing, and the 
 
 simplest perfect master of it, (up to the limits 
 
 of his nature) whom you can find — a skylark. 
 
 From him you may learn what it is to " sing for 
 
 103 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 joy." You must get the moral state first, the 
 pure gladness, then give it finished expression; 
 and it is perfected in itself, and made communi- 
 cable to other creatures capable of such joy. 
 But it is incommunicable^o those who are not 
 prepared to receive it. 
 
 Now, all right human song is, 'similarly, 
 the finished expression, by art, of the joy or 
 grief of noble persons, for right causes. And 
 accurately in proportion to the Tightness of the 
 cause, and purity of the emotion, is the possi- 
 bility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of 
 her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost 
 money. And with absolute precision from 
 highest to lowest, the fineness of the possible 
 art is an index of the moral purity and majesty 
 of the emotion it expresses. You may test it 
 practically at any instant. Question with your- 
 selves respecting any feeling that has taken 
 strong possession of your mind, " Could this be 
 sung by a master, and sung nobly, with a true 
 melody and art ? " Then it is a right feeling. 
 Could it not be sung at all, or only sung ludi- 
 crously ? It is a base one. And that is so in all 
 the arts ; so that with mathematical precision, 
 subject to no error or exception, the art of a 
 nation, so far as it exists, is an exponent of its 
 ethical state. 
 
 An exponent, observe, and exalting influ- 
 ence ; but not the root or cause. You cannot 
 104 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 paint or sing yourselves into being good men ; 
 you must be good men before you can either 
 paint or sing, and then the colour and sound 
 will complete in you all that is best. 
 
 And this it was that I called upon you to 
 hear, saying, " listen to me at least now," in the 
 first lecture, namely, that no art-teaching could 
 be of use to you, but would rather be harmful, 
 unless it was grafted on something deeper than 
 all art. For indeed not only with this, of which 
 it is my function to show you the laws, but 
 much more with the art of all men, which you 
 came here chiefly to learn, that of language, 
 the chief vices of education have arisen from the 
 one great fallacy of supposing that noble lan- 
 guage is a communicable trick of grammar and 
 accent, instead of simply the careful expression 
 of right thought. All the virtues of language 
 are, in their roots, moral ; it becomes accurate 
 if the speaker desires to be true ; clear, if he 
 speaks with sympathy and a desire to be intelli- 
 gible ; powerful, if he has earnestness ; pleas- 
 ant, if he has sense of rhythm and order. There 
 are no other virtues of language producible by 
 art than these : but let me mark more deeply 
 for an instant the significance of one of them. 
 Language, I said, is only clear when it is sym- 
 pathetic. You can, in truth, understand a 
 man's word only by understanding his temper. 
 Your own word is also as of an unknown tongue 
 105 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 to him unless he understands yours. And it is 
 this which makes the art of language, if any one 
 is to be chosen separately from the rest, that 
 which is fittest for the instrument of a gentle- 
 man's education. To teach the meaning of a 
 word thoroughly is^o teach the nature of the 
 spirit that coined 'it; the secret of language is 
 the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is 
 possible only to the gentle. And thus the prin- 
 ciples of beautiful speech have all been fixed by 
 sincere and kindly speech. On ,the laws which 
 have been determined by sincerity, false speech, 
 apparently beautiful, may afterwards be con- 
 structed; but all such utterance, whether in 
 oration or poetry, is not only without perma- 
 nent power, but it is destructive of the principles 
 it has usurped. So long as no words are uttered 
 but in faithfulness, so long the art of language 
 goes on exalting itself; but the moment it is 
 shaped and chiselled on external principles, it 
 falls into frivolity, and perishes. And this truth 
 would have been long ago manifest, had it not 
 been that in periods of advanced academical 
 science there is always a tendency to deny the 
 sincerity of the first masters of language. Once 
 learn to write gracefully in the manner of an 
 ancient author, and we are apt to think that he 
 also wrote in the manner of some one else. 
 But no noble nor right style was ever yet 
 founded but out of a sincere heart. 
 1 06 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 No man is worth reading to form your style, 
 who does not mean what he says ; nor was any 
 great style ever invented but by some man who 
 meant what he said. Find out the beginner of 
 a great manner of writing, and you have also 
 found the declarer of some true facts or sincere 
 passions; and your whole method of reading 
 will thus be quickened, for, being sure that your 
 author really meant what he said, you will be 
 much more careful to ascertain what it is that 
 he means. 
 
 And of yet greater importance is it deeply to 
 know that every beauty possessed by the lan- 
 guage of a nation is significant of the innermost 
 laws of its being. Keep the temper of the peo- 
 ple stern and manly; make their associations 
 grave, courteous, and for worthy objects ; oc- 
 cupy them in just deeds; and their tongue 
 must needs be a grand one. Nor is it possible, 
 therefore — observe the necessary reflected ac- 
 tion — that any tongue should be a noble one, 
 of which the words are not so many trumpet- 
 calls to action. All great languages invariably 
 utter great things, and command them ; they 
 cannot be mimicked but by obedience; the 
 breath of them is inspiration because it is not 
 only vocal, but vital ; and you can only learn 
 to speak as these men spoke, by becoming what 
 these men were. 
 
 Now for direct confirmation of this, I want 
 107 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 you to think over the relation of expression to 
 character in two great masters of the absolute 
 art of language, Virgil and Pope. You are 
 perhaps surprised at the last name; and indeed 
 you have in English much higher grasp and 
 melody of language from more passionate 
 minds, but you have nothing else, in its range, 
 so perfect. I name, therefore, these two men, 
 because they are the two most accomplished 
 Artists, merely as such, whom I know in litera- 
 ture ; and because I think you will be after- 
 wards interested in investigating how the infi- 
 nite grace in the words of the one, the severity 
 in those of the other, and the precision in those 
 of both, arise wholly out of the moral elements 
 of their minds: — out of the deep tenderness in 
 Virgil which enabled him to write the stories 
 of Nisus and Lausus; and the serene and just 
 benevolence which placed Pope, in his theology, 
 two centuries in advance of his time, and en- 
 abled him to sum the law of noble life in two 
 lines which, so far as I know, are the most com- 
 plete, the most concise, and the most lofty 
 expression of moral temper existing in English 
 words : — 
 " Never elated, while one mail's oppress' d / 
 Never dejected, while another's blessed" 
 I wish you also to remember these lines of Pope, 
 and to make yourselves entirely masters of his 
 system of ethics ; because, putting Shakespeare 
 1 08 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 aside as rather the world's than ours, I hold 
 Pope to be the most perfect representative we 
 have, since Chaucer, of the true English mind ; 
 and I think the Dunciad is the most absolutely- 
 chiselled and monumental work " exacted " in 
 our country. You will find, as you study Pope, 
 that he has expressed for you, in the strictest 
 language and within the briefest limits, every 
 law of art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, 
 and, finally, of a benevolence, humble, rational, 
 and resigned, contented with its allotted share 
 of life, and trusting the problem of its salvation 
 to Him in whose hand lies that of the universe. 
 
 And now I pass to the arts with which I have 
 special concern, in which, though the facts are 
 exactly the same, I shall have more difficulty 
 in proving my assertion, because very few of us 
 are as cognisant of the merit of painting as we 
 are of that of language ; and I can only show you 
 whence that merit springs from, after having 
 thoroughly shown you in what it consists. But, 
 in the meantime, I have simply to tell you, that 
 the manual arts are as accurate exponents of 
 ethical state, as other modes of expression; 
 first, with absolute precision, of that of the 
 workman, and then with precision, disguised 
 by many distorting influences, of that of the 
 nation to which he belongs. 
 
 And, first, they are a perfect exponent of the 
 mind of the workman; but, being so, remem- 
 109 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 ber, if the mind be great or complex, the art is 
 not an easy book to read; for we must ourselves 
 possess all the mental characters of which we are 
 to read the signs. No man can read the evi- 
 dence of labour who is not himself laborious, 
 for he does not know what the work cost : nor 
 can he read the evidence of true passion if he 
 is not passionate; nor of gentleness if he is not 
 gentle : and the most subtle signs of fault and 
 weakness of character he can only judge by 
 having had the same faults to fight with. I 
 myself, for instance, know impatient work, and 
 tired work, better than most critics, because I 
 am myself always impatient, and often tired: — 
 so also, the patient and indefatigable touch of 
 a mighty master becomes more wonderful to 
 me than to others. Yet, wonderful in no mean 
 measure it will be to you all, when I make it 
 manifest ; — and as soon as we begin our real 
 work, and you have learned what it is to draw 
 a true line, I shall be able to make manifest to 
 you, — and indisputably so, — that the day's 
 work of a man like Mantegna or Paul Veronese 
 consists of an unfaltering, uninterrupted succes- 
 sion of movements of the hand more precise 
 than those of the finest fencer : the pencil leav- 
 ing one point and arriving at another, not only 
 with unerring precision at the extremity of the 
 line, but with an unerring and yet varied course 
 — sometimes over spaces a foot or more in ex- 
 1 10 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 tent — yet a course so determined everywhere 
 that either of these men could, and Veronese 
 often does, draw a finished profile, or any other 
 portion of the contour of a face, with one line, 
 not afterwards changed. Try, first, to realise 
 to yourselves the muscular precision of that 
 action, and the intellectual strain of it ; for the 
 movement of a fencer is perfect in practised 
 monotony ; but the movement of the hand of 
 a great painter is at every instant governed by 
 direct and new intention. Then imagine that 
 muscular firmness and subtlety, and that instan- 
 taneously selective and ordinant energy of the 
 brain, sustained all day long, not only without 
 fatigue, but with a visible joy in the exertion, 
 like that which an eagle seems to take in the 
 wave of his wings ; and this all life long, and 
 through long life, not only without failure of 
 power, but with visible increase of it, until the 
 actually organic changes of old age. And then 
 consider, so far as you know anything of physi- 
 ology, what sort of an ethical state of body and 
 mind that means! — ethic through ages past! 
 what fineness of race there must be to get it, 
 what exquisite balance and symmetry of the 
 vital powers ! And then, finally, determine for 
 yourselves whether a manhood like that is con- 
 sistent with any viciousness of soul, with any 
 mean anxiety, any gnawing lust, any wretched- 
 ness of spite or remorse, any consciousness of 
 in 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 rebellion against law of God or man, or any 
 actual, though unconscious, violation of even 
 the least law to which obedience is essential for 
 the glory of life, and the pleasing of its Giver. 
 
 It is, of course, true that many of the strong 
 masters had deep faults of character, but their 
 faults always show in their work. It is true that 
 some could not govern their passions ; if so, 
 they died young, or they painted ill when old. 
 But the greater part of our misapprehension in 
 the whole matter is from our not having well 
 known who the great painters were, and taking 
 delight in the petty skill that was bred in the 
 fumes of the taverns of the North, instead of 
 theirs who breathed empyreal air, sons of the 
 morning, under the woods of Assisi and the 
 crags of Cadore. 
 
 It is true however also, as I have pointed out 
 long ago, that the strong masters fall into two 
 great divisions, one leading simple and natural 
 lives, the other restrained in a Puritanism of 
 the worship of beauty ; and these two manners 
 of life you may recognise in a moment by their 
 work. Generally the naturalists are the strong- 
 est ; but there are two of the Puritans, whose 
 work if I can succeed in making clearly under- 
 standable to you during my three years here, 
 it is all I need care to do. But of these two 
 Puritans one I cannot name to you, and the 
 other I at present will not. One I cannot, for 
 112 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 no one knows his name, except the baptismal 
 one, Bernard, or " dear little Bernard " — Ber- 
 nardino, called, from his birthplace, (Luino, on 
 the lago Maggiore,) Bernard of Luino. The 
 other is a Venetian, of whom many of you prob- 
 ably have never heard, and of whom, through 
 me, you shall not hear until I have tried to get 
 some picture by him over to England. 
 
 Observe then, this Puritanism in the worship 
 of beauty, though sometimes weak, is always 
 honourable and amiable, and the exact reverse 
 of the false Puritanism, which consists in the 
 dread or disdain of beauty. And in order to 
 treat my subject rightly, I ought to proceed 
 from the skill of art to the choice of its subject,, 
 and show you how the moral temper of the 
 workman is shown by his seeking lovely forms 
 and thoughts to express, as well as by the force 
 of his hand in expression. But I need not now 
 urge this part of the proof on you, because you 
 are already, I believe, sufficiently conscious of 
 the truth in this matter, and also I have already 
 said enough of it in my writings; whereas I 
 have not at all said enough of the infallibleness 
 of fine technical work as a proof of every other 
 good power. And indeed it was long before I 
 myself understood the true meaning of the pride 
 of the greatest men in their mere execution, 
 shown, for a permanent lesson to us, in the 
 stories which, whether true or not, indicate with 
 
 113 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 absolute accuracy the general conviction of 
 great artists ; — the stories of the contest of 
 Apelles and Protogenes in a line only, (of which 
 I can promise you, you shall know the meaning 
 to some purpose in a little while), — the story 
 of the circle of Giotto, and especially, which 
 you may perhaps not have observed, the ex- 
 pression of Durer in his inscription on the 
 drawings sent him by Raphael. These figures, 
 he says, " Raphael drew and sent to Albert 
 Durer in Nurnberg, to show him " — What ? 
 Not his invention, nor his beauty of expression, 
 but "sein Hand zu weisen," "To show him his 
 hand" And you will find, as you examine far- 
 ther, that all inferior artists are continually try- 
 ing to escape from the necessity of sound work, 
 and either indulging themselves in their delights 
 in subject, or pluming themselves on their noble 
 motives for attempting what they cannot per- 
 form ; (and observe, by the way, that a great 
 deal of what is mistaken for conscientious mo- 
 tive is nothing but a very pestilent, because 
 very subtle, condition of vanity); whereas the 
 great men always understand at once that the 
 first morality of a painter, as of everybody else, 
 is to know his business ; and so earnest are they 
 in this, that many, whose lives you would think, 
 by the results of their work, had been passed 
 in strong emotion, have in reality subdued 
 themselves, though capable of the very strong- 
 114 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 est passions, into a calm as absolute as that of 
 a deeply sheltered mountain lake, which reflects 
 every agitation of the clouds in the sky, and 
 every change of the shadows on the hills, but 
 is itself motionless. 
 
 Finally, you must remember that great ob- 
 scurity has been brought upon the truth in this 
 matter by the want of integrity and simplicity 
 in our modern life. I mean integrity in the 
 Latin sense, wholeness. Everything is broken 
 up, and mingled in confusion, both in our 
 habits and thoughts; besides being in great 
 part imitative : so that you not only cannot tell 
 what a man is, but sometimes you cannot tell 
 whether he is, at all ! — whether you have in- 
 deed to do with a spirit, or only with an echo. 
 And thus the same inconsistencies appear now, 
 between the work of artists of merit and their 
 personal characters, as those which you find 
 continually disappointing expectation in the 
 lives of men of modern literary power; — the 
 same conditions of society having obscured or 
 misdirected the best qualities of the imagina- 
 tion, both in our literature and art. Thus there 
 is no serious question with any of us as to the 
 personal character of Dante and Giotto, of 
 Shakespeare and Holbein ; but we pause timidly 
 in the attempt to analyse the moral laws of the 
 art skill in recent poets, novelists, and painters. 
 - Let me assure you once for all, that as you 
 
 "5 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 grow older, if you enable yourselves to distin- 
 guish, by the truth of your own lives, what is 
 true in those of other men, you will gradually 
 perceive that all good has its origin in good, 
 never in evil ; that the fact of either literature 
 or painting being truly fine of their kind, what- 
 ever their mistaken aim, or partial error, is 
 proof of their noble origin : and that, if there 
 is indeed sterling value in the thing done, it 
 has come of a sterling worth in the soul that did 
 it, however alloyed or defiled by conditions of 
 sin which are sometimes more appalling or 
 more strange than those which all may detect 
 in their own hearts, because they are part of a 
 personality altogether larger than ours, and as 
 far beyond our judgment in its darkness as be- 
 yond our following in its light. And it is suf- 
 ficient warning against what some might dread 
 as the probable effect of such a conviction on 
 your own minds, namely, that you might permit 
 yourselves in the weaknesses which you ima- 
 gined to be allied to genius, when they took the 
 form of personal temptations; — -it is surely, I 
 say, sufficient warning against so mean a folly, 
 to discern, as you may with little pains, that, 
 of all human existences, the lives of men of that 
 distorted and tainted nobility of intellect are 
 probably the most miserable. 
 
 I pass to the second, and for us the more . 
 practically important question, What is the 
 116 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 effect of noble art upon other men ; what has 
 it done for national morality in time past; and 
 what effect is the extended knowledge or pos- 
 session of it likely to have upon us now? And 
 here we are at once met by the facts, which are 
 as gloomy as indisputable, that, while many 
 peasant populations, among whom scarcely the 
 rudest practice of art has ever been attempted, 
 have lived in comparative innocence, honour, 
 and happiness, the worst foulness and cruelty 
 of savage tribes have been frequently associated 
 with fine ingenuities of decorative design ; also, 
 that no people has ever attained the higher 
 stages of art skill, except at a period of its civ- 
 ilisation which was sullied by frequent, violent, 
 and even monstrous crime ; and, lastly, that the 
 attaining of perfection in art power, has been 
 hitherto, in every nation, the accurate signal 
 of the beginning of its ruin. 
 
 Respecting which phenomena, observe first, 
 that although good never springs out of evil, it is 
 developed to its highest by contention with evil. 
 There are some groups of peasantry, in far-away 
 nooks of Christian countries, who are nearly as 
 innocent as lambs ; but the morality which 
 gives power to art is the morality of men, not 
 of cattle. 
 
 Secondly, the virtues of the inhabitants of 
 many country districts are apparent, not real ; 
 their lives are indeed artless, but not innocent; 
 117 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 and it is only the monotony of circumstances, 
 and the absence of temptation, which prevent 
 the exhibition of evil passions not less real 
 because often dormant, nor less foul because 
 shown only in petty faults, or inactive malig- 
 nities. 
 
 But you will observe also that absolute artless- 
 ness, to men in any kind of moral health, is 
 impossible ; they have always, at least, the art 
 by which they live — agriculture or seamanship ; 
 and in these industries, skilfully practised, you 
 will find the law of their moral training ; while, 
 whatever the adversity of circumstances, every 
 rightly-minded peasantry, such as that of Swe- 
 den, Denmark, Bavaria, or Switzerland, has 
 associated with its needful industry a quite 
 studied school of pleasurable art in dress; and 
 generally also in song, and simple domestic 
 architecture. 
 
 Again, I need not repeat to you here what I 
 endeavoured to explain in the first lecture in 
 the book I called "The Two Paths," respecting 
 the arts of savage races: but I may now note 
 briefly that such arts are the result of an intel- 
 lectual activity which has found no room to 
 expand, and which the tyranny of nature or of 
 man has condemned to disease through arrested 
 growth. And where neither Christianity, nor 
 any other religion conveying some moral help, 
 has reached, the animal energy of such races 
 118 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 necessarily flames into ghastly conditions of 
 evil, and the grotesque or frightful forms as- 
 sumed by their art are precisely indicative of 
 their distorted moral nature. 
 
 But the truly great nations nearly always 
 begin from a race possessing this imaginative 
 power ; and for some time their progress is very 
 slow, and their state not one of innocence, but 
 of feverish and faultful animal energy. This is 
 gradually subdued and exalted into bright 
 human life ; the art instinct purifying itself with 
 the rest of the nature, until social perfectness 
 is nearly reached ; and then comes the period 
 when conscience and intellect are so highly de- 
 veloped, that new forms of error begin in the 
 inability to fulfil the demands of the one, or to 
 answer the doubts of the other. Then the 
 wholeness of the people is lost ; all kinds of 
 hypocrisies and oppositions of science develope 
 themselves; their faith is questioned on one 
 side, and compromised with on the other; 
 wealth commonly increases at the same period 
 to a destructive extent; luxury follows; and 
 the ruin of the nation is then certain : while 
 the arts, all this time, are simply, as I said at 
 first, the exponents of each phase of its moral 
 state, and no more control it in its political 
 career than the gleam of the firefly guides its 
 oscillation. It is true that their most splendid 
 results are usually obtained in the swiftness of 
 119 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 the power which is hurrying to the precipice ; 
 but to lay the charge of the catastrophe to the 
 art by which it is illumined, is to find a cause 
 for the cataract in the hues of its iris. It is true 
 that the colossal vices belonging to periods of 
 great national wealth (for wealth, you will find, 
 is the real root of all evil) can turn every good 
 gift and skill of nature or of man to evil pur- 
 pose. If, in such times, fair pictures have been 
 misused, how much more fair realities? And 
 if Miranda is immoral to Caliban, is that Mi- 
 randa's fault ? 
 
 And I could easily go on to trace for you 
 what, at the moment I speak, is signified, in 
 our own national character, by the forms of art, 
 and unhappily also by the forms of what is not 
 art, but axe^vta, that exist among us. But the 
 more important question is, What will be sig- 
 nified by them ; what is there in us now of 
 worth and strength which, under our new and 
 partly accidental impulse towards formative 
 labour, may be by that expressed, and by that 
 fortified ? 
 
 Would it not be well to know this? Nay, 
 irrespective of all future work, is it not the first 
 thing we should want to know, what stuff we 
 are made of — how far we are iyaOol or xaxol — 
 good, or good for nothing? We may all know 
 that, each of ourselves, easily enough, if we like 
 to put one grave question well home. 
 120 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 Supposing it were told any of you by a phy- 
 sician whose word you could not but trust, that 
 you had not more than seven days to live. And 
 suppose also that, by the manner of your edu- 
 cation it had happened to you, as it has hap- 
 pened to many, never to have heard of any 
 future state, or not to have credited what you 
 heard ; and therefore that you had to face this 
 fact of the approach of death in its simplicity : 
 fearing no punishment for any sin that you 
 might have before committed, or in the coming 
 days might determine to commit ; and having 
 similarly no hope of reward for past, or yet 
 possible, virtue ; nor even of any consciousness 
 whatever to be left to you, after the seventh day 
 had ended, either of the results of your acts to 
 those whom you loved, or of the feelings of any 
 survivors towards you. Then the manner in 
 which you would spend the seven days is an 
 exact measure of the morality of your nature. 
 
 I know that some of you, and I believe the 
 greater number of you, would, in such a case, 
 spend the granted days entirely as you ought. 
 Neither in numbering the errors, or deploring 
 the pleasures of the past ; nor in grasping at 
 vile good in the present, nor vainly lamenting 
 the darkness of the future ; but in instant and 
 earnest execution of whatever it might be pos- 
 sible for you to accomplish in the time, in set- 
 ting your affairs in order, and in providing for 
 
 121 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 the future comfort, and — so far as you might 
 by any message or record of yourself — for the 
 consolation of those whom you loved, and by 
 whom you desired to be remembered, not for 
 your good, but for theirs. How far you might 
 fail through human weakness, in shame for the 
 past, despair at the little that could in the rem- 
 nant of life be accomplished, or the intolerable 
 pain of broken affection, would depend wholly 
 on the degree in which your nature had been 
 depressed or fortified by the manner of your 
 past life. But I think there are few of you who 
 would not spend those last days better than all 
 that had preceded them. 
 
 If you look accurately through the records of 
 the lives that have been most useful to human- 
 ity, you will find that all that has been done 
 best, has been done so ; — that to the clearest 
 intellects and highest souls, — to the true chil- 
 dren of the Father, with whom a thousand 
 years are as one day, their poor seventy years 
 are but as seven days. The removal of the 
 shadow of death from them to an uncertain, but 
 always narrow, distance, never takes away from 
 them their intuition of its approach ; the ex- 
 tending to them of a few hours more or less of 
 light abates not their acknowledgment of the 
 infinitude that must remain to be known beyond 
 their knowledge, — done beyond their deeds: 
 the unprofitableness of their momentary service 
 
 I 22 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 is wrought in a magnificent despair, and their 
 very honour is bequeathed by them for the joy 
 of others, as they lie down to their rest, regard- 
 ing for themselves the voice of men no more. 
 
 The best things, I repeat to you, have been done 
 thus, and therefore, sorrowfully. But the great- 
 est part of the good work of the world is done 
 either in pure and unvexed instinct in duty, "I 
 have stubbed Thornaby waste," or else, and 
 better, it is cheerful and helpful doing of what 
 the hand finds to do, in surety that at evening 
 time, whatsoever is right, the Master will give. 
 And that it be worthily done, depends wholly 
 on that ultimate quantity of worth which you 
 can measure, each in himself, by the test I 
 have just given you. For that test, observe, 
 will mark to you the precise force, first of your 
 absolute courage, and then of the energy in you 
 for the right ordering of things, and the kindly 
 dealing with persons. You have cut away from 
 these two instincts every selfish or common 
 motive, and left nothing but the energies of 
 Order and of Love. 
 
 Now, where those two roots are set, all the 
 other powers and desires find right nourish- 
 ment, and become to their own utmost, helpful 
 to others and pleasurable to ourselves. And 
 so far as those two springs of action are not in 
 us, all other powers become corrupt or dead ; 
 even the love of truth, apart from these, hardens 
 123 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 into an insolent and cold avarice of knowledge, 
 which unused, is more vain than unused gold. 
 
 These, then, are the two essential instincts 
 of humanity : the love of Order and the love 
 of Kindness. By the love of order the moral 
 energy is to deal with the earth, and to dress 
 it, and keep it ; and with all rebellious and dis- 
 solute forces in lower creatures, or in ourselves. 
 By the love of doing kindness it is to deal rightly 
 with all surrounding life. And then, grafted 
 on these, we are to make every other passion 
 perfect ; so that they may every one have full 
 strength and yet be absolutely under control. 
 
 Every one must be strong, every one perfect, 
 every one obedient as a war horse. And it is 
 among the most beautiful pieces of mysticism 
 to which eternal truth is attached, that the 
 chariot race, which Plato uses as an image of 
 moral government, and which is indeed the 
 most perfect type of it in any visible skill of 
 men, should have been made by the Greeks 
 the continual subject of their best poetry and 
 best art. Nevertheless, Plato's use of it is not 
 altogether true. There is no black horse in 
 the chariot of the soul. One of the driver's 
 worst faults is in starving his horses; another, 
 in not breaking them early enough ; but they 
 are all good. Take, for example, one usually 
 thought of as wholly evil — that of Anger, lead- 
 ing to vengeance. I believe it to be quite one 
 124 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 of the crowning wickednesses of this age that 
 we have starved and chilled our faculty of in- 
 dignation, and neither desire nor dare to punish 
 crime justly. We have taken up the benevolent 
 idea, forsooth, that justice is to be preventive 
 instead of vindictive ; and we imagine that we 
 are to punish, not in anger, but in expediency; 
 not that we may give deserved pain to the per- 
 son in fault, but that we may frighten other 
 people from committing the same fault. The 
 beautiful theory of this non-vindictive justice is, 
 that having convicted a man of a crime worthy 
 of death, we entirely pardon the criminal, re- 
 store him to his place in our affection and 
 esteem, and then hang him, not as a malefac- 
 tor, but as a scarecrow. That is the theory. 
 And the practice is, that we send a child to 
 prison for a month for stealing a handful of 
 walnuts, for fear that other children should 
 come to steal more of our walnuts. And we do 
 not punish a swindler" for ruining a thousand 
 families, because we think swindling is a whole- 
 some excitement to trade. 
 
 But all true justice is vindictive to vice as 
 it is rewarding to virtue. Only — and herein 
 it is distinguished from personal revenge — it 
 is vindictive of the wrong done, not of the 
 wrong done to us. It is the national expression 
 of deliberate anger, as of deliberate gratitude; 
 it is not exemplary, or even corrective, but 
 
 125 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 essentially retributive ; it is the absolute art of 
 measured recompense, giving honour where 
 honour is due, and shame where shame is due, 
 and joy where joy is due, and pain where pain 
 is due. It is neither educational, for men are 
 to be educated by wholesome habit, not by re- 
 wards and punishments; nor is it preventive, 
 for it is to be executed without regard to any 
 consequences; but only for righteousness' sake, 
 a righteous nation does judgment and justice. 
 But in this, as in all other instances, the Tight- 
 ness of the secondary passion depends on its 
 being grafted on those two primary instincts, 
 the love of order and of kindness, so that indig- 
 nation itself is against the wounding of love. 
 Do you think the jxtjvis 'AyiX-r^ came of a hard 
 heart in Achilles, or the " Pallas te hoc vulnere, 
 Pallas," of a hard heart in Anchises' son ? 
 
 And now, if with this clue through the laby- 
 rinth of them, you remember the course of the 
 arts of great nations, you will perceive that 
 whatever has prospered, and become lovely, 
 had its beginning — for no other was possible — 
 in the love of order in material things associated 
 with true Sixguogovy), and the desire of beauty in 
 material things, which is associated with true 
 affection, charitas ; and with the innumerable 
 conditions of true gentleness expressed by the 
 different uses of the words y^oir, and gratia. 
 You will find that this love of beauty is an es- 
 i 26 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 sential part of all healthy human nature, and 
 though it can long co-exist with states of life in 
 many other respects unvirtuous, it is itself 
 wholly good ; — the direct adversary of envy, 
 avarice, mean worldly care, and especially of 
 cruelty. It entirely perishes when these are 
 wilfully indulged; and the men in whom it has 
 been most strong have always been compassion- 
 ate, and lovers of justice, and the earliest dis- 
 cerners and declarers of things conducive to 
 the happiness of mankind. 
 
 Nearly every important truth respecting the 
 love of beauty in its familiar relations to human 
 life was mythically expressed by the Greeks in 
 their various accounts of the parentage and 
 offices of the Graces. But one fact, the most 
 vital of all, they could not in its fulness per- 
 ceive, namely, that the intensity of other per- 
 ceptions of beauty is exactly commensurate 
 with the imaginative purity of the passion of 
 love, and with the singleness of its devotion. 
 They were not fully conscious of, and could not 
 therefore either mythically or philosophically 
 express, the deep relation within themselves 
 between their power of perceiving beauty, and 
 the honour of domestic affection which found 
 their sternest themes of tragedy in the infringe- 
 ment of its laws ; — which made the rape of 
 Helen the chief subject of their epic poetry, and 
 which fastened their clearest symbolism of 
 127 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 resurrection on the story of Alcestis. Unhap- 
 pily, the subordinate position of their most 
 revered women, and the partial corruption of 
 feeling towards them by the presence of certain 
 other singular states of inferior passion which it 
 is as difficult as grievous to analyse, arrested 
 the ethical as well as the formative progress of 
 the Greek mind ; and it was not until after an 
 interval of nearly two thousand years of various 
 error and pain, that, partly as the true reward 
 of Christian warfare nobly sustained through 
 centuries of trial, and partly as the visionary 
 culmination of the faith which saw in a maiden's 
 purity the link between God and her race, the 
 highest and holiest strength of mortal love was 
 reached; and, together with it, in the song of 
 Dante, and the painting of Bernard of Luino 
 and his fellows, the perception, and embodi- 
 ment for ever of " whatsoever things are pure, 
 whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
 are of good report"; — that, if there be any vir- 
 tue, and if there be any praise, men might think 
 on those things. 
 
 You probably observed the expression I used 
 a moment ago, the imaginative purity of the 
 passion of love. I have not yet spoken, nor is 
 it possible for me to-day to speak adequately, 
 of the moral power of the imagination : but you 
 may for yourselves enough discern its nature 
 merely by comparing the dignity of the relations 
 128 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 between the sexes, from their lowest level in 
 moths or mollusca, through the higher creatures 
 in whom they become a domestic influence and 
 law, up to the love of pure men and women ; 
 and, finally, to the ideal love which animated 
 chivalry. Throughout this vast ascent it is the 
 gradual increase of the imaginative faculty 
 which exalts and enlarges the authority of the 
 passion until, at its height, it is the bulwark of 
 patience, the tutor of honour, and the perfect- 
 ness of praise. 
 
 You will find farther, that as of love, so of all 
 the other passions, the right government and 
 exaltation begins in that of the Imagination, 
 which is lord over them. For to subdue the pas- 
 sions, which is thought so often to be the sum 
 of duty respecting them, is possible enough to 
 a proud dulness ; but to excite them rightly, 
 and make them strong for good, is the work 
 of the unselfish imagination. It is constantly 
 said that human nature is heartless. Do not 
 believe it. Human nature is kind and gener- 
 ous ; but it is narrow and blind ; and can only 
 with difficulty conceive anything but what it 
 immediately sees and feels. People would in- 
 stantly care for others as well as themselves if 
 only they could imagine others as well as them- 
 selves. Let a child fall into the river before 
 the roughest man's eyes; — he will usually do 
 what he can to get it out, even at some risk to 
 129 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 himself; and all the town will triumph in the 
 saving of one little life. Let the same man be 
 shown that hundreds of children are dying of 
 fever for want of some sanitary measure which 
 it will cost him trouble to urge, and he will 
 make no effort; and probably all the town 
 would resist him if he did. So, also, the lives 
 of many deserving women are passed in a suc- 
 cession of petty anxieties about themselves, and 
 gleaming of minute interests and mean pleasures 
 in their immediate circle, because they are 
 never taught to make any effort to look beyond 
 it ; or to know anything about the mighty world 
 in which their lives are fading, like blades of 
 bitter grass in fruitless fields. 
 
 I had intended to enlarge on this — and yet 
 more on the kingdom which every man holds 
 in his conceptive faculty, to be peopled with 
 active thoughts and lovely presences, or left 
 waste for the springing up of those dark desires 
 and dreams of which it is written that " every 
 imagination of the thoughts of man's heart is 
 evil continually." True, and a thousand times 
 true it is, that, here at least, " greater is he that 
 ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city." 
 But this you can partly follow out for yourselves 
 without help, partly we must leave it for future 
 enquiry. I press to the conclusion which I 
 wish to leave with you, that all you can rightly 
 do, or honourably become, depends on the 
 
Art and Morals 
 
 government of these two instincts of order and 
 kindness, by this great Imaginative faculty, 
 which gives you inheritance of the past, grasp 
 of the present, authority over the future. Map 
 out the spaces of your possible lives by its help ; 
 measure the range of their possible agency ! 
 On the walls and towers of this your fair city, 
 there is not an ornament of which the first 
 origin may not be traced back to the thoughts 
 of men who died two thousand years ago. 
 Whom w\\\you be governing by your thoughts, 
 two thousand years hence ? Think of it, and 
 you will find that so far from art being im- 
 moral, little else except art is moral ; that life 
 without industry is guilt, and industry without 
 art is brutality; and for the words "good" and 
 " wicked," used of men, you may almost substi- 
 tute the words "Makers" or "Destroyers." 
 Far the greater part of the seeming prosperity 
 of the world is, so far as our present knowledge 
 extends, vain: wholly useless for any kind of 
 good, but having assigned to it a certain inevi- 
 table sequence of destruction and of sorrow. 
 Its stress is only the stress of wandering storm ; 
 its beauty the hectic of plague: and what is 
 called the history of mankind is too often the 
 record of the whirlwind, and the map of the 
 spreading of the leprosy. But underneath all 
 that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the 
 midst of it, the work of every man, "qui non 
 
 13* 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 accepit in vanitatem animam suam," endures 
 and prospers ; a small remnant or green bud 
 of it prevailing at last over evil. And though 
 faint with sickness, and encumbered in ruin, 
 the true workers redeem inch by inch the wil- 
 derness into garden ground ; by the help of 
 their joined hands the order of all things is 
 surely sustained and vitally expanded, and 
 although with strange vacillation, in the eyes 
 of the watcher, the morning cometh, and also 
 the night, there is no hour of human existence 
 that does not draw on towards the perfect day. 
 And perfect the day shall be, when it is of all 
 men understood that the beauty of Holiness 
 must be in labour as well as in rest. Nay ! 
 more, if it may be, in labour; in our strength, 
 rather than in our weakness ; and in the choice 
 of what we shall work for through the six days, 
 and may know to be good at their evening 
 time, than in the choice of what we pray for on 
 the seventh, of reward or repose. With the 
 multitude that keep holiday, we may perhaps 
 sometimes vainly have gone up to the house 
 of the Lord, and vainly there asked for what 
 we fancied would be mercy ; but for the few who 
 labour as their Lord would have them the mercy 
 needs no seeking, and their wide home no hallow- 
 ing. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow 
 them all the days of their life ; and they shall 
 dwell in the house of the Lord— FOR ever. 
 132 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 Lecture Delivered in the Theatre of the 
 Royal College of Science, Dublin, 1868 
 
 When I accepted the privilege of addressing 
 you to-day, I was not aware of a restriction 
 with respect to the topics of discussion which 
 may be brought before this Society* — a restrict 
 tion which, though entirely wise and right 
 under the circumstances contemplated in its in- 
 troduction, would necessarily have disabled me, 
 thinking as I think, from preparing any lecture 
 for you on the subject of art in a form which 
 might be permanently useful. Pardon me, 
 therefore, in so far as I must transgress such 
 limitation ; for indeed my infringement will be 
 of the letter — not of the spirit — of your com- 
 mands. In whatever I may say touching the 
 religion which has been the foundation of art, 
 or the policy which has contributed to its power, 
 
 * That no reference should be made to religious questions. 
 
 J 35 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 if I offend one, I shall offend all ; for I shall 
 take no note of any separations in creeds, or 
 antagonisms in parties : neither do I fear that 
 ultimately I shall offend any, by proving — or 
 at least stating as capable of positive proof — ■ 
 the connection of all that is best in the crafts 
 and arts of man, with the simplicity of his faith, 
 and the sincerity of his patriotism. 
 
 But I speak to you under another disadvan- 
 tage, by which I am checked in frankness of ut- 
 terance, not here only, but everywhere; namely, 
 that I am never fully aware how far my audi- 
 ences are disposed to give me credit for real know- 
 ledge of my subject, or how far they grant me 
 attention only because I have been sometimes 
 thought an ingenious or pleasant essayist upon 
 it. For I have had what, in many respects, I 
 boldly call the misfortune, to set my words 
 sometimes prettily together; not without a fool- 
 ish vanity in the poor knack that I had of 
 doing so ; until I was heavily punished for this 
 pride, by finding that many people thought of 
 the words only, and cared nothing for their 
 meaning. Happily, therefore, the power of 
 using such pleasant language — if indeed it 
 ever were mine — is passing away from me; 
 and whatever I am now able to say at all, I find 
 myself forced to say with great plainness. For 
 my thoughts have changed also, as my words 
 have; and whereas in earlier life, what little 
 136 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 influence I obtained was due perhaps chiefly to 
 the enthusiasm with which I was able to dwell 
 on the beauty of the physical clouds, and of 
 their colours in the sky ; so all the influence I 
 now desire to retain must be due to the ear- 
 nestness with which I am endeavouring to trace 
 the form and beauty of another kind of cloud 
 than those; the bright cloud, of which it is 
 written — 
 
 "What is your life? It is even as a vapour 
 that appeareth for a little time, and then 
 vanisheth away." 
 
 I suppose few people reach the middle or lat- 
 ter period of their age, without having, at some 
 moment of change or disappointment, felt the 
 truth of those bitter words ; and been startled 
 by the fading of the sunshine from the cloud of 
 their life, into the sudden agony of the know- 
 ledge that the fabric of it was as fragile as a 
 dream, and the endurance of it as transient as 
 the dew. But it is not always that, even at 
 such times as melancholy surprise, we can enter 
 into any true perception that this human life 
 shares, in the nature of it, not only the evan- 
 escence, but the mystery of the cloud ; that its 
 avenues are wreathed in darkness, and its 
 forms and courses no less fantastic, than spec- 
 tral and obscure ; so that not only in the vanity 
 which we cannot grasp, but in the shadow 
 which we cannot pierce, it is true of this cloudy 
 l 37 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 life of ours, that " man walketh in a vain shadow, 
 and disquieteth himself in vain." 
 
 And least of all, whatever may have been the 
 eagerness of our passions, or the height of our 
 pride, are we able to understand in its depth 
 the third and most solemn character in which 
 our life is like those clouds of heaven ; that to 
 it belongs not only their transience, not only 
 their mystery, but also their power ; that in the 
 cloud of the human soul there is a fire stronger 
 than the lightning, and a grace more precious 
 than the rain ; and that though of the good and 
 evil it shall one day be said alike, that the place 
 that knew them knows them no more, there is 
 an infinite separation between those whose 
 brief presence had there been a blessing, like 
 the mist of Eden that went up from the earth to 
 water the garden, and those whose place knew 
 them only as a drifting and changeful shade, 
 of whom the heavenly sentence is, that they are 
 "wells without water; clouds that are carried 
 with a tempest, to whom the mist of darkness 
 is reserved for ever ? " 
 
 To those among us, however, who have lived 
 long enough to form some just estimate of the 
 rate of the changes which are, hour by hour 
 in accelerating catastrophe, manifesting them- 
 selves in the laws, the arts, and the creeds of 
 men, it seems to me, that now at least, if never 
 at any former time, the thoughts of the true 
 
 138 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 nature of our life, and of its powers and re- 
 sponsibilities, should present themselves with 
 absolute sadness and sternness. 
 
 And although I know that this feeling is 
 much deepened in my own mind by disappoint- 
 ment, which, by chance, has attended the 
 greater number of my cherished purposes, I do 
 not for that reason distrust the feeling itself, 
 though I am on my guard against an exagger- 
 ated degree of it : nay, I rather believe that in 
 periods of new effort and violent change, disap- 
 pointment is a wholesome medicine ; and that 
 in the secret of it, as in the twilight so beloved 
 by Titian, we may see the colours of things 
 with deeper truth than in the most dazzling sun- 
 shine. And because these truths about the 
 works of men, which I want to bring to-day 
 before you, are most of them sad ones, though 
 at the same time helpful ; and because also I 
 believe that your kind Irish hearts will answer 
 more gladly to the truthful expression of a 
 personal feeling, than to the exposition of an 
 abstract principle, I will permit myself so much 
 unreserved speaking of my own causes of re- 
 gret, as may enable you to make just allowance 
 for what, according to your sympathies, you 
 will call either the bitterness, or the insight, of 
 a mind which has surrendered its best hopes, 
 and been foiled in its favourite aims. 
 
 I spent the ten strongest years of my life, 
 
 139 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 (from twenty to thirty,) in endeavouring to 
 show the excellence of the work of the man 
 whom I believed, and rightly believed, to be 
 the greatest painter of the schools of England 
 since Reynolds. I had then perfect faith in 
 the power of every great truth or beauty to pre- 
 vail ultimately, and take its right place in use- 
 fulness and honour ; and I strove to bring the 
 painter's work into this due place, while the 
 painter was yet alive. But he knew, better 
 than I, the uselessness of talking about what 
 people could not see for themselves. He always 
 discouraged me scornfully, even when he 
 thanked me — and he died before even the su- 
 perficial effect of my work was visible. I went 
 on, however, thinking I could at least be of use 
 to the public, if not to him, in proving his 
 power. My books got talked about a little. 
 The prices of modern pictures, generally, rose, 
 and I was beginning to take some pleasure in a 
 sense of gradual victory, when, fortunately or 
 unfortunately, an opportunity of perfect trial 
 undeceived me at once, and for ever. The 
 Trustees of the National Gallery commissioned 
 me to arrange the Turner drawings there, and 
 permitted me to prepare three hundred exam- 
 ples of his studies from nature, for exhibition 
 at Kensington. At Kensington they were and 
 are placed for exhibition; but they are not ex- 
 140 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 hibited, for the room in which they hang is 
 always empty. 
 
 Well — this showed me at once, that those 
 ten years of my life had been, in their chief 
 purpose, lost. For that, I did not so much care; 
 I had, at least, learned my own business thor- 
 oughly, and should be able, as I fondly sup- 
 posed, after such a lesson, now to use my 
 knowledge with better effect. But what I did 
 care for, was the — to me frightful — discovery, 
 that the most splendid genius in the arts might 
 be permitted by Providence to labour and perish 
 uselessly ; that in the very fineness of it there 
 might be something rendering it invisible to 
 ordinary eyes; but, that with this strange ex- 
 cellence, faults might be mingled which would 
 be as deadly as its virtues were vain ; that the 
 glory of it was perishable, as well as invisible, 
 and the gift and grace of it might be to us, as 
 snow in summer, and as rain in harvest. 
 
 That was the first mystery of life to me. 
 But, while my best energy was given to the 
 study of painting, I had put collateral effort, 
 more prudent, if less enthusiastic, into that of 
 architecture ; and in this I could not complain 
 of meeting with no sympathy. Among several 
 personal reasons which caused me to desire that 
 I might give this, my closing lecture on the 
 subject of art here, in Ireland, one of the chief 
 141 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 was, that in reading it, I should stand near the 
 beautiful building, — the engineers' school of 
 your college, — which was the first realisation I 
 had the joy to see, of the principles I had, until 
 then, been endeavouring to teach ; but which 
 alas, is now, to me, no more than the richly 
 canopied monument of one of the most earnest 
 souls that ever gave itself to the arts, and one 
 of my truest and most loving friends, Benjamin 
 Woodward. Nor was it here in Ireland only 
 that I received the help of Irish sympathy and 
 genius. When, to another friend, Sir Thomas 
 Deane, with Mr. Woodward, was entrusted the 
 building of the museum at Oxford, the best de- 
 tails of the work were executed by sculptors 
 who had been born and trained here; and the 
 first window of the facade of the building, in 
 which was inaugurated the study of natural sci- 
 ence in England, in true fellowship with litera- 
 ture, was carved from my design by an Irish 
 sculptor. 
 
 You may perhaps think that no man ought 
 to speak of disappointment, to whom, even in 
 one branch of labour, so much success was 
 granted. Had Mr. Woodward now been beside 
 me, I had not so spoken ; but his gentle and 
 passionate spirit was cut off from the fulfilment 
 of its purposes, and the work we did together is 
 now become vain. It may not be so in future; 
 but the architecture we endeavoured to intro- 
 142 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 duce is inconsistent alike with the reckless 
 luxury, the deforming mechanism, and the 
 squalid misery of modern cities; among the 
 formative fashions of the day, aided, especially 
 in England, by ecclesiastical sentiment, it in- 
 deed obtained notoriety ; and sometimes behind 
 an engine furnace, or a railroad bank, you may 
 detect the pathetic discord of its momentary 
 grace, and, with toil, decipher its floral carv- 
 ings choked with soot. I felt answerable to the 
 schools I loved, only for their injury. I per- 
 ceived that this new portion of my strength had 
 also been spent in vain ; and from amidst 
 streets of iron, and palaces of crystal, shrank 
 back at last to the carving of the mountain and 
 colour of the flower. 
 
 And still I could tell of failure, and failure 
 repeated as years went on ; but I have tres- 
 passed enough on your patience to show you, 
 in part, the causes of my discouragement. 
 Now let me more deliberately tell you its re- 
 sults. You know there is a tendency in the 
 minds of many men, when they are heavily dis- 
 appointed in the main purposes of their life, 
 to feel, and perhaps in warning, perhaps in 
 mockery, to declare, that life itself is a vanity. 
 Because it has disappointed them, they think 
 its nature is of disappointment always, or at 
 best, of pleasure that can be grasped by imagi- 
 nation only; that the cloud of it has no strength 
 
 143 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 nor fire within ; but is a painted cloud only, to 
 be delighted in, yet despised. You know how 
 beautifully Pope has expressed this particular 
 phase of thought : — 
 
 " Meanwhile opinion gilds, with varying rays, 
 These painted clouds that beautify our days ; 
 Each want of happiness by hope supplied, 
 And each vacuity of sense, by pride. 
 
 " Hope builds as fast as Knowledge can destroy; 
 In Folly's cup, still laughs the bubble joy. 
 One pleasure past, another still we gain, 
 And not a vanity is given in vain." 
 
 But the effect of failure upon my own mind has 
 been just the reverse of this. The more that 
 my life disappointed me, the more solemn and 
 wonderful it became to me. It seemed, con- 
 trarily to Pope's saying, that the vanity of it 
 was indeed given in vain ; but that there was 
 something behind the veil of it, which was not 
 vanity. It became to me not a painted cloud, 
 but a terrible and impenetrable one : not a 
 mirage, which vanished as I drew near, but a 
 pillar of darkness, to which I was forbidden to 
 draw near. For I saw that both my own fail- 
 ure, and such success in petty things as in its 
 poor triumph seemed to me worse than failure, 
 came from the want of sufficiently earnest effort 
 144 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 to understand the whole law and meaning of 
 existence, and to bring it to noble and due end; 
 as, on the other hand, I saw more and more 
 clearly that all enduring success in the arts, or 
 in any other occupation, had come from the 
 ruling of lower purposes, not by a conviction of 
 their nothingness, but by a solemn faith in the 
 advancing power of human nature, or in the 
 promise, however dimly apprehended, that the 
 mortal part of it would one day be swallowed up 
 in immortality ; and that, indeed, the arts them- 
 selves never had reached any vital strength or 
 honour but in the effort to proclaim this immor- 
 tality, and in the service either of great and 
 just religion, or of some unselfish patriotism, 
 and law of such national life as must be the 
 foundation of religion. 
 
 Nothing that I have ever said is more true or 
 necessary — nothing has been more misunder- 
 stood or misapplied — than my strong assertion, 
 that the arts can never be right themselves, un- 
 less their motive is right. It is misunderstood 
 this way: weak painters, who have never learned 
 their business, and cannot lay a true line, con- 
 tinually come to me, crying out — "Look at 
 this picture of mine ; it must be good, I had 
 such a lovely motive. I have put my whole 
 heart into it, and taken years to think over its 
 treatment." Well, the only answer for these 
 people is — if one had the cruelty to make it — 
 
 145 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 61 Sir, you cannot think over anything in any 
 number of years, — you haven't the head to do 
 it; and though you had fine motives, strong 
 enough to make you burn yourself in a slow- 
 fire, if only first you could paint a picture, you 
 can't paint one, nor half an inch of you ; you 
 haven't the hand to do it." 
 
 But, far more decisively we have to say to the 
 men who do know their business, or may know 
 it if they choose — " Sir, you have this gift and 
 a mighty one ; see that you serve your nation 
 faithfully with it. It is a greater trust than 
 ships and armies : you might cast them away, 
 if you were their captain, with less treason to 
 your people than in casting your own glorious 
 power away, and serving the devil with it in- 
 stead of men. Ships and armies you may re- 
 place if they are lost, but a great intellect, once 
 abused, is a curse to the earth for ever." 
 
 This, then, L meant by saying that the arts 
 must have noble motive. This also I said re- 
 specting them, that they never had prospered, 
 nor could prosper, but when they had such true 
 purpose, and were devoted to the proclamation 
 of divine truth or law. And yet I saw also that 
 they had always failed in this proclamation — 
 that poetry, and sculpture, and painting, though 
 only great when they strove to teach us some- 
 thing about the gods, never had taught us any- 
 thing trustworthy about the gods, but had always 
 146 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 betrayed their trust in the crisis of it, and, with 
 their powers at the full reach, became ministers 
 to pride and to lust. And I felt also, with increas- 
 ing amazement, the unconquerable apathy in 
 ourselves the hearers, no less than in these the 
 teachers ; and that, while the wisdom and Tight- 
 ness of every act and art of life could only be 
 consistent with a right understanding of the 
 ends of life, we were all plunged as in a languid 
 dream — our heart fat, and our eyes heavy, 
 and our ears closed, lest the inspiration of hand 
 or voice should reach us — lest we should see 
 with our eyes, and understand with our hearts, 
 and be healed. 
 
 This intense apathy in all of us is the first 
 great mystery of life; it stands in the way of 
 every perception, every virtue. There is no 
 making ourselves feel enough astonishment at 
 it. That the occupations or pastimes of life 
 should have no motive, is understandable ; but 
 — That life itself should have no motive — that 
 we neither care to find out what it may lead to, 
 nor to guard against its being for ever taken 
 away from us — here is a mystery indeed. For, 
 just suppose I were able to call at this moment 
 to any one in this audience by name, and to tell 
 him positively that I knew a large estate had 
 been lately left to him on some curious condi- 
 tions; but that, though I knew it was large, I did 
 riot know how large, nor even where it was — 
 H7 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 whether in the East Indies or the West, or in 
 England, or at the Antipodes. I only knew it 
 was a vast estate, and that there was a chance 
 of his losing it altogether if he did not soon 
 find out on what terms it had been left to him. 
 Suppose 1 were able to say this positively to 
 any single man in this audience, and he knew 
 that I did not speak without warrant, do you 
 think that he would rest content with that 
 vague knowledge, if it were anywise possible to 
 obtain more ? Would he not give every energy 
 to find some trace of the facts, and never rest 
 till he had ascertained where this place was, 
 and what it was like ? And suppose he were a 
 young man, and all he could discover by his 
 best endeavour was, that the estate was never 
 to be his at all, unless he persevered, during 
 certain years of probation, in an orderly and in- 
 dustrious life; but that, according to the Tight- 
 ness of his conduct, the portion of the estate 
 assigned to him would be greater or less, so 
 that it literally depended on his behaviour from 
 day to day whether he got ten thousand a year, 
 or thirty thousand a year, or nothing whatever 
 — would you not think it strange if the youth 
 never troubled himself to satisfy the conditions 
 in any way, nor even to know what was re- 
 quired of him, but lived exactly as he chose, 
 and never inquired whether his chances of the 
 estate were increasing or passing away ? Well, 
 148 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 you know that this is actually and literally so 
 with the greater number of the educated per- 
 sons now living in Christian countries. Nearly 
 every man and woman, in any company such 
 as this, outwardly professes to believe — and a 
 large number unquestionably think they believe 
 — much more than this; not only that a quite 
 unlimited estate is in prospect for them if they 
 please the Holder of it, but that the infinite 
 contrary of such a possession — an estate of 
 perpetual misery, is in store for them if they 
 displease this great Land-Holder, this great 
 Heaven-Holder. And yet there is not one in a 
 thousand of these human souls that cares to 
 think, for ten minutes of the day, where this 
 estate is, or how beautiful it is, or what kind of 
 life they are to lead in it, or what kind of life 
 they must lead to obtain it. 
 
 You fancy that you care to know this : so 
 little do you care that, probably, at this mo- 
 ment many of you are displeased with me for 
 talking of the matter ! You came to hear 
 about the Art of this world, not about the Life 
 of the next, and you are provoked with me for 
 talking of what you can hear any Sunday in 
 church. But do not be afraid. I will tell you 
 something before you go about pictures, and 
 carvings, and pottery, and what else you would 
 like better to hear of than the other world. 
 Nay, perhaps you say, "We want you to talk 
 149 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 of pictures and pottery, because we are sure 
 that you know something of them, and you 
 know nothing of the other world." Well — I 
 don't. That is quite true. But the very strange « 
 ness and mystery of which I urge you to take 
 notice is in this — that I do not; — nor you 
 either. Can you answer a single bold question 
 unflinchingly about that other world — Are you 
 sure there is a heaven ? Sure there is a hell ? 
 Sure that men are dropping before your faces 
 through the pavements of these streets into 
 eternal fire, or sure that they are not? Sure 
 that at your own death you are going to be de- 
 livered from all sorrow, to be endowed with all 
 virtue, to be gifted with all felicity, and raised 
 into perpetual companionship with a King, com- 
 pared to whom the kings of the earth are as 
 grasshoppers, and the nations as the dust of 
 His feet ? Are you sure of this ? or, if not sure, 
 do any of us so much as care to make it sure ? 
 and, if not, how can anything that we do be 
 right — how can anything we think be wise; 
 what honour can there be in the arts that amuse 
 us, or what profit in the possessions that please ? 
 
 Is not this a mystery of life? 
 
 But farther, you may, perhaps, think it a 
 beneficent ordinance for the generality of men 
 that they do not, with earnestness or anxiety, 
 dwell on such questions of the future ; because 
 the business of the day could not be done if this 
 
 150 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 kind of thought were taken by all of us for the 
 morrow. Be it so: but at least we might an- 
 ticipate that the greatest and wisest of us, who 
 were evidently the appointed teachers of the 
 rest, would set themselves apart to seek out 
 whatever could be surely known of the future 
 destinies of their race; and to teach this in no 
 rhetorical or ambiguous manner, but in the 
 plainest and most severely earnest words. 
 
 Now, the highest representatives of men who 
 have thus endeavoured, during the Christian 
 era, to search out these deep things, and relate 
 them, are Dante and Milton. There are none 
 who for earnestness of thought, for mastery of 
 word, can be classed with these. I am not at 
 present, mind you, speaking of persons set apart 
 in any priestly or pastoral office, to deliver 
 creeds to us, or doctrines ; but of men who try 
 to discover and set forth, as far as by human 
 intellect is possible, the facts of the other world. 
 Divines may perhaps teach us how to arrive 
 there, but only these two poets have in any 
 powerful manner striven to discover, or in any 
 definite words professed to tell, what we shall 
 see and become there : or how those upper and 
 nether worlds are, and have been, inhabited. 
 
 And what have they told us ? Milton's ac- 
 count of the most important event in his whole 
 system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is 
 evidently unbelievable to himself; and the more 
 
 151 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 so, that it is wholly founded on, and in a great 
 part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod's ac- 
 count of the decisive war of the younger gods 
 with the Titans. The rest of his poem is a pic- 
 turesque drama, in which every artifice of in- 
 vention is visibly and consciously employed, not 
 a single fact being, for an instant, conceived as 
 tenable by any living faith. Dante's conception 
 is far more intense, and, by himself, for the 
 time, not to be escaped from ; it is indeed a 
 vision, but a vision only, and that one of the 
 wildest that ever entranced a soul — a dream in 
 which every grotesque type or phantasy of 
 heathen tradition is renewed, and adorned ; 
 and the destinies of the Christian Church, un- 
 der their most sacred symbols, become literally 
 subordinate to the praise, and are only to be 
 understood by the aid, of one dear Florentine 
 maiden. 
 
 I tell you truly that, as I strive more with 
 this strange lethargy and trance in myself, and 
 awake to the meaning and power of life, it 
 seems daily more amazing to me that men such 
 as these should dare to play with the most 
 precious truths (or the most deadly untruths), 
 by which the whole human race listening to 
 them could be informed, or deceived ; — all the 
 world their audiences for ever, with pleased ear, 
 and passionate heart ; — and yet, to this sub- 
 missive infinitude of souls, and evermore suc- 
 
 *S 2 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 ceeding and succeeding multitude, hungry for 
 bread of life, they do but play upon sweetly 
 modulated pipes ; with pompous nomenclature 
 adorn the councils of hell ; touch a troubadour's 
 guitar to the courses of the suns ; and fill the 
 openings of eternity, before which prophets have 
 veiled their faces, and which angels desire to 
 look into, with idle puppets of their scholastic 
 imagination, and melancholy lights of frantic 
 faith in their lost mortal love. 
 
 Is not this a mystery of life ? 
 
 But more. We have to remember that these 
 two great teachers were both of them warped in 
 their temper, and thwarted in their search for 
 truth. They were men of intellectual war, un- 
 able, through darkness of controversy, or stress 
 of personal grief, to discern where their own 
 ambition modified their utterances of the moral 
 law; or their own agony mingled with their 
 anger at its violation. But greater men than 
 these have been — innocent-hearted — too great 
 for contest. Men, like Homer and Shakes- 
 peare, of so unrecognised personality, that it 
 disappears in future ages, and becomes ghostly, 
 like the tradition of a lost he then god. Men, 
 therefore, to whose unoffended, uncondemning 
 sight, the whole of human nature reveals itself 
 in a pathetic weakness, with which they will 
 not strive; or in mournful and transitory 
 strength, which they dare not praise. And all 
 
 *53 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 Pagan and Christian civilisation thus becomes 
 subject to them. It does not matter how little, 
 or how much, any of us have read, either of 
 Homer or Shakespeare : everything round us, 
 in substance, or in thought, has been moulded 
 by them. All Greek gentlemen were educated 
 under Homer. All Roman gentlemen, by 
 Greek literature. All Italian, and French, and 
 English gentlemen, by Roman literature, and 
 by its principles. Of the scope of Shakespeare, 
 I will say only, that the intellectual measure of 
 every man since born, in the domains of cre- 
 ative thought, may be assigned to him, accord- 
 ing to the degree in which he has been taught 
 by Shakespeare. Well, what do these two 
 men, centres of moral intelligence, deliver to 
 us of conviction respecting what it most behoves 
 that intelligence to grasp ? What is their hope ; 
 their crown of rejoicing? what manner of ex- 
 hortation have they for us, or of rebuke ? what 
 lies next their own hearts, and dictates their 
 undying words? Have they any peace to 
 promise to our unrest — any redemption to our 
 misery ? 
 
 Take Homer first, and think if there is any 
 sadder image of human fate than the great 
 Homeric story. The main features in the char- 
 acter of Achilles are its intense desire of justice, 
 and its tenderness of affection. And in that 
 bitter song of the Iliad, this man, though aided 
 
 *54 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 continually by the wisest of the gods, and 
 burning with the desire of justice in his heart, 
 becomes yet, through ill-governed passion, the 
 most unjust of men : and, full of the deepest 
 tenderness in his heart, becomes yet through 
 ill-governed passion, the most cruel of men. 
 Intense alike in love and in friendship, he 
 loses, first his mistress, and then his friend ; 
 for the sake of the one, he surrenders to death 
 the armies of his own land ; for the sake of the 
 other, he surrenders all. Will a man lay down 
 his life for his friend ? Yea — even for his dead 
 friend, this Achilles, though goddess-oorn, and 
 goddess-taught, gives up his kingdom, his 
 country, and his life — casts alike the innocent 
 and guilty, with himself, into one gulf of 
 slaughter, and dies at last by the hand of the 
 basest of his adversaries. Is not this a mystery 
 of life? 
 
 But what, then, is the message to us of our 
 own poet, and searcher of hearts, after fifteen 
 hundred years of Christian faith have been num- 
 bered over the graves of men ? Are his words 
 more cheerful than the heathen's — is his hope 
 more near — his trust more sure — his reading 
 of fate more happy ? Ah, no ! He differs from 
 the heathen poet chiefly in this — that he re- 
 cognises, for deliverance, no gods nigh at hand; 
 and that, by petty chance — by momentary 
 folly — by broken message — by fool's tyranny 
 
 155 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 — or traitor's snare, the strongest and most 
 righteous are brought to their ruin, and perish 
 without word of hope. He indeed, as part of 
 his rendering of character, ascribes the power 
 and modesty of habitual devotion, to the gentle 
 and the just. The death-bed of Katharine is 
 bright with vision of angels ; and the great 
 soldier-king, standing by his few dead, acknow- 
 ledges the presence of the hand that can save 
 alike by many or by few. But observe that 
 from those who with deepest spirit, meditate, 
 and with deepest passion, mourn, there are no 
 such words as these ; nor in their hearts are any 
 such consolations. Instead of the perpetual 
 sense of the helpful presence of the Deity, which, 
 through all heathen tradition, is the source of 
 heroic strength, in battle, in exile, and in the 
 valley of the shadow of death, we find only in 
 the great Christian poet, the consciousness of a 
 moral law, through which "the gods are just, 
 and of our pleasant vices make instruments to 
 scourge us ; " and of the resolved arbitration of 
 the destinies, that conclude into precision of 
 doom what we feebly and blindly began; and 
 force us, when our indiscretion serves us, and 
 our deepest plots do pall, to the confession, that 
 "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough 
 hew them how we will." 
 
 Is not this a mystery of life ? 
 
 Be it so then. About this human life that is 
 
 156 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 to be, or that is, the wise religious men tell us 
 nothing that we can trust ; and the wise con- 
 templative men, nothing that can give us peace. 
 But there is yet a third class, to whom we may- 
 turn — the wise practical men. We have sat 
 at the feet of the poets who sang of heaven, 
 and they have told us their dreams. We have 
 listened to the poets who sang of earth, and 
 they have chanted to us dirges, and words of 
 despair. But there is one class of men more : 
 ■ — men, not capable of vision, nor sensitive to 
 sorrow, but firm of purpose — practised in busi- 
 ness: learned in all that can be, (by hand- 
 ling, — ) known. Men whose hearts and hopes 
 are wholly in this present world, from whom, 
 therefore, we may surely learn, at least, how 5 
 at present, conveniently to live in it. What 
 will they say to us, or show us by example ? 
 These kings — these councillors — these states- 
 men and builders of kingdoms — these capital- 
 ists and men of business, who weigh the earth, 
 and the dust of it, in a balance. They know 
 the world, surely ; and what is the mystery of 
 life to us, is none to them. They can surely 
 show us how to live, while we live, and to 
 gather out of the present world what is best. 
 I think I can best tell you their answer, by 
 telling you a dream I had once. For though I 
 am no poet, I have dreams sometimes: — I 
 dreamed I was at a child's May-day party, in 
 
 157 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 which every means of entertainment had been 
 provided for them, by a wise and kind host. It 
 was in a stately house, with beautiful gardens 
 attached to it; and the children had been set 
 free in the rooms and gardens, with no care 
 whatever but how to pass their afternoon re- 
 joicingly. They did not, indeed, know much 
 about what was to happen next day ; and some 
 of them, I thought, were a little frightened, be- 
 cause there was a chance of their being sent to 
 a new school where there were examinations; 
 but they kept the thoughts of that out of their 
 heads as well as they could, and resolved to 
 enjoy themselves. The house, I said, was in a 
 beautiful garden, and in the garden were all 
 kinds of flowers ; sweet grassy banks for rest ; 
 and smooth lawns for play ; and pleasant 
 streams and woods ; and rocky places for 
 climbing. And the children were happy for a 
 little while, but presently they separated them- 
 selves into parties ; and then each party de- 
 clared, it would have a piece of the garden for 
 its own, and that none of the others should have 
 anything to do with that piece. Next, they 
 quarrelled violently, which pieces they would 
 have ; and at last the boys took up the thing, 
 as boys should do, " practically," and fought in 
 the flower-beds till there was hardly a flower 
 left standing; then they trampled down each 
 other's bits of the garden out of spite ; and the 
 
 158 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 girls cried till they could cry no more ; and so 
 they all lay down at last breathless in the ruin, 
 and waited for the time when they were to be 
 taken home in the evening.* 
 
 Meanwhile, the children in the house had 
 been making themselves happy also in their 
 manner. For them, there had been provided 
 every kind of in-doors pleasure : there was 
 music for them to dance to ; and the library 
 was open, with all manner of amusing books; 
 and there was a museum, full of the most curi- 
 ous shells, and animals, and birds ; and there 
 was a workshop, with lathes and carpenters' 
 tools, for the ingenious boys ; and there were 
 pretty fantastic dresses, for the girls to dress 
 in ; and there were microscopes, and kaleido- 
 scopes ; and whatever toys a child could fancy; 
 and a table, in the dining-room, loaded with 
 everything nice to eat. 
 
 But, in the midst of all this, it struck two or 
 three of the more "practical" children, that 
 they would like some of the brass-headed nails 
 that studded the chairs ; and so they set to 
 work to pull them out. Presently, the others, 
 who were reading, or looking at shells, took a 
 fancy to do the like ; and, in a little while, all 
 
 * I have sometimes been asked what this means. I intended 
 it to set forth the wisdom of men in war contending for king- 
 doms, and what follows to set forth their wisdom in peace, 
 contending for wealth. 
 
 159 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 the children, nearly, were spraining their fingers, 
 in pulling out brass-headed nails. With all 
 that they could pull out, they were not satis- 
 fied; and then, everybody wanted some of 
 somebody else's. And at last the really practi- 
 cal and sensible ones declared, that nothing was 
 of any real consequence, that afternoon, except 
 to get plenty of brass- headed nails ; and that 
 the books, and the cakes, and the microscopes 
 were of no use at all in themselves, but only, if 
 they could be exchanged for nail-heads. And, 
 at last, they began to fight for nail-heads, as 
 the others fought for the bits of garden. Only 
 here and there, a despised one shrank away 
 into a corner, and tried to get a little quiet with 
 a book, in the midst of the noise; but all the 
 practical ones thought of nothing else but count- 
 ing nail-heads all the afternoon — even though 
 they knew they would not be allowed to carry 
 so much as one brass knob away with them. 
 But no — it was — "who has most nails? I 
 have a hundred and you have fifty; or I have 
 a thousand and you have two. I must have as 
 many as you before I leave the house, or I can- 
 not possibly go home in peace." At last, they 
 made so much noise that I awoke, and thought 
 to myself, " What a false dream that is, of 
 children." The child is the father of the man; 
 and wiser. Children never do such foolish 
 things. Only men do. 
 160 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 But there is yet one last class of persons to be 
 interrogated. The wise religious men we have 
 asked in vain ; the wise contemplative men, 
 in vain; the wise worldly men, in vain. But 
 there is another group yet. In the midst of 
 this vanity of empty religion — of tragic con- 
 templation — of wrathful and wretched ambi- 
 tion, and dispute for dust, there is yet one great 
 group of persons, by whom all these disputers 
 live — the persons who have determined, or 
 have had it by a beneficent Providence deter- 
 mined for them, that they will do something 
 useful ; that whatever may be prepared for them 
 hereafter, or happen to them here, they will, at 
 least, deserve the food that God gives them by 
 winning it honourably; and that, however fal- 
 len from the purity, or far from the peace, of 
 Eden, they will carry out the duty of human 
 dominion, though they have lost its felicity; 
 and dress and keep the wilderness, though they 
 no more can dress or keep the garden. 
 
 These, — hewers of wood, and drawers of 
 water — these bent under burdens, or torn of 
 scourges — these, that dig and weave — that 
 plant and build ; workers in wood, and in mar- 
 ble, and in iron — by whom all food, clothing, 
 habitation, furniture, and means of delight are 
 produced, for themselves, and for all men 
 beside; men, whose deeds are good, though 
 their words may be few ; men, whose lives are 
 161 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 serviceable, be they never so short, and worthy 
 of honour, be they never so humble ; — from 
 these, surely at least, we may receive some clear 
 message of teaching : and pierce, for an instant, 
 into the mystery of life, and of its arts. 
 
 Yes; from these, at last, we do receive a les- 
 son. But I grieve to say, or rather — for that 
 is the deeper truth of the matter — I rejoice to 
 say — this message of theirs can only be re- 
 ceived by joining them — not by thinking about 
 them. 
 
 You sent for me to talk to you of art ; and I 
 have obeyed you in coming. But the main 
 thing I have to tell you is, — that art must not 
 be talked about. The fact that there is talk 
 about it at all, signifies that it is ill done, or 
 cannot be done. No true painter ever speaks, 
 or ever has spoken, much of his art. The 
 greatest speak nothing. Even Reynolds is no 
 exception, for he wrote of all that he could not 
 himself do, and was utterly silent respecting 
 all that he himself did. 
 
 The moment a man can really do his work, 
 he becomes speechless about it. All words 
 become idle to him — all theories. 
 
 Does a bird need to theorise about building 
 its nest, or boast of it when built ? All good work 
 is essentially done that way — without hesitation, 
 without difficulty, without boasting; and in the 
 doers of the best, there is an inner and involun- 
 162 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 tary power which approximates literally to the in- 
 stinct of an animal — nay, I am certain that in 
 the most perfect human artists, reason does not 
 supersede instinct, but is added to an instinct 
 as much more divine than that of the lower 
 animals as the human body is more beautiful 
 than theirs; that a great singer sings not with 
 less instinct than the nightingale, but with more 
 — only more various, applicable, and govern- 
 able ; that a great architect does not build with 
 less instinct than the beaver or the bee, but 
 with more — with an innate cunning of propor- 
 tion that embraces all beauty, and a divine in- 
 genuity of skill that improvises all construction. 
 But be that as it may — be the instinct less or 
 more than that of inferior animals — like or un- 
 like theirs, still the human art is dependent on 
 that first, and then upon an amount of practice, 
 of science, — and of imagination disciplined by 
 thought, which the true possessor of it knows 
 to be incommunicable, and the true critic of it, 
 inexplicable, except through long process of 
 laborious years. That journey of life's con- 
 quest, in which hills over hills, and Alps on 
 Alps arose, and sank, — do you think you can 
 make another trace it painlessly, by talking? 
 Why, you cannot even carry us up an Alp, by 
 talking. You can guide us up it, step by step, 
 no otherwise — even so, best silently. You 
 girls, who have been among the hills, know 
 163 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 how the bad guide chatters and gesticulates, 
 and it is " put your foot here," and " mind how 
 you balance yourself there ; " but the good 
 guide walks on quietly, without a word, only 
 with his eyes on you when need is, and his arm 
 like an iton bar, if need be. 
 
 In that slow way, also, art can be taught — 
 if you have faith in your guide, and will let 
 his arm be to you as an iron bar when need is. 
 But in what teacher of art have you such faith ? 
 Certainly not in me ; for, as I told you at first, 
 I know well enough it is only because you think 
 I can talk, not because you think I know my 
 business, that you let me speak to you at all. 
 If I were to tell you anything that seemed to 
 you strange, you would not believe it, and yet 
 it would only be in telling you strange things 
 that I could be of use to you, I could be of 
 great use to you — infinite use, with brief say- 
 ing, if you would believe it ; but you would not, 
 just because the thing that would be of real use 
 would displease you. You are all wild, for in- 
 stance, with admiration of Gustave Dore. 
 Well, suppose I were to tell you in the strongest 
 terms I could use, that Gustave Dore's art 
 was bad — bad, not in weakness, — not in fail- 
 ure,— but bad with dreadful power — the power 
 of the Furies and the Harpies mingled, enrag- 
 ing, and polluting; that so long as you looked 
 at it, no perception of pure or beautiful art was 
 164 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 possible for you. Suppose I were to tell you 
 that ! What would be the use ? Would you 
 look at Gustave Dore less ? Rather more, I 
 fancy. On the other hand, I could soon put 
 you into good humour with me, if I chose. I 
 know well enough what you like, and how to 
 praise it to your better liking. I could talk to 
 you about moonlight, and twilight, and spring 
 flowers, and autumn leaves, and the Madonnas 
 of Raphael — how motherly! and the Sibyls 
 of Michael Angelo — how majestic! and the 
 Saints of Angelico — how pious! and the Cher- 
 ubs of Correggio — how delicious! Old as I 
 am, I could play you a tune on the harp yet, 
 that you would dance to. But neither you nor 
 I should be a bit the better or wiser ; or, if we 
 were, our increased wisdom could be of no prac- 
 tical effect. For, indeed, the arts, as regards 
 teachableness, differ from the sciences also in 
 this, that their power is founded not merely on 
 facts which can be communicated, but on dis- 
 positions which require to be created. Art is 
 neither to be achieved by effort of thinking, nor 
 explained by accuracy of speaking. It is the 
 instinctive and necessary result of powers which 
 can only be developed through the mind of suc- 
 cessive generations, and which finally burst into 
 life under social conditions as slow of growth as 
 the faculties they regulate. Whole seras of 
 mighty history are summed, and the passions 
 
 165 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 of dead myriads are concentrated in the exist- 
 ence of a noble art ; and if that noble art were 
 among us, we should feel it and rejoice; not 
 caring in the least to hear lectures on it ; and 
 since it is not among us, be assured we have to 
 go back to the root of it, or, at least, to the 
 place where the stock of it is yet alive, and the 
 branches began to die. 
 
 And now, may I have your pardon for point- 
 ing out, partly with reference to matters which 
 are at this time of greater moment than the arts 
 — that if we undertook such recession to the 
 vital germ of national arts that have decayed, 
 we should find a more singular arrest of their 
 power in Ireland than in any other European 
 country. For in the eighth century, Ireland 
 possessed a school of art in her manuscripts and 
 sculpture, which, in many of its qualities — ap- 
 parently in all essential qualities of decorative 
 invention — was quite without rival; seeming 
 as if it might have advanced to the highest tri- 
 umphs in architecture and in painting. But 
 there was one fatal flaw in its nature, by which 
 it was stayed, and stayed with a conspicuousness 
 of pause to which there is no parallel : so that, 
 long ago, in tracing the progress of European 
 schools from infancy to strength, I chose for the 
 students of Kensington, in a lecture since pub- 
 lished, two characteristic examples of early art, 
 of equal skill ; but in the one case, skill which 
 1 66 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 was progressive — in the other, skill which 
 was at pause. In the one case, it was work 
 receptive of correction — hungry for correction 
 — and in the other, work which inherently re- 
 jected correction. I chose for them a cor- 
 rigible Eve, and an incorrigible Angel, and I 
 grieve to say that the incorrigible Angel was 
 also an Irish angel ! * 
 
 And the fatal difference lay wholly in this. 
 In both pieces of art there was an equal falling 
 short of the needs of fact ; but the Lombardic 
 Eve knew she was in the wrong, and the Irish 
 Angel thought himself all right. The eager 
 Lombardic sculptor, though firmly insisting on 
 his childish idea, yet showed in the irregular 
 broken touches of the features, and the imper- 
 fect struggle for softer lines in the form, a per- 
 ception of beauty and law that he could not 
 render; there was the strain of effort, under 
 conscious imperfection, in every line. But the 
 Irish missal-painter had drawn his angel with 
 no sense of failure, in happy complacency, and 
 put red dots into the palms of each hand, and 
 rounded the eyes into perfect circles, and, I re- 
 gret to say, left the mouth out altogether, with 
 perfect satisfaction to himself. 
 
 May I without offence ask you to consider 
 whether this mode of arrest in ancient Irish art 
 may not be indicative of points of character 
 
 * See The Two Paths, p. 27. 
 167 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 which even yet, in some measure, arrest your 
 national power ? I have seen much of Irish 
 character, and have watched it closely, for I 
 have also much loved it. And I think the form 
 of failure to which it is most liable is this, 
 that being generous-hearted, and wholly in- 
 tending always to do right, it does not attend 
 to the external laws of right, but thinks it must 
 necessarily do right because it means to do so, 
 and therefore does wrong without finding it out: 
 and then when the consequences of its wrong 
 come upon it, or upon others connected with it, 
 it cannot conceive that the wrong is in anywise 
 of its causing or of its doing, but flies into 
 wrath, and a strange agony of desire for justice, 
 as feeling itself wholly innocent, which leads it 
 farther astray, until there is nothing that it is 
 not capable of doing with a good conscience. 
 
 But mind, I do not mean to say that, in past 
 or present relations between Ireland and Eng- 
 land, you have been wrong, and we right. Far 
 from that, I believe that in all great questions 
 of principle, and in all details of administration 
 of law, you have been usually right, and we 
 wrong; sometimes in misunderstanding you, 
 sometimes in resolute iniquity to you. Never- 
 theless, in all disputes between states, though 
 the strongest is nearly always mainly in the 
 wrong, the weaker is often so in a minor de- 
 gree ; and I think we sometimes admit the pos- 
 sibility of our being in error, and you never do. 
 1 68 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 And now, returning to the broader question 
 what these arts and labours of life have to teach 
 us of its mystery, this is the first of their lessons 
 ■ — that the more beautiful the art, the more it 
 is essentially the work of people who feel them- 
 selves wrong; — who are striving for the fulfil- 
 ment of a law, and the grasp of a loveliness, 
 which they have not yet attained, which they 
 feel even farther and farther from attaining, the 
 more they strive for it. And yet, in still deeper 
 sense, it is the work of people who know also 
 that they are right. The very sense of inevit- 
 able error from their purpose marks the per- 
 fectness of that purpose, and the continued 
 sense of failure arises from the continued open- 
 ing of the eyes more clearly to all the sacredest 
 laws of truth. 
 
 This is one lesson. The second is a very 
 plain, and greatly precious one, namely: — that 
 whenever the arts and labours of life are ful- 
 filled in this spirit of striving against misrule, 
 and doing whatever we have to do, honourably 
 and perfectly, they invariably bring happiness, 
 as much as seems possible to the nature of man. 
 In all other paths, by which that happiness is 
 pursued, there is disappointment, or destruc- 
 tion : for ambition and for passion there is no 
 rest — no fruition ; the fairest pleasures of 
 youth perish in a darkness greater than their 
 past light ; and the loftiest and purest love too 
 often does but inflame the cloud of life with 
 169 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 endless fire of pain. But, ascending from low- 
 est to highest, through every scale of human 
 industry, that industry worthily followed, gives 
 peace. Ask the labourer in the field, at the 
 forge, or in the mine ; ask the patient, delicate- 
 fingered artisan, or the strong-armed, fiery- 
 hearted worker in bronze, and in marble, and 
 in the colours of light ; and none of these, who 
 are true workmen, will ever tell you, that they 
 have found the law of heaven an unkind one — 
 that in the sweat of their face they should eat 
 bread, till they return to the ground; nor that 
 they ever found it an unrewarded obedience, if, 
 indeed, it was rendered faithfully to the com- 
 mand — "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do 
 — do it with thy might." 
 
 These are the two great and constant lessons 
 which our labourers teach us of the mystery of 
 life. But there is another, and a sadder one, 
 which they cannot teach us, which we must 
 read on their tombstones. 
 
 "Do it with thy might." There have been 
 myriads upon myriads of human creatures who 
 have obeyed this law — who have put every 
 breath and nerve of their being into its toil — 
 who have devoted every hour, and exhausted 
 every faculty — who have bequeathed their un- 
 accomplished thoughts at death — who being 
 dead, have yet spoken, by majesty of memory, 
 and strength of example. And, at last, what 
 170 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 has all this " Might" of humanity accomplished, 
 in six thousand years of labour and sorrow ? 
 What has it done ? Take the three chief occu- 
 pations and arts of men, one by one, and count 
 their achievements. Begin with the first — the 
 lord of them all — agriculture. Six thousand 
 years have passed since we were sent to till the 
 ground, from which we were taken. How much 
 of it is tilled ? How much of that which is, 
 wisely or well ? In the very centre and chief gar- 
 den of Europe — where the two forms of parent 
 Christianity have had their fortresses — where 
 the noble Catholics of the Forest Cantons, and 
 the noble Protestants of the Vaudois valleys, 
 have maintained, for dateless ages, their faiths 
 and liberties — there the unchecked Alpine rivers 
 yet run wild in devastation : and the marshes, 
 which a few hundred men could redeem with a 
 a year's labour, still blast their helpless inhabi- 
 tants into fevered idiotism. That is so, in the 
 centre of Europe ! While, on the near coast of 
 Africa, once the Garden of the Hesperides, an 
 Arab woman, but a few sunsets since, ate her 
 child, for famine. And, with all the treasures 
 of the East at our feet, we, in our own domin- 
 ion, could not find a few grains of rice, for a 
 people that asked of us no more ; but stood by, 
 and saw five hundred thousand of them perish 
 of hunger. 
 
 Then, after agriculture, the art of kings, take 
 171 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 the next head of human arts — weaving; the 
 art of queens, honoured of all noble heathen 
 women, in the person of their virgin goddess — 
 honoured of all Hebrew women, by the word 
 of their wisest king — " She layeth her hands 
 to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff; 
 she stretcheth out her hand to the poor. She 
 is not afraid of the snow for her household, for 
 all her household are clothed with scarlet. She 
 maketh herself covering of tapestry, her cloth- 
 ing is silk and purple. She maketh fine linen, 
 and selleth it, and delivereth girdles to the mer- 
 chant." What have w T e done in all these thou- 
 sands of years with this bright art of Greek 
 maid and Christian matron ? Six thousand 
 years of weaving, and have we learned to 
 weave ? Might not every naked wall have 
 been purple with tapestry, and every feeble 
 breast fenced with sweet colours from the cold ? 
 What have we done ? Our fingers are too few, 
 it seems, to twist together some poor covering 
 for our bodies. W T e set our streams to work for 
 us, and choke the air with fire, to turn our 
 spinning-wheels — and, — are we yet clothed? 
 Are not the streets of the capitals of Europe 
 foul with the sale of cast clouts and rotten rags ? 
 Is not the beauty of your sweet children left in 
 wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better 
 honour, nature clothes the brood of the bird in 
 its nest, and the suckling of the wolf in her 
 172 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 den ? And does not every winter's snow robe 
 what you have not robed, and shroud what 
 you have not shrouded ; and every winter's 
 wind bear up to heaven its wasted souls, to wit- 
 ness against you hereafter, by the voice of their 
 Christ, — "I was naked, and ye clothed me 
 not?" 
 
 Lastly — take the Art of Building — the 
 strongest — proudest — most orderly — most en- 
 during of the arts of man, that, of which the 
 produce is in the surest manner accumulative, 
 and need not perish, or be replaced; but if 
 once well done, will stand more strongly than 
 the unbalanced rocks — more prevalently than 
 the crumbling hills. The art which is associ- 
 ated with all civic pride and sacred principle ; 
 with which men record their power — satisfy 
 their enthusiasm — make sure their defence — 
 define and make dear their habitation. And, 
 in six thousand years of building, what have 
 we done ? Of the greater part of all that skill 
 and strength, no vestige is left, but fallen 
 stones, that encumber the fields and impede the 
 streams. But, from this waste of disorder, and 
 of time, and of rage, what is left to us ? Con- 
 structive and progressive creatures that we are, 
 with ruling brains, and forming hands, capable 
 of fellowship, and thirsting for fame, can we 
 not contend, in comfort, with the insects of the 
 forest, or, in achievement, with the worm of 
 
 173 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 the sea ? The white surf rages in vain against 
 the ramparts built by poor atoms of scarcely 
 nascent life ; but only ridges of formless ruin 
 mark the places where once dwelt our noblest 
 multitudes. The ant and the moth have cells 
 for each of their young, but our little ones lie in 
 festering heaps, in homes that consume them 
 like graves ; and night by night, from the 
 corners of our streets, rises up the cry of the 
 homeless — " I was a stranger, and ye took me 
 not in.' , 
 
 Must it be always thus ? Is our life for ever 
 to be without profit — without possession ? 
 Shall the strength of its generations be as bar- 
 ren as death ; or cast away their labour, as the 
 wild fig tree casts her untimely figs ? Is it all a 
 dream then — the desire of the eyes and the 
 pride of life — or, if it be, might we not live in 
 nobler dream than this ? The poets and pro- 
 phets, the wise men, and the scribes, though 
 they have told us nothing about a life to come, 
 have told us much about the life that is now. 
 They have had — they also, — their dreams, 
 and we have laughed at them. They have 
 dreamed of mercy, and cf justice ; they have 
 dreamed of peace and good- will; they have 
 dreamed of labour undisappointed, and of rest 
 undisturbed; they have dreamed of fulness in 
 harvest, and overflowing in store ; they have 
 dreamed of wisdom in council, and of providence 
 174 
 
The Mystery ot Life 
 
 in law ; of gladness of parents, and strength of 
 children, and glory of grey hairs. And at 
 these visions of theirs we have mocked, and 
 held them for idle and vain, unreal and unac- 
 complishable. What have we accomplished 
 with our realities? Is this what has come of 
 our worldly wisdom, tried against their folly? 
 this our mightiest possible, against their im- 
 potent ideal? or have we only wandered among 
 the spectra of a baser felicity, and chased phan- 
 toms of the tombs, instead of visions of the 
 Almighty; and walked after the imaginations 
 of our evil hearts, instead of after the counsels 
 of Eternity, until our lives — not in the likeness 
 of the cloud of heaven, but of the smoke of 
 hell — have become " as a vapour, that ap- 
 peareth for a little time, and then vanisheth 
 away ? " 
 
 Does it vanish then ? Are you sure of that ? — 
 sure, that the nothingness of the grave will be 
 a rest from this troubled nothingness; and that 
 the coiling shadow, which disquiets itself in 
 vain, cannot change into the smoke of the tor- 
 ment that ascends for ever? Will any answer 
 that they are sure of it, and that there is no 
 fear, nor hope, nor desire, nor labour, whither 
 they go? Be it so; will you not, then, make 
 as sure of the Life, that now is, as you are of 
 the Death that is to come ? Your hearts are 
 wholly in this world — will you not give them to 
 
 *75 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 it wisely, as well as perfectly ? And see, first 
 of all, that you have hearts, and sound hearts, 
 too, to give. Because you have no heaven to 
 look for, is that any reason that you should 
 remain ignorant of this wonderful and infinite 
 earth, which is firmly and instantly given you 
 in possession ? Although your days are num- 
 bered, and the following darkness sure, is it 
 necessary that you should share the degradation 
 of the brute, because you are condemned to its 
 mortality ; or live the life of the moth, and 
 of the worm, because you are to companion 
 them in the dust? Not so; we may have 
 but a few thousands of days to spend, perhaps 
 hundreds only — perhaps tens; nay, the longest 
 of our time and best, looked back on, will be 
 but as a moment, as the twinkling of an eye ; 
 still, we are men, not insects; we are living 
 spirits, not passing clouds. " He maketh the 
 winds His messengers ; the momentary fire, 
 His minister ; " and shall we do less than these t 
 Let us do the work of men while we bear the 
 form of them; and, as we snatch our narrow 
 portion of time out of Eternity, snatch also our 
 narrow inheritance of passion out of Immortal- 
 ity — even though our lives ^as a vapour, that 
 appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth 
 away. 
 
 But there are some of you who believe not 
 this — who think this cloud of life has no such 
 176 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 close — that it is to float, revealed and illu- 
 mined, upon the floor of heaven, in the day 
 when He cometh with clouds, and every eye 
 shall see Him. Some day, you believe, within 
 these five, or ten, or twenty years, for every 
 one of us the judgment will be set, and the 
 books opened. If that be true, far more than 
 that must be true. Is there but one day of 
 judgment ? Why, for us every day is a day of 
 judgment — every day is a Dies Irae, and writes 
 its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its West. 
 Think you that judgment waits till the doors 
 of the grave are opened? It waits at the doors 
 of your houses — it waits at the corners of your 
 streets ; we are in the midst of judgment — the 
 insects that we crush are our judges — the mo- 
 ments that we fret away are our judges — the 
 elements that feed us, judge, as they minister 
 — and the pleasures that deceive us, judge as 
 they indulge. Let us, for our lives, do the 
 work of Men while we bear the Form of them, 
 if indeed those lives are Not as a vapour, and 
 do Not vanish away. 
 
 "The work of men" — and what is that? 
 Well, we may any of us know very quickly, on 
 the condition of being wholly ready to do it. 
 But many of us are for the most part thinking, 
 not of what we are to do, but of what we are to 
 get ; and the best of us are sunk into the sin 
 of Ananias, and it is a mortal one — we want 
 177 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 to keep back part of the price ; and we continu- 
 ally talk of taking up our cross, as if the only 
 harm in a cross was the weight of it — as if it 
 was only a thing to be carried, instead of to be 
 — crucified upon. " They that are His have 
 crucified the flesh, with the affections and lusts. " 
 Does that mean, think you, that in time of 
 national distress, of religious trial, of crisis for 
 every interest and hope of humanity — none of 
 us will cease jesting, none cease idling, none put 
 themselves to any wholesome work, none take 
 so much as a tag of lace off their footmen's 
 coats, to save the world? Or does it rather 
 mean, that they are ready to leave houses, 
 lands, and kindreds — yes, and life, if need be? 
 Life ! — some of us are ready enough to throw 
 that away, joyless as we have made it. But 
 " station in Life " — how many of us are ready 
 to quit that? Is it not always the great objec- 
 tion, where there is question of finding some- 
 thing useful to do — "We cannot leave our 
 stations in Life ? " 
 
 Those of us who really cannot — that is to 
 say, who can only maintain themselves by con- 
 tinuing in some business or salaried office, have 
 already something to do : and all that they 
 have to see to, is that they do it honestly and 
 with all their might. But with most people 
 who use that apology, "remaining in the sta- 
 tion of life to which Providence has called them," 
 178 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 means keeping all the carriages, and all the 
 footmen and large houses they can possibly pay 
 for ; and, once for all, I say that if ever Provi- 
 dence did put them into stations of that sort 
 — which is not at all a matter of certainty — 
 Providence fc> just now vefy distinctly calling 
 them out again. Levi's station in life was the 
 receipt of custom; and Peter's, the shore of 
 Galilee; and Paul's, the antechambers of the 
 High Priest, — which " station in life " each had 
 to leave, with brief notice. 
 
 And, whatever our station in life may be, at 
 this crisis, those of us who mean to fulfil our 
 duty ought, first, to live on as little as we can ; 
 and, secondly, to do all the wholesome work for 
 it we can, and to spend all we can spare in doing 
 all the sure good we can. 
 
 And sure good is first in feeding people, then 
 in dressing people, then in lodging people, and 
 lastly in rightly pleasing people, with arts, or 
 sciences, or any other subject of thought. 
 
 I say first in feeding ; and, once for all, do 
 not let yourselves be deceived by any of the 
 common talk of " indiscriminate charity." The 
 order to us is not to feed the deserving hungry^ 
 nor the industrious hungry, nor the amiable 
 and well-intentioned hungry, but simply to feed 
 the hungry. It is quite true, infallibly true, 
 that if any man will not work, neither should he 
 eat — think of that, and every time you sit 
 179 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 down to your dinner, ladies and gentlemen, 
 say solemnly, before you ask a blessing, " How 
 much work have I done to-day for my dinner ? " 
 But the proper way to enforce that order on 
 those below you, as well as on yourselves, is not 
 to leave vagabonds and honest people to starve 
 together, but very distinctly to discern and 
 seize your vagabond; and shut your vagabond 
 up out of honest people's way, and very sternly 
 then see that, until he has worked, he does not 
 eat. But the first thing is to be sure you have 
 the food to give ; and, therefore, to enforce the 
 organisation of vast activities in agriculture and 
 in commerce, for the production of the whole- 
 somest food, and proper storing and distribu- 
 tion of it, so that no famine shall any more 
 be possible among civilised beings. There is 
 plenty of work in this business alone, and at 
 once, for any number of people who like to 
 engage in it. 
 
 Secondly, dressing people — that is to say, 
 urging every one within reach of your influence 
 to be always neat and clean, and giving them 
 means of being so. In so far as they absolutely 
 refuse, you must give up the effort with respect 
 to them, only taking care that no children 
 within your sphere of influence shall any more 
 be brought up with such habits ; and that every 
 person who is willing to dress with propriety 
 shall have encouragement to do so. And the 
 

 The Mystery of Life 
 
 first absolutely necessary step towards this is the 
 gradual adoption of a consistent dress for differ- 
 ent ranks of persons, so that their rank shall be 
 known by their dress ; and the restriction of 
 the changes of fashion within certain limits. 
 All which appears for the present quite impos- 
 sible ; but it is only so far as even difficult as it 
 is difficult to conquer our vanity, frivolity, and 
 desire to appear what we are not. And it is 
 not, nor ever shall be, creed of mine, that these 
 mean and shallow vices are unconquerable by 
 Christian women. 
 
 And then, thirdly, lodging people, which you 
 may think should have been put first, but I put 
 it third, because we must feed and clothe people 
 where we find them, and lodge them afterwards. 
 And providing lodgment for them means a 
 great deal of vigorous legislation, and cutting 
 down of vested interests that stand in the way, 
 and after that, or before that, so far as we can 
 get it, thorough sanitary and remedial action in 
 the houses that we have ; and then the building 
 of more, strongly, beautifully, and in groups 
 of limited extent, kept in proportion to their 
 streams, and walled round, so that there may 
 be no festering and wretched suburb anywhere, 
 but clean and busy street within, and the open 
 country without, with a belt of beautiful garden 
 and orchard round the walls, so that from any 
 part of the city perfectly fresh air and grass, 
 181 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 and sight of far horizon might be reachable 
 in a few minutes' walk. This is the final aim ; 
 but in immediate action every minor and pos- 
 sible good to be instantly done, when, and as, 
 we can ; roofs mended that have holes in them 
 — fences patched that have gaps in them — 
 walls buttressed that totter — and floors propped 
 that shake ; cleanliness and order enforced with 
 our own hands and eyes, till we are breathless, 
 every day. And all the fine arts will healthily 
 follow. I myself have washed a flight of stone 
 stairs all down, with bucket and broom, in a 
 Savoy inn, where they hadn't washed their 
 stairs since they first went up them ; and I 
 never made a better sketch than that afternoon. 
 These, then, are the three first needs of civil- 
 ised life ; and the law for every Christian man 
 and woman is, that they shall be in direct ser- 
 vice towards one of these three needs, as far as 
 is consistent with their own special occupation, 
 and if they have no special business, then 
 wholly in one of these services. And out of 
 such exertion in plain duty all other good will 
 come ; for in this direct contention with ma- 
 terial evil, you will find out the real nature of 
 all evil ; you will discern by the various kinds 
 of resistance, what is really the fault and main 
 antagonism to good; also you will find the 
 most unexpected helps and profound lessons 
 given, and truths will come less down to us 
 182 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 which the speculation of all our lives would 
 never have raised us up to. You will find 
 nearly every educational problem solved, as 
 soon as you truly want to do something; 
 everybody will become of use in their own fit- 
 test way, and will learn what is best for them 
 to know in that use. Competitive examination 
 will then, and not till then, be wholesome, be- 
 cause it will be daily, and calm, and in prac- 
 tice ; and on these familiar arts, and minute, 
 but certain and serviceable knowledges, will be 
 surely edified and sustained the greater arts and 
 splendid theoretical sciences. 
 
 But much more than this. On such holy 
 and simple practice will be founded, indeed, at 
 last, an infallible religion. The greatest of all 
 the mysteries of life, and the most terrible, is 
 the corruption of even the sincerest religion, 
 which is not daily founded on rational, effective, 
 humble, and helpful action. Helpful action, 
 observe ! for there is just one law, which obeyed, 
 keeps all religions pure — forgotten, makes 
 them all false. Whenever in any religious 
 faith, dark or bright, we allow our minds to 
 dwell upon the points in which we differ from 
 other people, we are wrong, and in the devil's 
 power. That is the essence of the Pharisee's 
 thanksgiving — " Lord, I thank thee that I am 
 not as other men are." At every moment of 
 our lives we should be trying to find out, not in 
 
 183 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 what we differ with other people, but in what 
 we agree with them ; and the moment we find 
 we can agree as to anything that should be 
 done, kind or good, (and who but fools couldn't?) 
 then do it ; push at it together ; you can't quar- 
 rel in a side-by-side push ; but the moment that 
 even the best men stop pushing, and begin 
 talking, they mistake their pugnacity for piety, 
 and it's all over. I will not speak of the crimes 
 which in past times have been committed in the 
 name of Christ, nor of the follies which are at 
 this hour held to be consistent with obedience 
 to Him : but I will speak of the morbid corrup- 
 tion and waste of vital power in religious senti- 
 ment, by which the pure strength of that which 
 should be the guiding soul of every nation, the 
 splendour of its youthful manhood, and spotless 
 light of its maidenhood, is averted or cast away. 
 You may see continually girls who have never 
 been taught to do a single useful thing thor- 
 oughly; who cannot sew, who cannot cook, 
 who cannot cast an account, nor prepare a 
 medicine, whose whole life has been passed 
 either in play or in pride ; you will find girls 
 like these when they are earnest-hearted, cast 
 all their innate passion of religious spirit, which 
 was meant by God to support them through 
 the irksomeness of daily toil, into grievous and 
 vain meditation over the meaning of the great 
 Book, of which no syllable was ever yet to be 
 184 
 
The Mystery of Life 
 
 understood but through a deed ; all the instinc- 
 tive wisdom and mercy of their womanhood 
 made vain, and the glory of their pure con- 
 sciences warped into fruitless agony concerning 
 questions which the laws of common service- 
 able life would have either solved for them in 
 an instant, or kept out of their way. Give such 
 a girl any true work that will make her active 
 in the dawn, and weary at night, with the con- 
 sciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed 
 been the better for her day, and the powerless 
 sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself 
 into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace. 
 So with our youths. We once taught them 
 to make Latin verses, and called them edu- 
 cated ; now we teach them to leap and to row, 
 to hit a ball with a bat, and call them educated. 
 Can they plough, can they sow, can they plant 
 at the right time, or build with a steady hand ? 
 Is it the effort of their lives to be chaste, 
 knightly, faithful, holy in thought, lovely in 
 word and deed ? Indeed it is, with some, nay 
 with many, and the strength of England is in 
 them, and the hope ; but we have to turn their 
 courage from the toil of war to the toil of mercy ; 
 and their intellect from dispute of words to dis- 
 cernment of things ; and their knighthood from 
 the errantry of adventure to the state and fidel- 
 ity of a kingly power. And then, indeed, shall 
 abide, for them, and for us an incorruptible 
 
 185 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 felicity, and an infallible religion ; shall abide 
 for us Faith, no more to be assailed by tempta- 
 tion, no more to be defended by wrath and by 
 fear ; — shall abide with us Hope, no more to be 
 quenched by the years that overwhelm, or made 
 ashamed by the shadows that betray ; shall 
 abide for us, and with us, the greatest of these ; 
 the abiding will, the abiding name, of our 
 Father. For the greatest of these, is Charity. 
 
 186 
 
Peace 
 
 
Peace 
 
 HAVE you ever thought seriously of the mean- 
 ing of that blessing given to the peacemakers ? 
 People are always expecting to get peace in 
 heaven ; but you know whatever peace they 
 get there will be ready-made. Whatever mak- 
 ing of peace they can be blest for, must be on 
 the earth here : not the taking of arms against, 
 but the building of nests amidst, its "sea of 
 troubles. " Difficult enough, you think? Per- 
 haps so, but I do not see that any of us try. 
 We complain of the want of many things — we 
 want votes, we want liberty, we want amuse- 
 ment, we want money. Which of us feels, or 
 knows, that he wants peace ? 
 
 There are two ways of getting it, if you do 
 want it. The first is wholly in your own power; 
 to make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. 
 Those are nests on the sea indeed, but safe be- 
 yond all others; only they need much art in 
 the building. None of us yet know, for none 
 189 
 
John Ruskin 
 
 of us have yet been taught in early youth, what 
 fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought 
 
 — proof against all adversity. Bright fancies, 
 satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful say- 
 ings, treasure-houses of precious and restful 
 thoughts, which care cannot disturb, nor pain 
 make gloomy, nor poverty take away from us 
 
 — houses built without hands, for our souls to 
 live in. 
 
 And in actual life, let me assure you, in con- 
 clusion, the first " wisdom of calm," is to plan, 
 and resolve to labour for, the comfort and 
 beauty of a home such as, if we could obtain it, 
 we would quit no more. Not a compartment 
 of a model lodging-house, not the number so- 
 and-so of Paradise Row; but a cottage all of 
 our own, with its little garden, its pleasant view, 
 its surrounding fields, its neighbouring stream, 
 its healthy air, and clean kitchen, parlours, and 
 bedrooms. Less than this, no man should be 
 content with for his nest ; more than this few 
 should seek : but if it seem to you impossible, 
 or wildly imaginary, that such houses should 
 ever be obtained for the greater part of the 
 English people, again believe me, the obstacles 
 which are in the way of our obtaining them are 
 the things which it must be the main object now 
 of all true science, true art, and true literature 
 to overcome. Science does its duty, not in tell- 
 ing us the causes of spots in the sun ; but in 
 190 
 
Peace 
 
 explaining to us the laws of our own life, and 
 the consequences of their violation. Art does 
 its duty, not in filling monster galleries with 
 frivolous, or dreadful, or indecent pictures ; but 
 in completing the comforts and refining the 
 pleasures of daily occurrence, and familiar ser- 
 vice : and literature does its duty, not in wast- 
 ing our hours in political discussion, or in idle 
 fiction; but in raising our fancy to the height of 
 what may be noble, honest, and felicitous in ac- 
 tual life; — in giving us, though we may ourselves 
 be poor and unknown, the companionship of 
 the wisest fellow-spirits of every age and coun- 
 try, — and in aiding the communication of clear 
 thoughts and faithful purposes, among distant 
 nations, which will at last breathe calm upon 
 the sea of lawless passion, and change into such 
 halcyon days the winter of the world, that the 
 birds of the air may have their nests in peace, 
 and the Son of Man, where to lay his head. 
 
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