RUSKIN'S CAREER VIEWED AS A TRAGEDY.

 It is twenty-one years since John Ruskin, the English writer, died and something over a century since he was born. The impression he left on his own generation was vivid and intense, but we of to-day hear only as faint reverberations the controversial storms in which his life was spent. In connection with the publication of a centenary volume, Ruskin the Prophet (Dutton). containing estimates by John Masefield, Dean Inge, C. F. G. Masterman, Lawrence Binyon, J. A. Hobson and others, the questions are worth asking; What does he mean to the men and women of the present time? How  is his message still a living message? and above all, What is the net result of the doctrines he preached?
The spirit of the new volume is strangely contradictory. While all of the contributors to it endeavour to emphasise the positive side of Ruskin's genius and to show that his influence is still an inspiration, the total impression conveyed is one of frustrated idealism. The moralistic art-philosophy he enunciated in matchless prose in " Modern Painters" and others of his works already seems old-fashioned. The social ideas that obsessed him during his later years were perverted by the war and are even identified with Bolshevism by one of the writers in the present volume. The fact is, as Dean Inge puts it, that Ruskin's teaching, like all other prophetical messages, is as leaven hid in three measures of meal. "There is no likelihood of its having any visible or palpable effect upon society at large." One of his fullest confessions of faith appears in a statement of principles written for an organisation that he called St. George's Guild. He was much of a Socialist, but his Socialism was anti-democratic and anti-libertarian. "Not merely," says J. A. Hobson, "did he repudiate with violence two out of the three terms of the revolutionary trinity, viz., liberty and equality, insisting that men were not equal and not intended to be free, but, following his master, Carlyle, he stretched to an extreme the rights of masterhood and authority."
Ruskin never explained where the masterhood and authority he believed in were to come from, and it is one of the ironies of history that his pure and idealistic theories, turned out, in practice, just the opposite of what he intended. "So far as I can learn," writes C. F. G. Masterman, "the whole apparatus of government in what is called Bolshevist Russia carries out almost in detail the ideals of St. George's Guild. You have the same contempt for democracy and liberty, and the same determination that the ordinary man must put himself absolutely under the control of those self-sacrificing leaders who are determined to direct him in the way that he should go. You have the same ideal of communist activity, and especially communist activity in land. You have the same high and almost austere ideal of the sacrifice of the whole citizens for the education of the coming generation. . . I think, when the story is told. . ." you will find that Lenin and his ideal community owe less to Karl Marx than to John Ruskin."
The tragedy of Ruskin, as Leo Stein views it in the New Republic, was a double tragedy, "for his failure was immediate as well as ultimate."
"He bitterly recognised that people would read him because he had the gift of gab, and because he could twist sonorous strings of beautiful words. He was well aware that little groups of serious thinkers would struggle thoughtfully with difficult passages, and, having solved them, would go forth in the conviction that he had not lived in vain, nor they either. But it was not for such ends as these that Ruskin had agonised. Ho had sweated blood in searching out the truth. Each time that he believed himself to have found one of its jewels, he had rushed forth eager to display it and to make the world partakers of his new-found wealth. He wanted people to see in Turner a revelation of the' beauty of nature. He had hoped to open their eyes and to make them value the revelation, and he sought to enrich their lives by making them active participants in it. His books were books of rapturous exposition that should lead men deeper into the understanding of the splendour that is the body of nature and the glory that is its soul. He found the art appreciation of his time to be, almost entirely, a concern with the charm of beauty, an indulgence for one's leisure moments, an affair essentially of the leisure classes. He thought that beauty was the birthright of all men, and that the greater part of mankind were being defrauded of their rights. He soon came to see that the bitterest enemy to beauty in life was the factory system and the modern industrial organisation ; and almost all the years of his maturer life were spent in a losing warfare against this monster."
Ruskin was a critic, according to Mr. Stein, but not a critic for the sake of criticism. He was a man with very definite convictions concerning things as they ought to be and as they were not, and he proceeded strenuously to set them right. "At the first he felt sure of himself, but, as he developed, his certainties were more and more displaced by uncertainties. He may have been a little mad in his assurances as in his doubts, but "his madness," Mr. Stein assures us, "was a noble thing, and not a submissive stupidity." The argument proceeds:
"Ruskin was a neurotic and he was honest, than which no worse fate is possible to man. He had a vision and his honesty compelled him to live in accord with it. Many men have some real beliefs, but most of them are far too clever to allow to those beliefs any part or function in the day's work. These men are the politicians of life, and to them belong the kingdoms of the earth. Others are the seekers after truth, those who reject the compromises of convenience and advantage, and follow the lead of what, to them, is evidence. Among these are the few who are privileged or fated to believe that faith moves mountains. Sometimes, indeed, it does, but the moved mountain is almost never stable, and after a little while, and in most cases, it comes rocking back, to crush the overenthusiastic disturber. Tho politician often will admit the mountain to be in the way. In fact, he may go further and admit that, in part, at least, it is not as sound a mountain as it seems, that it is indeed mostly a great heap of rubbish; but none the less he recommends that if one must get to the other side, a way around it may be found." It is the great historic tragedy of the truth-seeker, Mr. Stein declares, that he should be buried with honour by his enemies, and that he should find his tomb within the rubbish heap which he has tried to move with faith and works. "So is Jesus honoured by the princes of the church and of the state and of the market place. So was the humility of Francis conserved in the pride of the mendicant orders, and so was Ruskin celebrated in the disquisition of aesthetes and in the higher prices paid for Tintoretto and Fra Angelico." The article concludes:
"Of course, the seeker after truth is not without his share in the responsibility. Even though the mountain be a heap of rubbish it is a real heap and has a meaning in the world. Ruskin, like other seers, was honesty but he was mad and had the simple faith that the truth would set you free. And there in he ignored the lie that lives with truth at the heart of things.
"The neurotic is totally unable to evaluate the reality of that which is unreal to his experience. He cannot rightfully estimate the world's needs. The tragedy of the politician is to be hoisted with his own petard, to find his own cunning and adaptability recoil upon him, but the personal tragedy of the seeker after truth is to find that the world-context of his own passionate faith remains unknown to him, and therefore he becomes enmeshed, bewildered, and in the end strangled by the unknown which was to him a lie only, but which was only in part a lie, and which, to his undoing, his own half truth ignored."

Northern Champion (Taree, NSW : 1913 - 1954), Sunday 16 October 1921, page 7