St. George's Company

FOR seven years past Mr. John Ruskin has published monthly a pamphlet letter addressed to the workmen and laborers of Great Britain. In one of the recent numbers of Fors Clavigera¹ — as this series of letters is named —he intimates that during these seven years he has been engaged in setting forth principles which are now to have a more manifest declaration in the work of St. George’s Company, a society ordered mainly by Mr. Ruskin, who holds the post of master in it. A review of the letters, then, may show what St. George’s Company is, and what Mr. Ruskin is so earnest and persistent about. It may show this, but to the casual reader the letters, taken separately, seem desultory and hap-hazard, as if the author merely wrote down what happened to be uppermost in his mind at the time, with no method or thought for what should follow, letting chance carry the key for him. At the end of most of the letters appears a body of notes and correspondence, containing letters from friends and others to the author, with rejoinders and comments, and clippings from current newspapers, all intended to emphasize some point in the Fors in hand, or a previous number; accounts current of St. George’s Fund or Affairs of the Company, with copies of Mr. Ruskin’s own expense account. Occasional photographic frontispieces from works of art easily beguile one into thinking that he is in the neighborhood of Mr. Ruskin the critic in art.

A still closer examination would disclose discussions of rent, wages, capital, and interest; comments on the FrancoGerman war and the Paris Commune; inquiries whether bishops really oversee; suggestions as to the proper reading of the Bible; observations upon modern modes of education; a receipt for Yorkshire goose pie; translations from Plato, Marmontel, and a Swiss pastor’s pretty story of The Broom Merchant; passages from Walter Scott’s life; comments on scenes and characters in Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray; with many bits of autobiography, and a wide range of minor topics illustrative of the work in hand. One might be pardoned if he failed to see precisely what Mr. Ruskin’s aim has been; but Mr. Ruskin would not pardon him, or rather he would waste no concern on the casual reader, for he exacts of his readers the tribute of close attention, and has no wish to tell them anything that they can understand without taking trouble. Meanwhile, he has himself, in two or three passages, summed up the main contents of his letters, and it is quite possible to get from these summaries the outline of his plan so far as it has shaped itself. The reason for writing the letters is the reason for forming St. George’s Company: it is despair of England as it is, and hope of what it may be if there is only a return to a few simple principles of honor and honesty which prevailed in an older England. These principles he formulates at the close of his second letter:—

To do your own work well, whether it be for life or for death.

To keep other people at theirs when you can, and seek to avenge no injury.

To be sure you can obey good laws before you seek to alter bad ones.

Honesty, Friendliness, Obedience, — these are the three words by which he seeks to reform England; words easily spoken, we may say, yet wrung bitterly from Carlyle and Ruskin, and frothing a little in Tennyson’s Maud. Let us see what practical measures our philosopher offers to a people who pride themselves on their practicalness. He tells them that, there are three material things essential to life: pure air, water, and earth; three immaterial things alike essential: Admiration, Hope, and Love. They vitiate pure air with foul chemical exhalations, while the horrible nests called towns are little more than laboratories for the distillation into heaven of venomous smokes and smells, mixed with effluvia from decaying animal matter, and infectious miasmata from purulent disease; they have changed every river of England into a common sewer; they have turned their science to the invention of explosive and deathful instead of blossoming and lifegiving dust. For the immaterial essential things, instead of admiration they have learned contempt and conceit, instinctively hating the good and destroying it; and for hope the whole spirit is doubting and timid, with no confidence in the future of England; while in place of loving their neighbors as themselves they have founded an entire science of political economy on the basis of a desire to defraud one’s neighbor, and have driven woman no longer to ask for love or fellowship, but for justice. So arraigning them he breaks out into this appeal : —

“ Are there any of you who are tired of all this? Any of you. Landlords or Tenants, Employers or Workmen?

“ Are there any landlords, any masters, who would like better to be served by men than by iron devils?

“ Any tenants, any workmen, who can be true to their leaders and to each other? who can vow to work and to live faithfully, for the sake of the joy of their homes ?

“ Will any such give the tenth of what they have and of what they earn, not to emigrate with, but to stay in England with, and do what is in their hands and hearts to make her a happy England ?

“ I am not rich (as people now estimate riches), and great part of what I have is already engaged in maintaining art-workmen, or for other objects more or less of public utility. The tenth of whatever is left to me, estimated as accurately as I can (you shall see the accounts), I will make over to you in perpetuity, with the best security that English law can give, on Christmas Day of this year, with engagement to add the tithe of whatever I earn afterwards. Who else will help, with little or much? the object of such fund being to begin, and gradually — no matter how slowly — to increase, the buying and securing of land in England, which shall not be built upon, but cultivated by Englishmen, with their own hands and such help of force as they can find in wind and wave.

“I do not care with how many or how few this thing is begun, nor on what inconsiderable scale. — if it be but in two or three poor men’s gardens. So much, at least, I can buy, myself, and give them. If no help come, I have done and said what I could, and there will be an end. If any help come to me, it is to be on the following conditions: We will try to make some small piece of English ground beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no steamengines upon it, and no railroads; we will have no untended or unthought-of creatures on it; none wretched but the sick; none idle but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it, but instant obedience to known law and appointed persons; no equality upon it, but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and reprobation of every worseness. When we want to go anywhere, we will go there quietly and safely, not at forty miles an hour, in the risk of our lives; when we want to carry anything anywhere, we will carry it either on the backs of beasts or on our own, or in carts or boats; we will have plenty of flowers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass in our fields, — and few bricks. We will have some music and poetry; the children shall learn to dance to it and sing it; perhaps some of the old people, in time, may also. We will have: some art, moreover; we will at least try if, like the Greeks, we can’t make some pots. The Greeks used to paint pictures of gods on their pots; we, probably, cannot do as much, but we may put some pictures of insects on them, and reptiles; butterflies and frogs, if nothing better. There was an excellent old potter in France who used to put frogs and vipers into his dishes, to the admiration of mankind; we can surely put something nicer than that. Little by little some higher art and imagination may manifest themselves among us, and feeble rays of science may dawn for us: botany, though too dull to dispute the existence of flowers; and history, though too simple to question the nativity of men ; nay, even perhaps an uncalculating and uncovetous wisdom, as of rude Magi, presenting at such nativity gifts of gold and frankincense.”

In three months after writing this he is able to say definitely that St. George’s Fund, as he proposes to call it, has been begun by a gift from himself of one thousand pounds; and with this announcement he gives further detail of the plan:

“ I will tell you a little more of what we are to do with this money, as it increases.

“First, let whoever gives us any be clear in their minds that it is a Gift, ft is not an Investment. It is a frank and simple gift to the British people; nothing of it is to come back to the giver.

“ But also nothing of it is to be lost. This money is not to be spent in feeding Woolwich infants with gunpowder. It is to be spent in dressing the earth and keeping it, in feeding human lips, in clothing human bodies, in kindling human souls.

“First of all, I say, in dressing the earth. As soon as the fund reaches any sufficient amount, the Trustees shall buy with it any kind of land offered them at just price in Britain: rock, moor, marsh, or sea-shore, — it matters not what, so it be British ground and secured to us.

“ Then we will ascertain the absolute best that can be made of every acre. We will first examine what flowers and herbs it naturally bears; every wholesome flower that it will grow shall be sown in its wild places, and every kind of fruit tree that can prosper; and arable and pasture land extended by every expedient of tillage, with humble and simple cottage dwellings under faultless sanitary regulation. Whatever piece of land we begin work upon we shall treat thoroughly at once, putting unlimited manual labor on it, until we have every foot of it Under as strict care as a flower garden: and the laborers shall be paid sufficient, unchanging wages; and their children educated compulsorily in agricultural schools inland, and naval schools by the sea, the indispensable first, condition of such education being that the boys learn either to ride or to sail, the girls to spin, weave, and sew, and at a proper age to cook all ordinary food exquisitely; the youth of both sexes to be disciplined daily in the strictest practice of vocal music; and for morality, to be taught gentleness to all brute creatures, finished courtesy to each other, to speak truth with rigid care, and to obey orders with the precision of slaves. Then, as they get, older, they are to learn the natural history of the place they live in; to know Latin, boys and girls both, and the history of five cities, — Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, and London. . . . In the history of the five cities I have named they shall learn, so far as they can understand, what has been beautifully and bravely done; and they shall know the lives of the heroes and heroines in truth and naturalness; and shall be taught to remember the greatest of them on the days of their birth and death, so that the year shall have its full calendar of reverent memory. And on every day part of their morning service shall be a song in honor of the hero whose birthday it is, and part of their evening service a song of triumph for the fair death of one whose deathday it is; and in their first learning of notes, they shall be taught the great purpose of music, which is to say a thing that you mean deeply in the strongest and clearest possible way; and they shall never be taught to sing what they don’t mean. They shall be able to sing merrily when they are happy, and earnestly when they are sad; but they shall find no mirth in mockery nor in obscenity; neither shall they waste and profane their hearts with artificial and lascivious sorrow, ”

One further quotation is desirable, although, as an expansion and more detailed account, it necessarily repeats somewhat the passages already given. It occurs in the first letter of the fourth year.

“ The children will be required to attend training-schools for bodily exercise and music, with such other education as I have already described. Every household will have its library, given it from the fund, and consisting of a fixed number of volumes, — some constant, the others chosen by each family out of a list of permitted books, from which they afterwards may increase their library if they choose. The formation of this library for choice, by a republication of classical authors in standard forms, has long been a main object with me. No newspapers, nor any books but those named in the annually renewed lists, are to be allowed in any household. In time I hope to get a journal published containing notice of any really important matters taking place in this or other countries, in the closely sifted truth of them.

“The first essential point in the education given to the children will be the habit of instant, finely accurate, and totally unreasoning obedience to their fathers, mothers, and tutors; the same precise and unquestioning submission being required from heads of families to the officers set over them. The second essential will be the understanding of the nature of honor, making the obedience solemn and constant; so that the slightest willful violation of the laws of the society may be regarded as a grave breach of trust, and no less disgraceful than a soldier’s recoiling from his place in a battle. . . .

“ That it should be left to me to begin such a work, with only one man in England — Thomas Carlyle—to whom I can look for steady guidance, is alike wonderful and sorrowful to me; but as the thing is so, I can only do what seems to me necessary, none else coming forward to do it. For my own part, I entirely hate the whole business; I dislike having either power or responsibility; am ashamed to ask for money, and plagued in spending it. I don’t want to talk, nor to write, nor to advise or direct anybody. I am far more provoked at being thought foolish by foolish people than pleased at being thought sensible by sensible people; and the average proportion of the numbers of each is not to my advantage. If I could find any one able to carry on the plan instead of me, I never should trouble myself about it more; and even now it is only with extreme effort and chastisement of my indolence that I go on; but, unless I am struck with palsy, I do not seriously doubt my perseverance, until I find somebody able to take up the matter in the same mind and with a better heart.

“ The laws required to be obeyed by the families living on the land will be — with some relaxation and modification, so as to fit them for English people — those of Florence in the fourteenth century. In what additional rules may be adopted I shall follow, for the most part, Bacon or Sir Thomas More, under sanction always of the higher authority which of late the English nation has wholly set its strength to defy, that of the founder of its religion; nor without due acceptance of what teaching was given to the children of God by their Father before the day of Christ, of which, for present ending, read and attend to these following quiet words.” Thereupon follows a passage from the close of the ninth book of Plato’s Republic.

In one of his letters, speaking of the doubtfulness which his readers feel of his plan, from its lack of definiteness, Mr. Ruskin says paradoxically that to define it severely would be to falsify it, and that he is wrong even in speaking of it as a plan or scheme at all. “It is only a method of uniting the force of all good plans and wise schemes; it is a principle and tendency, like the law of form in a crystal; not a plan.” Accordingly the idea of the company grows with its palpable proportions. For the ordering of it there is to be a master; members, styled companions, who give money or lands, and are enrolled with due solemnity; and tenants and laborers, styled retainers. As a part of the general purpose a museum has been formed at Sheffield: the beginning has been made of a collection of classics, including thus far The Economist of Xenophon and Rock Honeycomb, or Broken Pieces of Sir Philip Sidney’s Psalter;² and a series of photographs, four thus far (Madonna by Filippo, the Etruscan Leucothea, Madonna by Titian, and Infanta Margaret by Velasquez), have been issued for study and admiration in the homes of companions and retainers. Of the financial operations of St. George’s Company the briefest statement is in this: that a debt is a crime, and store a duty; the store “ to be primarily of food, next of materials for clothing and covert, next of books and works of art, — food, clothes, books, and works of art all being good, and every poisonous condition of any of them destroyed. . . . The most simply measurable part of the store of food and clothing will be the basis of the currency, which will be thus constituted. The standard of value will be a given weight or measure of grain, wine, wool, silk, flax, wood, and marble; all answered for by the government as of fine and pure quality, variable only within narrow limits. The grain will be either wheat, oats, barley, rice, or maize; the wine of pure vintage, and not less than ten years old; the wool, silk, and flax of such standard as can be secured in constancy; the wood, seasoned oak and pine, and for fuel in log and fagot, with finest wood and marble for sculpture. The penny’s worth, florin’s worth, and hundred ducats’ worth of each of these articles will be a given weight or measure of them, the penny roll of our present breakfast table furnishing some notion of what, practically, the grain standard will become. ... Of these articles the government will always have in its possession as much as may meet the entire demand of its currency in circulation. That is to say, when it has a million in circulation, the million’s worth of solid property must be in its storehouses; as much more as it can gather, of course, but never less.” Regulations follow as to coinage, markets, dress, and ornament, all inspired by the same purpose to secure entire honesty, public and private; to regard strictly the natural differences of rank, as indicated by the different gifts to men; and to make life orderly, decent, and beautiful. Finally, this creed or vow, written and signed by every person received into St. George’s Company, may be taken as the spiritual pledge of the new crusade against corrupt England.

I. I trust in the Living God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things and creatures visible and invisible.

And I will strive to love Him, and keep His law, and see His work, while I live.

II. I trust in the nobleness of human nature, in the majesty of its faculties, the fullness of its mercy, and the joy of its love.

And I will strive to love my neighbor as myself, and even when I cannot will act as if I did.

III. I will labor, with such strength and opportunity as God gives me, for my own daily bread, and all that my hand finds to do I will do with my might.

IV. I will not deceive, or cause to be deceived, any human being for my gain or pleasure; nor hurt, or cause to be hurt, any human being for my gain or pleasure; nor rob, or cause to be robbed, any human being for my gain or pleasure.

V. I will not kill nor hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle life, and guard and perfect all natural beauty, upon the earth.

VI. I will strive to raise my own body and soul daily into higher powers of duty and happiness; not in rivalship or contention with others, but for the help, delight, and honor of others, and for the joy and peace of my own life.

VII. I will obey all the laws of my country faithfully; and the orders of its monarch, and of all persons appointed to be in authority under its monarch, so far as such laws or commands are consistent with what I suppose to be the law of God; and when they are not, or seem in any wise to need change, I will oppose them loyally and deliberately, not with malicious, concealed, or disorderly violence.

VIII. And with the same faithfulness, and under the limits of the same obedience which I render to the laws of my country and the commands of its rulers, I will obey the laws of the Society called of St. George, into which I am this day received, and the orders of its masters, and of all persons appointed to be in authority under its masters, so long as I remain a Companion, called of St. George.

The information given in Fors Clavigera of the actual working of the company is slight. In April, 1877, the statement is made that a few of the Sheffield workingmen, influenced by St. George’s notions, asked permission to rent some ground from the company, whereon to spend what spare hours they had in useful labor. Thirteen acres had accordingly been purchased for this purpose, and let out to the workman at a rental of three per cent. on the cost; a little piece of England, Mr. Ruskin says, given into the English workman’s hands, and Heaven’s. Then, work having been organized at Abbey Dale, a possession of the company, Mr. Ruskin says, very characteristically, in Fors for November, 1877, that he had been greatly concerned by the difficulties attending this first venture; “ the more that these are for the most part attributable to very little and very ridiculous things, which, with all my frankness, I see no good in publishing. The root of all mischief is, of course, that the Master is out of the way, and the men, in his absence, tried at first to get on by vote of the majority; it is at any rate to be counted as no small success that they have entirely convinced themselves of the impossibility of getting on in that popular manner; and that they will be glad to see me when I can get there.”

Interesting as the history of a single case might be, with its practical difficulties, “attributable to very little and very ridiculous things,” no such history is of course possible when the experiment has only just been placed on trial. But the experiment has had seven years of preliminary discussion and theoretical development, and it cannot be said that the plan of the company has been presented in altogether vague outline. Nothing could well be more definite than certain of the passages cited above; and though the vow taken by the companions is, with the exception of the last clause, possible to any right-minded man or woman, it is very evident that St. George’s Company does not intend a Utopia but a Kalotopia. Enough, I think, has been taken from Mr. Ruskin’s words to make clear the meaning which I read in the whole project. It is a protest against corruption of life, public and private, in England, thrown into visible shape by the formation of an England within an England. The miniature state, whose order has been outlined, contains, it will be noted, all the functions of a state except what refers to international relations; and that offered now could only serve to throw an air of insincerity over the whole scheme.³ In this state of St. George there is a fixed standard of exchange among the members, coinage is provided for, the wants of the body and soul are held to be the field for governmental administration, a system of laws including sumptuary provisions is rigidly studied and enforced by moral sanctions, and the life of the citizens is regulated by principles discovered in the history of the wisest states and the writings of the wisest men. Mr. Ruskin sees a decadence in English life since the coming in of the Stuart line, apparently, and looks upon the introduction of steam power, with the accompanying exchange of rural for urban life, as the most powerful impulse upon the downward road. He would restore England piece by piece, by reconstructing within her limits communities which should be visible records of a possible England, —an England where lords and squires recovered the rights and duties indicated by their names, and where a contented peasantry lived honorable lives; where art might be possible in a land no longer resting under the smoke cloud of innumerable factories, and where religion should be neither blind idolatry of a book nor sleek conformity to concealed worldliness. That kings and all leaders should prove their title by the service which they do; that every man should live by the labor of his hands, and not by the labor of other men who support him in idleness; that the weak, the poor, and the suffering should be a holy charge upon the strong, the rich, and the healthy, — these are cardinal points of his belief. What his own conception of the working of his design is may best be learned from the page with which he concludes the fifty-eighth number of Fors Clavigera, the number containing the fullest exposition:— “ The ultimate success or failure of the design will not in the least depend on the terms of our constitution, but on the quantity of living honesty and pity which can be found, to be constituted. If there is not material enough out of which to choose companions, or energy enough in the companions chosen to fill the chainmail of all terms and forms with living power, the scheme will be choked by its first practical difficulties; and it matters little what becomes of the very small property its prompters are ever likely to handle. If, on the contrary, as I believe, there be yet honesty and sense enough left in England to nourish the effort, from its narrow source there will soon develop itself a vast policy, of which neither I nor any one else can foresee the issue, far less verbally or legally limit it, but in which, broadly, by the carrying out of the primally accepted laws of obedience and economy, the master and marshals will become the ministry of the state, answerable for the employment of its revenues, for its relations with external powers, and for such change of its laws as from time to time may he found needful; the landlords will be the resident administrators of its lands and immediate directors of all labor, its captains in war and magistrates in peace; the tenants will constitute its agricultural and military force, having such domestic and acquisitive independence as may be consistent with patriotic and kindly fellowships and the artists, schoolmen, tradesmen and inferior laborers will form a body of honorably paid retainers, undisturbed in their duty by any chance or care relating to their means of subsistence.”

It would be an easy matter to turn into ridicule the whole scheme, and to cover with laughter the man who propounds it. Most persons will dismiss it with the term quixotic, and those who really know what quixotic means will not much quarrel with the term; for the whole plan springs from the keenest sense of evil rampant, and the honest desire to break a lance in destruction of it. Is he, by his own confession, “ old, tired, and very ill-natured ” ? I answer that no man can make his profound sense of human misery and wrongness lead him to the jeered-at task of feeling with his own hands for the root of it, that he may pluck it up if possible, without thereby proving his earnestness and the reality of his conviction. In the midst of scoffing England, bidding him keep to the fine arts and let political economy alone, pitied by the weaker sort and held by some to be an eccentric visionary, he holds firmly to his resolve, and at times seems to cling to it to save himself from making shipwreck altogether of hope.

A fair comparison might be made between Mr. Ruskin and Mr. W. R. Greg, who takes the attitude of Cassandra in his prophecy of England’s decline.⁴ In Mr. Greg’s opinion the three national dangers are: I. The political supremacy of the lower classes. II. The approaching industrial decline of England. III. The divorce of the Intelligence of the country from its Religion. Mr. Ruskin might formulate his conception of England’s fall under three similar heads: I. The abrogation of duties by the upper classes. II. The increasing poverty of the country through the enriching of a few. III. The divorce of faith from works, and the loss of the meaning of religion as summed up in the word obedience. With Mr. Greg the taking of representation out of the hands of the propertied class and putting it. into the hands of the wage-receiving class is in itself a political revolution, the end of which is not yet, and the only remedy which he sees possible is in gradually transmuting this class into capitalists, summing his philosophy in the sentence, “ Political power lies naturally with Intellect and Property, and what God has joined man cannot put asunder with impunity.” With Mr. Ruskin, the position is taken that in human nature itself is an eternal division into leaders and led, masters and servants; that when the lords of Great Britain are true to their name, and the ladies are loaf-givers, the present blind attempts to set the pyramid of society on its apex will cease, and he will be found ruling who makes himself a servant of all. Mr. Greg sees in the near approach to the exhaustion of cheap coal the doom of British industry; and, while he recognizes in the deterioration of skilled labor a moral cause of decline, it is evident that the weight of the difficulty in his mind is economic. From this calamity of the loss of the world’s market he finds no escape, and looks to emigration as but a partial relief from an overburdening population, since it is the able-bodied who will go, the weak and inefficient who will stay, Mr. Ruskin sees in the whole course of modern trade a gigantic evil, resulting in a selfishness which makes every one eager to getrich through an injury to his neighbor, and in an economic falsehood which makes a national debt a national blessing instead of a national curse; he rests the strength of England in the toil of its laborers, and holds that these are robbed of their rightful earning of food, clothing, and shelter, He would find a return to contentment and peace in a return to manual labor, in honesty of living, and in the ignobility of luxury. For the third national danger of England, Mr, Greg finds that skepticism of the national creed is rapidly permeating all classes, and dissolving those bonds of spiritual life which are essential to a nation’s well - being; and the only escape which he discovers is in the gradual reconstruction, by the intelligence which has thrown down, of a new and more credible faith. His divorce of intelligence from religion is to be followed by a, new marriage of intelligence with certain dim aspirations, in the hope that religion will be the offspring. Mr. Ruskin, believing that religion Is submission to God and his laws, and is discovered by a life of fruitful obedience, is not much concerned about the skepticism which questions a formal theology, but takes greatly to heart the presence of a show of religion which is divorced from morality, and the submission to the decrees of such false gods as he sees worshiped in London and Manchester, while he knows no way of escape from this but such as an old prophet might. declare to a recreant Israel. The difference in position between the two men is the difference between a man who speculates with great sagacity upon the state of England, and finds a certain intellectual satisfaction in the inevitability of his reasoning, and a man whose insight is so charged with morality that he is compelled to turn away from the things he most enjoys to some visible lifting of the burden, taking up the task lest he should go mad. There is not, there never can be, a test of sincerity but the plain one of doing; and Mr. Ruskin, though he has been crying passionately that the axe is laid at the root of the tree, seems to turn, almost with scorn at his own ineffectual words, to take up the axe himself, striking a blow with a force which is rather nervous than muscular.

The eloquence of this writer, and the almost painful precision of his style, — by which he is constantly trying to make his words carry more freight than they ever bore,—his zeal, and the largeness of his intellectual sympathy, carry the reader over many doubtful stretches of logic, and make the entire scheme of St. George’s Company assume an ideal perfectness of proportion and a grace of being which fill the eye as a poetic structure. One is permitted to draw from all sources, ancient and modern, as he gradually conceives the image: he hears the Tyrolese peasant sing like a robin; he watches the wife of Ischomachus ordering her household; he listens in turn to two Chelsea magi, separate by three hundred years and more; he catches a glimpse of Sir John Hawkwood and his white knights; and the dress and coins make Italy and England melt into one. Charge this picture with a profound moral meaning; believe in it as the harbinger of a new England, not found by crossing the seas, but by a moral cataclysm of the England of the London Times and Pall Mall Gazette, and it is possible that any embodiment in human kind and environment in English fields would catch some of this light that never was on sea or land. But a disillusionizing might take place if one were to look closely at some companion piece, not invested with the charm of literature, or flooded by any historic light. There is a grotesque likeness to St. George’s Company in any one of the so-called Shaker families, to be found scattered about our New England States, and in some Western places. Here one may see the bare prose into which the loveliest of idyls has been turned. I happened to be spending a summer in the. immediate neighborhood of one of these villages, and Fors Clavigera coming to me each month I was not slow to place it in the hands of the leader, nor greatly surprised to find it at once accepted as a grateful statement of many articles of the Shaker faith, and read aloud in the gatherings of the brothers and sisters. The keen analysis of usury which I listened to at the Sunday meeting was as final as in Mr. Raskin’s pages; the return to nature as the saviour of humanity was the central doctrine of the Shaker life; the broad farms were the manifest declaration of that redemption of the, soil which forms an article in St. George’s creed. Here was no debt, but only store; steam played no part, but human labor or the action of wind and water were the factors of industry ; the looms, it is true, were idle, but the higher-minded looked at this as a loss and decay of the Shaker mind; perfectness of work and economy of resources were still regarded as religious duties.

That this life had done much to lift the human nature which tried it, and was itself tried by it, the honest observer could not doubt; but if be measured it by the test of Moses, David, Hesiod, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and St. John the Divine, he was compelled to admit that the Shakers had not solved the problem of living, and he even suspected that the spiritual exaltation which found expression in rhythmic procession and rude music could not suffice to deliver the company from the suspicion of being worldly-minded after all, and of looking upon their apple-trees and blackberryvines with not altogether an ancient Hebraic sentiment. There are differences, to be sure, as well as likenesses to be noted in the two societies. In the Shaker family, there is the mildest possible form of hierarchy, and a homely approach to the Quaker principles of pure democracy; in St. George’s Company, there is the fullest recognition of ranks and orders; in both, education is jealously guarded, but the Shaker family knows nothing of that choiceness of wisdom and example which the founder of StGeorge’s Company offers in place of current literature and science. Yet the fatal error attaches to both, that with all their professions of trust in human nature the societies are founded on a practical distrust. Is human nature so poor a thing that it can be hedged about and its processes predetermined by such inflexible organizations as these? The assumption in each case is that men are children, and will continue such, and growth must constantly “ put out ” the well-ordered schemes. An observer of the Shaker families perceives how uneasily the women and elders watch the boys and girls who stand on the brink of conscious manhood and womanhood, and with what frequent pain they see them bid adieu to the family just when they give promise of becoming pillars to support it. St. George’s Company, too, inevitably recalls the institution of slavery in our own country: the ideal excellence of that order was in the careless, child-like condition of the slaves, the protecting, determining government of the masters, with their chivalrous education and generous life. Yet somehow this relation was constantly disproved by the ungrateful disappearance of slaves and the unchivalric conduct of masters. The ideal St. George pins the dragon with his lance, but Mr. Ruskin’s St. George sometimes appears to be armed with a fork, vainly endeavoring to expel, not a dragon, but Nature herself.

It must be said, too, that in their organization both of these societies are fragments — and not constituents — of a body politic. The Shakers are witnesses, as they believe, to a future state of single blessedness, and by an irresistible logic they have no part in the family or the state which God created. St. George’s Company is a protest against a corrupt England; it mimics a greater state, and it has partial foundations in its trust in God and in the nobleness of human nature, but it is not founded in the whole nature of man; its integrity could only be preserved by isolation, and shut up within itself it would die of exhaustion. By a divine paradox it could only perpetuate itself by destroying itself in the larger life of the nation. Mr. Ruskin is building an ark against the deluge to come, and we are all laughing him to scorn. That is one way of regarding it. But it is quite possible for students of history and of revelation to believe that nations have their holy life, which is unbroken though a prophet may lodge in a cave and complain that he only is left, when altars are thrown down and a covenant forsaken. There is that in Mr. Ruskin’s despair which is heroic; there is that also which is childish. With an exquisiteness of artistic sense, the power to perceive subtle harmonies of life and the capacity for irritation at ignoble discords go together; with a tremulous moral nature, inflexibly true in direction, there is joined a mind so persistently critical that the whole nature seems racked with the constant trial of cases of conscience. He has no rest from this labor of judgment, and one is puzzled at the double feeling with which one approaches him, — of reverence for his nobility of genius, and of gentle pity for his distraction. He is Hamlet the Englishman.

There are few pages in Fors Clavigera, for the reader on this side of the Atlantic, more moving and more lovely in their way than those given to Mr. Ruskin’s autobiographic sketches. I should not wish to touch them in the way even of bringing them together into a connected narrative. Occurring as they do at intervals, they break in upon the discourse with delightful force, and certainly help a stranger to understand something of the author’s training and vicissitudes of life. In one number there is a touching paragraph called out by a lively, halfirritable letter from a lady who feels the force of Mr. Ruskin’s pressure upon her conscience sufficiently to lead her to make excuses. Among other words she declares that she is willing to join the company when Mr. Ruskin himself does. “It seems to me,” she says smartly, “ that the first duty any one owes to his country is to live in it. I go farther, and maintain that every one is bound to have a home and live in that. Where is your house and your garden?” Then she reproaches him for wandering away to lovely places in England or on the Continent, while she stays at home a household drudge. To all this Mr. Ruskin replies with the melancholy words: —

“ She tells me, first, that I have not joined the St. George’s Company, because I have no home. It is too true. But that is because my father and mother and nurse are dead; because the woman I hoped would have been my wife is dying; and because the place where I would fain have stayed to remember all of them was rendered physically uninhabitable to me by the violence of my neighbors, — that is to say, by their destroying the fields I needed to think in, and the light I needed to work by. Nevertheless, I have under these conditions done the best thing possible to me, — bought a piece of land on which I could live in peace; and on that land, wild when I bought it, have already made not only one garden, but two, to match against my correspondent’s; nor that without help from children, who, though not mine, have been cared for as if they were. ”

In somewhat other terms he lays claim to the name of gentleman. “ It is quite possible for the simplest workman or laborer for whom I write to understand what the feelings of a gentleman are, and share them if he will; but the crisis and horror of this present time are that its desire of money and the fullness of luxury dishonestly attainable by common persons are gradually making churls of all men, and the nobler passions are not merely disbelieved, but even the conception of them seems ludicrous to the impotent churl mind; so that — to take only so poor an instance of them as my own life — because I have passed it in alms-giving, not in fortune-hunting; because I have labored always for the honor of others, not my own, and have chosen rather to make men look to Turner and Luini than to form or exhibit the skill of my own hand; because I have lowered my rents and assured the comfortable lives of my poor tenants, instead of taking from them all I could force for the roofs they needed; because I love a wood-walk better than a London street, and would rather watch a sea-gull fly than shoot it, and rather hear a thrush sing than eat it; finally, because I never disobeyed my mother, because I have honored all women with solemn worship, and have been kind even to the unthankful and the evil, therefore the hacks of English art and literature wag their heads at me, and the poor wretch who pawns the dirty linen of his soul daily for a bottle of sour wine and a cigar talks of the ‘ effeminate sentimentality of Ruskin.’ ”

The series of Fors Clavigera, as I have said, has mainly to do with the ordering of St. George’s Company; but as that company is not, in Mr. Ruskin’s intention, an arbitrary or wholly isolated guild, having peculiar laws and customs inapplicable to simple people elsewhere, in England or out of it, the explication of the principles at its foundation is broad and variously suggestive. From the wide range of his reading in literature, art, history, and religion, the author has gathered a remarkable store of wisdom and generous example. His running commentary, for example, on Sir Walter Scott’s life, character, and work is full of fine interpretative power; his readings from Plato, from Sir Philip Sidney, from Marmontel, his inquiry into Biblical meanings, are of quite unusual force, provoking the student to fresh examination of familiar words ; and nothing wiser, respecting the education of girls, has been written in this generation of schoolmasters and school-mistresses than the sixty-fifth and sixty-sixth letters.⁵ No fair-minded reader can study this extraordinary series without finding his mind quickened as to the application of eternal principles to the conditions of present civilization. That he will recoil from some of Mr. Ruskin’s conclusions is inevitable, partly from his own unpreparedness, partly from a mental waywardness characteristic of the writer; but he will never find concession to falsehood or infidelity to truth.

To us on this side of the Atlantic the letters come shorn of some immediate force by reason of the different conditions of life here, but with an added weight by reason of a possibly wider application. That is to say, the conditions of life in England which have wrung the letters and the resolution from Mr. Ruskin are not as yet reproduced here; we have tendencies toward what he regards as fixed facts in England. The larger breathing space, the truer respect for law, the firmer establishment of a liberty that cannot choose evil, the wider charity, and above all the freer hope, which I believe to be inherent in American life, — these elements make us look with some wonder upon the picture which he draws of English misery. Nor are the principles laid down in Fors Clavigera so foreign from habits of thought familiar to Americans. The despotism of trade and the selfishness of a cruel competition have not yet degraded the common mind here to so great an extent as in England, and the difference in training which the American and English public mind receives renders the American more receptive of classic and generous ideas. An American traveling, for instance, in England might easily accept Mr. Ruskin’s measure of Englishmen, accounting for what might seem extravagance by the better knowledge which a resident must have, but himself discovering the existence of the same evil in a less portentous form. On his return to his own country he would not be less aware of the incompleteness of the national character, but he would at once acknowledge joyfully that he had come to a land of larger hope and brighter skies.

Still, to us who have not the frequent opportunity of making these manifest comparisons, many of Mr. Ruskin’s strictures upon modern civilization strike with real force by the suggestion they have of evils immediate and visibly present. For my own part I can see processes going on in the neighborhood of our great cities entirely answering to the severest of bis denunciations. It is not difficult to discover the beginning of evil which it will be a weary work hereafter to overturn. To take the nearest example, the river Charles, offering small inducements to great commercial enterprises, ought to be the silver thread, shining with its lovely windings, all through a district rapidly growing in population. Efforts are making, against strong currents, to preserve this precious stream. Yet see what one or two men can do to destroy its beauty! Not far from the seat of the University, the river makes a turn around a tongue of land, and flows past what was once a lovely piece of river-bank. The ground rose in a little bluff overhanging the marshy rim of the water, and then sloped away from the river, having on its highest point little clumps of fir-trees. It was bought as a speculation, the trees cut down, the hill leveled, great gashes made in the slopes, and now what might always have been a delight to the eye is a level piece of gravel, with scarcely a sign of vegetation. The gravel, I am told, was sold for more than the land cost, and the owners have been complimented on their prudence and sagacity; but no arithmetical calculation can estimate the loss which I and many more have suffered who used to cross the bridge at that point, climb over the little knoll, watch the river at our feet, and walk down the grassy slope. Now, as I stroll along the bank, further up, and see the broad meadows which skirt the river, I think that something remains, for these meadows, covered with water at high tide, are as yet unprofitable to the speculator. But I have the dread of seeing in my paper, some day, a polite paragraph upon some enterprising land company which proposes to utilize the flats by making them the place of amphibious manufactories, belching forth smoke, and fouling the river with their chemical waste. I doubt not that there are many timid people like myself, who find it hard to look on and see our cities spreading desolation about them. To such I commend these letters of Mr. Ruskin; at least they speak our thoughts with a consolatory vengeance. For weightier reasons, it could be wished that letters so irritating as these to a comfortable nature, so stimulating to all who would measure the thoughts of the time by noble standards, might be more generally known and studied. They have been caught at here and there by foolish people, eager only to find high authority for their own crude notions respecting labor, and the half-concealed truths in them distorted for partisan ends; they merit wider recognition and more fruitful application. If there are vagaries in them, these will be discovered and lightly dismissed only by those capable of discovering the enduring thoughts.

H. E. Scudder.