25. "Now, I dare say," said Mr. Ruskin, resuming, "you all think you have improved greatly in sense, and good-nature, and love of scenery since Evelyn's time. I admit there are I admit there are a certain number of you very different creatures indeed. But there is nothing to me so amazing in Evelyn's injustice to the poor peasants, and terrified hatred of their Alps, as there is in the total absence from the papers of the Alpine Club of the smallest expression of any human interest in anything they see in Switzerland except the soaped poles they want to get to the top of, and their continual exultation, over their cheese and beer, in their guides' legs and their own, without ever appearing conscious for an instant that every valley of which the blue breaks through the cloud at their feet is full of the most beautiful human piety and courage, being gradually corrupted and effaced by European vice, after contending for long ages with conditions of hardship and disease, prolonged by European neglect, folly, and cruelty. And of the less adventurous Englishman, content with flatter mountain tops, here without question is the central type for this hour." Mr. Ruskin here showed Punch's cartoon of "The Old Lion Aroused," to which he had referred in a former lecture, and in doing so he apologized for any pain that had been caused by his thus accidentally ridiculing Mr. Brightfor whose character he had in most things a great respect, although it was "an awful sign of the times" that so honourable and excellent a man should have stood up on a memorable occasion in the House of Commons to defend the adulteration of food as a legitimate form of competition.3 "You are all of you," Mr. Ruskin resumed, with reference to this cartoon, "resolving yourselves, and that with rapidity, into this kind of British person, and this kind of British standard-bearer-consumer of all things consumable, producer of nothing but darkness and abomination, with his foot on all that he once revered, his hope lost in all that he once worshipped, a god to himself, and to all the world an incarnate calamity.

26. "Your way out of all this I told you full fourteen years ago, in my inaugural lectures, to not one word of which any of you have practically attended. I have, indeed, one pupil-friend, an accomplished and amiable artist, another a conscientious and prosperous lawyer —of formal school or consistent disciples no vestige whatever. The time may yet come; anyhow next year I have again, with the ever-ready help of Mr. Macdonald, to begin at the beginning, and meanwhile I will close my discourses to you for this year by re-reading the conditions of prosperous art work which I laid before you in 1870." The passage which Mr. Ruskin read is in the fourth of his inaugural Lectures on Art, on “The Relation of Art to Use," in which it was laid down that after recovering, for the poor, wholesomeness of food, the next steps towards founding Schools of Art in England must be in recovering for them decency and wholesomeness of dress and of lodging, and then after this that "nothing be ever made of iron that can be as effectually made of wood or stone, and nothing moved by steam that can be as effectually moved by natural 1 [See Sesame and Lilies, § 35 (Vol. XVIII. p. 90).]

2 [See above, p. 479.]

[See Fors Clavigera, Letter 37 (Vol. XXVIII. pp. 16, 17).]

[The two translators for Ruskin of The Economist of Xenophon: see Vol. XXXI.

p. 30.]

forces. . . . And until you do this, be it soon or late, things will continue in that triumphant state to which, for want of finer art, your mechanism has brought them; that though England is deafened with spinning-wheels, her people have not clothes; though she is black with digging of fuel, they die of cold; and though she has sold her soul for gain, they die of hunger. Stay in that triumph, if you choose; but be assured of this, it is not one which the Fine Arts will ever share with you."1

27. "All this," said Mr. Ruskin, in conclusion, "is called impossible. It may be so. I have nothing to do with its possibility, but only with its indispensability.2 And at any rate this much is possible to you to prefer life in the country, though it be dull, to life in London, though it is merry; to look at one thing in the day, instead of at twenty; and to think of that one in such a way as will give you some love for man and some belief in God."

1

[SS 122, 123: Vol. XX. pp. 111-114.]

[Compare, again, Lectures on Art, § 123 (Vol. XX. p. 113).]

END OF VOLUME XXXIII