DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0014
2
JOHN RUSKIN.
hold ways of the home on Herne Hill partly remained
with him, reverend and unquestionable, to his last day.
And yet the student of the work done in this quiet
life of repetitions is somewhat shaken from the stead-
fastness of study by two things—multitude and move-
ment. The multitude is in the thoughts of this great
and original mind, and the movement is the world’s.
Ruskin’s enormous work has never had steady auditors
or spectators: it may be likened to a sidereal sky
beheld from an earth upon the wing. Many, innumer-
able, are the points that seem to shift and journey, to
the shifting eye. Partly it was he himself who altered
his readers; and partly they changed with the long
change of a nation; and partly they altered with suc-
cessive and recurrent moods. John Ruskin wrote first
for his contemporaries, young men j fifty years later he
wrote for the same readers fifty years older, as well as
for their sons. And hardly has a mob of Shakespeare’s
shown more sudden, unanimous, or clamorous versions
and reversions of opinion than those that have ac-
claimed and rejected, derided and divided, his work,
once to ban and bless, and a second time to bless
and ban.
Political economy in i860 had but one orthodoxy,
which was that of “ Manchester ”; scientifically, it held
competition in production and in distribution, with the
removal (as far as was possible to coherent human
society) of all intervention of explicit social legislation,
to be favourable to the wealth of nations; and ethically
JOHN RUSKIN.
hold ways of the home on Herne Hill partly remained
with him, reverend and unquestionable, to his last day.
And yet the student of the work done in this quiet
life of repetitions is somewhat shaken from the stead-
fastness of study by two things—multitude and move-
ment. The multitude is in the thoughts of this great
and original mind, and the movement is the world’s.
Ruskin’s enormous work has never had steady auditors
or spectators: it may be likened to a sidereal sky
beheld from an earth upon the wing. Many, innumer-
able, are the points that seem to shift and journey, to
the shifting eye. Partly it was he himself who altered
his readers; and partly they changed with the long
change of a nation; and partly they altered with suc-
cessive and recurrent moods. John Ruskin wrote first
for his contemporaries, young men j fifty years later he
wrote for the same readers fifty years older, as well as
for their sons. And hardly has a mob of Shakespeare’s
shown more sudden, unanimous, or clamorous versions
and reversions of opinion than those that have ac-
claimed and rejected, derided and divided, his work,
once to ban and bless, and a second time to bless
and ban.
Political economy in i860 had but one orthodoxy,
which was that of “ Manchester ”; scientifically, it held
competition in production and in distribution, with the
removal (as far as was possible to coherent human
society) of all intervention of explicit social legislation,
to be favourable to the wealth of nations; and ethically