[TO TUE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.") Sin,—Your review in the
Spectator of October 25th of Mr. Frederic Harrison's recent misrepresentation of Ruskin is, from the point of view of students of Ruskin, in a very great measure misleading. (By the term "students of Ruskin" I mean those who recognise that his writings are from first to last singularly homogeneous.) You inform your readers, for instance, that "the Ruskin of 1860 who turned from art to social problems was the man who had suffered beyond measure, and who was determined to give others the happiness that he himself had missed. It is surely incorrect to
say that his marriage, and its unhappy end, had not affected his habits or his books. We cannot doubt that it revolutionised his nature and his work." Now this statement is surely very much on a par with the prevalent :opinion that the key to Carlyle's philosophy was his dyspepsia, for the actual cause of Ruskin turning his attention to social problems is clearly enough set forth in the very first letter of "Fors Clavigera" thus:—
" I cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky has become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of, where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly. Therefore, I will endure it no longer quietly ; but henceforward, with any few or many who will help, do my poor best to abate this misery."
Then you tell us that you "sincerely sympathise with Ruskin in the horror he must have felt when Mr. Harrison persistently reminded him in public and in private that most of his social doctrines had been anticipated by Auguste Comte"; but Ruskin does not appear to have felt any horror whatever, for his own words were :— " I have never read a word he [Comte] has written,—never heard anything about him that interested me,—and never repre- sented, or misrepresented, him, in any manner whatsoever."
And this statement of Ruskin's sufficiently signalises the kind of misrepresentation which appears in the course of Mr. Harrison's volume, for on p. 73 Mr. Harrison says that
Ruskin "was not equipped to lecture Auguste Comte about the evolution of religion" ; and on p. 195 he says that "we may forget the many follies and blunders of the prophet of Fors—his incorrigible misunderstanding and reviling of such men as Mill, Spencer, and Comte." Ruskin's own words are surely refutation enough of such writing as this. You make no reference in your review to the great work of Ruskin's later life, the "Fors Clavigera," but you say :—
" Doubtless much of the froth and foam of his [Ruskin's] social ideas is offensive to pure reason Unfortunately Ruskin, not being a frequenter of society, contracted the habit of con- versing in print, and allowed ideas of the conversational character to attain the permanence of type."
If these remarks of yours refer to "Fors," as they probably do, it would only be right if you were to inform your readers that there is another view which is diametrically opposed to that which you have expressed, and I find it very excellently set forth in Mr. William Smart's critical study of Ruskin, entitled "A Disciple of Plato " :—
" Just because the seven volumes of 'Fors' are familiar talk, one may say of them what Ruskin says of the teachings of Heaven : 'they are given in so obscure, nay, often in so ironical a manner, that a blockhead necessarily reads them wrong.' There is no obscurity in the Fors,' if read continuously from the beginning; but people now-a-days will not take time to read so long a book. Now beyond all books that I know, this one admits of texts and extracts utterly misleading and damnatory ; and so long as an ingenious press can quote passages and suppress con- texts, so long we shall get no justice done to the 'Fore.'" I have been told that the Spectator does endeavour to be fair in its comments. Will your journal, therefore, show that this is so by doing justice to "Fore Clavigera" ?—I am, Sir, &c.,
P.S.—One of your reviewers some time ago expressed the fervent wish that a Lucian might soon arise. I suppose therefore, that he had not read "Fore," or he would have known that the Lucian of this epoch has already risen.
[Mr. Frederic Harrison on p. 195 of his book tells us that Mr. Ruskin spoke of Comte with "abhorrence and contempt." "Comte had never heard of Ruskin, and Ruskin never men- tioned Comte, unless in some grotesque parody of what he fancied Comte might have said, though he actually had said the contrary." With respect to the general question of the effect of a man's private life on his public work,
it seems to us impossible not to see a reflection of private happiness or un- happiness or eccentricity of life in work given to the public. This is true, on the one hand, of George Eliot, Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle; and, on the other, of Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Thackeray, Browning.—En. Spectator.]
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