MR RUSKIN'S SOCIETY.
[We give this account from a friend to the scheme, as of a certain intellectual interest. We pass no criticism on what may be called a dream of fair living.—En. Spectator.] MR. RUSKIN'S Guild of St. George has held its first "chapter," and one of the most thoroughly English 'towns in England has been the scene of it. Perhaps very few, besides readers of "Fors Clavigera," have been aware that the great prose-poet to whose genius we owe the debt of a new and noble impulse in Art, and one of the cardinal points in whose teaching has always been the interdependence between the 'artistic and moral energy of a nation, has for a long time endeavoured to put his protest against, what he holds to be, the evil influences of the age, in the most practical form possible, namely, a Society of which the actual working should be in direct and visible opposition to them. Those who accepted his teaching were asked to contribute, according to their ability, towards the obtaining land in England, within the limits of -which, subject to existing laws, an example might be set, firstly, a the right relations between landlord and tenant, master and servant; secondly, of the best education of the young, or indeed we may as well say, of the most excellent discipline and training .of old and young ; and thirdly, of the wisest and most beneficial use of the ground, by cultivation, for the most part, but some- times by careful neglect, where great natural beauty, or other reasons, made such neglect desirable. It may sound strange, but moneys and land have been given to a society formed for this pur- pose. "Companions," not many, it must be confessed, have been enrolled, and their first meeting was held the other day in Birming- ham l It was, we have been told, a perfectly matter-of-fact affair. Mr. Ruskin himself was unfortunately unable to be present, and the address from him, which was read, was a poor substitute for his voice and presence ; but even if he had been there, how- ever much greater the interest of the meeting would have been, he would have had no very astonishing marvel to tell ; nothing wherewith to strike the imagination, like the acquisition of some bold outlying island in which the experiment might be, as the public would think, fairly tried ; nothing—except, indeed, his own eloquent words—to lessen the sense of disproportion which could not but attend the first actual setting to work of a society with so lofty an aim, and such vague, imagined possi- bilities of all-embracing growth, as are involved in the design of St. George's Guild. The aim is high, and the framework capable, in its author's hope, of indefinite expansion; but the lines are so laid that the world will, perhaps, be the better for the experiment, if only a small measure of success, such as it is within reason to hope for, be obtained. The public has heard less of the essential than of the minor and somewhat fantastic details of the scheme. They have been used to regard Mr. Ruskin (when they thought of him as anything else than a great art-critic, the greatest, perhaps, that ever lived), as one who had lost all patience with the world, and who had gone utterly wrong in his views about the currency; he was childish about railways, machinery, and the sacred right of getting the best interest you could for your money ; he was a hater of liberty and progress,—yet positively, no better than a Communist, if all that was said of this new brotherhood of his were true. Undoubtedly "Fors Clavigera," or the pamphlet of that name which he gave to the world, or to those who took the trouble to write to Mr. George Allen for it, month by month for eight years, until his untoward illness, was, to say the very least, most varied and delightful reading. In its pages Mr. Ruskin has used to the full the license which clearly belongs to founders of imaginary republics, and has given his mind to a great variety of details in the economy of his own. He has told us what the National Store—in place of the National Debt—shall consist of; has fixed his standard of value; chosen his coinage, a most lovely one, of course— the ducat and half-ducat, with the Archangel Michael on one side and a branch of Alpine rose on the other, in gold—the florin and penny, with its English daisy, and divisions of the penny, in silver; has meditated laws regulating dress and ornament; all in the most picturesque and quaintly-worded way. In fact many a page is, as it were, stiff with garniture of antique phrases, titles, and dignities, gathered from wide ranges of history, to be revived for modern use ; in the midst of which the master's—i.e., Mr. Ruskin's—accounts, household and other, and Messrs. Tarrant and Mackrell, solicitors', letter conveying the information that "the Companions of St. George will indeed be capable of holding land, but not as the St. George's Company, that is, not as a corporation," and giving warning of various legal and other dangers, come in as passages of quite unilluminated. prose. But there was no number of the series which did not con- tain passages of great beauty and sterling value, and over and over again, Mr. Ruskin stated in a clear and direct manner, the objects of the Society, and what he proposed should be its methods of action. Every one knows how, in his opinion, and. in some other people's also, the world is in a very bad way,— selfishness, vanity, and practical atheism having wholly under- mined the framework of social order, degraded labour, and de- stroyed art. Those, to whom acquiescence in such a state of things intolerable, are asked to form a Guild, "the object of which is is to be the health, wealth, and long life of the British nation,' or, as he puts it elsewhere, "to buy, or obtain by gift, land in England, and thereon to train into the healthiest and most refined life possible, as many English men, English women, and English children, as the land so possessed can maintain in com- fort; to establish for them and their descendants a National Store of continually augmenting wealth ; and to organise the government of the persons, and administration of the proper- ties, under laws which shall be just to all, and secure in their inviolable foundation on the Law of God." "The rents of such land, though they will be required from the tenants as strictly as those of any other estates, will differ from common rents
primarily in being lowered, instead of raised, in proportion - to every improvement made by the tenant ; secondly, in
that they will be entirely used for the benefit of the tenantry themselves, or better culture of the estates, no money being ever taken by the landlords, unless they earn it by their own personal labour." So much for the difficult subject of rent, regarded from the landlord's side. The unselfishness which is thus largely counted on in the matter of gifts of land, to begin with, and the surrender of rents in perpetuity, is, after all, no larger than that which founded and endowed old-world monas- teries. As the leases of such lands fall in, the directing power of St. George will come more and more into play. Conditions as to the use of steam-power will be made. (We may observe, by the way, that Mr. Ruskin does not reject "the use of steam or other modes of heat-power under all circumstances, and would allow it for speed on main lines of communication, and for raising water from great depths, or other work beyond human strength.") "Schools and museums, always small and instantly serviceable, will be multiplying among the villages,—youth after youth being instructed in the proper laws of justice, patriot- ism, and domestic happiness." Those of the Companions who can, will reside, and see that St. George's laws, as well as those
of the land, are duly obeyed. These St. George's laws "will, most of them, be merely old English laws revived, and the rest Florentine and Roman ; none will be constituted but such as have already been in fore among great nations." No persons will be appointed to lordships who cannot show proofs of a right-
divine to rule. Higher by the head, broader by the shoulders, and heartier in the will, the lord of laud and lives must ever be than those he rules." There is to be no equality in St. George's domain, "no competitive examinations "- here we turn to the educational side of the scheme—" but contrariwise, absolute prohibition of all violent and strained effort—most of all, envious or anxious effort—in every exercise of body and mind ;" the natural mental rank will be as carefully sought out, we suppose, as it ever was by Jesuit instructors : each scholar will be taught to know his place, to be content with his faculty, while putting it to the best use he can, and to cultivate reverent admiration of superior faculties as one of the first of duties. Wordsworth's line, "We live by admiration, hope, and love," seems to represent the ever-present, up-lifting thought of Mr. Ruskin's mind, when dealing with the subject of education :—" All boys shall learn either to ride or sail, the power of highest discipline and honour being vested by Nature in the two chivalries of the Horse and the Wave." "Children shall learn, in the history of five cities—Athens, Rome, Venice, Florence, and London—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 honour of the hero whose birth-day it is ; and part of their evening service, a song of triumph for the fair death of one whose death-day it is ; and in their first learn- ing of notes, they shall be taught the great purpose of music, which is to say a thing which you mean deeply, in the strongest and clearest possible way."
The great doctrine of the value to mind and body of a fair proportion of manual labour will be well kept in view,—labour, that is, with tools, not machines. The thought of the studious person will be made wholesome by bodily toil, the toil of the labourer noble by elevated thought. Nay, Mr. Ruskin would have us "able to imagine (not an easy thing, he declares, for any person trained in modern habits of thought) a true and refined scholarship, of which the essential foundation is to be skill in some useful labour." Even coarse work, in pure air and in the midst of nature which has not been unfairly dealt with, ought not of itself to tend in any degree to render any human being unable to love beautiful things in Nature and feel greatness in art As for Art and artists, "and some forms of intellectual or artistic labour inconsistent (as a musician's) with other manual labour," St. George cannot be said to look over-kindly on them ! "Scholars, painters, and musicians may be advisedly kept on due pittance, to instruct and amuse the labourer at or after his work, provided the duty be severely restricted to those who have high special gifts of voice, touch, and imagination,"—to the few, in fact, who will sing, or preach, or paint, however badly they may be paid, all from pure love, and with a stiff examination as to technical skill to be gone through before license of exhibition is granted them at all. Here, again, pure air and unspoiled nature are reckoned on as all-powerful helpers. "No great arts," says Mr. Ruskin, "were practicable by any people, unless they were living contented lives, in pure air, out of the way of unsightly objects, and emancipated from unnecessary mechanical occu- pation."
We have left ourselves no space for the confession of faith and vow which every Companion is required to write out and sign. The first article, "I trust in the Living God," is fol- lowed by one which declares trust "in the nobleness of human nature, in the majesty of its faculties, the fulness of its mercy, and the joy of its love." Nor can we give here any sketch of the constitution of the Society, and the conditions of com- panionship. We had intended to convey to our readers a notion of what we take to be the essential objects of Mr. Ruskin's design, keeping aside much which represented only the indulgence on the founder's part of his own brilliant fancies in State-making, as well as the wide-sweeping arrangements which, as he himself says, "are thought out in the scale of European work." Some very small bits of various parishes being all the Society has to begin with, we wished to give only such extracts
from " Fors " as would, fit this modest scale, and be capable— assuming a certain amount of unselfishness—of being put in practice within it ; but the temptation to quote some sentences at length which go beyond this, and show how much that is noble is contained in the author's ideal of education and life, has been too much for us now and then. The Society, however, exists, and we may possibly one day give some account of the meeting, presided over by an ex-mayor of no mean city, and attended by real, hard-working Companions, with which its public life may be said to have commenced.
Previous page
