: Fors Clavigera (Volume 4 of 8) Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain by Ruskin John - Conduct of life; Social problems; Aesthetics; Great Britain Social conditions 19th century; Working class Great Britain

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FORS CLAVIGERA.

LETTERS

TO THE WORKMEN AND LABOURERS OF GREAT BRITAIN.

BY JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D., HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND SLADE PROFESSOR OF FINE ART.

GEORGE ALLEN, SUNNYSIDE, ORPINGTON, KENT. 1874.

FORS CLAVIGERA.

"Selon la loy, et ly prophetes, Qui a charit? parfaicte Il ayme Dieu sur toute rien De cueur, de force, et d'ame nette; Celui devons-nous tous de debte Comme soy-mesmes, son prochain; Qu'on dit qui in ayme, ayme mon chien. De tel pierre, et de tel merrien Est ?s cieulx nostre maison faicte Car nulz ne peut dire, 'c'est mien,' Fors ce qu'il a mis en ce bien; Tout le remenant est retraicte."

According to the Law and the Prophets, He who has perfect charity, Loves God above everything, With heart, with flesh, and with spirit pure. Him also, our neighbour, we are all in debt To love as ourselves; For one says, Who loves me, loves my dog. Of such stone, and of such crossbeam, Is in the heavens our house made; For no one can say, 'It is mine,' Beyond what he has put into that good, All the rest is taken away.

One day last November, at Oxford, as I was going in at the private door of the University galleries, to give a lecture on the Fine Arts in Florence, I was hindered for a moment by a nice little girl, whipping a top on the pavement. She was a very nice little girl; and rejoiced wholly in her whip, and top; but could not inflict the reviving chastisement with all the activity that was in her, because she had on a large and dilapidated pair of woman's shoes, which projected the full length of her own little foot behind it and before; and being securely fastened to her ancles in the manner of mocassins, admitted, indeed, of dextrous glissades, and other modes of progress quite sufficient for ordinary purposes; but not conveniently of all the evolutions proper to the pursuit of a whipping-top.

There were some worthy people at my lecture, and I think the lecture was one of my best. It gave some really trustworthy information about art in Florence six hundred years ago. But all the time I was speaking, I knew that nothing spoken about art, either by myself or other people, could be of the least use to anybody there. For their primary business, and mine, was with art in Oxford, now; not with art in Florence, then; and art in Oxford now was absolutely dependent on our power of solving the question--which I knew that my audience would not even allow to be proposed for solution--"Why have our little girls large shoes?"

Indeed, my great difficulty, of late, whether in lecturing or writing, is in the intensely practical and matter-of-fact character of my own mind as opposed to the loquacious and speculative disposition, not only of the British public, but of all my quondam friends. I am left utterly stranded, and alone, in life, and thought. Life and knowledge, I ought to say; for I have done what thinking was needful for me long ago, and know enough to act upon, for the few days, or years, I may have yet to live. I find some of my friends greatly agitated in mind, for instance, about Responsibility, Free-will, and the like. I settled all those matters for myself, before I was ten years old, by jumping up and down an awkward turn of four steps in my nursery-stairs, and considering whether it was likely that God knew whether I should jump only three, or the whole four at a time. Having settled it in my mind that He knew quite well, though I didn't, which I should do; and also whether I should fall or not in the course of the performance,--though I was altogether responsible for taking care not to,--I never troubled my head more on the matter, from that day to this. But my friends keep buzzing and puzzling about it, as if they had to order the course of the world themselves; and won't attend to me for an instant, if I ask why little girls have large shoes.

I don't suppose any man, with a tongue in his head, and zeal to use it, was ever left so entirely unattended to, as he grew old, by his early friends; and it is doubly and trebly strange to me, because I have lost none of my power of sympathy with them. Some are chemists; and I am always glad to hear of the last new thing in elements; some are palaeontologists, and I am no less happy to know of any lately unburied beast peculiar in his bones; the lawyers and clergymen can always interest me with any story out of their courts or parishes;--but not one of them ever asks what I am about myself. If they chance to meet me in the streets of Oxford, they ask whether I am staying there. When I say, yes, they ask how I like it; and when I tell them I don't like it at all, and don't think little girls should have large shoes, they tell me I ought to read the 'Cours de Philosophie Positive.' As if a man who had lived to be fifty-four, content with what philosophy was needful to assure him that salt was savoury, and pepper hot, could ever be made positive in his old age, in the impertinent manner of these youngsters. But positive in a pertinent and practical manner, I have been, and shall be, with such stern and steady wedge of fact and act as time may let me drive into the gnarled blockheadism of the British mob.

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