Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14: The New Era: A Supplementary Volume, by Recent Writers, as Set Forth in the Preface and Table of ContentsLord, John
Philosophy
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 14: The New Era: A Supplementary Volume, by Recent Writers, as Set Forth in the Preface and Table of Contents
Lord, John
History
now, we believe, but a memory, if we except the art museum and library
of the Order taken over and still maintained by the town.
More practical, may we not say, than this imitation of the Florentine
_arti_ of the Middle Ages was the Working Men's College, founded in
London in the fifties by that other earnest Christian Socialist, F.D.
Maurice, in which Ruskin lectured gratuitously, took charge of the
drawing classes, and hied off to the country with its members to sketch
from nature and otherwise instruct and entertain them. Yet good in many
respects came of the Guild of St. George, in the impulse it gave to the
revival of the then dormant industries, such as the hand-spinning of
linen, hand-weaving of carpets and woollen fabrics, lace-making,
wood-carving, and metal-working, besides the stimulus it gave, with the
infusion of higher ideals of workmanship, to the decorative arts, and
the improvement in the sightliness of factories, and in the homes and
surroundings of labor. Here Ruskin's philanthropy and reform zeal showed
themselves most worthily in the financial aid he gave in the pulling
down, in crowded districts of the British metropolis, of poor tenements,
and the building up in their place of clean, attractive, and wholesome
habitations. In such benevolences and well-doings, and in this life of
renunciation and self-sacrifice, Ruskin spent himself, and made serious
inroads into his bodily health and strength, as well as scattered the
fortune--about a million dollars--left him by his now deceased father.
But this was the manner and character of Ruskin, and this the mode of
expressing his love for his fellow-man, which in myriad ways showed
itself throughout a long and strenuous career of devotion to high
ideals, and of practical, tender help in all good works. In all his
philanthropies he was true to his own preachings and counsellings,
spending and being spent in the spirit of his Divine Master, his whole
soul aglow with reverence and adoration and tender with a profound moral
emotion. Besides his rare endowments as a lover of the beautiful, he had
that other precious gift, of golden speech, which threw a mantle of
loveliness over every book he wrote and perpetual lustre over the domain
of letters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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