Fors Clavigera (Volume 1 of 8): Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great BritainRuskin, John
General
Fors Clavigera (Volume 1 of 8): Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain
Ruskin, John
Aesthetics; Conduct of life; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems; Working class -- Great Britain
But the best that can be done in this way will be useless ultimately,
unless the deep source of the misery be cut off. While Miss Hill,
with intense effort and noble power, has partially moralized a couple
of acres in Marylebone, at least fifty square miles of lovely country
have been Demoralized outside London, by the increasing itch of the
upper classes to live where they can get some gossip in their idleness,
and show each other their dresses.
That life of theirs must come to an end soon, both here and in Paris,
but to what end, it is, I trust, in their own power still to decide. If
they resolve to maintain to the last the present system of spending the
rent taken from the rural districts in the dissipation of the capitals,
they will not always find they can secure a quiet time, as the other
day in Dublin, by withdrawing the police, nor that park-railings
are the only thing which (police being duly withdrawn) will go
down. Those favourite castle battlements of mine, their internal
"police" withdrawn, will go down also; and I should be sorry to see
it;--the lords and ladies, houseless at least in shooting season,
perhaps sorrier, though they did find the grey turrets dismal in
winter time. If they would yet have them for autumn, they must have
them for winter. Consider, fair lords and ladies, by the time you
marry, and choose your dwelling-places, there are for you but forty
or fifty winters more in whose dark days you may see the snow fall
and wreathe. There will be no snow in Heaven, I presume--still less
elsewhere, (if lords and ladies ever miss of Heaven).
And that some may, is perhaps conceivable, for there are more than a
few things to be managed on an English estate, and to be "faithful"
in those few cannot be interpreted as merely abstracting the rent of
them. Nay, even the Telegraph's beau ideal of the landowner, from a
mechanical point of view, may come short, somewhat. "Cultivating huge
farms for himself with abundant machinery;--" Is that Lord Derby's
ideal also, may it be asked? The Scott-reading of my youth haunts me,
and I seem still listening to the (perhaps a little too long) speeches
of the Black Countess who appears terrifically through the sliding
panel in 'Peveril of the Peak,' about "her sainted Derby." Would
Saint Derby's ideal, or his Black Countess's, of due ordinance for
their castle and estate of Man, have been a minimum of Man therein,
and an abundance of machinery? In fact, only the Trinacrian Legs of
Man, transposed into many spokes of wheels--no use for "stalwart arms"
any more--and less than none for inconveniently "heroic" souls?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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