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
"Cultivating huge farms for himself!" I don't even see, after the
sincerest efforts to put myself into a mechanical point of view, how
it is to be done. For himself? Is he to eat the cornricks then? Surely
such a beau ideal is more Utopian than any of mine? Indeed, whether
it be praise- or blame-worthy, it is not so easy to cultivate
anything wholly for oneself, nor to consume, oneself, the products of
cultivation. I have, indeed, before now, hinted to you that perhaps
the "consumer" was not so necessary a person economically, as has been
supposed; nevertheless, it is not in his own mere eating and drinking,
or even his picture-collecting, that a false lord injures the poor. It
is in his bidding and forbidding--or worse still, in ceasing to do
either. I have given you another of Giotto's pictures, this month,
his imagination of Injustice, which he has seen done in his time,
as we in ours; and I am sorry to observe that his Injustice lives
in a battlemented castle and in a mountain country, it appears;
the gates of it between rocks, and in the midst of a wood; but in
Giotto's time, woods were too many, and towns too few. Also, Injustice
has indeed very ugly talons to his fingers, like Envy; and an ugly
quadruple hook to his lance, and other ominous resemblances to the
"hooked bird," the falcon, which both knights and ladies too much
delighted in. Nevertheless Giotto's main idea about him is, clearly,
that he "sits in the gate" pacifically, with a cloak thrown over his
chain-armour (you can just see the links of it appear at his throat),
and a plain citizen's cap for a helmet, and his sword sheathed,
while all robbery and violence have way in the wild places round
him,--he heedless.
Which is, indeed, the depth of Injustice: not the harm you do, but that
you permit to be done,--hooking perhaps here and there something to you
with your clawed weapon meanwhile. The baronial type exists still, I
fear, in such manner, here and there, in spite of improving centuries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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