Fors Clavigera (Volume 6 of 8): $b Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great BritainRuskin, John
General
Fors Clavigera (Volume 6 of 8): $b 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
This photograph of Etruscan art is therefore to be the second of our
possessions, and means of study; affording us at once elements of
art-practice in many directions, according to our strength; and as we
began with drawing the beads of cap, and spiral of chair, in the Lippi,
rather than the Madonna, so here it will be well to be sure we can draw
the throne, before we try the Leucothea. Outline it first by the eye,
then trace the original, to correct your drawing; and by the time next
Fors comes out, I hope your power of drawing a fine curve, like that of
the back of this throne, will be materially increased; by that time
also I shall have got spirals to compare with these Etruscan ones,
drawn from shells only an hour or two old, sent me by my good friend
Mr. Sillar, (who taught me the wrongness of the infinite spiral of
money interest,) by which I am at present utterly puzzled, finding our
conclusions in last Fors on this point of zoology quite wrong; and that
the little snails have no less twisted houses than the large. But
neither for drawing nor architecture is there to-day more time, but
only to correct and clarify my accounts, which I have counted a little
too far on my power of keeping perspicuous without trouble; and have
thereby caused my subscribers and myself a good deal more than was
needful.
Henceforward I must ask their permission, unless I receive definite
instruction to the contrary, to give names in full, as the
subscriptions come in, and give up our occult notation.
I am not quite so well pleased with my good friend Mr. Girdlestone’s
pamphlet on luxury as I was with that on classification of society,
though I am heartily glad to be enabled by him to distribute it to my
readers, for its gentle statements may be more convincing than my
impatient ones. But I must protest somewhat against their mildness. It
is not now merely dangerous, but criminal, to teach the lie that the
poor live by the luxury of the rich. Able men—even Pope himself—have
been betrayed into thinking so in old times, (blaming the luxury,
however, no less,) but the assertion is now made by no intelligent
person, unless with the deliberate purpose of disguising abuses on
which all the selfish interests of society depend.
I have to acknowledge a quite magnificent gift of Japanese inlaid work
to our Sheffield Museum, from my kind friend Mr. Henry Willett, of
Arnold House, Brighton. A series of some fifty pieces was offered by
him for our selection: but I have only accepted a tithe of them,
thinking that the fewer examples of each school we possess, the better
we shall learn from them. Three out of the five pieces I have accepted
are of quite unsurpassable beauty, and the two others of extreme
interest. They are sent to the Curator at Sheffield.
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
I. Affairs of the Company.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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