even now, in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die: the last exit of us all is in a fire-chariot of pain. But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heartworn, weary, yet isolated, girt in with a cold universal Laissez Faire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, infinite Injustice, as in the cursed iron belly of a Phalaris Bull! This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God has made. Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled."

Concerning the economic aspect of the situation, Carlyle's thought was elementary. He continued to treat, with the emotional horror of the first discoverer, problems of over-production and unemployment. The other evils that beset society, cant, insincerity, restlessness, and the decay of true religion, all tended in his mind to find source and cause in that social injustice which, holding a whole class in false conditions, reacted upon all other classes, and produced a feverish unrest whose origin men failed to understand. But close analysis was unknown to him.

While Carlyle was indicting society with vehement and spasmodic eloquence, Ruskin was happily writing his beautiful interpretations of beauty. In his message the English public found nothing

1 Past and Present, book iii. ch. xiii. "Democracy."

repugnant or obscure, and "Modern Painters," "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," and "The Stones of Venice" met only enough opposition to impart to their popularity something the ardor of a cult. Social unrest might seem quite alien to the æsthetic revival which these books did so much to foster. But it was a wholly natural transition which led Ruskin from criticism of the fine arts to criticism of society. The last volume of "Modern Painters," in 1860, shows this transition already accomplished.

For no enthusiast could be content to interpret the art of the past to a listening England: he must seek to stimulate a living art in the present. When Ruskin turned to the present, he did not find its aspect encouraging. The first thing to awaken his social conscience was the ugliness of his country. He beheld it overrun with the products of manufacturing towns, for which he did not share Macaulay's admiration, and covered in larger areas every year with cheap, dreary, crowded buildings, only the more painful because contrasting with the pathetic remains of beauty bequeathed from ages when Manchester was not. In noting the sharp difference between the conditions that surrounded the youth of Giorgione and that of Turner, Ruskin was yet strictly within the province of æsthetics; but he was perilously near to that of social reform. Nor was a definite statement long in coming: "The beginning of art is in getting our country clean and our people beautiful." 1 "Beautiful art can only

1 Lectures on Art, sec. 116.

be produced by people who have beautiful things around them and leisure to look at them; and unless you provide some elements of beauty for your workmen to be surrounded by, you will find that no elements of beauty can be invented by them."

The emphasis in Ruskin's social arraignment fell then first of all on those displeasing outward conditions which had certainly never arrested nor troubled for a moment the peasant-eyes of Carlyle. But no man could stop there. The next step was to inquire into the causes of these conditions. As he inquired, he became assured that such causes lay deep in the character of the modern industrial system. And so, starting with entirely different facts, Ruskin's social diagnosis came wholly to agree with that of the austere Scotch sage whom by this time he had learned to call master. Competition, the rise of machine industry, and the suppression of hand labor; the growth of new relations between employers and employed; in short, the concentration under new conditions of an immense working-class, these were phenomena that seemed to him all the more portentous and dangerous because society accepted them with so perfect a complacency.

Practical experiment came to the aid of general observation. Ruskin really tried to arouse in England, even taking it as it was, the creative impulse: to stimulate at least those humble decorative arts which, as he believed, must flourish before High Art, in any true sense, could appear. And here,

1 The Two Paths, Lecture III.

too, the disillusion that quickens awaited him. The nearer to the life of actual wage-earners he came in his experiments, the more his sense of some great wrong was strengthened. He was accustomed in thought to the exquisite work of the Middle Ages and of the early Renascence; and he believed that all true art must be, as in these ages, the expression of a common life, and must spring from the heart of the people. But he found that even the physical healthfulness of labor was destroyed habitually by false conditions of time and pay; and that its educational connotation was destroyed, if not habitually yet in countless cases, by the mechanical character of modern industry. The craftsman of the Renascence passed instinctively into the artist, and the artist ranked himself with the craftsman, as the bottega of Donatello or of Andrea may testify; but the manual worker of to-day loses, when hardly more than a child, all spring of spontaneity, all impulse toward creation. In this respect, at least, the growth of social fellowship since Ruskin's time has only confirmed his conclusion. No one can live intimately among working-people without feeling the invisible bondage which prevents in them the evolution of the higher productive powers. In the days of handicraft, work was its own reward: it is so no longer. The professional classes possibly work as hard as manual laborers. But their work is life. The activities of teacher, doctor, lawyer, merchant, however strenuous and protracted, are interesting. They employ, cultivate, delight, the higher faculties.

But to iron two thousand linen collars a day, to spend the bright hours "busheling" in a tailorshop, to carry on any one of the minute occupations introduced by the division of labor, leaves people where it found them, only a little more stupefied. The real life of the modern wage-earner must lie without, not within his trade; and he has freedom for it only in the weary evening hours after work is done, on Sundays and holidays. Philanthropists, awake to the lack of resource in the lives of working-people, are trying nowadays to give them some share in the interests that make so large a part of existence for the privileged public. They know well how all offers of delightful things - art, music, learning, even sociability -are hampered and almost nullified by the fact that those to whom they are offered have literally no leisure for enjoyment, or at best only tired odds and ends of time, after a long day's work. To this state of things one might be reconciled were it necessary and universal; but history reveals that while the material conditions of the wage-earner in the past may sometimes have been worse than at present, yet at times there have been industrial conditions that have neither suppressed personal expression nor destroyed personal freedom. John Ruskin was first to raise the cry that the arts can never flourish as a class monopoly, and that they will remain decadent until the moralizing of industry shall bring freedom to the nation as a whole. It is a cry which artists have never dropped from his day to our own.