Painters From England

"Even as the moon grows queenlier in mid-space When the sky darkens, and her cloud-rapt car Thrills with intenser radiance from afar,— So lambent, lady, beams thy sovereign grace When the drear soul desires thee."

"Beauty like hers is genius."

"At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart: And as the last slow sudden drops are shed From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled, So singly flagged the pulses of each heart."

"A Sonnet is a moment's monument,— Memorial from the Soul's eternity To one dead deathless hour."

"We two will lie i' the shadow of That living mystic tree Within whose secret growth the Dove Is sometimes felt to be, While every leaf that His plumes touch Saith His Name audibly."

"We two will stand beside that shrine, Occult, withheld, untrod, Whose lamps are stirr'd continually With prayer sent up to God; And see our old prayers, granted, melt Each like a little cloud."

"The sun was gone now; the curl'd moon Was like a little feather Fluttering far down the gulf; and now She spoke through the still weather. Her voice was like the voice the stars Had when they sang together."

"From the fix'd place of Heaven she saw Time like a pulse shake fierce Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove Within the gulf to pierce Its path; and now she spoke as when The stars sang in their spheres."

"Around her, lovers, newly met 'Mid deathless love's acclaims, Spoke evermore among themselves Their heart-remember'd names; And the souls mounting up to God Went by her like thin flames."

"The blessed damozel lean'd out From the gold bar of Heaven; Her eyes were deeper than the depth Of waters still'd at even; She had three lilies in her hand, And the stars in her hair were seven."

"Thou fill'st from the wingèd chalice of the soul Thy lamp, O Memory, fire-wingèd to its goal."

"If the light is It is because God said 'Let there be light.'"

"Was it a friend or foe that spread these lies? Nay, who but infants question in such wise, 'T was one of my most intimate enemies."

"Gather a shell from the strewn beach And listen at its lips: they sigh The same desire and mystery, The echo of the whole sea's speech."

"Still we say as we go,— "Strange to think by the way Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day.""

"If God in his wisdom have brought close The day when I must die, That day by water or fire or air My feet shall fall in the destined snare Wherever my road may lie."

"I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet, keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore."

"Tell me now in what hidden way is Lady Flora the lovely Roman? Where's Hipparchia, and where is Thais, Neither of them the fairer woman? Where is Echo, beheld of no man, Only heard on river and mere— She whose beauty was more than human?— But where are the snows of yester-year?"

"From perfect grief there need not be Wisdom or even memory; One thing then learned remains to me — The woodspurge has a cup of three."

"I am not as these are, the poet saith In youth's pride, and the painter, among men At bay, where never pencil comes nor pem"

"When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece."

"It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot — it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better."

"The style in which page after page of Modern Painters is written takes our breath away. We find ourselves marvelling at the words, as if all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight for our pleasure, but it seems scarcely fitting to ask what meaning they have for us. After a time, falling into a passion with this indolent pleasure-loving temper in his readers, Ruskin checked his fountains, and curbed his speech to the very spirited, free and almost colloquial English in which Fors Clavigera and Praeterita are written. In these changes, and in the restless play of his mind upon one subject after another, there is something, we scarcely know how to define it, of the wealthy and cultivated amateur, full of fire and generosity and brilliance, who would give all he possesses of wealth and brilliance to be taken seriously, but who is fated to remain for ever an outsider."

"Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the characterization here given would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper."

"He [John Ruskin] knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do; he puts things into my head, and points out meanings in them that I never intended."

"It is insufficiently recognised in many universities that some of the great issues of social relations today are not susceptible to analysis and understanding by any one social science discipline alone. In part, this has happened because we have compartmentalised and departmentalised knowledge about man in society. "Not only," said John Ruskin over a hundred years ago, "is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is one way of seeing them, and that is seeing the whole of them.""

"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey."

"Ruskin's special gift was the feeling for beauty, in nature as in art. It was in Beauty that his nature led him to seek reality, and his entirely religious life received from it an entirely aesthetic use. But this Beauty to which he thus happened to dedicate his life was not conceived by him as an object of enjoyment made to charm, but as a reality infinitely more important than life, for which he would have given his own life. From this, as you will see, the whole aesthetic system of Ruskin follows. First, you will understand that the years when he became acquainted with a new school of architecture or of painting were the principal landmarks in the development of his ethics. He would speak of the years when Gothic art presented itself to him with the same gravity, the same emotional nostalgia, the same serenity with which a Christian speaks of the day the truth was revealed to him."

"This lack of appreciation (for Lorrain) on Ruskin’s part is one of the many reasons why he was far from being the art critic that he considered himself"

"For the sake of others who have not known him as I have known him, I would declare my conviction that no other master of literature in our time has more earnestly and steadily endeavoured to set forth for the help of those whom he addressed whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, and lovely; or in his own life has more faithfully tried to practise the virtues which spring from the contemplation of these things and their adoption as the rule of conduct."

"...there were a few who were in open rebellion against the said Whiggery — a few, say two, Carlyle and Ruskin. The latter, before my days of practical Socialism, was my master towards the ideal aforesaid, and, looking backward, I cannot help saying, by the way, how deadly dull the world would have been twenty years ago but for Ruskin!"

"He used to attend Mr. Gladstone's breakfasts, and at one of them the host pronounced three grand things to be done to the ways of the world by mankind. First, the introduction of more lenient and humane practice with prisoners; second, a general sentiment against war; and third, the abolition of slaves. "Yes," said Ruskin in his mild tones, "but then I don't think prisons ought to be made humane; and I'm not against slavery; and I'm not against war.""

"Long and singular was Ruskin's journey through many landscapes, and his influence in all directions, social and aesthetic, was so remarkable that even those who have least predilection for it may perhaps call it the greatest event in our literary history since Lyrical Ballads and Waverley. At least one exceptionally good observer judged that as Carlyle...had written himself out as a source of social inspiration, it was Ruskin alone among writers of prose, apart from fiction, who relieved us from the reign of Commentators."

"The change which Ruskin's work made in economic thinking has been so far-reaching that today it is difficult for us to realise the perversity and the power of the economic teaching which he fought... Perhaps the greatest contribution which Ruskin made to political economy was this enlargement of its scope. It was not to be confined to exchange: it was not to ignore the real goodness or badness of men's choices: "The essential work of the political economist", he says in Munera Pulveris, "is to determine what are in reality useful or life-giving things and by what degrees and kinds of labour they are attainable and distributable". The political economists of his time would have stoutly denied that it was their business to determine what things are in reality useful, and many economists would still be of the same opinion. By the economist demand must be taken for granted—whatever it was a demand for. Whether the object demanded was good or evil, would do good or harm was not the economists' business. Ruskin refused to accept this abstraction—for an abstraction it surely is, and by his refusal often saw things to which the professionals were blind."

"I should wish never to lose the impression of the kind welcome which I received from him. He is the gentlest and most innocent of mankind, of great genius but inconsecutive; and he has never rubbed his mind against others, so that he is ignorant of very obvious things."

"Ruskin's own artistic life would have been impossible without the paternal sherry and the rich men who drank it."

"There are very few whose Utopias have in any detail come true, or have, like Ruskin's, remained a permanently fruitful ideal. In politics his influence has been entirely for good."

"Human work must be done thoroughly and honourably because we are now men; whether we ever expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter."

"Fifty years ago Ruskin was widely and, with rare exceptions, approvingly regarded as a major moral and practical inspiration behind the public welfare reforms of wartime and post-war Britain... Social security from the cradle to the grave, public ownership of key industries, state patronage of culture, planned new towns, and policies of full employment were all seen as clearly foreshadowed in Ruskin's writings on social philosophy of the 1860s and 1870s, particularly in Unto This Last and Fors Clavigera."

"I cannot therefore claim much book knowledge. However, I believe I have not lost much because of this enforced restraint. On the contrary, the limited reading may be said to have enabled me thoroughly to digest what I did read. Of these books, the one that brought about an instantaneous and practical transformation in my life was Unto This Last. I translated it later into Gujarati, entitling it Sarvodaya (the welfare of all). I believe that I discovered some of my deepest convictions reflected in this great book of Ruskin, and that is why it so captured me and made me transform my life. A poet is one who can call forth the good latent in the human breast. Poets do not influence all alike, for everyone is not evolved in a equal measure. The teaching of Unto This Last I understood to be:1. That the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2. That a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's inasmuch as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3. That a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living.The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it as clear as daylight for me that the second and the third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice."

"The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism — the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine would remould our life; and he who teaches its application to any one department of human activity with such power as Mr Ruskin's, is a prophet for his generation."

"Mr Ruskin is morally Conservative, intellectually Radical."

"The combination of shrewd common sense and romantic sentiment; the oscillation between levity and dignity, from caustic jest to tender earnestness ; the restlessness, the fervour, the impestuosity, — all these are characteristics of a Scotsman of parts and highly developed in Ruskin."

"Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases. Poets may not be "the unacknowledged legislators of the world"; but Ruskin, like Rousseau, changed the world by a vision which has the intensity and innocence of poetry."

"The point and stab of his challenge still really stands and sticks, like a dagger in a dead man."

"As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of the bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight as a bullet."

"No one managed Carlyle so well as Ruskin; it was quite beautiful to see him. Carlyle would say outrageous things, running counter to all Ruskin valued and cared for. Ruskin would treat Mr. Carlyle like a naughty child, lay his arms round him, and say, "Now, this is too bad! ...""

"Of all the bête, clumsy, blundering, boggling, baboon-blooded stuff I ever saw on a human stage, that thing last night beat — as far as the acting and story went — and of all the affected, sapless, soulless, beginningless, endless, topless, bottomless, topsiturviest, tuneless and scrannelpipiest — tongs and boniest — doggerel of sounds I ever endured the deadliness of, that eternity of nothing was the deadliest, so far as the sound went. I never was so relieved, so far as I can remember in my life, by the stopping of any sound — not excepting railway whistles — as I was by the cessation of the cobbler’s bellowing."

"For this dead Venice once taught us to be merchants, sailors and gentlemen; and this dying England taught the Americans all they have of speech, or thought, hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from England are foolish thoughts; what words they have not learned from England, unseemly words; the vile among them not being able even to be humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking birds."

"I am far more provoked at being thought foolish by foolish people, than pleased at being thought sensible by sensible people; and the average proportion of the numbers of each is not to my advantage."