Excerpt from Selections and Essays
The life of John Ruskin, like that of his master Carlyle, stretched nearly across the nineteenth century. Born in 1819, before the industrial revolution had fairly begun, he lived to see England transformed, by the application of steam and electricity, into the England of to-day, for he died as late as 1900, at the age of eighty-one. Considering the great range and abundance of his work, considering his distinction as a writer of prose, as an art-critic, and as a social reformer, Ruskin's career was extraordinary even in an age of great men. His first printed book appeared in 1830, when he was a boy of eleven, his last in 1889, fifty-nine years later. As his latest biographer, Sir E. T. Cook, says: "the world in which he lived and moved and had his being was from his earliest years the world of art and letters." For more than half a century, he wrote, lectured, and talked on mountains, waves, leaves, and clouds; rocks, minerals, birds, and flowers; painting, architecture, sculpture, engraving, and drawing; political economy, social reform, education, and ethics; myths, literature, and religion. These discursive writings, recently gathered into the Library Edition, number thirty-seven volumes, - a splendid monument of life-long devotion to truth, beauty, and justice. No literary reputation and influence could be more stormy than his. In the days when his position as an art-critic was at its height, he was hailed by William Morris and Burne-Jones as a "Luther of the Arts." Even the cool rationalist, John Stuart Mill, recorded in his diary that whereas most men were but commentators, "Ruskin was one of those two men in Europe who seemed to draw what he said from a source within himself." Then came a change.
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