Excerpt from John Ruskin, Ethical and Religious Teacher: A Lecture, Delivered at Oxford, August, 1901

And on that simple text John Ruskin preached all his life through. We think of him too exclusively as a critic of painting and sculpture, or as an enthusiastic worshipper of loveliness in Nature. A thorough examination of all his works will dispel that view.

He is primarily and above all things else a moralist, an ethical and religious teacher: from first to last a preacher, by profession and by bent, in gifts and in failings, in the bed-rock purpose and aim of his life. If I were called upon to define him, I should say this He was a man who cared for Nature more than Art; for Humanity more than Nature 5 for the glory of God most of all. For Art pure and simple, it may be seriously questioned whether he truly felt. Ruskin's strongest points, says Dr. Waldstein, and greatest achievements are not to be found in the domain and criticism of Art. Art as such does not respond to the natural bent of his mind. I know well that a distinguished French writer, De la Sizeranne, has maintained that passionate love of Nature was Ruskin's Alpha and Omega, and that he discusses morality, industry, and religion in order to lead us up to a higher sense of Art. None of us will deny the passionate love of Nature, but the rest of the judgment is misleading and gives no clue. The English critic who has written with completest insight and subtlest comprehension on Ruskin's work, Frederic Harrison, has found the truth. John Ruskin began, he says, by preaching to us a higher sense of Art, in order to lead us up to a truer understanding of morality, industry, religion, and humanity.

There is the secret, then. Art is the text, right living is the sermon. The devotees Of the formula, 'art for Art's sake' are perfectly justified in their hostility. It is not wonderful that so many of our painters to day, especially those under the influence of Frenchideas, ridicule his theories and smile pityingly at the mention of his name. Art, they say, is its own religion, its own morality; and we want neither Bible nor missal to Show us how to paint. That, blurted out Tennyson once in his rough way, is the road to Hell; and Ruskin would have agreed with him. Though he repudiated the name, he was a Puritan at heart. He loved Fra Angelico and could not understand Raphael. Religion and Ethics and Art were all to him inextricably intermingled. Art, he wrote in the first volume of [modern Paz'nlers, has for its business to praise God: in the last volume, Art is the expression of delight in God's work. Why you might almost believe that Ruskin, of the same race as John Knox, trained by Scottish parents, was here but te-echoing the Shorter Catechism of Scotland learnt at his mother's knee' What is the chief end of man? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever. TO those who believe that Art is simply unmoral, that the sole business of the artist is to paint anything he sees as he sees it, to our modern gifted delineators Of butchers' shops and executions and surgical Operations, no teacher could seem more fantastic and foolish than this man who demanded noble life from the painter, and something of the divine in his work.

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