MY DEAR SIR,-I am most deeply grateful for your letter and you cannot, I think, but feel assured that I must be and I think it extremely probable that you have been ordered by Fors herself to write it, at the time when she wishes me to change the tone of my own letters. For their past tone I am no more answerable than the men whom you regret my blaming are answerable for their mistakes, or rather, let me say, than a tree is answerable for being bent by storm. I could only write as I felt and thought, and whatever harm the book has done, or whatever good it has fallen short of doing, I cannot regret its inevitable form. But all this year, it has been more or less shown me that such form may now change. I can only answer your letter to-day with my truest thanks. I have not yet read more than the letter itself, nor can, till to-morrow. MY DEAR SIR,-I am heartily sorry to have delayed till now the acknowledgment of your kind letters. One especially I meant to have answered instantly, but was hindered-the apologetic one. I can't understand how you could have thought for a moment any of your letters had [In Fors Clavigera, Letter 79 (dated June 18, 1877), Ruskin had quoted with much approval and some criticism a paper contributed to the Manchester Guardian on February 27, 1877. The writer of the paper was Mr. T. C. Horsfall, who thereupon put himself into communication with Ruskin. One of his letters (July 25, 1877)—a remonstrance with Ruskin for the denunciatory tone of Forswas printed in Letter 81, § 6 (p. 195). A passage from the MSS. at Brantwood, replying further to the remonstrance, is now appended to the text (see above, p. 196 n.). To Mr. Horsfall himself Ruskin sent the letter here given.] 2 [Mr. Horsfall among other letters wrote the one printed in § 6 of Letter 81. The following letters (2, 3, and 4) refer to Ruskin's intention to publish it.] been other than courteous and kind. The greater part of the one on Museums you will see printed in next Fors Correspondence, with a few comments. I am entirely unable for private correspondence, but if you read my fourth inaugural lecture (Lectures on Art, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 18701) you will see clearly how far I can go with you, and if you look for the accounts of the Sheffield Museum in Fors, gradually how far I am going by myself. I am much interested by what you tell me of your Bishop, but in what do you suppose it inconsistent with my words? I assert that he refuses to state the whole Gospel of God that he may keep smooth with Manchester. You tell me how smooth he has keptwhere is the inconsistency? Very heartily yours, J. RUSKIN. August, 1877. MY DEAR SIR,-I made all the corrections as you direct-the queried sentence was by the printer, not me (I scratched out his query). The places of omission have been marked by stars. I left out the bit about cups, because pottery is too serious a piece of education to be spoken about so slightly. 4 " You have not answered my chief query in last Fors, Why we have less leisure than the Greeks? 3 Please send me just a line about this. If you will look at the abstract of the history of usury, given in White's Warfare of Science, prefaced by Tyndall (in which the writer is triumphing in the victory of the Usurer in these latter days), I do not think you will again call usury a sin "invented by Mr. Sillar. It is a sin of the same unnatural class as Cannibalism. I have nothing to do with judging the culpability of Robinson Crusoe's Friday. But when once he is told that Cannibalism is wrong-if he goes on supposing himself wiser than God and all his old servants-I have no civil language, for him, and I believe, of all existing vices, usury to be the most pernicious in its essence—in its effect on the modern mind. Of whoredom and theft a man repents-in usury he triumphs. If I believed men were better now than of old, my dear Sir, I never should write a word more in this world. God knows how tired I am, and that nothing but the fiercest agony of indignation would wring a word more from me. But I will answer your letter tenderly and accurately; forgive any over-impetuosity in this, but the horror to me of the things done in modern life is quite unspeakable otherwise. 1 [See Vol. XX. pp. 95-117.] 2 See the reference to this in Letter 81, § 8 (above, p. 198).] [See Letter 79, § 8 (p. 153).] [The Warfare of Science, by Andrew Dickson White, LL.D., President of Cornell University, with Prefatory Note by Professor Tyndall, 1876. The theme of the book is "the great, sacred struggle" of science; and one of the victories, won after "centuries of war" against "rigid adherence to the Bible," is "the taking of interest on loans" (pp. 122 seq.). For another reference to the book, see (in a later volume of this edition) Usury: a Reply and a Rejoinder, § 26.] August 24th, 1877. MY DEAR SIR,-I am deeply interested by your gentle and wise letter, and am more than ever grieved that your state of health prevents your doing all that your kindly will and good sense would enable you to effect. You must please pardon the tone in which, in the forthcoming Fors, some parts of your letter, considered as the expression of many other persons, are answered.1 I am not able always to write as I would-the thoughts take their own way in form when I begin to get them down. The principal difference between us-the conviction, on your part, of national progress, on mine, of national decline-has not been touched upon. It requires most careful statements and explanations, for which I have neither time nor, at present, power, being nearly as ill, I fancy, as you are, though without pain, but with threatening, if I over-think myself, of worse than headache. Always believe me faithfully and affectionately yours I may give your name, may I not? J. RUSKIN. August 25th, 1877. DEAR MR. HORSFALL,-There was no mistake of any import in your former letters. I have, alas, no time even to read their correction this morning, but I chance to open on a leaf of your former about your Bishop, which I never answered. Your Bishop was challenged, as the Overseer of the greatest Mercantile City in England, by Mr. Sillar, to say whether the Bible (whether the Word of God or not) did or did not condemn the taking of Interest on loans. To this the Bishop answered, "He had not time to inquire." 2 An answer which, had it been true, would have been so intensely idiotic that I cannot believe it to have been anything else than a lie of the basest kind. I believe he knew perfectly well what his answer must be, if he answered at all. 3 But, grant him to be so foolish as to suppose his time better occupied than in determining such a question, and so ignorant as not to be aware of the nature of such a struggle as the Church fought against usury for ten centuries, I challenged him again through my own private secretary 3 that it might be done in perfect courtesy. And he remained utterly silent. What was to hinder him from expressing the conviction that his time was better occupied than in acquainting himself with the facts of this matter? if he knew the facts, his resolution not to assert them, on the pleas which you now find for him? Ever most truly yours, or, 1 [See above, pp. 197-200.] [See Letter 56 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 401).] J. R. August 27th, 1877. DEAR MR HORSFALL,-Neither our pain nor pleasure have anything whatever to do with this matter. The declaration of a Bishop of any Christian body of men that he has not time to ascertain the meaning of a Scriptural prohibition, which possibly affects the entire system of the commerce of his day, is either madness of folly or equivocation-for which I use the briefer wordhaving never, as I have stated in Fors before now, met with one honest clergyman in my life, except Bishop Colenso.1 They are all partizans, concealing what they think makes against their opinions, or against the good of men-as they in their better wisdom than God's understand it-and sophistically urging what they think advantageous. You are also separated from me by one great difference in principle. I never judge, or attempt to judge, men's conscience. I never praise myself or blame others—they may be infinitely better men than I, for aught I know. My business is only to declare that they are lying, stealing, or equivocating, if they are so. Their consciences are God's field, not mine. Ever affectionately yours, J. R. August 28th, 1877. MY DEAR SIR,-I find your letters so interesting that-without being able to read them straight through-I let them lie among my papers and take a bit every now and then. I had not before noticed your reference to Savonarola. Yes, both he and Botticelli 2 were, I thank God, utterly of one mind with me, and both spoke absolutely truth to the falling Florence they alone saw Death in the face of. And, refusing their testimony, she died. You don't suppose there is any life in Florence now! She is not even a whitened sepulchre, but a blackened and foul one. And the signs of England's ruin are as clear and fearful as of hers, yet the life in us is larger and the rural population more active. The future of England may be, for aught I know, redeemable, but she must first recognize her state as needing redemption. Ever affectionately yours, J. R. August 29th, 1877 MY DEAR SIR,-I am very grateful for your letter of yesterday (of which I at once destroyed the first part). But I think you were perfectly right in calling the man a liar; and, so far as you were not, only wrong if you allowed the sense of personal injury to make your language violent. 1 [See Vol. XIV. p. 285 n., and Vol. XXVIII. p. 244.] All such expressions in Fors are the deliberate assertions of what the hypocrisy of the age can not discern in itself, and the unconsciousness of the lie, which you think its palliation, is, in my mind, its completion. Ever affectionately yours, J. R. We are in the extremest at issue in all our views of Facts. That is the real reason of your regret at my manner of statement. I think the good which it seems to you your Bishop is doing, no good whatever. I think the harm you believe Colenso did, the only good done by any Bishop in my day. I think of men like Dr. Guthrie, and the great popular Glasgow Editor of Good Words,2 and your Bishop, as men who make all things smooth and smiling for the Devil's work, and daub every wall with untempered mortar.3 1 [Thomas Guthrie (1803-1873), preacher and philanthropist. Ruskin admired his work (see Vol. XII. p. xxx. n.), though criticising his theology (Vol. VI. p. 483).] 2 [Norman Macleod (1812-1872); minister of the Church of Scotland; one of the founders of the Evangelical Alliance, 1847; chaplain to Queen Victoria, 18571872; D.D., Glasgow, 1858; editor of Good Words, 1860-1872.] [This correspondence led to a visit by Mr. Horsfall to Brantwood; while at a later date (1883) Ruskin contributed an Introduction to a pamphlet by Mr. Horsfall, entitled The Study of Beauty and Art in Large Towns (see a later volume of this edition).] |