and day to try to keep a little home of one room, until
the father died from exhaustion and the son had a film come over his
eyes.

John Ruskin, social reformer, has an important place in the social
movement of the nineteenth century. Many of his theories, which were
considered revolutionary, have since become the commonplace
expressions of twentieth-century social economists.

General Characteristics.--Ruskin was a champion of the
Pre-Raphaelite school of art. He used his powerful influence to free
art from its conventional fetters and to send people direct to nature
for careful loving study of her beautiful forms. His chief strength
lies in his moral enthusiasm and his love of the beautiful in nature.
Like his master, Carlyle, Ruskin is a great ethical teacher; but he
aimed at more definite results in the reformation of art and of social
life. He moralized art and humanized political economy.

Some of his art criticisms and social theories are fanciful, narrow,
and sometimes even absurd. He did not seem to recognize with
sufficient clearness the fact that immoral individuals might produce
great works of art; but no one can successfully assail his main
contention that there must be a connection between great art and the
moral condition of a people. His rejection of railroads and steam
machinery as necessary factors in modern civilization caused many to
pay little attention to any of his social theories. Much of the gospel
that he preached has, however, been accepted by the twentieth century.
He was in advance of his time when he said in 1870 that the object of
his art professorship would be accomplished if "the English nation
could be made to understand that the beauty which is indeed to be a
joy forever must be a joy for all."

At the age of fifty-eight, he thus summed up the principal work of his
life:--

"_Modern Painters_ taught the claim of all lower nature on the
hearts of men; of the rock, and wave, and herb, as a part of their
necessary spirit life... _The Stories of Venice_ taught the laws of
constructive Art, and the dependence of all human work or edifice,
for its beauty, on the happy life of the workman. _Under this Last_
taught the laws of that life itself and its dependence on the Sun of
Justice; the _Inaugural Oxford Lectures_, the necessity that it
should be led, and the gracious laws of beauty and labor recognized,
by the upper, no less than the lower classes of England; and,