T is no light task that falls upon me, as President of this IT Society, to deliver its inaugural address. I am conscious that I have before me comparatively few who come as members of the Ruskin Society, or as sympathizers with its work; and that the bulk of my audience is composed of those who hold very different opinions ;-from those who look upon John Ruskin merely as a brilliant writer on Art, down the varying scale, to those who come to hear something in defence of one they consider a mere enthusiast. To the former class I feel that I can say very little that is new, not being by any means the best qualified among them to say even that: while, in regard to the latter, I am aware that, by want of skill in setting forth the truths Mr. Ruskin has devoted his life to teach, I may raise such a prejudice against him in their minds as will vitiate any effect that the chance reading of his works might hereafter have. And when, looking around me, I see not only those whose views of life must have been more or less shaped by commercial pursuits, but also many whose lives have been spent in the domain of thought, and in the search for truth, I realize most fully the responsibility attaching to one who preaches what may seem a new gospel. Of you, then, who know Mr Ruskin and his writings as well as I do, I must beg indulgence if I traverse ground which is already a beaten track to you, while I speak to that wider part of my audience which knows him only by name and his writings by report. There is probably no other great writer of whom so little is now known, and that after forty years of continuous literary work, as John Ruskin. One knows him not at all—not even by name another knows him only as an art critic: a third, as an aesthetic philosopher, whose work on art has unfitted him for any practical views of life, and made him a dangerous guide in morals. A more numerous class regard him as a dreamer, or, less ambiguously, an amiable madman. For it is a sorrowful fact that a self-styled practical world is just as apt, in the nineteenth century, Anno Domini, to say of its greatest men, as it did four thousand years ago, "behold this dreamer cometh ;" or, at a later date, and of a greater than man, “he hath a devil and is mad." And, of our madman, we must again answer as one of the same class did for himself 'Not mad, most noble world, but speaking forth the words of truth and soberness.' It would be curious, and perhaps interesting, to examine the grounds on which an arrogant ignorance fixes the stigma of madness on Mr. Ruskin, but I will only mention three, and, for refutation, do little more than leave it to your good judgment, when I have set forth his teaching, with such extracts from his works as may be necessary. |