The Harvest of Ruskin

The horrors of the Franco-German war of 1871, relatively small as they now appear, were a nightmare to him, and cloud the first volume of Fors, which records his current thoughts in that year.

His most prominent utterance is his lecture on “War” delivered to the students at the Engineering College at Woolwich in 1865 and printed in The Crown of Wild Olive. It appears, throughout, to be in praise of war. But we shall see that great deductions are to be made. Nevertheless it begins appallingly enough by stating that all fine arts have been founded in war, and can only be practised by warlike nations. He gives as instances, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The instances are all fallacious, particularly those of the peace-loving people in the Nile Valley, and the very inartistic Romans. Nor is there any proof that war either caused or aided the artistic faculty of the Greeks. How can there be? The characteristic warrior city – Sparta – was as inartistic as Woolwich. He goes a step further to please his audience of young warrior-students by the strange assertion that “war is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men”: and that, in History, we find coupled together “peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness – peace and death.” “I found that all the great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war: that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace; taught by war and deceived by peace; trained by war, and betrayed by peace; in a word that they were born in war, and expired in peace.”99

Such is the rash and partial generalization of the rhetorician, based on this much of historic truth that the early years of a nation’s life have often been occupied in conflict for safety or empire, and its later, more peaceful and more prosperous years are marked sometimes by the weakening influences of wealth, and end in decay. But it is hard, indeed, impossible I venture to say, to show that the motives or the methods of war are not, from beginning to end, retrograde and barbaric, a harking back to the life of the beast; and not the source of any of these good things named.

But now comes the antidote; after such an exordium, what manner of peace address might he not give to those Woolwich men and they listen?

First he excepts from his approval “the rage of a barbarian wolf flock,” and the “habitual restlessness or rapine of mountaineers,” and “the occasional struggle of a strong, peaceful nation for its life" – a strange exception that – and the “contest of merely ambitious nations for extent of power" – a wide exception that. It leaves him three kinds of beneficial war: war for exercise or play, out of mere high spirits and unused energies of the upper classes – war for aggression against surrounding evil – and wars for defence of noble institutions and pure households.

I. As to wars for pastime, we find that they are to be fought somewhat in the manner of duels or tournaments by the officers; by the idle young men who are too proud for peaceful business, and whose arms and legs want play. There is to be no gathering of peasants to fire into one another; and Carlyle on the thirty peasants from Dumdrudge is helpfully quoted, from Sartor Resartus. The man who could quote that to Woolwich students could do most things with an audience. We next have a little paragraph thrown in on Arbitration. “Grant,” he says sarcastically, “that no law of reason can be understood by nations; no law of justice submitted to by them; and that, while questions of a few acres and of petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in the perishing or saving of Kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle.”100 I doubt if any one has ever had the ear of that audience of thoughtless aspiring soldier students to an Arbitration argument, before or since. He proceeds to wash his hands wholly of modern war.

“If you have to take masses of men from all industrial employment, – to feed them by the labour of others, – to provide them with destructive machines varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you have to ravage the country which you attack – to destroy, for a score of future years, its roads, its woods, its cities and its harbours; and if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged shot, and leave the living creatures, countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down into clots of clay – what book of accounts shall record the cost of your work – what book of judgment sentence the guilt of it?”101

Methinks it sounds not unlike a Peace Address.

II. We pass next to wars of aggression against evil – and the lecturer spends powerful pages on the selfishness and faithlessness of ambitious warlike kings; on the common degradation of the idea of power; and on the need for concentrating all our energies on home reforms. We are warned against supposing that a big nation is a strong one, bade to aim at union of hearts rather. “Only that nation gains true territory which gains itself.” “A nation,” he proceeds, “does not strengthen itself by seizing dominion over races whom it cannot benefit.” “Whatever apparent increase of majesty and of wealth may have accrued to us from the possession of India, whether these prove to us ultimately power or weakness, depends wholly on the degree in which our influence on the native race shall be benevolent and exalting.”102

He nevertheless believes that the rule of England is for the good of the subject races, is a national duty and a piece of self-sacrifice and world service, the English white man’s burden. He has an eloquent passage on this subject in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, beginning “Reign or die.” His hostility to the Manchester School comes out in his characteristic style. “I tell you that the principle of non-intervention, as now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel as the worst frenzy of conquest, and differs from it only by being not only malignant, but dastardly.” “Within these last ten years, we English have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs: we have fought where we should not have fought, for gain; and we have been passive, where we should not have been passive, for fear.”103 I am indeed much afraid that this, spoken in 1865, has generally been the case throughout our history.

III. As to wars for defence: Ruskin principally devotes himself to attacking the essential slavery of military obedience: he will have no mercenary standing armies, only unprofessional citizen armies for defence.

So he ends with fatherly counsel to his hearers to be industrious and serious minded, not to bet, to be pure and honourable, and reverent towards all women; and the ladies present he exhorts to wear black whenever there is war, that so, by their influence, there may be no more wars.

There you have a summary of the famous lecture on War in the Crown of Wild Olive, which has weakened Ruskin’s influence with many of his friends, and done undoubted harm. But I call it on the whole a peace address given by a man who combined with his hatred of violence and ruin a certain attachment to picturesque mediævalism. The wars of Arthur or Roland were his ideal. He recognized the heroism and self-abandonment of such soldiers as he had read about all his life in Homer and Scott. But our modern wars include everything he hated; they are wars for trade and for gain, sordid and financial in origin and sordid and financial in results.

Ruskin explains his attitude quite clearly in the Appendix to the Crown of Wild Olive, at the beginning of his notes on the Political Economy of the Kings of Prussia.

“I am often accused of inconsistency; but believe myself defensible against the charge with respect to what I have said on nearly every subject except that of war. It is impossible for me to write consistently of war, for the groups of facts I have gathered about it lead me to two precisely opposite conclusions.

“When I find this the case, in other matters, I am silent, till I can choose my conclusion: but, with respect to war, I am forced to speak, by the necessities of the time; and forced to act, one way or another. The conviction on which I act is, that it causes an incalculable amount of avoidable human suffering and that it ought to cease among Christian nations; and if therefore any of my boy-friends desire to be soldiers, I try my utmost to bring them into what I conceive to be a better mind. But, on the other hand, I know certainly that the most beautiful characters yet developed among men have been formed in war – that all great nations have been warrior nations – and that the only kinds of peace which we are likely to get in the present age are ruinous alike to the intellect and the heart.

“The last lecture in this volume, addressed to young soldiers, had for its object to strengthen their trust in the virtue of their profession. It is inconsistent with itself, in its closing appeal to women, praying them to use their influence to bring wars to an end. And I have been hindered from completing my long intended notes on the economy of the Kings of Prussia by continually increasing doubt how far the machinery and discipline of war, under which they learned the art of government, was essential for such lesson; and what the honesty and sagacity of the Friedrich who so nobly repaired his ruined Prussia, might have done for the happiness of his Prussia, unruined.

“How far, in the future, it may be possible for men to gain the strength necessary for kingship without either fronting death, or inflicting it, seems to me not at present determinable. The historical facts are that, broadly speaking, none but soldiers, or persons with a soldierly faculty, have ever yet shown themselves fit to be kings; and that no other men are so gentle, so just, or so clear-sighted. Wordsworth’s character of the Happy Warrior cannot be reached in the height of it but by a warrior; nay, so much is it beyond common strength that I had supposed the entire meaning of it to be metaphorical, until one of the best soldiers of England104 himself read me the poem, and taught me, what I might have known, had I enough watched his own life, that it was entirely literal.”

By extending his soldierly qualification to “persons with a soldierly faculty,” he gives the case away. For that can only mean the faculty of courage, organization and command. These qualities a peaceful ruler like William Penn possessed in striking measure. The whole passage is the record of a swaying contest between sentiment and conviction; between the glamour of the glowing haze of distant tradition and actual facts, only too closely pressing upon mankind to-day.

Truly the question of the effect of war on character is vital. I had written here, in pre-war days, some observations upon it; but they seem to me now faint and platitudinous. We have had since then such widespread experience of the play of character faced with the dread calamity of the world-war, that it is too complicated to treat briefly. We are all saddened and wearied. So I leave it to the experience of the millions who know more about it from their own experience than I do.

We need not wait for war to harden our fibre and stiffen our backs. Surely this can be done without wholesale demoralization and destruction. Are there not national evils to be fought? privations to be endured here in fighting vice, ugliness and disease, or in voluntarily participating in poverty? There is courage needed to stand against public opinion and to lead it, to sacrifice wealth and social repute if required. These things are what we must turn to for the exercise of the courage and unselfishness of the soldier. We want more strenuous asceticism of a form not so essentially unreasonable and destructive as war.

It would entirely overload this chapter to give any idea of the vigour and number of the passages in Fors which storm against war: – “storming” is generally the method, varied, as usual with this master of fancy and emotion, with stinging sarcasm and mocking raillery. The burden of his plea throughout is that “the game of our nobles and the gain of our usurers” is war.105

“When you have got the Devil well under foot in Sheffield, you may begin to stop him from persuading my Lords of the Admiralty that they want a new grant, etc., etc., to make his machines with… The fiend sees that he can blind you, through your lust for drink, into quietly allowing yourselves to pay fifty millions a year, that the rich may make their machines of blood, and play at shedding blood.”106

“In this contest (of poor and rich) assuredly, the victory cannot be by violence; every conquest under the Prince of War retards the standards of the Prince of Peace.”107

He quotes108 from the Daily Telegraph the following from its description of the capture of Paris: “Each demolished house has its own legend of sorrow, of pain, and horror; each vacant doorway speaks to the eye, and almost to the ear, of hasty flight, as armies of fire came – of weeping women and trembling children running away in awful fear, abandoning the home that saw their birth, the old house they loved – of startled men seizing quickly under each arm their most valued goods, and rushing, heavily laden, after their wives and babes, leaving to hostile hands the task of burning all the rest. When evening falls, the wretched outcasts, worn with fatigue and tears, reach Versailles, St. Germain, or some other place outside the range of fire, and there they beg for bread and shelter, homeless, foodless, broken with despair. And this, remember, has been the fate of something like a hundred thousand people during the last four months. Versailles alone has about fifteen thousand such fugitives to keep alive, all ruined, all hopeless, all vaguely asking the grim future what still worse fate it may have in store for them.”

The following passage is interesting, however feeble it may appear in view of our recent developments of war: —

“We fight inelegantly as well as expensively, with machines instead of bow and spear; we kill about a thousand now to the score then, in settling any quarrel – (Agincourt was won with the loss of less than a hundred men; only 25,000 English altogether were engaged at Creçy; and 12,000, some say only 8,000, at Poictiers); we kill with far ghastlier wounds, crashing bones and flesh together; we leave our wounded necessarily for days and nights in heaps on the fields of battle; we pillage districts twenty times as large, and with completer destruction of more valuable property; and with a destruction as irreparable as it is complete; for if the French or English burnt a church one day, they could build a prettier one the next; but the modern Prussians couldn’t even build so much as an imitation of one; we rob on credit, by requisition, with ingenious mercantile prolongations of claim; and we improve contention of arms with contention of tongues, and are able to multiply the rancour of cowardice, and mischief of lying, in universal and permanent print; and so we lose our tempers as well as our money, and become indecent in behaviour as in raggedness.”109

“The first reason for all wars and for the necessity of national defences, is that the majority of persons, high and low, in all European nations, are Thieves, and in their hearts, greedy of their neighbours’ goods, land, and fame. But besides being Thieves they are also fools, and have never yet been able to understand that if Cornishmen want pippins cheap, they must not ravage Devonshire – that the prosperity of their neighbours is in the end, their own also; and the poverty of their neighbours, by the communism of God, becomes in the end, their own.” “And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in it, are the Capitalists – that is to say, people who live by percentages on the labour of others, instead of by fair wages for their own.”110

“There is no physical crime at this day, so far beyond pardon – so without parallel in its untempted guilt, as the making of war-machinery, and invention of mischievous substance. Two nations may go mad, and fight like harlots – God have mercy on them: – you, who hand them carving knives off the table, for leave to pick up a dropped sixpence, what mercy is there for you?”111

“The men who have been killed within the last two months, and whose work, and the money spent in doing it, have filled Europe with misery which fifty years will not efface, had they been set at the same cost to do good instead of evil, and to save life instead of destroying it, might by this 10th January, 1871, have embanked every dangerous stream at the roots of the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Po, and left to Germany, to France and to Italy, an inheritance of blessing for centuries to come – they and their families living all the while in brightest happiness and peace. And now! Let the Red Prince look to it: red inundation bears also its fruit in time.”112

He calls War “the moral organization of massacre, and the mechanical reduplication of ruin.”113 “All the cruellest wars inflicted, all the basest luxuries grasped by the idle classes, are thus paid for by the poor a hundred times over” (in interest on debt).114

Thus Ruskin is to be found among the Peace advocates – uttering indeed the characteristic refrain of Christianity, and saying emphatically in Fors, in so many words, that we are not to avenge injuries. Yet he was altogether out of sympathy with the ordinary channels of such advocacy. Liberalism he loathed, democracy he utterly disbelieved in, John Bright was the object of his occasional angry or contemptuous reference; anything that savoured of Manchester was condemned as tainted with political economy; the British aristocrats, the present ones, not ones selected on new principles of excellence, but even the ones we have, were to be the leaders of a regenerated England, and fathers of the Fatherland. Liberty was a red rag to him; he preferred the servitude of the shepherd dog to the freedom of the buzzing gnat: – and so he experienced the awkwardness felt by those who, having on some issue joined the party of reaction, have yet within them their old reforming zeal: for in reality Ruskin was an enlightened Socialist philanthropist.

For these reasons I fear that his peace influence has been very much neutralized and wasted; and therefore I have had peculiar pleasure in bringing it out in this chapter.

All these extracts make it clear that the writer’s hatred of modern war waged by multitudes of conscript or other soldiers, machine guns, and chemical explosives, was a constant horror to him; and that his sentimental admiration for the feudal and Greek chivalry was an academic and otiose emotion, figuring appropriately as a propitiatory exordium to the young warriors of Woolwich, but otherwise not an influential part of his thoughts.

Nevertheless Ruskin was a devotee of the nobler type of imperialism. He lived before the sordidness of “Empire,” and its taproot in High Commerce and Finance, had become as plain as they are to-day; and before the series of wars of Empire-building had culminated in the struggle for power in the Near East, power whose pursuit formed the principal motive for the Great World War. The Inaugural Lecture at Oxford is the central expression of this imperialism, in its concluding paragraphs. There are kindred passages in The Crown of Wild Olive.115 A Knight’s Faith, the Life of Sir Herbert Edwardes of the Punjab, is written in the noblest imperialist vein. In this, though not in his economic teaching in general, Ruskin falls under the sentimental glamour of popular phrases, and loses touch with reality.