e now venture
to deal.

After the magnificent work done by Ruskin in art up to his fortieth
year, that he should turn, for practically the remainder of his life, to
the seemingly vain and profitless task of a social reformer and
regenerator of modern society, has to most men been a riddle too elusive
and enigmatic to solve. And yet, in his earlier career, had he not
himself prepared us for just such a departure as he took in the sixties,
for in art was he not equally revolutionary and iconoclastic, as well as
personally self-willed, passionate, and impulsive? Moreover, had not
Mother Nature endowed him with the gifts of a seer and made him
chivalrous as well as intensely sympathetic, while his early training
inclined him to be serious, and even ascetic? Nor were the rebuffs he
met with throughout his career calculated at this stage to make him
court the applause of his fellow-men or be mindful of the world's
censure or approval. Nor can one well quarrel with what he had now to
say on many a subject, visionary and enthusiast as he always was, and
given over to mediaeval views and preachments, and to abounding moral
and ethical exhortation. Like Carlyle's, his voice was that of one
crying in the wilderness, and yet in the industrial and social condition
of Britain at the era there was need of just such appeals for
regeneration and reform as Ruskin strenuously uttered, accompanied by
indignant rebukes of grossness, vulgarity, and meanness, as manifested
in masses of the people. If in his strivings after amelioration he was
too denunciatory as well as too radical, we must remember the temper and
manner of the man, and recognize how difficult it was in him, or in any
iconoclast who scorned modern science as Ruskin scorned it, to reconcile
the age of steam and industrial machinery, which he spurned and would
have none of, with the views he held of Christianity, morals, and faith.
His views on political economy, which he treated neither as an art nor a
science, might be perverse and wrong-headed, and his method of adapting
prophetic and apostolic principles to the practice of every-day life
utterly impracticable; but the virtues he counselled the nation to
manifest, and the graces he enjoined of truthfulness, justice,
temperance, bravery, and obedience, were qualities needed to be
cultivated in his time, with a fuller recognition of and firmer trust in
God and His right of sway in the world He had created.

What Ruskin's eco