Page:The Victorian Age.djvu/23

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[19]

displayed in their results. He hated the scepticism of the Revolution, its negations, its love of claptrap rhetoric and fine phrases, and above all its anarchism. He wished to see society well ordered, under its wisest men; he wished to overcome materialism by idealism, and loose morality by industry and the fear of God. Justice, he declared, is done in this world; right is might, if we take long views. Institutions collapse when they become shams, and no longer fulfil their function. The sporting squires ought to be founding colonies instead of preserving game. As for the new industrialism, he disliked it with the fervour of a Scottish peasant.

Ruskin was a Platonist, steeped in the study of Plato, and bound to him by complete sympathy. We cannot separate Ruskin the art-critic from Ruskin the social reformer. His great discovery was the close connection of the decay of art with faulty social arrangements. Ugliness in the works of man is a symptom of social disease. He could not avert his eyes from the modern town, as Wordsworth did, because the modern town meant a

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