CORRESPONDENCE MR. RUSKIN'S STYLE AND ITS ORIGIN.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 334, 9 March 1910, Page 6

CORRESPONDENCE

MR. RUSKIN'S STYLE AND ITS ORIGIN.

To the Editor. Sir,—l have been much interested in a recent article in the Pall Mall Magazine by Mr. E. T. Cook, the joint editor of the works of John Ruskin, in nearly forty volumes—truly a "great literary undertaking," as it is there termed. In discussing the secret of Ruskin's style, Mr. Cook informs us that "Tennyson on being asked to name the six authors in whom the stateliest English prose was to be found, gave Hooker, .Bacon, Milton, Jeremy Taylor, De Quincy and Ruskin," each of whom was a profound student of the Bible, I may remark. Or Mr. Ruskin, his editor says: "He rose with the sun. and before breakfast he made notes of a few verses of the Bible," which reminds us tliat he himself has told us how much he owed in a literary way to his mother's plan of making him commit to memory the Psalms of David. We learn that his study of the Bible'was constant throughout his life. It appears 'there is a vogue for Ruskin just now in France, and scarcely a month passes without a new translation of his books." As writers they are just as ignorant of the Bible as some of your contributors, and in 'consequence blunders equally ludicrous occur there as with some nearer home. Mr. Ruskin's acquaintance with the Book was so intimate that he never needed and does not appear to have prepared a Concordance. A friend staying at Brentwood asked where he would find Cruden. "Not in this house," replied Ruskin; "I should be ashamed to need the book." How small should this make many of us feel; but then how few are blessed with so tenacious a memory as he! 'Although he always quoted from memory, his editors have only found one false reference—when he speaks of the "three smooth stones" taken by David from the brook, instead of five. How thankful ought we to be to have lived in the same age as such a Biblical giant! But his thought is ternpered by that other, most sad ; most melancholy one: that we are living in the first age of Christendom in which wouth is being trained wfithout the benefit of the Book of Books, a fact that mu'St $1 all thoughtful minds with pity and *orrow, especially when we have, as your readers have recently had occular demonstration Of the woeful outcome of such a system. Taking ho* Mgher grounds, it is quite certain that no future Miltons or Ruskins will arise to illuminate our literature and to gladden its students, while the regular study of the Bible is" officially denied the young by a Governmental monopoly of ao-called education. After giving some beautiful extracts from these works which Mr. Cook asserts to be "themselves a work of art," he concludes by endorsing the statement of the late Professor Charles Eliot Morton, that "no matter 01 literature in our time enden vored morn earnestly and steadily to set forth, for Ihe help of those ho addressed, whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely and of good spirit: or in his own life tried more faithfully to practise the virtues which sprang from the contemplation of such things and from their adoption as the rule of conduct" To myself, after a colonial life of more than half a centir-'-, the bitterest thought :isso<"'inted Willi out future outlook is this: that insteaa of breedincr men of the stamp of JoTin Ruskin with his studv of God's Word, which -produced so finished a 'style and so humble a Christian, we are satisfied to turn out a type of citizen bereft of all these qualities and ignor- ' ant of that Bonk from which hp drew his inspiration.--T am. etc., B. ENROTH.