should be primarily concerned.




I

THE LIFE OF RUSKIN


[Sidenote: Ancestry.]

It is easy to trace in the life of Ruskin these two forces tending
respectively toward the love of beauty and toward the contempt of mere
beauty. They are, indeed, present from the beginning. He inherited
from his Scotch parents that upright fearlessness which has always
characterized the race. His stern mother "devoted him to God before he
was born,"[1] and she guarded her gift with unremitting but perhaps
misguided caution. The child was early taught to find most of his
entertainment within himself, and when he did not, he was whipped. He
had no playmates and few toys. His chief story-book was the Bible,
which he read many times from cover to cover at his mother's knee.
His father, the "perfectly honest wine-merchant," seems to have been
the one to foster the boy's aesthetic sense; he was in the habit of
reading aloud to his little family, and his son's apparently genuine
appreciation of Scott, Pope, and Homer dates from the incredibly early
age of five. It was his father, also, to whom he owed his early
acquaintance with the finest landscape, for the boy was his companion
in yearly business trips about Britain, and later visited, in his
parents' company, Belgium, western Germany, and the Alps.