Among this small body of men whose spiritual force continues to live in
their books or through the influence of their great self-sacrifices,
Ruskin deserves a place, for he gave fortune, work and a splendid
enthusiasm to the common people's cause.
Ruskin's whole life was abnormal, and his early training served to
accentuate those weaknesses of mind and will that made failures of so
many schemes for the public good. If Ruskin had been trained in the
English public schools he would have learned common sense in boyhood.
As it was, his father and mother shielded the boy in every way from
all contact with the world. Ruskin's father was a prosperous wine
merchant with much culture; his mother was a religious fanatic, whose
passion for the Bible imposed upon her boy the daily reading of the
Scriptures and the daily memorizing of scores of verses.
Such training in most cases causes a revolt against religion, but in
Ruskin's case it resulted in training his boyish ear to the cadences
of the Bible writers and in filling his mind with the sublime imagery
of the prophets, with the result that when he began to write he had
already formed a style, the richest and most varied of the last
century.
The boy was a mental prodigy, for he taught himself to read when four
years old, and at five he had devoured hundreds of books and was
already writing poems and plays. At ten, when he had his first tutor,
his knowledge was wide and he had become a passionate lover of natural
scenery, as well as no mean artist with pen and pencil.
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