Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 January 1910 — BUSKIN AS HOME BOY. [ARTICLE]

BUSKIN AS HOME BOY.

Great Thinker aa a Youth Was Much Pampered and Coddled. Ruskin was an only son, and from the very first the firm character of his parents in a sense overshadowed him. In all material things his life was a sheltered dne —what the French call capitonne. He was never forced to go out Into the world and battle for a living. His father’s large fortune was always at his command; and as his father was convinced that the boy was an extraordinary genius, he never stinted or denied him anything. Therefore, young Ruskin was free from ordinary cares. He could gratify his taste for art, buy pictures, endow museums, act as his own publisher; or, if he liked, he could fight over immaterial questions without ever having to think about the question of an income. Even after his parents died, and when Ruskin, after middle life, had practically thrown away the fortune which had been left him, he still received an income of some $20,000 a year from his copyrights, so that he never once did know the meaning of poverty, or what it was to toil sos money, Lyndon Orr says in Munsey’s. All this gave his genius full play. His eccentricities, so to speak, were endowed. Had he been less pampered, he would have been a different man in every way. Perhaps it was a good thing for him and for the world that his circumstances were as I have described them; "but, on the other hand, he lacked that hard experience which makes men really strong. Even physically, this may perhaps have injured him. To the world at large he seemed a radical reformer, attacking the whole commercial system of modern life, and hurling epithets that flamed like balefires over social questions. But at home —and he lived with his father and mother during the whole formative period of his- life —he seemed more of a child than a grown man. He submitted to the dictation of his parents in everything domestic. When he was 40 years of age he used to cover up all his cherished paintings on Sunday because his mother did not approve of anything that would) please the fleshly eye and distract the mind from spiritual meditation.