Jasper County Democrat, Volume 19, Number 104, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 March 1917 — LIVED TO HELP FELLOW MEN [ARTICLE]

LIVED TO HELP FELLOW MEN

Ruskin’s Noble Words Show How tho , Appeal of Humanity Stirred Him to Self-Sacrifice. John Buskin began his life as an art critic; as one who could see what was truest and most full of the beauty that helps the soul; he counted it his mission, his gift, to open the dull eyes of his countrymen to see the glory of the-vision that had dazzled his own. He flung the treasures of his mind before men in three great books “Modern Painters,” “The Stones of Venice,” and “The Seven Lamps of Architecture.” But meantime there had been entering into his mind some knowledge of-the deadness of the human soul, ofcnlre misery of human lives, of the "degradation and brutality rampant everywhere in modern society. He could not go on talking beautifully about pictures when men were starving. Hence he felt the necessity of leaving his gift before the altar, or, at any rate, of harnessing it to other uses. He says: “For my own part I feel the force of mechanism and the fury of avaricious commerce to be at present so irresistible that I have seceded from the study not only of architecture but nearly of all art; and have given myself, as I would in a besieged city, to seek the best modes of getting bread and butter for its multitudes.”'

Again he says: “I cannot paint; nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sun has become hateful to me, because,of the misery that I know of, and see signs of, where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly. Therefore I will endure it no longer quietly, but henceforward, with any few or many

wiio win” fielp, do my poor Dest to abate this misery.”