John Lord

“ Whole schools of art, entire ages of old workmanship, the very soul of the Middle Age, have been revealed with a new inspiration and transfigured in a more mysterious light. Poetry, Greek sculpture, mediaeval worship, commercial morality, the training of the young, the nobility of industry, the purity of the home,--a thousand things that make up the joy and soundness of human life have been irradiated by the flashing searchlight of one ardent soul: irradiated, let us say, as this dazzling ray shot round the horizon, glancing from heaven to earth, and touching the gloom with fire. ”

“ Wherever the Turk has carried the sword and the Koran, there is blight and death. Only as soldiers and scholars of Europe have forced their way into these seats of ancient empires has it been possible to ask and learn what is buried beneath their gray desolation.
The man who did more than any other to awaken the interest of the world in the search for forgotten empires was Sir Henry Layard, the excavator of Nineveh. But before his day another man had startled the world with what we may call the discovery of Egypt. ”

“ Why, it may be asked, did nearly all the most eminent naturalists and geologists until recently decline to believe in the mutability of species? Darwin replies that the belief that species were immutable productions was almost unavoidable as long as the history of the world was thought to be of short duration. Even now that we have acquired some idea of the lapse of time, men are too apt to assume without proof that the geological record is so perfect that it would have afforded plain evidence of the mutation of species if they had really undergone mutation. ”

“ Perhaps the Bible is right in saying that the first seat of civilized man was in Eden, and that the Euphrates was the chief river of Paradise. Or was it from Arabia, the immemorial home of the Semitic tribes, that land of sand and mountain and fertile valley, land of changeless culture and tradition, so near the centres of civilization, and yet still the most inaccessible, the least known portion of the inhabited earth,--was it from Arabia that the wiser, stronger multitude came that first overran the valleys of both the Nile and the Euphrates, bringing to Egypt and Chaldea arts and letters? ”

“ And there remain the two lands most sacred and beloved in poetry and history,--the land of Israel and the land of Homer. It is amazing that so little search has been made to find out what is hidden under the soil of Palestine. Scholars in plenty have walked over the top of it, and have told all that is on the surface, but almost nothing has been done underground, no such excavations as in Egypt or Assyria. I do not forget that the English Palestine Exploration Fund has followed out, with trenches and tunnels, the walls of Jerusalem, nor that one or two old mounds have been partly explored. ”

“ Here is the greatest living master [the passage was written while Mr. Ruskin was yet alive] of the English tongue, one of the most splendid lights of our noble literature, one to whom a dozen paths of ambition and power lay open, who had everything that could be offered by genius, fame, wealth, social popularity, and intense sensitiveness to all lovely things--and this man, after thirty years of untiring labor, devotes himself to train, teach, delight, and inspire a band of young men, girls, workmen, children,--all who choose to come around him. He lavishes the whole of his fortune on them ”

“ When Livingstone went home, after his third journey, his fellow-countrymen crowded to see and hear the explorer, who had added more facts to geographical knowledge than any other man of his time. They saw a person of middle age, plainly and rather carelessly dressed, whose deep-furrowed and well-tanned face indicated a man of quick and keen discernment, strong impulses, inflexible resolution, and habitual self-command. ”

“ Still now is the once active, fertile, stimulating mind of the man who so effectively roused his generation from its complacent smugness and indifference in its appreciation of the beautiful, and with ardent boldness challenged established beliefs in art and defied the conventionality and authority of his time. His has been a powerful force in innumerable departments of human thought, and epoch-making the influence he has exerted in giving to the world new ideals of the beautiful and in shaping modern opinion and taste in art. ”

“ What a noble passion those Frenchmen have for discovery! For Egypt did not Napoleon provide the most elephantine books of monuments and records that printing-presses have yet issued? And from that time to this have not Frenchmen held the primacy in excavations until, even while England holds and rules Egypt, she leaves, by special convention, the care of its monuments and their exploration to French savants? And before Layard removed a basketful of the earth that covered the palace of Shalmaneser at Nimroud, had not the Frenchman Botta disclosed the friezes and sphinxes of Sargon at Khorsabad ”

“ The son of a worthy weaver in Blantyre, Scotland, Livingstone's early life was that of a poor boy, working in a spinning-mill, quiet, sober, affectionate, and faithful in every relation of life. Moved at last by the thirst for knowledge that has distinguished many a humble Scotch boy, he entered the University at Glasgow, studying during the winter months and spending the summers at his trade in the factory, fitting himself all the while for the conquests he little dreamed he was to achieve over difficulties almost insurmountable. ”

“ Among the "Beacon Lights" of the age there can be no question that Ruskin is worthy of an exalted place, since few men of our modern time, rich as it is in eminent thinkers and writers, has done more than he to illumine the many subjects with which he has so fascinatingly dealt,--and that not only in art and its cult of the Beautiful, but in ethics, education, and political economy. ”

“ We must recognize, he thinks, as the truth, established by an overwhelming array of inductive evidence, that man, with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which he feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men, but to the humblest living creature, with his godlike intellect, which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted powers--man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. ”

“ Towards politics Ruskin was never drawn, but had he been more prosaic and less given to anathematizing, most valuable would have been his aid in legislation at this era of political and moral reform. But if political science, or science in any other of its branches or departments, did not come within his purview, great was the revolution he wrought in the working-man's surroundings, and immense the illumination he shed upon industry and on the spirit in which the laborer should think and work. ”

“ We may look for remarkable development in South Africa, whose promise is larger than that of any other part of the continent. Whatever may be said of some of the methods by which the British have enlarged their empire, their rule has blessed the barbarous peoples whose countries they have absorbed. The task of improving the few millions of blacks in South Africa, and of developing the large and in some respects wonderful resources of that region, will be greatly assisted by the incoming of hundreds of thousands of Europeans, bringing with them the arts and other blessings of civilization. ”

“ Truly, he has done much for his time, and great has been the gain Modern Art has won from his inspiring lessons and thought. The coming of such a man, and at the time that was his, one cannot help reflecting, was one of the providences of an overruling Power, and adequately to estimate his influence and work, and the tone and temper in which he wrought, we have but to consider what the age would have been, in countless departments of thought and activity, had the century now passed possessed no John Ruskin. ”

“ But the age is a practical, unimaginative one, and whatever compacts men make, even for their highest welfare, there are, it is to be feared, few so loyal, tractable, and docile as to place themselves for long under such tutoring and one-patterned, fashioning forms of co-operative living. Into whatever millennial state Ruskin sought to usher his little band of English followers and disciples, one must speak appreciatively of his motives in projecting the scheme, and of the money and labor he personally lavished upon the Utopian project. ”

“ Ruskin set before himself a high, if somewhat quixotic, ideal of life, and with great earnestness did much, not only for the elevation of his fellow-men, but for the development of sound artistic taste and the enriching and spiritualizing of life by seeking to surround it at all times with the true and the beautiful, and with the old-time virtues of purity, manliness, and courage. ”

“ All three lectures, observes a commentator, "tell men and women of the ideals they should set before them; how to read and to build character under the inspiration of the nobility of the past, fitting one's self for such great society; how to develop noble womanhood; how to bear one's self toward the wonder of life, toward one's work in the world, and toward one's duty to others." ”

“ And when we go into the further east of Persia and Old Elam, not to speak of the yet farther east of Central Asia, now just beginning to yield strange treasures to daring travellers, and ancient India and China,--how ancient we know not at all,--there is field for centuries of further research. For we must go back past empires and kingdoms and tribal conditions to the very beginning of the human race on the earth, even if so it be, to the first Pithecanthropus which men of science tell us was the link which connected Homo sapiens with the race of primitive simians. ”

“ Spencer's opinion, the evidence here brought to a focus ought to dissipate once for all the belief in a moral sense, as commonly entertained. A long experience of mankind, however, prevents him from indulging in such an expectation. Among men at large, lifelong convictions are not to be destroyed either by conclusive arguments or multitudinous facts. Only to those who are not by creed or cherished theory committed to the hypothesis of a supernaturally created human species will the evidence above summed up prove that the human mind has no originally implanted conscience. ”

“ It is the author's final conviction that, if the process of evolution, which, unceasing throughout past time, has brought life to its present height, continues throughout the future, as we cannot but anticipate, then, amid all the rhythmical changes in each society, amid all the lives and deaths of nations, amid all the supplantings of race by race, there will go on that adaptation of human nature to the social state which began when savages first gathered together into hordes for mutual defence,--an adaptation finally complete. ”

“ Schliemann, the Greek merchant who achieved wealth in the United States, bravely opened the great ruins of Troy, in the full patriotism of his assurance that Homer's story of the Trojan war was history as well as poetry. As he found one burnt and buried city under another,--for many times was Troy destroyed,--and extended his investigations to Tiryns and other ancient cities, one volume of splendid research followed another, until the trader had compelled the unwilling scholar to confess that he must dig for both history and art. ”

“ Even Meyerbeer, the ruler of the musical world in Paris at that time, was not without influence on him, though he had cause to disapprove of him because of his submission to the demands of the fashionable taste of the day, which contrasted so strongly with Wagner's own courageous defiance of everything inconsistent with his ideals of art. The result to-day--Meyerbeer's fall and Wagner's triumph--shows that courage, like honesty, is, in the long run, the best policy, and, like virtue, its own reward. ”

“ The harnessing and efficient utilization of these great natural energies is the direct function of the engineer, or more especially of the dynamic engineer, and in this noble guild of workers, Ericsson carved for himself an enduring place and left behind a record which should serve as an inspiration to all who are following the same pathway in later years.
No one feature perhaps better differentiates our modern civilization from that of earlier times, four hundred years ago, or even one hundred, than that of intercommunication between man and his fellow. ”

“ The childhood of Greece, its mighty infancy, out of which it grew to be the creator and the example of all the world's culture, is even now being exposed to our view, safely kept to be recovered by the scholars of our generation.
Of interest rather to the student of the curiosities of history are the mounds and pyramids and temples built by the aborigines of America; for these tribes have had absolutely no part in creating our dominant civilization or developing its art. China and Japan are, at this late day, giving something to the world's store of beauty and utility ”

“ I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically of what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did." Darwin was convinced that the loss of these tastes was not only a loss of happiness, but might possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional side of one's nature. ”

“ As far as the light of history can be projected into the past, we see Egypt among the first and foremost on the threshold of civilization. The continent discovered last and opened last to the enterprises of the world is still Africa. ”

“ But who knew, fifty years ago, that Wagner and Liszt, or even their predecessors, Chopin and Schumann, and the song specialist, Robert Franz, were giants? We know it now, and future generations will know whether we have giants among us. Things of beauty that will be a joy forever have been created by men of genius now living in Europe; such men as the Norwegian Grieg, the Bohemian Dvorák, the French Saint-Saëns and Massenet, the Hungarian Goldmark, the German Humperdinck and Richard Strauss, the Polish Paderewski. England has more good composers and listeners than it ever had before ”

“ If in this brief article, which does not purport to be more than a sketch of the tremendous strides made by medicine in the Nineteenth Century, so much space has been given to the germ theory of disease, it is because the demonstration of the truth of that theory has been absolute, and has constituted the very marrow of almost all the medical progress of the century that has been the outcome of continuous thought and study as opposed to chance discovery. ”

“ The Makalolo chief, Sekeletu, on the Zambesi River, supplied Livingstone with men, ivory, and trading commissions, that helped the humble and unknown white man, lacking all financial resources except his slender salary, to make the two great journeys which kindled the world's interest and led to the wonderful achievements of our generation. In this noteworthy incident we see the human agencies through which Africa will attain the full stature allotted to her. The Caucasian and the Negro each has his onerous part in the work of bringing the civilized world and Africa into touch and accord. ”

“ The Niagara Falls power transmission system stands to-day as a magnificent testimonial to the genius of Faraday, and as a living monument of the varied and valuable gifts his researches have bestowed upon mankind. ”