Newell Dwight Hillis

“ Poet, statesman, philosopher, champion and martyr of English literature, John Milton was born at one of the critical moments in the history of mankind. His era, says Macaulay, "was one of the memorable eras—the very crisis of the great conflict between liberty and despotism, reason and prejudice. The battle was fought for no single generation, for no single land. The destinies of the human race were staked on the same cast with the freedom of the English people. ”

“ No one will ever know whether Beatrice was indeed the loveliest girl in Italy; whether she really was the daughter of intellect, or whether the greatness was in Dante, who projected the image of beauty, created by his imagination and superimposed upon Beatrice. We all know that it is within the power of the sun in the late afternoon to cast the brilliant hues of gold and purple upon the vine and transform slender tendrils into purest gold. Dante had a powerful intellect, the finest imagination of any known artist, vast moral endowments—gifts, however, that in themselves are impotent. ”

“ Through fear, Dante endeavoured to scourge men back from the horrors of iniquity. He appealed to material men through the imagery of material flames, and slowly by this scourge, tried to drive them back toward obedience, sympathy and love for the poor and the weak. For their allurement also he showed them a golden city in the far-off blue, with the flowers blooming in the fields of Paradise. He used his unrivalled genius to make vice and sin revolting and infinitely repulsive, just as he tried to make truth, kindness and justice alluring. ”

“ Dante, with other innocent citizens, was banished and condemned to death by burning. A statesman, he saw his party defeated and driven from the land; a man of property, he lost his whole fortune; one of the proudest of men, he was forced to humble himself and live on foreign alms. Inspired by the noblest intentions, the world gave him no thanks, but drove him forth like a wild beast, branded his name with foul crimes and condemned him to wander over the hills of Italy till death at last gave him release. He never saw Florence again. For years he knew poverty, neglect and hatred. ”

“ The great man of Florence at this moment was Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo was the most powerful figure in Italy, the most widely-travelled, and the richest man of his time. Tiring of luxury and flattery, he was ambitious to be called the patron of art and literature. He had fitted up a great banqueting-room in his palace, in which he could assemble painters, sculptors, architects, actors, poets, philosophers. His seat at the head of the table was after the fashion of a throne, and he had made himself a kind of dictator in the realm of learning. ”

“ Great institutions are the shadows that great men cast across the centuries. A great law, a great liberty, a great art or tool or reform represents a great soul, organized, and made unconsciously immortal for all time. Explorers trace the Nile or Amazon back to the lake in which the river takes its rise. Historians trace institutions back to some hero from whose mind and heart the life-giving movement pours forth. When the scholar travels back to the far-off beginnings of jurisprudence, he comes to some Moses, toiling in Thebes, to some Solon in Athens, to some Justinian in Rome. ”

“ Like all men of the first order of genius he was great on many sides. It was his glory that he awakened the moral sense and brought the life of God into the soul of man. Savonarola was like the Matterhorn or the Breithorn that lift their peaks so high that they look out upon the Rhine of the north and the Po of the south, upon the vineyards of France and the valleys of Austria. ”

“ When the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Cromwell was celebrated, Great Britain awakened to the fact that too little recognition had been given to the great reformer whose career was one of the marvels of English history. The measure of a nation's greatness is the kind of man it admires. To-day, it is of little consequence what we think of Cromwell, but it is of the first importance that Cromwell should approve the leaders of our world-capitals. Only in the last generation has the tide turned, and the reaction begun to set in. ”

“ Little wonder that Spain looked longingly toward this people and meditated plans for breaking down its fortresses, subjugating its peoples and transferring its accumulated treasure from the chests of the burghers to the vaults of the Spanish dons and cavaliers. And when at length it began to look as if the scepter of the sea might pass from Spain to Holland, King Philip and his soldiers, under Bloody Alva, resolved to draw a circle of fire around little Holland and rob her of the treasure she had so slowly earned. ”

“ DANTE
(1265–1321) And the Dawn After the Dark Ages
All scholars are agreed as to the classes of men who build the State. There are the soldiers who keep the State in liberty, the physicians who keep the State in health, the teachers who sow the land with wisdom and knowledge, the farmers and merchants who feed and clothe the people, the prophets who keep the visions burning, and the poets who inspire and fertilize the soul of the race. But in every age and clime, the poet has been the real builder of his city and country. The only kind of work that lives forever is the work of the poet. ”

“ The genius of John Ruskin's message is in a single sentence: "Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art and education is brutality." He held that all the doing that makes commerce is born of the thinking that makes scholars, and that all the flying of looms and the whirling of spindles begins with the quiet thought of some scholar, hidden in a closet, or sequestered in a cloister. ”

“ The genius of the Inferno is that sins are seeds, big with the harvest of their own penalty.
Our age makes little of the Purgatory itself—this realm which Dante describes as the place where the human soul is cleansed and made worthy to ascend to heaven. It is described as a kind of vestibule of Paradise, where the soul fronts the results of wrong-doing, through the debt of penalty and the evil inclination of the will, and the instincts that have been perverted. The sins of which men are cleansed are the sins against love and pride, envy and anger ”

“ No one has ever been able to define genius, though many scholars have told us what genius is not. Many men in the English lecture halls and universities had talent, but that stablekeeper's son, John Keats, had genius. More than one of the four hundred members of the House of Lords during Charles the Second's reign had talent, but a poor tinker, John Bunyan, had genius, that blazed like the sun. There were multitudes of men living in the Thirteen Colonies, and many of them rich, but that poor boy flying a kite, Benjamin Franklin, had the divine gift. ”

“ Dante has been well-called the "Morning Star of the Renaissance." He was born at the end of, perhaps, the darkest period in history,—the five black centuries succeeding the fall of Rome; he lived to see the first fruits of his own sowing—that wonderful rebirth of art and culture which was to culminate, two hundred years later, in the canvases of Raphael and the sculptures of Michael Angelo. It has been beautifully said that before singing his song Dante had to invent his harp. No graceful phrase ever had a sounder kernel of truth. Great poets are more than great artists in language ”

“ John Ruskin once called attention to the fact that as every great art-age has been a reaction from an era of unendurable ugliness, so every movement for liberty has been a reaction precipitated by unwonted tyranny. Certain it is that as Oliver Cromwell represented a rebound from feudalism, and Abraham Lincoln a reaction from the cruelty of slavery, so William the Silent represented a thrilling protest against the crime of a foreign usurper. ”

“ The angels that cleanse are the angels of forgiveness and peace. On that island of cleansing Virgil and Dante land, and place their hands upon the ground and bathe in dew their tear-stained cheeks. But climbing up the steep way of penitence is like climbing up a craggy mountainside, toiling on hands and knees, with tire that almost brings despair; and yet the higher Dante climbs the easier the task. ”

“ The best-loved books in our libraries are books of heroism, books of eloquence, books of success, and books of love. It is a matter of misfortune that no history of human love has ever been written. Scholars have set forth the history of wars, the history of engines and ships, the history of laws and reforms, but no library holds a history of the greatest gift of man, the gift of love. That is the one creative [Pg 19] gift that belongs to his soul. Beyond all other writers, the author of the Divine Comedy is the poet of love. ”

“ It is the man of vision who founds the new school of painting, or the new reform or the new liberty. The visions of the idealist to-day become the laws and institutions of to-morrow.
In this power of the open eye, Ruskin found the secret of daily happiness, and mental growth. No one knew better than John Ruskin that the millions of working men and women would never be able to make their way to the galleries of Paris and Madrid, of Florence and Venice, to St. Peter's or the Parthenon, much less have time, leisure and money for travel unto the far-off ends of the earth. ”

“ He loved literature, and his warmest friend was John Milton, the greatest poet and author of the age. If he levelled the castles of England to the ground, that feudalism might have no stronghold to which it could flee, it cannot be said that he hated art, for Cromwell bought the cartoons of Raphael for England, and preserved the art treasures of Charles the First. It stirs our sense of wonder that men should think that Cromwell represents opposition to culture, and that Charles the Second stands for the refinements of life. ”

“ His host was suspicious and asked Garibaldi if he was not a fugitive, to which the youth replied with open truthfulness, "Yes, I am an Italian! I fled from soldiers who would have shot or hung me, had they been quick enough." . . . "What have you done?" asked the landlord. Garibaldi answered: "I met Mazzini. He told me about the republic in the United States. He said that the American colonists threw off the yoke of a tyrant and made a constitution for themselves, and asked whether the people of Italy could not break their own fetters. I answered that Italy should become a republic." ”

“ You find genius, but you cannot create it." Getting on, therefore, does not mean "more horses, more footmen, more fortune, more public honour,—it means more personal soul. He only is advancing in life whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into living peace." Education is a preparation for complete living; therefore Ruskin adopts Milton's definition of the complete and generous education as, "that which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all the duties of all the offices of life." ”

“ All selfish culture is like salt in a barrel; the salt has no power to save unless it is scattered. Selfish culture is like seed corn in the granary, important for a harvest. Under Ruskin's influence many of his friends gave an evening or two a week to lectures before his working men's clubs, his art groups, and his classes for the improvement of the handicrafts.
No modern author has made so much of vision, or tried so hard to teach people how to see. Many teachers think that education is stuffing the pocket of memory with a mass of facts. ”

“ But a full century before the Pilgrim Fathers set foot in Leyden, Holland had become a shelter to foreign exiles, and her citizens had pledged themselves to a deathless hatred of all forms of tyranny. To the cities of Holland had fled those men who were denied liberty of thought [Pg 57] in Paris and Nuremburg. To Holland had come the victims of oppression in Venice and Florence. It was in Holland that the great Humanist had lived and died, that scholar and philosopher Erasmus, who wrought as powerfully for reform in religion as Huss and Savonarola. ”

“ The world's ingratitude to Cromwell becomes the more striking when we remember what he did for Great Britain, for her people, to right the wrongs of her poor, to found her free institutions and to give her a place among the nations of the earth. Oliver Cromwell found England almost next to nothing in the scale of European politics. France pitied poor little England, and Spain, the one world-wide force of the time, despised her. He found her people a group of quarrelling sects, divided, hostile and full of hate. ”

“ The inventor multiplies the conveniences of life, but the poet makes the life itself worth living. We cannot find out the secret of his power. Until we know why the rose is sweet, or the dewdrop pure, or the rainbow beautiful, we cannot know why the poet is the best benefactor of humanity. But we know that the poet is the harmonizer, strengthener and consoler, and that the inexpressible mystery of Divine Love and purpose has been best breathed in parable and poem."
By common consent the three great poets of the world are Homer, Dante and Shakespeare ”

“ He carries letters from Sir Henry Wotton; he sees the great Hugo Grotius at Paris; sees the sunny country of olives in Provence; sees the superb front of Genoa piling up from the blue waters of the Mediterranean; sees Galileo at Florence—the old philosopher too blind to study the face of the studious young Englishman that has come so far to greet him. He sees, too, what is best and bravest at Rome ”

“ For centuries the books, the arts, the tools, once so familiar to Virgil and Horace, to Mæcenas and Cæsar Augustus had lain neglected on the shores of that Dead Sea called the Dark Ages. Vague and uneasy memories haunted Europe. Imagination increased the value of the lost treasure. Looking backward through an atmosphere roseate through fancy, Helen's face took on new loveliness. Achilles became the ideal knight, Ulysses a divine hero, and Penelope the sum of all the gifts distributed among ideal women. ”

“ Next to the Bible in influence upon English literature comes the Pilgrim's Progress. England kept John Bunyan in jail at Bedford for twelve years, as his reward. For some reason, nations reserve their wreaths of recognition until the heart is broken, until hope is dead, and the ambitions are in heaven. The history of the other great leaders, therefore, leads us to expect that the greatest, because the most typical, Englishman of all time, shall be unique in his obloquy and shame, as he was signal in his supreme gifts. ”

“ Homely but forceful illustration of an old truth. The angel of truth and the angel of beauty, leaning from the battlements of heaven, oft whispers, "Oh, my children! I would fain give you a new tool, a new painting, a new science, but you have no eyes to see the vision, and no ears to hear the sweetest music that ever fell from heaven's battlements." ”

“ He never made the mistake of supposing that education would change a ten-cent boy into a thousand-dollar-a-year man, but he did know that there is some power in Nature that will transform a seed into a sheaf, an acorn into an oak, and that the truth will change a child into a sage, a statesman, a seer, a man with a message for his century.
Ruskin wrote many volumes to prove that wealth is not in raw material;—not in iron, not in wood, not in stone, not in cotton, not in wool. Wealth is largely in the intelligence [Pg 191] put into the raw material. ”