Carlyle’s message may be summed up in two imperatives,—­labor, and be sincere.  He lectured and wrote chiefly for the upper classes who had begun to think, somewhat sentimentally, of the conditions of the laboring men of the world; and he demanded for the latter, not charity or pity, but justice and honor.  All labor, whether of head or hand, is divine; and labor alone justifies a man as a son of earth and heaven.  To society, which Carlyle thought to be occupied wholly with conventional affairs, he came with the stamp of sincerity, calling upon men to lay aside hypocrisy and to think and speak and live the truth.  He had none of Addison’s delicate satire and humor, and in his fury at what he thought was false he was generally unsympathetic and often harsh; but we must not forget that Thackeray—­who knew society much better than did Carlyle—­gave a very unflattering picture of it in Vanity Fair and The Book of Snobs.  Apparently the age needed plain speaking, and Carlyle furnished it in scripture measure.  Harriet Martineau, who knew the world for which Carlyle wrote, summed up his influence when she said that he had “infused into the mind of the English nation ... sincerity, earnestness, healthfulness, and courage.”  If we add to the above message Carlyle’s conceptions of the world as governed by a God of justice who never forgets, and of human history as “an inarticulate Bible,” slowly revealing the divine purpose, we shall understand better the force of his ethical appeal and the profound influence he exercised on the moral and intellectual life of the past century.

JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)

In approaching the study of Ruskin we are to remember, first of all, that we are dealing with a great and good man, who is himself more inspiring than any of his books.  In some respects he is like his friend Carlyle, whose disciple he acknowledged himself to be; but he is broader in his sympathies, and in every way more hopeful, helpful, and humane.  Thus, in the face of the drudgery and poverty of the competitive system, Carlyle proposed, with the grim satire of Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” to organize an annual hunt in which successful people should shoot the unfortunate, and to use the game for the support of the army and navy.  Ruskin, facing the same problem, wrote:  “I will endure it no longer quietly; but henceforward, with any few or many who will help, do my best to abate this misery.”  Then, leaving the field of art criticism, where he was the acknowledged leader, he begins to write of labor and justice; gives his fortune in charity, in establishing schools and libraries; and founds his St. George’s Guild of workingmen, to put in practice the principles of brotherhood and cooperation for which he and Carlyle contended.  Though his style marks him as one of the masters of English prose, he is generally studied not as a literary man but as an ethical teacher, and we shall hardly appreciate his works unless we see behind every book the figure of the heroically sincere man who wrote it.