Two of Ruskin’s works on architecture, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), had a decided effect on British taste in building.  The three volumes of the The Stones of Venice give a history of the Venetians and of their Gothic architecture.  He aims to show that the beauty of such buildings as St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Doges’ Palace is due to the virtue and patriotism of the people, the nobility of the designers, and the joy of the individual workmen, whose chisels made the very stones of Venice tell beautiful stories.

The most important of his many other writings on art is the volume entitled Lectures on Art, Delivered before the University of Oxford, 1870.  In his famous Inaugural of this series, he thus states what he considers the central truth of his teaching:  “The art of any country is the exponent of its social and political virtues.”

Social Works.—­By turning from the criticism of art to consider the cause of humanity, Ruskin shows the influence of the ethical and social forces of the age.  In middle life he was overwhelmed with the amount of human misery and he determined to do his best to relieve it.  He wrote:—­

“I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky, when there is any—­which is seldom, nowadays, near London—­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."[9]

After 1860 his main efforts with both pen and purse were devoted to improving the condition of his fellow men.  His attempts to provide a remedy led him to write Unto this Last (1860), his first and most complete work on political economy, Munera Pulveris (1863), Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne (1868), Fors Clavigera (1871-1884), which is a long series of letters to workingmen, and a number of other works, that also present his views on social questions.

He abhorred the old political economy, which he defined as “the professed and organized pursuit of money.”  Instead of considering merely the question of the production and distribution of articles, his interest lay in the causes necessary to produce healthy, happy workmen.  It seemed to him that the manufacture “of souls” ought to be “exceedingly lucrative.”  This statement and his maxim, “There is no wealth but life,” were called “unscientific.”  In his fine book of essays, entitled Sesame and Lilies (1864), he actually had printed in red those pathetic pages describing how an old cobbler and his son worked night and day to try to keep a little home of one room, until the father died from exhaustion and the son had a film come over his eyes.

John Ruskin, social reformer, has an important place in the social movement of the nineteenth century.  Many of his theories, which were considered revolutionary, have since become the commonplace expressions of twentieth-century social economists.