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Arrows of the Chace, vol. 2/2 / being a collection of scattered letters published chiefly in the daily newspapers 1840-1880 cover

Arrows of the Chace, vol. 2/2 / being a collection of scattered letters published chiefly in the daily newspapers 1840-1880

Chapter 105: FOOTNOTES:
By John Ruskin
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About This Book

A collected set of public letters offers sustained commentary on political, economic, and cultural questions of the era. Subjects include foreign policy, war, and imperial unrest, as well as economic issues such as currency, supply and demand, wages, strikes, and the nature of wealth and property. Other pieces discuss infrastructure and industry, domestic service and housing, education, art and literary criticism, dress and women's work, and proposals for social and institutional reform. The epistolary form combines moral argument, practical policy suggestions, and cultural observation addressed to newspapers, public figures, and civic audiences.

[From "The Sheffield Daily Telegraph," September 7, 1875.]
ST. GEORGE'S MUSEUM.[118]
Brantwood, Coniston, Lancashire.

My dear Sir: I am obliged by your note, but the work of the St. George's Company is necessarily distinct from all other. My "museum" may be perhaps nothing but a two-windowed garret. But it will have in it nothing but what deserves respect in art or admiration in nature. A great museum in the present state of the public mind is simply an exhibition of the possible modes of doing wrong in art, and an accumulation of uselessly multiplied ugliness in misunderstood nature. Our own museum at Oxford is full of distorted skulls, and your Sheffield ironwork department will necessarily contain the most barbarous abortions that human rudeness has ever produced with human fingers. The capitals of the iron shafts in any railway station, for instance, are things to make a man wish—for shame of his species—that he had been born a dog or a bee.

Ever faithfully yours,
J. Ruskin.

P.S.—I have no doubt the geological department will be well done, and my poor little cabinets will enable your men to use it to better advantage, but would be entirely lost if united with it.

FOOTNOTES:

[118] This letter was written in answer to one addressed to Mr. Ruskin by Mr. W. Bragge, F.R.G.S., who, having read in "Fors Clavigera" of Mr. Ruskin's intention to found the St. George's Museum at Sheffield, wrote to inform him that another museum, in which his might be incorporated, was already in course of building. It was read by Mr. Bragge at a dinner which followed the opening of Western Park to the public on September 6, 1875.