It was a stock taunt at Ruskin twenty years ago, when he began to become unfashionable, that he was 1 a schoolmaster.’ In the sense that he was mainly concerned with the imposition of a divinely-inspired discipline on a perverse and unruly generation, this is undoubtedly true. The same may be said—at least in his later manifestations—of Mr. Shaw; with the devastating difference that his curriculum is avowedly of his own devising, and does not lay claim to any sanction whatever outside the author’s invariably upright but occasionally insensitive conscience. Bearing in mind these points of contact and cleavage, it is extraordinarily interesting to read in the speech delivered by Mr. Shaw at the Ruskin Centenary Exhibition, and now re-published as Ruskin's Politics, the younger teacher’s opinion of the older.

Mr. Shaw starts, as all good pedagogues do, by arguing from the seen to the unseen. He points out the portraits of Ruskin on the walls of the exhibition— the early Mozart-like medallion; the Herkomer, strongly resembling John Stuart Mill; the photographs taken at Coniston, where the head is a naturalist’s (Grant Allen’s, to be precise); and finally, Severn’s studies of the wonderful old man like ‘God as depicted in Blake’s Book of Job.’ Through these he traces the painter, music-lover, poet, rhetorician, economist and sociologist who ended (he says) by ‘developing sociology and economics into a religion, as all economics and sociology that are worth anything do finally develop.’

Now this is very much the same thing as saying that a sufficiently devoted mill-wheel finally develops into the mountain torrent that turns it.