Perhaps you may be surprised at my talking of labour and the
workman. You have heard of me, I fear, through the medium of your
somewhat imaginative newspapers as, if not a 'Japanese young man,'
at least a young man to whom the rush and clamour and reality of
the modern world were distasteful, and whose greatest difficulty in
life was the difficulty of living up to the level of his blue china
- a paradox from which England has not yet recovered.
Well, let me tell you how it first came to me at all to create an
artistic movement in England, a movement to show the rich what
beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful
things they might create.
One summer afternoon in Oxford - 'that sweet city with her dreaming
spires,' lovely as Venice in its splendour, noble in its learning
as Rome, down the long High Street that winds from tower to tower,
past silent cloister and stately gateway, till it reaches that
long, grey seven-arched bridge which Saint Mary used to guard (used
to, I say, because they are now pulling it down to build a tramway
and a light cast-iron bridge in its place, desecrating the
loveliest city in England) - well, we were coming down the street -
a troop of young men, some of them like myself only nineteen, going
to river or tennis-court or cricket-field - when Ruskin going up to
lecture in cap and gown met us.
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