Discuss #The_Crown_of_Wild_Olive as a criticism of contemporary socio-economic life.

Discuss #The_Crown_of_Wild_Olive
as a criticism of contemporary
socio-economic life.

#Ruskin’s Crown of Wild Olive consists of
lectures which were meant for workers,
traders and soldiers. Ruskin asks each
one of them about the real nature of his
calling. He takes up various
contemporary social and economic
problems and offers his own view-point
about their solution. In fact, Ruskin was
a social reformer possessing all
qualifications of a social reformer. J. A.
Hobson, in his study of Ruskin as a social
reformer, points out that Ruskin
possessed “special qualifications is for
social and economic criticism; for he was
a skilled specialist in the finer qualities
of work which men put into the raw
material supplied by Nature in order to
furnish the necessaries of human
consumption.”
In his first lecture on work in The Crown
of Wild Olive, Ruskin takes up some
glaring problems of the poor. He does
not like that society in which the poor
become poorer and the rich richer. The
upper classes enjoy themselves by
compelling the poor labourers to work
for them and to provide for them. There
is no difference between the modern
capitalists and the barons in the Middle
Ages so far as the poor are concerned :
“And I can tell you, the poor vagrants by
the road-side suffer now quite as much
from the bag baron as ever they did from
the crag-baron. Bags and Crags have just
the same result on rags.”
In the same lecture, Ruskin clarified the
false notions about the rich and the poor.
There are two bases of distinction
between the two—the lawful and the
unlawful. The lawful basis of wealth is
that a man who works should be paid
the fair value of his work and that if he
does not like it spend it today, he should
have freedom to keep it for tomorrow.
Thus an industrious man working daily
will save something in the end. On the
other hand, there is the idle person who
does not work and the wasteful person
who lays nothing by will be doubly poor
in possession and dissolute in moral
habit. A law should be enacted in society
that only he who earns justly should
keep money. This is the proper basis of
distinction between the rich and the
poor. But there is also a false basis. There
are people who inherit money and make
more money by the power to use it. They
set themselves to the accumulation of
money as the sole object of their lives.
Ruskin feels that such people are an
uneducated class because an educated or
brave man cannot make money-earning
the chief object of his thoughts. With
them work is first and money second.
They are God’s servants. The former are
slaves of money, they are satans.
In his lecture on Traffic in The Crown of
Wild Olive, Ruskin exhorts people to give
up Mammon-worship because it is
detrimental to man’s moral, social and
spiritual development. He says, “Continue
to make that forbidden duty your
principal one and soon no more art, no
more science, no more pleasure will be
possible. Catastrophe will come or worse
than catastrophe, slow mouldering and
withering into Hades. But if you can fix
some conception of a true human state
of life to be striven for—life for all men
as for yourselves—if you can determine
some honest and simple order of
existence ; following these trodden ways
of wisdom which are pleasantness and
seeking her quiet and withdrawn paths,
which are peace; then, and so sanctifying
wealth into ‘common wealth’ all your
art, your literature, your daily labours,
your domestic affection and citizen’s
duty, will join and increase into one
magnificent harmony.”
Ruskin was aware of the ills of growing
industrialization. The industrial urge of
his times led to unhealthy competitions
and intolerance. It made people greedy
and selfish. The money-making tendency
made the privileged class exploit the poor
workers. Ruskin satirizes such people in
his lecture on work : “However, in every
nation, there are and must always be a
certain number of these Friend’s servants
who have it principally for the object of
their lives to make money. They are
always, as I said more or less stupid and
cannot conceive of anything else so nice
as money. Stupidity is always the basis of
Judas bargain.”
Thus Ruskin told the people of his age
that all was not well with the prosperous
classes. They were being deadened in
soul by the wealth they possessed. They
were wholly blind to the fearful cost at
which it was being won to the
destruction of the beauty and the country
which was gradually but surely removing
some of the most purifying and uplifting
influences that can work upon the hearts
of men and to the self-destroying
drudgery and monotony of the
mechanical toil to which the boasted
inventions of the century were
condemning the vast majority of the
population.
The Crown of Wild Olive is, therefore, a
commentary on the contemporary social
and economic life. In it Ruskin appears
not merely as a satirist, but he changes
himself into a preacher and a prophet.
The satirist being changed into a
preacher, exhorts work-men to be loyal
and to love their work and their
employers; asks the traders not to be
money-minded and advises the soldier to
be loyal to his calling.