NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
A cutting was sent me the other day, from a provincial paper, apparently well meant and conducted, but which in its column of ‘aphorisms,’ having, unfortunately, ventured to lead off with one on political economy, enunciated itself as follows:—
“All capital comes back at last, though sometimes by a roundabout road, to the pocket of the labourer, in the shape of wages. Consumable produce, however, may be dissipated in a thousand ways, in none of which is either the capitalist or the prolétaire benefited at all.”
I don’t happen to know, at this moment, what a ‘prolétaire’ is, and can’t find it in my French dictionary; but will ascertain, by next month; and, meantime, I keep the ‘aphorism,’ being a very curious one, for future comment.
A letter from “a working woman” has given me much pleasure. She says she does not understand my plans; but can trust me. She may be pleased to know that I don’t yet understand some of my plans myself, for they are not, strictly speaking, mine at all, but Nature’s and Heaven’s, which are not always comprehensible, until one begins to act on them. Then they clear as one goes on, and, I hope, my expression of what I can see of them, for her, and all true workers, will, also.
I have an interesting letter from Glasgow, but have not been able to read it yet. A slip of the ‘Glasgow Chronicle’ was enclosed, containing the Editor’s opinions on my modes of selling my books. Not having any occasion for his opinions on the subject, I threw the slip into the fire. The letter, which I have just glanced at, says my comparison of the price of my books to a doctor’s fee is absurd, for the poor don’t pay guinea fees. I know that, and I don’t want any poor people to read my books. I said so long ago, in ‘Sesame.’ I want them to read these letters, which they can get, each for the price of two pots of beer; and not to read my large books, nor anybody else’s, till they are rich enough, at least, to pay for good printing and binding. Even oracular Mr. Grant Duff says they are all to be rich first, and only next to be intelligent, and I am happy in supposing it needs a great deal of intelligence to read ‘Modern Painters.’ But, by the way, if the Editor of the ‘Glasgow Chronicle’ will tell me, why, in these fine manufacturing counties of his, and mine, I can only, with the greatest possible difficulty, or by mere good luck, and help of the Third Fors, now get a quarter of a yard of honest leather to stitch my leaves into, I shall be greatly obliged to him, and will reprint his communication in my best type, instead of throwing it into the fire.
[1] Cornutus, quoted by Ducange under the word ‘Baro.’ [↑]
[2] I am told in the north such pleasant fiction still holds in the Teesdale district; the wife calling her husband ‘my masterman.’ [↑]
[3] ‘The Book of a Hundred Ballads.’ You shall hear more of them, soon. [↑]
[4] This singular use of the word ‘free’ in baronial times, corresponding to our present singular use of it respecting trade, we will examine in due time. A soldier who fights only for his own hand, and a merchant who sells only for his own hand, are of course, in reality, equally the slaves of the persons who employ them. Only the soldier is truly free, and only the merchants, who fight and sell as their country needs, and bids them. [↑]
[5] I always give Mr. Rawdon Brown’s translation from his work, ‘The English in Italy,’ already quoted. [↑]
[6] Remember, briefly always, till I can tell you more about it, that the first Fors is Courage, the second, Patience, the third, Fortune. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XVI.
Denmark Hill,
15th March, 1872.
My Friends,
The meditation I asked you to give to the facts put before you in my last letter, if given, should have convinced you, for one thing, quite sufficiently for all your future needs, of the unimportance of momentary public opinion respecting the characters of men; and for another thing, of the preciousness of confirmed public opinion, when it happens to be right;—preciousness both to the person opined of, and the opiners;—as, for instance, to Sir Roger de Coverley, the opinion formed of him by his tenants and club: and for third thing, it might have properly led you to consider, though it was scarcely probable your thoughts should have turned that way, what an evil trick of human creatures it was to reserve the expression of these opinions—or even the examination of them, until the persons to be opined of are dead; and then to endeavour to put all right by setting their coffins on baptistery fonts—or hanging them up at Tyburn. Let me very strongly advise you to make up your minds concerning people, while they are with you; to honour and obey those whom you consider good ones; to dishonour and disobey those whom you consider bad ones; and when good and bad ones die, to make no violent or expressive demonstrations of the feelings which have now become entirely useless to the persons concerned, and are only, as they are true or false, serviceable, or the contrary, to yourselves; but to take care that some memorial is kept of men who deserve memory, in a distinct statement on the stone or brass of their tombs, either that they were true men, or rascals,—wise men, or fools.
How beautiful the variety of sepulchral architecture might be, in any extensive place of burial, if the public would meet the small expense of thus expressing its opinions, in a verily instructive manner; and if some of the tombstones accordingly terminated in fools’ caps; and others, instead of crosses or cherubs, bore engravings of cats-of-nine-tails, as typical of the probable methods of entertainment, in the next world, of the persons, not, it is to be hoped, reposing, below.
But the particular subject led up to in my last letter, and which, in this special month of April, I think it appropriate for you to take to heart, is the way in which you spend your money, or allow it to be spent for you. Colonel Hawkwood and Colonel Fiske both passed their whole lives in getting possession, by various means, of other people’s money; (in the final fact, of working-men’s money,—yours, that is to say), and everybody praises and crowns them for doing so. Colonel Cromwell passes his life in fighting for, what in the gist of it meant, not freedom, but freedom from unjust taxation;—and you hang his coffin up at Tyburn.
“Not Freedom, but deliverance from unjust taxation.” You call me unpractical. Suppose you became practical enough yourselves to take that for a watchword for a little while, and see how near you can come to its realization.
For, I very positively can inform you, the considerablest part of the misery of the world comes of the tricks of unjust taxation. All its evil passions—pride, lust, revenge, malice, and sloth,—derive their main deadliness from the facilities of getting hold of other people’s money open to the persons they influence. Pay every man for his work,—pay nobody but for his work,—and see that the work be sound; and you will find pride, lust, and sloth have little room left for themselves.
Observe, however, very carefully, that by unjust taxation, I do not mean merely Chancellor of Exchequer’s business, but a great part of what really very wise and worthy gentlemen, but, unfortunately, proud also, suppose to be their business.
For instance, before beginning my letter to you this morning, (the last I shall ever date from Denmark Hill,[1]) I put out of my sight, carefully, under a large book, a legal document, which disturbed me by its barbarous black lettering. This is an R
in it, for instance, which is ugly enough, as such; but how ugly is the significance of it, and reasons of its being written that way, instead of in a properly intelligible way, there is hardly vituperation enough in language justly to express to you. This said document is to release the sole remaining executor of my father’s will from further responsibility for the execution of it. And all that there is really need for, of English scripture on the occasion, would be as follows:—
I, having received this 15th of March, 1822, from A. B., Esq., all the property which my father left, hereby release A. B., Esq., from future responsibility, respecting either my father’s property, or mine, or my father’s business, or mine. Signed, J. R., before such and such two witnesses.
This document, on properly cured calf-skin, (not cleaned by acids), and written as plainly as, after having contracted some careless literary habits, I could manage to write it, ought to answer the purpose required, before any court of law on earth.
In order to effect it in a manner pleasing to the present legal mind of England, I receive eighty-seven lines of close writing, containing from fourteen to sixteen words each, (one thousand two hundred and eighteen words in all, at the minimum); thirteen of them in black letters of the lovely kind above imitated, but produced with much pains by the scrivener. Of the manner in which this overplus of one thousand one hundred and seventy-eight words is accomplished, (my suggested form containing forty only), the following example—the last clause of the document—may suffice.
“And the said J. R. doth hereby for himself his heirs executors and administrators covenant and agree with and to the said A. B. his executors and administrators that he the said J. R. his heirs executors administrators or assigns shall and will from time to time and at all times hereafter save harmless and keep indemnified the said A. B. his heirs executors administrators and assigns from and in respect of all claims and demands whatsoever which may be made upon him or them or any of them for or in respect of the real or personal estate of the said J. R. and from all suits costs charges and damages and expenses whatsoever which the said A. B. his heirs executors administrators or assigns shall be involved in or put unto for or in respect of the said real or personal estate or any part thereof.”
Now, what reason do you suppose there is for all this barbarism and bad grammar, and tax upon my eyes and time, for very often one has actually to read these things, or hear them read, all through? The reason is simply and wholly that I may be charged so much per word, that the lawyer and his clerk may live. But do you not see how infinitely advantageous it would be for me, (if only I could get the other sufferers under this black literature to be of my mind), to clap the lawyer and his clerk, once for all, fairly out of the way in a dignified almshouse, with parchment unlimited, and ink turned on at a tap, and maintenance for life, on the mere condition of their never troubling humanity more, with either their scriptures or opinions on any subject; and to have this release of mine, as above worded, simply confirmed by the signature of any person whom the Queen might appoint for that purpose, (say the squire of the parish), and there an end? How is it, do you think, that other sufferers under the black literature do not come to be of my mind, which was Cicero’s mind also, and has been the mind of every sane person before Cicero and since Cicero,—so that we might indeed get it ended thus summarily?
Well, at the root of all these follies and iniquities, there lies always one tacit, but infinitely strong persuasion in the British mind, namely, that somehow money grows out of nothing, if one can only find some expedient to produce an article that must be paid for. “Here,” the practical Englishman says to himself, “I produce, being capable of nothing better, an entirely worthless piece of parchment, with one thousand two hundred entirely foolish words upon it, written in an entirely abominable hand; and by this production of mine, I conjure out of the vacant air, the substance of ten pounds, or the like. What an infinitely profitable transaction to me and to the world! Creation, out of a chaos of words, and a dead beast’s hide, of this beautiful and omnipotent ten pounds. Do I not see with my own eyes that this is very good?”
That is the real impression on the existing popular mind; silent, but deep, and for the present unconquerable. That by due parchment, calligraphy, and ingenious stratagem, money may be conjured out of the vacant air. Alchemy is, indeed, no longer included in our list of sciences, for alchemy proposed,—irrational science that it was,—to make money of something;—gold of lead, or the like. But to make money of nothing,—this appears to be manifoldly possible, to the modern Anglo-Saxon practical person,—instructed by Mr. John Stuart Mill. Sometimes, with rare intelligence, he is capable of carrying the inquiry one step farther. Pushed hard to assign a Providential cause for such legal documents as this we are talking of, an English gentleman would say: “Well, of course, where property needs legal forms to transfer it, it must be in quantity enough to bear a moderate tax without inconvenience; and this tax on its transfer enables many well-educated and agreeable persons to live.”
Yes, that is so, and I (speaking for the nonce in the name of the working-man, maker of property) am willing enough to be taxed, straightforwardly, for the maintenance of these most agreeable persons; but not to be taxed obliquely for it, nor teased, either obliquely or otherwise, for it. I greatly and truly admire (as aforesaid, in my first letter,) these educated persons in wigs; and when I go into my kitchen-garden in spring time, to see the dew on my early sprouts, I often mentally acknowledge the fitness, yet singularity, of the arrangement by which I am appointed to grow mute Broccoli for the maintenance of that talking Broccoli. All that I want of it is to let itself be kept for a show, and not to tax my time as well as my money.
Kept for a show, of heads; or, to some better purpose, for writing on fair parchment, with really well-trained hands, what might be desirable of literature. Suppose every existing lawyer’s clerk was trained, in a good drawing school, to write red and blue letters as well as black ones, in a loving and delicate manner; here for instance is an R and a number eleven, which begin the eleventh chapter of Job in one of my thirteenth-century Bibles. There is as good a letter and as good a number—every one different in design,—to every chapter, and beautifully gilded and painted ones to the beginning of books; all done for love, and teasing nobody. Now suppose the lawyer’s clerks, thus instructed to write decently, were appointed to write for us, for their present pay, words really worth setting down—Nursery Songs, Grimm’s Popular Stories, and the like, we should have again, not, perhaps, a cheap literature; but at least an innocent one. Dante’s words might then be taken up literally by relieved mankind. “Più ridon le carte.” “The papers smile more,” they might say, of such transfigured legal documents.
Not a cheap literature, even then; nor pleasing to my friend the ‘Glasgow Herald,’ who writes to me indignantly, but very civilly, (and I am obliged to him,) to declare that he is a Herald, and not a Chronicle. I am delighted to hear it; for my lectures on heraldry are just beginning at Oxford, and a Glaswegian opinion may be useful to me, when I am not sure of my blazon. Also he tells me good leather may be had in Glasgow. Let Glasgow flourish, and I will assuredly make trial of the same: but touching this cheap literature question, I cannot speak much in this letter, for I must keep to our especial subject of April—this Fools’ Paradise of Cloud-begotten Gold.
Cloud-begotten—and self-begotten—as some would have it. But it is not so, friends.
Do you remember the questioning to Job? The pretty letter R stopped me just now at the Response of Zophar; but look on to the thirty-eighth chapter, and read down to the question concerning this April time:—“Hath the rain a Father—and who hath begotten the drops of dew,—the hoary Frost of Heaven—who hath gendered it?”
That rain and frost of heaven; and the earth which they loose and bind: these, and the labour of your hands to divide them, and subdue, are your wealth, for ever—unincreasable. The fruit of Earth, and its waters, and its light—such as the strength of the pure rock can grow—such as the unthwarted sun in his season brings—these are your inheritance. You can diminish it, but cannot increase: that your barns should be filled with plenty—your presses burst with new wine,—is your blessing; and every year—when it is full—it must be new; and every year, no more.
And this money, which you think so multipliable, is only to be increased in the hands of some, by the loss of others. The sum of it, in the end, represents, and can represent, only what is in the barn and winepress. It may represent less, but cannot more.
These ten pounds, for instance, which I am grumbling at having to pay my lawyer—what are they? whence came they?
They were once, (and could be nothing now, unless they had been) so many skins of Xeres wine—grown and mellowed by pure chalk rock and unafflicted sunshine. Wine drunk, indeed, long ago—but the drinkers gave the vineyard dressers these tokens, which we call pounds, signifying, that having had so much good from them they would return them as much, in future time. And, indeed, for my ten pounds, if my lawyer didn’t take it, I could still get my Xeres, if Xeres wine exists anywhere. But, if not, what matters it how many pounds I have, or think I have, or you either? It is meat and drink we want—not pounds.
As you are beginning to discover—I fancy too many of you, in this rich country. If you only would discover it a little faster, and demand dinners, instead of Liberty! For what possible liberty do you want, which does not depend on dinner? Tell me, once for all, what is it you want to do, that you can’t do? Dinner being provided, do you think the Queen will interfere with the way you choose to spend your afternoons, if only you knock nobody down, and break nobody’s windows? But the need of dinner enslaves you to purpose!
On reading the letter spoken of in my last correspondence sheet, I find that it represents this modern form of slavery with an unconscious clearness, which is very interesting. I have, therefore, requested the writer’s permission to print it, and, with a passage or two omitted, and briefest comment, here it is in full type, for it is worth careful reading:—
Glasgow,
12th February, 1872.“Sir,
“You say in your ‘Fors’ that you do not want any one to buy your books who will not give a ‘doctor’s fee’ per volume, which you rate at 10s. 6d.; now, as the ‘Herald’ remarks, you are clearly placing yourself in a wrong position, as you arbitrarily fix your doctor’s fee far too high; indeed, while you express a desire, no doubt quite sincerely, to elevate the working-man, morally, mentally, and physically, you in the meantime absolutely preclude him from purchasing your books at all, and so almost completely bar his way from the enjoyment and elevating influence of perhaps the most” [etc., complimentary terms—omitted].
“Permit me a personal remark:—I am myself a poorly paid clerk, with a salary not much over the income-tax minimum; now no doctor, here at least, would ever think of charging me a fee of 10s. 6d., and so you see it is as much out of my power to purchase your books as any working-man. While Mr. Carlyle is just now issuing a cheap edition of his Works at 2s. per volume, which I can purchase, here, quite easily for 1s. 6d.;” [Presumably, therefore, to be had, as far north as Inverness, for a shilling, and for sixpence in Orkney,] “I must say it is a great pity that a Writer so much, and, in my poor opinion, justly, appreciated as yourself, should as it were inaugurate with your own hands a system which thoroughly barriers your productions from the great majority of the middle and working classes. I take leave, however, to remark that I by no means shut my eyes to the anomalies of the Bookselling Trade, but I can’t see that it can be remedied by an Author becoming his own Bookseller, and, at the same time, putting an unusually high price on his books. Of course, I would like to see an Author remunerated as highly as possible for his labours.” [You ought not to like any such thing: you ought to like an author to get what he deserves, like other people, not more, nor less.] “I would also crave to remark, following up your unfortunate analogy of the doctor’s fee, that doctors who have acquired, either professionally or otherwise, a competence, often, nay very often, give their advice gratis to nearly every class, except that which is really wealthy; at least, I speak from my own experience, having known, nay even been attended by such a benevolent physician in a little town in Kirkcudbrightshire, who, when offered payment, and I was both quite able and willing to do so, and he was in no way indebted or obliged to me or mine, positively declined to receive any fee. So much for the benevolent physician and his fees.
“Here am I, possessed of a passionate love of nature in all her aspects, cooped up in this fearfully crammed mass of population, with its filthy Clyde, which would naturally have been a noble river, but, under the curse of our much belauded civilization, forsooth, turned into an almost stagnant loathsome ditch, pestilence-breathing, be-lorded over by hundreds upon hundreds of tall brick chimney-stacks vomiting up smoke unceasingly; and from the way I am situated, there are only one day and a half in the week in which I can manage a walk into the country; now, if I wished to foster my taste for the beautiful in nature and art, even while living a life of almost servile red-taped routine beneath the too frequently horror-breathing atmosphere of a huge overgrown plutocratic city like Glasgow, I cannot have your Works” [complimentary terms again] “as, after providing for my necessaries, I cannot indulge in books at 10s. 6d. a volume. Of course, as you may say” [My dear sir, the very last thing I should say], “I can get them from a library. Assuredly, but one (at least I would) wishes to have actual and ever-present possession of productions such as yours” [more compliments]. “You will be aware, no doubt, that ‘Geo. Eliot’ has adopted a ‘new system’ in publishing her new novel by issuing it in 5s. ‘parts,’ with the laudable view of enabling and encouraging readers to buy the work for themselves, and not trusting to get it from ‘some Mudie’ or another for a week, then galloping through the three volumes and immediately forgetting the whole matter. When I possess a book worth having I always recur to it now and again. Your ‘new system,’ however, tends to prevent the real reading public from ever possessing your books, and the wealthy classes who could afford to buy books at 10s. 6d. a volume, as a rule, I opine, don’t drive themselves insane by much reading of any kind.
“I beg a last remark and I’ve done. Glasgow, for instance, has no splendid public buildings. She has increased in wealth till I believe there are some of the greatest merchants in the world trading in her Exchange; but except her grand old Cathedral, founded by an almost-forgotten bishop in the twelfth century, in what we in our vain folly are pleased to call the dark ages, when we ourselves are about as really dark as need be; having no ‘high calling’ to strive for, except by hook or by crook to make money—a fortune—retire at thirty-five by some stroke of gambling of a highly questionable kind on the Share market or otherwise, to a suburban or country villa with Turkey carpets, a wine-cellar and a carriage and pair; as no man now-a-days is ever content with making a decent and honest livelihood. Truly a very ‘high calling!’ Our old Cathedral, thank God, was not built by contract or stock-jobbing: there was, surely, a higher calling of some sort in those quiet, old, unhurrying days. Our local plutocratic friends put their hands into their pockets to the extent of 150,000l. to help to build our new University buildings after a design by G. Gilbert Scott, which has turned out a very imposing pile of masonry; at least, it is placed on an imposing and magnificent site. I am no prophet, but I should not wonder if old St. Mungo’s Cathedral, erected nearly six hundred years ago to the honour and glory of God, will be standing a noble ruin when our new spick-and-span College is a total wreck after all. Such being the difference between the work of really earnest God-fearing men, and that done by contract and Trades’ Unions. The Steam Engine, one of the demons of our mad, restless, headlong civilization, is screaming its unearthly whistle in the very quadrangles of the now deserted, but still venerable College buildings in our High Street, almost on the very spot where the philosophic Professors of that day, to their eternal honour, gave a harbourage to James Watt, when the narrow-minded guild-brethren of Glasgow expelled him from their town as a stranger craftsman hailing from Greenock. Such is the irony of events! Excuse the presumption of this rather rambling letter, and apologizing for addressing you at such length,
“I am, very faithfully yours.”
I have only time, just now, to remark on this letter, first, that I don’t believe any of Mr. Scott’s work is badly done, or will come down soon; and that Trades’ Unions are quite right when honest and kind: but the frantic mistake of the Glaswegians, in thinking that they can import learning into their town safely in a Gothic case, and have 180,000 pounds’ worth of it at command, while they have banished for ever from their eyes the sight of all that mankind have to learn anything about, is,—Well—as the rest of our enlightened public opinion. They might as well put a pyx into a pigsty, to make the pigs pious.
In the second place, as to my correspondent’s wish to read my books, I am entirely pleased by it; but, putting the question of fee aside for the nonce, I am not in the least minded, as matters stand, to prescribe my books for him. Nay, so far as in me lies, he shall neither read them, nor learn to trust in any such poor qualifications and partial comforts of the entirely wrong and dreadful condition of life he is in, with millions of others. If a child in a muddy ditch asked me for a picture-book, I should not give it him; but say, “Come out of that first; or, if you cannot, I must go and get help; but picture-books, there, you shall have none!”
Only a day and a half in the week on which one can get a walk in the country, (and how few have as much, or anything like it!) just bread enough earned to keep one alive, on those terms—one’s daily work asking not so much as a lucifer match’s worth of human intelligence;—unwholesome besides—one’s chest, shoulders, and stomach getting hourly more useless. Smoke above for sky, mud beneath for water; and the pleasant consciousness of spending one’s weary life in the pure service of the devil! And the blacks are emancipated over the water there—and this is what you call “having your own way,” here, is it?
Very solemnly, my good clerk-friend, there is something to be done in this matter; not merely to be read. Do you know any honest men who have a will of their own, among your neighbours? If none, set yourself to seek for such; if any, commune with them on this one subject, how a man may have sight of the Earth he was made of, and his bread out of the dust of it—and peace! And find out what it is that hinders you now from having these, and resolve that you will fight it, and put end to it. If you cannot find out for yourselves, tell me your difficulties, briefly, and I will deal with them for you, as the Second Fors may teach me. Bring you the First with you, and the Third will help us.
And believe me, faithfully yours,
ROBERT, COUNT OF FLANDERS, called “The Son of St. George.”
Thus drawn by John Baptist Vrints, of Antwerp.
[1] Between May and October, any letters meant for me should be addressed to Brantwood, Coniston; between October and May, to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. They must be very short, and very plainly written, or they will not be read; and they need never ask me to do anything, because I won’t do it. And, in general, I cannot answer letters; but for any that come to help me, the writers may be sure that I am grateful. I get a great many from people who “know that I must be good-natured,” from my books. I was good-natured once; but I beg to state, in the most positive terms, that I am now old, tired, and very ill-natured. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XVII.
Florence,
1st May, 1872.
My Friends,
Have you thought, as I prayed you to think, during the days of April, what things they are that will hinder you from being happy on this first of May? Be assured of it, you are meant, to-day, to be as happy as the birds, at least. If you are not, you, or somebody else, or something that you are one or other responsible for, is wrong; and your first business is to set yourself, them, or it, to rights. Of late you have made that your last business; you have thought things would right themselves, or that it was God’s business to right them, not yours. Peremptorily it is yours. Not, observe, to get your rights, but to put things to rights. Some eleven in the dozen of the population of the world are occupied earnestly in putting things to wrongs, thinking to benefit themselves thereby. Is it any wonder, then, you are uncomfortable, when already the world, in our part of it, is over-populated, and eleven in the dozen of the over-population doing diligently wrong; and the remaining dozenth expecting God to do their work for them; and consoling themselves with buying two-shilling publications for eighteenpence?
To put things to rights! Do you not know how refreshing it is, even to put one’s room to rights, when it has got dusty and decomposed? If no other happiness is to be had, the mere war with decomposition is a kind of happiness. But the war with the Lord of Decomposition, the old Dragon himself,—St. George’s war, with a princess to save, and win—are none of you, my poor friends, proud enough to hope for any part in that battle? Do you conceive no figure of any princess for May Queen; or is the definite dragon turned into indefinite cuttlefish, vomiting black venom into the waters of your life; or has he multiplied himself into an host of pulicarious dragons—bug-dragons, insatiable as unclean,—whose food you are, daily?
St. George’s war! Here, since last May, when I engraved Giotto’s Hope for you, have I been asking whether any one would volunteer for such battle? Not one human creature, except a personal friend or two, for mere love of me, has answered.
Now, it is true, that my writing may be obscure, or seem only half in earnest. But it is the best I can do: it expresses the thoughts that come to me as they come; and I have no time just now to put them into more intelligible words. And, whether you believe them or not, they are entirely faithful words: I have no interest at all to serve by writing, but yours.
And, literally, no one answers. Nay, even those who read, read so carelessly that they don’t notice whether the book is to go on or not.
Heaven knows; but it shall, if I am able, and what I undertook last May, be fulfilled, so far as the poor faculty or time left me may serve.
Read over, now, the end of that letter for May last, from “To talk at a distance,” in page 10.
I have given you the tenth of all I have, as I promised. I cannot, because of those lawyers I was talking of last month, get it given you in a permanent and accumulative form; besides that, among the various blockheadisms and rascalities of the day, the perversion of old endowments from their appointed purposes being now practised with applause, gives one little encouragement to think of the future. However, the seven thousand pounds are given, and wholly now out of my own power; and, as I said, only two or three friends, for love of me, and one for true love of justice also, have, in the course of the year, joined with me.
However, this is partly my own fault, for not saying more clearly what I want; and for expecting people to be moved by writing, instead of by personal effort. The more I see of writing the less I care for it; one may do more with a man by getting ten words spoken with him face to face, than by the black lettering of a whole life’s thought.
In parenthesis, just read this little bit of Plato; and take it to heart. If the last sentence of it does not fit some people I know of, there is no prophecy on lip of man.
Socrates is speaking. “I have heard indeed—but no one can say now if it is true or not—that near Nancratis, in Egypt, there was born one of the old gods, the one to whom the bird is sacred which they call the ibis; and this god or demigod’s name was Theuth.” Second parenthesis—(Theuth, or Thoth: he always has the head of an ibis with a beautiful long bill, in Egyptian sculpture; and you may see him at the British Museum on stone and papyrus infinite,—especially attending at judgments after death, when people’s sins are to be weighed in scales; for he is the Egyptian account-keeper, and adds up, and takes note of, things, as you will hear presently from Plato. He became the god of merchants, and a rogue, among the Romans, and is one now among us). “And this demigod found out first, they say, arithmetic, and logic, and geometry, and astronomy, and gambling, and the art of writing.
“And there was then a king over all Egypt, in the great city which the Greeks called Thebes. And Theuth, going to Thebes, showed the king all the arts he had invented, and said they should be taught to the Egyptians. But the king said:—‘What was the good of them?’ And Theuth telling him, at length, of each, the king blamed some things, and praised others. But when they came to writing: ‘Now, this piece of learning, O king,’ says Theuth, ‘will make the Egyptians more wise and more remembering; for this is physic for the memory, and for wisdom.’ But the king answered:—‘O most artful Theuth, it is one sort of person’s business to invent arts, and quite another sort of person’s business to know what mischief or good is in them. And you, the father of letters, are yet so simple-minded that you fancy their power just the contrary of what it really is; for this art of writing will bring forgetfulness into the souls of those who learn it, because, trusting to the external power of the scripture, and stamp[1] of other men’s minds, and not themselves putting themselves in mind, within themselves, it is not medicine of divine memory, but a drug of memorandum, that you have discovered, and you will only give the reputation and semblance of wisdom, not the truth of wisdom, to the learners: for,’ ” (now do listen to this, you cheap education-mongers), “ ‘for becoming hearers of many things, yet without instruction, they will seem to have manifold opinions, but be in truth without any opinions; and the most of them incapable of living together in any good understanding; having become seeming-wise, instead of wise.’”
So much for cheap literature; not that I like cheap talk better, mind you; but I wish I could get a word or two with a few honest people, now, face to face. For I have called the fund I have established The St. George’s Fund, because I hope to find, here and there, some one who will join in a White Company, like Sir John Hawkwood’s, to be called the Company of St. George; which shall have for its end the wise creating and bestowing, instead of the wise stealing, of money. Now it literally happened that before the White Company went into Italy, there was an Italian Company called ‘of St. George,’ which was afterwards incorporated with Sir John’s of the burnished armour; and another company, called ‘of the Rose,’ which was a very wicked and destructive one. And within my St. George’s Company,—which shall be of persons still following their own business, wherever they are, but who will give the tenth of what they have, or make, for the purchase of land in England, to be cultivated by hand, as aforesaid, in my last May number,—shall be another company, not destructive, called of “Monte Rosa,” or “Mont Rose,” because Monte Rosa is the central mountain of the range between north and south Europe, which keeps the gift of the rain of heaven. And the motto, or watchword of this company is to be the old French “Mont-joie.” And they are to be entirely devoted, according to their power, first to the manual labour of cultivating pure land, and guiding of pure streams and rain to the places where they are needed: and secondly, together with this manual labour, and much by its means, they are to carry on the thoughtful labour of true education, in themselves, and of others. And they are not to be monks nor nuns; but are to learn, and teach all fair arts, and sweet order and obedience of life; and to educate the children entrusted to their schools in such practical arts and patient obedience; but not at all, necessarily, in either arithmetic, writing, or reading.
That is my design, romantic enough, and at this day difficult enough; yet not so romantic, nor so difficult as your now widely and openly proclaimed design, of making the words “obedience” and “loyalty” to cease from the English tongue.
That same number of the ‘Republican’ which announced that all property must be taken under control, was graced by a frontispiece, representing, figuratively, “Royalty in extremis;” the joyful end of Rule, and of every strength of Kingship; Britannia, having, perhaps, found her waves of late unruly, declaring there shall be no rule over the land neither. Some day I may let you compare this piece of figurative English art with Giotto’s; but, meantime, since, before you look so fondly for the end of Royalty, it is well that you should know somewhat of its beginnings, I have given you a picture of one of the companions in the St. George’s Company of all time, out of a pretty book, published at Antwerp, by John Baptist Vrints, cutter of figures in copper, on the 16th April, 1598; and giving briefly the stories, and, in no unworthy imagination, the pictures also, of the first ‘foresters’ (rulers of woods and waves[2]) in Flanders, where the waves once needed, and received, much ruling; and of the Counts of Flanders who succeeded them, of whom this one, Robert, surnamed “of Jerusalem,” was the eleventh, and began to reign in 1077, being “a virtuous, prudent, and brave prince,” who, having first taken good order in his money affairs, and ended some unjust claims his predecessors had made on church property; and established a perpetual chancellorship, and legal superintendence over his methods of revenue; took the cross against the infidels, and got the name, in Syria, for his prowess, of the “Son of St. George.”
So he stands, leaning on his long sword—a man desirous of setting the world to rights, if it might be; but not knowing the way of it, nor recognizing that the steel with which it can be done, must take another shape than that double-edged one.
And from the eleventh century to this dull nineteenth, less and less the rulers of men have known their weapon. So far, yet, are we from beating sword into ploughshare, that now the sword is set to undo the plough’s work when it has been done; and at this hour the ghastliest ruin of all that moulder from the fire, pierced through black rents by the unnatural sunlight above the ashamed streets of Paris, is the long, skeleton, and roofless hollow of the “Grenier d’Abondance.”
Such Agriculture have we contrived here, in Europe, and ploughing of new furrows for graves. Will you hear how Agriculture is now contrived in America?—where, since you spend your time here in burning corn, you must send to buy it; trusting, however, still to your serviceable friend the Fire, as here to consume, so there, to sow and reap, for repairing of consumption. I have just received a letter from California, which I trust the writer will not blame me for printing:—
“March 1st, 1872.
“Sir,
“You have so strongly urged ‘agriculture by the hand’ that it may be of some interest to you to know the result thus far of agriculture by machinery, in California. I am the more willing to address you on this subject from the fact that I may have to do with a new Colony in this State, which will, I trust, adopt, as far as practicable, your ideas as to agriculture by the hand. Such thoughts as you might choose to give regarding the conduct of such a Colony here would be particularly acceptable; and should you deem it expedient to comply with this earnest and sincere request, the following facts may be of service to you in forming just conclusions.
“We have a genial climate and a productive soil. Our farms (‘ranches’) frequently embrace many thousands of acres, while the rule is, scarcely ever less than hundreds of acres. Wheat-fields of 5,000 acres are by no means uncommon, and not a few of above 40,000 acres are known. To cultivate these extensive tracts much machinery is used, such as steam-ploughs, gang-ploughs, reaping, mowing, sowing, and thrashing machines; and seemingly to the utter extermination of the spirit of home, and rural life. Gangs of labourers are hired during the emergency of harvesting; and they are left for the most part unhoused, and are also fed more like animals than men. Harvesting over, they are discharged, and thus are left near the beginning of our long and rainy winters to shift for themselves. Consequently the larger towns and cities are invested for months with idle men and boys. Housebreaking and highway robbery are of almost daily occurrence. As to the farmers themselves, they live in a dreamy, comfortless way, and are mostly without education or refinement. To show them how to live better and cleaner; to give them nobler aims than merely to raise wheat for the English market; to teach them the history of those five cities, and ‘their girls to cook exquisitely,’ etc., is surely a mission for earnest men in this country, no less than in England, to say nothing of the various accomplishments to which you have alluded. I have caused to be published in some of our farming districts many of the more important of your thoughts bearing on these subjects, and I trust with beneficial results.
“I trust I shall not intrude on Mr. Ruskin’s patience if I now say something by way of thankfulness for what I have received from your works.[3] I know not certainly if this will ever reach you. If it does, it may in some small way gladden you to know that I owe to your teaching almost all the good I have thus attained. A large portion of my life has been spent at sea, and in roaming in Mexico, Central and South America, and in the Malaysian and Polynesian Islands. I have been a sailor before and abaft the mast. Years ago I found on a remote island of the Pacific the ‘Modern Painters’; after them the ‘Seven Lamps of Architecture’; and finally your complete works. Ignorant and uncultivated, I began earnestly to follow certain of your teachings. I read most of the books you recommended, simply because you seemed to be my teacher; and so in the course of these years I have come to believe in you about as faithfully as one man ever believes in another. From having no fixed object in life I have finally found that I have something to do, and will ultimately, I trust, have something to say about sea-life, something that has not, I think, hitherto been said—if God ever permits me the necessary leisure from hard railway work, the most hopeless and depressing of all work I have hitherto done.
“Your most thankful servant,
——”
With the account given in the first part of this letter of the results of mechanical agriculture in California, you shall now compare a little sketch by Marmontel of the peasant life, not mechanical, in his own province. It is given, altering only the name of the river, in the “Contes Moraux,” in the story, professing to continue that of Moliére’s ‘Misanthrope’:
“Alceste, discontented as you know, both with his mistress and with his judges, decided upon flying from men, and retired very far from Paris to the banks of the Vologne; this river, in which the shells enclose pearl, is yet more precious by the fertility which it causes to spring on its borders; the valley that it waters is one beautiful meadow. On one side of it rise smiling hills, scattered all over with woods and villages, on the other extends a vast level of fields covered with corn. It was there that Alceste went to live, forgotten by all, free from cares, and from irksome duties; entirely his own, and finally delivered from the odious spectacle of the world, he breathed freely, and praised heaven for having broken all his chains. A little study, much exercise, pleasures not vivid, but untroubled; in a word, a life peacefully active, preserved him from the ennui of solitude: he desired nothing, and regretted nothing. One of the pleasures of his retreat was to see the cultivated and fertile ground all about him nourishing a peasantry, which appeared to him happy. For a misanthrope who has become so by his virtue, only thinks that he hates men, because he loves them. Alceste felt a strange softening of the heart mingled with joy at the sight of his fellow-creatures rich by the labour of their hand. ‘Those people,’ said he, ‘are very happy to be still half savage. They would soon be corrupted if they were more civilized.’ As he was walking in the country, he chanced upon a labourer who was ploughing, and singing as he ploughed. ‘God have a care of you, my good man!’ said he; ‘you are very gay?’ ‘I mostly am,’ replied the peasant. ‘I am happy to hear it: that proves that you are content with your condition.’ ‘Until now, I have good cause to be.’ ‘Are you married?’ ‘Yes, thank heaven.’ ‘Have you any children?’ ‘I had five. I have lost one, but that is a mischief that may be mended.’ ‘Is your wife young?’ ‘She is twenty-five years old.’ ‘Is she pretty?’ ‘She is, for me, but she is better than pretty, she is good.’ ‘And you love her?’ ‘If I love her! Who would not love her! I wonder?’ ‘And she loves you also, without doubt.’ ‘Oh! for that matter, with all her heart—just the same as before marriage.’ ‘Then you loved each other before marriage?’ ‘Without that, should we have let ourselves be caught?’ ‘And your children—are they healthy?’ ‘Ah! it’s a pleasure to see them! The eldest is only five years old, and he’s already a great deal cleverer than his father, and for my two girls, never was anything so charming! It’ll be ill-luck indeed if they don’t get husbands. The youngest is sucking yet, but the little fellow will be stout and strong. Would you believe it?—he beats his sisters when they want to kiss their mother!—he’s always afraid of anybody’s taking him from the breast.’ ‘All that is, then, very happy?’ ‘Happy! I should think so—you should see the joy there is when I come back from my work! You would say they hadn’t seen me for a year. I don’t know which to attend to first. My wife is round my neck—my girls in my arms—my boy gets hold of my legs—little Jeannot is like to roll himself off the bed to get to me—and I, I laugh, and cry, and kiss all at once—for all that makes me cry!’ ‘I believe it, indeed,’ said Alceste. ‘You know it, sir, I suppose, for you are doubtless a father?’ ‘I have not that happiness.’ ‘So much the worse for you! There’s nothing in the world worth having, but that.’ ‘And how do you live?’ ‘Very well: we have excellent bread, good milk, and the fruit of our orchard. My wife, with a little bacon, makes a cabbage soup that the King would be glad to eat! Then we have eggs from the poultry-yard; and on Sunday we have a feast, and drink a little cup of wine’ ‘Yes, but when the year is bad?’ ‘Well, one expects the year to be bad, sometimes, and one lives on what one has saved from the good years.’ ‘Then there’s the rigour of the weather—the cold and the rain, and the heat—that you have to bear.’ ‘Well! one gets used to it; and if you only knew the pleasure that one has in the evening, in getting the cool breeze after a day of summer; or, in winter, warming one’s hands at the blaze of a good faggot, between one’s wife and children; and then one sups with good appetite, and one goes to bed; and think you, that one remembers the bad weather? Sometimes my wife says to me,—“My good man, do you hear the wind and the storm? Ah, suppose you were in the fields?” “But I’m not in the fields, I’m here,” I say to her. Ah, sir! there are many people in the fine world, who don’t live as content as we.’ ‘Well! but the taxes?’ ‘We pay them merrily—and well we should—all the country can’t be noble, our squires and judges can’t come to work in the fields with us—they do for us what we can’t—we do for them what they can’t—and every business, as one says, has its pains.’ ‘What equity!’ said the misanthrope; ‘there, in two words, is all the economy of primitive society. Ah, Nature! there is nothing just but thee! and the healthiest reason is in thy untaught simplicity. But, in paying the taxes so willingly, don’t you run some risk of getting more put on you?’ ‘We used to be afraid of that; but, thank God, the lord of the place has relieved us from this anxiety. He plays the part of our good king to us. He imposes and receives himself, and, in case of need, makes advances for us. He is as careful of us as if we were his own children.’ ‘And who is this gallant man?’ ‘The Viscount Laval—he is known enough, all the country respects him.’ ‘Does he live in his château?’ ‘He passes eight months of the year there.’ ‘And the rest?’ ‘At Paris, I believe.’ ‘Does he see any company?’ ‘The townspeople of Bruyeres, and now and then, some of our old men go to taste his soup and chat with him.’ ‘And from Paris does he bring nobody?’ ‘Nobody but his daughter.’ ‘He is much in the right. And how does he employ himself?’ ‘In judging between us—in making up our quarrels—in marrying our children—in maintaining peace in our families—in helping them when the times are bad.’ ‘You must take me to see his village,’ said Alceste, ‘that must be interesting.’
“He was surprised to find the roads, even the cross-roads, bordered with hedges, and kept with care; but, coming on a party of men occupied in mending them, ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘so you’ve got forced labour here?’ ‘Forced?’ answered an old man who presided over the work. ‘We know nothing of that here, sir; all these men are paid, we constrain nobody; only, if there comes to the village a vagrant, or a do-nothing, they send him to me, and if he wants bread he can gain it; or, he must go to seek it elsewhere.’ ‘And who has established this happy police?’ ‘Our good lord—our father—the father to all of us.’ ‘And where do the funds come from?’ ‘From the commonalty; and, as it imposes the tax on itself, it does not happen here, as too often elsewhere, that the rich are exempted at the expense of the poor.’
“The esteem of Alceste increased every moment for the wise and benevolent master who governed all this little country. ‘How powerful would a king be!’ he said to himself—‘and how happy a state! if all the great proprietors followed the example of this one; but Paris absorbs both property and men, it robs all, and swallows up everything.’
“The first glance at the village showed him the image of confidence and comfort. He entered a building which had the appearance of a public edifice, and found there a crowd of children, women, and old men occupied in useful labour;—idleness was only permitted to the extremely feeble. Childhood, almost at its first steps out of the cradle, caught the habit and the taste for work; and old age, at the borders of the tomb, still exercised its trembling hands; the season in which the earth rests brought every vigorous arm to the workshops—and then the lathe, the saw, and the hatchet gave new value to products of nature.
“ ‘I am not surprised,’ said Alceste, ‘that this people is pure from vice, and relieved from discontent. It is laborious, and occupied without ceasing.’ He asked how the workshop had been established. ‘Our good lord,’ was the reply, ‘advanced the first funds for it. It was a very little place at first, and all that was done was at his expense, at his risk, and to his profit; but, once convinced that there was solid advantage to be gained, he yielded the enterprise to us, and now interferes only to protect; and every year he gives to the village the instruments of some one of our arts. It is the present that he makes at the first wedding which is celebrated in the year.’ ”
Thus wrote, and taught, a Frenchman of the old school, before the Revolution. But worldly-wise Paris went on her own way absorbing property and men; and has attained, this first of May, what means and manner of festival you see in her Grenier d’Abondance.
Glance back now to my proposal for the keeping of the first of May, in the letter on “Rose Gardens” in ‘Time and Tide,’ and discern which state is best for you—modern “civilization,” or Marmontel’s rusticity, and mine.
Ever faithfully yours,
[1] “Type,” the actual word in the Greek. [↑]
[2] “Davantage, ilz se nommoyent Forestiers, non que leur charge et gouvernement fust seulement sur la terre, qui estoit lors occupee et empeschee de la forest Charbonniere, mais la garde de la mer leur estoit aussi commise. Convient ici entendre, que ce terme, forest, en vieil bas Aleman, convenoit aussi bien aux eaux comme aux boys, ainsi qu’il est narré es memoires de Jean du Tillet.”—‘Les Genealogies des Forestiers et Comtes de Flandres’ AntP. 1598. [↑]
[3] I accept the blame of vanity in printing the end of this letter, for the sake of showing more perfectly the temper of its writer, whom I have answered privately; in case my letter may not reach him, I should be grateful if he would send me again his address. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XVIII.
Pisa, 29th April, 1872.
My Friends,
You would pity me, if you knew how seldom I see a newspaper, just now; but I chanced on one yesterday, and found that all the world was astir about the marriage of the Marquis of B.; and that the Pope had sent him, on that occasion, a telegraphic blessing of super-fine quality.
I wonder what the Marquis of B. has done to deserve to be blessed to that special extent, and whether a little mild beatitude, sent here to Pisa, might not have been better spent? For, indeed, before getting hold of the papers, I had been greatly troubled, while drawing the east end of the Duomo, by three fellows who were leaning against the Leaning Tower, and expectorating loudly and copiously, at intervals of half a minute each, over the white marble base of it, which they evidently conceived to have been constructed only to be spit upon. They were all in rags, and obviously proposed to remain in rags all their days, and pass what leisure of life they could obtain, in spitting. There was a boy with them, in rags also, and not less expectorant; but having some remains of human activity in him still, being not more than twelve years old; and he was even a little interested in my brushes and colours, but rewarded himself, after the effort of some attention to these, by revolving slowly round the iron railing in front of me like a pensive squirrel. This operation at last disturbed me so much, that I asked him if there were no other railings in Pisa he could turn upside down over, but these? “Sono cascato, Signor—” “I tumbled over them, please, Sir,” said he, apologetically, with infinite satisfaction in his black eyes.
Now it seemed to me that these three moist-throated men and the squirrelline boy stood much more in need of a paternal blessing than the Marquis of B.—a blessing, of course, with as much of the bloom off it as would make it consistent with the position in which Providence had placed them; but enough, in its moderate way, to bring the good out of them instead of the evil. For there was all manner of good in them, deep and pure—yet for ever to be dormant; and all manner of evil, shallow and superficial, yet for ever to be active and practical, as matters stood that day, under the Leaning Tower.
Lucca, 7th May.—Eight days gone, and I’ve been working hard, and looking my carefullest; and seem to have done nothing, nor begun to see these places, though I’ve known them thirty years, and though Mr. Murray’s Guide says one may see Lucca, and its Ducal Palace and Piazza, the Cathedral, the Baptistery, nine churches, and the Roman amphitheatre, and take a drive round the ramparts, in the time between the stopping of one train and the starting of the next.
I wonder how much time Mr. Murray would allow for the view I had to-day, from the tower of the Cathedral, up the valley called of “Niévole,”—now one tufted softness of fresh springing leaves, far as the eye can reach. You know something of the produce of the hills that bound it, and perhaps of its own: at least, one used to see “Fine Lucca Oil” often enough in the grocers’ windows (petroleum has, I suppose, now taken its place), and the staple of Spitalfields was, I believe, first woven with Lucca thread.
The actual manner of production of these good things is thus:—The Val di Niévole is some five miles wide by thirty long, and is simply one field of corn or rich grass land, undivided by hedges; the corn two feet high, and more, to-day. Quite Lord Derby’s style of agriculture, you think? No; not quite. Undivided by hedges, the fields are yet meshed across and across by an intricate network of posts and chains. The posts are maple-trees, and the chains, garlands of vine. The meshes of this net each enclose two or three acres of the corn-land, with a row of mulberry-trees up the middle of it, for silk. There are poppies, and bright ones too, about the banks and roadsides; but the corn of Val di Niévole is too proud to grow with poppies, and is set with wild gladiolus instead, deep violet. Here and there a mound of crag rises out of the fields, crested with stone-pine, and studded all over with the large stars of the white rock-cistus. Quiet streams, filled with close crowds of the golden waterflag, wind beside meadows painted with purple orchis. On each side of the great plain is a wilderness of hills, veiled at their feet with a grey cloud of olive woods; above, sweet with glades of chestnut; peaks of more distant blue, still, to-day, embroidered with snow, are rather to be thought of as vast precious stones than mountains, for all the state of the world’s palaces has been hewn out of their marble.
I was looking over all this from under the rim of a large bell, beautifully embossed, with a St. Sebastian upon it, and some lovely thin-edged laurel leaves, and an inscription saying that the people should be filled with the fat of the land, if they listened to the voice of the Lord. The bell-founder of course meant, by the voice of the Lord, the sound of his own bell; and all over the plain, one could see towers rising above the vines voiced in the same manner. Also much trumpeting and fiddling goes on below, to help the bells, on holy days; and, assuredly, here is fat enough of land to be filled with, if listening to these scrapings and tinklings were indeed the way to be filled.
The laurel leaves on the bell were so finely hammered that I felt bound to have a ladder set against the lip of it, that I might examine them more closely; and the sacristan and bell-ringer were so interested in this proceeding that they got up, themselves, on the cross-beams, and sat like two jackdaws, looking on, one on each side; for which expression of sympathy I was deeply grateful, and offered the bell-ringer, on the spot, two bank-notes for tenpence each. But they were so rotten with age, and so brittle and black with tobacco, that, having unadvisedly folded them up small in my purse, the patches on their backs had run their corners through them, and they came out tattered like so much tinder. The bell-ringer looked at them hopelessly, and gave me them back. I promised him some better patched ones, and folded the remnants of tinder up carefully, to be kept at Coniston, (where we have still a tenpence-worth or so of copper,—though no olive oil)—for specimens of the currency of the new Kingdom of Italy.
Such are the monuments of financial art, attained by a nation which has lived in the fattest of lands for at least three thousand years, and for the last twelve hundred of them has had at least some measure of Christian benediction, with help from bell, book, candle and, recently, even from gas.
Yet you must not despise the benediction, though it has not provided them with clean bank-notes. The peasant race, at least, of the Val di Niévole are not unblest; if honesty, kindness, food sufficient for them, and peace of heart, can anywise make up for poverty in current coin. Only the evening before last, I was up among the hills to the south of Lucca, close to the remains of the country-house of Castruccio Castracani, who was Lord of the Val di Niévole, and much good land besides, in the year 1328; (and whose sword, you perhaps remember, was presented to the King of Sardinia, now King of Italy, when first he visited the Lucchese after driving out the old Duke of Tuscany; and Mrs. Browning wrote a poem upon the presentation;) a Neapolitan Duchess has got his country-house now, and has restored it to her taste. Well, I was up among the hills, that way, in places where no English, nor Neapolitans either, ever dream of going, being altogether lovely and at rest, and the country life in them unchanged; and I had several friends with me, and among them one of the young girls who were at Furness Abbey last year; and, scrambling about among the vines, she lost a pretty little cross of Florentine work. Luckily, she had made acquaintance, only the day before, with the peasant mistress of a cottage close by, and with her two youngest children, Adam and Eve. Eve was still tied up tight in swaddling clothes, down to the toes, and carried about as a bundle; but Adam was old enough to run about; and found the cross, and his mother gave it us back next day.
Not unblest, such a people, though with some common human care and kindness you might bless them a little more. If only you would not curse them; but the curse of your modern life is fatally near, and only for a few years more, perhaps, they will be seen—driving their tawny kine, or with their sheep following them,—to pass, like pictures in enchanted motion, among their glades of vine.
Rome, 12th May.—I am writing at the window of a new inn, whence I have a view of a large green gas-lamp, and of a pond, in rustic rock-work, with four large black ducks in it; also of the top of the Pantheon; sundry ruined walls; tiled roofs innumerable; and a palace about a quarter of a mile long, and the height, as near as I can guess, of Folkestone cliffs under the New Parade; all which I see to advantage over a balustrade veneered with an inch of marble over four inches of cheap stone, carried by balusters of cast iron, painted and sanded, but with the rust coming through,—this being the proper modern recipe in Italy for balustrades which may meet the increasing demand of travellers for splendour of abode. (By the way, I see I can get a pretty little long vignette view of the roof of the Pantheon, and some neighbouring churches, through a chink between the veneering and the freestone.)
Standing in this balcony, I am within three hundred yards of the greater Church of St. Mary, from which Castruccio Castracani walked to St. Peter’s on 17th January, 1328, carrying the sword of the German Empire, with which he was appointed to gird its Emperor, on his taking possession of Rome, by Castruccio’s help, in spite of the Pope. The Lord of the Val di Niévole wore a dress of superb damask silk, doubtless the best that the worms of Lucca mulberry-trees could spin; and across his breast an embroidered scroll, inscribed, “He is what God made him,” and across his shoulders, behind, another scroll, inscribed, “And he shall be what God will make.”
On the 3rd of August, that same year, he recovered Pistoja from the Florentines, and rode home to his own Lucca in triumph, being then the greatest war-captain in Europe, and Lord of Pisa, Pistoja, Lucca, half the coast of Genoa, and three hundred fortified castles in the Apennines; on the third of September he lay dead in Lucca, of fever. “Crushed before the moth;” as the silkworms also, who were boiled before even they became so much as moths, to make his embroidered coat for him. And, humanly speaking, because he had worked too hard in the trenches of Pistoja, in the dog-days, with his armour on, and with his own hands on the mattock, like the good knight he was.
Nevertheless, his sword was no gift for the King of Italy, if the Lucchese had thought better of it. For those three hundred castles of his were all Robber-castles, and he, in fact, only the chief captain of the three hundred thieves who lived in them. In the beginning of his career, these “towers of the Lunigiana belonged to gentlemen who had made brigandage in the mountains, or piracy on the sea, the sole occupation of their youth. Castruccio united them round him, and called to his little court all the exiles and adventurers who were wandering from town to town, in search of war or pleasures.”[1]
And, indeed, to Professors of Art, the Apennine between Lucca and Pistoja is singularly delightful to this day, because of the ruins of these robber-castles on every mound, and of the pretty monasteries and arcades of cloister beside them. But how little we usually estimate the real relation of these picturesque objects! The homes of Baron and Clerk, side by side, established on the hills. Underneath, in the plain, the peasant driving his oxen. The Baron lives by robbing the peasant, and the Clerk by blessing the Baron.
Blessing and absolving, though the Barons of grandest type could live, and resolutely die, without absolution. Old Straw-Mattress of Evilstone,[2] at ninety-six, sent his son from beside his death-mattress to attack the castle of the Bishop of Arezzo, thinking the Bishop would be off his guard, news having gone abroad that the grey-haired Knight of Evilstone could sit his horse no more. But, usually, the absolution was felt to be needful towards the end of life; and if one thinks of it, the two kinds of edifices on the hill-tops may be shortly described as those of the Pillager and Pardoner, or Pardonere, Chaucer’s word being classical in spelling, and the best general one for the clergy of the two great Evangelical and Papal sects. Only a year or two ago, close to the Crystal Palace, I heard the Rev. Mr. Tipple announce from his pulpit that there was no thief, nor devourer of widows’ houses, nor any manner of sinner, in his congregation that day, who might not leave the church an entirely pardoned and entirely respectable person, if he would only believe what the Rev. Mr. Tipple was about to announce to him.
Strange, too, how these two great pardoning religions agree in the accompaniment of physical filth. I have never been hindered from drawing street subjects by pure human stench, but in two cities,—Edinburgh and Rome.
There are some things, however, which Edinburgh and London pardon, now-a-days, which Rome would not. Penitent thieves, by all means, but not impenitent; still less impenitent peculators.
Have patience a little, for I must tell you one or two things more about Lucca: they are all connected with the history of Florence, which is to be one of the five cities you are to be able to give account of; and, by the way, remember at once, that her florin in the 14th century was of such pure gold that when in Chaucer’s “Pardonere’s Tale” Death puts himself into the daintiest dress he can, it is into a heap of “floreines faire and bright.” He has chosen another form at Lucca; and when I had folded up my two bits of refuse tinder, I walked into the Cathedral to look at the golden lamp which hangs before the Sacred Face—twenty-four pounds of pure gold in the lamp: Face of wood: the oath of kings, since William Rufus’ days; carved eighteen hundred years ago, if one would believe, and very full of pardon to faithful Lucchese; yet, to some, helpless.
There are, I suppose, no educated persons in Italy, and few in England, who do not profess to admire Dante; and, perhaps, out of every hundred of these admirers, three or four may have read the bit about Francesca di Rimini, the death of Ugolino, and the description of the Venetian Arsenal. But even of these honestly studious three or four we should rarely find one, who knew why the Venetian Arsenal was described. You shall hear, if you will.
“As, in the Venetian Arsenal, the pitch boils in the winter time, wherewith to caulk their rotten ships … so, not by fire, but divine art, a thick pitch boiled there, beneath, which had plastered itself all up over the banks on either side. But in it I could see nothing, except the bubbles that its boiling raised, which from time to time made it all swell up over its whole surface, and presently fell back again depressed. And as I looked at it fixedly, and wondered, my guide drew me back hastily, saying, ‘Look, look!’ And when I turned, I saw behind us, a black devil come running along the rocks. Ah, how wild his face! ah, how bitter his action as he came with his wings wide, light upon his feet! On his shoulder he bore a sinner, grasped by both haunches; and when he came to the bridge foot, he cried down into the pit: ‘Here’s an ancient from Lucca; put him under, that I may fetch more, for the land is full of such; there, for money, they make “No” into “Yes” quickly.’ And he cast him in and turned back,—never mastiff fiercer after his prey. The thrown sinner plunged in the pitch, and curled himself up; but the devils from under the bridge cried out, ‘There’s no holy face here; here one swims otherwise than in the Serchio.’ And they caught him with their hooks and pulled him under, as cooks do the meat in broth; crying, ‘People play here hidden; so that they may filch in secret, if they can.’ ”
Doubtless, you consider all this extremely absurd, and are of opinion that such things are not likely to happen in the next world. Perhaps not; nor is it clear that Dante believed they would; but I should be glad if you would tell me what you think is likely to happen there. In the meantime, please to observe Dante’s figurative meaning, which is by no means absurd. Every one of his scenes has symbolic purpose, down to the least detail. This lake of pitch is money, which, in our own vulgar English phrase, “sticks to people’s fingers;” it clogs and plasters its margin all over, because the mind of a man bent on dishonest gain makes everything within its reach dirty; it bubbles up and down, because underhand gains nearly always involve alternate excitement and depression; and it is haunted by the most cruel and indecent of all the devils, because there is nothing so mean, and nothing so cruel, but a peculator will do it. So you may read every line figuratively, if you choose: all that I want is, that you should be acquainted with the opinions of Dante concerning peculation. For with the history of the five cities, I wish you to know also the opinions, on all subjects personally interesting to you, of five people who lived in them; namely, of Plato, Virgil, Dante, Victor Carpaccio (whose opinions I must gather for you from his paintings, for painting is the way Venetians write), and Shakespeare.
If, after knowing these five men’s opinions on practical matters (these five, as you will find, being all of the same mind), you prefer to hold Mr. J. S. Mill’s and Mr. Fawcett’s opinions, you are welcome. And indeed I may as well end this by at once examining some of Mr. Fawcett’s statements on the subject of Interest, that being one of our chief modern modes of peculation; but, before we put aside Dante for to-day, just note farther this, that while he has sharp punishment for thieves, forgers, and peculators,—the thieves being changed into serpents, the forgers covered with leprosy, and the peculators boiled in pitch,—he has no punishment for bad workmen; no Tuscan mind at that day being able to conceive such a ghastly sin as a man’s doing bad work wilfully; and, indeed, I think the Tuscan mind, and in some degree the Piedmontese, retain some vestige of this old temper; for though, not a fortnight since (on 3rd May), the cross of marble in the arch-spandril next the east end of the Chapel of the Thorn at Pisa was dashed to pieces before my eyes, as I was drawing it for my class in heraldry at Oxford, by a stone-mason, that his master might be paid for making a new one, I have no doubt the new one will be as honestly like the old as master and man can make it; and Mr. Murray’s Guide will call it a judicious restoration. So also, though here, the new Government is digging through the earliest rampart of Rome (agger of Servius Tullius), to build a new Finance Office, which will doubtless issue tenpenny notes in Latin, with the dignity of denarii (the “pence” of your New Testament), I have every reason to suppose the new Finance Office will be substantially built, and creditable to its masons; (the veneering and cast-iron work being, I believe, done mostly at the instigation of British building companies). But it seems strange to me that, coming to Rome for quite other reasons, I should be permitted by the Third Fors to see the agger of Tullius cut through, for the site of a Finance Office, and his Mons Justitiæ (Mount of Justice), presumably the most venerable piece of earth in Italy, carted away, to make room for a railroad-station of Piccola Velocità. For Servius Tullius was the first king who stamped money with the figures of animals, and introduced a word among the Romans with the sound of which Englishmen are also now acquainted, “pecunia.” Moreover, it is in speaking of this very agger of Tullius that Livy explains in what reverence the Romans held the space between the outer and inner walls of their cities, which modern Italy delights to turn into a Boulevard.
Now then, for Mr. Fawcett:—
At the 146th page of the edition of his ‘Manual’ previously quoted, you will find it stated that the interest of money consists of three distinct parts:
- 1. Reward for abstinence.
- 2. Compensation for the risk of loss.
- 3. Wages for the labour of superintendence.
I will reverse this order in examining the statements; for the only real question is as to the first, and we had better at once clear the other two away from it.
3. Wages for the labour of superintendence.
By giving the capitalist wages at all, we put him at once into the class of labourers, which in my November letter I showed you is partly right; but, by Mr. Fawcett’s definition, and in the broad results of business, he is not a labourer. So far as he is one, of course, like any other, he is to be paid for his work. There is no question but that the partner who superintends any business should be paid for superintendence; but the question before us is only respecting payment for doing nothing. I have, for instance, at this moment 15,000l. of Bank Stock, and receive 1,200l. odd, a year, from the Bank, but I have never received the slightest intimation from the directors that they wished for my assistance in the superintendence of that establishment;—(more shame for them.) But even in cases where the partners are active, it does not follow that the one who has most money in the business is either fittest to superintend it, or likely to do so; it is indeed probable that a man who has made money already will know how to make more; and it is necessary to attach some importance to property as the sign of sense: but your business is to choose and pay your superintendent for his sense, and not for his money. Which is exactly what Mr. Carlyle has been telling you for some time; and both he and all his disciples entirely approve of interest, if you are indeed prepared to define that term as payment for the exercise of common sense spent in the service of the person who pays for it. I reserve yet awhile, however, what is to be said, as hinted in my first letter, about the sale of ideas.
2. Compensation for risk.
Does Mr. Fawcett mean by compensation for risk, protection from it, or reward for running it? Every business involves a certain quantity of risk, which is properly covered by every prudent merchant, but he does not expect to make a profit out of his risks, nor calculate on a percentage on his insurance. If he prefer not to insure, does Professor Fawcett mean that his customers ought to compensate him for his anxiety; and that while the definition of the first part of interest is extra payment for prudence, the definition of the second part of interest is extra payment for imprudence? Or, does Professor Fawcett mean, what is indeed often the fact, that interest for money represents such reward for risk as people may get across the green cloth at Homburg or Monaco? Because so far as what used to be business is, in modern political economy, gambling, Professor Fawcett will please to observe that what one gamester gains another loses. You cannot get anything out of Nature, or from God, by gambling;—only out of your neighbour: and to the quantity of interest of money thus gained, you are mathematically to oppose a precisely equal disinterest of somebody else’s money.
These second and third reasons for interest then, assigned by Professor Fawcett, have evidently nothing whatever to do with the question. What I want to know is, why the Bank of England is paying me 1,200l. a year. It certainly does not pay me for superintendence. And so far from receiving my dividend as compensation for risk, I put my money into the bank because I thought it exactly the safest place to put it in. But nobody can be more anxious than I to find it proper that I should have 1,200l. a year. Finding two of Mr. Fawcett’s reasons fail me utterly, I cling with tenacity to the third, and hope the best from it.
The third, or first,—and now too sorrowfully the last—of the Professor’s reasons, is this, that my 1,200l. are given me as “the reward of abstinence.” It strikes me, upon this, that if I had not my 15,000l. of Bank Stock I should be a good deal more abstinent than I am, and that nobody would then talk of rewarding me for it. It might be possible to find even cases of very prolonged and painful abstinence, for which no reward has yet been adjudged by less abstinent England. Abstinence may, indeed, have its reward, nevertheless; but not by increase of what we abstain from, unless there be a law of growth for it, unconnected with our abstinence. “You cannot have your cake and eat it.” Of course not; and if you don’t eat it, you have your cake; but not a cake and a half! Imagine the complex trial of schoolboy minds, if the law of nature about cakes were, that if you ate none of your cake to-day, you would have ever so much bigger a cake to-morrow!—which is Mr. Fawcett’s notion of the law of nature about money; and, alas, many a man’s beside,—it being no law of nature whatever, but absolutely contrary to all her laws, and not to be enacted by the whole force of united mankind.
Not a cake and a quarter to-morrow, dunce, however abstinent you are—only the cake you have,—if the mice don’t get at it in the night.
Interest, then, is not, it appears, payment for labour; it is not reward for risk; it is not reward for abstinence.
What is it?
One of two things it is;—taxation, or usury. Of which in my next letter. Meantime believe me
Faithfully yours,
[1] Sismondi: ‘History of Italian Republics,’ Vol. III., Chap. ii. [↑]
[2] “Saccone of Pietra-mala.” [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XIX.
Verona, 18th June, 1872.
My Friends,
What an age of progress it is, by help of advertisements! No wonder you put some faith in them, friends. In summer one’s work is necessarily much before breakfast; so, coming home tired to-day, I order a steak, with which is served to me a bottle of “Moutarde Diaphane,” from Bordeaux.
What a beautiful arrangement have we here! Fancy the appropriate mixture of manufactures of cold and hot at Bordeaux—claret and diaphanous mustard! Then the quantity of printing and proclamation necessary to make people in Verona understand that diaphanous mustard is desirable, and may be had at Bordeaux. Fancy, then, the packing, and peeping into the packages, and porterages, and percentages on porterages; and the engineering, and the tunnelling, and the bridge-building, and the steam whistling, and the grinding of iron, and raising of dust in the Limousin (Marmontel’s country), and in Burgundy, and in Savoy, and under the Mont Cenis, and in Piedmont, and in Lombardy, and at last over the field of Solferino, to fetch me my bottle of diaphanous mustard!
And to think that, besides paying the railway officers all along the line, and the custom-house officers at the frontier, and the original expenses of advertisement, and the profits of its proprietors, my diaphanous mustard paid a dividend to somebody or other, all the way here! I wonder it is not more diaphanous by this time!
An age of progress, indeed, in which the founding of my poor St. George’s Company, growing its own mustard, and desiring no dividends, may well seem difficult. I have scarcely had courage yet to insist on that second particular, but will try to find it, on this Waterloo day.
Observe, then, once for all, it is to be a company for Alms-giving, not for dividend-getting. For I still believe in Alms-giving, though most people now-a-days do not, but think the only hopeful way of serving their neighbour is to make a profit out of him. I am of opinion, on the contrary, that the hopefullest way of serving him is to let him make a profit out of me, and I only ask the help of people who are at one with me in that mind.
Alms-giving, therefore, is to be our function; yet alms only of a certain sort. For there are bedesmen and bedesmen, and our charities must be as discriminate as possible.
For instance, those two steely and stalwart horsemen, who sit, by the hour, under the two arches opposite Whitehall, from ten to four per diem, to receive the public alms. It is their singular and well-bred manner of begging, indeed, to keep their helmets on their heads, and sit erect on horseback; but one may, with slight effort of imagination, conceive the two helmets held in a reversed manner, each in the mouth of a well-bred and politely-behaving dog, Irish greyhound, or the like; sitting erect, it also, paws in air, with the brass instead of copper pan in its mouth, plume downwards, for reception of pence.
“Ready to fight for us, they are, on occasional 18ths of June.”
Doubtless, and able-bodied;—barons of truest make: but I thought your idea of discriminate charity was to give rather to the sick than the able-bodied? and that you have no hope of interfering henceforward, except by money payments, in any foreign affairs?
“But the Guards are necessary to keep order in the Park.”
Yes, certainly, and farther than the Park. The two breastplated figures, glittering in transfixed attitudes on each side of the authoritative clock, are, indeed, very precious time-piece ornamentation. No watchmaker’s window in Paris or Geneva can show the like. Finished little figures, perfect down to the toes of their boots,—the enamelled clasp on the girdle of the British Constitution!—You think the security of that depends on the freedom of your press, and the purity of your elections?
Do but unclasp this piece of dainty jewellery; send the metal of it to the melting-pot, and see where your British Constitution will be, in a few turns of the hands of the faultless clock. They are precious statues, these, good friends; set there to keep you and me from having too much of our own way; and I joyfully and gratefully drop my penny into each helmet as I pass by, though I expect no other dividend from that investment than good order, picturesque effect, and an occasional flourish on the kettle-drum.
Likewise, from their contributed pence, the St. George’s Company must be good enough to expect dividend only in good order and picturesque effect of another sort. For my notion of discriminate charity is by no means, like most other people’s, the giving to unable-bodied paupers. My alms-people are to be the ablest bodied I can find; the ablest minded I can make; and from ten to four every day will be on duty. Ten to four, nine to three, or perhaps six to twelve;—just the time those two gilded figures sit with their tools idle on their shoulders, (being fortunately without employment,) my ungilded, but not unstately, alms-men shall stand with tools at work, mattock or flail, axe or hammer. And I do not doubt but in little time, they will be able to thresh or hew rations for their day out of the ground, and that our help to them need only be in giving them that to hew them out of. Which, you observe, is just what I ask may be bought for them.
“ ‘May be bought,’ but by whom? and for whom, how distributed, in whom vested?” and much more you have to ask.
As soon as I am sure you understand what needs to be done, I will satisfy you as to the way of doing it.
But I will not let you know my plans, till you acknowledge my principles, which I have no expectation of your doing yet awhile.
June 22nd.
“Bought for them”—for whom? How should I know? The best people I can find, or make, as chance may send them: the Third Fors must look to it. Surely it cannot matter much, to you, whom the thing helps, so long as you are quite sure, and quite content, that it won’t help you?
That last sentence is wonderfully awkward English, not to say ungrammatical; but I must write such English as may come to-day, for there’s something wrong with the Post, or the railroads, and I have no revise of what I wrote for you at Florence, a fortnight since; so that must be left for the August Letter, and meanwhile I must write something quickly in its place, or be too late for the first of July. Of the many things I have to say to you, it matters little which comes first; indeed, I rather like the Third Fors to take the order of them into her hands, out of mine.
I repeat my question. It surely cannot matter to you whom the thing helps, so long as you are content that it won’t, or can’t, help you? But are you content so? For that is the essential condition of the whole business—I will not speak of it in terms of money—are you content to give work? Will you build a bit of wall, suppose—to serve your neighbour, expecting no good of the wall yourself? If so, you must be satisfied to build the wall for the man who wants it built; you must not be resolved first to be sure that he is the best man in the village. Help any one, anyhow you can: so, in order, the greatest possible number will be helped; nay, in the end, perhaps, you may get some shelter from the wind under your charitable wall yourself; but do not expect it, nor lean on any promise that you shall find your bread again, once cast away; I can only say that of what I have chosen to cast fairly on the waters myself, I have never yet, after any number of days, found a crumb. Keep what you want; cast what you can, and expect nothing back, once lost, or once given.
But for the actual detail of the way in which benefit might thus begin, and diffuse itself, here is an instance close at hand. Yesterday a thunder-shower broke over Verona in the early afternoon; and in a quarter of an hour the streets were an inch deep in water over large spaces, and had little rivers at each side of them. All these little rivers ran away into the large river—the Adige, which plunges down under the bridges of Verona, writhing itself in strong rage; for Verona, with its said bridges, is a kind of lock-gate upon the Adige, half open—lock-gate on the ebbing rain of all the South Tyrolese Alps. The little rivers ran into it, not out of the streets only, but from all the hillsides; millions of sudden streams. If you look at Charles Dickens’s letter about the rain in Glencoe, in Mr. Forster’s Life of him, it will give you a better idea of the kind of thing than I can, for my forte is really not description, but political economy. Two hours afterwards the sky was clear, the streets dry, the whole thunder-shower was in the Adige, ten miles below Verona, making the best of its way to the sea, after swelling the Po a little (which is inconveniently high already), and I went out with my friends to see the sun set clear, as it was likely to do, and did, over the Tyrolese mountains.
The place fittest for such purpose is a limestone crag about five miles nearer the hills, rising out of the bed of a torrent, which, as usual, I found a bed only; a little washing of the sand into moist masses here and there being the only evidence of the past rain.
Above it, where the rocks were dry, we sat down, to draw, or to look; but I was too tired to draw, and cannot any more look at a sunset with comfort, because, now that I am fifty-three, the sun seems to me to set so horribly fast; when one was young, it took its time; but now it always drops like a shell, and before I can get any image of it, is gone, and another day with it.
So, instead of looking at the sun, I got thinking about the dry bed of the stream, just beneath. Ugly enough it was; cut by occasional inundation irregularly out of the thick masses of old Alpine shingle, nearly every stone of it the size of an ostrich-egg. And, by the way, the average size of shingle in given localities is worth your thinking about, geologically. All through this Veronese plain the stones are mostly of ostrich-egg size and shape; some forty times as big as the pebbles of English shingle (say of the Addington Hills), and not flat nor round; but resolvedly oval. Now there is no reason, that I know of, why large mountains should break into large pebbles, and small ones into small; and indeed the consistent reduction of our own masses of flint, as big as a cauliflower, leaves and all, into the flattish rounded pebble, seldom wider across than half a crown, of the banks of Addington, is just as strange a piece of systematic reduction as the grinding of Monte Baldo into sculpture of ostrich-eggs:—neither of the processes, observe, depending upon questions of time, but of method of fracture.
The evening drew on, and two peasants who had been cutting hay on a terrace of meadow among the rocks, left their work, and came to look at the sketchers, and make out, if they could, what we wanted on their ground. They did not speak to us, but bright light came into the face of one, evidently the master, on being spoken to, and excuse asked of him for our presence among his rocks, by which he courteously expressed himself as pleased, no less than (though this he did not say) puzzled.
Some talk followed, of cold and heat, and anything else one knew the Italian for, or could understand the Veronese for (Veronese being more like Spanish than Italian); and I praised the country, as was just, or at least as I could, and said I should like to live there. Whereupon he commended it also, in measured terms; and said the wine was good. “But the water?” I asked, pointing to the dry river-bed. The water was bitter, he said, and little wholesome. “Why, then, have you let all that thunder-shower go down the Adige, three hours ago?” “That was the way the showers came.” “Yes, but not the way they ought to go.” (We were standing by the side of a cleft in the limestone which ran down through ledge after ledge, from the top of the cliff, mostly barren; but my farmer’s man had led two of his grey oxen to make what they could of supper from the tufts of grass on the sides of it, half an hour before). “If you had ever been at the little pains of throwing half-a-dozen yards of wall here, from rock to rock, you would have had, at this moment, a pool of standing water as big as a mill-pond, kept out of that thunder-shower, which very water, to-morrow morning, will probably be washing away somebody’s hay-stack into the Po.”
The above was what I wanted to say; but didn’t know the Italian for hay-stack. I got enough out to make the farmer understand what I meant.
Yes, he said, that would be very good, but “la spesa?”
“The expense! What would be the expense to you of gathering a few stones from this hillside? And the idle minutes, gathered out of a week, if a neighbour or two joined in the work, could do all the building.” He paused at this—the idea of neighbours joining in work appearing to him entirely abortive, and untenable by a rational being. Which indeed, throughout Christendom, it at present is,—thanks to the beautiful instructions and orthodox catechisms impressed by the two great sects of Evangelical and Papal pardoneres on the minds of their respective flocks—(and on their lips also, early enough in the lives of the little bleating things. “Che cosa è la fede?” I heard impetuously interrogated of a seven years’ old one, by a conscientious lady in a black gown and white cap, in St. Michael’s, at Lucca, and answered in a glib speech a quarter of a minute long). Neither have I ever thought of, far less seriously proposed, such a monstrous thing as that neighbours should help one another; but I have proposed, and do solemnly still propose, that people who have got no neighbours, but are outcasts and Samaritans, as it were, should put whatever twopenny charity they can afford into useful unity of action; and that, caring personally for no one, practically for every one, they should undertake “la spesa” of work that will pay no dividend on their twopences; but will both produce and pour oil and wine where they are most wanted. And I do solemnly propose that the St. George’s Company in England, and (please the University of Padua) a St. Anthony’s Company in Italy, should positively buy such bits of barren ground as this farmer’s at Verona, and make the most of them that agriculture and engineering can.
Venice, 23rd June.
My letter will be a day or two late, I fear, after all; for I can’t write this morning, because of the accursed whistling of the dirty steam-engine of the omnibus for Lido, waiting at the quay of the Ducal Palace for the dirty population of Venice, which is now neither fish nor flesh, neither noble nor fisherman—cannot afford to be rowed, nor has strength nor sense enough to row itself; but smokes and spits up and down the piazzetta all day, and gets itself dragged by a screaming kettle to Lido next morning, to sea-bathe itself into capacity for more tobacco.
Yet I am grateful to the Third Fors for stopping my revise; because just as I was passing by Padua yesterday I chanced upon this fact, which I had forgotten (do me the grace to believe that I knew it twenty years ago), in Antonio Caccianiga’s ‘Vita Campestre.’[1] “The Venetian Republic founded in Padua”—(wait a minute; for the pigeons are come to my window-sill and I must give them some breakfast)—“founded in Padua, in 1765, the first chair of rural economy appointed in Italy, annexed to it a piece of ground destined for the study, and called Peter Ardouin, a Veronese botanist, to honour the school with his lectures.”
Yes; that is all very fine; nevertheless, I am not quite sure that rural economy, during the 1760 years previous, had not done pretty well without a chair, and on its own legs. For, indeed, since the beginning of those philosophies in the eighteenth century, the Venetian aristocracy has so ill prospered that instead of being any more able to give land at Padua, it cannot so much as keep a poor acre of it decent before its own Ducal Palace, in Venice; nor hinder this miserable mob, which has not brains enough to know so much as what o’clock it is, nor sense enough so much as to go aboard a boat without being whistled for like dogs, from choking the sweet sea air with pitch-black smoke, and filling it with entirely devilish noise, which no properly bred human being could endure within a quarter of a mile of them—that so they may be sufficiently assisted and persuaded to embark, for the washing of themselves, at the Palace quay.
It is a strange pass for things to have reached, under politic aristocracies and learned professors; but the policy and learning became useless, through the same kind of mistake on both sides. The professors of botany forgot that botany, in its original Greek, meant a science of things to be eaten; they pursued it only as a science of things to be named. And the politic aristocracy forgot that their own “bestness” consisted essentially in their being fit—in a figurative manner—to be eaten, and fancied rather that their superiority was of a titular character, and that the beauty and power of their order lay wholly in being fit to be—named.
I must go back to my wall-building, however, for a minute or two more, because you might probably think that my answer to the farmer’s objection about expense, (even if I had possessed Italian enough to make it intelligible,) would have been an insufficient one; and that the operation of embanking hill-sides so as to stay the rain-flow, is a work of enormous cost and difficulty.
Indeed, a work productive of good so infinite as this would be, and contending for rule over the grandest forces of nature, cannot be altogether cheap, nor altogether facile. But spend annually one-tenth of the sum you now give to build embankments against imaginary enemies, in building embankments for the help of people whom you may easily make your real friends,—and see whether your budget does not become more satisfactory, so; and, above all, learn a little hydraulics.
I wasted some good time, a year or two since, over a sensational novel in one of our magazines, which I thought would tell me more of what the public were thinking about strikes than I could learn elsewhere. But it spent itself in dramatic effects with lucifer matches, and I learned nothing from it, and the public mislearned much. It ended, (no, I believe it didn’t end,—but I read no farther,) with the bursting of a reservoir, and the floating away of a village. The hero, as far as I recollect, was in the half of a house which was just going to be washed down; and the anti-hero was opposite him, in the half of a tree which was just going to be torn up; and the heroine was floating between them down the stream, and one wasn’t to know, till next month, which would catch her. But the hydraulics were the essentially bad part of the book, for the author made great play with the tremendous weight of water against his embankment;—it never having occurred to him that the gate of a Liverpool dry dock can keep out—and could just as easily for that matter keep in—the Atlantic Ocean, to the necessary depth in feet and inches; the depth giving the pressure, not the superficies.
Nay, you may see, not unfrequently, on Margate sands, your own six-years-old engineers of children keep out the Atlantic ocean quite successfully, for a little while, from a favourite hole; the difficulty being not at all in keeping the Atlantic well out at the side, but from surreptitiously finding its way in at the bottom. And that is the real difficulty for old engineers; properly the only one; you must not let the Atlantic begin to run surreptitiously either in or out, else it soon becomes difficult to stop; and all reservoirs ought to be wide, not deep, when they are artificial, and should not be immediately above villages (though they might always be made perfectly safe merely by dividing them by walls, so that the contents could not run out all at once). But when reservoirs are not artificial, when the natural rocks, with adamantine wall, and embankment built up from the earth’s centre, are ready to catch the rain for you, and render it back as pure as their own crystal,—if you will only here and there throw an iron valve across a cleft,—believe me—if you choose to have a dividend out of Heaven, and sell the Rain, you may get it a good deal more easily and at a figure or two higher per cent. than you can on diaphanous mustard. There are certainly few men of my age who have watched the ways of Alpine torrents so closely as I have (and you need not think my knowing something of art prevents me from understanding them, for the first good canal-engineer in Italy was Lionardo da Vinci, and more drawings of water-wheels and water-eddies exist of his, by far, than studies of hair and eyes); and the one strong impression I have respecting them is their utter docility and passiveness, if you will educate them young. But our wise engineers invariably try to manage faggots instead of sticks; and, leaving the rivulets of the Viso without training, debate what bridle is to be put in the mouth of the Po! Which, by the way, is a running reservoir, considerably above the level of the plain of Lombardy; and if the bank of that one should break, any summer’s day, there will be news of it, and more cities than Venice with water in their streets.
June 24th.
You must be content with a short letter (I wish I could flatter myself you would like a longer one) this month; but you will probably see some news of the weather here, yesterday afternoon, which will give some emphasis to what I have been saying, not for the first time by any means; and so I leave you to think of it, and remain
Faithfully yours,