NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
The subjoined letter is from a clergyman of the Church of England; I publish it with his permission, advising him at the same time to withhold his name, as the arguments he has brought forward are those which would generally occur to a mind ecclesiastically trained:—
10th September, 1872.
Sir,—At page 15 of the 21st letter of your ‘Fors Clavigera’ you tell the working men and labourers of this country that “lending for gain is sinful;” and you intimate, as I gather, that this is the teaching of the Bible. May I, therefore, be allowed to submit that this unqualified assertion, with its world-wide consequences, is not true?
In [Deut. xxiii. 20], you will find these words: “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury.” And the margin (a), for the scope and meaning of this word “stranger,” refers you to [Deut. x. 19], which says, “Love ye therefore the stranger.” And the margin (b) refers us also to [Lev. xix. 35], which enjoins us to “love the stranger” as ourselves.
So that we are thus plainly taught—
I. That the lending upon usury cannot be in itself a sin, or God (c) could not have allowed it in any case whatsoever, any more than He could have allowed theft or lying (d).
II. That the lending to the stranger was not incompatible with the command, “Love ye the stranger,” or else God, in the laws and writings given by Moses, at one and the same time, stultifies and contradicts Himself (e).
III. That the laws forbidding usury, like the laws for preserving estates to their families by the year of Jubilee, and like the laws which bound Israelitish servants until the “year of release,” were peculiar and exclusive, and concerned only that people living in a peculiar and exclusive way. Outside that little patch of territory, but the size of our two largest English counties, the Jews were expressly told they might lend upon usury; and this at the same time that they were enjoined to love the stranger, and not to “oppress the stranger (f).”
Says old ‘Cruden’s Concordance:’—“It seems as lawful for me to receive interest for money, which another takes pain with, improves, but runs the hazard of in trade, as it is to receive rent for my land, which another takes pain with, improves, but runs the hazard of in husbandry.” What should we think of discovering in the holy books of some recently found people, a God so eccentric that he allowed you to invest money in tea, or sugar, or iron, or cotton, and get fifteen or even twenty per cent. out of it, and this from poor and rich alike, with whom you traded; but threatened you with his condemnation and everlasting displeasure if, at the same time, you helped a deserving man to commence business by lending him money at four per cent.; or lent money to your country until such time as it could pay its debts, for a moderate compensation, which would prevent you and yours from being ruined? (g) Love of self is as lawful as love of neighbour—“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” My neighbour is as much bound to give me some portion of the interest or gain he has earned with my money, as he would be chargeable with selfishness and grasping if he kept it wholly for himself. Trading much more whets the appetite for gain than the taking moderate interest for money. Would our Lord have held up that which was wicked in itself for our imitation, as He has done in [Matt. xxv. 27], if lending upon interest were sinful? (h) Nothing but this sight of the taking portion of the Bible without the other, and then summing up and pronouncing judgment upon a portion of the evidence only, thus arriving at an unsound judgment, would have led me to trouble you with these lines.
I remain, Sir,
Yours faithfully.
(a), (b), and (c). My correspondent uses “God” and “the margin” as synonymous terms. May I be allowed to submit to him that they are not the same, and that my statement involved no reference to either? My assertion is respecting the Bible; and has no reference either to its margin, or to God:—and my assertion is simply that “usury,” in the language of the Bible, means any percentage, however small, on lent money. I have made no assertion myself as to the characters assigned to it, for I have not examined them. I know that usury is sinful, as I know that theft is, and have no need of inquiring whether the Bible says so or not, but Ezekiel 18th is sufficiently explicit.
(d). Why does not my correspondent say “theft, lying, or murder”? The occupation of the land of Canaan was one colossal theft; the prophetess-Judge of Israel gave enthusiastic benediction, in one and the same person, to the firmness of the hand of the murderess, and fineness of the art of the liar; and the first monarch of Israel forfeited his throne, because after having faithfully slain the men, women, children, sucklings, and domestic animals of a hostile tribe, he faithlessly spared their king, and serviceablest cattle.
(e). The writings commonly assumed to be given by Moses very certainly contradict themselves in many places. It is my correspondent’s conclusion, not mine, that therefore God does so.
(f). The Jews have accordingly carried out their love to the stranger, (though I beg my correspondent to observe that stranger is not the same word as Gentile) by making as much money out of him as they can, in all places and on all occasions. But it does not follow, either that they have been blessed in doing so, or that Christians are therefore justified in treating each other either as strangers or Jews.
(g). A singular instance of the looseness of thought possible respecting matters to which we are accustomed. A man is not ruined, because he can get no gain by lending his money. No one objects to his keeping it in his pocket.
(h). Presumably, the unjust steward’s modification of his master’s accounts was also virtuous?
I have not time to ask Mr. Sillar’s permission, but hope his pardon for assuming it, to print the following portion of a letter I have had very great pleasure in receiving from him:—
“You wrong me in saying I have entirely given myself up to this question. I am occupied in saving our lovely streams from pollution, and endeavouring (no easy task, I assure you,) to put in daily practice, the principles you teach. I wish you could see our works at Crossness.
“The reason why I exclusively attack this vice is because it is the only one which is not attacked from the pulpit. Men do not know even that it is a vice. I have such confidence in the integrity of Englishmen that I believe they would at once discountenance it if they had the least idea of its character and mischievous nature.”
THESEUS.
With the Symbol of his Life-problem.
Thus drawn by a Master of the Mint in Crete.
[1] Or of their native towns or villages,—these being recognized as masters, also. [↑]
[2] Or the use of it, Mr. Emerson should have added. [↑]
[3] ‘English Traits,’ (Routledge, 1856), p. 95. [↑]
[4] Provost, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. [↑]
[5] The ‘Telegraph’ has always seemed to me to play fairer than the rest. The words “daily newspaper press” are, of course, too general. [↑]
[6] Compare ‘Munera Pulveris,’ § 140. [↑]
[7] Compare also Mr. Maurice’s sermon for the fourth Sunday after Trinity in Vol. II. of third series. (Smith, Elder & Co., no date.) [↑]
[8] In calling a man pre-eminently unfortunate, I do not mean that, as compared with others, he is absolutely less prosperous; but that he is one who has met with the least help or the greatest hostility, from the Third Fors, in proportion to the wisdom of his purposes, and virtue of his character. [↑]
[9] Italian ‘fregata,’ I believe ‘polished-sided’ ship, for swiftness, ‘fricata;’ but the derivation is uncertain. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XXIII.
Brantwood,
October 24th, 1872.
My Friends,
At breakfast this morning, which I was eating sulkily, because I had final press-corrections to do on ‘Fors,’ (and the last are always worst to do, being without repentance,) I took up the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ for the 21st, and chanced on two things, of which one much interested, the other much pleased me, and both are to our present purpose.
What interested me was the statement in the column of “This Evening’s News,” made by a gentleman much acquainted with naval business, that “Mr. Goschen is the one man to whom, and to whom alone, we can as a nation look even for permission to retain our power at sea.”
Whether entirely, or, as I apprehend, but partially, true, this statement is a remarkable one to appear in the journals of a nation which has occupied its mind lately chiefly on the subject of its liberties; and I cannot but wonder what Sir Francis Drake would have thought of such a piece of Evening’s News, communicated in form to him!
What he would have thought—if you can fancy it—would be very proper for you also to think, and much to our eventual purpose. But the part of the contents of the ‘Pall Mall’ which I found to bear on the subject of this letter, was the address by a mangled convict to a benevolent gentleman. The Third Fors must assuredly have determined that this letter should be pleasing to the Touchstone mind,—the gods will have it poetical; it ends already with rhyme, and must begin in like manner, for these first twelve verses of the address are much too precious to be lost among “news,” whether of morning or evening.
“Mr. P. Taylor, honnered Sir,
Accept these verses I indict,
Thanks to a gentle mother dear
Whitch taught these infant hands to rite.
“And thanks unto the Chaplin here,
A heminent relidjous man,
As kind a one as ever dipt
A beke into the flowing can.
“He pointes out to me most clear
How sad and sinfull is my ways,
And numerous is the briney tear
Which for that man I nigtly prays.
“ ‘Cohen,’ he ses, in sech a voice!
‘Your lot is hard, your stripes is sore;
But Cohen,’ he ses, ‘rejoice! rejoice!
And never never steale no more!’
“His langwidge is so kind and good,
It works so strong on me inside,
I woold not do it if I could,
I coold not do it if I tryed.
“Ah, wence this moisteur in my eye?
Whot make me turn agin my food?
O, Mister Taylor, arsk not why,
Ime so cut up with gratitood.
“Fansy a gentleman like you,
No paultry Beak, but a M.P.,
A riggling in your heasy chair
The riggles they put onto me.
“I see thee shudderin ore thy wine,—
You hardly know what you are at,
Whenere you think of Us emplyin
The bloody and unhenglish Cat.
“Well may your indigernation rise!
I call it Manley what you feeled
At seein Briton’s n-k-d b-cks
By brutial jalors acked and weald.
“Habolish these yere torchiers!
Dont have no horgies any more
Of arf a dozen orficers
All wallerin in a fellers goar.
“Inprisonment alone is not
A thing of whitch we would complane;
Add ill-conwenience to our lot,
But do not give the convick pain.
“And well you know that’s not the wust,
Not if you went and biled us whole;
The Lash’s degeradation!—that’s
What cuts us to the wery soul!”
The questions respecting punishment and reformation, which these verses incidentally propose, are precisely the same which had to be determined three thousand years ago in the city of Athens—(the only difference of any importance being that the instrument of execution discussed was club instead of cat); and their determination gave rise to the peculiar form in which the history of the great Athenian Squire, Theseus,—our to-day’s subject—was presented to mankind.
The story is a difficult one to tell, and a more difficult one still to understand. The likeness, or imagined likeness, of the hero himself, as the Greeks fancied him, you may see, when you care to do so, at the British Museum, in simple guise enough.
Miss Edgeworth, in her noble last novel, ‘Helen,’ makes her hero fly into a passion at even being suspected of wishing to quote the too trite proverb that “No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre.” But Mr. Beauclerk disclaims it for its triteness only, when he ought rather to have disclaimed it for its untruth. Every truly great man that ever I heard of, was a principal hero to his servants, and most heroic to those most intimate with him. At all events, the Greeks meant all the world to be to their hero as valets-de-chambre, for he sits mother-naked. Under which primitive aspect, indeed, I would fain show you, mentally as well as bodily, every hero I give you account of. It is the modern method, in order to give you more inviting pictures of people, to dress them—often very correctly—in the costume of the time, with such old clothes as the masquerade shops keep. But my own steady aim is to strip them for you, that you may see if they are of flesh, indeed, or dust. Similarly, I shall try to strip theories bare, and facts, such as you need to know.
Mother-naked sits Theseus: and round about him, not much more veiled, ride his Athenians, in Pan-Athenaic procession, honouring their Queen-Goddess. Admired, beyond all other marble shapes in the world; for which reason, the gentlemen of my literary club here in London, professing devotion to the same goddess, decorate their very comfortable corner house in Pall Mall with a copy of this Attic sculpture.
Being therein, themselves, Attic in no wise, but essentially barbarous, pilfering what they cannot imitate: for a truly Attic mind would have induced them to pourtray themselves, as they appear in their own Pan-Christian procession, whenever and wherever it may be:—presumably, to Epsom downs on the Derby day.
You may see, I said, the statue of Theseus whenever you care to do so. I do not in the least know why you should care. But for years back, you, or your foolish friends, have been making a mighty fuss to get yourselves into the British Museum on Sundays: so I suppose you want to see the Theseus, or the stuffed birds, or the crabs and spiders, or the skeleton of the gorilla, or the parched alligator-skins; and you imagine these contemplations likely to improve, and sanctify, that is to say, recreate, your minds.
But are you quite sure you have got any minds yet to be recreated? Before you expect edification from that long gallery full of long-legged inconceivable spiders, and colossal blotchy crabs, did you ever think of looking with any mind, or mindfulness, at the only too easily conceivable short-legged spider of your own English acquaintance? or did you ever so much as consider why the crabs on Margate sands were minded to go sideways instead of straightforward? Have you so much as watched a spider making his cobweb, or, if you have not yet had leisure to do that, in the toil of your own cobweb-making, did you ever think how he threw his first thread across the corner?
No need for you to go to the British Museum yet, my friends, either on Sundays or any other day.
“Well, but the Greek sculpture? We can’t see that at home in our room corners.”
And what is Greek sculpture, or any sculpture, to you? Are your own legs and arms not handsome enough for you to look at, but you must go and stare at chipped and smashed bits of stone in the likenesses of legs and arms that ended their walks and work two thousand years ago?
“Your own legs and arms are not as handsome as—you suppose they ought to be,” say you?
No; I fancy not: and you will not make them handsomer by sauntering with your hands in your pockets through the British Museum. I suppose you will have an agitation, next, for leave to smoke in it. Go and walk in the fields on Sunday, making sure, first, therefore, that you have fields to walk in: look at living birds, not at stuffed ones; and make your own breasts and shoulders better worth seeing than the Elgin Marbles.
Which to effect, remember, there are several matters to be thought of. The shoulders will get strong by exercise. So indeed will the breast. But the breast chiefly needs exercise inside of it—of the lungs, namely, and of the heart; and this last exercise is very curiously inconsistent with many of the athletic exercises of the present day. And the reason I do want you, for once, to go to the British Museum, and to look at that broad chest of Theseus, is that the Greeks imagined it to have something better than a Lion’s Heart beneath its breadth—a hero’s heart, duly trained in every pulse.
They imagined it so. Your modern extremely wise and liberal historians will tell you it never was so:—that no real Theseus ever existed then; and that none can exist now, or, rather, that everybody is himself a Theseus and a little more.
All the more strange then, all the more instructive, as the disembodied Cincinnatus of the Roman, so this disembodied Theseus of the Ionian; though certainly Mr. Stuart Mill could not consider him, even in that ponderous block of marble imagery, a “utility fixed and embodied in a material object.” Not even a disembodied utility—not even a ghost—if he never lived. An idea only; yet one that has ruled all minds of men to this hour, from the hour of its first being born, a dream, into this practical and solid world.
Ruled, and still rules, in a thousand ways, which you know no more than the paths by which the winds have come that blow in your face. But you never pass a day without being brought, somehow, under the power of Theseus.
You cannot pass a china-shop, for instance, nor an upholsterer’s, without seeing, on some mug or plate, or curtain, or chair, the pattern known as the “Greek fret,” simple or complex. I once held it in especial dislike, as the chief means by which bad architects tried to make their buildings look classical; and as ugly in itself. Which it is: and it has an ugly meaning also; but a deep one, which I did not then know; having been obliged to write too young, when I knew only half truths, and was eager to set them forth by what I thought fine words. People used to call me a good writer then; now they say I can’t write at all; because, for instance, if I think anybody’s house is on fire, I only say, “Sir, your house is on fire;” whereas formerly I used to say, “Sir, the abode in which you probably passed the delightful days of youth is in a state of inflammation,” and everybody used to like the effect of the two p’s in “probably passed,” and of the two d’s in “delightful days.”
Well, that Greek fret, ugly in itself, has yet definite and noble service in decorative work, as black has among colours; much more, has it a significance, very precious, though very solemn, when you can read it.
There is so much in it, indeed, that I don’t well know where to begin. Perhaps it will be best to go back to our cathedral door at Lucca, where we have been already. For as, after examining the sculpture on the bell, with the help of the sympathetic ringer, I was going in to look at the golden lamp, my eyes fell on a slightly traced piece of sculpture and legend on the southern wall of the porch, which, partly feeling it out with my finger, it being worn away by the friction of many passing shoulders, broad and narrow, these six hundred years and more, I drew for you, and Mr. Burgess has engraved.
The straggling letters at the side, read straight, and with separating of the words, run thus:—
HIC QVEM CRETICVS EDIT DEDALVS EST LABERINTHVS.
DE QVO NVLLVS VADERE QVIVIT QVI FVIT INTVS
NI THESEVS GRATIS ADRIANE STAMINE JVTVS.
which is in English:—
This is the labyrinth which the Cretan Dedalus built,
Out of which nobody could get who was inside,
Except Theseus; nor could he have done it, unless he had been helped with a thread by Adriane, all for love.
Upon which you are to note, first, that the grave announcement, “This is the labyrinth which the Cretan Dedalus built,” may possibly be made interesting even to some of your children, if reduced from mediæval sublimity, into your more popular legend—“This is the house that Jack built.” The cow with the crumpled horn will then remind them of the creature who, in the midst of this labyrinth, lived as a spider in the centre of his web; and the “maiden all forlorn” may stand for Ariadne, or Adriane—(either name is given her by Chaucer, as he chooses to have three syllables or two)—while the gradual involution of the ballad, and necessity of clear-mindedness as well as clear utterance on the part of its singer, is a pretty vocal imitation of the deepening labyrinth. Theseus, being a pious hero, and the first Athenian knight who cut his hair short in front, may not inaptly be represented by the priest all shaven and shorn; the cock that crew in the morn is the proper Athenian symbol of a pugnacious mind; and the malt that lay in the house fortunately indicates the connection of Theseus and the Athenian power with the mysteries of Eleusis, where corn first, it is said, grew in Greece. And by the way, I am more and more struck every day, by the singular Grecism in Shakespeare’s mind, contrary in many respects to the rest of his nature; yet compelling him to associate English fairyland with the great Duke of Athens, and to use the most familiar of all English words for land, “acre,” in the Greek or Eleusinian sense, not the English one!
“Between the acres of the rye,
These pretty country-folks do lie—”
and again—“search every acre in the high grown field,” meaning “ridge,” or “crest,” not “ager,” the root of “agriculture.” Lastly, in our nursery rhyme, observe that the name of Jack, the builder, stands excellently for Dædalus, retaining the idea of him down to the phrase, “Jack-of-all-Trades.” Of this Greek builder you will find some account at the end of my ‘Aratra Pentelici:’ to-day I can only tell you he is distinctively the power of finest human, as opposed to Divine, workmanship or craftsmanship. Whatever good there is, and whatever evil, in the labour of the hands, separated from that of the soul, is exemplified by his history and performance. In the deepest sense, he was to the Greeks, Jack of all trades, yet Master of none; the real Master of every trade being always a God. His own special work or craft was inlaying or dove-tailing, and especially of black in white.
And this house which he built was his finest piece of involution, or cunning workmanship; and the memory of it is kept by the Greeks for ever afterwards, in that running border of theirs, involved in and repeating itself, called the Greek fret, of which you will at once recognise the character in these two pictures of the labyrinth of Dædalus itself, on the coins of the place where it was built, Cnossus, in the island of Crete; and which you see, in the frontispiece, surrounding the head of Theseus, himself, on a coin of the same city.
Of course frets and returning lines were used in ornamentation when there were no labyrinths—probably long before labyrinths. A symbol is scarcely ever invented just when it is needed. Some already recognised and accepted form or thing becomes symbolic at a particular time. Horses had tails, and the moon quarters, long before there were Turks; but the horse-tail and crescent are not less definitely symbolic to the Ottoman. So, the early forms of ornament are nearly alike, among all nations of any capacity for design: they put meaning into them afterwards, if they ever come themselves to have any meaning. Vibrate but the point of a tool against an unbaked vase, as it revolves, set on the wheel,—you have a wavy or zigzag line. The vase revolves once; the ends of the wavy line do not exactly tally when they meet; you get over the blunder by turning one into a head, the other into a tail,—and have a symbol of eternity—if, first, which is wholly needful, you have an idea of eternity!
Again, the free sweep of a pen at the finish of a large letter has a tendency to throw itself into a spiral. There is no particular intelligence, or spiritual emotion, in the production of this line. A worm draws it with his coil, a fern with its bud, and a periwinkle with his shell. Yet, completed in the Ionic capital, and arrested in the bending point of the acanthus leaf in the Corinthian one, it has become the primal element of beautiful architecture and ornament in all the ages; and is eloquent with endless symbolism, representing the power of the winds and waves in Athenian work, and of the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, in Gothic work: or, indeed, often enough, of both, the Devil being held prince of the power of the air—as in the story of Job, and the lovely story of Buonconte of Montefeltro, in Dante: nay, in this very tale of Theseus, as Chaucer tells it,—having got hold, by ill luck, only of the later and calumnious notion that Theseus deserted his saviour-mistress, he wishes him Devil-speed instead of God-speed, and that energetically—
“A twenty-divel way the wind him drive.”
For which, indeed, Chaucer somewhat deserved (for he ought not to have believed such things of Theseus,) the God of Love’s anger at his drawing too near the daisy. I will write the pretty lines partly in modern spelling for you, that you may get the sense better:—
I, kneeling by this flower, in good intent,
Abode, to know what all the people meant,
As still as any stone; till at the last
The God of Love on me his eyen cast
And said, “Who kneeleth there?” And I answered
Unto his asking,
And said, “Sir, it am I,” and came him near
And salued him.—Quoth he, “What dost thou here
So nigh mine own flower, so boldly?
A worm to nighen near my flower than thou.”
“And why, Sir,” quoth I, “an it like you?”
“For thou,” quoth he, “art nothing thereto able,
It is my relike, digne, and delitable.
And thou my foe, and all my folk worriest.[1]
And of mine old servants thou missayest.”
But it is only for evil speaking of ladies that Chaucer felt his conscience thus pricked,—chiefly of Cressida; whereas, I have written the lines for you because it is the very curse of this age that we speak evil alike of ladies and knights, and all that made them noble in past days;—nay, of saints also; and I have, for first business, next January, to say what I can for our own St. George, against the enlightened modern American view of him, that he was nothing better than a swindling bacon-seller (good enough, indeed, so, for us, now!)
But to come back to the house that Jack built. You will want to know, next, whether Jack ever did build it. I believe, in veritable bricks and mortar—no; in veritable limestone and cave-catacomb, perhaps, yes; it is no matter how; somehow, you see, Jack must have built it, for there is the picture of it on the coin of the town. He built it, just as St. George killed the dragon; so that you put a picture of him also on the coin of your town.
Not but that the real and artful labyrinth might have been, for all we know. A very real one, indeed, was built by twelve brotherly kings in Egypt, in two stories, one for men to live in, the other for crocodiles;—and the upper story was visible and wonderful to all eyes, in authentic times: whereas, we know of no one who ever saw Jack’s labyrinth: and yet, curiously enough, the real labyrinth set the pattern of nothing; while Jack’s ghostly labyrinth has set the pattern of almost everything linear and complex, since; and the pretty spectre of it blooms at this hour, in vital hawthorn for you, every spring, at Hampton Court.
Now, in the pictures of this imaginary maze, you are to note that both the Cretan and Lucchese designs agree in being composed of a single path or track, coiled, and recoiled, on itself. Take a piece of flexible chain and lay it down, considering the chain itself as the path: and, without an interruption, it will trace any of the three figures. (The two Cretan ones are indeed the same in design, except in being, one square, and the other round.) And recollect, upon this, that the word “Labyrinth” properly means “rope-walk,” or “coil-of-rope-walk,” its first syllable being probably also the same as our English name “Laura,” ‘the path,’ and its method perfectly given by Chaucer in the single line—“And, for the house is crenkled to and fro.” And on this, note farther, first, that had the walls been real, instead of ghostly, there would have been no difficulty whatever in getting either out or in, for you could go no other way. But if the walls were spectral, and yet the transgression of them made your final entrance or return impossible, Ariadne’s clue was needful indeed.
Note, secondly, that the question seems not at all to have been about getting in; but getting out again. The clue, at all events, could be helpful only after you had carried it in; and if the spider, or other monster in midweb, ate you, the help in your clue, for return, would be insignificant. So that this thread of Ariadne’s implied that even victory over the monster would be vain, unless you could disentangle yourself from his web also.
So much you may gather from coin or carving: next, we try tradition. Theseus, as I said before, is the great settler or law-giver of the Athenian state; but he is so eminently as the Peace-maker, causing men to live in fellowship who before lived separate, and making roads passable that were infested by robbers or wild beasts. He is the exterminator of every bestial and savage element, and the type of human, or humane power, which power you will find in this, and all my other books on policy, summed in the terms, “Gentleness and Justice.” The Greeks dwelt chiefly in their thoughts on the last, and Theseus, representing the first, has therefore most difficulty in dealing with questions of punishment, and criminal justice.
Now the justice of the Greeks was enforced by three great judges, who lived in three islands. Æacus, who lived in the island of Ægina, is the administrator of distributive, or ‘dividing’ justice; which relates chiefly to property, and his subjects, as being people of industrious temper, were once ants; afterwards called Ant-people, or ‘Myrmidons.’
Secondly, Minos, who lived in the island of Crete, was the judge who punished crime, of whom presently; finally, Rhadamanthus, called always by Homer “golden,” or “glowing” Rhadamanthus, was the judge who rewarded virtue; and he lived in a blessed island covered with flowers, but which eye of man hath not yet seen, nor has any living ear heard lisp of wave on that shore.
For the very essence and primal condition of virtue is that it shall not know of, nor believe in, any blessed islands, till it find them, it may be, in due time.
And of these three judges, two were architects, but the third only a gardener. Æacus helped the gods to build the walls of Troy. Minos appointed the labyrinth in coils round the Minotaur; but Rhadamanthus only set trees, with golden fruit on them, beside waters of comfort, and overlaid the calm waves with lilies.
They did these things, I tell you, in very truth, cloud-hidden indeed; but the things themselves are with us to this day. No town on earth is more real than that town of Troy. Her prince, long ago, was dragged dead round the walls that Æacus built; but her princedom did not die with him. Only a few weeks since, I was actually standing, as I told you, with my good friend Mr. Parker, watching the lizards play among the chinks in the walls built by Æacus, for his wandering Trojans, by Tiber side. And, perhaps within memory of man, some of you may have walked up or down Tower Street, little thinking that its tower was also built by Æacus, for his wandering Trojans and their Cæsar, by Thames side: and on Tower Hill itself—where I had my pocket picked only the other day by some of the modern Æacidæ—stands the English Mint, “dividing” gold and silver which Æacus, first of all Greeks, divided in his island of Ægina, and struck into intelligible money-stamp and form, that men might render to Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s.
But the Minos labyrinth is more real yet; at all events, more real for us. And what it was, and is, as you have seen at Lucca, you shall hear at Florence, where you are to learn Dante’s opinion upon it, and Sandro Botticelli shall draw it for us.
That Hell, which so many people think the only place Dante gives any account of, (yet seldom know his account even of that,) was, he tells you, divided into upper, midmost, and nether pits. You usually lose sight of this main division of it, in the more complex one of the nine circles; but remember, these are divided in diminishing proportion: six of them are the upper hell; two, the midmost; one, the lowest.[2] You will find this a very pretty and curious proportion. Here it is in labyrinthine form, putting the three dimensions at right angles to each other, and drawing a spiral round them. I show you it in a spiral line, because the idea of descent is in Dante’s mind, spiral (as of a worm’s or serpent’s coil) throughout; even to the mode of Geryon’s flight, “ruota e discende;” and Minos accordingly indicates which circle any sinner is to be sent to, in a most graphically labyrinthine manner, by twisting his tail round himself so many times, necessarily thus marking the level.
The uppermost and least dreadful hell, divided into six circles, is the hell of those who cannot rightly govern themselves, but have no mind to do mischief to any one else. In the lowest circle of this, and within the same walls with the more terrible mid-hell, whose stench even comes up and reaches to them, are people who have not rightly governed their thoughts: and these are buried for ever in fiery tombs, and their thoughts thus governed to purpose; which you, my friends, who are so fond of freedom of thought, and freedom of the press, may wisely meditate on.
Then the two lower hells are for those who have wilfully done mischief to other people. And of these, some do open injury, and some, deceitful injury, and of these the rogues are put the lower; but there is a greater distinction in the manner of sin, than its simplicity or roguery:—namely, whether it be done in hot blood or cold blood. The injurious sins, done in hot blood—that is to say, under the influence of passion—are in the midmost hell; but the sins done in cold blood, without passion, or, more accurately, contrary to passion, far down below the freezing point, are put in the lowest hell: the ninth circle.
Now, little as you may think it, or as the friend thought it, who tried to cure me of jesting the other day, I should not have taken upon me to write this ‘Fors,’ if I had not, in some degree, been cured of jesting long ago; and in the same way that Dante was,—for in my poor and faltering path I have myself been taken far enough down among the diminished circles to see this nether hell—the hell of Traitors; and to know, what people do not usually know of treachery, that it is not the fraud, but the cold-heartedness, which is chiefly dreadful in it. Therefore, this nether Hell is of ice, not fire; and of ice that nothing can break.
“Oh, ill-starred folk,
Beyond all others wretched, who abide
In such a mansion as scarce thought finds words
To speak of, better had ye here on earth
Been flocks or mountain goats.
I saw, before, and underneath my feet,
A lake, whose frozen surface liker seemed
To glass than water. Not so thick a veil
In winter e’er hath Austrian Danube spread
O’er his still course, nor Tanais, far remote
Under the chilling sky. Rolled o’er that mass
Had Tabernich or Pietrapana fallen
Not even its rim had creaked.
As peeps the frog,
Croaking above the wave,—what time in dreams
The village gleaner oft pursues her toil,—
Blue-pinched, and shrined in ice, the spirits stood,
Moving their teeth in shrill note, like the stork.”
No more wandering of the feet in labyrinth like this, and the eyes, once cruelly tearless, now blind with frozen tears. But the midmost hell, for hot-blooded sinners, has other sort of lakes,—as, for instance, you saw a little while ago, of hot pitch, in which one bathes otherwise than in Serchio—(the Serchio is the river at Lucca, and Pietrapana a Lucchese mountain). But observe,—for here we get to our main work again,—the great boiling lake on the Phlegethon of this upper hell country is red, not black; and its source, as well as that of the river which freezes beneath, is in this island of Crete! in the Mount Ida, “joyous once with leaves and streams.” You must look to the passage yourselves—‘Inferno,’ XIV. (line 120 in Carey)—for I have not room for it now. The first sight of it, to Dante, is as “a little brook, whose crimsoned wave Yet lifts my hair with horror.” Virgil makes him look at this spring as the notablest thing seen by him in hell, since he entered its gate; but the great lake of it is under a ruinous mountain, like the fallen Alp through which the Adige foams down to Verona;—and on the crest of this ruin lies couched the enemy of Theseus—the Minotaur:
“And there,
At point of the disparted ridge, lay stretched
The infamy of Crete—at sight of us
It gnawed itself, as one with rage distract.
To him my guide exclaimed, ‘Perchance thou deem’st
The King of Athens here.’ ”
Of whom and of his enemy, I have time to tell you no more to-day—except only that this Minotaur is the type or embodiment of the two essentially bestial sins of Anger and Lust;—that both these are in the human nature, interwoven inextricably with its chief virtue, Love, so that Dante makes this very ruin of the Rocks of hell, on which the Minotaur is couched, to be wrought on them at the instant when “the Universe was thrilled with love,”—(the last moment of the Crucifixion)—and that the labyrinth of these passions is one not fabulous, nor only pictured on coins of Crete. And the right interweaving of Anger with Love, in criminal justice, is the main question in earthly law, which the Athenian lawgiver had to deal with. Look, if you can, at my introductory Lectures at Oxford, p. 83; and so I must leave Theseus for this time;—in next letter, which will be chiefly on Christmas cheer, I must really try to get as far as his vegetable soup.
As for Æacus, and his coining business, we must even let them alone now, till next year; only I have to thank some readers who have written to me on the subject of interest of money, (one or two complaining that I had dismissed it too summarily, when, alas! I am only at the threshold of it!), and, especially, my reader for the press, who has referred me to a delightful Italian book, ‘Teoremi di Politica Cristiana,’ (Naples, 1830,) and copied out ever so much of it for me; and Mr. Sillar, for farther most useful letters, of which to-day I can only quote this postscript:—
“Please note that your next number of ‘Fors Clavigera’ ought to be in the hands of your readers on Friday, the 1st, or Saturday, the 2nd, of November. The following day being Sunday, the 3rd, there will be read in every church in England, or in the world, where the Church Service is used, the 15th Psalm, which distinctly declares the man who shall ascend to God’s holy hill to be him who, amongst other things, has not put forth his money upon usury; a verse impiously ignored in most of the metrical versions of the Psalms; those adapted to popular tunes or popular prejudices.”
I think, accordingly, that some of my readers may be glad to have a sounder version of that Psalm; and as the 14th is much connected with it, and will be variously useful to us afterwards, here they both are, done into verse by an English squire,—or his sister, for they alike could rhyme; and the last finished singing what her brother left unsung, the Third Fors having early put seal on his lips.
PSALM XIV.—(Dixit insipiens.)
The foolish man by flesh and fancy ledd,
His guilty hart with this fond thought hath fed:
There is noe God that raigneth.
And so thereafter he and all his mates
Do workes, which earth corrupt, and Heaven hates:
Not one that good remaineth.
Even God himself sent down his piercing ey;
If of this clayy race he could espy
One, that his wisdome learneth.
And loe, he findes that all a strayeng went:
All plung’d in stincking filth, not one well bent,
Not one that God discerneth.
O maddnes of these folkes, thus loosly ledd!
These caniballs, who, as if they were bread,
Gods people do devower:
Nor ever call on God; but they shall quake
More than they now do bragg, when he shall take
The just into his power.
Indeede the poore, opprest by you, you mock:
Their councells are your common jesting stock:
But God is their recomfort.
Ah, when from Syon shall the Saver come,
That Jacob, freed by thee, may glad become
And Israel full of comfort?
PSALM XV.—(Domine, quis habitabit.)
In tabernacle thine, O Lord, who shall remaine?
Lord, of thy holy hill, who shall the rest obtaine?
Ev’n he that leades a life of uncorrupted traine
Whose deedes of righteous hart, whose harty wordes be plain:
Who with deceitfull tongue hath never us’d to faine;
Nor neighboure hurtes by deede, nor doth with slander stain:
Whose eyes a person vile doth hold in vile disdaine,
But doth, with honour greate, the godly entertaine:
Who othe and promise given doth faithfully maintain,
Although some worldly losse thereby he may sustain;
From bityng usury who ever doth refraine:
Who sells not guiltlesse cause for filthy love of gain,
Who thus proceedes for ay, in sacred mount shall raign.
You may not like this old English at first; but if you can find anybody to read it to you who has an ear, its cadence is massy and grand, more than that of most verse I know, and never a word is lost. Whether you like it or not, the sense of it is true, and the way to the sacred mount, (of which mounts, whether of Pity, or of Roses, are but shadows,) told you for once, straightforwardly,—on which road I wish you God-speed.
Ever faithfully yours,
“WE HAVE SEEN HIS STAR IN THE EAST.”
Painted by Bernard of Luino, at Milan.
[1] Chaucer’s real word means “warrest with all my folk;” but it was so closely connected with “weary” and “worry” in association of sound, in his days, that I take the last as nearest the sense. [↑]
[2] The deepening orders of sin, in the nine circles, are briefly these,—1. Unredeemed nature; 2. Lust; 3. Gluttony; 4. Avarice; 5. Discontent; 6. Heresy; 7. Open violence; 8. Fraudful violence; 9. Treachery. But they are curiously dove-tailed together,—serpent-tailed, I should say,—by closer coil, not expanding plume. You shall understand the joiner’s work next month. [↑]
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER XXIV.
Corpus Christi Coll.,
November 7th, 1872.
My Friends,
I shall not call you so any more, after this Christmas; first, because things have chanced to me, of late, which have made me too sulky to be friends with anybody; secondly, because in the two years during which I have been writing these letters, not one of you has sent me a friendly word of answer; lastly, because, even if you were my friends, it would be waste print to call you so, once a month. Nor shall I sign myself “faithfully yours” any more; being very far from faithfully my own, and having found most other people anything but faithfully mine. Nor shall I sign my name, for I never like the look of it; being, I apprehend, only short for “Rough Skin,” in the sense of “Pig-skin”; (and indeed, the planet under which I was born, Saturn, has supreme power over pigs,)—nor can I find historical mention of any other form of the name, except one I made no reference to when it occurred, as that of the leading devil of four,—Red-skin, Blue-skin—and I forget the skins of the other two—who performed in a religious play, of the fourteenth century, which was nearly as comic as the religious earnest of our own century. So that the letters will begin henceforward without address; and close without signature. You will probably know whom they come from, and I don’t in the least care whom they go to.
I was in London, all day yesterday, where the weather was as dismal as is its wont; and, returning here by the evening train, saw, with astonishment, the stars extricate themselves from the fog, and the moon glow for a little while in her setting, over the southern Berkshire hills, as I breathed on the platform at the Reading station;—(for there were six people in the carriage, and they had shut both the windows).
When I got to Oxford, the sky was entirely clear; the Great Bear was near the ground under the pole, and the Charioteer high over-head, the principal star of him as bright as a gas-lamp.
It is a curious default in the stars, to my mind, that there is a Charioteer among them without a chariot; and a Waggon with no waggoner; nor any waggon, for that matter, except the Bear’s stomach; but I have always wanted to know the history of the absent Charles, who must have stopped, I suppose to drink, while his cart went on, and so never got to be stellified himself. I wish I knew; but I can tell you less about him than even about Theseus. The Charioteer’s story is pretty, however:—he gave his life for a kiss, and did not get it; got made into stars instead. It would be a dainty tale to tell you under the mistletoe: perhaps I may have time next year: to-day it is of the stars of Ariadne’s crown I want to speak.
But that giving one’s life for a kiss, and not getting it, is indeed a general abstract of the Greek notion of heroism, and its reward; and, by the way, does it not seem to you a grave defect in the stars, at Christmas time, that all their stories are Greek—not one Christian? In all the east, and all the west, there is not a space of heaven with a Christian story in it; the star of the Wise men having risen but once, and set, it seems, for ever; and the stars of Foolish men—innumerable, but unintelligible, forming, I suppose, all across the sky that broad way of Asses’ milk; while a few Greek heroes and hunters, a monster or two, and some crustaceous animals, occupy, here in the north, our heaven’s compass, down to the very margin of the illuminated book. A sky quite good enough for us, nevertheless, for all the use we make of it, either by night or day—or any hope we have of getting into it—or any inclination we have, while still out of it, to “take stars for money.”
Yet, with all deference to George Herbert, I will take them for nothing of the sort. Money is an entirely pleasant and proper thing to have, itself; and the first shilling I ever got in my life, I put in a pill-box, and put it under my pillow, and couldn’t sleep all night for satisfaction. I couldn’t have done that with a star; though truly the pretty system of usury makes the stars drop down something else than dew. I got a note from an arithmetical friend the other day, speaking of the death of “an old lady, a cousin of mine, who left—left, because she could not take it with her—200,000l. On calculation, I found this old lady, who has been lying bedridden for a year, was accumulating money (i.e. the results of other people’s labour,) at the rate of 4d. a minute; in other words, she awoke in the morning ten pounds richer than she went to bed.” At which, doubtless, and the like miracles throughout the world, “the stars with deep amaze, stand fixed with steadfast gaze;” for this is, indeed, a Nativity of an adverse god to the one you profess to honour, with them, and the angels, at Christmas, by over-eating yourselves.
I suppose that is the quite essential part of the religion of Christmas; and, indeed, it is about the most religious thing you do in the year; and if pious people would understand, generally, that, if there be indeed any other God than Mammon, He likes to see people comfortable, and nicely dressed, as much as Mammon likes to see them fasting and in rags, they might set a wiser example to everybody than they do. I am frightened out of my wits, every now and then, here at Oxford, by seeing something come out of poor people’s houses, all dressed in black down to the ground; which, (having been much thinking of wicked things lately,) I at first take for the Devil, and then find, to my extreme relief and gratification, that it’s a Sister of Charity. Indeed, the only serious disadvantage of eating, and fine dressing, considered as religious ceremonies, whether at Christmas, or on Sunday, in the Sunday dinner and Sunday gown,—is that you don’t always clearly understand what the eating and dressing signify. For example: why should Sunday be kept otherwise than Christmas, and be less merry? Because it is a day of rest, commemorating the fulfilment of God’s easy work, while Christmas is a day of toil, commemorating the beginning of His difficult work? Is that the reason? Or because Christmas commemorates His stooping to thirty years of sorrow, and Sunday His rising to countless years of joy? Which should be the gladdest day of the two, think you, on either ground? Why haven’t you Sunday pantomimes?
It is a strait and sore question with me, for when I was a child, I lost the pleasure of some three-sevenths of my life because of Sunday; for I always had a way of looking forward to things, and a lurid shade was cast over the whole of Friday and Saturday by the horrible sense that Sunday was coming, and inevitable. Not that I was rebellious against my good mother or aunts in any wise; feeling only that we were all crushed under a relentless fate; which was indeed the fact, for neither they nor I had the least idea what Holiness meant, beyond what I find stated very clearly by Mr. David—the pious author of “The Paradezeal system of Botany, an arrangement representing the whole globe as a vast blooming and fruitful Paradise,”—that “Holiness is a knowledge of the Ho’s.”
My mother, indeed, never went so far as my aunt; nor carried her religion down to the ninth or glacial circle of Holiness, by giving me cold dinner; and to this day, I am apt to over-eat myself with Yorkshire pudding, in remembrance of the consolation it used to afford me at one o’clock. Good Friday, also, was partly “intermedled,” as Chaucer would call it, with light and shade, because there were hot-cross-buns at breakfast, though we had to go to church afterwards. And, indeed, I observe, happening to have under my hand the account in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ of Good Friday at the Crystal Palace, in 1870, that its observance is for your sakes also now “intermedled” similarly, with light and shade, by conscientious persons: for in that year, “whereas in former years the performances had been exclusively of a religious character, the directors had supplemented their programme with secular amusements.” It was, I suppose, considered “secular” that the fountains should play (though I have noticed that natural ones persist in that profane practice on Sunday also), and accordingly, “there was a very abundant water-supply, while a brilliant sun gave many lovely prismatic effects to the fleeting and changeful spray” (not careful, even the sun, for his part, to remember how once he became “black as sackcloth of hair”). “A striking feature presented itself to view in the shape of the large and handsome pavilion of Howe and Cushing’s American circus. This vast pavilion occupies the whole centre of the grand terrace, and was gaily decorated with bunting and fringed with the show-carriages of the circus, which were bright with gilding, mirrors, portraits, and scarlet panels. The out-door amusements began”—(the English public always retaining a distinct impression that this festival was instituted in the East)—“with an Oriental procession”—(by the way, why don’t we always call Wapping the Oriental end of London?)—“of fifteen camels from the circus, mounted by negroes wearing richly coloured and bespangled Eastern costume. The performances then commenced, and continued throughout the day, the attractions comprising the trained wolves, the wonderful monkeys, and the usual scenes in the circle.”
“There was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.” I often wonder, myself, how long it will be, in the crucifixion afresh, which all the earth has now resolved upon, crying with more unanimous shout than ever the Jews, “Not this man, but Barabbas”—before the Ninth Hour comes.
Assuming, however, that, for the nonce, trained wolves and wonderful monkeys are proper entertainments on Good Friday, pantomimes on Boxing-day, and sermons on Sunday, have you ever considered what observance might be due to Saturday,—the day on which He “preached to the spirits in prison”? for that seems to me quite the part of the three days’ work which most of us might first hope for a share in. I don’t know whether any of you perceive that your spirits are in prison. I know mine is, and that I would fain have it preached to, and delivered, if it be possible. For, however far and steep the slope may have been into the hell which you say every Sunday that you believe He descended into, there are places trenched deep enough now in all our hearts for the hot lake of Phlegethon to leak and ooze into: and the rock of their shore is no less hard than in Dante’s time.
And as your winter rejoicings, if they mean anything at all, mean that you have now, at least, a chance of deliverance from that prison, I will ask you to take the pains to understand what the bars and doors of it are, as the wisest man who has yet spoken of them tells you.
There is first, observe, this great distinction in his mind between the penalties of the Hell, and the joy of Paradise. The penalty is assigned to definite act of hand; the joy, to definite state of mind. It is questioned of no one, either in the Purgatory or the Paradise, what he has done; but only what evil feeling is still in his heart, or what good, when purified wholly, his nature is noble enough to receive.
On the contrary, Hell is constituted such by the one great negative state of being without Love or Fear of God;—there are no degrees of that State; but there are more or less dreadful sins which can be done in it, according to the degradation of the unredeemed Human nature. And men are judged according to their works.
To give a single instance. The punishment of the fourth circle in Hell is for the Misuse of Money, for having either sinfully kept it, or sinfully spent it. But the pain in Purgatory is only for having sinfully Loved it: and the hymn of repentance is, “My soul cleaveth unto the dust; quicken thou me.”
Farther, and this is very notable. You might at first think that Dante’s divisions were narrow and artificial, in assigning each circle to one sin only, as if every man did not variously commit many. But it is always one sin, the favourite, which destroys souls. That conquered, all others fall with it; that victorious, all others follow with it. Nevertheless, as I told you, the joiner’s work, and interwoven walls of Dante’s Inferno, marking double forms of sin, and their overlapping, as it were, when they meet, is one of the subtlest conditions traceable in his whole design.
Look back to the scheme I gave you in last number. The Minotaur, spirit of lust and anger, rules over the central hell. But the sins of lust and anger, definitely and limitedly described as such, are punished in the upper hell, in the second and fifth circles. Why is this, think you?
Have you ever noticed—enough to call it noticing seriously—the expression, “fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind”? There is one lust and one anger of the flesh only; these, all men must feel; rightly feel, if in temperance; wrongly, if in excess; but even then, not necessarily to the destruction of their souls. But there is another lust, and another anger, of the heart; and these are the Furies of Phlegethon—wholly ruinous. Lord of these, on the shattered rocks, lies couched the Infamy of Crete. For when the heart, as well as the flesh, desires what it should not, and the heart, as well as the flesh, consents and kindles to its wrath, the whole man is corrupted, and his heart’s blood is fed in its veins from the lake of fire.
Take for special example, this sin of usury with which we have ourselves to deal. The punishment in the fourth circle of the upper hell is on Avarice, not Usury. For a man may be utterly avaricious,—greedy of gold—in an instinctive, fleshly way, yet not corrupt his intellect. Many of the most good-natured men are misers: my first shilling in the pill-box and sleepless night did not at all mean that I was an ill-natured or illiberal boy; it did mean, what is true of me still, that I should have great delight in counting money, and laying it in visible heaps and rouleaux. I never part with a new sovereign without a sigh: and if it were not that I am afraid of thieves, I would positively and seriously, at this moment, turn all I have into gold of the newest, and dig a hole for it in my garden, and go and look at it every morning and evening, like the man in Æsop’s Fables, or Silas Marner: and where I think thieves will not break through nor steal, I am always laying up for myself treasures upon earth, with the most eager appetite: that bit of gold and diamonds, for instance (IV. 8.), and the most gilded mass-books, and such like, I can get hold of; the acquisition of a Koran, with two hundred leaves richly gilt on both sides, only three weeks since, afforded me real consolation under variously trying circumstances.
Truly, my soul cleaves to the dust of such things. But I have not so perverted my soul, nor palsied my brains, as to expect to be advantaged by that adhesion. I don’t expect, because I have gathered much, to find Nature or man gathering for me more:—to find eighteenpence in my pill-box in the morning, instead of a shilling, as a “reward for continence;” or to make an income of my Koran by lending it to poor scholars. If I think a scholar can read it,—(N.B., I can’t, myself,)—and would like to—and will carefully turn the leaves by the outside edge, he is welcome to read it for nothing: if he has got into the habit of turning leaves by the middle, or of wetting his finger, and shuffling up the corners, as I see my banker’s clerks do with their ledgers, for no amount of money shall he read it. (Incidentally, note the essential vulgarism of doing anything in a hurry.)
So that my mind and brains are in fact untainted and unwarped by lust of money, and I am free in that respect from the power of the Infamy of Crete.
I used the words just above—Furies of Phlegethon. You are beginning to know something of the Fates: of the Furies also you must know something.
The pit of Dante’s central hell is reserved for those who have actually committed malicious crime, involving mercilessness to their neighbour, or, in suicide, to themselves. But it is necessary to serpent-tail this pit with the upper hell by a district for insanity without deed; the Fury which has brought horror to the eyes, and hardness to the heart, and yet, having possessed itself of noble persons, issues in no malicious crime. Therefore the sixth circle of the upper hell is walled in, together with the central pit, as one grievous city of the dead; and at the gates of it the warders are fiends, and the watchers Furies.
Watchers, observe, as sleepless. Once in their companionship,
Nor poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owed’st yesterday.
Sleepless and merciless; and yet in the Greek vision of them which Æschylus wrote, they are first seen asleep; and they remain in the city of Theseus, in mercy.
Elsewhere, furies that make the eyes evil and the heart hard. Seeing Dante from their watch-tower, they call for Medusa. “So will we make flint of him” (“enamel,” rather—which has been in the furnace first, then hardened); but Virgil puts his hands over his eyes.
Thus the upper hell is knitted to the central. The central is half joined to the lower by the power of Fraud: only in the central hell, though in a deeper pit of it, (Phlegethon falls into the abyss in a Niagara of blood) Fraud is still joined with human passion, but in the nether hell is passionate no more; the traitors have not natures of flesh or of fire, but of earth; and the earth-giants, the first enemies of Athena, the Greek spirit of Life, stand about the pit, speechless, as towers of war. In a bright morning, this last midsummer, at Bologna, I was standing in the shade of the tower of Garisenda, which Dante says they were like. The sun had got just behind its battlements, and sent out rays round them as from behind a mountain peak, vast and grey against the morning sky. I may be able to get some picture of it, for the January ‘Fors,’ perhaps; and perchance the sun may some day rise for us from behind our Towers of Treachery.
Note but this farther, and then we will try to get out of Hell for to-day. The divisions of the central fire are under three creatures, all of them partly man, partly animal. The Minotaur has a man’s body, a bull’s head, (which is precisely the general type of the English nation to-day). The Centaur Chiron has a horse’s body; a man’s head and breast. The Spirit of Fraud, Geryon, has a serpent’s body, his face is that of a just man, and his breast chequered like a lizard’s, with labyrinthine lines.
All these three creatures signify the mingling of a brutal instinct with the human mind; but, in the Minotaur, the brute rules, the humanity is subordinate; in the Centaur, the man rules, and the brute is subordinate; in the third, the man and the animal are in harmony; and both false.
Of the Centaurs, Chiron and Nessus, one, the type of human gentleness, justice, and wisdom, stooping to join itself with the nature of animals, and to be healed by the herbs of the ground,—the other, the destruction of Hercules,—you shall be told in the ‘Fors’ of January: to-day I must swiftly sum the story of Theseus.
His conquest of the Minotaur, the chief glory of his life, is possible only to him through love, and love’s hope and help. But he has no joy either of love or victory. Before he has once held Ariadne in his arms, Diana kills her in the isle of Naxos. Jupiter crowns her in heaven, where there is no following her. Theseus returns to Athens alone.
The ship which hitherto had carried the Minotaur’s victim’s only, bore always a black sail. Theseus had received from his father a purple one, to hoist instead, if he returned victorious.
The common and senseless story is that he forgot to hoist it. Forgot! A sail is so inconspicuous a part of a ship! and one is so likely to forget one’s victory, returning, with home seen on the horizon! But he returned not victorious, at least for himself;—Diana and Death had been too strong for him. He bore the black sail. And his father, when he saw it, threw himself from the rock of Athens, and died.
Of which the meaning is, that we must not mourn for ourselves, lest a worse thing happen to us,—a Greek lesson much to be remembered by Christians about to send expensive orders to the undertaker: unless, indeed, they mean by their black vestments to tell the world that they think their friends are in hell. If in Heaven, with Ariadne and the gods, are we to mourn? And if they were fit for Heaven, are we, for ourselves, ever to leave off mourning? Yet Theseus, touching the beach, is too just and wise to mourn there. He sends a herald to the city to tell his father he is safe; stays on the shore to sacrifice to the gods, and feast his sailors. He sacrifices; and makes pottage for them there on the sand. The herald returns to tell him his father is dead also. Such welcome has he for his good work, in the islands, and on the main.
In which work he persists, no less, and is redeemed from darkness by Hercules, and at last helps Hercules himself in his sorest need—as you shall hear afterwards. I must stop to-day at the vegetable soup,—which you would think, I suppose, poor Christmas cheer. Plum-pudding is an Egyptian dish; but have you ever thought how many stories were connected with this Athenian one, pottage of lentils? A bargain of some importance, even to us, (especially as usurers); and the healing miracle of Elisha; and the vision of Habakkuk as he was bearing their pottage to the reapers, and had to take it far away to one who needed it more; and, chiefly of all, the soup of the bitter herbs, with its dipped bread and faithful company,—“he it is to whom I shall give the sop when I have dipped it.” The meaning of which things, roughly, is, first, that we are not to sell our birth-rights for pottage, though we fast to death; but are diligently to know and keep them: secondly, that we are to poison no man’s pottage, mental or real: lastly, that we look to it lest we betray the hand which gives us our daily bread.
Lessons to be pondered on at Christmas time over our pudding; and the more, because the sops we are dipping for each other, and even for our own children, are not always the most nourishing, nor are the rooms in which we make ready their last supper always carefully furnished. Take, for instance, this example of last supper—(no, I see it is breakfast)—in Chicksand Street, Mile End:—
On Wednesday an inquest was held on the body of Annie Redfern, aged twenty-eight, who was found dead in a cellar at 5, Chicksand Street, Mile End, on the morning of last Sunday. This unfortunate woman was a fruit-seller, and rented the cellar in which she died at 1s. 9d. per week—her only companion being a little boy, aged three years, of whom she was the mother. It appeared from the evidence of the surgeon who was summoned to see the deceased when her body was discovered on Sunday morning that she had been dead some hours before his arrival. Her knees were drawn up and her arms folded in such a position as to show that she died with her child clasped in her arms. The room was very dark, without any ventilation, and was totally unfit for human habitation. The cause of death was effusion of serum into the pericardium, brought on greatly by living in such a wretched dwelling. The coroner said that as there were so many of these wretched dwellings about, he hoped the jurymen who were connected with the vestry would take care to represent the case to the proper authorities, and see that the place was not let as a dwelling again. This remark from the coroner incited a juryman to reply, “Oh, if we were to do that we might empty half the houses in London; there are thousands more like that, and worse.” Some of the jurors objected to the room being condemned; the majority, however, refused to sign the papers unless this was done, and a verdict was returned in accordance with the evidence. It transpired that the body had to be removed to save it from the rats. If the little child who lay clasped in his dead mother’s arms has not been devoured by these animals, he is probably now in the workhouse, and will remain a burden on the ratepayers, who unfortunately have no means of making the landlord of the foul den that destroyed his mother answerable for his support.
I miss, out of the column of the ‘Pall Mall’ for the 1st of this month, one paragraph after this, and proceed to the next but one, which relates to the enlightened notion among English young women, derived from Mr. J. Stuart Mill,—that the “career” of the Madonna is too limited a one, and that modern political economy can provide them, as the ‘Pall Mall’ observes, with “much more lucrative occupations than that of nursing the baby.” But you must know, first, that the Athenians always kept memory of Theseus’ pot of vegetable soup, and of his sacrifice, by procession in spring-time, bearing a rod wreathed with lambs’-wool, and singing an Easter carol, in these words:—
“Fair staff, may the gods grant, by thee, the bringing of figs to us, and buttery cakes, and honey in bulging cups, and the sopping of oil, and wine in flat cups, easy to lift, that thou mayest” (meaning that we may, but not clear which is which,) “get drunk and sleep.”
Which Mr. Stuart Mill and modern political economy have changed into a pretty Christmas carol for English children, lambs for whom the fair staff also brings wine of a certain sort, in flat cups, “that they may get drunk, and sleep.” Here is the next paragraph from the ‘Pall Mall’:—
One of the most fertile causes of excessive infant mortality is the extensive practice in manufacturing districts of insidiously narcotising young children that they may be the more conveniently laid aside when more lucrative occupations present themselves than that of nursing the baby. Hundreds of gallons of opium in various forms are sold weekly in many districts for this purpose. Nor is it likely that the practice will be checked until juries can be induced to take a rather severe view of the suddenly fatal misadventures which this sort of chronic poisoning not unfrequently produces. It appears, however, to be very difficult to persuade them to look upon it as other than a venial offence. An inquest was recently held at Chapel Gate upon the body of an infant who had died from the administration, by its mother, of about twelve times the proper dose of laudanum. The bottle was labelled carefully with a caution that “opium should not be given to children under seven years of age.” In this case five drops of laudanum were given to a baby of eighteen months. The medical evidence was of a quite unmistakable character, and the coroner in summing up read to the jury a definition of manslaughter, and told them that “a lawful act, if dangerous, not attended with such care as would render the probability of danger very small, and resulting in death, would amount to manslaughter at the least. Then in this case they must return a verdict of manslaughter unless they could find any circumstance which would take it out of the rule of law he had laid down to them. It was not in evidence that the mother had used any caution at all in administering the poison.” Nevertheless, the jury returned, after a short interval, the verdict of homicide by misadventure.
“Hush-a-bye, baby, upon the tree top,” my mother used to sing to me: and I remember the dawn of intelligence in which I began to object to the bad rhyme which followed:—“when the wind blows, the cradle will rock.” But the Christmas winds must blow rudely, and warp the waters askance indeed, which rock our English cradles now.
Mendelssohn’s songs without words have been, I believe, lately popular in musical circles. We shall, perhaps, require cradle songs with very few words, and Christmas carols with very sad ones, before long; in fact, it seems to me, we are fast losing our old skill in carolling. There is a different tone in Chaucer’s notion of it (though this carol of his is in spring-time indeed, not at Christmas):—
Then went I forth on my right hand,
Down by a little path I found,
Of Mintës full, and Fennel greene.
* * * * *
Sir Mirth I found, and right anon
Unto Sir Mirth gan I gone,
There, where he was, him to solace:
And with him, in that happy place,
So fair folke and so fresh, had he,
That when I saw, I wondered me
From whence such folke might come,
So fair were they, all and some;
For they were like, as in my sight
To angels, that be feathered bright.
These folke, of which I tell you so,
Upon a karole wenten tho,[1]
A Ladie karoled them, that hight[2]
Gladnesse, blissful and light.
She could make in song such refraining
It sate her wonder well to sing,
Her voice full clear was, and full sweet,
She was not rude, nor unmeet,
But couth[3] enough for such doing,
As longeth unto karolling;
For she was wont, in every place,
To singen first, men to solace.
For singing most she gave her to,
No craft had she so lefe[4] to do.
Mr. Stuart Mill would have set her to another craft, I fancy (not but that singing is a lucrative one, now-a-day, if it be shrill enough); but you will not get your wives to sing thus for nothing, if you send them out to earn their dinners (instead of earning them yourselves for them), and put their babies summarily to sleep.
It is curious how our English feeling seems to be changed also towards two other innocent kind of creatures. In nearly all German pictures of the Nativity, (I have given you an Italian one of the Magi for a frontispiece, this time,) the dove is one way or other conspicuous, and the little angels round the cradle are nearly always, when they are tired, allowed by the Madonna to play with rabbits. And in the very garden in which Ladie Gladness leads her karol-dance, “connis,” as well as squirrels, are among the happy company; frogs only, as you shall hear, not being allowed; the French says, no flies either, of the watery sort! For the path among the mint and fennel greene leads us into this garden:—
The garden was by measuring,
Right even and square in compasing:
It was long as it was large,
Of fruit had every tree his charge,
And many homely trees there were,[5]
That peaches, coines,[6] and apples bare.
Medlers, plommes, peeres, chesteinis,
Cherise, of which many one faine[7] is,
With many a high laurel and pine
Was ranged clean all that gardene.
There might men Does and Roes see,
And of Squirrels ful great plentee
From bough to bough alway leping;
Connis there were also playing
And maden many a tourneying
Upon the fresh grass springing.
In places saw I wells there
In which no frogges were.
There sprang the violet all new
And fresh pervinke, rich of hue,
And flowers yellow, white and rede,
Such plenty grew there never in mede,
Full gay was all the ground, and quaint,
And poudred, as men had it peint
With many a fresh and sundry flour
That castes up full good savour.
So far for an old English garden, or “pleasance,” and the pleasures of it. Now take a bit of description written this year of a modern English garden or pleasance, and the pleasures of it, and newly invented odours:—
In a short time the sportsmen issued from the (new?) hall, and, accompanied by sixty or seventy attendants, bent their steps towards that part of the park in which the old hall is situate. Here were the rabbit covers—large patches of rank fern, three or four feet in height, and extending over many acres. The doomed rabbits, assiduously driven from the burrows during the preceding week by the keepers, forced from their lodgings beneath the tree-roots by the suffocating fumes of sulphur, and deterred from returning thither by the application of gas-tar to the “runs,” had been forced to seek shelter in the fern patch; and here they literally swarmed. At the edge of the ferns a halt was called, and the head gamekeeper proceeded to arrange his assistants in the most approved “beating” fashion. The shooting party, nine in number, including the prince, distributed themselves in advance of the line of beaters, and the word “Forward!” was given. Simultaneously the line of beaters moved into the cover, vigorously thrashing the long ferns with their stout sticks, and giving vent to a variety of uncouth ejaculations, which it was supposed were calculated to terrify the hidden rabbits. Hardly had the beaters proceeded half-a-dozen yards when the cover in front of them became violently agitated, and rabbits were seen running in all directions. The quantity of game thus started was little short of marvellous—the very ground seemed to be alive. Simultaneously with the appearance of the terrified animals the slaughter commenced. Each sportsman carried a double-barrelled breechloader, and an attendant followed him closely, bearing an additional gun, ready loaded. The shooter discharged both barrels of his gun, in some cases with only the interval of a second or two, and immediately exchanged it for a loaded one. Rabbits fell in all directions. The warning cry of “Rabbit!” from the relentless keepers was heard continuously, and each cry was as quickly followed by the sharp crack of a gun—a pretty sure indication that the rabbit referred to had come to an untimely end, as the majority of the sportsmen were crack shots.
Of course all this is quite natural to a sporting people who have learned to like the smell of gunpowder, sulphur, and gas-tar, better than that of violets and thyme. But, putting the baby-poisoning, pigeon-shooting, and rabbit-shooting of to-day in comparison with the pleasures of the German Madonna, and her simple company; and of Chaucer and his carolling company: and seeing that the present effect of peace upon earth, and well-pleasing in men, is that every nation now spends most of its income in machinery for shooting the best and bravest men, just when they were likely to have become of some use to their fathers and mothers, I put it to you, my friends all, calling you so, I suppose, for the last time, (unless you are disposed for friendship with Herod instead of Barabbas,) whether it would not be more kind and less expensive, to make the machinery a little smaller; and adapt it to spare opium now, and expenses of maintenance and education afterwards, (besides no end of diplomacy) by taking our sport in shooting babies instead of rabbits?
Believe me,
Faithfully yours,