FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER LXIX.
I have just been down to Barmouth to see the tenants on the first bit of ground,—noble crystalline rock, I am thankful to say,—possessed by St. George in the island.
I find the rain coming through roofs, and the wind through walls, more than I think proper, and have ordered repairs; and for some time to come, the little rents of these cottages will be spent entirely in the bettering of them, or in extending some garden ground, fenced with furze hedge against the west wind by the most ingenious of our tenants.
And in connection with this first—however small—beginning under my own eyes of St. George’s work,—(already some repairs had been made by my direction, under the superintendence of the donor of the land, Mrs. Talbot, before I could go to see the place)—I must state again clearly our St. George’s principle of rent. It is taken first as the acknowledgment [[276]]of the authority of the Society over the land, and in the amount judged by the Master to be just, according to the circumstances of the person and place, for the tenant to pay as a contribution to the funds of the Society. The tenant has no claim to the return of the rent in improvements on his ground or his house; and I order the repairs at Barmouth as part of the Company’s general action, not as return of the rent to the tenant. The reader will thus see that our so-called ‘rents’ are in fact taxes laid on the tenants for the advancement of the work of the Company. And all so-called rents are, in like manner, taxes laid on the labourer for the advancement of the work of his landlord. If that work be beneficial, on the whole, to the estate, and of all who live on it, the rents are on a right footing; but if they are abstracted by the landlord to his own private uses, he is merely another form of the old mediæval Knight of Evilstone, living as hawk in eyrie.
It chanced, while I set this work on foot at Barmouth, that a paragraph was sent me out of a Carlisle paper, giving the information that all Lord Lonsdale’s tenants have received notice to quit, that the farms might be re-valued. I requested my correspondent to ascertain for me the manner of the holdings on Lord Lonsdale’s estates;—his reply is the third article in our correspondence this month, and I beg to recommend it to the reader’s most earnest attention. What it says of [[277]]rents, with the exception indicated in my note, is right; and cannot be more tersely or clearly expressed. What it says of ground-produce is only partially right. To discover another America at our own doors would not be any advantage to us;—nor even to make England bigger. We have no business to want England to be bigger, any more than the world to be bigger. The question is not, for us, how much land God ought to have given us; but to fill the land He has given us, with the wisest and best inhabitants we can. I could give a plan, if I chose, with great ease, for the maintenance of a greatly increased quantity of inhabitants, on iron scaffolding, by pulverizing our mountains, and strewing the duly pulverized and, by wise medical geology, drugged, materials, over the upper stages; carrying on our present ingenious manufactures in the dark lower stories. But the arrangement, even if it could be at once achieved, would be of no advantage to England.
Whereas St. George’s arrangements, which are to take the hills, streams, and fields that God has made for us; to keep them as lovely, pure, and orderly as we can;[1] to gather their carefully cultivated fruit in due season; and if our children then multiply so that we cannot feed them, to seek other lands to cultivate in like manner,—these arrangements, I repeat, will be found [[278]]very advantageous indeed, as they always have been; wheresoever even in any minor degree enforced. In some happy countries they have been so, many a long year already; and the following letter from a recent traveller in one of them, may further illustrate the description given in a Fors of early date, of the felicity verily and visibly to be secured by their practice.
“Salzburg, July 30, 1876.
“Dear Professor Ruskin,—I have long intended to write to you, but the mountain of matters I had to tell you has increased till Pelion is piled upon Ossa within my mind, and so I must confine myself to one or two points. In the Black Forest, and more especially in remote mountain valleys of Tyrol, I have found the people living more or less according to principles laid down for the Company of St. George. I have seen the rules so much decried, and even ridiculed, in England, wrought into the whole life of the people. One may still find villages and communes where lawsuits are impossible—a head-man of their own deciding all disputes; where the simplest honesty and friendliness are all but universal, and the stranger is taken in only in the better sense of the phrase; where the nearest approach to steam power is the avalanche of early summer; where there are no wheeled vehicles, and all burthens are carried on the backs of men and mules,” (my dear friend, I really don’t want people to do without [[279]]donkey-carts, or pony-chaises; nay, I was entirely delighted at Dolgelly, the other day, to meet a four-in-hand coach—driven by the coachman’s daughter;) “where rich and poor must fare alike on the simple food and cheap but sound wine of the country; where the men still carve wood, and the women spin and weave, during the long hours of winter; and where the folk still take genuine delight in picturesque dress, and daily church-going, and have not reduced both to the dreary felon’s uniform of English respectability. With these unconscious followers of Ruskin, and Companions of St. George, I formed deep friendships; and for me, if I ever revisit the wild recesses of the Œtzthal, it will almost be like going amongst my own people and to my own home. Indeed, wherever I left the beaten track of tourists, and the further I left it, so did the friendliness of my entertainers increase. It was evident they regarded me not as a mere purse-bearing animal, but as an argosy of quite a different sort—a human spirit coming from afar, from a land ‘belonging,’ as one of them conjectured, ‘to Spain,’ and laden with all kinds of new knowledge and strange ideas, of which they would gladly have some share. And so towards the close of a dinner, or supper, the meek-eyed hostess would come and sit beside me, hoping I had enjoyed a ‘happy meal;’ and after a complimentary sip from my glass, ask me all sorts of delightful and simple questions about myself, and my family, and my country. [[280]]Or the landlord would come sometimes,—alas, at the very beginning of a meal,—and from huge pipe bowl, wonderfully painted with Crucifixion or Madonna, blow clouds of anything but incense smoke. But the intention of honouring and amusing me were none the less apparent.”
With my friend’s pleasant days among this wise and happy people, I will forthwith compare the very unpleasant day I spent myself on my journey to Barmouth, among unwise and wretched ones; one incident occurring in it being of extreme significance. I had driven from Brantwood in early morning down the valley of the Crake, and took train first at the Ulverston station, settling myself in the corner of a carriage next the sea, for better prospect thereof. In the other corner was a respectable, stolid, middle-aged man reading his paper.
I had left my Coniston lake in dashing ripples under a south wind, thick with rain; but the tide lay smooth and silent along the sands; melancholy in absolute pause of motion, nor ebb nor flow distinguishable;—here and there, among the shelves of grey shore, a little ruffling of their apparent pools marked stray threadings of river-current.
At Grange, talking loud, got in two young coxcombs; who reclined themselves on the opposite cushions. One had a thin stick, with which, in a kind of St. Vitus’s dance, partly affectation of nonchalance, partly real fever [[281]]produced by the intolerable idleness of his mind and body, he rapped on the elbow of his seat, poked at the button-holes of the window strap, and switched his boots, or the air, all the way from Grange to the last station before Carnforth,—he and his friend talking yacht and regatta, listlessly;—the St. Vitus’s, meantime, dancing one expressing his opinion that “the most dangerous thing to do on these lakes was going before the wind.” The respectable man went on reading his paper, without notice of them. None of the three ever looked out of the windows at sea or shore. There was not much to look at, indeed, through the driving, and gradually closer-driven, rain,—except the drifting about of the seagulls, and their quiet dropping into the pools, their wings kept open for an instant till their breasts felt the water well; then closing their petals of white light, like suddenly shut water flowers.
The two regatta men got out, in drenching rain, on the coverless platform at the station before Carnforth, and all the rest of us at Carnforth itself, to wait for the up train. The shed on the up-line side, even there, is small, in which a crowd of third-class passengers were packed close by the outside drip. I did not see one, out of some twenty-five or thirty persons, tidily dressed, nor one with a contented and serenely patient look. Lines of care, of mean hardship, of comfortless submission, of gnawing anxiety, or ill-temper, characterized every face. [[282]]
The train came up, and my poor companions were shuffled into it speedily, in heaps. I found an empty first-class carriage for myself: wondering how long universal suffrage would allow itself to be packed away in heaps, for my convenience.
At Lancaster, a father and daughter got in; presumably commercial. Father stoutly built and firm-featured, sagacious and cool. The girl hard and common; well dressed, except that her hat was cocked too high on her hair. They both read papers all the way to Warrington. I was not myself employed much better; the incessant rain making the windows a mere wilderness of dirty dribblings; and neither Preston nor Wigan presenting anything lively to behold, I had settled myself to Mrs. Brown on Spelling Bees, (an unusually forced and poor number of Mrs. Brown, by the way).
I had to change at Warrington for Chester. The weather bettered a little, while I got a cup of tea and slice of bread in the small refreshment room; contemplating, the while, in front of me, the panels of painted glass on its swinging doors, which represented two troubadours, in broadly striped blue and yellow breeches, purple jackets, and plumed caps; with golden-hilted swords, and enormous lyres. Both had soft curled moustaches, languishing eyes, open mouths, and faultless legs. Meanwhile, lounged at the counter behind me, much bemused in beer, a perfect example of the special type of youthful blackguard now developing generally [[283]]in England; more or less blackly pulpous and swollen in all the features, and with mingled expression of intense grossness and intense impudence,—half pig, half jackdaw.
There got in with me, when the train was ready, a middle-class person of commercial-traveller aspect, who had possessed himself of a ‘Graphic’ from the news-boy; and whom I presently forgot, in examining the country on a line new to me, which became quickly, under gleams of broken sunlight, of extreme interest. Azure-green fields of deep corn; undulations of sandstone hill, with here and there a broken crag at the edge of a cutting; presently the far glittering of the Solway-like sands of Dee, and rounded waves of the Welsh hills on the southern horizon, formed a landscape more fresh and fair than I have seen for many a day, from any great line of English rail. When I looked back to my fellow-traveller, he was sprawling all his length on the cushion of the back seat, with his boots on his ‘Graphic,’—not to save the cushions assuredly, but in the foul modern carelessness of everything which we have ‘done with’ for the moment;—his face clouded with sullen thought, as of a person helplessly in difficulty, and not able to give up thinking how to avoid the unavoidable.
In a minute or two more I found myself plunged into the general dissolution and whirlpool of porters, passengers, and crook-boned trucks, running round corners [[284]]against one’s legs, of the great Chester station. A simply-dressed upper-class girl of sixteen or seventeen, strictly and swiftly piloting her little sister through the populace, was the first human creature I had yet seen, on whom sight could rest without pain. The rest of the crowd was a mere dismal fermentation of the Ignominious.
The train to Ruabon was crowded, and I was obliged to get into a carriage with two cadaverous sexagenarian spinsters, who had been keeping the windows up, all but a chink, for fear a drop of rain or breath of south wind should come in, and were breathing the richest compound of products of their own indigestion. Pretending to be anxious about the construction of the train, I got the farther window down, and my body well out of it; then put it only half-way up when the train left, and kept putting my head out without my hat; so as, if possible, to impress my fellow-passengers with the imminence of a collision, which could only be averted by extreme watchfulness on my part. Then requesting, with all the politeness I could muster, to be allowed to move a box with which they had occupied the corner-seat—“that I might sit face to the air”—I got them ashamed to ask that the window might be shut up again; but they huddled away into the opposite corner to make me understand how they suffered from the draught. Presently they got out two bags of blue grapes, and [[285]]ate away unanimously, availing themselves of my open window to throw out rolled-up pips and skins.
General change, to my extreme relief, as to their’s, was again required at Ruabon, effected by a screwing backwards and forwards, for three-quarters of an hour, of carriages which one was expecting every five minutes to get into; and which were puffed and pushed away again the moment one opened a door, with loud calls of ‘Stand back there.’ A group of half a dozen children, from eight to fourteen—the girls all in straw hats, with long hanging scarlet ribands—were more or less pleasant to see meanwhile; and sunshine through the puffs of petulant and cross-purposed steam, promised a pleasant run to Llangollen.
I had only the conventional ‘business man with a paper’ for this run; and on his leaving the carriage at Llangollen, was just closing the door, thinking to have both windows at command, when my hand was stayed by the father of a family of four children, who, with their mother and aunt, presently filled the carriage, the children fitting or scrambling in anywhere, with expansive kicks and lively struggles. They belonged to the lower middle-class; the mother an ideal of the worthy commonplace, evidently hard put to it to make both ends meet, and wholly occupied in family concerns; her face fixed in the ignoble gravity of virtuous persons to whom their own troublesome households have become monasteries. The father, slightly [[286]]more conscious of external things, submitting benevolently to his domestic happiness out on its annual holiday. The children ugly, fidgety, and ill-bred, but not unintelligent,—full of questionings, ‘when’ they were to get here, or there? how many rails there were on the line; which side the station was on, and who was to meet them. In such debate, varied by bodily contortions in every direction, they contrived to pass the half-hour which took us through the vale of Llangollen, past some of the loveliest brook and glen scenery in the world. But neither the man, the woman, nor any one of the children, looked out of the window once, the whole way.
They got out at Corwen, leaving me to myself for the run past Bala lake and down the Dolgelly valley; but more sorrowful than of late has been my wont, in the sense of my total isolation from the thoughts and ways of the present English people. For I was perfectly certain that among all the crowd of living creatures whom I had that day seen,—scarlet ribands and all,—there was not one to whom I could have spoken a word on any subject interesting to me, which would have been intelligible to them.
But the first broad sum of fact, for the sake of which I have given this diary, is that among certainly not less than some seven or eight hundred people, seen by me in the course of this day, I saw not one happy face, and several hundreds of entirely miserable ones. [[287]]The second broad sum of fact is, that out of the few,—not happy,—but more or less spirited and complacent faces I saw, among the lower and the mercantile classes, what life or spirit they had depended on a peculiar cock-on-a-dunghill character of impudence, which meant a total inability to conceive any good or lovely thing in this world or any other: and the third sum of fact is, that in this rich England I saw only eight out of eight hundred persons gracefully dressed, and decently mannered. But the particular sign, and prophetic vision of the day, to me, was the man lying with his boots on his ‘Graphic.’ There is a long article in the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ sent me this morning, on the folly of the modern theory that the nation is suffering from ‘over-production.’ The writer is quite correct in his condemnation of the fallacy in question; but it has not occurred to him, nor to any other writer that I know of on such matters, to consider whether we may not possibly be suffering from over-destruction. If you use a given quantity of steam power and human ingenuity to produce your ‘Graphic’ in the morning, and travel from Warrington to Chester with your boots upon it in the afternoon,—Is the net result, production, my dear editor? The net result is labour with weariness A.M.,—idleness with disgust P.M.,—and nothing to eat next day. And do not think our Warrington friend other than a true type of your modern British employer of industry. The universal British public has [[288]]no idea of any other use of art, or industry, than he! It reclines everlastingly with its boots on its ‘Graphic.’ ‘To-morrow there will be another,—what use is there in the old?’ Think of the quantity of energy used in the ‘production’ of the daily works of the British press? The first necessity of our lives in the morning,—old rags in the evening! Or the annual works of the British naval architect? The arrow of the Lord’s deliverance in January, and old iron in June! The annual industry of the European soldier,—of the European swindler,—of the European orator,—will you tell me, good Mr. Editor, what it is that they produce? Will you calculate for me, how much of all that is, they destroy?
But even of what we do produce, under some colour or fancy, of service to humanity,—How much of it is of any service to humanity, good Mr. Editor? Here is a little bit of a note bearing on the matter, written last Christmas in a fit of incontrollable provocation at a Christian correspondent’s drawl of the popular sentiment, “living is so very expensive, you know!”
Why, of course it is, living as you do, in a saucepan full of steam, with no potatoes in it!
Here is the first economical fact I have been trying to teach, these fifteen years; and can’t get it, yet, into the desperate, leathern-skinned, death-helmeted skull of this wretched England—till Jael-Atropos drive it down, through skull and all, into the ground;—that you can’t [[289]]have bread without corn, nor milk without kine; and that being dragged about the country behind kettles won’t grow corn on it; and speculating in stocks won’t feed mutton on it; and manufacturing steel pens, and scrawling lies with them, won’t clothe your backs or fill your bellies, though you scrawl England as black with ink as you have strewed her black with cinders.
Now look here: I am writing in a friend’s house in a lovely bit of pasture country, surrounding what was once a bright bit of purple and golden heath—inlaid as gorse and heather chose to divide their possession of it; and is now a dusty wilderness of unlet fashionable villas, bricks, thistles, and crockery. My friend has a good estate, and lets a large farm; but he can’t have cream to his tea, and has ‘Dorset’ butter.[2] If he ever gets any of these articles off his own farm, they are brought to him from London, having been carried there that they may pay toll to the railroad company once as they go up, and again as they come down; and have two chances of helping to smash an excursion train.
Meantime, at the apothecary’s shop in the village, I can buy, besides drugs,—cigars, and stationery; and among other stationery, the ‘College card,’ of “eighteen useful articles,”—namely, Bohemian glass ruler, Bohemian glass penholder, pen-box with gilt and diapered lid, pen-wiper [[290]]with a gilt tin fern leaf for ornament, pencil, india-rubber, and twelve steel pens,—all stitched separately and neatly on the card; and the whole array of them to be bought for sixpence.
What times!—what civilization!—what ingenuity!—what cheapness!
Yes; but what does it mean? First, that I, who buy the card, can’t get cream to my tea? And secondly, that the unhappy wretches,—Bohemian and other,—glass blowers, iron diggers, pen manufacturers, and the like,—who have made the eighteen useful articles, have sixpence to divide among them for their trouble! What sort of cream have they to their tea?
But the question of questions about it all, is—Are these eighteen articles ‘useful articles’? For what? Here’s a—nominal—‘pencil’ on our ‘College card.’ But not a collegian, that I know of, wants to draw,—and if he did, he couldn’t draw with this thing, which is not a pencil, but some sand and coal-dust jammed in a stick. The ‘india-rubber’ also, I perceive, is not india-rubber; but a composition for tearing up the surface of paper,—useful only to filthy blunderers; the nasty glass-handled things, which will break if I drop them, and cut the housemaid’s fingers, I shall instantly turn out of the house; the pens, for which I bought the card, will perhaps be useful to me, because I have, to my much misery, writing to do: but you, happier animals, who may exist without scratching either paper or your [[291]]heads,—what is the use of them to you? (N.B. I couldn’t write a word with one of them, after all.)
I must go back to my Warrington friend; for there are more lessons to be received from him. I looked at him, in one sense, not undeferentially. He was, to the extent of his experience, as good a judge of art as I. He knew what his ‘Graphic’ was worth. Pronounced an entirely divine verdict upon it. Put it, beneficently, out of its pictorial pain,—for ever.
Do not think that it is so difficult to know good art from bad. The poorest-minded public cannot rest in its bad possessions,—wants them new, and ever new. I have given my readers, who have trusted me, four art-possessions, which I do not fear their wishing to destroy; and it will be a long while before I wish them to get another. I have too long delayed beginning to tell them why they are good; and one of my Sheffield men asked Mr. Swan the other day what I had commended the Leucothea for,—“he couldn’t see anything in it.” To whom the first answer must be—Did you expect to, then? My good manufacturing friend, be assured there was no more thought of pleasing you when Leucothea was carved, than of pleasing—Ganymede, when Rosalind was christened. Some day you will come to “like her name.”
But, whether you ever come to ‘see anything in it’ or not, be assured that this, and the Lippi, and the Titian, and the Velasquez, are, all four, alike in one [[292]]quality, which you can respect, even if you do not envy. They are work of men doing their best. And whose pride is in doing their best and most. You modern British workmen’s pride, I find more and more, is in doing ingeniously the worst, and least, you can.
Again: they all four agree in being the work of men trained under true masters, and themselves able to be true masters to others. They belong, therefore, to what are properly called ‘schools’ of art. Whereas your modern British workman recognizes no master; but is, (as the result of his increasing intelligence, according to Mr. Mill,) less and less disposed “to be guided in the way which he should go by any prestige or authority.” The result of which is that every British artist has to find out how to paint as he best can; and usually begins to see his way to it, by the time he is sixty.
Thirdly. They belong to schools which, orderly and obedient themselves, understood the law of order in all things. Which is the chief distinction between Art and Rudeness. And the first aim of every great painter, is to express clearly his obedience to the law of Kosmos, Order, or Symmetry.[3] The only perfect work of the four [[293]]I have given, the Titian, binds itself by this symmetry most severely. Absolutely straight lines of screen behind the Madonna’s head,—a dark head on one side, a dark head on the other; a child on one side, a child on the other; a veil falling one way on one side, a scroll curling the other way on the other; a group of leaves in the child’s right hand balanced by another in the Madonna’s left; two opposed sprays of leaves on the table, and the whole clasped by a single cherry. In the Lippi, the symmetry is lateral; the Madonna fronting the group of the child central, with supporting angel on each side. In the Leucothea, the diminishing magnitudes of the attendant goddesses on the right are answered by the diminishing magnitudes from the seated goddess and the child, to the smallest figure at her knee, which clasps both the sides of the chain.
Lastly, in the Velasquez, the little pyramid of a child, with her three tassels and central brooch, and a chair on each side of her, would have been too symmetrical, but for the interferent light in the dog.
I said just now, the Titian was the only perfect one of the four. Everything there is done with absolute rightness: and you don’t see how. The hair in the Lippi is too stiff,—in the Velasquez, too slight; and one sees that it is drawn in the one, dashed in the other; but by Titian only, ‘painted’—you don’t know how.
I say the Titian is the most perfect. It does not [[294]]follow that it is the best. There are gifts shown in the others, and feelings, which are not in it; and of which the relative worth may be matter of question. For instance, the Lippi, as I told you before, is a painting wrought in real Religion;—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the conceived nature and laws of God.
The Titian is wrought in what Mr. Harrison calls the Religion of Humanity: but ought more accurately to call, the Religion of Manity, (for the English use of the word ‘humane’ is continually making him confuse benevolence with religion,)—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the nature and laws of Man.
And, finally, the Velasquez is wrought in the still more developed Modern Religion of Dogity, or obedience of the heart to the nature and laws of Dog; (the lovely little idol, you observe, dominant on velvet throne, as formerly the Madonna). Of which religion, as faithfully held by the brave British Squire, in its widest Catholic form of horse-and-dog-ity, and passionately and tenderly indulged by the devoted British matron in the sectarian limitation of Lapdogity,—there is more to be told than Velasquez taught, or than we can learn, to-day. [[295]]