LETTER LXVI.

Brantwood, 14th May, 1876.

Those of my readers who have followed me as far as I have hitherto gone in our careful reading of the Pentateuch, must, I think, have felt with me, in natural consequence of this careful reading, more than hitherto, the life and reality of the record; but, in the degree of this new life, new wonderfulness, and difficult credibility! For it is always easy to imagine that we believe what we do not understand; and often graceful and convenient to consent in the belief of others, as to what we do not care about. But when we begin to know clearly what is told, the question if it be fable or fact becomes inevitable in our minds; and if the fact, once admitted, would bear upon our conduct, its admission can no longer be made a matter of mere social courtesy.

Accordingly, I find one of my more earnest readers [[172]]already asking me, privately, if I really believed that the hail on Good Friday last had been sent as a punishment for national sin?—and I should think, and even hope, that other of my readers would like to ask me, respecting the same passage, whether I believed that the sun ever stood still?

To whom I could only answer, what I answered some time since in my paper on Miracle for the Metaphysical Society, (‘Contemporary Review’) that the true miracle, to my mind, would not be in the sun’s standing still, but IS in its going on! We are all of us being swept down to death in a sea of miracle; we are drowned in wonder, as gnats in a Rhine whirlpool: unless we are worse,—drowned in pleasure, or sloth, or insolence.

Nevertheless, I do not feel myself in the least called upon to believe that the sun stood still, or the earth either, during that pursuit at Ajalon. Nay, it would not anywise amaze me to find that there never had been any such pursuit—never any Joshua, never any Moses; and that the Jews, “taken generally,” as an amiable clerical friend told me from his pulpit a Sunday or two ago, “were a Christian people.”

But it does amaze me—almost to helplessness of hand and thought—to find the men and women of these days careless of such issue; and content, so that they can feed and breathe their fill, to eat like cattle, and breathe like plants, questionless of the Spirit that makes the grass to grow for them on the mountains, or the [[173]]breeze they breathe on them, its messengers, or the fire that dresses their food, its minister. Desolate souls, for whom the sun—beneath, not above, the horizon—stands still for ever.

‘Amazed,’ I say, ‘almost to helplessness of hand and thought’—quite literally of both. I was reading yesterday, by Fors’ order, Mr. Edward B. Tylor’s idea of the Greek faith in Apollo: “If the sun travels along its course like a glittering chariot, forthwith the wheels, and the driver, and the horses are there;”[1] and Mr. Frederick Harrison’s gushing article on Humanity, in the ‘Contemporary Review’; and a letter about our Cotton Industry, (hereafter to be quoted,[2]) and this presently following bit of Sir Philip Sidney’s 68th Psalm;—and my hands are cold this morning, after the horror, and wonder, and puzzlement of my total Sun-less-day, and my head is now standing still, or at least turning round, giddy, instead of doing its work by Shrewsbury clock; and I don’t know where to begin with the quantity I want to say,—all the less that I’ve said a great deal of it before, if I only knew where to tell you to find it. All up and down my later books, from ‘Unto This Last’ to ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ and again and again throughout ‘Fors,’ [[174]]you will find references to the practical connection between physical and spiritual light—of which now I would fain state, in the most unmistakable terms, this sum: that you cannot love the real sun, that is to say physical light and colour, rightly, unless you love the spiritual sun, that is to say justice and truth, rightly. That for unjust and untrue persons, there is no real joy in physical light, so that they don’t even know what the word means. That the entire system of modern life is so corrupted with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth, carried to the point of not recognising themselves as either—for as long as Bill Sykes knows that he is a robber, and Jeremy Diddler that he is a rascal, there is still some of Heaven’s light left for both—but when everybody steals, cheats, and goes to church, complacently, and the light of their whole body is darkness, how great is that darkness! And that the physical result of that mental vileness is a total carelessness of the beauty of sky, or the cleanness of streams, or the life of animals and flowers: and I believe that the powers of Nature are depressed or perverted, together with the Spirit of Man; and therefore that conditions of storm and of physical darkness, such as never were before in Christian times, are developing themselves, in connection also with forms of loathsome insanity, multiplying through the whole genesis of modern brains.

As I correct this sheet for press, I chance, by Fors’ [[175]]order, in a prayer of St. John Damascene’s to the Virgin, on this, to me, very curious and interesting clause: “Redeem me from the dark metamorphosis of the angels, rescuing me from the bitter law-giving of the farmers of the air, and the rulers of the darkness.”

“τῆς σκοτεινῆς με τῶν διαμόνων λυτρου μέτημορφῆς, (I am not answerable either for Damascene Greek, or for my MS. of it, in 1396,) τοῦ πικροτάτου λογοθεσίου τῶν τελωνῶν τοῦ ἀέρος καὶ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ σκότους ἐξαίρουσα.”

And now—of this entangling in the shrine of half born and half-sighted things, see this piece of Sir Philip Sidney’s psalm. I want it also for the bit of conchology at the end. The italics are mine.

“And call ye this to utter what is just,

You that of justice hold the sov’raign throne?

And call yee this to yield, O sonnes of dust,

To wronged brethren ev’ry one his own?

O no: it is your long malicious will

Now to the world to make by practice known,

With whose oppression you the ballance fill,

Just to your selves, indiff’rent else to none.

But what could they, who ev’n in birth declin’d,

From truth and right to lies and injuries?

To shew the venom of their cancred mynd

The adder’s image scarcely can suffice. [[176]]

Nay, scarce the aspick may with them contend,

On whom the charmer all in vaine applies

His skillful’st spells: aye, missing of his end,

While shee self-deaf, and unaffected lies.

Lord, crack their teeth, Lord, crush Thou these lions’ jawes,

Soe lett them sinck as water in the sand:

When deadly bow their aiming fury drawes,

Shiver the shaft, ere past the shooter’s hand.

So make them melt as the dishowsed snaile,

Or as the embrio, whose vitall band

Breakes ere it holdes, and formlesse eyes doe faile

To see the sun, though brought to lightfull land.”

‘Dishoused’ snail! That’s a bit, observe, of Sir Philip’s own natural history, perfecting the image in the psalm, “as a snail which melteth.” The ‘housed’ snail can shelter himself from evil weather, but the poor houseless slug, a mere slimy mass of helpless blackness,—shower-begotten, as it seems,—what is to become of it when the sun is up!

Not that even houseless snails melt,—nor that there’s anything about snails at all in David’s psalm, I believe, both Vulgate and LXX. saying ‘wax’ instead, as in Psalms lxviii. 2, xcvii. 5, etc.; but I suppose there’s some reptilian sense in the Hebrew, justifying our translation here—all the more interesting to me [[177]]because of a puzzle I got into in Isaiah, the other day; respecting which, lest you should fancy I’m too ready to give up Joshua and the sun without taking trouble about them, please observe this very certain condition of your Scriptural studies: that if you read the Bible with predetermination to pick out every text you approve of—that is to say, generally, any that confirm you in the conceit of your own religious sect,—that console you for the consequences of your own faults,—or assure you of a pleasant future though you attend to none of your present duties—on these terms you will find the Bible entirely intelligible, and wholly delightful: but if you read it with a real purpose of trying to understand it, and obey; and so read it all through, steadily, you will find it, out and out, the crabbedest and most difficult book you ever tried; horribly ill written in many parts, according to all human canons; totally unintelligible in others; and with the gold of it only to be got at by a process of crushing in which nothing but the iron teeth of the fiercest and honestest resolution will prevail against its adamant.

For instance, take the 16th of Isaiah. Who is to send the Lamb? why is the Lamb to be sent? what does the Lamb mean? There is nothing in the Greek Bible about a Lamb at all, nor is anybody told to send anything. But God says He will send something, apostolically, as reptiles!

Then, are the daughters of Moab the outcasts, as [[178]]in the second verse, or other people, as in the fourth? How is Moab’s throne to be established in righteousness, in the tabernacle of David, in the fifth? What are his lies not to be, in the sixth? And why is he to howl for himself, in the seventh? Ask any of the young jackanapes you put up to chatter out of your pulpits, to tell you even so much as this, of the first half-dozen verses! But above all, ask them who the persons are who are to be sent apostolically as reptiles?

Meanwhile, on the way to answer, I’ve got a letter,[3] not from a jackanapes, but a thoroughly learned and modest clergyman, and old friend, advising me of my mistake in April Fors, in supposing that Rahab, in the 89th Psalm, means the harlot. It is, he tells me, a Hebrew word for the Dragon adversary, as in the verse “He hath cut Rahab, and wounded the Dragon.” That will come all the clearer and prettier for us, when we have worked it out, with Rahab herself and all; meantime, please observe what a busy creature she must have been—the stalks of her flax in heaps enough to hide the messengers! doubtless also, she was able to dye her thread of the brightest scarlet, a becoming colour.[4]

Well, I can’t get that paper of Mr. Frederick Harrison’s out of my head; chiefly because I know and like its writer; and I don’t like his wasting his time in writing [[179]]that sort of stuff. What I have got to say to him, anent it, may better be said publicly, because I must write it carefully, and with some fulness; and if he won’t attend to me, perhaps some of his readers may. So I consider him, for the time, as one of my acquaintances among working men, and dedicate the close of this letter to him specially.

My dear Harrison,—I am very glad you have been enjoying yourself at Oxford; and that you still think it a pretty place. But why, in the name of all that’s developing, did you walk in those wretched old Magdalen walks? They’re as dull as they were thirty years ago. Why didn’t you promenade in our new street, opposite Mr. Ryman’s? or under the rapturous sanctities of Keble? or beneath the lively new zigzag parapet of Tom Quad?—or, finally, in the name of all that’s human and progressive, why not up and down the elongating suburb of the married Fellows, on the cock-horse road to Banbury?

However, I’m glad you’ve been at the old place; even though you wasted the bloom of your holiday-spirits in casting your eyes, in that too childish and pastoral manner, “round this sweet landscape, with its myriad blossoms and foliage, its meadows in their golden glory,” etc.; and declaring that all you want other people to do is to “follow out in its concrete results this sense of collective evolution.” Will you only be patient enough, for the help of this old head of mine [[180]]on stooping shoulders, to tell me one or two of the inconcrete results of separate evolution?

Had you done me the honour to walk through my beautifully developing schools, you would have found, just outside of them, (turned out because I’m tired of seeing it, and want something progressive) the cast of the Elgin Theseus. I am tired thereof, it is true; but I don’t yet see my way, as a Professor of Modern Art, to the superseding it. On the whole, it appears to me a very satisfactory type of the human form; arrived at, as you know, two thousand and two hundred years ago. And you tell me, nevertheless, to “see how this transcendent power of collective evolution holds me in the hollow of its hand!” Well, I hope I am handsomer than the Theseus; it’s very pleasant to think so, but it did not strike me before. May I flatter myself it is really your candid opinion? Will you just look at the “Realization of the (your?) Ideal,” in the number of ‘Vanity Fair’ for February 17th, 1872, and confirm me on this point?

Granting whatever advance in the ideal of humanity you thus conclude, I still am doubtful of your next reflection. “But these flowers and plants which we can see between the cloisters, and trellised round the grey traceries—” (My dear boy, what have you to do with cloisters or traceries? Leave that business to the jackdaws; their loquacious and undeveloped praise is enough for such relics of the barbarous past. You don’t want [[181]]to shut yourself up, do you? and you couldn’t design a tracery, for your life; and you don’t know a good one from a bad one: what in the name of common sense or common modesty do you mean by chattering about these?) “What races of men in China, Japan, India, Mexico, South America, Australasia, first developed their glory out of some wild bloom?” Frankly, I don’t know—being in this no wiser than you; but also I don’t care: and in this carelessness am wiser than you, because I do know this—that if you will look into the Etruscan room of the British Museum, you will find there an Etruscan Demeter of—any time you please—B.C., riding on a car whose wheels are of wild roses: that the wild rose of her time is thus proved to be precisely the wild rose of my time, growing behind my study on the hillside; and for my own part, I would not give a spray of it for all Australasia, South America, and Japan together. Perhaps, indeed, apples have improved since the Hesperides’ time; but I know they haven’t improved since I was a boy, and I can’t get a Ribston Pippin, now, for love or money.

Of Pippins in Devonshire, of cheese in Cheshire, believe me, my good friend,—though I trust much more than you in the glorified future of both,—you will find no development in the present scientific day;—of Asphodel none; of Apples none demonstrable; but of Eves? From the ductile and silent gold of ancient womanhood to the resonant bronze, and tinkling—not cymbal, but [[182]]shall we say—saucepan, of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, there is an interval, with a vengeance; widening to the future. You yourself, I perceive, have no clear insight into this solidified dispersion of the lingering pillar of Salt, which had been good for hospitality in its day; and which yet would have some honour in its descendant, the poor gleaning Moabitess, into your modern windily progressive pillar of Sand, with “career open to it” indeed other than that of wife and mother—good for nothing, at last, but burial heaps. But are you indeed so proud of what has been already achieved? I will take you on your own terms, and study only the evolution of the Amazonian Virgin. Take first the ancient type of her, leading the lucent Cobbes of her day, ‘florentes aere catervas.’

“Bellatrix. Non illa colo, calathisve Minervae

Foemineas assueta manus.

Illam omnis tectis agrisqu’ effusa juventus

Turbaque miratur matrum; et prospectat euntem.

Attonitis inhians animis: ut regius ostro

Velet honos leves humeros; ut fibula crinem

Auro internectat; Lyciam ut gerat ipsa pharetram

Et pastoralem praefixa cuspide myrtum.”

With this picture, will you compare that so opportunely furnished me by the author of the ‘Angel in the House,’[5] of the modern Camilla, in “white [[183]]bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes.” From this sphere of Ethiopian aspiration, may not even the divinely emancipated spirit of Cobbe cast one glance—“Backward, Ho”?

But suppose I grant your Evolution of the Japanese Rose, and the Virginian Virago, how of other creatures? of other things? I don’t find the advocates of Evolution much given to studying either men, women, or roses; I perceive them to be mostly occupied with frogs and lice. Is there a Worshipful Batrachianity—a Divine Pedicularity?—Stay, I see at page 874 that Pantheism is “muddled sentiment”; but it was you, my dear boy, who began the muddling with your Japanese horticulture. Your Humanity has no more to do with roses than with Rose-chafers or other vermin; but I must really beg you not to muddle your terms as well as your head. “We, who have thought and studied,” do not admit that “humanity is an aggregate of men.” An aggregate of men is a mob, and not ‘Humanity’; and an aggregate of sheep is a flock, and not Ovility; and an aggregate of geese is——perhaps you had better consult Mr. Herbert Spencer and the late Mr. John Stuart Mill for the best modern expression,—but if you want to know the proper names for aggregates, in good old English, go and read Lady Juliana’s list in the book of St. Albans.

I do not care, however, to pursue questions with you [[184]]of these ‘concrete developments.’ For, frankly, I conceive myself to know considerably more than you do, of organic Nature and her processes, and of organic English and its processes; but there is one development of which, since it is your special business to know it, and I suppose your pleasure, I hope you know much more than I do, (whose business I find by no means forwarded by it, still less my pleasure)—the Development of Law. For the concrete development of beautifully bewigged humanity, called a lawyer, I beg you to observe that I always express, and feel, extreme respect. But for Law itself, in the existent form of it, invented, as it appears to me, only for the torment and taxation of Humanity, I entertain none whatsoever. I may be wrong, and I don’t want to be wrong; and you, who know the law, can show me if I am wrong or not. Here, then, are four questions of quite vital importance to Humanity, which if you will answer to me positively, you will do more good than I have yet known done by Positivism.

1. What is ‘Usury’ as defined by existing Law?

2. Is Usury, as defined by existing law, an absolute term, such as Theft, or Adultery? and is a man therefore a Usurer who only commits Usury a little, as a man is an Adulterer who only commits Adultery a little?

3. Or is it a sin incapable of strict definition, or strictly retributive punishment; like ‘Cruelty’? and is a man criminal in proportion to the quantity of it he commits? [[185]]

4. If criminal in proportion to the quantity he commits, is the proper legal punishment in the direct ratio of the quantity, or inverse ratio of the quantity, as it is in the case of theft?

If you will answer these questions clearly, you will do more service to Humanity than by writing any quantity of papers either on its Collective Development or its Abstract being. I have not touched upon any of the more grave questions glanced at in your paper, because in your present Mercutial temper I cannot expect you to take cognizance of anything grave. With respect to such matters, I will “ask for you to-morrow,” not to-day. But here—to end my Fors with a piece of pure English,—are two little verses of Sir Philip’s, merry enough, in measure, to be set to a Fandango if you like. I may, perhaps, some time or other, ask you if you can apply them personally, in address to Mr. Comte. For the nonce I only ask you the above four plain questions of English law; and I adjure you, by the soul of every Comes reckoned up in unique Comte—by all that’s positive, all that’s progressive, all that’s spiral, all that’s conchoidal, and all that’s evolute—great Human Son of Holothurian Harries, answer me.

“Since imprisoned in my mother

Thou me feed’st, whom have I other

Held my stay, or made my song? [[186]]

Yea, when all me so misdeemed,

I to most a monster seemed

Yet in thee my hope was strong.

Yet of thee the thankful story

Filled my mouth: thy gratious glory

Was my ditty all the day.

Do not then, now age assaileth,

Courage, verdure, vertue faileth,

Do not leave me cast away.”

I have little space, as now too often, for any definite school work. My writing-lesson, this month, is a facsimile of the last words written by Nelson; in his cabin, with the allied fleets in sight, off Trafalgar. It is entirely fine in general structure and character.

Mr. Ward has now three, and will I hope soon have the fourth, of our series of lesson photographs, namely,—

On these I shall lecture, as I have time, here and in the ‘Laws of Fésole;’ but, in preparation for all farther study, when you have got the four, put them beside each other, putting the Leucothea first, the Lippi second, and the others as numbered. [[187]]

Then, the first, the Leucothea, is entirely noble religious art, of the fifth or sixth century B.C., full of various meaning and mystery, of knowledges that are lost, feelings that have ceased, myths and symbols of the laws of life, only to be traced by those who know much both of life and death.

Technically, it is still in Egyptian bondage, but in course of swiftly progressive redemption.

The second is nobly religious work of the fifteenth century of Christ,—an example of the most perfect unison of religious myth with faithful realism of human nature yet produced in this world. The Etruscan traditions are preserved in it even to the tassels of the throne cushion: the pattern of these, and of the folds at the edge of the angel’s drapery, may be seen in the Etruscan tomb now central in the first compartment of the Egyptian gallery of the British Museum and the double cushion of that tomb is used, with absolute obedience to his tradition, by Jacopo della Quercia, in the tomb of Ilaria di Caretto.

The third represents the last phase of the noble religious art of the world, in which realization has become consummate; but all supernatural aspect is refused, and mythic teaching is given only in obedience to former tradition, but with no anxiety for its acceptance. Here is, for certain, a sweet Venetian peasant, with her child, and fruit from the market-boats of Mestre. The Ecce Agnus, topsy-turvy on the [[188]]finely perspectived scroll, may be deciphered by whoso list.

But the work itself is still sternly conscientious, severe, reverent, and faultless.

The fourth is an example of the highest reach of technical perfection yet reached in art; all effort and labour seeming to cease in the radiant peace and simplicity of consummated human power. But all belief in supernatural things, all hope of a future state, all effort to teach, and all desire to be taught have passed away from the artist’s mind. The Child and her Dog are to him equally real, equally royal, equally mortal. And the History of Art since it reached this phase—cannot be given in the present number of ‘Fors Clavigera.’ [[189]]