FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER VII.
Denmark Hill,
1st July, 1871.
My Friends,
It seldom chances, my work lying chiefly among stones, clouds, and flowers, that I am brought into any freedom of intercourse with my fellow-creatures; but since the fighting in Paris I have dined out several times, and spoken to the persons who sat next me, and to others when I went upstairs; and done the best I could to find out what people thought about the fighting, or thought they ought to think about it, or thought they ought to say. I had, of course, no hope of finding any one thinking what they ought to do. But I have not yet, a little to my surprise, met with any one who either appeared to be sadder, or professed himself wiser, for anything that has happened.
It is true that I am neither sadder nor wiser, because of it, myself. But then I was so sad before, that nothing could make me sadder; and getting wiser has always been to me a very slow process,—(sometimes even quite stopping for whole days together),—so that if two or three new ideas fall in my way at once, it only puzzles me; and the fighting in Paris has given me more than two or three.
The newest of all these new ones, and, in fact, quite a glistering and freshly minted idea to me, is the Parisian notion of Communism, as far as I understand it, (which I don’t profess to do altogether, yet, or I should be wiser than I was, with a vengeance).
For, indeed, I am myself a Communist of the old school—reddest also of the red; and was on the very point of saying so at the end of my last letter; only the telegram about the Louvre’s being on fire stopped me, because I thought the Communists of the new school, as I could not at all understand them, might not quite understand me. For we Communists of the old school think that our property belongs to everybody, and everybody’s property to us; so of course I thought the Louvre belonged to me as much as to the Parisians, and expected they would have sent word over to me, being an Art Professor, to ask whether I wanted it burnt down. But no message or intimation to that effect ever reached me.
Then the next bit of new coinage in the way of notion which I have picked up in Paris streets, is the present meaning of the French word ‘Ouvrier,’ which in my time the dictionaries used to give as ‘Workman,’ or ‘Working-man.’ For again, I have spent many days, not to say years, with the working-men of our English school myself; and I know that, with the more advanced of them, the gathering word is that which I gave you at the end of my second number—“To do good work, whether we live or die.” Whereas I perceive the gathering, or rather scattering, word of the French ‘ouvrier’ is, ‘To undo good work, whether we live or die.’