For example of the impossibility of publishing on a system. It happens to be now fine weather here in Lancashire;—I am able, therefore, to draw out of doors; and am painting a piece of foreground vegetation, which I don’t want to be used by students till after at least fifty other exercises have been gone through. But I must do this one while light and life serve; and not wait till I am sixty, to do work which my eyes are not good enough for at fifty-five.
And if the readers of Fors think my letters too desultory, let them consider what this chief work, specified in [page 20 of Letter IX.], involves. No one has the least notion of the quantity of manual labour I have to go through, to discharge my duty as a teacher of Art. Look at the frontispiece to [Letter XX.], which [[255]]is photographed from one of my architectural sketches; and if you can draw, copy a bit of it;—try merely the bead moulding with its dentils, in the flat arch over the three small ones, lowest on the left. Then examine those three small ones themselves. You think I have drawn them distorted, carelessly, I suppose. No. That distortion is essential to the Gothic of the Pisan school; and I measured every one of the curves of those cusps on the spot, to the tenth of an inch; and I ought to be engraving and publishing those drawings, by rights; but, meantime, your Pisan Republicans dash the chapel down, for a job in rebuilding it;—and the French Emperor dashes every cathedral in France to pieces, to find his masons work,—and gets for result, Reuter’s telegram, ([page 21 of Letter VI.]); and I, with my eyes full of dust and driven smoke, am obliged to leave my own work, and write Fors, more and more necessarily becoming principal, as I find all my other work rendered vain.
Nevertheless, in the course of Fors itself, I shall try to give, as aforesaid, art instruction enough for all need, if any one cares to obey it. How little any one is likely to care, the closing paragraphs of the letter from Wakefield show so clearly that I think it desirable to print them here consecutively, as part of the text of Fors itself.
“Yet people tell me that those were very benighted Tory days I am regretting. Wakefield was always held [[256]]to be a Tory place, given up hand and foot to the magnates who owned the great estate round. I know how when a small thing in frilled slops, but with my bosom full of patriotic pride in our town, I used to feel bitterly depressed at hearing a rising Radical Leeds clothier, who came to see us, sometimes denounce Wakefield as a ‘one-eyed hoil,’ his emphatic way of indicating our want of sweep of vision. I remember he generally capped his arguments by demanding, in sonorous tones, if any men worthy of the name of Britons would put up with that ‘obsolete monopoly’ of the soke mills.
“To tell truth, I am afraid that we felt a good deal of mean-spirited admiration for the neighbouring squires and lords on the occasions when they showed themselves and their handsome carriages in our streets: but at least the Wentworths and Pilkingtons and Squire Waterton were gentlemen and scholars; our new magnates have nothing to boast but their money. It seems to me better that people should boast of the old oaks of Walton, and the old pictures of —— Priory, than tell how many thousands an iron lord made by the last rise in iron: and that is what they talk of now. And if the iron kings have supplanted the landlords, they are not any more free. The old farmers might vote blindly out of blind respect for the old landlords; but is it not better than the newly-enfranchised puddlers and strikers selling votes openly for the price of a [[257]]gallon of whisky? We have lost a good deal, although we are long rid of the soke monopoly, which used to be a standing reproach to us. I think that the town bought off the soke just after the Corn Law agitation, when the great railways began to enclose the wide meadows about the town with their ugly ramparts and arches, where the trains keep up a continual scream.
“But the wool and corn magnates of the place held to their old traditions long after that; and when Titus Salt asked for a footing in the town that he might build there his great alpaca factories, he was rejected. I had gone abroad then, but my heart was in the old place, and I caught up eagerly all concerning it. Sometimes I heard doleful accounts of its decadence—how the big houses were empty altogether, how the inns were closed, the coaches stopped, the river traffic diminished, and the great corn warehouses by the bridge falling to ruin. There was no trace left of the gaieties that once gave the town the name of ‘Merrie Wakefield.’ All the smart young men were leaving it to push their way in Leeds or Manchester, and the girls left behind were growing up into a population of old maids.
“So the doleful story went on for many a year. But insensibly the key changed. Mills were springing up, and shops; and the houses had gone up in rent. The sleepy streets were thronged with workers; in [[258]]short, the town seemed new-born altogether. And the ——s,—I knew the ——s,—nobody would have thought it, such a simple kind of man as old —— seemed; yet the tale ran that he could buy up all Wakefield, and young Bill was going to live in —— Hall!! Young Bill in —— Hall! one of the most sacred spots my memory cherished.
“I remembered him well,—an audacious boy, with a gift for wry faces, and always up to some street prank. I remembered the well-worn jacket and battered cap that his father’s thrift imposed on him. And he was to be one of new rulers of the bright new time! and lord it in those venerable oaken chambers sacred to Lady ——‘s ghost! It seemed incredible; but twenty years had changed everything. Old ——, the father—a man of the true old English grain, had, in my young days, a foundry at the lower end of the town, and was said even then to be worth a ‘mint of money.’ Worthy folks were he and his; but still people of whom the loftier town’s-folk took no cognizance socially, for was not the wife’s father old Robin the Pedlar? A good old soul he was, who peddled to frugal farm wives the best thread and needles that could be got,—and took no alms from his kinsfolk, and lived and died in blameless humble honesty. And his grandson now rules in the hall where old Robin, perchance, took a humble bit and sup at the back door. He has a Scotch estate besides, and only failed [[259]]of Parliament last year because he bribed his way a little too openly. My enlightened friends look upon his rise as one of the grandest signs of the grand new time; but I cannot rejoice with them. When I see how he and his like are doing their worst to foul the air and blacken the fields about the town, I cannot help wishing the squires back in —— Hall.
“Men say, too, that he is a stronger Tory than the bluest of the old squires. He has forgotten old Robin of the bobbins, and rules the people from whom he sprang, with an iron hand, as such often do. Naturally, his success has attracted others, and the town will soon be surrounded with forges. On the once green Calder bank, where I used to see garlands of brown pears ripening in the sweet sunshine, there is a desert of dross and ashes, and twenty black throats vomiting fire and fumes into the summer sky; and under the big sheds you see hundreds of the liberated Britons of these improved days, toiling, half-naked, in sweltering heat and din, from morning to evening. This, however, is ‘the activity and spread of the iron trade,’ which our local paper tells us ‘are the most satisfactory pledge of the future progress and prosperity of our town.’
“I wish that I could believe it; but it vexes me beyond comfort to see the first landscape I knew and loved blighted by the smoke of the forges, and to find one sweet association after another swept away. [[260]]