| £ | s. | d. | |
| Balance, May 16th. | 1225 | 19 | 1 |
| 460 | 0 | 0 | |
| £765 | 19 | 1 |
| Spent. | £ | s. | d. | ||
| May 17. | [a.] Messrs. Weldon and Inglis | 23 | 0 | 0 | |
| [b.] Mr. Stowe, Camberwell Green | 11 | 0 | 0 | ||
| Warren and Jones | 21 | 19 | 3 | ||
| June 1. | [c.] Annie Brickland | 10 | 0 | 0 | |
| 8. | [d.] Furniture of new Lodge | 300 | 0 | 0 | |
| Downs | 44 | 0 | 9 | ||
| 3. | Kate | 50 | 0 | 0 | |
| £460 | 0 | 0 |
[[234]]
[a] and [b]. The first of these bills is for a sealskin jacket; the second for a gold and pearl frame to a miniature. Respecting my need for these articles, I have more to say when my lecture on Jewels can be got published: it is fine weather just now, and I can’t see to it.
[c.] In 1871, in one of my walks at Abingdon, (see Fors, Letters IV. and VI.,) I saw some ragged children playing by the roadside on the bank of a ditch, and gathering what buttercups they could find. Watching them a little while, I at last asked what they were doing. ‘This is my garden,’ answered a little girl about nine years old. ‘Well, but gardens ought to be of use; this is only full of buttercups. Why don’t you plant some strawberries in it?’ ‘I have none to plant.’ ‘If you had a little garden of your own, and some to plant, would you take care of them?’ ‘That I would.’ Thereupon I told her to come and ask for me at the Crown and Thistle, and with my good landlady Mrs. Wonnacott’s help, rented a tiny piece of ground for her. Her father and mother have since died; and her brothers and sisters (four, in all,) are in the Union, at Abingdon. I did not like to let this child go there too; so I’ve sent her to learn shepherding at a kindly shepherd’s; close to Arundel, on the farm of the friend whose son (with perhaps a little help from his sister) took me out foxhunting; and examined the snail-shells for me. This ten pounds is for her board, etc., till she can be made useful.
[d.] I had settled my servant Crawley, with his wife and his three children, in a good house here at my gate. He spent his savings in furnishing it, in a much more costly manner than I thought quite proper; but that, (as I then supposed,) was his affair, more than mine. His wife died last year: and now both he and I think he will be more useful to me at Oxford than Coniston. So I send him to Oxford,—but have to pay him for his house-furniture, which is very provoking and tiresome, and the kind of expense one does not calculate on. The curious troublesomeness [[235]]of Fors to me in all business matters has always been one of the most grotesque conditions of my life. The names of Warren and Jones appear for the last time in my accounts, for I have had to give up my tea-shop, owing to the (too surely mortal) illness of my active old servant, Harriet Tovey,—a great grief to me, no less than an utter stop to my plans in London.
III. I somewhat regret, for my friend’s sake, that he desires me to print the subjoined letter in its entirety, if at all. I must print his answer to my question about Usury, for which I am heartily grateful to him, for reference in next Fors; and can only therefore do as he bids me with the rest, which he has written more hastily than is his habit. What answer it seems to me to need will be found in the attached notes.
“Dear Mr. Ruskin,—It did not need your kind letters by the post to assure me that the rebuke pronounced on me by Fors in June was meant in the most friendly spirit—for my good and that of all men. Fors set me thinking, and, as you urged me to say what I thought, I began to write you a letter, partly to show that I am not such so repulsive a person as you paint, ([a]) or at least that it is not the fault of Comte if I am; partly to show that, whilst agreeing with you very much about modern life, I find other reasons for trusting that the world as a whole improves. I owe you, and the age owes you, profound gratitude for much noble teaching; and it is very sad to me to find you reviling ([b]) other teachers to whom we owe much, and who know a thousand things about which you have told us nothing. And indiscriminate abuse of all that the human race has now become, wounds my ear as if I heard one cursing our own fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. If you believe that ‘the entire system of modern life is corrupted [[236]]with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth,’ I wonder that you believe in God, or any future, in effort at all, or in anything but despair. ([c])
“But my letter to you grew at last to such a length that I must find for it another place, and you or any reader of Fors who may take the trouble to look, may see what I wish to put to you in the ‘Fortnightly Review.’ I wanted especially to point out that the impression you have conveyed about Comte and his teaching is almost exactly the contrary of the truth. You speak as if Comte were a physiologist, ([d]) mostly occupied with frogs and lice, whereas he is mostly occupied with history, morality, and religion; as if he insisted on the origin of man from the protozoa, whereas no one has more earnestly repudiated such speculations; as if he claimed political and public careers for women, whereas no one has said more against everything of the kind; as if he looked on modern industrial and social life with admiration, whereas he preaches a regeneration of our lives far more searching than any which you even contemplate; lastly, you speak of him and his students as if they were forbidden all sympathy with the spirit of ages past, whereas the reverence which Comte has expressed for the Middle Age at its best, its religion, its chivalry, its poetry, and its art, far exceeds in depth and completeness of spiritual insight even all the fine things which you yourself have taught us.
“Now I ask you, who love the very soul of truth, to repair an injustice which you have done in representing Comte ([e]) to teach quite the contrary of what you will find, if you turn to his books, that he does teach. I give a trifling instance. You write as if it were sheer impertinence in me, a student of positivism, ([f]) to allude to a mediæval building or speak of a tracery. Now the truth is that some of Comte’s profoundest thoughts relate to the moral and spiritual meaning of these sacred relics; and for my own part, though I know nothing of [[237]]the matter, some of the best seasons of my life have been given to companionship with these most sublime monuments, and study of the ‘writing on the wall,’—or all that men have spared.
“I say nothing about others whose views you may wish to class under the general title ‘Evolution,’ or of a lady whom I am sorry to see you speak of as ‘Cobbe.’ I have never shared all the opinions of those to whom you allude, and they are not followers of Comte. I shall say nothing about them; though I should like to know on what grounds you think yourself entitled to call Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. John Stuart Mill—geese. ([g]) The letter addressed to me in Fors has reference to Positivism, or it should have been addressed to some one else; and I assure you that every one of the doctrines which you ascribe to Positivists are not held by them at all, but quite the contrary are held.
“Whether the world is wholly worse than it was of old, is a very big matter on which I cannot now enter. I do not think it can be settled by statutes, old MSS., or bits from the poets. Thought and life are very wide; and I will listen to the judgment only of those who have patiently weighed the whole of both. ([h]) The grandest times of art are often those of especial vileness in life and society; and the grandest times of one art are sometimes those of utter decadence in another art, even in the same people and place. When the Theseus was carved, Aristophanes gives us the domestic and public life of the Athenians, and it has its dark side. Titian was the contemporary of Palladio, and also of Philip II.; Milton of Sir Peter Lely and Louis XIV.; so too were Bach and Mozart contemporaries of Greuze and Louis XV. I don’t quite see what is to be made of these violent contrasts. And by the way, I wish you would work out for us the bearing of musical art on the social and moral life of various ages. It always seemed to me you omitted music. [[238]]
“Now I will try to answer your questions of law about Usury. There is no such thing as usury in law at all,—that is to say, there is no rate of interest above which the lending of money is criminal or unlawful. By the 17 and 18 Vict., c. 90, (passed in 1854,) “all existing laws against usury shall be repealed.” (Caps. mine.) There are a great many cases where courts of law interfere in bargains which seem to them unfair or unreasonable. But they all arise out of the special relations of the parties, and it would take a volume to tell you what these may be. For more than twenty years, as I suppose every one knows who reads a newspaper, there has been known to the law no lawful rate of interest which it is punishable to exceed. I cannot imagine for what end you ask me the question. Lawyers do not make the law, be it good or bad; they follow it like policemen or soldiers who obey orders.
“I reserve what else I have to say. I am sure all that you write to me comes from you in the most friendly feeling, as believe me does from me all that I write to you. Your Fors fills me with melancholy each time I read it. For it reminds me how many of those to whom we might look to bring more order, patience, and faith into the world, are occupied in setting us against one another, in making us rebels against our fathers, and all that they have done for us and taught us.
“Ever gratefully and most sincerely yours,
“Frederic Harrison.”
[a.] I believe there is no other friend, with whom I have had so brief opportunity of intercourse, whom I like so much as I do Mr. Harrison. What reproach this sentence is to me as an artist, I must submit to silently.
[b.] To ‘revile’ means, in accurate English, to vilify under the influence of passion. It is not an expression which my friend could have used, except thoughtlessly, of any words of mine, uttered of any person living. [[239]]